Small Press Intravues:
Occasional Interviews with writers working and
publishing in the small press ecosystem
Interview #14: Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as a RN in the Seattle area. His most recent book is The Long Blade of Days Ahead from Impspired Press. You can find more of his work at ferrypoetry.com.
Michael Sikkema: Scott, you have some recent collections out, and I know you’ve just finished up a big collaboration with some other writers? Can you talk to us about the solo books, and then let us know about the collabs?
Scott Ferry: First of all, thank you Michael for interviewing me. I am a big fan of your poetry and your always fascinating FB posts. I have been writing like a possessed person the last three years or so. When I say possessed I am being literal, as if something in the ether is continually pushing me to create and throw it out very quickly into the world. The urge and pull to write is pretty constant, every day or every other day. I’m not saying it is all good, but there is certainly volume. Since 2019 I have put out 6 books and a mini-chap, and I have a collab book on the way and another book tied up in contests. If you are interested, you can check out all of those at my page ferrypoetry.com under “books.”
My latest book is called The Long Blade of Days Ahead from Impspired Press in England and it was written from Dec 2021 to May 2022. I go back and forth writing really vulnerable clear pieces and loopy surrealistic ones. By loopy I mean they go in loops, the beginnings curling back to the endings to eat their tails. Many times I don’t have a firm grip on the reins on these and they can speed off and circle back around before I know it. For the vulnerable ones I try to keep it crisp and stark, using only the words necessary to relay that truth. By truth I mean my truth…I don’t pretend to know anything but that. I really don’t agonize over editing besides gaining clarity and replacing a word or so or a line break. I feel that my poetry loses its original power if I do that too much. But I try to be interesting and surprising in my images and word choices at least to give a little weird thrill if I can. I think maybe much of poetry provides a weird thrill of pulling off the surface from reality.
The book before this one, Skinless in the Cereal Aisle (also from Impspired Press) helped me work through a troubling period of anxiety I experienced. It is not often that I have felt that I have lost control of the ship, but this was one of those stretches. I got medical help and stabilized and wrote my way through it. It was very super not fun, but I came out the other side of that Willa Wonka boat ride.
One more book I should mention is fishmirror which I wrote during the depths of the pandemic. I had a great time with this one, even though the themes are mostly dark. I took many forms such as a medical note, a recipe, a workshop syllabus, a medical procedure intake form, and stuck poems in those frameworks. I was writing to an experimental poetry contest which I didn’t win, so I had a fully formed book ready and Alien Buddha was a good fit for that one.
My collab project titled Midnight Glossolalia! Oh man I am so excited about this. I saw collabs people were doing like Luke Johnson and Megan Merchant and loved the idea of the synergy. So I contacted my great friends Lillian Necakov and Lauren Scharhag and proposed we do a thing together. If you don’t know them, oh Jesus they are both so amazing. Lillian just writes off the map with so much texture and breadth it’s just hard to know how she does it. Her last book Il Virus is really a masterpiece, every bit as good as Frank: Sonnets in my opinion. Lauren just expands your whole body from microcosm to the heavens and everywhere in between with a darkly-sparkling ether-nozzle from God. She is just unreal. Check out her books Requiem for a Robot Dog or Languages First and Last and prepare the get your face blown off. So we decided to tackle the darkness and the occult in this book, loosely, and each write a poem which we each respond to, and we did that 7 times for a grand total of 63 poems. We are all really happy with it and we found Elizabeth Macduffie at Meat For Tea, who we all loved already, to snatch it up for a Springish 2023 publish date. Elizabeth said that reading the book is “like entering into a fever dream or eating just one gram more of psilocybin than you meant to.” Yes, she gets it and we are all so pleased!
Sikkema: You’ve written and published a ton in a short amount of time. Congrats! Can you talk a bit about process? Are poems coming out more or less fully formed? How much tinkering do you do? Do you think that the collabs fed your solo work, and the other way around? I mostly found that the workshop scenario was not generative for my own poetry and I get the vibe that that’s maybe the same for you?
Ferry: Thank you, my friend! My process consists of mostly listening to those voices in the air which only make themselves known when I get really receptive. Problem is, it is hard to walk around in that state because I am an open target for life’s arrows. So I try to take a phrase from that deeper lake and then come back up into this world to exist until I have the time and quiet to expand it into a poem. I wait until it really hits me, when it rolls and the words are coming out and I am just placing them. Sometimes I use google to find a word which is escaping me or to research plants in Alaska or fish in the abyss or names of nerves. I rarely edit unless something doesn’t flow well, then I work on it until it slides off the page smoothly. Sometimes the trigger for poems is reading brilliant poetry until I get so filled with inspiration, it just pours out. With the more surrealistic ones I just try to have as much fun as I can, honestly, while staying on theme and tone.
The collab with Lill and Lauren really fed me. Writing with them was effortless, like we were all drinking the same pearlish kool-aid. It was thrilling to interweave poems with those two. They inspire me regularly, so that isn’t new.
Yeah, workshops. Not my thing. Like I said, I just listen and find stuff so being in a room with a bunch of people, some of them really trying to impress each other is really not my gig. Plus, I really only trust a few people to make changes to my work and half the time I don’t end up changing it. Not that I think my work is perfect, but I have integrity about how it comes out. I had a guy message me on FB several times giving me “advice” and telling me my poems were really good except this or that. I told him no thank you and blocked him. There are a lot of “experts” around but not too many who really listen very well to the deepest silences.
Sikkema: I love what you’re saying about poetry being an art of listening. Do you feel affinities with any of the other well known listeners/channelers, like Jack Spicer, Alice Notley, Brenda Hillman? Others?
Also, I wonder if you could name some folks who gave you permission, so to speak, to go your own way? When I read people like Hannah Wiener, Jackson Mac Low, Kenneth Patchen, Mei Mei Bersenbrugge, I felt like so many more approaches were “allowed” than I had previously thought. Anybody like that for you?
Ferry: I picked up Talking Poetics From Naropa Institute at a used bookstore in my mid 20s and it pretty much allowed me to listen to the voices inside myself in the air on the bus in the drain. The talk by Burroughs entitled “It belongs to the cucumbers: on the subject of Raudive’s tape voices” was especially instructive. It is all about capturing hidden voices on tape that are below hearing or below notice and using that as a metaphor for writing. Quoting Burroughs:
“In fact, almost any sound that is not too uniform may produce words. Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise. The very tree branches brushing against her window seemed to mutter murder murder murder…So that people may think they are losing their minds when they find that what they see and hear in the street has a special meaning to them.”
I think we all do this but some of us listen and some think this type of enlightenment is nonsense and don’t listen to the roar of the sea around them, inside them. I come from a long line of weird psychics on my father’s side where it was known that many of the women could speak directly to the dead. So maybe this is what I am doing? I really don’t know. But words and images just pop in there if I am receptive and not wanting to impress anyone and then I just let it come out. Is it channeling? I don’t think so, maybe tapping into the collective unconscious, or even just my subconscious which may be interlinked, like we all are, to a deeper ocean.
In terms of who gave me permission I would say Naomi Shihab Nye with her clarity and emotional punch was an early influence. Gary Snyder for his spiritual take of this earth. Raymond Carver for his precise storytelling. Emily Dickinson for everything really, her condensed lightning. Billy Collins for his way of leading us quietly into a mystery. I got pretty frustrated with the word salad type poems which were popular a while back and I think I was trying too hard to be “salad-ey.” Then I read The Moon My Lover My Mother & The Dog by Daniel McGinn and was reminded that authentic emotion and experience are much more powerful in a clear vessel. He just said the poems and they were there and they resonated without effort or torture. Man, that book saved me. He is a humble guy and super nice, not some showboating “look at me” type poet. Here is a prose poem from that book:
Death in the Village
When you drown the child in the wading pool he begs you NO with his black, black eyes. The plastic pool is cheerful blue. If the sky was a coin that landed on your lawn it would come up this shade of blue. The face on the coin is like the face in the mirror in a service station bathroom. Stare at it long enough and the mirror stops breathing. Light leaks and outlines the edges of the body. Everyone has an aura, even you.
I mean, damn. That’s power. I dropped the whole “trying to be a tricky wordsmith poet guy” thing after that book and just tried to tell it straight out like that.
There are so many contemporary poets who give me permission to do whatever. There are really too many to name. I love the FB poetry community but I try to stay away from the more “look at me I am published in this and that and won this and geez look how awesome I am” types and just stick with the people who write brilliant shit and feed off of it. I like to build others up and celebrate the fuck out of great poetry. I mean why not? Unless you are jealous of other people’s success or something and I don’t got time for that. We are not in Jr. High. Many of us live and breathe for this stuff and want to expand it out like a fricken big bang. Again, why not?
Sikkema: We worship at the same churches! Good to know. I know that you are safely tucked away from academia but could you talk about how you keep the lights on and the cupboards stuffed while also tending to the voices? I remember the one and only AWP that I went to, where I was asked by someone I had never heard of before: “if you’re not part of a program, why are you here?” I was involved with editing small press stuff, and I was writing like I was on fire, and I didn’t know how to answer her question, so I didn’t. I kind of wandered off. I teach some at a community college but I also do gardening and landscaping and am doing a bunch of stay at home dadding. These things feed and shape and limit the writing that gets done in turns, but I am usually not doing any kind of academic work with poetry, which I think is healthy for me. How about you? How are you generating capitalism credits while still tending the voices?
Ferry: The extent of my involvement in academia was a BA in English at UCSB back in the last ice age and a Masters in Education. I also taught High School English for a few years. I have tried the editor thing a couple of times and I realized I am a great judge of poetry quality, but really impatient with “bad” poetry. I never knew I was such a snob, actually. In fact, I don’t even keep reading a book or even a poem if it doesn’t have that pull or that texture that gets me excited. So I quit my editor positions pretty quickly and feel that it is not my calling. I think I would really love being in an MFA program but I don’t have the time or the money for that right now. It is not a priority. Plus, I think I am doing pretty well just reading tons of poetry and absorbing what works and what doesn’t. But, of course, that is subjective.
There are many things about the academia machine and insiders club that really bothers me. I mean, if you write a stellar poem and are not from “a program,” does that poem have any less merit? Most people would say no, but in practice, that is wildly different. Getting a book of poetry which is solid noticed for what it is as an indie publication at a local or national level is super hard because academia has all those roads blocked so to speak. It is frustrating at times. Then I wonder, why do I need that recognition? My wife asked me the same thing and I said that I guess every author wants their work to hit as many people as possible (which may or may not be true). It is also an issue of fairness. You have all these indie books that just rule over the super self-conscious “literary” books but nobody in the castle will hear the shouts outside the walls. But, again, in the end, why do I care? I am satisfied bringing my best work out and having people eat it up. I will stop there.
As for how I make the credits, I am a RN for the VA. I have a BA and a Masters and my Associates degree in Nursing makes far more money that those combined. I used to work bedside but now I work in care coordination, which is a desk job. I enjoy helping the Veterans as I feel that they are underappreciated and underserved, to say the least. I try to have enough energy for my wife and two kids at the end of the day. And that, my friend, is the real priority.
Sikkema: Do you have a poetry origin story, memories of early making, ideas about what got you started? I used to write collaborative stories with my friends which were super absurd and sometimes mega violent and gross. I remember it being really exciting to be working on a thing and not knowing what was happening with it until it was your turn to write again. I also remember looking at comic books before I could read and creating narratives based solely on the images. When I was pretty young, I went through some trauma that resulted in a stutter that it took me a while to shake, and part of shaking it included breath control and syllable counting, which later morphed directly into a part of my writing practice. Actually all of the above did. Anything similar for you? Or did poetry just start as poetry for you?
Ferry: I remember writing for me in Freshman and Sophomore year to be really dry and calculated and completely without flow. I had no trust in my voice. I began just writing a few poems here and there, little rhymed things that weren’t very good but were sincere at least. As soon as I began listening to my voice buried under years of rote memorization, I began to write with some confidence and depth. Then writing essays was much easier and came from a more playful place. I kept writing poetry at intervals when the spirit moved me and have been doing it ever since.
I think for me the place from which I write has always been more important than the writing itself. I mean, it is a sacred thing for me, a deep sacred fucking thing, like prayer and very personal. If you are writing poems to show off or be edgy or be literary then you are missing it, for me. You best climb back into that elevator and go down 100 floors and then walk down the rickety stairways another 100 and then into the room with the upside-down trees with the roots in the stars and then stop breathing or start breathing and then begin writing. I want to write those poems. I want to read those poems.
Sikkema: I love what you’re saying. Poetry = meditation. Poetry = prayer. Poetry = ritual. It seems like reading is just as important to you as writing. Before we say farewell, can you link to some work you’ve been enjoying lately, as well as some of your own recent work?
Ferry: Yes, I input all the time with exciting stuff. Here are just a few, plus some of my own and a link to my website. It has been a pleasure, my friend! Thank you for this opportunity to shout from this rooftop!
Links:
http://www.thebanyanreview.com/summer-2022/scott-ferry-banyan-review-summer-2022/
Michael Sikkema is the author of Caw Caw Phony and Half an Owl in Garden Light so he believes that poetry IS like the wind but all those words are just branches moving.
