Kara Candito is the author of Taste of Cherry (University of Nebraska Press), winner of the 2008 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. She has received an Academy of American Poets Prize and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

The Rumpus: The business side of poetry has quite a few demands that poems themselves don’t have or have never thought about. For instance, the importance of a website. What’s it like to have an electronic “face”?

Kara Candito: I agree. After devoting so much time to reading, writing, and talking about poetry, it was something of a surprise to encounter this world of promotion and marketing. When a publicist at University of Nebraska Press first suggested that I create a personal website, I was really taken aback. Poet? Website? Of course, lots of poets have websites these days, so the suggestion wasn’t a complete surprise. I quickly discovered that web design was therapeutic. There’s a definitive goal, a beginning and an end. So unlike poetry!

When I put the site together my concerns were the color palette, what to include in the navigation bar, how to create hyperlinks. Very gratifying. Maybe this is just my way of coming to terms with the business/promotion side of poetry, but I think of having a website as a matter of utility, a way to organize and present my work and discussions of my work on the web. I feel as if I’m giving my poems, and not myself, an electronic face. Sometimes, the poems are embarrassed or reluctant, but they shut up and come around eventually.

Rumpus: So many writers play the I’m-so-insecure-and-self-conscious part when it comes to public presentation. How do you feel about the ego’s place in the world of a poet?

Candito: Ha. But I am so-insecure-and-self-conscious! I think most contemporary poets occupy a fairly humble place in the universe, that we have few Byronic illusions about our fame. I’m a fairly private person, and for me, poetry is a personal, though not necessarily autobiographical phenomenon. The act of reading my poems to an audience has and will always be a bit scary, as if someone were broadcasting a telephone conversation I’d had with a good friend.

Recently, as I’ve done more readings, I’ve actually begun to enjoy them. It’s wonderful to have the chance to present your poems the way you hear them in your head. I think it’s the physical presence element of readings that I find most daunting. This probably stems from a traumatic elementary school recital memory, which I won’t bore you with. Last winter, I recorded a few poems for Blackbird, and I think audio is my true medium. So, I haven’t answered the question. I think that the ego’s role in the world of a poet depends on the poet. For me, the id has been more of a poetry tyrant.

Rumpus: Is it kind of an ego-trip to have your own website?

Candito: Maybe. Maybe not. I think it depends on one’s motivations for having or not having a site. If you simply think that poetry and the internet are on two different planets, then don’t have one. If you have a website and you see it as the altar of your poetic genius, then that’s an ego trip. If you don’t have a website because you think your poetry, as Art, is head and shoulders above the banal spectacle of late capitalism, then that’s an ego trip, too. Having hosted a few readings series, I think that having a website with a bio and a downloadable photo can be an act of compassion. This way, the host doesn’t have to put together a bio and search for a photo, praying that it’s not one the writer’s ashamed of. For me, it goes back to the question of utility. If I read a poem in a journal and enjoy it, I often search for more of the poet’s work online. It’s great when most of that work is pre-catalogued on a website.

Rumpus: There’s a lot of discussion in the contemporary poetry scene concerning “book contests.” Some say they’re creating a hazard for the poetry world, while others argue vehemently for their existence. As the winner of a very prestigious prize can you comment on your choice to enter such contests and your view of their place in contemporary poetry?

Candito: That’s a great question. Book contests have been around for a while, and the vast array of contests out there today might be a response to the growing number of writers submitting to them, and also to the economic pressures on smaller literary and university presses. When I began sending out my manuscript, I submitted to contests and presses that published books I’ve enjoyed. Honestly, this is an issue that I haven’t thought about deeply enough. I’ve been more concerned with contemporary poetry’s audience (or lack thereof).

Sometimes, the knowledge that our audience is comprised, for the most part, of other poets with vaguely similar training makes writing poetry feel a bit like masturbation: it’s satisfying, but limited. Rather than dwelling too much on this, I’ve tried to reach different readers by participating in non-academic readings series and gifting books of poetry to friends and acquaintances who aren’t writers. As a teacher, I also try to turn students on to poetry by introducing them to poems that feel fresh and relevant to them. Sometimes, it’s as simple as saying, Try it.

Rumpus: Taste of Cherry had just been accepted when we first met at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and I remember you asking several of us if we thought the title was too “racy.” How do you feel about it now that the book’s been out for a while?

Candito: I think there’s a definite moment of panic when you realize something that’s been so private for so long is going to be printed and published. I got some great advice that day: if people don’t like it, that’s their problem. More specifically, no one’s work is going to reach every reader. I think we’ve all had the experience of picking up a book of poetry that a trusted friend recommended and thinking, What am I missing? I’ve since learned to live with (for the most part) the static of critique. Though it’s nowhere near flawless, I’m happy with my first book because it was an honest exploration of my interests and obsessions at the time. Of course, I’ve since begun to develop new interests and obsessions. Several years from now, I hope I’ll be able to say the same about the poems I’m working on now.

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Richard Carr’s debut collection, Mister Martini, does not have something for everyone. This is no carnival of contemporary poetics, nor is it a semi-strong beginning to what I hope will be a stronger second collection.  Mr. Carr’s second collection is already out; so are his third and fourth; all of them released in 2008.  This alone should signal that Richard Carr is making something worth our minutes.

A quick stroll through the table of contents reveals that Mister Martini is resisting the compact organization so often offered in two, three, or four section books.  The sixty-four poems collected here are a straight shot from beginning to end.  I say this book does not have something for everyone because the more-than-happy-to-read-a-poem-here-read-a-poem-there reader is going to struggle for understanding if he tries to choose his own adventure. Mister Martini has an agenda and it requires willingness and participation on behalf of the reader.  Richard Carr has created an album, not a hodge-podge of hits.

The book’s first poem, “Inventor,” introduces the reader to the speaker and his father:

My father was an inventor of martinis.
He acquired archaic languages,
collected Renaissance textiles.
But mostly he made martinis.

He worked at night in a closed room.

In these first five lines, Carr has delivered the context that his book’s world will inhabit.  The voice heard here remains consistent throughout, as does the focus on the father-son relationship.

The second part of this poem is given to the martini, which ubiquitously performs as a character, metaphor, simile, clarification, and the only solid aspect of the father-son relationship occurring directly above it:

Martini chilled among purple crocuses,
served with two drops of spring snow
gathered from the petals.

This structure endures throughout the collection in every poem except the last.  The italicized moment given to the martini is often as elusive as the above example.

Such complex compactness evokes thoughts of Robert Creeley, William Carlos Williams, and Mark Strand.  The displayed control of tone, syntax, and line recalls Anne Carson or H.D.  In these comparisons I’m suggesting a lineage that may be appropriate for Carr’s first book, but I look to the idea of “Inventor” as a suggestion that Carr is acutely aware he’s working within a tradition and working, in part, to extend said tradition.  I’m not at all suggesting an allegorical reading, but I do find it fascinating that the lineage mentioned in this opening poem is highly reminiscent of poem-making in the contemporary moment.  What a relief to find a poet who’s aware that his work isn’t happening in a vacuum.

From this initial poem the collection’s movements are largely governed by the course of the father-son relationship.  This is not to say that the book’s movement is entirely narrative; it’s not.  The movement is also not entirely lyric.  I remain ambiguous on how to label this work, as Carr seems to be drawing from almost every poetic movement since the 1800’s.  In “Language” Carr writes,

Martini with a formation of tundra swans
flying a mile above it in blue space,
only the ghosts of their voices reaching the surface

and sunlight
passing through their white bodies.

and you can see my anxiety over a label.  Is this passage surreal?  Is it symbolic?  Is it lyric?  Does it work to clarify the poem’s initial narrative?  Yes.  As the book moves each piece plays along and off something that has come before and something that will come after.  This tenuous ambiguity is one of the collection’s main sources of pleasure.

The pleasure though is not with out its equal pain.  While Carr has composed these poems without giving in to the urge toward sentimentality, he has given-in to the idea of raw emotion as a dual agent for exploration and characterization.  This dual agency is highly evident in one of the collection’s last poems “Clams”:

Over a dinner of clams,
only clams,
I bragged to him that I would succeed
where he had failed,

and he replied dryly:  Then you will do nothing.
But it hurt him
to know I had made an account of his failures.
He tapped a shell with his cocktail fork.

It angered him.

The language here is, like the father’s reply, very dry, but this allows the seething emotion and conflict between the characters to leap off the page.  Arriving at this poem, I don’t get the feeling that this is a one-time occurrence.  In making an account of his father’s failures, the speaker shows he’s been biding his time (and timing in this collection is everything).  The account is also peppered with the painful notion that this speaker wants to hurt his father and get back at him.  Carr doesn’t let us rest there, though.  Moments like these create a heavy dramatic irony for the reader because we see that while the speaker is resisting his father, he can’t help but carry some of his qualities.  The cool surface tone paired with the emotional lava beneath reminds me of Louise Glück’s “At the River” where her characters and readers arrive simultaneously at an end that emanates from the page in a multilayered wave of grief, pain, and closure.

Naomi Shihab Nye, judge of the 2007 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry says about this winning selection,  “This is a truly original book.  There’s nothing extra:  sharp and clear and astonishing.  Viva!”  I absolutely agree and I rejoice in her choice to close the statement with such an exclamation.  I had a similar reaction upon closing the covers and I almost felt guilty because both the relationship and the poems are anything but celebratory.

These poems often resist the reader in the same way his speaker resists his father, but the book’s exploration of such distance creates a closeness between the reader and the poems, and the speaker and his father, that’s almost too much to bear.  Richard Carr’s ability to not only expose, but also create, such humanness and connection out of such discord and brokenness is my understanding of Nye’s “Viva!” And it’s the first thing I’ll say if Richard Carr comes up in conversation anytime soon.

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Walking the line between modern confessional and a reinvention of the pastoral, John Casteen’s poems speak to the need of fully living the one life he’s been given.  A former designer and maker of custom furniture, Casteen traded his ten self-employed years for a future more concerned with approaching the blank page.  Perhaps it is the urgency required in such a move that allows the poems in Free Union to arrive at their peace with well-crafted fervor and elegant conviction.

“Poem for Mary Magdalene” begins this poet’s debut with the forceful assertion:

I was raised to be the judging kind.
Not much halts that, not much galls it,
but the winter sun stalls me.  Sedge-color-sedge,
black Iowa River, north of town, tan marsh-grass,
black trees above the river…

This poem works to locate both the poet and the town in one fell swoop of a stanza that promises to bring Casteen’s world to light.  By world I mean a town boasting just over twelve hundred inhabitants, and about thirty square miles of land that still resembles the landscape Abraham Lincoln may have seen on his way to the White House.  But by world I also mean the poet’s inner landscape, which is shaped by the same workers’ hands, woodworking tools, and large farm equipment, as the land he claims as home.

The collection’s title poem identifies Free Union as, “the husk of the general store, / broad semaphores of six-board fence.  The frieze of the hills, and of their omnipresence.”  Throughout this, and all of Casteen’s poems, there’s a definite sense that Free Union is much more than a small Virginia town.  It is also the choice involved; the choice to go back to the land, the choice to settle with a partner, father children, and find both comfort and discomfort in the God these pages depict. The journey here is not the long walk home, but the walking of home with Casteen as he moves through his adult life, simultaneously away from, but closer to, the truths of his native land and self.

The poem “Gravid” illustrates the movement to fatherhood, and echoes the fatherly sentiment one finds in Frost’s “Home Burial,” but Casteen’s version of the feeling doesn’t end in despair or gut-wrenching ambiguity, it mixes the anxiety of new fatherhood with the kind of experience one gains on the return home after a long while gone.  It’s here that we see the knowledge of the one who got out, but chose to come back, perhaps because the world was big in a way not meant to suit the speaker, who is able to say both:

In this season which is the season of invented errands,
the least of tasks explains a drive along the smaller roads.
We live in two instincts: the one to make ready
the other to rest, and wait.  The baby was due
yesterday…

and

The garden is gone to seed and I am calling all over
for kind people I haven’t seen in years.  They seem fine.
I’m thinking of my child’s introduction to this world,
or to its unambiguous, it’s relevant: sweet, sour, bitter, salt.

In this moment the speaker displays his ability to turn his wife’s pregnancy into a season all its own, while also telling each of us about our own lives.  This is the power of Casteen’s poetry: his unnerving ability to graft the simpleness he’s learned in Free Union onto the skin of his readers so that we too are able to reduce our hectic, waiting lives down to what the tongue can taste.  Knowledge like this comes only from a traveler who has made it home to tell the tale.

The God infused throughout Casteen’s poetry initially made me nervous, wary of this poet’s conceit.  We’ve all read poems that seem insistent and pushy in their telling of their faiths.  But like Dan Albergotti in The Boatloads, Casteen is able to delight and surprise the reader, reverently turning his God into a spirituality rising from the Blue Ridge, far above the need for denomination.  “Night Hunting” for example, begins:

Because we wanted things the way they were
in our minds’ black eyes we waited.  The beaver
raising ripples in a V behind his head
the thing we wanted…

He then moves forward with a meditation on the heart’s moral dilemma while hunting, the strangeness “to hope / to see the signs of motion, to make an end / to Peter’s old refrain:  He’ll be along, son of a bitch, / and then you best be ready.”  Translating the saint’s words into the central Virginia vernacular just under the opening lines of this poem calls the reader back to that earlier moment in “Gravid,”  “We live in two instincts: the one to make ready, / the other to rest.”  Again we see the poems moving with the spirit in the nature, the notion of Free Union complicating itself layer upon layer, building to the book’s second section, which begins with the poem “More about the World of Things and the World of Ideas.”

In this poem the poet writes:

We learn that there is the word: fiat,
say, or truth.  And then there is the world.
Do we learn the one without asking of the other
what is it…

There is, after all, that other world, where
our letters are nothing.  Where we can know the truth
but cannot write its name.  Here, then, is the anvil,
warm from its celestial forge; here is the hammer,
pealing like a bell.  Our words the wrinkles in damascus.
This is recollection, and is the pattern behind the pattern.

Damascus is both the oldest inhabited city in the world and a type of metalwork, which involves tedious labor, resulting in a beautiful swirl of metals bonded in a way nature won’t naturally allow.  In this instance “damascus” is the giving of one’s self over to his humanness.  It’s the ability to make this utterance that allows Casteen his move to Free Union’s end:  “Letter to Family, before Leaving” and “The Night Pasture.”  The former calling back to the choice to return home: “I hope I never tire of this valley’s changing faces…and bringing you / family, my life, my love,” the latter, still sustaining the patient, observant voice with which the book began, leaving us with a farmer’s telling of his heifer who’s just birthed a stillborn:

…Little changed, except something
sank in me like a leaf settling silently in water—

there’s another mouth to feed, but I think
you know where.  I’ve said enough now.

At latitude 38.155, longitude -78.564, and an elevation of 587 feet above sea level, Free Union, Virginia is centrally located in the middle of nowhere. The same cannot be said for the poems in this collection, where John Casteen conflates tightly woven lyrics with lyric narratives, and his woodshop’s sounds with honest experience to build his readers a house in Free Union, where “our life here is poor and full.”

Read a new poem by John Casteen in The Rumpus Original Poems.

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