michael earl craig; two poems, one interview, six photos

poem one, from CAN YOU RELAX IN MY HOUSE

IN PATIENT SPADEFOOT TORPOR,
PERHAPS LISTENING

he waits, for he is a spadefoot. And as surely as men
ride in the beds of pickups holding shovels, sometimes
squinting, so too does the spadefoot. He is surrounded.
An ant crawls across a dog biscuit. Nobody seems to ever tire
of this. Then everyone gets tired at once, and night is quiet.

It is now that the spadefoot works his little leg.
In time a hallway is made, and a woman,
and we see the remains of a muffin left out on a plate
by the window, which somehow holds for me all of Evening.

Rain falls on the world, and into the cracks, and into a teacup
someone left on a fencepost. Each drop comes tapping the garden.
A mudslide occurs and the spadefoot is swept away.

poem two, from YES, MASTER

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

You could say I rode a tall horse.
You could say I rode a long black horse.
In reality I'd never even touched a horse.
I drove by them all the time.
Horses loose in pastures;
horses tied to fences, to trees;
horses hobbled;
horses running wild along the ditches;
and then th ones that simply stood in the rain,
that baked in the sun,
that dreamt with their heads down.
As I shot past in my car it was all I could manage
to even glance at a horse.
However, I do remember noticing
this one horse, a grey horse;
he was young and was kept apart from other horses.
He was always pacing and stomping
and throwing his head and whinnying,
and basically always on the brink
of exploding chest-first through the fence
to get over to the other horses.
For horses are herd animals.
Horses need other horses.
Horses easily die of loneliness.
This young grey horse seemed to be doing this.
He was a colt when I first saw him,
and about thirty-two when I finally pulled over and parked my car.
I left the engine running and got out
and strode through the tall grass
to get to the barbed-wire fence where he stood.
He was quite old, sway-backed, bad teeth.
His eyes were sunk in his head. He no longer
moved about, but just stood there in place
and sort of bobbed his head
in a kind of left-to-right figure eight.
It was all he was capable of--I could see this
as I approached him in his pasture.
All the other horses were in a distant pasture.
They looked like specks of black rice
on the yellow hillside. I reached the fence.
I was finally standing not three feet from this horse.
I reached over the top strand of wire.
As I lowered my hand
the horse looked at me serenely
as if he'd known me all his life.
I patted his head.
I am one of the world's largest assholes.

interview

You are a farrier. "One who shoes horses." But you never explicitly write about shoeing horses, I don't think. Is shoeing horses a passion for you? Or do you do it for the money? Can you write a five word, two line poem about being a farrier?

Go look at the poem called I RATTLED OFF TO WORK TODAY in new book. That may not be “me,” but that’s how time usually moves for me (and that is definitely my pickup).

Yes, shoeing is a passion. It's very challenging and rewarding work. I have to run a business, be good with people, be good with horses, understand equine anatomy, and work well with my hands. Most of the tools used daily are tools that have been in use for hundreds of years. In many ways it’s very primitive. I’m like a caveman, really—stooped over, smeared with horseshit and urine, blowing farmer snots next to the customer’s Navigator, just looking for my next Ibuprofen.

But what exactly is the caveman up to? Well, to summarize: I'm carefully trimming and sculpting the horse’s foot with nippers and a rasp while holding it between my knees (not kidding). Then I look at it carefully, take a few measurements, and go to the anvil to shape an inanimate object (horseshoe) to fit this horse's foot. I use a forge so the metal is extremely hot and has to be handled with tongs. After a few trips, making sure the shoe fits, I quench it in water and take a small hammer named Rick and nail it (shoe) onto the horse's foot while he/she stands there on 3 legs, quietly or not.

But yes, I also do it for the money. There is no money in poetry.

Brief poem you asked for: Fondling my clinch / block, wondering.

When something funny happens or when you have an interesting or funny thought, in your head, during the daytime, away from poetry-writing-time, do you immediately think of how to somehow get that into a poem or somehow write a poem about it; or do you only think back on those things during your poetry-writing-time, if you have such a thing (poetry-writing-time)?

I don't take many notes during the day. If I do have notes written down somewhere (napkin, notebook, etc.) I might later collect 7 or 8 of them (note fragments) on a sheet of paper. Then I start writing and using these images or quotes or whatever. I don't try too hard to know where I'm going. I push everything around until something interests me, adding and adding and adding of course. And quite often I end up cutting many of the things from the list that I initially found so interesting... they just don't fit in the poem anymore.

You have manatees, cows, horses, sheep, and mules in your poetry. You have no hamsters, ocean sunfish, moose, dolphins, or bears. How do you choose your animals? The animals you use are all funny and interesting in their own ways but these are general ways and to me can be said of many animals; but to me the animals I listed are uniquely funny and interesting and in more specific ways; for example an ocean sunfish's head is its body more than any other animal's head is its
body. But this may just be focusing on surface things, rather than psychology, or whatever. How do you choose your animals? Over time have you changed in which animals you enjoy writing about more?

Sounds like you should write a poem about the ocean sunfish.

Okay.

Brief poem about ocean sunfish: Its face / is its ass.

See, I knew you could do it.

I can do it. Can you do it?

No. That was my original point.

How do you choose your animals?

Well, some are chosen simply because I'm around them all the time: dogs, flies, horses, mules, beetles, cows, etc. Others are chosen because I, for some reason, am interested in them--perhaps I've read about the spadefoot toad, or seen some program about sea horses. And then, while writing, a mood or direction surfaces and suddenly I find myself working this animal or insect into the poem.

We spend so much time taking orders from humans, obeying laws written by them, etc., and then giving commands of our own to other humans via phone, fax, mail, email; and meanwhile the plant, animal and insect world surrounds us at all times. We seldom ask a pill bug, Why? And we may need help feeling a donkey's pain.

Now, you could easily argue that it's not fair (or even intelligent) to project all our human traits/psychoses onto the animal world. I like that stance very much also.

I didn’t know the spadefoot in that poem was a toad. I thought it was just a human with something like clubfoot. What about projecting human traits/psychoses onto inanimate objects or abstractions? Are you interested in that?

I am interested in that. This is a little different, but did you see the film Chungking Express by Wong Kar-wai, where the guy’s girlfriend (airline stewardess) leaves him and he spends a lot of time talking to his soap, his towel, a stuffed animal, and I think something from his refrigerator? I loved that. I could hear his voice for weeks in my head, and I would think of him with his things--his soap, his towel. Anyway, I think that a person’s relationships with their things can be very rewarding. I know a lady whose dolls mean more to her than her husband and who am I to say she’s wrong? So yes, projecting human traits/psychoses onto inanimate objects or abstractions seems fine if not appropriate to me. It’s probably not “projecting.”

But about inanimate objects. I used to arrange my stuffed animals so that parts of them wouldn’t be exposed, and if one leg was bent wrongly I would fix it. Today I don’t do that anymore. Really it is just relieving my own bad feelings of not wanting the stuffed animal to be uncomfortable, which is not something a stuffed animal can be. It is in my head only. So my time is better spent doing nice things to things that have actual feelings. So it is bad in that way. Or not ‘bad,’ but selfish. What do you think?

Yes, it is bad. Bad and selfish.

If say a 'goth' band like Marilyn Manson is trying to achieve, with their songs, making you back into a fourteen-year old depressed, suicidal teenager the extreme, or perfection, of which would be to actually transform you into a fourteen-year old depressed, suicidal teenager, what are you trying for with your poems, and what would be the extreme, or perfection, of it? What effect are you trying to create in the reader? Or rather what effect are you trying to create in yourself with your poems when you write them and then read them to see if you have written a poem you like?

I don't know if I am trying to "create an effect in the reader." I think, like most writers, I am, at least initially, writing to entertain myself. If I get bored with what I'm writing I either stop or force a change in direction. Usually the latter. I don't normally totally abandon a poem/draft. I like to think I can fix anything.

You have a few instances in your poems where natural catastrophes (mudslide, meteor storm) destroy single human beings. The way you write it is very calm and I feel not painful destruction but just very quiet and good. Are you consoled against death when you end a poem with a meteor storm hitting a man and obliterating the man? If not,what are you consoled against? Have you ever tried to console against death using poetry? Cite examples.

"Consoled against death." That's interesting. I don't know if that's what I'm up to or not. I do like the powerful feeling I get when I destroy a man or toad with a quick line in a poem.

What if you had a moose destroy a toad in a poem. Would you still feel as powerful? Or would you feel as if the moose in your poem had taken some of your power?

Yeah. Yeah definitely, he would have taken some of my power.

In your poetry sometimes decades pass in a very calm and confused way using very few words, mostly without adjectives or adverbs. Does this console against depression? That actually if you live thirty-years it is just a very calm and vague and confused thing (thirty-years) in the memory? If not, what effect does it have on you when you read your own poem about a horse who is seen by a man as in despair of dying of loneliness as a young baby horse and who thirty years later as an old horse is talked about again by the same man and pet by the man for the first time though he has, the reader assumes, looked at the horse each day for thirty years and seen the horse's loneliness and despair?

"Consoled against depression." That's interesting. I don't know if that's what I'm up to or not. I do know that I like the powerful feeling I get when I can move a man's (or horse's) life story along swiftly without getting too bogged down in taxes (or oats). In poems--all writing, I guess--there is so much that needs to be left out. This is the number one task at hand. I do think that that horse standing alone, growing neurotic (AUTOBIOGRAPHY), is sad. It makes me want to punch someone.

If every object, abstraction, and sentient thing--speakers, pencils, God, the idea of hierarchies, me, Bono, yourself, etc.--in the universe lined up for you to punch in the face after thinking about the lonely horse, who would you punch?

You mean who would I punch first?

Would you punch Bono first? What if his glasses broke and made your fist bleed? Or maybe they would break toward his face and blind him?

Uh, I hadn’t really thought about any of that. I guess it’s more a figure of speech--“it makes me want to punch someone.”

photo one, just cinch block

photo two, cinch block with jerky

photo three, holding cinch block--wondering

photo four, t-bone's tongue is his calling card

photo five, t-bone's tongue is dirty

photo six, what does t-bone's ear feel like