NORTH CAROLINA LITERARY REVIEW Number 16 - Peter Makuck

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Photograph by Leanne E. Smith CommemoratiNg 100 years of writers aNd writiNg at eCu 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. 70 North CaroliNa literary review 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. Number 16 2007
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. CommemoratiNg 100 years of writers aNd writiNg at eCu “You are at the university to be broadly educated, not necessarily learn a job skill.” Number 16 2007 North CaroliNa literary review 71
Page 1 and 2: Published annually by the East Caro
Page 3 and 4: setting and subject matter. A poet
Page 5: diving and fishing the Gulf Stream.
Page 9 and 10: My wife and I met in a graduate cou

NORTH CAROLINA LITERARY REVIEW Number 16 - Peter Makuck

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