NORTH CAROLINA LITERARY REVIEW Number 16 - Peter Makuck

Published annually by the East Carolina University Department of English, Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences 

and Office of the Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association 

© COPYRIGHT 2007 NCLR 

North CaroliNa literary review 

NC 

L R 

Number 16

Photograph by Sherryl Janosko 

CommemoratiNg 100 years of writers aNd writiNg at eCu 

1 Quotations in the introduction are 

excerpted from Gary Ettari’s email interview 

with Peter Makuck. 

2 When Vernon Ward, founder of Tar river 

Poets, retired in 1978, Peter Makuck was 

asked to establish a national literary journal. 

In an email to NCLr editor Margaret 

Bauer, he explained that he “decided to 

stick with the poetry format” but changed 

the title to Tar river Poetry “in order to 

reflect a change of emphasis from the 

severely regional if not local. . . . Then 

I started soliciting work from poets of 

national stature, did several large direct 

mailing ads, plus a few journals, and very 

slowly our submission and subscription 

base widened.” He also “added a review 

section [and] later includ[ed] the occasional 

interview, [and he] upgraded the layout, 

printing, and quality of paper.” The Dictionary 

of Literary biography has listed Tar 

river Poetry as one of the top ten poetry 

magazines in the country. Just a couple 

of years before his retirement, Makuck 

received for Tar river Poetry a grant from 

the National Endowment for the Arts (and 

just after his retirement, under the editorship 

of his former student and colleague 

Luke Whisnant, Tar river Poetry received a 

second NEA grant). 

66 North CaroliNa literary review 

The Poet 

& the Sea: 

An Interview with 

Peter Makuck 

by Gary Ettari 

with photography by Sandra Carawan 

When you ask Peter Makuck about the journey 

he took from beginning writer to retired Distinguished Professor of Arts and 

Sciences at east Carolina university, he inevitably mentions the people who 

helped him on his way. When asked about his mentors, he responds: 

At St. Francis College in maine, Hugh Hennedy was the first teacher who 

caught my attention and forced me to start taking myself seriously. I had 

him for History of Drama and Shakespeare. A great teacher, I owe him a 

lot. Also Father David Flood, a freshman comp teacher, who recognized in 

me a talent for writing that I didn’t know I had. robert Parenteau was an 

excellent instructor of French literature who whet my appetite for rimbaud 

and baudelaire, Valéry and Verlaine. I also learned a great deal about poetry 

from Al Poulin who went on to found bOA editions, Ltd.. but Leslie Norris 

was the mentor figure I was perhaps closest to; he was wise about many 

things beyond the writing of stories and poems. We became good friends, 

wrote to each other, and spoke with some frequency on the phone. He 

very generously read many early drafts of my stories and poems and offered 

invaluable feedback. 1 

The litany of names that makuck provides is a testament to the fact that, no 

matter how solitary the writer’s life may be, it takes a number of dedicated 

individuals to make a writer. makuck himself was a mentor to many young 

writers during his tenure at east Carolina, and Tar River Poetry, the literary 

magazine he edited for almost thirty years, 2 regularly features new voices 

alongside established writers of national reputation. 

between encouraging young writers and teaching a variety of classes 

at eCu, makuck managed to publish six volumes of poetry and two short 

story collections, an impressive and eclectic output. One of the things that 

distinguishes makuck’s work, particularly his poems, is the variety of both 

Number 16 2007

setting and subject matter. A poet who is intimately acquainted with the world 

he moves through, he has penned poems on subjects ranging from working 

construction to sledding in the French countryside to diving on wrecks off the 

Carolina coast. The variety of settings mirrors the winding journey he has taken 

as a writer, which he traced for me: 

After high school I went to St. Francis College (now university of New 

england) in biddeford, maine (a French Canadian enclave), which was 

owned and largely staffed by Canadian Franciscans. When I arrived there, 

we were only a handful of freshmen who didn’t speak French. The foreign 

language atmospherics of the place apparently triggered interest and 

before long I found myself with a fellowship to study at l’université Laval in 

Quebec. I lived with a French family, and made a promise to the university 

to avoid english for the duration of my stay. Quebec City really agreed with 

me and I spent two glorious summers there. I taught French from 1964 

to 1966 at Norwich Free Academy in Connecticut. Since I refused to take 

those nonsensical education courses, the headmaster wouldn’t renew my 

contract (even though I had won a teaching award my first year!), so I went 

to Kent State university for a PhD, which is where I met Phyllis, who had 

a desk next to mine in the grad student bullpen. After the students were 

killed on may 4, 1970, the Kent campus was a very depressing place to 

be and we wanted out as soon as possible. I had always wanted to write 

about Shakespeare but knew the research would take far too long. Faulkner 

as a dissertation subject would be quicker, so I wrote on Faulkner and we 

got out the following year. Next came West Liberty State College in West 

Virginia where I was an assistant professor for four years. Then the Fulbright 

to France where I lectured on modern American Poetry. Then eCu. 

As a writer who has spent a good deal of time in 

North Carolina, makuck is quick to recognize the many 

ways that the state supports the arts, and he seems very 

fond of his adopted home, especially once he got over 

his self-described “Yankee paranoia.” He is a writer who, 

perhaps because of his travels, seems at home wherever 

he is and whatever he is doing, and that feeling of being 

comfortable regardless of one’s circumstances often 

infuses his poems, even when they tackle risky or tragic 

subjects. In addition to his other accomplishments, he 

has co-edited a volume of essays on the work of Welsh 

poet Leslie Norris and spent a year as a Fulbright lecturer 

in France. He now spends most of his time on the 

bogue banks of North Carolina with his wife, Phyllis. The 

following interview was conducted via email over the 

course of a week in early fall 2006. responses have been 

edited for length and clarity. 

Gary Ettari: What has your teaching experience revealed to you about what 

can and what can’t be taught in a creative writing classroom? 

Peter Makuck: What you can’t teach is easy: curiosity, motivation, raw 

material of close observation, imagination, talent, love of language, the 

sounds of language (not just our own), etc. I studied Spanish, French, 

and Latin and taught French at the beginning of my career. Some of my 

writing students confessed to hating their foreign language courses, a red 

flag for me because their poems, in terms of sound, were – no surprise – 


Peter Makuck on his last day teaching at ECU, 

2006. For a story on Makuck’s retirement, 

written by one of his graduate students, 

Leanne E. Smith (who provided photos for this 

interview), see the ECU Department of English 

newsletter, the Common reader 24.6 (2006): 

www.ecu.edu/english/tcr/24-6/default.htm. 

“What you can’t teach is 

easy: curiosity, motivation, raw 

material of close observation, 

imagination, talent, love of 

language, the sounds of 

language (not just our own)” 

Number 16 2007 North CaroliNa literary review 

67 

Photograph by Leanne E. Smith


“I’ve had moments out 

on the big blue that are as 

close to heaven as I’m 

likely to get, moments that 

are productive of poems 

and stories. “ 

3 “Back Roads by Night” is in Makuck’s 

Where We Live (Rochester: BOA Editions, 

Ltd., 1982). 


flatliners. And, of course, because they also didn’t like to 

read, what you often got was a Dick-and-Jane vocabulary 

– weak verbs, pale nouns and adjectives. But for the students 

who are motivated and do read and produce promising 

work, you can show them what their strengths and weaknesses 

are, show them how to improve lines breaks, how to capitalize 

on and strengthen the stresses and musical patterns already 

in their work. I’m simplifying here, but you say, “Do less 

of this and a lot more of that.” My students were no 

doubt sick of my no-ideas-but-in-things mantra. So many 

beginning writers have a fondness for TV clichés and bloodless 

abstractions. I’d keep telling them that all good writing is 

an assault on cliché. I never had a creative writing course 

myself. I learned by reading closely, trial and error – the 

slowest way to learn anything. If nothing else, I suppose 

we save serious student writers lots of time. 

Mark Strand once remarked that during his time at the University of Utah the 

landscape of the West had a profound effect on the way he wrote poetry. You 

spend a great deal of time on the barrier islands of North Carolina, and I was 

wondering if you experience the same thing. That is, how does the geography 

of your surroundings, beyond providing you with something to look at, affect or 

influence your writing? 

Good question, but I’m not really the one to answer that. It presupposes 

that I’m more aware of my own creative process than I am, that I spend 

time looking at what I’ve produced and come to conclusions about 

how, say, the regular sound of the ocean across the street works its 

way into my lines. I think it was Yeats who said that the mind creates 

the world, and perhaps it was William Carlos Williams who suggested 

that the world creates the mind. The latter view might be closer to my 

own. I’ve never cared for egocentric poets who babble on about their 

inner feelings. My gratitude is to poets who show me about myself by 

way of the world around me. For me, the outer world is so much more 

interesting. It’s the best kind of objective correlative for whatever might 

be the inner drama. I grew up in a rural home without a TV until I was 

a senior in high school. I spent much of my time in the woods and 

streams, hunting, fishing, and trapping. My father, a farm kid, taught me 

about birds and animals. I’ve written about the local outdoors wherever 

I’ve lived: Maine, West Virginia, Utah, France, and North Carolina. One 

of my best poems, “Back Roads by Night,” is about sanglies, wild hogs in 

France. 3 Without necessarily becoming paysage moralisé, outer landscapes 

or seascapes eventually move inward, tell us about ourselves, our human 

limits, provide us with a sense of awe. The natural environment for 

me has always been about awareness and renewal, about forgetting the 

greedy ego that keeps us from seeing. 

You mentioned the ocean in your response, which reminds me that many of 

your poems are set near, on, or in water. Why does water seem to be such a 

trigger for you? 

On the Connecticut coast where I grew up I had a ten-foot row boat 

with a tiny egg-beater motor on it and remember some haloed moments 

catching fish, either alone or with a friend. Ever since moving to North 

Carolina in 1976, I’ve continued my love affair with the ocean by scuba 


diving and fishing the Gulf Stream. Melville, that great poet of the sea, 

tells us that water and reverie are forever wedded. Substitute “poetry” 

for “reverie” and you’ve got it. The ocean has great mystery and beauty. 

I’ll never forget the first time losing sight of land (about fourteen miles 

out), not another boat on the horizon, an altering perspective, a Pascalian 

sense of your own smallness. I’ve had moments out on the big 

blue that are as close to heaven as I’m likely to get, moments that are 

productive of poems and stories. And a few moments of terror too when 

you get caught in a storm. These moments remind you who you are and 

what’s important. 

Besides water, a number of your poems also deal with the concept of home. In 

Against Distance, for example, your poems “Close” and “French Doors” are 

set, at least initially, at home. 4 In both poems, however, the speaker or other 

figures in the poem seem to be passing through the domestic realm on their 

way to somewhere else. What made you want to complicate the notion of the 

comfortable domestic space? 

Well, I want to complicate the notion because “home” is often a 

sentimental idea, a Norman Rockwell construct with the loveable 

grandfather, say, carving the turkey at Thanksgiving. But what if the 

grandfather is an alcoholic and makes everyone’s life miserable? It was 

Heidegger, I think, who said that “home” involved movement to a 

place of dynamic stillness and that poetry was always an attempt to get 

home. It seems to me that both of the titles you mention work through 

domestic tensions and unsettled issues toward a stillness or distance that 

promises renovation and restoration, even if short-lived. 

You have not only written five volumes of poetry, but also two books of short 

stories, including the 2002 release, Costly Habits. 5 As a writer who is chiefly 

a poet, what is it that attracts you to prose? What does prose allow you to do 

as an artist that poetry does not? 

I’ve always written essays, reviews, and stories in addition to poetry. I 

don’t remember deliberately choosing such a habit, but working different 

genres gives you perspective and keeps you writing. If you get stuck on a 

poem, say, put it on the back burner and go back to work on that essay 

or story. Right now I’m working on a long piece of fiction about losing 

an engine fifty miles offshore and having to send out a May Day. Well, 

there are simply too many characters and too much detail for a poem to 

digest. Some poets are very good at getting characters into poems – Louis 

Simpson, for example. I’m not. I need more space. Another advantage 

of writing fiction is that it allows me my sense of humor. I’ve written 

very few funny poems. That’s a gift I wasn’t given. I’m envious as hell of 

somebody like Bill Trowbridge whose King Kong poems will make you 

laugh until your stomach muscles ache. But I do like to laugh and fiction 

is an outlet for my comic impulses, allows me to have characters interact 

in humorous ways. It also allows me to have characters quite unlike me 

say things that would be considered didactic if found in a poem. 

You were editor of Tar River Poetry from 1978 to 2006. As someone who 

has been in the business of publishing poetry for thirty years, how do you 

feel generally about the state of poetry in America? Is it still seen as a 

marginalized, arcane art, or is it your experience that contemporary 

American poetry has garnered more readers lately? 


4 Against Distance (BOA Editions, Ltd., 

1997) was reviewed in NCLr 7 (1998). 

5 Michael Parker reviewed Costly Habits 

(Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2002) in NCLr 

12 (2003). 

The cover of the spring 2004 issue of tar 

river Poetry featured photography by Sandra 

Carawan, a former student of Peter Makuck whose 

photography appears throughout this interview. 

Number 16 2007 North CaroliNa literary review 69

Photograph by Leanne E. Smith 


Peter Makuck at the 40 th anniversary of ECU’s Poetry 

Forum, a bi-monthly writers’ workshop founded in 1965 

by Vernon Ward and directed from 1978 to 2006 by Peter 

Makuck. Under Makuck’s direction and with ECU Student 

Government Association funding, such poets as William 

Stafford, Carolyn Kizer, and Louis Simpson have visited 

ECU. North Carolina State University poet John Balaban 

(pictured left) visited for the 40 th anniversary celebration, 

2 Feb. 2005. For more information on the ECU Poetry 

Forum, see www.ecu.edu/org/poetryforum/history.html. 

6 breaking and entering, a collection of 

short stories (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1981) 

and Where We Live, cited previously. 

Deo Gratias 

by Peter Makuck 

behind a skirt of hydrangeas 

was a crawlspace door that led to a crypt 

where the bones and skulls of old pastors 

lay scattered about, 

or so we believed, 

until candlelight for the first time wavered 

and vault covers lay in a row. 

The eighth grade altar boys made us do it. 

Like sneaking wine before mass, 

or munching down a host or two, 

but this ritual was after novena 

when mr. marino, the old sexton, 

locked up the church. 


You’ve shoved a tempting soapbox in front of me, but I’m not sure I 

should step up. I’ll just say that poetry will probably always be a marginal 

art. My first book was fiction, the second poetry, within a year of each 

other. 6 Friends and family were quick to talk about the fiction, but one 

uncle put up his hand and said, “Man, poetry is way beyond me.” An 

intelligent man, why would he say that about narrative, fairly accessible 

poems? Education, I think, is the answer. Poetry was badly taught when I 

was in high school, badly taught when my son was in school, and it’s still 

badly taught, students given nonsensical assignments and sent on symbolhunting 

expeditions, learning to hate it. Last year a parent I met in Barnes 

& Noble tried to get me to talk her daughter (one of my best students in 

years) out of majoring in English and studying poetry. Why? “Because 

I was an English major,” she said, “and poetry never put any money in 

my pocket.” For the most part, this woman’s values reflect a turn away 

from the liberal arts and are typical of what our society considers most 

important: money, stuff, and power. Such willful ignorance, not poetry, 

will always have a brilliant future in our country. 

Has the marginalization you mention affected the business of publishing poetry 

more than usual in recent history? Is it easier or more difficult these days to 

publish a book of poems than it was, say, twenty or thirty years ago? What 

does the current book publishing landscape look like for poets? 

For me, that’s a tough question because I’ve done no studies, nor do I have 

any statistics. Impressions will have to unreliably suffice. It’s fairly obvious 

that creative writing programs, both graduate and undergraduate, have 

mushroomed in the last forty years. As a student I was only aware of Iowa 

and Johns Hopkins. Now nearly every university, college, and community 

college offers creative writing programs, so I’d have to say publication is 

more competitive than ever. On the other hand, I’m also aware of more 

journals and presses. The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses lists 

upwards of fifteen hundred journals, not to mention electronic journals. 

Also excellent new presses like Cavankerry and Autumn House cater 

As if on a mission, 

we’d emerge from the crypt 

into the basement hall 

where boy’s brigade marched us 

in tight formation on Friday nights 

toward this about face, 

this passing through the kitchen 

up spiral stairs 

to the vestry, sacristy, 

then down the main aisle – 

the nave quiet with outside wind, 

the ghosts of black widows 

whispering Aves in loud Italian – 

past the holy water stoup, 

up to the choir loft, 

twisty bell tower stairs, 

and the chortle of pigeons. 


exclusively to poets. There seem as well to be more contests for both books 

and individual poems. I have to believe that good poems will eventually 

see the light. I was always delighted to find and publish solid poems by 

previously unpublished poets in Tar River Poetry. 

As a follow-up to your story about the mother of your student not wanting her 

daughter to major in English, does that extend to the practice of teaching at 

all? In other words, do teachers of creative writing have an obligation to inform 

their students about just how marginalized an art poetry is? There are those, for 

example, who suggest that graduate programs in the humanities in general end 

up doing a disservice to many grad students because of the very long odds of such 

students obtaining gainful employment in their chosen fields. Do you think that 

is a valid criticism and do MFA programs fall under that umbrella as well? Is it 

possible to both discourage and encourage young writers simultaneously? 

We need to make a distinction between education in the best sense of 

the word and education as bottom-line job training. I’ve never seen myself 

as a career counselor and don’t see it as my responsibility to point students 

toward “gainful employment.” You are at the university to be broadly 

educated, not necessarily learn a job skill. Admittedly, the way universities 

are routinely backing away from the liberal arts, mine is an old-fashioned 

point of view. I still believe and have been told by many graduates that 

English is a wonderfully versatile major for lots of fields. My wife, with a 

graduate degree in English literature (seventeenth-century English poetry), 

has had a good position for many years in the office of North Carolina’s 

Department of Revenue. Her communication skills, her ability to read, 

write, speak, and think clearly were assets that got her the position. I 

never had a plan, never thought or cared about gainful employment, no 

doubt to my parents’ chagrin. I studied French, for heaven’s sake. At the 

dinner table one night, my father asked me what I was studying and what 

I was going to do with it. I didn’t know. I told him I liked the sounds of 

French nouns that ended in “euil.” There was a squirrel on a limb outside 

the window. I gave him the French word for squirrel, écureuil. His face 

Once, slightly drunk, in my mid-twenties, 

something brought me back, 

then as now, 

for one final climb above the dark 

habits of nuns, the slaps, 

the catechistic drills and Latin responses. 

I saw that the wooden locker for my cassock 

and surplice was no longer there, 

but everything else exactly the same. 

I watched myself 

step up to the parapet, 

staggered under a skymap of stars, 

blessed by the sight 

of that hometown seaport glittering 

like the jewel box of a bishop 

flung open at my feet. 


“You are at the 

university to be 

broadly educated, 

not necessarily learn 

a job skill.” 



Roy 

by Peter Makuck 

At the gym when I see him 

for the first time in months 

shuffling toward me, 

he’s bald, paler than pale, 

cheeks sunk in shadow, 

but eyes full of spark, 

and his voice 

that sandpaper rasp: 

Did you hear? Man, 

Carolina just put a hurtin’ 

on Kentucky. 

Thir-teen points! 

We always talk and joke 

but I’ve never confessed 

I’m a lapsed believer, 

sick of sports clichés, 

the student-athlete fraud, 

fan brawls, pay-offs, 

homicidal hockey dads, 

obscene salaries . . . . 

Yet to roy, 

Jesus pulls for Carolina 

and promises victory 

over the darkest powers. 

When the black hole 

of a pause yawns open, 

I growl, Tarheels forever! 

trying my damnedest. 

And he comes back 

with a coughing laugh, 

an incredulous headshake 

and a great chemo grin: 

What a hurtin’! 

Can you believe? 

Lord, have mercy! 


went funny – I thought he was having a coronary. My father had a gas 

station, serviced and repaired cars – work that I myself enjoyed. If nothing 

turned up, I always figured I’d go into business with him, which I think he 

wanted me to do anyway. College was my mother’s idea. 

Writing poetry and fiction was something I was drawn to. It was 

never a career plan. You can study poetry and write it – as did Stevens, 

Williams, Eliot, and many more – without it being your day job. I just 

taught a workshop at West Virginia University and only one of the 

eight people in the workshop was a teacher. I’ve had very talented 

doctors, lawyers, and computer people in my classes and I think you 

can encourage young writers without promising them they will be able 

to support themselves as poets or teachers. 

Since you have spent the bulk of your career in North Carolina, I was 

wondering if you could reflect for a moment on what that has meant for you 

professionally. North Carolina seems to be a state that supports and nurtures 

the arts. Have you found that to be the case? 

North Carolina does nurture the arts in a big way. As a state, it has few 

rivals in this respect. The Arts Council and the North Carolina Writer’s 

Network do a great deal to help. And writers here invite you into the 

fold and tend to support one another. I didn’t live in the state for very 

long before, as a Tennessee Williams character puts it, “the kindness 

of strangers” put an end to my Yankee paranoia. And let’s not forget 

the independent booksellers, like Nancy Olson at Quail Ridge Books 

in Raleigh, who sponsor readings almost every week. Also extremely 

important are state newspapers like the Charlotte Observer, the Raleigh 

News and Observer, the Southern Pines Pilot, and a number of others 

that review the books of in-state fiction writers and poets. Given the 

scaling back of book reviews in major newspapers across the country, 

it’s remarkable, say, that the News and Observer has the kind of Sunday 

book section it does. 

Most of the time, you seem to write in free verse, with little attention to more 

rigid forms, but in your latest book, Off-Season in the Promised Land [BOA, 

2005], there is a villanelle titled “Another Art.” Can you talk about how this 

poem came to take the shape that it did? What, for you, are the advantages 

that a more formal structure offers? 

I have used forms now and then and find that sometimes a subject is just 

right for a particular form. The villanelle you mention is loosely based 

on three pathological liars I’ve unluckily known. When someone like this 

lies, it isn’t a one-time-only phenomenon. Hence the refrain in a villanelle 

is perfect for a serial bull-thrower. Rhyme also adds to the humor, as it 

does in limericks. My poem isn’t meant as a parody of Elizabeth Bishop’s 

famous “One Art,” but I did use that poem as a point of departure. To 

return to your earlier question about what can be taught – forms, for 

example, can be taught. You can teach someone the formal requirements 

of an Italian or Shakespearean sonnet, and the student will fill them out, 

but there is no guarantee that the poem will have a heartbeat. What is 

required to make the poem viable is what is not teachable. 

You mentioned the importance of reading in the context of the creative writing 

classroom. What have you been reading lately that you have enjoyed? And, 

just for fun, what is the first poem you remember reading? 


My wife and I met in a graduate course in the Victorian novel and one 

of the first assignments was George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which we spoke 

about with much excitement. For more than thirty-five years I’ve been 

wanting to reread that book. Well, two weeks ago I finished it and found 

it much more rewarding the second time through when I wasn’t pressed 

to write a paper about it. We also watched the BBC series based on the 

novel. Simply delicious. The scene where Bulstrode watches his dying 

blackmailer Raffles has the kind of psychological power and subtlety 

that rivals Dostoyevsky. 

The first poem I recall was Milton’s “On His Blindness.” This was in 

high school. I didn’t so much read the poem as memorize it and stand 

before the class and recite it, much to the amusement of my crotchgrabbing 

buddies in the back row. Everyone had to do this – our teacher’s 

brilliant idea of how poetry should be taught. I hated it, but oddly 

enough I can still recite the whole of it these many years later. Quite 

a sonnet, needless to say. But the first poem I remember reading in 

college is Edward Arlington Robinson’s “Mr. Flood’s Party” as well as 

some of his other poems. That might have been the beginning for me. 

Regarding Robinson, I was wondering if that “beginning” that you mention had 

to do more with the effects of rhythm than content? More than one critic has 

made the point that as human beings developing in the womb, we 

are able to hear the sound of the mother’s heartbeat before we can 

see anything, hence the almost primal, instinctive affinity we seem 

to have for rhythmic language. Was this the case for you with 

Robinson? Or was it something else that caught your attention? 

Rhythms and sounds were certainly a part of it, but there’s 

also a strong narrative dimension to “Mr. Flood’s Party” and 

some of the other poems that interested me, and a sense of 

drama that sometimes verges on the sentimental. But that 

would also have appealed to the teenage romantic that I was 

at the time. Robinson was a start, but we also read some Frost 

and Eliot. I remember being knocked out by Eliot’s “Prufrock” even though 

I didn’t know what the hell it was about until I read it a dozen times and 

we discussed it in class. This, I suppose, proves Eliot’s notion about a poem 

making an emotional connection that often precedes comprehension. 

I want to ask a question about a particular poem that appears in your early 

volume, Where We Live. It’s called “The Commons” and it refers to the killing 

of the four students at Kent State, in 1970. You were there, I know, and 

I wanted to ask about the process of writing about an especially emotionally 

charged event. Did you approach the writing of that poem differently than you 

would, say, a poem about the neighbor’s cat? And if Keats is correct, that the 

poet must possess negative capability, must dwell continually in uncertainties, 

how is that possible when a poet has witnessed the truly horrific? 

I’ll never forget that day, the tear gas, the masked faces of the guardsmen, 

the panic, the running for cover, but I have little recollection of 

how that poem came to be written – I mean, the process. Maybe I’ve 

blocked it out. Months after the killings when I saw the construction 

machinery on the commons, I remember thinking – conspiracy: those 

bastards want to change the look of the place so people will forget the 

horrible thing that happened here. I can’t let them do it. Obviously, 

though, when you write from experience, the experience comes alive 


“North Carolina does 

nurture the arts in a big 

way. As a state, it has few 

rivals in this respect.” 

Peter makuck appearances in NCLR: 

“egret” and “On the blue Again” in NCLR 

2.2 (1995) 

translations of “Le Chat [Interieur]” (“The 

Cat [Within]”) and “Chat” (“Cat”) by 

Charles baudelaire in NCLR 5 (1996) 

a review of Black Shawl by Katheryn Stripling 

byer in NCLR 8 (1999) 

biographical entry in “Dictionary of North 

Carolina Writers” in NCLR 9 (2000) 

interview with NCLR founding editor Alex 

Albright for the 10 th anniversary issue, 

NCLR 11 (2002) 


Courtesy of Peter Makuck 


7 An Open World: essays on Leslie Norris, 

co-edited with Eugene England (Columbia, 

SC: Camdem House, 1994). 

gary ettari is an Assistant Professor 

at the university of North Carolina at 

Asheville. He teaches creative writing, 

Shakespeare, and Humanities courses. 

Peter makuck was his first creative writing 

professor at brigham Young university 

in utah. ettari has published poetry in 

Poetry Northwest, the Lullwater Review, 

and Tar River Poetry, among other journals, 

including NCLR 15 (2006) and is 

currently seeking a publisher for his first 

novel, set in Las Vegas. 


again in the writing process, even if imaginatively modified, and the 

hurt will hurt again. This is true even if you are writing about parents or 

a loved one who has died. 

You co-edited a collection of essays on the work of the Welsh poet Leslie 

Norris. 7 What is it about Norris’s work that attracted you to that project? 

I was teaching high school French when I encountered one of Norris’s 

powerful stories in The Atlantic. I continued reading his stories and poems 

with great interest as they appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere, never 

dreaming that one day I would meet the man and that he would invite 

me to be Visiting Writer at Brigham Young University where he taught 

for a good many years. I was initially impressed by his attention to detail 

and his interest in animals and the natural world, his ability to create 

characters. Norris is a great describer, an extraordinary storyteller and 

poet, but he was also a modest man who was in no way a self-promoter 

or networker. As a result, he unfairly fell into the category of neglected 

writers. Eugene England, my colleague at BYU, had the idea we should 

promote Leslie with a book of essays, and we did. We had no trouble 

getting essays from high profile writers who knew Leslie’s work and 

realized its worth. 

And finally, as a fisherman myself, I must ask: What’s the biggest you’ve ever 

caught, and where? 

A sixty-three pound wahoo. Phyllis and I were trolling sea-witches and 

ballyhoo about five miles south of the Big Rock (a miles-long underwater 

structure that runs from northeast to southwest), about fifty miles out 

of Beaufort Inlet. On twenty-pound test line, it took a sweaty hour and 

fifteen minutes to boat it, Phyllis at the helm, very skillfully keeping 

the fish off the stern quarter. Quite a workout, like pumping iron. A 

memorable day because we had already put about two hundred pounds 

of dolphin (mahi-mahi in restaurants) in the fish boxes and knew our 

freezer would now be full until after Christmas. Since it’s a two-hour trip 

out to the Gulf Stream, we usually fish until three pm, but after this big 

wahoo, we slowly headed back to port around noon, eating lunch as we 

went, gorgeous cloud formations all the way. 

In Peter Makuck’s “fish story,” one can get a glimpse of how he constructs 

his poems. Note how he models much of what he said earlier can be taught 

to young writers, especially curiosity and paying attention. His description of 

the fight with the wahoo, the weather, the sea, and the struggle against and 

with nature demonstrate the first rule of poetry: pay intense attention to the 

world around you. The sharpness of the details, the way the fisherman poet 

so easily recalls the specifics of the day speak of long practice and of countless 

hours spent observing his environment in order to construct poems out of his 

experiences. Even in retirement, he is still teaching us lessons.

NORTH CAROLINA LITERARY REVIEW Number 16 - Peter Makuck

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?