NORTH CAROLINA LITERARY REVIEW Number 16 - Peter Makuck

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CommemoratiNg 100 years of writers aNd writiNg at eCu “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). 68 North CaroliNa literary review 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 Number 16 2007
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? CommemoratiNg 100 years of writers aNd writiNg at eCu 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
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NORTH CAROLINA LITERARY REVIEW Number 16 - Peter Makuck

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