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

The Importance of Having More Than One Mentor or Role Model

As a writer, it’s extremely helpful for you to have a mentor, someone who provides you with guidance, encouragement, inspiration, and networking connections. The support of a mentor often makes the difference between a talented individual who merely dabbles in writing at a certain point, and someone who sustains a literary career over a lifetime.

Similarly, it’s important for you as a writer to have role models, authors whose work serves as a goal to aim for. The poet Charles Baudelaire called this kind of artistic role model “a beacon shining from a thousand citadels” in his poem “The Beacons.” 

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)

It’s good to have a hero or heroine who shows you at the start of your journey that the literary project and life you desire is possible, within reach.

Mentors and role models are often people with powerful personalities who seem almost larger than life. They can be charismatic, bold, risk-taking. That’s what makes them appealing as mentors and role models. That’s exactly why we want to emulate them.

But a mentor or role model who looms too large in your consciousness can also be a detriment. It’s tempting to want to imitate that role model, to want be that person. And often mentors of that type need to fuel their egos with disciples who follow their every precept. Behind a mentor’s big ego is often a fragile self, requiring adulation.

The danger of your having just one role model or mentor is that you can become only an imitator. Often mentors make exciting innovations, so it seems that by following that person, you can also be an innovator. But shadows of new styles are not new.

The poet John Ashbery accomplished an extraordinary sweep of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976 for his book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Ashbery’s collection sounded extremely daring at the time. He used a radical collage technique that pieced together reflection, wit, observation, pop culture, and traditional art. Given the enormous success at the time of Ashbery’s poetic style, an entire crop of Ashbery disciples began to publish work that utilized his techniques. Those imitators enjoyed a brief celebrity in the reflected light of Ashbery’s reputation, but their names are mostly forgotten today. 

Rather than become a devoted follower of a particular author, you have to discover your own literary project. Apprenticing yourself to a mentor can be a highly important step in that process because it provides the validation of that admired author’s support, and often entrée into a literary community. But the more influences you’re open to, the more you can pick and choose which of those influences are helpful in finding a literary project that is yours alone, and that only you can accomplish. That takes time, and it also takes courage to step out from behind a mentor and make your own mark.

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

Choosing Poems for a Reading

The poems you choose for a reading can make an enormous difference in how an audience receives and appreciates your work. The order that you select for your poems can be equally important.

You may want to focus your choices on a recent book, in order to promote sales. If you include poems from too many different projects, the audience may not focus enough on any one series of poems to want to read more.

The poem you start a reading with should be one of your best, or at least one of the works you feel particularly excited about in the collection or group of poems you’re featuring.

The first poem sets the tone for your reading. It shows the audience that you’re going to deliver a satisfying experience, and that they should pay close attention. The first poem forms a bond between the poet and the audience—if it’s the right poem. The wrong poem can have the opposite effect—it can put the listeners on guard that this reading might demand things emotionally that they are not prepared to give.

What do I mean by “the right poem” or “the wrong poem” to start a reading with? Well, a poem that puts the audience members on the defensive or that puts an idea in their mind that the poet is not psychologically stable is not a good choice. For instance, a first poem that relates an episode of kinky sex, or violence, or terrible tragedy, is a questionable way to start a reading.  I’m not suggesting that you take those poems off your list. Not at all. But the audience wants to know first of all that the poet is in control of his/her life and that the audience is not there to take care of the poet’s life traumas.

A poem that is dense and requires multiple readings to understand or appreciate is also not a great choice for the first poem of a reading. Long poems are also not the best.

On the other hand, the first poem, and all the poems in a reading, should challenge the audience. The people who have made the effort to come out and hear you want to be surprised, moved, and provoked to think and feel. That balance between tossing a thunderbolt at the audience, and making them feel comfortable, is not an easy one, but it’s critical to a good reading.

One way to set an audience at ease from the beginning of a reading is to use humor. Audiences love the release of laughter. It allows them to relax.

One of the most effective arcs for a poetry reading is to begin with humor, and to grow more serious as the reading progresses. This allows the audience to get comfortable with you and to trust you, and then to challenge them with more highly charged work as the reading goes deeper.

The transition from humor to seriousness is a delicate one. Sometimes humor can lighten up a serious mood that you create with a poem about a highly emotional topic. But reading too raucous a poem after one that deals with tragedy may trivialize and conflict with the mood you’ve created, and it can distance the audience. In my opinion, it’s better to start funny, and then move toward deeper topics, with a transitional poem to make the bridge.

Of course, some poets focus primarily on humor in their work, and some deal with such serious subjects that humor isn’t part of their repertoire. All that is fine. I’d only suggest starting and ending with two of the most impactful poems, to create a shape to the reading.

One final rule of thumb: don’t cry at your own reading. It’s good to read emotional poetry, and for the audience to see that you have a lot at stake emotionally in your own writing, through your voice and expression. But if you actually cry, you’re going to weaken the bond between you and your audience, because they’re going to start worrying if they have to take care of you, rather than appreciating your writing. In a sense, the poet is taking care of the audience’s edification and emotions for the duration of her/his reading, so it makes the audience uncomfortable when the shoe is forced onto the other foot. 

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

Michael Field: The Work and Lives of a Victorian Poet

The poet Michael Field was not actually a man. Or a woman. Michael Field was the pen name of two women who lived in Victorian England, Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913). The story is even more complicated than that. Katharine Bradley was Edith Cooper’s aunt, and they were lovers who lived together as a couple. The two were accomplished authors who collaborated to write eight books of poems and numerous verse dramas.

Michael Field: Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper

Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, like many women writers of their time, published under a man’s name as a way to be taken seriously. In fact, once the secret got out that they were really a female writing duo, their work was reviewed less earnestly by critics, as the novelist and critic Emma Donoghue documents in her engaging and beautifully written biography, We Are Michael Field.

In their time, “the Michael Fields,” as they were called by their circle, were befriended and accepted by many of the leading writers of the day, including Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, and Havelock Ellis. They were true eccentrics who actually wrote a book of love poems to their deceased lap dog. Their work fell out of fashion toward the end of their lives and has only recently received new attention. I’m extremely grateful to Professor Pearl Chaozon Bauer of Notre Dame de Namur University, who acquainted me with their writings and is part of a new wave of scholars reviving the work of Michael Field.

The work of Katharine Bradly and Edith Cooper declined in renown partly because of sexism and homophobia. Their poetry also dropped out of favor because the Michael Fields accepted many of the conventions of Victorian style. They preferred “thou” to “you,” “doth” to “does,” and used poetic interjections such as “O!” The pair often wrote in rhyme, meter, and form. Since their careers ended right at the same time that modernism was purging poetry of the cliché language of the nineteenth century, the poetry of the Michael Fields was lost in the tidal wave of new writing that discarded more traditional diction.

Then why is it important to give the work of the Michael Fields another look? Because their poetry still feels contemporary and exciting in many ways. They were clear-sighted writers who saw with a fresh and free-thinking perspective. Here is a poem of theirs I particularly like:

Nests in Elms

The rooks are cawing up and down the trees!

Among their nests they caw. O sound I treasure,

Ripe as old music is, the summer's measure,

Sleep at her gossip, sylvan mysteries,

With prate and clamour to give zest of these—

In rune I trace the ancient law of pleasure,

Of love, of all the busy-ness of leisure,

With dream on dream of never-thwarted ease.

O homely birds, whose cry is harbinger

Of nothing sad, who know not anything

Of sea-birds’ loneliness, of Procne’s strife,

Rock round me when I die! So sweet it were

To die by open doors, with you on wing

Humming the deep security of life.

It’s so unexpected that cawing crows become for the speaker of this poem a reassuring presence, affirming the calm persistence of life. I often think of crows as annoying, noisy, dirty birds, but Michael Field surprisingly sees their vitality and tenaciousness. The crows stimulate the poets to write in runes of “the ancient law of pleasure,/of love”—a pagan and joyous celebration of the carnal side of life. Not what I think of as Victorian poetry, at all! Even within the confines of this Petrarchan sonnet, Michael Field manages to include thrilling language: “Rock round me when I die!”

Sadly, both Katharine and Edith succumbed to the family illness of cancer, Katharine dying at 67, and her niece Edith at 51, predeceasing her aunt by ten months.

If you don’t know the writing of Michael Field, take the time to seek out their work. They’ll surprise you with the sensuality and depth of their poems.

  

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