ABRAHAM SMITH
interviewed by JOSHUA MARIE WILKINSON

 

Spring 2008

 

 

JOSHUA MARIE WILKINSON: I'm curious about how you read live, and what goes into it.  What's the relationship to your poems on the page and your method or approach for the live presentation of your work?

ABRAHAM SMITH: sorry this took such a kansan plains of time to get back to

ny reading was a ballyhoo and blast  but fell sick thereafter and spent my
hours in town in cough on pillow  sigh sigh  but back now
in the southern climes where the cities always sleep and the
sun is some kinda giddy insomniac

in response then

my poems pledge allegiance to blake's "exuberance is beauty"
the same goes for my reading style   if youll forgive a little tuba toot, id say
my outloud self approximates an amalgam of one not so smooth elvis,
one talking-in-tongues preacher, plus one doystoevysky plumed malingerer
moments prior to his epileptic fit   which is to say, i wriggle and squirm and
spray the poems in the style of a suburban lawnsprinkler seduced
by a goodnatured devil   though i feel a tad guilty about it, i dont really honor
the stops or the half halters or fissures in the poems   i subject them,
one and all, to my hopping yelp and hooting yowl   around the age of 50, i figure
i will think on trying to begin to slow down--the better to mirror
the page with the lung   for now, i thank the great guitar poet
chris whitley, from whom i pickpocketed my stomping foot   i thank old
dark and brooding greg brown, from whom i swiped my
wagging head   i wink at townes van zandt too..  townes was
an early church for me  his self-deprecating sweetness   his piercing solemnity.

 

JMW: What's changed since your book came out?

AS: not mucho  tho i sign many more autographs now  tee hee

the lions share  the sea change  would go like this

ive been rewriting old poems
varnish on the olden weary birds and bears of yore 
and ive been writing a new very very long one
  
this new batch of bird is a riverlong gab pertaining to
the southern pained singers hank sr jimmie rodgers
and townes van zandt   elegiac for those
coyote-eyed blue yodelers  and intertwined in it is  
a lattice of gnomic praise for coyotes  the! primordial! blue! yodelers!
the! ultimate! woodland sky! weaver poets!  tho farmers with
plato in one hand and a jiggly battery flashlight in maw
and a gun in the other fleshy fingers five forever try
to eradicate the 'yote from the kingdom  ne'ertheless
trill on they do yip yip  so it's an almost but not quite elegy for the coyote  yippeee
and it's a genuine real true elegy for the pained gents aforementioned 

 

JMW: Your performance (and being struck by a car?) in NYC earlier this year is starting to become legendary--

AS: it was raining squid from the sky  a white van  white whale
pierced the wall of rain  i goofed and stepped off a curb at which time
the van bopped me on the right cheek   thereby launching yrs truly iceskater style
into the air   the hippie gentleman with what looked like a beard from the pleistocene pulled over  he beseeched me to sit in the van for recuperation purposes  he provided me with a snot rag to rub the blood off my cheek   i recall he had tapes on the dash from maybe the late 70's  and a layer of dust from
maybe the middle 60's on the dash as well  and a sage smudge stick
like a snoozing bat hanging from
the rearview   then i exited the van and went on in to do the reading  twas
a tad to a tadpole to a big fish worth of embarrassment  reading with a bleeding cheek  i guess i did my typical reading but i made more mistakes than the usual due to the van bop aforementioned

  
JMW: Abe, how does place affect your writing? You divide your time between rural Wisconsin and Tuscaloosa, Alabama--what of these places (and others?) has gotten into your work?

AS: o it is in there  yes place very important indeedly  ive writ much much about wisconsin  and a bit on massachusetts  less about alabam  but thats because ive been there so much  of late   cant write about where ya are  unless its that outside my window kindling poem
which is one i write a lot just for fun
tho i am starting to point my inky compass southerly a bit more 
as i try my hand at this country singer quasi elegy

the crow the deer the bear from wisconsin   the mockingbird the fire ant from the southern swales

seems when i am writing  i am always on that rusty bridge
overlooking whats called the Jump River not that far from the county line
between rusk and taylor counties  north north wisconsin 

almost every writing moment  i am feeling like i am that skinny boy
staring down at those bitty whipping body fish the suckers the redhorse  
and the bullheads and sometimes catfish and sometimes sturgeon

and when the trucks pulled through I had to press my white shirt hard
to the rusting steel  and I never went home without
a coppery sunset line writ between my heart and hunger

JMW: Where did you grow up and what was it like there?

AS: a bit in texas with my dad  hour outside of houston  but almost entirely in
northern wisconsin  its what youd imagine some folk singer singing a farm aid show for

lumber country  that boomed a hundred years ago  then there was a brief
flirtation with the turnip farmingwise in what was then called the cutover
lotsa white pine stumps giving the middle finger to the heavens  

and since then fairly steady sporadic farming and decline  we have high unemployment
lotsa meth etc etc

my fam was grade school and jr high and highschool teachers  so we were lower middle class

these days we live on a farm   hawks highland farms   it's a sheep dairy
farm my bro in law Ed and sister Megg have just begun 
they have a baby called Angus
named after that ac/dc fellar  theyre great people   its about family
farming  and gosh damn if they are not doing it right   my yoga guru
comma grade school teacher Ma lives there as well  
thats where i am bound for for a summer on the old rickety tractor
making hay   hauling junk metal to the metal dump   sipping bourbon on
the porch with Edinator  its pretty lovely  also a lotta bears on
the property  lotta deer   the occasional wolf  lotta coyotes to
feed this poem project of mine  and hawks galore! while i am on
the tractor!  hawks to hush me  hawks for my simile prone head

JMW:  If I may: You mentioned meth in Wisconsin--and it's appearance in your work is striking—what's your relationship / history with drugs?

AS: zero relations with meth or any t'other drug cept booze

my northwoods was a pre-meth head northwoods
was one with a boozy step pa
a recovered boozer grandpa 
boozers boozers every which way ya looked

any tangled tango with the thornier sides of this life
adds up to boozes for me

runs like sap from a maple
that line of gulper's woe
it does in my fam
and a whole lot of the fams up that way

all you need for a tavern is a beer
and the shade of a tree
and at least two decent stories about deer or bear

i think something like 70 taverns thrive
in ashland wisconsin
town of 10,000
a few hours north of us up on the big water

but other sorts of drugs beyond the sipping kind nope none for me
tho you see those pallid wanderers nowadays in the stores
on the streets them toothless scarecrow bedragglers   
and the question sits like windwhipped tents in my head
how the bones hold up that flesh
really does haunt me

JMW: From Texas to Rural Wisconsin, how did you come to poetry?

AS: i was prating my wee chickadee plaints from early on 
little yearning bings of text from high school on   then in college
i was priming for a phd run in archaeology   tho writing my
pitter patter on the side  one day   days deep in chipped stones
and bone fragments  i realized that it was a greater pleasure to
stare at and rewrite a batch of text   yeps i knew i never tired of staring
or fiddling wordwise  but with the stones and bones and the weights and
the measures    that kind of rigor and exacting peering.. well it felt like
someone was holding me down in a chair   so lope and lion on i did  

JMW: Graham Foust's blurb on your book is one of my favorites ("If Frank Stanford got up from the dead to slam (and slammed to win), what he would say might well resemble the poems in Whim Man Mammon")—What is your relationship with slam poetry—since you are now heralded among some of the avant circles off the blog comment loop as the first good slam poet?

AS: the slam dealy is interesting  where is one to go when one
is a young jotter in search of a twine of night life and writing life?
in austin in the late 90s i went to the slam  i slammed regularly
for a couple years there   then i went to chicago to the national
slams as an individual contestant in 2000  also around that
time out to the the now defunct tho utterly miraculous Taos Poetry Circus  and in
the early 2000s i did go up to birmingham a couple times to encourage their slam there  and i did run an open mic in tuscaloosa for 5 years but slam we did not  this then is what i know of slam  yet
i hear a lot that ol' abe sure is a great slam poet   really does drive me
over the curb into the hedge into the swampy swamp  now i am not
eschewing my connection with it  and i am very grateful to graham
for the blurb  i was very very honored by the blurb  it is very lovely  
but i am also certain that theres nothing in the writing in that
book thats slam   maybe one poem with a gal called Lila in it that might
fetch a few hoots and hands  but ya know
if i took old "whim" weekly to a slam  anywhere
in america  i would lose lose lose lose and then i'd lose again   the way i perform
i was performing that way when i was a kid doing environmental
speech contests in grade school in sheldon wisconsin  and ladysmith
wisconsin  what i owe to slam then is a grand community  
mike henry and sonya feher and danny solis and bronmin shumay
et al et al who took me in  and encouraged me at a tender
tendril moment in my writing life  true amigos indeedy  maybe my
hesitant "no nope not really" shying away from the slam label has to
do with how strongly i reacted against it from the get go  slam sort of
does what chicago did to the blues  squeeze into this
fixedly benumbing enervate jacket straight  3 minute poem please 
and the stars shall dribble laurel juice on you  the larger question  i guess  becomes why is reading aloud in an effusive manner slam?  i think thats the
thing maybe   brash performance equals slam?   excited
rocking about whilst yelping poems is that slam?  hollering poem tis a
pretty mossy tradition (go shop mongst the scops etc etc) and its taproot aint
about to burst thru the floor at the green mill in chicago..       

JMW: I think Foust's blurb is wonderful--especially in the world of blurbs which
wax toward a hyperbolic string of adjectives without telling you anything about
what's happening between the book's covers--but your relationship with slam is fascinating.  I helped organize the Seattle Poetry Slam in the late 90s as an undergrad, and really found the community gathering aspect of it and the possibility for a kind of trancendant presentation--of hearing the work aloud in the poet's voice—it has this potential right? Even if much slam poetry is cliche-ridden,
prostelatizing stuff--what should poets who know little to nothing of slam be aware of? What should they be learning from a poetry slam's possibilities, to your mind?

AS: seems to me if
you are looking for lots of body energy  even tho there is a derivative
slam voice  from saul williams from reggie gibson et al  just as there is a
standard delivery in the ivory tower (the breathy pausy lilt lift at the end of the line) 
even tho the lyric be light  i think maybe  well ya know i dunno  ten years
from being a regular in the scene i dunno  maybe mainly it's a place
just as the academician's reading is a place  to go to pull out a few
threads  bite off a few buttons  squirrel a few great lines away  for the
next morning  when you forget again not to scald yr mouth with the morning coffee
i guess id say energy  body energy   have a laugh or two  and steal
a phrase for the following morn  to jumpstart yr heart yr hand

from the possibilities.. well ya know i dont think its from slam  i think it is in
charlie olson freddy lorca et al et al  but one thing you can learn from slam  again squirrel it away and work it up in yr own performance  is this:  inhabit the body  inhabit the
throat  dont throttle the duende  academicians too often they throttle the duende  they think of readin aloud  and again not all of em  but it's the standard way  to read poetry like public speaking 101   read a few lines  scan the audience  read
a few lines scan the audience  read scan read scan
one great thing to take from slam is inhabit
the throat inhabit the body  what i tell kids when i talk about this is this:  embrace
whats embarrassing  so you shake a little in the hands?  heck shake like yr
hands are two egrets flying off the back of a bull  contacting the crowd
with yr eyes doesnt matter  let yr voice dart into their ears like starlings
down a clothes hamper  i hear too many readings  both slam and academe where
the poets clutch clutch keep the poems   i say give the poem away  

JMW: What's your writing process like? Do you work on individual poems?
Do think in advance about the arc of a book?  What are your tics and habits?

AS: i do all the same things most folks do  i try to get in a little
chirrup every day  teaching doesnt necessarily allow that  but
hopefully its nearly diurnal   walking about  long live wordsworthian
cantering  that gets the engine going  thankfully the
cats have left a few birds for me  seeing a bird almost always enacts
the licorice whip for me   let me goof up lorine niedecker  something
like i am the lonesome plover  pencil for a wing bone   this idea of
a project and an arc is newer to me   i am trying it on with this
country singer coyote singer project  but thats harder for me 
i can think up what seem like lovely arcs all day  o this will be a 
series of slightly sutured clatterers which begin with a swiss chard haiku and
end in a long rant about jimmie rodger's lungs  every day i think
up stuff like that  and it sends me running   i got the silk
i shout i got the silk  but its not quite panning out   i know i will
get this written  this landed pain-ed country sangin sanguine holler
it really makes me happy  but i think i will have to break a window
near the back door and throw a coat over the broken glass to get in 
no homesteading hot shouts for this smithy  i think i will have to whisper
i am home

JMW: You mention Niedecker, Blake, Wordsworth alongside Greg Brown,
Chris Whitley, Townes Van Sandt--who are you most important influences? What do you take on road trips—books, music, etc. Who did you read as a kid that was a turning point for you?

AS: on road trips all the aforementioned plus dylan charley patton robert johnson
son house and throw in mike cooley from the drive by truckers etc etc as per reading i have much in the coffer this summer  rousseau's confessions woolf's between the acts  and on and on

JMW: How did you come to find Action Books? What was it like working with Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney as publishers?

AS: well i knew both of 'em at alabama   a bit after theyd gone on to notre dame  they had me up
there to do a reading with barbara jane reyes   i was on the plane
back to greenpoint brooklyn when
they called me   i thought i'd left my toothbrush
or left a left cowboy boot or some thing   but they wanted to pitch
putting a book out   very very very grand of them to think of me
yes working with them was delightful  dynamo   thatd
be the closest word i could come up with  you can see why
they are everywhere at this present moment  they couple rare
vision with rarest energy   such a booming duo with brains
the size of alaska and hearts the span of canada  wonderful
working with them  editorially speaking when they had a suggestion
opting one poem in dropping another
again it goes back to vision
their tips were winged were visionary 

JMW: [The interviewer should say that between the end of the last question and the answer to the next, Abe and I met in Chicago at Danny’s where Abe read and we drank a little and I filmed the performance] You mentioned reading with Barbara Jane Reyes in Indiana—who else would you most like to read with? Who are you favorite contemporaries?

AS: thanks again for swoopin by last eve
and by gosh if ya got the gasoline why
do think on puddling up north where the
loons do sing..

as for readers   very looking forward to reading with steve timm this june

o i guess id love to read with cd wright
tho i am no gravy gobbling fan of his i would love to read
with hank williams the third and it's been a longtime
dream to gig around some with the bonnie prince mr. will oldham

seems i keep my head poked a quarter mile deep
in the sand  In unending ooo la la over
older salty pooches say dh lawrence or
knut hamsun or other old gold ore gobblers say
keats or jean rhys

of course my alabam pals   some deeeelightful poets
john pursley iii    nathan parker   ashley and scott mcwaters etc et al

truffling around online recently
i happened 'pon yet another younger wildly good
wordsmith called darcie dennigan  i hadnt run amok among her
work afore  but i was really excited by it   and am presently mucho giddy to
have tha chance to read with her later this summ   for one who
spends more time on power line bird stare and less online  it's always
a peach when i click in to see that yes yes
the sea is wide the sea is fresh the sea is singing

JMW: What sort of good do you think can happen in the poetry classroom?

AS: brother jmw  sorry it took me a bushel of minutos to get back at ya

been out on the land here on the farm  .. .  yeppers grand ta see ye
down chitown way..   and glad ye been in the berry rich writin glades..
always good when one can get away to the berry scented clay.. the writin life yip yip..

-- poetry in the classroom.. a well-placed overextended almost fib..  i think thats my key.. there are those for whom the image.. soundweaving.. comes naturally.. but they may not stick to it.. others there are tho who need it.. who live by it..  you can kind of feel it when yr near one of those.. for me it's been important to get a bit overwrought with my kindnesses.. in a way i am paying back margaret lacey.. had her for a literature survey course at uw madison.. she was ancient.. thin as a heron..a bit frazzled... but gloriously gone.. gone gone into the word..  i began to sidle toward her.. during office hours.. in a room with that weird incubating light.. i took her my little poems.. they were bad.. little trinkets.. rhyming rime..  but she praised and cooed.. she made me believe.. sail of my soul.. everybody wants to workshop right away..but i'm saying lets cook.. cook over the open flame before we get to clattering around in the kitchen..  description not prescription..  dance dance before we settle into gagging on our cravats and simperin our well-mannered punchbowl banter...   let's get it happening.. then praise.. sure a few "what have we here?" tags? maybe some "try more of this" cajoling... but a whole lot of dollops of cream and birthday candles too..

JMW: What advice do you give a beginning poet in terms of engaging with what’s out there?

AS: hmm.. advice.. engage the real dirt and what hops on it.. stevens: "i am what is around me"..  i like to use campus as a lab.. i dont coach that it's poor form to coo those interiority barnswallows down off the rafters.. but it does get dizzying and turgid when every pomme drops mealy and worm bit with that angsty solipsistic bruise.. so i try and say let's get out there.. let's move.. foot and metrical foot.. let's see.. blake's "intense" bird.. let's
sneak into a dance class.. let's eavesdrop in the lunch room.. those interior brokenhearted mournful numbers that the younger set adore ( so do i !).. how much more a satisfying icebox parfait.. when we we've been out in the world.. tinkering similes for squirrels.. parodying rilke while the dance class kids whirl.. my main push then is to hell with the vegetative.  let's barge in on the light.. let's guzzle good old fashioned wind..

JMW:  I’m now teaching Whim Man Mammon for the first time to students unfamiliar with most all poetry—and there is, I have to say, an elemental awe I have garnered from your poems. Your concatenation of age-old images (“snake handler / under a lime wedge moon”; “taught to spool buck tenderloin / by tender I mean easy as / blocks of unthawed sod / told to spiral the wedges / inside something softer”; and the poem titled “I had my shrew on”) and characters and place names and your compressed music and yet mellifluous unpredictability (“a loom of ice and lice and ice and snow”) is staggering.  If you “are what is around you”—well, wow. From where does the book’s title come?

AS: twas a line in there  in a poem i had originally placed in
a manuscript called dear weirdo   joy and joh and i worked
to smash together the best of my more regional book
called the plate lickers (buncha bearded venison gravy
carryings on) and the dear weirdo (more sonic play
pariah whisper things)   i had all manner of titles
it was pretty much a weighty pontoon wortha titles
finally joh and joy said hey abe what about this line
whim man mammon from this bitty doomsday ditty.. seemed
just right to me.. the poems are jittery .. they acclimate by whim...
cattail turnstiles the poems are.. theyre fellar-centric...  jittery
fellar centric  whim man  and then the mammon  we all know what that is
a mastodon a nun a nulled vetch anon

JMW: How do your images and stories come to you?  

AS: dont know.. well..  ive mined a lot of the north.. i am very close to this land.. ive lived away for 17 or so years..  it's a strange thing as many
of my concerns center up here in the pinched in by birches
north.. and tho i maintain close ties to fam and to the land here..
well.. culturally.. getting up here.. i always feel such
an outcast.. such a loner.. such a loon.. i guess stable
me in that long tradition of scribblers who side step toward the birth soil
as 'posed to flinging the porch door open..  but a lot of the
stuff isnt northern railroad stuff... and those sound joy
tinkerings of mine.. all bark back to my very early love of
manic roethke and glug glug sip sip dylan thomas

JMW: What's been your inclination to abandon punctuation?

AS: didnt ever use it.. was eaten alive in workshops in mfa for
not using it..  still dont use it much.. would like to get into
ellipses in the future..  perhaps parrot zb. herbert the great
polish poet by throwing in some dashes.. anyways.. a gruff olde
famoso poet came down to bama whilst i was in mfa..
he told me i wrote like a polish poet in the 60s and 70s
(which is true, i do, in a way)  ..  he went on to say..
glowering at me thru his owl sized glasses.. his squalid talons
his inkstained shirt.. that I'd never get a poem published
ever.. period.. all life long.. and that not punctuating was.. partially.. why..
anyways.. tho i am fond of rattling like a pressure cooker..
tho i am prone to the on and on.. ive also felt a desire to
get small.. give me a half a hands worth of birch bark
and let me write out all of my cares there.. just this
feeling that i havent had anything to say.. just yet.. worth
making measured, balanced, gymnast flit tuck worthy...
no caps really either.. no need of that watertower today.. i like
what don revell said he said let a poem stumble to rest..

JMW: Given that experience in your workshop, what's your sense of the MFA program
landscape now?

AS: gosh i dont know..  not sure if i know how or what
to burble in this regard.. only thing that i skirmish with
is this phrasing i hear out of the gullets of some of the
younger pups.. this way of saying yippee i wrote a poem
worthy of journal xyz.. surely i shall get into xyz with this
poem..!  ive heard that aplenty and it never ceases
dropping veils of poison berries over moi.. that careerist
intent from the get go.. but who am i to say.. generally tho, my
sense of the mfa goes something like.. what a grand hide out to get lots
of merry writin roaring.. also a grand place to learn not to listen
to the straight road chirpers who would deny anything bent and
ticket you for anything beautifully swerved..

JMW: What do you hope for the future of poetry? For the future of your own poetry?

AS: what am i hoping for? my future? poetrys future?

as for poesy generally, i havent a say nor a handle.. it seems positively
bursted.. thats grand.. 1,000s of scenes.. one can delve and
dip and never exhaust the crannies..  yip to that..

for moi, i want the new.. both performance and page performance wise..
feels that ive been in the same narrow neck field page wise and in the
same yell whoop holler vein performance wise.. i'd like to do a gig
wherein i ne'er leap higher than a whisper.. or perhaps i'd like to whisper for
a few seconds then scream then sing then whisper then laugh/yodel loonlike..
as for the page, i'd like more long line poems.. i'd like to write a long batch of very quiet pearls.. i'd like to write a book so kind and so gentle that the airlines'd
decide to switch out their flotation devices with my book..  something really buoyant that'd double as shark repellent.