The Aftermath of Love

KARAN

Michael, I’ve loved reading these poems — they’re plainspoken and haunted, melancholic and exuberant. Domesticity and estrangement swirl together here in ways that are wondrous. The past is a constant companion. Let’s begin with “A Partial List of Truths” — such a gentle, precise dismantling of a life. You write: “no longer needing to answer when the children call, no more nearness to those few, essential words, and the painless nothing that was.” I see so much grief here. What is it about poetry that allows grief to be expressed so freely, deeply?

MICHAEL

Thank you for this question, Karan, and thank you for the close reading.

Maybe I should begin… Well, maybe I should begin at the beginning. Five years ago, on the first day of summer, I wrote a prose poem. The next day I wrote another and the next day I wrote yet another. I had no idea that I’d soon be documenting a season of grief. In July, we lost our dog (“A Partial List of Truths”) and then, despite the risks early in the pandemic, I traveled from Chicago to Oregon to visit my father for the last time. Less than a month later, my wife died unexpectedly, and I became both a widower and a single parent to our two young children. I wrote each day through the final week of that summer: ninety-three days, ninety-three poems.  

Poetry offered a place to collect and hold these losses during the first weeks and months of mourning. The grieving process isn’t linear and is different for everyone, even when two people share the same loss. In A Primer of Poets and Readers of Poetry, Gregory Orr writes beautifully about the disorder of human experience and our great need for grounding. For some, a sense of order and understanding comes through long periods of reflection. Others might talk with a sibling or friend or a professional. All good things, as far as I’m concerned, and I feel especially grateful for the practice—decades at this point—of shaping experience through writing, long before my wife’s death. That last phrase, by the way, remains incredibly strange to me… “After a great pain,” Emily Dickinson writes, “a formal feeling comes.” And poetry, according to Robert Frost, offers “a momentary stay against confusion.” In my daily practice during the summer of 2020, each poem became a record—a loosely organized time capsule—of where my life was swept and pulled on that particular day. Poetry invites the range of human emotions, grief among them. And in ways similar to our experience as humans, poetry is capable of simultaneity by holding what’s seemingly misaligned or even contradictory.

KARAN

What does your writing process look like, Michael — structurally, emotionally, spatially? How do you usually begin, write, and finish a poem, Michael? And what’s your relationship to revision like — do your poems arrive slow, fast, all at once?

MICHAEL

I tend to work on a single poem until its finished but, for me, the process of writing a prose poem is wildly different than my process when writing a poem with line breaks. Lineation spotlights the first and last words of each line and maybe it’s an acrobatic quality I feel toward lineation: the necessity for absolute balance or else the language will slip from the tightrope that stretches from the first letter of the title to the poem’s final period. The journey can’t be rushed, and I often spend several months revising a poem with line breaks. Elizabeth Bishop compared the effortlessness of composing “One Art” to “writing a letter.” Well, writing a letter might take up an hour or two of someone’s morning or afternoon but—in her introduction to Bishop’s drafts in Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box—Alice Quinn notes that “One Art” was “completed to [Bishop’s] satisfaction within months.” In other words, a “quick” poem from one of America’s great poets still amounted to something like sixteen or seventeen drafts. As writers, the job is to give our time and energy to that process no matter what.

If I’ve convinced anyone here that writing a lineated poem is a highwire act, then writing a prose poem is akin to crossing the same tightrope when it’s much, much closer to the ground. The pressure I sense while working with lines and lineation is instantly relieved. There’s still a sense of wonder and magic, especially since the prose poem continues to implement all the tools of poetry except for the line break. Strangely enough, I feel the same pleasure and satisfaction after finishing a prose poem as I do after finishing a poem with line breaks, even though most of my prose poems are written in a single day.

Regardless of what I’m writing, I give myself space or, if necessary, create the space for attention and curiosity to arrive. Right this moment, the sounds of a nearby swimming pool stir memories of my twenty-third birthday and stopping at a series of waterfalls along the Columbia River Gorge. And the clouds I can see here to the south of Lake Charles, Louisiana… Maybe my love, who lives but two blocks away, is noticing these same clouds. I’m also reminded there’s a series of disturbances out in the Atlantic, any of which could develop into a hurricane and make landfall just thirty miles from here. And now, after closing my eyes, out of nowhere I hear echoes of a recent phone call in which a casual “How are you?” was met with “Well, I’m not being bombed or starved.” None of these impressions offer a blueprint for the next poem, but I sense possibilities. Maybe those waterfalls connect to the time I almost drowned. Perhaps the natural, brutal force of a hurricane isn’t so different than—here comes yet another memory—the sting of a wasp that somehow found its way into my bed when I lived in Massachusetts. Or maybe, in any of these scenarios, the background of war and genocide should instead swing into focus.

KARAN

A lot of these poems seem to be concerned with the past — how it can’t be changed, how the people we lose are imprisoned forever in the past, how we revisit it to celebrate, yearn for them. What does truth mean for you in the context of memory — especially as it recedes or reforms?

MICHAEL

That’s a great question, Karan. I continue to be thankful for the proximity of poetry when so many things five years ago—including a world enduring a pandemic—hit the proverbial fan. Much from those summer months remains firm and changeless in the writing, especially through imagery and description. The writing was my truth during that difficult time. Of course, my experience was subjective and flawed and quite different from what my children experienced, what our friends experienced, what my wife experienced. And the neuroscientists tell us each time we revisit or share a memory it becomes susceptible to change: we rewrite our memories with tiny inaccuracies before filing them away until next time. In a sense, every one of us is an unreliable narrator. Truth is an illusion, in danger always of being erased, fabricated, and overwritten. I nonetheless feel tethered and hope my life—my sense of self—expands and grows based on my experiences, or at least what my body and mind retain from those experiences. This stretches back to what I believe to be my early memories, including those I’ve constructed from photographs and stories shared by my parents or older siblings.

Not long after my wife died, an entirely new wave of grief arrived when I realized Valerie’s memory of our children had vanished with her: memories we shared, yes, but also the memories separate from my own. It felt like pages from the story of our family had been ripped from existence. I once believed the very act of living was an elegy, and I’d lament the fact that most of each day never gets processed into long-term memory. Soon enough, for instance, I’ll forget the drops soaking through my shirt when I hurried into a rain shower just this morning. When I relayed this observation to my friend, the novelist Nathan Hill, he responded with a different take: he described his astonishment by how much we remember, especially when something from twenty or thirty years ago reemerges out of nowhere. How does the brain do that? And this type of memory, according to science, is more accurate than the memories we visit more frequently. I find consolation in these things, although I’ve continued to write toward some kind of record, including a dozen essays that document Valerie’s life, our life together, and my life after her death. If nothing else, I hope these stories will help our children remember their mother.

KARAN

You also circle around the ruins of intimacy — rooms emptied out, dishes cleared, old injuries held up to the light. I’m thinking of “Knocking Twice on Wood” and “Self-Portrait at Twenty-Three” especially. And then a line like this stops me cold: “I put on your necklace just that once.” How do you approach the aftermath of love in your writing? The heartbreak/grief seems not to be an event, but part of the daily texture.

MICHAEL

That’s exactly right. There’s no “full recovery” from our deepest losses, and loss accumulates for each of us the longer we live. Heartbreak is plenty by itself, which is compounded in grief and must be carried if we’re to move forward. I’m thinking, as example, of “Michiko Dead” by Jack Gilbert. A few months ago, a well-meaning friend asked about my grieving process and used the past tense, as though at some point I’d reached the end. You used the phrase “aftermath of love” and “aftermath” of course is not the same thing as “absence.” In fact, when we lose someone, our connection to that person is intensified and can accompany us in everything we do, which begs the question: “If their presence is everywhere, is the person really gone?”

I think it’s easier to write a poem out of sorrow—some heartbreak, loneliness, even anger—than it is to write a poem focused on joy. It’s easier to write a poem that’s half-empty than one that’s half-full, but there’s certainly an audience for both. I hope I don’t sound cynical, but grief sells… Conflict sells… Three-quarters of the poems I wrote during the summer of 2020 have found homes in journals. Meanwhile, more often than not, my other poems—especially those I’d categorize as “love poems”—are returned with form rejections. While it’s important to acknowledge the darkness, it’s equally important—maybe more important in this specific cultural and political moment—to write towards the light. A love poem, in its brave act of saying yes, stands against the terrible, routine violence of this world.

KARAN

I keep coming back to grief. Grief pulses through this collection like a low radio hum — sometimes explicit (“my god, these empty blankets”), other times more diffused, as in “Brief as It Was” or “Before We Ever Lived.” But what strikes me most is how rarely the speaker tries to name or narrativize that grief. It’s just there, in the soft collapse of objects, in a child reaching across the night. Can we speak about withholding vs. disclosing?

MICHAEL

After Valerie’s death, instead of resisting or bottling my feelings, I made a conscious choice to meet the waves of grief, to show emotion even in front of my children, and to give myself permission to share with others. It’s a difference between expansiveness and constriction, between vulnerability and keeping others at arm’s length. A new semester has just begun at McNeese State University, and I’ve already mentioned—as I’ve done in each class during the last five years—my journey with grief. Boundaries and professionalism are important, and I simultaneously believe acknowledging our personal struggles is an opportunity for connection and growth. Loss shapes us unlike anything. Loss is part of who I am.

Of course, the diction and syntax I use in a poem is not the diction and syntax I use in the classroom. And—back to your question—the absence of naming or narrativizing in these poems is a result of my own impulse toward the oblique and the fact that their writing felt less like I was making individual works—despite separate titles and pages—and more like I was making one continuous poem. I love to read a poem in isolation, separate from the rest, and I love reading two or three poems by the same writer: suddenly there’s a conversation, each poem informing the rest. The same is true with songs by the same artist and movies by the same director. For these prose poems, it would have been redundant to write, “It’s now been three days since…” And the next day write, “It’s now been four days since…” Or to explain in poem after poem that my dog died or that my father is dying or that I’ll never see my wife again. Instead, my impulse might be to hint toward those many losses with a title such as “Like a Country Western Song.” Although not a conscious intention, the withholding in my work is an opportunity for some readers to more easily connect the writing with their own experiences.  

KARAN

There’s also a distinct musicality to your line — one that’s conversational but syncopated, full of stray ampersands, sudden pivots, and unresolved clauses. Do you think about lineation, rhythm, and silence when composing?

MICHAEL

My focus on lineation comes late when I’m making a poem, which is to say I like to have a strong sense of content before shifting attention toward the line break. But “late” isn’t really accurate, because there’s still so much writing and revision that happens because of the line break. It’s the pressure I mentioned earlier, and I could never feel satisfied if I just added line breaks to a prose poem, setting aside my belief that each line is like a brick and essential in holding the poem together as a whole. Admittedly, what I do in the moment relies a lot on instinct, although that instinct is informed by the decades I’ve spent reading, writing, and listening.

And that listening is listening to others—impossible to say how many readings attended—as well as to myself. When I read a new draft aloud, my ear picks up a whole new frequency of rhythms and sounds. And revision is crucial if there’s even the smallest question or hesitation. I can’t hear the language without recitation, which is close enough to resuscitation that I like to blur their meanings. “I made it out of a mouthful of air,” Yeats writes. By reciting published poems and our in-progress attempts, we breathe air and meaning into the lifeless symbols on the page. The poem begins and ends in silence, but the music rises between those bookends.

KARAN

Some of these poems feel time-struck — like snapshots from lives that have already moved on. “Ours Was the Room Upstairs,” “Next Time We’ll Get It Right,” “Like a Country Western Song” — they feel like elegies for things that were never even whole to begin with. But there’s so much specificity in the image work, it almost redeems the loss. Is there a kind of faith in your work — not necessarily religious, but maybe faith in the fragment, the half-memory, the second attempt? What is your relationship with faith?

MICHAEL

My siblings and I were taught to say prayers before bed. And I remember attending church on both Christmas and Easter, but not so much during the rest of the year. I attended Vacation Bible School one summer when a church replaced the field ripe with grasshoppers and snakes at the end of our street in Southeast Portland, and in the middle years of high school I became actively involved in a church youth group. This was when I began reading stories and novels and poems beyond those assigned in my classes, and the writings and lives of those authors didn’t always align with the tenets of Christianity. The church’s position on abortion and homosexuality, for example, didn’t sit well with me. Stepping away from a religious faith, I turned toward literature.

In his commencement address at Kenyon College, David Foster Wallace noted “In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” I chose literature then and choose it now because the language connects me to lives and experiences beyond my own. I choose literature because it makes me laugh, makes me cry, makes me angry… I choose literature and return to the books I’ve read because they help me understand how I’ve changed and how I haven’t, how the world has changed and how it hasn’t. I choose literature because when I read, I feel less alone.  

And look, the fact is I’m going to die and you, Karan, are going to die. The people dearest to both of our lives (I’m so sorry) are going to die. It’s that great, common denominator we share. There have been just a few moments in my life—nearly half a century already—when I thought, “Right now I’m willing to let go.” When I think of those instances, each one was infused with the image: a perfect confluence of the senses. Writing gives us permission to reframe and understand the moments of our lives, to hold the image for ourselves and, if lucky, to offer it to others.

KARAN

This is a question we ask all our poets, though the answers are always wildly different: There’s a theory that a poet’s work tends toward one of four major axes — poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. Of course, like all best poets, I see all of these elements in your work. But if you were to place yourself in one of these categories, where would you? And do you see yourself moving to another?

MICHAEL

Such an intriguing question, and one that feels a little like being asked to choose only one leg on a chair or a single direction—North, South, East, or West?—on a compass. My partner, a poet and visual artist, recently surprised me by asking if I liked being in a body. I appreciate art because its making doesn’t rely on the body in the same way that sports do. I’d like to believe I lean away from the poetries of the body and mind, and more toward the heart with its emotional center of human experience. Next February, if all goes well, I’ll reach the fifty-year milestone that is my life. Looking toward whatever time I have left, I hope my writing will reflect connection and truth, a peace and understanding of the self, which is to say the poetry of the soul. But please, let me also treasure the four-leaf clover. Let me indulge each of the four stages of the moon.

KARAN

You’ve been publishing for years now. What advice would you offer to poets just beginning to take their work seriously? Alternatively or additionally, what’s the best writing-related advice you’ve received?

MICHAEL

My first piece of advice is to read. My second piece of advice to young writers is to read. Reading requires a unique energy and attention, and there’s no such thing as passive reading. I don’t tend to linger in regret—if I’m happy with who I am now, why regret anything that’s shaped that journey?—but damn, I wish I’d read more between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. And I wish I was reading more now. There’s this thing called expendable time, which is hard to recognize until after the responsibilities of work and bills and family arrive. Reading—whether poems or novels or the fine print on a billing statement—exposes us to a range of voices and brings us closer to the truths of our hearts and the hearts of others.

The best writing advice I ever received is, at best, tangential to writing. It was the end of summer in Amherst, Massachusetts. My time in graduate school coincided with the beginning and end of a relationship, which included a painfully short marriage. I really wanted to stay in New England, but I needed to move forward into the next chapter of my life. One afternoon, just weeks before I left Amherst for Chicago, I looked up to see a site both familiar and comforting: James Tate and Dara Wier walking together through town. They’d attended my wedding the previous August and I asked if they’d heard the news. They had, and the three of us sat for maybe ten minutes on a nearby bench, discussing among other things my plans for the future. There were periods of silence and I must have been a shell of myself because Jim, turning ever so slightly, finally said, “Well, it gets easier.”

How many times have I returned to those simple words? I indeed moved to Chicago and eventually found my footing. When something awful happens, I know it’ll eventually subside. This has been true during difficult stretches of parenting, through loss and my eventual sobriety, and after those everyday disappointments that arrive without warning. If it’s a matter of faith, I believe in the silver lining, that most people are good, that there’s hope when humans choose love.

KARAN

Would you offer our readers a poetry prompt — something strange, simple, or rigorous — to help them begin a new poem?

MICHAEL

There was a time when I stopped offering Joe Brainard’s I Remember because everyone knew that book. Lately, I’ve found it’s something new for many of my students. Brainard, who died right around the time I graduated high school, is primarily known as a visual artist. Among other projects, he often collaborated with the first- and second-generation of New York School poets. As a writer, his I Remember is a deceptively simple project: a list of memories, each beginnning with the phrase “I remember…” For me, the following prompt is an antidote to writer’s block and a reminder that our ordinary and exceptional lives are rich with material for the page.  

PROMPT: Using I Remember as a model, create your own list of ten memories, beginning each with the phrase “I remember…” Don’t overthink it. Write down any memory, big or small, that comes to mind. You have your entire life: you can offer your very first memory or the memory of reading this very prompt. Once you have ten memories, stop writing, read over your list, and choose three memories that seem most interesting to you. Of those three memories, choose one and write about that memory for ten minutes, allowing yourself to stumble down any path that presents itself: a random thought, a connected memory, an unexpected association.

KARAN

Please recommend a piece of art — a film, a painting, a song (anything other than a poem) — that’s nourished you or shifted your imagination.

MICHAEL

That’s a tough one. I’m reminded how I once became a member of the Portland Art Museum so I could regularly visit a single painting, but I’ll recommend instead a memoir, plus the film and accompanying soundtrack it inspired: (1) The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1997) by Jean-Dominic Bauby, which was (2) adapted into a gorgeous movie (2007) directed by Julian Schnabel, which in turn (3) features music by Tom Waits, Ultra Orange and Emmanuelle, and Joe Strummer, among others. For those who don’t know, Jean-Dominique Bauby was an editor of Elle magazine in France. In December 1995, at the age of forty-three, he suffered a stroke and lived the remaining fifteen months of his life with locked-in syndrome: Bauby was aware of his surroundings but couldn’t move. When it was discovered he could respond to questions by blinking his left eye, he worked with a transcriber who recited a version of the French alphabet—most frequent letters first—until Bauby blinked, eventually forming words and sentences. At night and during the long stretches he spent alone, Bauby memorized what he wanted to write and then spent hours each day slowly dictating what became The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Bauby’s descriptions of food, of time travel, of his yearnings for connection both real and invented—everything from the stillness of his bed or wheelchair—are a testament to all that memory and imagination make possible.

KARAN

And finally, since we believe in studying masters’ masters, who are the poets who have influenced you most?

MICHAEL

A substitute teacher in high school, Mr. Bernard, led me to Jack Kerouac and the Beat writers. Allen Ginsberg became my gateway poet—like a gateway drug—into the world of poetry. Another high school teacher, Mrs. Johnson, encouraged my earliest attempts at writing and, ultimately, my teachers are those who influenced me the most… During my one and only year of community college, I met Sandra Williams, a poet and teacher who founded the non-profit Mountain Writers Series in the 1970s. She introduced me to the poetry communities of Portland, Oregon: Walt Curtis, Verlena Orr, Paulann Peterson, Carlos Reyes, Vern Rutsala, Jim Shugrue, Greg Simon, and Lisa Steinman, among others. As a young poet, I felt very lucky to meet and sometimes just observe so many writers.

Later, while living in Eugene, I became enamored by the life and writings of Lew Welch, a minor Beat figure who, in 1971, left a note and vanished in the Sierra Nevada wilderness. But I also took classes from Paul Dresman and Dorianne Laux at the University of Oregon. Dorianne and her husband, Joe Millar, were huge for me. After graduating, I worked for a while with Mountain Writers Series, and there I met even more poets, including Jim Tate and Dara Wier, with whom I’d eventually study—along with Peter Gizzi—at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. There are still so many poets and so many books of poetry. Even after thirty years of reading, I have many blind spots: countless writers—long dead, my contemporaries, those up-and-coming—I’ve yet to discover. The poets whose work has excited me the most in the past decade are almost exclusively women: Ellen Bass, Dilruba Ahmed, Ellen Bass, Ada Limón, Mary Ruefle, and Diane Seuss come to mind. Truly, they’re all my teachers.

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