Michael Carrino’s latest collection of poems, In
No Hurry (Kelsay Books, 2021) does what Carrino does best: create such a
solid link between place and time that we inherently understand that in his
poetic universe, one is rarely without the other. Actual travel—and more
powerfully, emotional displacement—are the geographies he explores with the
precision of a cartographer. All because of the practice of naming. And occasionally,
we feel the force, the agency of nature, of the weather, affecting his
interpretation of the time/space continuum. In this interview, we discuss what
makes a good poem, geographical space, space as punctuation and what drives a
poetry teacher/mentor.
Carolyne Van Der Meer: You studied and taught poetry for many years. For
you, what are the characteristics of a good poem? A good poet? What are the hot
buttons?
Michael Carrino: For me, a good poem
communicates without ranting or forcing opinions or ideas on people—the point
of the poem being more evoked than explained. Yes, it’s a kind of “show, don’t
tell”—but it’s more than that—it’s about being universal. A poem should be
universal. What I mean by that is that it shouldn’t matter if you wrote it 5,
10 or 20 years ago, it will still be relevant today.
I like accessible poetry. Writers who try to confuse you or make you
work too hard make me suspicious. Mary Oliver is a good example of someone who
seems to be writing simple poems. Or the haiku from a thousand years ago about
the frog in a pond. These kinds of poems have more meaning than what appears on
the surface but how deep you go is your choice. For me, less is more. Look at
Shakespeare. He wrote 14-line sonnets. They were formal, but not unnecessarily
abstract. And they continue to be relevant today, they continue to be universal
and relatable. They are still read and enjoyed.
For me, what it comes down to is communication—as the writer of the
poem, you are trying to communicate with someone other than yourself. If you
just want to communicate with yourself, use your journal. But if you’re trying
to get other people to think about something, to feel something, then you have
to get outside of yourself, outside of the abstract. As soon as you are no
longer writing for yourself, you have to take the audience into consideration
and use what you know about craft to reach them. A poem needs to create images
and needs to make some kind of sound—not necessarily an end-of-line rhyme but
it needs to echo and chime in some way. Line breaks need to be intentional—not
just arbitrary choices of line endings. Poetry is more about lines than it is
about sentences.
CVDM: In your own poetry, place is extremely important. Can you explain
why this is so—and why so many of your poems are grounded in place?
MC: You call it place—which it is—but I
also call it naming. I think it’s important to name things because it puts a
spike in the ground. There, that is what you call place. Everything is named,
everywhere. People have first and last names; rivers have one name or
three—yes, names change over time, but people remember the old names. And what
I like about naming is that it takes you out of the abstract. By naming, you
are in the concrete world, the here and now. The more you don’t name things,
the more likely you will fall into the abstraction of your own mind. And when
you do that, once again, you might as well be writing in your journal. When I
was a teacher of poetry, I would often put this sentence on the board to
illustrate my point: “I walked down the street.” And I would say to the
students, what is the first thing that should be changed about that sentence?
Well, the first thing, the most important thing, was to name the street. And
then we needed to find a better word for “walked.” And after that, we needed to
change the “I” to an actual name. “Dorothy stumbled down Manchester Street.” That’s
way more interesting that “I walked down the street.” But the thing that starts
it all is the name.
But you’re right, place is important to me, not just grounding the
reader to a place in a poem, but where you are. Where you are when you
are writing, the environment that influences you and drives you. I try to name
places and objects, and sometimes, though not often, I invent names for
fictional locations to best evoke meaning. Sometimes I even change the name, or
I put myself in towns around here to write poems because the names are better.
When I lived in Vermont, there were poets coming out of the woodwork—new poets,
older poets, retired poets, starting-out poets. And being in such a place where
everyone was writing and wanted to write made me want to write.
CVDM: Let's talk about punctuation and the use of spaces and line
breaks. How do you think space can be used to advantage in a poem?
MC: For me, only the thinnest amount of punctuation
is necessary. Along with intentional line breaks, using very little punctuation
challenges and pushes the writer to think more clearly about where one line
ends, where the next begins, why a longer break might be needed and where
spacing can be used. Where can I use white space or spacing instead of a
comma—what does it mean if I use one space or two—or three or four? If there
are too many commas floating around in a 20-line poem, I can’t help but think
there is something the matter. If I am end-stopping with periods or commas—then
something might sound a bit off in the rhythm, the flow, the pace, maybe even
the tone of the poem.
To me, the perfect poem is one with no punctuation at all, but readers
can still make perfect sense of it.
CVDM: If you had to classify your own work, how would you? What kind of
poet are you?
MC: I am a free verse poet. I like some
kind of structure—I wouldn’t play tennis without a net. So sometimes I like to
count syllables and put boundaries, but I am still a free verse poet.
CVDM: You are the author of nine poetry collections and chapbooks. Which
of them is your favourite and why?
MC: Let me start with my least favourite
by way of explanation. That was Some Rescues, my first book, which came
out of my MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts. That book was overstuffed,
crammed with poems. It was 75 pages, and it should have been 62 pages.
Sentimentality crept in and I included pieces that shouldn’t have made the cut.
That book set the tone at the beginning of my career, and I felt like it got
righted somewhat with By Available Light, published by Guernica Editions.
That book took the best poems from all the other books—it’s a new and
selected—and I added a good streak of new pieces. The other two I am pleased
with are Autumn’s Return to the Maple Pavilion and the latest one, In
No Hurry. For Autumn’s Return, I was completely engaged, enjoyed the
process and the poems were simple—the way I like them. In No Hurry was a surprise. I had no
intention of writing another book, but I found myself writing a lot over a
short period and seeing many of the poems published in journals quickly. I
wasn’t writing for anyone, I was unfettered and that felt good.
CVDM: You were a lecturer at SUNY Plattsburgh for many years and you
taught poetry. What was your goal as a teacher of poetry?
MC: I wanted to take my students on a
journey that made them feel better about the work they were doing, like they
had advanced in some way, gained new knowledge and insight about themselves. I
pushed them to try different points of view, different approaches—even if they
didn’t stay with them, just to broaden their practice. My favourite thing was when
students would tell me about a poet they liked, and I would suggest reading
other similar poets—and then I’d sneak in something a little different because
I wanted them to go beyond their own expectations and preconceived ideas of
taste. I would tell them, “I don’t want you to look, I want you to see.” I
hated the idea of being the gatekeeper who would only let poets with a certain
aesthetic advance—I think this happened far too much in my day. Instead, I
wanted to push as many students as possible to grow.
Michael Carrino taught poetry and literature
at SUNY Plattsburgh in New York State from 1998 to 2008. He completed his
undergraduate degree there in 1971 and, later in his career, graduated with an
MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. He was co-founder and poetry editor of SUNY
Plattsburgh’s literary journal, Saranac Review. He has been widely
published in literary journals in the United States and Canada. His poetry
collections include Some Rescues (New Poets Series, Inc.), Under This
Combustible Sky (Mellen Poetry Press), Café Sonata (Brown Pepper
Press), Autumn’s Return to the Maple Pavilion (Conestoga Press), By
Available Light (Guernica Editions), Always Close, Forever Careless
(Kelsay Books) and Until I’ve Forgotten, Until I’m Stunned (Kelsay
Books). His latest chapbook, In No Hurry, was published by Kelsay Books
in 2021.
Carolyne Van Der Meer is a
Montreal-based journalist, public relations professional and university
lecturer who has published articles, essays, short stories and poems
internationally. She is the author of Motherlode: A Mosaic of Dutch Wartime
Experience (WLUP, 2014), Journeywoman (Inanna, 2017) and Heart of
Goodness: The Life of Marguerite Bourgeoys in 30 Poems | Du cœur à l’âme : La
vie de Marguerite Bourgeoys en 30 poèmes (Guernica Editions, 2020). This
book, for which she translated her own poems into French, was awarded second
prize in the Poetry Category of the Catholic Media Association's 2021 Annual
Book Awards and was a finalist in the Specialty Books category of The Word
Guild’s 2021 annual Word Awards. A fourth book, Sensorial, is
forthcoming from Inanna in spring 2022.
