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.
