Poet extraordinaire and all-around good guy, Marcus Cafagña, has seen his poetry published in hundreds of magazines across the country, including AGNI, Witness, Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and on and on and on. His first book, The Broken World, was selected for the National Poetry Series. In a review of The Broken World, Edward Hirsch provided our favorite description of Marcus’ work: “Marcus Cafagña is a poet who shies at nothing, who will not turn away from what he sees—ordinary people struggling against, and sometimes breaking on, the wheel of their fate.” That pretty much sums it up. Where other poets might see and seek to elicit grandiose notions and ethereal concepts that pop like CGI in a big-budget blockbuster, Marcus reaches up from the page, places both his hands on the reader’s face, and forces us to take a good look at difficult truths that bind us to this veil of tears.

JW: The thing about the writing process is that there’s not a one-size-fits- all approach to writing anything. And what a relief that is. Sure, there are craft considerations we all tend to agree on, but, otherwise, anything goes—so long as it’s done well. Myself, I tend to let an idea take off like an old hunting dog on the trail of something I haven’t yet laid eyes on. From there, I follow along without any organizing principle in mind. Eventually, something with a heartbeat comes running out of the briar patch and confronts me, and, once it’s in my sights, I know what I have to do. What’s your writing process like?
Marcus: I love your characterization of the writing process as “anything goes.” That certainly fits my process, which I would describe as an erratic form of discipline. By that I mean I don’t sit down every day at a certain time and write. But when a subject for a poem crosses my mind, often when I’m driving or when I awake in the middle of the night, I write down whatever comes to mind. From the poet Sharon Olds I learned that I could receive a poem by listening for the sound of oncoming lines, like feeling the ground tremble when a train is approaching. I’m trying to gather language that possesses a sense of movement, that describes a dramatic situation or the memory of an experience that strikes me as surprising or ironic, a memory that might move me toward strong emotion. Once I have a subject and some of the language to propel it forward with, I work on the poem for as long as it takes to feel intact.

JW: As we’ve just said, there’s a zillion ways to approach writing something new, but, for you, when do you know a piece might have a pulse and is worth bringing to life? Does a zinger line tend to get the ball rolling? Or is it an image? When do you know? And, perhaps more importantly, how do you decide when to let an idea go?
Marcus: Yeah, either a zinger line or a vivid image gets me going. I don’t usually complete a poem in one day’s writing, as I would in my youth in Michigan. At that time, I lived above a nightclub in East Lansing. I would toss my failed drafts into the trash compactor otherwise filled with the bar’s empty liquor bottles that were crushed according to law each night at closing time. My process has changed over the years. Now, I’m more patient. Once I have some evocative lines and a feeling of progression, of movement, in what I have scrawled down, I move my handwritten draft to the computer screen for further revision. I’m hesitant to throw away what at first appear to be failed drafts.
JW: You’ve somewhat recently retired but still teach a few poetry courses. Have you found this affords you more time to write? What about your process has changed?

Marcus: Well, I’m still writing dramatic narrative poems. Since retiring to emeritus faculty at Missouri State, I’ve been writing poems toward a future book, raw, vivid stuff. I feel like I’m catching up with myself, if that makes any sense? I’ve even been trying my hand at writing prose poems. In my younger days I wrote both poetry and short stories. In college I was introduced to narrative poetry and realized that I could bring my love of storytelling to my poems, which in turn diminished my enthusiasm for writing fiction. Writing the occasional prose poem allows me a brief return to fiction since a prose poem must work both as a poem and as prose. The prose poem allows me to alter my poetic voice or to take on voices other than my own. I love the poetic line too much to abandon it for long, but it is fun to write poems in prose.
JW: Years ago, I had the joy of hearing you read before having actually read any of your work (even as an adult, I still sometimes indulge in dessert before dinner), but one thing that struck me right away was your handling of form poetry. Up until then, form poetry seemed too much like a suit and tie endeavor for my taste. Nevertheless, at that moment the utility of the form poem as an organizing principle finally clicked for me. More recently, I was again treated to one of your readings at River Pretty Writers Retreat, and, once again, it was a form poem that stood out to me for some reason (“Last Things,” which features the title line of your latest, excellent book, All the Rage in the Afterlife This Season). Besides the obvious constraints of a given form, do you approach form poetry any differently than free verse work?

Marcus: Usually, I write the first draft of a poem with no attention to form. Then I write the poem over again, say as a pantoum. Since in a pantoum each line is repeated in a pattern it’s obvious if the lines are holding up under repetition, whether the rhythmic progression of the pantoum is enhancing the poem or exposing its shortcomings. Even though I generally write a draft in a traditional form, most of my poems are written in free verse, if verse is ever truly free. In his posthumous book on prosody, The Orbit of Meter, Springfield poet and editor Robert Wallace writes that “without our intending or noticing them…strings of iambs show up in speech, especially in passionate speech.” “Last Things” was originally created by a Frankenstein-like piecing together of three unfinished poems. Rewriting it as a pantoum annealed it together and lent emotional impact to the original drafts. The pantoum format served the layered subject matter of my imagining my late wife Dianne’s ashes rising like a small cloud from her urn on the mantle, her ghostly presence revisiting her childhood, her abusive alcoholic parents, her shoplifting as a teenager, a series of scenes from her life leading to her suicide and to her being “trapped” inside an urn. I revised that poem for months until it brought me to tears every time I read it to myself. Often, reaching an involuntary emotional reaction is my measuring stick for a poem. For me, writing about trauma is at once a painful and an intimate experience. There’s still such shame around the subject of suicide. I don’t think I would’ve had the nerve to write a poem like “Last Things”—let alone a book like All the Rage in the Afterlife This Season—had I not, as a teenager, read Anne Sexton her fearlessly personal poems about her nervous breakdown, her time in the madhouse, her divorce, her suicide attempts, the trauma she endured written in whatever form served her subject matter.

The pantoum allows for dramatic effect and at times for humor as in my poem “Birds in the Breezeway” – poking fun at my being so afraid of two starlings caught indoors, circling the ceiling above my son’s head and mine. This is what comes of watching too many Hitchcock films.
JW: This is sort of a part B to the previous question, but there’s a preamble: I recently attended a wonderful poetry workshop led by the poet Richard Jackson. It was a nice change of pace because I had been waist deep in prose for months prior and was badly in need of a change of scenery. Of all the pearls of wisdom offered at that workshop, Rick said one thing so seemingly bizarre that I felt a little swine-like. I might have laughed. What he said was this: “There is no such thing as inspiration. You must simply do the work.” I’m paraphrasing the second part, but the gist is that: we must simply put our butts in the chair and do the work, like putting one foot in front of the other when taking on any other task. So, there is such a thing as inspiration, but creative endeavors do not require it. If only I had received this message in my teens or twenties. I would have spared myself a lot of looking for inspiration and probably got a lot more done. Nevertheless, I’m pleased to report that, since this epiphany, I’ve been more productive than ever in terms of finishing writing projects. I’ve even strayed outside my comfort zone and developed two pantoums recently (and even “finished” one of them). At any rate, I guess my question is this: As a younger writer, I always had that inherent artsy-fartsy fear that if I tried to force something it would turn out to be shit. So, if I wasn’t inspired to do so, I wouldn’t. I’d give up without even trying. Or, when I did try, when I sat down and said something along the lines of, “I’m going to write a pantoum right now,” it often lacked that manic sort of high you get when working on a piece so inspired it basically writes itself. What’s your advice to writers as it pertains to reconciling inspirational drought and wanting to write?

Marcus: Rick Jackson is right of course. I make myself write, especially when I don’t feel like it. One way I get myself going is to read a few poems I love from any book by Sharon Olds. Then, I close the book and wait to see if the energy of her language or emotion moves me to want to write. I find this method useful if I’ve been reading a writer whose subject matter is different than my own so that I’m responding to the trajectory of their language, not imitating their subject matter. I have been fortunate to have lived an interesting, if at times a difficult, life. I’m seldom at a loss for ideas. For me, the challenge is to discover an approach to dramatizing experience that feels unexpected in some way. Portraying people at pivotal moments in their lives has made me aware that sometimes what blocks me from writing is my fear of revisiting unresolved feelings. In graduate school we would tease each other; if your life is a mess your poems will be amazing.
JW: Maybe this is a throwaway question, but it really is something I’ve
been wondering about:

Every so often I unintentionally find myself churning out what I now know skeptics refer to as “shape poetry.” Much like I described in Question 1, I never go into a poem thinking, “I’m going to write a poem that looks like a chicken head,” but these things happen. However, I never realized the apparent ill repute of this form. As it turns out, many journals outright stipulate that they don’t publish shape poetry. Every time I come across this, I like to imagine that journal’s editor saying the words aloud with the malice of Mordor’s gatekeeper in Lord of the Rings and looking like they’ve just sucked on a lemon. There seems to be a certain vehement seriousness to this that I just don’t understand. Is it because form poetry can be or has been done so cheaply in the past? I have to assume that’s it. At any rate, all this discovery has done to headstrong me is steel my resolve to finish the chapbook of shape poetry I’m now working on partly just to spite critics. What are your thoughts on shape poetry?
Marcus: Though it’s not my bag, there’s nothing inherently wrong with shaping the lines of a poem about a cat into the shape of a cat’s head. Historically, concrete or shape poems were written by poets like George Herbert, Guillaume Appollinaire, and E. E. Cummings. The primary drawback of this approach is having to sacrifice some of the length, rhythm, or torque of a poetic line in favor of clipping the line to conform to the triangular shape of a cat’s ear. The best contemporary shape poetry I’ve read was published in Poetry East, a literary journal worth checking out.

JW: As a younger writer, it always felt like there were distinctive camps, and you were either a poet or a fiction writer or [insert other make-believe primogeniture]. For so long it hadn’t occurred to me how useful it was to exercise a fair amount of overlap. After all, great writers steal, as the old adage goes. Personally, I find myself caught in an inescapable, interconnected web where, when working on an essay, for example, I’ll be inspired by a Billy Collins poem; or, if I’m working on a new poem, a phrase from some Louis L’amour novel I’m reading causes the course of said poem to change. Such interplay between works has become a prime mover for me these days. One thing I love about your poetry is the way you weave outside influences into your work. In this moment, I’m thinking in particular about your truly killer poem, “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.” Tell us a little about how a poem like this comes about for you.
Marcus: I was raised in a musical family, but after playing the violin badly for five years I stopped torturing my mother with my daily practicing and returned to writing poems. As a child, most of what I wrote rhymed. Then, as a teenager, I discovered the Beats and stopped rhyming. I know what you mean by outside influences. I have put down a novel I was reading and written a poem or written while listening to music, even titled a poem after the Bob Dylan song “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.” That’s actually an older poem of mine that began as a detailed description of my frustrating encounter with a man who was camped out on a beanbag chair singing soulful songs for three days and nights in the alley below my apartment window in East Lansing, Michigan. After I wrote the poem and began to revise it, I listened to the Dylan song. Like my poem, his song narrates an encounter with a stranger, whom he calls the Ragman. He also sings the line: “Shakespeare he’s in the alley.” I related to those feelings of entrapment, of displacement expressed in Dylan’s lyrics, since so much of the published poetry I’d read seemed stuffy and unapproachable.

JW: For me, it’s always seemed important to counterbalance creative endeavors with hands-on physical activities. I won’t go so far as to suggest I’m exercising again, but I do find that getting out of my head is an outright necessity after a writing day. After a few days or, God willing, a few weeks of writing success, I like to take things a step further and go on some kind of adventure outside of my usual routine. Maybe it’s a hike or a camping trip or a concert or even a nice quiet drive somewhere with a view, but the important thing, for me, is to not stray too far from my center, to recharge my batteries, so to speak. I’ve learned that you can get stoned, but you can’t get blood from a stone. As with Question 3, inspiration may not be required to write, but rest, rehabilitation, and the occasional change of scenery go a long way. Do you have any advice for writers working on developing better writing habits and prewriting rituals?
Marcus: One ritual I developed over the years was to write poems in my car, preferably not while the car was actually moving. Growing up in Michigan, many of my poems were set in cars, many still are. My grandfather worked on the assembly line in Detroit. I would tape a pad of paper to the dashboard to jot down lines at red lights. I don’t write in my car anymore and don’t recommend it. It’s too dangerous–though at times I still get ideas for poems while I’m driving, as I did for my poem “Changing Light.” I’m thinking now, I should write a poem about writing a poem while driving.

JW: Your poem “Mobile Home” is another favorite of mine. There’s so much depth and it really hits home for me. Lines like, “wind that rattles a magazine’s unread pages,” and “hands reaching under beds,” and finding “food jars stuffed with dollars we never = found” make a case for the power of the unsaid in poems like this, highlighting a mysteriousness we’re simultaneously perfectly familiar with. Like finding a shoebox time capsule under my grandmother’s bed, old and held together by tape. The aroma is musty with a hint of mothballs. Finding these sorts of hidden treasures in such places—and in poems—leads to as many questions as answers. In poems like “Mobile Home” do you find yourself planning much of this mystery while you’re drafting the piece? Or is it more discovery on your part—uncovering mysteries? In writing anything, we’re often seeking answers to questions we have, but perhaps the greatest discovery is that sometimes there aren’t any definitive answers.
Marcus: As with “Mobile Home” most of my poems are portraits of people I’ve known, but I started that particular poem by describing in images the wreck of my late aunt’s mobile home as well as what furniture or belongings were found inside. I admire the way Ted Kooser writes poems about abandoned homesteads, so I thought I’ll write one about my aunt’s trailer. The elusiveness of her supposed wealth caught in that image of those baby food jars supposedly stuffed with dollar bills that were never found lent an air of mystery to the poem. So much of life seems shrouded by mystery, by chance occurrence.

I often discover subjects for poems by chance occurrence, by accident, by witnessing a dramatic moment in daily life. For example, “Changing Light” is a poem I wrote after happening upon a dramatic scene in an abandoned parking lot in Springfield. In that poem, I witnessed a woman being arrested by DEA agents and her little boy being taken from her—all while waiting in my car for the traffic light to change from red to green. When I drove away from this disturbing scene, I felt compelled to write the poem.
JW: What are you currently reading?
Marcus: One book I’m reading is Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrim of the Flesh by John Lahr, the definitive biography of the playwright. My first wife was writing a dissertation on Williams before she died. His plays are another outside influence on my poetry, with their richly drawn characters emoting poetic dialogue ripe with the wisdom of lived experience. I’m also reading Life on Earth by Dorianne Laux, a poet I have long admired.
A new book of poems I would like to recommend is And Now, Nowhere but Here by Andrea Hollander. In 1998, when I moved from Philadelphia to Springfield, Andrea sent me a postcard, on which she wrote “Welcome to the Ozarks, a deeper way of life.” It’s always a delight to encounter her poems. The simple pleasure of reading a good book is what led me to want to write in the first place.