PERMAFROST, VOL. 32 (SUMMER 2010):
AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN MORGAN
Born in New York City, John Morgan studied with Robert Lowell at Harvard, where he won the Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry. At the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, he was awarded the Academy of American Poets’ Prize. In 1976, he moved with his family to Fairbanks, Alaska where he build a home overlooking the TananaRiver, with a long view south to the Alaska Range. Morgan has won the Discovery Award of the New York Poetry Center (92nd Street Y), held a John Atherton Scholarship at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was a fellow at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Morgan has published three books of poetry as well as four chapbooks and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and many other magazines, as well as in more than a twenty anthologies. He recently served as the first Writer-in-Residency at DenaliNational Park in Alaska. His newly released Spear-Fishing on the Chatanika: New and Selected Poems is the culmination of over forty years of writing. Morgan has enjoyed a distinguished career as a poet.
Poetry staff members Airika Parker and Cody Kucker interviewed John in April 2010.
Permafrost: What is the process of selecting poems for this kind of collection? How much control did you have over which poems would be included?
John Morgan: It can vary. In this case the publisher, (Jessie Lendennie, Salmon Poetry),asked me to send a manuscript. I said ‘the small one or the big one,’ and she said ‘the big one’ which is Spearfishing. A year went by, I had almost forgotten. Then she emailed me and said she wanted to do it. She had no suggestions, she simply took the manuscript. I made a few editing changes when it was in the process of getting ready to go to press, but they were very small.
P: What are the concerns of putting this type of collection together in terms of the overall narrative, speaker, tone and voice?
JM: The process of selecting the poems was, essentially, to find a balance from my three earlier books and new poems. Roughly, half the book is new. The other half is an equal sampling from my three earlier books. The process of selecting was really more intuitive, simply ‘these poems I like.’ I trusted the voice is consistent enough that it isn’t going to be jarring. What I found in putting it together is that my style had changed. I guess I knew it at the time – that I was changing – but it sort of faded into the past. Looking at the earlier poems in the book, they have a more romantic feel. They tend to be fairly longs lines. I think Theodore Roethke was an influence, particularly in the forms. There is a move toward irony in some of the later poems, not that it was ever absent but it is more highlighted, and different kinds of line breaks come into the poems. Reading William Carlos Williams had an effect on my lines. The new sections cover a long period of time, about twenty years. I was choosing from a larger group of poems and making selections.
P: Was there anything that surprised you about looking at those old poems about the poet you were or the poems you had written?
JM: Well, they seemed like a young man’s poems, [laughs] some of them. I am happy with them, but they aren’t the kinds of poems I write today, for better or worse.
P: The earlier speaker was more romantic, the forms are a little looser than when you get into “Spells and Auguries,” or even the selections from Walking Past Midnight and you mentioned irony playing a greater role. Why is “Scouts Spear-Fishing on the Chatanika” the title poem for this collection? Does it speak to who you’ve become as a poet?
JM: It does seem to embody some of the larger themes in the book. There are quite a few war poems. I was never in the war, but Vietnam was certainly a disaster that happened to all of us at the time. I was actually born during World War Two; some of my earliest memories are of bombersflying overhead. The element of irony, the main irony in that poem, is the child’s point of view and the adult’s point of view and how they clash.
P: Poems like “A Man Without Legs” and “The Siege of Leningrad” veer from the consistent voice of the speaker that runs through most of this collection. Did you find that using another voice and subject was helpful, particularly in the war poems?
JM: The Leningrad poem came out of a book I read, The 900 Days by Harrison Salisbury. which quoted from diaries that had been preserved that recorded the suffering of the peopleincluding one by a teenage girl. It seemed appropriate to give it to the girl to speak it rather than trying to take on that kind of experience with my own voice.
P: The idea of place comes up in this collection in many different ways. Alaska is explicitly mentioned throughout the text. What role does Alaska play and how does the landscape help to facilitate the merging of external and internal conflict?
JM: Alaska is a major influence on the poems. There are quite a few poems that are set in one specific location, overlooking the Tanana River. It is simply where I go to sit and wait for a poem. There is always some sensory information there as my inner thoughts go in various directions, so it is the perfect scene to try to incorporate the internal and the external.
P: You do that beautifully in those poems.
JM: Thank you. I think that is the central voice of the book, even though I don’t start with it. As the book evolves that’s where I come through most directly.
P: How does the Alaskan lifestyle stand up to things that need to be contained in modern poetry to stay contemporary?
JM: At one point I sent the manuscript to an editor in New York who wrote back to say ‘there is way too much Alaska in this book. People in New York don’t know Alaska.’ [smiles] That was before Sarah Palin I guess. I am a New Yorker. That is where I grew up. The move to Alaska was unexpected. It is a remarkable place, it has certainly been an important part of my own development and that’swhy it is in the poetry.
P: You recently had the chance to be the Poet in Residence at DenaliNational Park. How did that experience differ from the time you frequently spend on the Tanana?
JM: I was living in a cabin in the park and I was completely free to do whatever I felt like doing. Everyday I felt like I was having new and unexpected experiences. There were eagles all over. There was a fox den nearby. There was a field with over a hundred caribou in it. It had a real impact on me. I had a sense that I was in a different relationship to nature than I had been before--I'm not conventionally religious--but it came close to being a religious experience.
P: I know that as a Poet in Residence you're required to produce a poem for the park to use. Does process differ when you have a poem that needs to be written as opposed to more organic writing experiences like waiting above the Tanana for an inspiration and working with something that arises naturally?
JM: Yes, I think you're right to point out the difference. The things that had impact on me, that I chose to write about, were not the standard kind of nature poems. I only wrote about the things that I felt ‘well this is really new and interesting and I better write about it’ [laughs]. Hopefully that overcomes the problem.
P: Being from New York, do you find Alaska more suitable for your sensibilities? Do you find yourself writing urban poems in other places?
JM: When I came up here I thought, ‘gee, I am a newbie I better not write about Alaska for awhile. I better just absorb it.’ That resolution lasted for about a week, and then I started writing about Alaska because there is so much here. It has such an impact. The first poem in the book is set in the Caribbean; it is a diving poem. I put it first to say, ‘just because I am an Alaskan doesn’t mean I always write about Alaska.’ It also seemed like a way in to the collection. Diving has a mythic element to it that is comparable to going into a book of poetry. You’regoing to see some new things, and you need instruction on how to read a book of poetry. It’s kind of an instruction poem.
P:The idea of the ‘Alaskan Poet’ seems to be a hot topic right now. Do you have a take on it?
JM: There doesn’t seem like any reason to shy away from writing about Alaska. If you are in New York and writing about New York City you have Frank O’Hara to worry about, Walt Whitman, Hart Crane. You will not be the first to write about the urban experience. In Alaska there have been important writers too, but Alaska has its own space that is unusual.
P: You studied under Robert Lowell and refer to him several times throughout the Selected Poems. How has Lowell influenced your work?
JM: He influenced me more as a poet than as a teacher. He was hands-off as a teacher. Poetry for him was a calling, not merely a craft but something that you gave your life to, and that was an important influence. Later, in grad school, is when I started to read his poetry carefully.
P: Speaking of grad school, you studied at Iowa. What was that like for you?
JM: Disorientating because of the number of poets that year. Many of them were very talented. I had to learn pretty fast that what I was doing from my undergraduate writing was not going to stand up. I was engaged at the time, to Nancy. She would send me postcards from the Gardner Museum in Boston. I would write her letters responding to the paintings on the postcards. Those became the first poems that I felt really had my voice and had some craft to them. They were kind of love poems in letter form.
P: What is the role of form in your work? What are the limitations and liberations that you find in form?
JM: I believe what Robert Frost said about poems being a ‘momentary stay against confusion.’ Our mental world is full of competing material. In a poem you find some aspect of that world that you can get a handle on, and the handle is form. My poems begin, often, with free association, not thevery rigorous lines and stanzas that develop as I work through the material and get a feel for the direction it could take.
P: How did putting “Spell and Auguries” into sonnet form help facilitate the composition of that experience?
JM: I started writing the sonnets for Ben while he was still in the coma. It was a way of keeping contact with a part of myself that I thought was endangered. The thought that he might die was devastating, so the poems were therapeutic. I used the sonnet form because it gave me a sense of control. Those poems, as I wrote them, I knew they weren’t any good. I was writing poems for me, to keep myself as steady as I could. Later, I went back, after Ben had recovered from the coma. At that point, I thought, ‘maybe I can write this as a memoir.’ I went back and looked at the sonnets. I found a couple of them that I could salvage, others just had information that I could use. Probably none of the poems really resemble the sonnets I started with, but that was the generative material.
P: Your family seems central to your work. How do you balance the role of father, son, husband and poet?
JM: It wasn’t something that I expected. I didn’t expect to get married until I proposed. I didn’t expect to have children, but then a time came that we were ready. Once you have children you have to deal with it [laughs]. Jeff is a poet. Ben is a musician, so those are the values in our family. We are lucky to be able to do those things.
P: This brings up another question I have: throughout the collection you achieve a wonderful balance of lyric and narrative and are continually able, in Eliot’s terms, to turn some very particular experiences into general truths. Do you find yourself being cautious of that, in terms of becoming too personal?
JM: This comes back to an idea of who the reader of the poems might be. I have an internal dialogue based on my relationship with some friends who read my work. Their reactions become my internalized critic. I have a sense of how they might react, and that helps me draw lines. I certainly don’t begin that way, the poems start with my own impulse.
P: Was it a long process learning where to draw that line? Have you learned any hard lessons?
JM: We’ll see [laughs]. At the time I was starting to write these very personal poems it wasn’t unique because it was the period of confessional poetry in the 60s with Lowell as one of the major figures, Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton writing about her daughter. What I was doing was not really on the edge compared to what some of what those poets wrote. I don’t consider my poems confessional. They are personal. They are things I might say to a member of the family. They are not generally things I would conceal within an intimate circle. I like that intimacy as a part of the voice.
P: It is definitely there, especially in a poem like “Sonnet of the Lost Labor.” It is quite stunning and powerful. There is a lot to balance in a poetic voice. What about the balance between music and story?
JM: The music of the language has to be there. I tend to like poems that have some narrative elements, not necessarily a full story but an element of tension that you get from dramatic situations. The emotional element is the other thing in the poem that has to be there. You need the sound and the feeling.
P: Something else we appreciated about your work was the humor that ran throughout, poems like “Moo” and “Time off From Bad Behavior.” Can you say something about the role humor plays in this collection?
JM: It’s just part of my personality that comes out. I’mglad that I can get it out into the poems. I know some very funny people that write only serious poems. It is partly a pacing device. As I put the book together I knew that after a few heavy blows I needed something a little lighter to give the reader a sense of stepping back and hopefully being amused.
P: It worked. With the completion of this collection you have the opportunity to look back on your journey as a poet. What are your landmark moments?
JM: The most important thing was getting to the first poems that I thought were good, as good as I could do at the time. Those were the poems for Nancy that I wrote in graduate school my first year. Everything else follows from that. Getting a first book published was important, but that was more of a professional accomplishment than a discovery of voice. This new book is important in a similar way and does have the quality of summarizing my entire career.
P: What advice do you have for new poets in terms of becoming the type of poet they want to be?
JM: Write on a regular basis. A lot of the poems I now value I dragged out of myself over a blank computer screen, just to get them started. Not that they were necessarily promising from the start but I stayed with it and found where the material could go. That is my process. It is an amazing life to produce over a long period of time and then see the result.The other thing is to read. Read widely.
P: It must be a very proud moment to have this collection coming out.
JM: Yes.
P: Thank you for your time John. It has been a pleasure.
JM: Thank you.