{"id":2422,"date":"2019-10-24T08:52:17","date_gmt":"2019-10-24T12:52:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/?p=2422"},"modified":"2019-10-24T08:52:17","modified_gmt":"2019-10-24T12:52:17","slug":"interview-with-dave-lucas-by-anna-davies-and-karina-primmer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/2019\/10\/24\/interview-with-dave-lucas-by-anna-davies-and-karina-primmer\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Dave Lucas by Anna Davies and Karina Primmer"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Dave Lucas became Ohio\u2019s second-ever Poet Laureate on Jan. 1, 2018, he approached the position with a mission. Despite his impressive academic background–B.A. from John Carroll University, MFA from the University of Virginia, and MA and PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor–Lucas firmly believes poetry belongs outside the classroom as a staple of everyday life. A self-proclaimed \u201cevangelist\u201d for both poetry and his hometown, Cleveland, Lucas actively utilizes his platform to make people aware of the poetic world in which they live.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"Lucas himself draws heavily from his surroundings, especially those of his upbringing. His first book, <\/span>Weather <\/span><\/i>(Georgia, 2011),\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0a recipient of the 2012 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry, focuses on the city of Cleveland and how it shaped Lucas\u2019s development as both a writer and an individual. Lucas calls himself more of a \u201cwinter poet\u201d than a \u201cspring poet\u201d–common themes of his include the interplay and conflict of industry and nature, religious ritual and myth, and decay in the physical, spiritual, and seasonal sense.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lucas\u2019s work functions as a sort of anti-defamation league for the Midwest, shaking off shameful feelings Rust Belt natives endure from those who have never seen the sun set over Lake Erie. Defiant poems like \u201cRiver on Fire\u201d take an environmental disasters like the Cuyahoga River Fire of 1969 and utilize \u201clinguistic bombast\u201d that \u201ccould be in the King James Bible\u201d to reclaim the act as a supernatural triumph for Cleveland. Like the titular river, Cleveland \u201cburned and was not consumed\u201d by declines in industry. Lucas writes to celebrate the lands that raised him, and through his efforts readers can do the same. Oh rejoice, ye residents of Steubenville, Wheeling, Buffalo, Youngstown! Here is an artist who\u2019s just not shedding light on you, but is one of you. Poems like \u201cSuburban Pastoral\u201d take a romantic, yearning tone, playing with the frailty of memory and serving as a microcosm for any forgotten, beloved Midwestern corner, while \u201cMidwestern Cities\u201d celebrates the morning commutes of Midwesterners from Chicago to Pittsburgh to Kenosha.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Lucas isn\u2019t only a loyal advocate of the Midwest, but of poetry itself. His column \u201cPoetry for People Who Hate Poetry\u201d (inspired by a course he teaches at Case Western Reserve University) explores the poetic acts of daily life\u2014how can anyone truly hate poetry when they love singing along to their favorite song in the car, every word perfectly memorized?<\/span><\/p>\n

As a professor at a STEM school, Lucas\u2019s MO is giving everyone the opportunity to appreciate the humanities. He tailors his class to address topics like the poetics of algebra and the structural component of writing, showing the coexistence of poetry and science. Lucas also takes poetry into his beloved city, partnering with and supporting small businesses in the process. In 2012, he co-founded the Brews and Prose reading series at Market Garden Brewery with the belief that \u201c<\/span>listening to great writing while sipping great beer could make both experiences better.\u201d Now in its sixth year, the series \u201chas grown to showcase America’s great authors to Cleveland and to showcase Cleveland to America’s great authors\u201d the first Tuesday of every month at 7 p.m.<\/span><\/p>\n

OWL editors and Ohio natives Karina Primmer \u201921 and A.L. Davies \u201919 sat down with Lucas to discuss his identity as a Midwestern writer, his focus on the \u201csmall moment made large,\u201d the modern value of poetry, and, of course, his favorite beer.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a <\/b>2016 award citation, you said, \u201c[The Cleveland Arts Prize is] a great honor, especially because I think of myself so much as a poet from Cleveland and the first book [Weather] is so thoroughly about this city.\u201d <\/b>How has growing up in the Midwest inspired your writing? How did leaving the Midwest for graduate school affect you?\u00a0<\/b>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

\"\"If a writer is one that writes about a place, one of the things that seems to focus them most intently on that place is leaving it. All of the sudden, the aspects that are obvious to the point of mundane when you\u2019re there every day are suddenly noticed again. I had the sense that I wanted to write about where I was from, and I was figuring out how to do it. But part of figuring out how to do it was leaving. Longing is a great thing to write out of.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In terms of thinking of myself as a Midwestern writer, it was certainly important for my book <\/span>Weather<\/span><\/i>, in part because I loved Seamus Heaney\u2019s book <\/span>Death of a Naturalist<\/span><\/i>. The way he writes about his \u201cplot of Earth\u201d inspired me. What\u2019s specific to the Midwest and Cleveland for me is that people were getting it wrong. As a result, I developed a sort of indignation about what the narrative of Cleveland was, and found myself wanting to address that tonally in the poems. It supplied me with a tone I could use. Because I\u2019m interested in linguistic bombast, that also became a way of adapting language that sounds like it could be in the King James Bible.<\/span><\/p>\n

In class, we\u2019ve read \u201cSuburban Pastoral\u201d and \u201cAt the Cuyahoga Flats,\u201d both celebrations of seemingly ordinary scenes from Midwestern life. How do you go about the \u201csmall moment made large\u201d in your work? Where does the impulse towards the ordinary come from? What makes a \u201cgood\u201d subject?<\/b><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t necessarily think there\u2019s such a thing as a good or bad subject. I think it\u2019s all in the treatment. If you were my publisher, and I pitched you, \u201cWell, this novel\u2019s just about a day in Dublin,\u201d you\u2019d say, \u201cWow, that sounds terrible. I don\u2019t wanna publish that.\u201d But if it\u2019s <\/span>Ulysses, <\/span><\/i>then it\u2019s amazing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I think that appreciating the ordinary comes from somebody else showing you how to. Other writers made ordinary moments extraordinary. Good poetry often takes something familiar and makes it unfamiliar, or does the opposite–takes something that seems completely foreign and brings it home in a way that is deeply satisfying.<\/span><\/p>\n

I’m a firm believer in poetry that\u2019s grounded in the sensory world. I don\u2019t respond well to abstractions; I never did well with reading philosophy. But I can deal with philosophical ideas if they\u2019re presented in a metaphorical way. For me, the images that work best are visceral in a way both familiar and unfamiliar at once. There was a line somewhere, maybe from the chef Ferran Adria, about eating a tomato and the amazing act of eating the heart–the taste of it, how there\u2019s nothing like it. Or, Seamus Heaney describes eating an oyster by saying, \u201cMy palate hung with starlight.\u201d That\u2019s the paradox of metaphor–it makes suddenly extraordinary this thing you\u2019ve done a thousand times or more.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Those are very striking metaphors, but i<\/strong>n an interview with cleveland.com you also note that metaphor and poetry “pervade everything we do.\u201d Where in everyday life do you most often see metaphor, and how does that relate to teaching poetry?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

\"\"The way that we talk about our lives is almost always metaphor–in order to understand our lives, we make them into narratives.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In my class “Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry,” we read <\/span>Metaphors We Live By <\/span><\/i>by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. This book is like a good poem or stand-up comedy. When you hear what they\u2019re saying, you go, \u201cOh yeah, of course.\u201d Alexander Pope said what makes a good poem is \u201cWhat oft was thought but ne\u2019er so well expressed.\u201d This book is like that idea that\u2019s in your mind, and you can never find the words to express it, until someone else says it and you\u2019re like, \u201cOh yes, exactly!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In it, they talk about spatial metaphors like \u201cThe future is in front of us.\u201d But there are some cultures where it\u2019s opposite: the future is behind you, and the past is in front of you because you can see it. You move backwards into the future you cannot see. When I think about that spatial metaphor, my mind starts to boggle a bit. The metaphor of the future being before us is so ingrained in our minds that it doesn\u2019t even seem like a metaphor, it seems like a fact. But it\u2019s a specific way of framing our experience with the world.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Or the idea that \u201cI want to be the top of my profession.\u201d How did the top become good and the bottom become bad? We also have sayings like \u201cI invested so much time in that,\u201d or \u201cI wasted so much time.\u201d \u201cHow do you spend your time?\u201d Even the verb we use has to do with monetary and financial transactions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I think people have been made to feel intimidated by poems as objects they\u2019re supposed to read, analyze, decipher, and often, people will say, find the hidden <\/span>or deeper <\/span>meaning. I think the best way of opening people up to poetry is to talk about the ways poetry itself is part of everyday life–specifically the way we make sense of our lives through language.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If you say something like \u201cWell, I don\u2019t know what\u2019s going to happen, that\u2019s a ways down the road,\u201d you\u2019re already using the poetic gesture of metaphor to understand your life. When somebody says \u201cI can\u2019t stand poetry,\u201d you just used a poetic gesture to say that. And the more that we\u2019re open to that, the more open we can be to poems in the traditional sense. Poetry is part of the fabric we speak in.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"What other texts do you teach to convince students of poetry\u2019s value?<\/b><\/p>\n

We look at Jay-Z\u2019s book <\/span>Decoded<\/span><\/i> as a way of thinking about the deliberately poetic elements of hip-hop. Because I teach at Case Western University, and it\u2019s a very big STEM school, I want to aim this course specifically for the pre-engineering and pre-health majors.<\/span><\/p>\n

We also read a book by G.H. Hardy called A Mathematician’s Apology<\/i>. I first read this book by Hardy in a course that was the inverse of mine, called \u201cMath in Creativity.\u201d I had always believed I did not understand mathematics. It opened me up to the idea that math wasn\u2019t about finding the right answer, it was about finding the most elegant answer. The idea that mathematics is about beauty, too, made me feel more open to it than I had before. A poem is often demonstrating metaphoric equation between two things. That\u2019s what algebra\u2019s doing all the time, and looking for the most eloquent way of expressing it.<\/p>\n

It’s interesting that you connect metaphor and math, because in a 2016 award citation, you describe poetry as “<\/b>a consolation for me that wasn\u2019t available through religious, scientific, or philosophical truth. Metaphorical truth through poetry became the way I could make sense of the world.\u201d Could you elaborate on this?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

The poetry that interests me most is concerned with ultimate questions. My particular lens for those questions is the Catholicism I grew up in. Although I\u2019ve struggled with the question of belief, the matter of ritual became very important. I think that\u2019s why I like metered poems so much. There\u2019s something very ritualistic about that style. It\u2019s probably a mix of Catholicism and OCD (laughs)<\/em>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Poetry has become my way of asking questions of belief, which I don\u2019t think I have satisfying, logical answers for. The best answers for them, I’ve found, are metaphorical: \u201cWe are fish and God is the sea.\u201d I like that metaphor. I don\u2019t know if I believe it, but I like it. I don\u2019t understand God, but nobody does. If we put it this way, maybe we can get a little better at understanding Him. I\u2019m interested in poetry that pushes the quality of language towards the quality of prayer as well, language that has an almost sacred purpose.<\/span><\/p>\n

How does this sense of the sacredness of language impact your poetry stylistically and thematically?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

Stylistically, I\u2019ll borrow a line from one of my teachers, Charles Wright, who says that \u201cpoetry tends to put tension between the written word and the spoken word.\u201d\u00a0<\/span>So, for instance, poets like William Carlos Williams keep the language in their poems as close to speech as it can possibly be. And others, Hart Crane for instance, push as far away from ordinary speech as they can. I\u2019m more in that latter camp–I\u2019m interested in poetry as language that has memorable grandeur to it. Poetry is something almost incantatory; the idea that if you say the right word, something can happen.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Thematically, I think some poets are spring poets, some are summer poets, and some are autumn or winter. I think I\u2019m an autumn or winter poet. I\u2019m more interested in the beautiful dying than the doomed beginning.\u00a0<\/span>I think my themes change, though, because the themes of our lives change, too. I keep coming back to myth quite often, because I think the older I get, the more I\u2019m finding in myths that I didn\u2019t have access to before. My friend tells this great story about a time he went to a used bookshop. He\u2019d already read <\/span>The Catcher in the Rye <\/span><\/i>and owns it, but he found a copy of it at this used bookshop and felt compelled to buy it. There\u2019s this old bearded guy at the counter, the kind of guy you expect to find at a used bookshop, and he takes one look at the book and says, \u201cThis book has changed since you last read it.\u201d I just think that\u2019s the coolest story! The things we need from stories change, and yet, a lot of it is already there.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Take something like <\/span>Hamlet<\/span><\/i>. I\u2019d read the play and admired its poetry. But it changed for me after my father died. A writer friend of mine lost her mom within a month of when my father died, and we would email about the grief process. We were both reading <\/span>Hamlet <\/span><\/i>at the time, and we found the depiction of Hamlet\u2019s grief was so spot-on. We\u2019d read it earlier in an academic, intellectual way. But now, it was visceral; now, it was real. That sort of thing comes through when Hamlet asks, \u201cTo be or not to be? That is the question.\u201d It\u2019s all these academic questions that are now coming through in a real, lived way.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I need to write that down. I\u2019m gonna use that some day.<\/span><\/p>\n

We had a visiting poetry professor and OWU alumna last year, Maggie Smith, who said during a lecture that her most recent poetry collection (published in 2017) featured a poem she\u2019d started during her senior year in 1998 that had never found a home in any of her other collections. Walk us through the collection process with the creation of your poetry books. How do you organize your poems into a collection? What makes a group of poems a collection? How do you revise a poem and truly know when a poem is done?<\/b><\/p>\n

Some writers tend to think in terms of stories or novels; some poets tend to think in poems, series, or in projects. I do tend to think in terms of projects, in part because a theme or style or something like that will get under my skin, and it takes a while to really work it out. The projects end up conforming to whatever a particular thought or moment is. For instance, when I travel by myself, I\u2019ll want to write about a place. Often those poems are so based in landscape that they\u2019re their own thing–they don\u2019t belong with these \u201cmythy\u201d poems that I\u2019ve been writing. They do some of the same things that [Weather] might do, but they\u2019re their own creation. I don\u2019t have a manuscript for those yet, but I sock \u2018em away in a file. Maybe one day I will have traveled enough and written enough to do something with them.<\/span><\/p>\n

I think the poems sort of announce themselves as they come into my mind. Of course, part of that is because I\u2019ve been thinking about this or that topic. Again, I think they begin out of necessity and then necessity started to conform them to whatever patterns they fall into. I do feel like I\u2019ve done enough with myth for now, but then I find stuff that makes me think I haven\u2019t or I find things that fit in a way, or poems apply that I didn\u2019t think applied necessarily.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As for when a particular poem is done, the best way for me to discover that a poem needs to be revised more is to see it in print when someone else has decided to publish it. Nothing clarifies my own writing like seeing it in print or reading it out loud and thinking \u201cOh God, this needs to be\u2026\u201d There are times where I find myself reading a poem to an audience and then think \u201cOh I should change this, I should change that.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On the other hand, I think after a certain amount of time that a poem is in the world already–and Paula Deen says this somewhere–that I really don\u2019t have any more right to change it than you would to go and change it. I mean, none of us feel like we should be welcome to go into an art museum and start touching things up, but if Monet wandered in, would he be allowed to do that to his own paintings? I don\u2019t know that he should, but there are stories that he did. I think that once a work has become public in some way it changes, and that can be just bringing something into workshop and seeing what happens. They\u2019re never finished, they\u2019re only finished enough.<\/span><\/p>\n

You operate in multiple genres as a writer. Karina and I read your essay \u201cThat Father Lost<\/a>\u201d in Professor Butcher\u2019s Writing Essays workshop, and we\u2019ve read your poetry for this Literary Editing course. How do you decide what genre you\u2019ll work in with a new piece? Why did \u201cThat Father Lost\u201d become an essay and not a series of poems?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

In the case of that essay, it started off as just notes on my own grief. I tend not to write poems that are autobiographical in an obvious way to a reader–some of the poems I have that feel the most autobiographical to me would not read that way to somebody else. I tend not to like when my poems are overtly autobiographical, but there are times when I\u2019m trying to figure out something that has happened, or that I\u2019ve done, or that I\u2019ve thought. That needs to be on the page, too. And those tend to be essays of some kind or another.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat Father Lost\u201d was written out of a time when I was writing from a need to express and think things through, and because it was a notebook full of these little moments, they ended up connecting eventually. Once I had a sense of what the form was, I started thinking to fit it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I think forms develop out of necessity, but then they begin to dictate based on their own habit. Someone had to invent the iambic pentameter and had a reason they needed it. It\u2019s survived 800 years, in part because it fits a moment, but also because once you\u2019ve got a pattern in mind, you tend to follow it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I think, also, in a poem, the language needs to be on display more than it does in an essay. Essays allow more space to think. Now, if you\u2019re Shakespeare, you can think really beautifully in the course of a soliloquy. I am not Shakespeare.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When we write, Professor Butcher often has us imagine we\u2019re writing to a \u201croom of writers\u201d whose style we admire, and who we\u2019d want to enjoy our work. Who would be in your \u201croom of writers?\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n

I think my room of writers has to have my teachers in it, all the way from Ellen Geisler, my 12th grade AP Literature teacher, to now. The people who I spent time with in classrooms, in terms of writers, are the ones I aim most to please. I think we write for our various dead, too. They\u2019re not necessarily writers, but we write for the people we\u2019ve lost in one way or another. I do, anyways.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Do you feel like you need to change your projected audience now that you\u2019re Ohio\u2019s Poet Laureate?<\/b><\/p>\n

My poems have not changed, not necessarily. I think, as a teacher or as someone who talks about poetry a lot, being named Poet Laureate is an opportunity to have a larger audience for things I\u2019m already interested in. I like having English majors in my classes a lot, I like people who have the same assumptions as I do about the value of poetry, but there\u2019s also a real pleasure in talking with somebody who is interested but doesn\u2019t necessarily have their own way in, or see that the door is open already. That is a different kind of pleasure, and it\u2019s one that I think is really important. Poetry can often be so insular and elliptical a form, I think it\u2019s important poets do that poetry outreach. Even if the work is sometimes obscure, we need not be obscure as people.<\/span><\/p>\n

Speaking of outreach: We read about your Brews and Prose<\/b> reading series at Market Garden Brewery in Cleveland. So, for our most important question: What\u2019s your favorite beer?\"\"<\/b><\/p>\n

I like a pilsner in the summer, or a porter in the winter. <\/span><\/p>\n

When I was in college and graduate school, I had very snobby beer taste.\u00a0 <\/span>Now, I like Modelo Especial. That with a lime is pretty much all I need.<\/span><\/p>\n

Final question: What is the value of poetry presently? How does the current social climate affect what you\u2019re doing? Or does it affect what you\u2019re doing?<\/b><\/p>\n

Why, is something going on? (laughs)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Poetry is a commitment to the long game. We are certainly living through terrifying times, and those times are more terrifying for people in the margins than for somebody who\u2019s lucky enough to be where I am, through no work of theirs or mine. But the work of poetry, to me, seems to be a way to make sense of a world that\u2019s making less and less sense on its own terms every day. Even if the poem isn\u2019t a protest poem, the act of writing a poem and the act of reading a poem is still a protest against the forces of chaos and, I\u2019d go so far to say, the forces of injustice, too. I think a poem, even if it\u2019s not addressing political themes, is still a gesture attempting to make a world better than the one we live in.<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think they have to name names, either. I think all poetry is political because everything is political, it\u2019s unavoidable. But I don\u2019t think the art has to be topical to stake political ground. There\u2019s great work being done that is very specific to individual moments. That\u2019s not the sort of work that I do, not because I think it\u2019s less than, but I\u2019d rather see what the story of Marsyas can tell us about the current moment than \u201cname a political party\u201d and go from there. In part because, unfortunately, injustice has not changed. It\u2019s not gone away, anyways, and doesn\u2019t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon.<\/span><\/p>\n

So maybe that\u2019s another thing poetry does–it teaches us to live, in spite of all of the elements of destructiveness.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Boy, that sounds grand now that I\u2019ve said it, but maybe I\u2019ll stick by it.<\/span><\/p>\n

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When Dave Lucas became Ohio\u2019s second-ever Poet Laureate on Jan. 1, 2018, he approached the position with a mission. Despite Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1813,"featured_media":2423,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-scholars-of-sturges"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1813"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2422"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2438,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2422\/revisions\/2438"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/engblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}