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:
https://samizdatpress.typepad.com/hal_issue_fifteen-2/poetry-by-lillian-necakov.html?fbclid=IwAR0ewb1cOASyFVZT6jdm0DFeB8rVtA1VHgxsySdHZsANNr9YlI1XfxEOYXE
https://ryethewhiskeyreview.blogspot.com/2022/10/emotional-labor-by-lauren-scharhag.html?fbclid=IwAR2slaQtIkg8aMuAvkBgy8cy9i4DGZLg5xhgzZLsxYbGqKljMGy1hVj3Vd8
https://asitoughttobemagazine.com/2022/11/02/ruth-bavetta-stargazers/?fbclid=IwAR2oakRT2YGCe2KsxGUiVCgkwfEAvuZIVdNheOv4tBWz22UbE5CcvpflT5A
http://www.thebanyanreview.com/summer-2022/scott-ferry-banyan-review-summer-2022/
https://ferrypoetry.com/
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.
