Interview with Poet Frank Paino

Frank Paino’s first two volumes of poetry, The Rapture of Matter and Out of Eden, both from Cleveland State University Press, astonished readers with their exquisite insights into the human condition. His literary mentors include the poets he studied with in the Vermont College MFA program, Mark Doty, Lynda Hull, Richard Jackson, and David Wojahn.

Frank Paino's long-awaited third poetry collection Obscura, can now be preordered through Orison Books.

Frank Paino

Zack Rogow: Should a book of poems have a common subject, theme, or thread? If so, why? And does Obscura have that? If it does, what is the common thread?

Frank Paino: I’m not sure I really buy into the idea of “should” and “should not” when it comes to poetry books. Each is as individual as the poet. That being said, it’s certainly true that most contemporary volumes tend be thematically-oriented. Some readers will find that approach helpful. Others may not.

Personally, I have never set out to deliberately create a manuscript organized around a specific theme; despite that, I really only write about the things I am wildly passionate about, so that narrows the field to such a degree that I think my same little cosmos of themes will always be there for me from book to book.

So…what are my common threads? In no particular order, and very broadly speaking:  Death. Religion and sex/the erotic, which, speaking as an atheist who was raised Catholic, I find to be inextricably bound together. Humanism. The terrible consequences of the worst of our tendencies. Obscure historical facts and events, especially relating to some or all of the above. There are other things I touch upon, of course, but these are my wellsprings.

ZR: If Obscura has a common thread, how did that affect your writing or editing process for the book? Are there ideas for poems you set aside, or entire finished poems you set aside for another collection, in order to maintain a common theme?

FP: The common threads in Obscura are what I mentioned a few moments ago. Yet, despite these connections, I had a difficult time putting the manuscript together because I was (and am) somewhat resistant to the idea of books being divided into sections. Instead of making those separations (which may have been problematic in any case), I just laid all the pieces on the floor and tried to determine how one might speak to another in ways beyond what might seem to be the most obvious. It was a process I both loved and abhorred.

I’ll add here that, as a reader of poetry, I almost never pick up a book and move from cover to cover. Instead, I choose by titles that intrigue me, or, sometimes, I just pick a page number and open to whatever poem happens to be there. I’m not sure if other people read poetry in this manner, but I prefer it that way. I look at each poem as its own world and I’m more than happy to switch things up between pieces. I don’t necessarily want a guide.

As for ideas and/or finished poems that weren’t included in Obscura, I’ve got enough other material for an entire manuscript, mostly older work that didn’t make it into the book for any number of reasons. It’s been over 20 years since I published a volume of poetry. During much of that time, I wrote on and off, but I really didn’t submit to many journals, and I certainly didn’t send manuscripts out until the last few years, so, in addition to a lot of newer work, I have a backlog of older poems.

Perhaps more to your point, though, while there’s nothing wrong with such topics, I don’t have a cache of nature poems, or love poems, or humorous poems, or political poems (you get the picture!) waiting for a new manuscript to fit into. I might experiment with different forms or styles, but my obsessions and passions, my themes, are pretty consistent. The one exception would be personal narratives…something I used to write a lot more of, but, honestly I find myself increasingly disinterested in creating that sort of work. There are exceptions, even in Obscura, but, for now at least, I’m far more interested in looking out at the world.

ZR: A number of the poems in Obscura are based on actual historical events or personages. How do you pick an event or person to write a poem about? How much research about a historical event or person is enough or too much? How do you write your way into an actual event so that you are not writing history or journalism, but approaching the event from a poet’s vantage point? 

FP: I’m not sure I pick an event or person so much as they pick me. If I read about something/someone, or see a show on a rather obscure, strange, dark, or off-the-wall topic, I’ll immediately know if it wants or needs to be a poem I want to take on. Additionally, I have a number of people who know me well enough that when they come across something they consider to be a “Frank topic,” they’ll pass the info on to me. It might be months or years, but a lot of those “tips” have become poems. My sister, Gerrie, is a good one for this sort of thing, but I’m often surprised and delighted by people who think of me when encountering the aforementioned sorts of information. It’s weirdly flattering!

The amount of research varies with my prior familiarity, or lack thereof. In the case of saints, for instance, I have a vast store of that information in my head. But something like William Forsyth’s “reverse Noah’s ark,” which I wrote about in the poem “Falling,” took quite a bit of research.

That being said, I don’t feel an obligation to get all the facts into a poem. Indeed, my first priority is to language...to the craft. Being 100% accurate about every historical fact is secondary. My poem about the space dog Laika is a case in point. I know I don’t have every detail right, but the basics are all there and I think the point is made. Someone, I can’t recall who, once told me about an artist from Newfoundland, Christopher Pratt. As the story goes, Mr. Pratt had a friend who remarked that the artist’s rendering of a hay field was very inaccurate because farmers would never make the haystacks in the way Pratt depicted. To which Pratt replied, “Probably so. But this isn’t a hayfield, it’s a painting.” Well, I’m a poet, not an historian. I want to tell the story, but I don’t feel any obligation to get every detail correct.

Finally, I’m a frustrated visual artist. I think this drives my lyric impulse. As I have no ability to paint or sculpt, I use words as my palette or clay. So, when I approach an actual event, it is with my innate tendency to see things with an artist’s eye…it’s the only way I know to enter those moments, and I think it saves me from any risk of merely recounting “the facts.”

ZR: Many of the poems in Obscura are about ill-starred or doomed events or people—the fire that devastated a pleasure cruise in New York in 1904, the execution of the spy Mata Hari, the suicide of the pregnant Harriet Westbrook Shelley (first wife of the poet Percy Shelley). What is it about the tragedies in this book that tug at you as a writer and make you want to explore them deeply in poetry? 

FP: I’ve got what I consider to be a healthy preoccupation with death. Our culture is such that many people want to ignore the fact of our mortality. But I think it’s critical to embrace that reality so that we are daily inspired to live as fully and as generously as we can. After all, this is the only life we can be certain of, so we should be mindful of making it the best it can be...for ourselves as well as others (including those who will come after us).

One natural avenue to take in this regard is pondering the ways others have faced tragedy and death. This can be quite instructive. It forces me, as a poet, to ask a lot of big questions, and, hopefully, share my perspectives in a way that’s both meaningful and aesthetically resonant with anyone kind enough to read my work.

Finally, I’ll say that while I believe it’s important to write about these topics, I also think there’s a fine line between a kind of redemptive exploration and simply being morbidly voyeuristic. I never want to write about something purely because it’s tragic. I’m interested in holding the darkness up to the light as a means of informing the way I live. My poetry refuses to turn away from disaster, evil, grief, oppression, etc., because it’s searching for a way through. If I’m lucky, whatever path I discover might be one at least a few of my readers will want to travel with me, too.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Writers and Collaboration, Part 2: Repurposing Existing Content

In the last blog I talked about collaborations where the writer doesn’t have to change much in an existing work. The example I gave is when a poet has his or her work illustrated by a visual artist.

In this blog, I’m going to discuss collaborations where a writer repurposes existing text to create a new work with another artist. Here are some examples:

• Adapt a work of narrative prose into a play (for more, please see this blog)

• Turn one of your poems into a song lyric and collaborate with a composer who writes the music

• Edit a literary anthology that includes work by a visual artist or artists

• Work with an artist to create an artist’s book that includes text that you rewrite for the project

One example in my own work of text repurposed for a collaboration is an adult poem I wrote that became a children’s picture book. The book started as a two-page poem called “Oranges” that appeared in my collection A Preview of the Dream, published by Gull Books, a literary publishing house run by Carolyn Bennett. A Preview of the Dream sold all of 200 copies, which is not unusual for a small press book of poems.

Cover art by Rachael Romero

My poem “Oranges” honors the diverse group of people whose labor goes into creating a single orange:

Somebody cleared the fields.

Somebody toppled the pines,

upturned the stumps.

Someone plowed the rows

straight as sunbeams in the heat

that made them swab their temples.

Probably they spoke Spanish.

The widely published and much lauded children’s writer Marilyn Sachs heard me read the poem and said, “With a little rewriting, that could be a picture book.” I’d never thought of writing a children’s book, so I asked her what she meant by rewriting the text. Marilyn pointed out that the ending was a little too adult for children:

A world of work

is in this ripe orange that I strip apart,

longitude by longitude.
I place a section

in my willing mouth

and its liquid fibers

dissolve on my tongue.

When I wrote that adult poem, I wanted to emphasize the sexiness of eating a section of orange. But in a children’s picture book?—not so much. I kept much of the poem as it was, but I rewrote the last lines:

A world of work

is in this ripe orange that I pry apart.

I place a section

in my mouth

and its liquid fibers

dissolve on my tongue.

Less sexy, but it still conveys some of the sensual experience of eating fruit, and in a way that children could appreciate.

A lesson I learned here: with collaboration, not every detail in a text has to be spelled out. The artwork ended up conveying much of the sensual experience of eating an orange. 

Oranges by Zack Rogow, illustration by Mary Szilagyi

Not only that, the illustrator communicated the entire concept of an orange containing a world of work  simply by drawing a frontispiece with an orange floating in space like a planet.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The book was still only an idea. How to get it in print? Carolyn Bennett, the publisher of the small press book that included the poem, agreed to act as the agent for the text. Sometimes, in a collaboration, people take on unaccustomed roles.

Carolyn did great job in this new role. She sent the text to Richard Jackson, an editor at Orchard Books who had successfully steered the careers of many writers, including Judy Blume. It happened, by coincidence, that Dick Jackson was interested in a book that dealt with diversity—he immediately bought the manuscript. It was an incredible stroke of luck, but it would never have happened without rewriting the text. That repurposing made all the difference.

I originally had in mind for the drawings an artist I liked who had never done book illustration. Dick Jackson quickly let me know that he had his own ideas on this subject. Dick selected the experienced illustrator Mary Szilagyi, and Mary created gorgeous paintings to illustrate the book, working much harder on her artwork than I had on my short text. The hours spent on a collaboration don’t always even out, I’m afraid.

Large publishers do tend to like to pick the illustrator they want for a children’s book that comes to them as a text. They have a stable of artists whose work they admire and they know they can rely on. The publishers like to give those artists a steady diet of work, partly because they genuinely like their artwork, partly to keep the artists’ loyalty, and partly to support and promote their careers.

Dick Jackson made a truly excellent suggestion to improve the text, but I was such a young, hothead radical at the time, that I refused to listen, thinking that Big Business was trying to co-opt my political message. This was a side of collaboration I hadn’t learned yet—it also involves taking advice, even if it means changing your beloved text.

But in the end, Oranges turned out to be a successful children’s book. It was selected as a Junior Library Guild Book of the Month, and it sold about 10,000 copies. Much more than all of my poetry books put together. That’s another side of writers’ collaborations worth mentioning—the work of other artists can sometimes make literature way more accessible.

Writers and Collaboration, Part 1, Part 3, Part 4

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Working with a Writing Mentor Part 2: Why It’s Difficult to Take Criticism of Your Writing

I understand how hard it is to absorb criticism in a world that is often indifferent to, hostile to, or resentful of your work as a writer. There are so many coworkers, relatives, and failed-writer English teachers who seem to feel it is their purpose in life to distance you from your creative self. To defend yourself from those who advise you against your creativity, you may sometimes build a bunker that you retreat into when you hear criticism.

Let me give you an example of how that sort of bunker can sometimes work to defeat you. When I was a much younger writer, I had the good fortune to have a book accepted by a great editor at a major press. I had written a poem called “Oranges” about the many people and languages that went into growing and bringing to market a single orange. The celebrated children’s author Marilyn Sachs advised me to edit the poem and send it out as the text of a picture book. I did, and to my amazement, it was accepted by Richard Jackson, who then had his own imprint at Orchard Books. If you’re a book editor at a major press, having your own imprint is like getting on Top Chef if you’re a cook. Dick Jackson had edited many writers who had written much better and more successfully for children than I had, including Judy Blume.

I first met with Dick Jackson in his office high up in a Manhattan skyscraper, with a view of expensive water. I was armed with all my defenses about what it meant to deal with a major press. I was sure he was going to try to censor the political content of my text. I also had in mind a politically correct poster artist I wanted to do the illustrations. Of course that artist had never illustrated a children’s book in his life. Dick Jackson politely informed me that he already had an illustrator in mind, a fantastic artist named Mary Szilagyi who, it turned out, was infinitely better known in the world of children’s books than I was. This was an incredible advantage for a novice writer, since it would bring the book to the attention of reviewers. I didn’t realize that at the time, though, so I resented that Dick Jackson didn’t take my naive suggestion about choosing an illustrator. My dander was up even higher at this point in our meeting.

Then Dick Jackson asked me to change a line that appeared many times in the poem. With each new person who helped to grow or ship or market this orange, I had added a line about the language that the person spoke: “Probably he spoke Spanish,” “Probably she spoke Creole,” etc. My aim was to show the multicultural sources of even the most familiar object. Dick suggested I change that repeating phrase to “Maybe he spoke Spanish,” etc. How did I know, after all, what language a certain individual spoke, and wasn’t that very stereotypical to assume that a farm worker spoke Spanish? Immediately I got defensive and retreated into my tortoise shell. No, I wasn’t going to let the multinational publishing industry tell me how to write poetry. I stood my ground and refused, despite his entreaties. How much I regret now not listening to him—the book was printed with the line as I wrote it, and it has never been reprinted as a children’s book since that first year, when it did sell quite well, thanks in large part to Mary Szilagyi’s wonderful illustrations.

My point is that you may assume that someone who is criticizing your work is against you, when in reality, that person is more likely than not for your text, if he or she is taking the time to read and critique it carefully. The longer I write, the more grateful I am when someone hands me a good suggestion for my work. It’s a gift. Now if I like it, I grab it greedily, and stuff it right into my text. I might not incorporate the suggestion exactly as the other person has offered it, but I will take it willingly, and with thanks, if it is an improvement over what I have written on my own.

Other recent posts about writing topics:Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka