NORTH CAROLINA LITERARY REVIEW Number 16 - Peter Makuck

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CommemoratiNg 100 years of writers aNd writiNg at eCu 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! 72 North CaroliNa literary review 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? Number 16 2007
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 CommemoratiNg 100 years of writers aNd writiNg at eCu “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) Number 16 2007 North CaroliNa literary review 73
Page 1 and 2: Published annually by the East Caro
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NORTH CAROLINA LITERARY REVIEW Number 16 - Peter Makuck

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