Michael Earl Craig

Mostly entertaining but too disjointed, too fickle in their imagery to make a lasting impression. I give Craig credit for his sense of humour, though, for never being boring, and for two or three real corkers like this:

WINTER

A kind of Danish cow
long thought to be extinct
lumbers slowly from a fog-soaked forest.
Past the statue of two men shaking hands on horseback.
Into the trainyard with its newly
brunette-colored coal cars.
It is late, lamps light the trainyard.
One of the trainmen sees the cow and has a thought
like a small grey infant sinking
ever so slowly in the icy harbor.
The cow continues out the other side of the trainyard.
The trainman shudders at the thought.
The trainman’s cat Stamina crunches walnuts in her cat dish.

Now, thirty years later,
ladies and gentlemen it is my great pleasure
to introduce to you that very same cow.
(The cow is led out onto the stage by a young boy dressed as a farmer.)… (plus d'informations)

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/84825364773/if-you-can-shoe-a-horse-does-it-mean-y...

There was a period some years ago when I engaged myself in a personal contradictory struggle over feeling my life had no meaning. I say contradictory because I had no reason to feel this way. I was happily married to the woman of my dreams, our children had all completed college except for our youngest who was enrolled, my wife and I both had decent jobs, we lived in a nice home with a dog and a yard, and I was writing poetry under the tutelage of Gordon Lish. I felt guilty then for feeling so poorly about my life and so poorly about the awful truth that it all didn't feel like all that much to me. I brought my problem up with Gordon on this one particular visit to New York City, a city my wife and I still visit annually because we love it so much, and now we also have two children living there. Ever since 1995 when I began attending his fiction-writing classes I made a point each trip to hook up with Gordon somewhere on the island. He was always a kind and gracious man with both me and my family, always finding the time to either have lunch with me or an evening meal with my whole family at some restaurant of his choosing. He treated my kids with the greatest respect and listened to them attentively. He added (performed) his many personal anecdotes none of us would ever forget him telling (showing) to us. My children to this day feel as if they know Gordon Lish on a personal level and all of them know they could call him anytime. I feel pretty good about that today too, but back when I was struggling with the meaning of the word meaning I wasn't feeling anything but down.

So I brought my problem up with Gordon at dinner, my wife sitting next to him, me across, three of my adult kids and a future husband of my step-daughter along the table's flanks, all present, all now aware of my personal conundrum. Gordon simply responded to my question with his hands motioning all around toward all the table's occupants, that this was meaning. This togetherness, our conversation, the sharing of each other's lives and food around a supper table among friends and family, that this, Michael, this was meaning. He didn't express it in any way that I felt at all embarrassed for asking the question, he simply stated the simple answer and for some unknown reason that night I got it. Gordon has always had a way of getting through to me. He doesn't have to say too much either. He is and was a key component in the saving of my life through the vehicle of my desire to write and then teaching me how to overcome myself on so many levels whether I am writing a poem or solving the countless other problems that crop up in my life on a daily basis. I never give this man too much credit. He is that important to me and for any success I might have now or in the future.

Gordon Lish introduced me and many others to the genius of the poet Jack Gilbert. Throughout my studies of the poetry and life of Jack Gilbert I learned of another great American poet, Wallace Stevens. And because of Wallace Stevens I learned most about being a working stiff in the corporate world and still capable of writing great poetry and immersing oneself in the important cultural appetites available through the mail in order to be satisfied if one isn't capable of physically traveling around the world hauling around that wondrous appetite some of us have for what would have to be termed the finer things in life. By studying under Gordon Lish and being ever aware of his litmag, The Quarterly, I also was introduced to Barton Allen and his immensely important poetry that to my knowledge he has not advanced since our time together in the mid to late nineties. Barton and I spent hours discussing Gilbert, Stevens, and also Emily Dickinson, and I learned so much from Barton about all three of these poets. Through these examples and our discussions I learned how to write verse that actually meant something on the page and have it magically transferred into our bodies, even if the lines didn't make sense. The work of Emily Dickinson became accessible and alive for me in those years Barton and I used her as a drug and a tool to get us and our poetry somewhere else than the same corner everyone else it seemed was huddled in. Perhaps we can say it might just have been us examining the many nuances of non-sense. Regardless, it was rewarding and a great deal of fun.

Now I drop these names here in order for my interested reader, the serious scholar, to further investigate these important artists in order to advance their own understanding of poetry and literature, or even to improve their own writing if they are so inclined. Gordon always taught that there is no reason to sit down to write unless your intent is to make history. Jack Gilbert expressed basically the same thing regarding the difference between a serious and a recreational poet. Gilbert pleaded for the recreational poet to please stop, or at least not publish their poems as there are already far too many inadequate poems available to the reading public with little need for more of them. And I bring up Barton Allen because he too has added his own great poems to the history of poetry, but most likely historically lacking a body of work large enough to make a dent as yet into the poetry canon. These poets all continue to hold their place on my bookshelves and are visited often. They do their best always to sustain me, even though my personal nature is one of being rarely satisfied. I am always looking for the next new discovery, and truth be told I have found a few, but none I can position in the elite category of the poets mentioned above. Honorable mention goes to Casey Finch and Cooper Esteban, and one must always consider the highly energetic John Rybicki.

Last year, two winters ago, I discovered Michael Earl Craig by accident. I was either researching David Foster Wallace or there was an interview of Gordon Lish in this magazine called The Believer published out of, I believe, San Francisco. And featured in whatever issue I am talking about here was a poem by Michael Earl Craig. I liked the poem enough to order his only two, at this time, published books of poetry as I am want to do when my obsessive/compulsive disorder kicks in which it does so very often. So I get these two books and I like them okay enough to have them stay on my bedside table for the last year and a half. Michael Earl Craig has been on my list of people to write an article about simply because he has stayed at my side for so long. There isn't a whole lot to know about the dude. I really haven't known what to say until now, or even how to say it. In other words, I have lacked a good idea, or even a word, which is an important place to start in any composition.

When I first began writing poetry for Lish in lieu of the short stories and novels I was studying fiction-writing for, Lish warned me against it. He sharply told me poetry was for sissies. I stood my ground at the time because I had failed so often for so many years at producing a fiction for him of any quality. His magazine, The Quarterly, with its short and quite different poetry Lish chose to publish, had finally given me hope that I might indeed be able to write something of quality like the poems found in his magazine given that the poems he published were so short. It wasn't that I couldn't produce a fiction sentence of quality. I could. I just could not sustain the quality of the sentences that followed past the first page. I would obviously get frightened and flit away from my object, abandoning all hope for keeping Lish's attention and subsequently another rejection slip would be speedily dropped in the mail. But I thought I had a pretty good chance at staying true to my object in a poem. Actually, I knew I could. So I continued writing poems until I produced the quality and strength of poem necessary to get Lish's attention, enough so that he has counseled me several times through the years since then to just stick with poetry and forget about wanting to write longer fiction. He has said many times that Cormac McCarthy already has that act down, and I would have to agree with him on that point regarding McCarthy's great novels he somehow continues to produce on a regular basis. He has said I am a natural born poet, and so he says for me to write the poems.

One lunch with my wife and youngest son present, Gordon told him that he needed to know his father was a great American poet. That is something somebody like me never forgets. Being anointed by Gordon Lish makes you feel that anything others might say about you just doesn't matter. At least it does for me. And here I was, a great American poet but also now obviously also a sissy. And I was OK with that too. Through the years, and the further my journey takes me deeper within myself, I have become comfortable in my skin, comfortable about my own sexuality, my manhood. My preferences have also evolved into a tolerance for others involved in their own deeply personal struggles whether it's their their sexual identity or place setting in society. The fact that I had been a very physical and hard-working carpenter for many years at an earlier stage in my life, and then moved on from there to sell brick and other building materials to home builders for the last several years, acutely made writing poetry even more eventful for me when my clients began to learn of my writing exploits and limited notoriety among some obscure pages. Home builders in Kentucky also think of poets as perhaps a little bit sissy themselves, but it was hard for them to reconcile me with being a sissy, and here I stood before them as a poet of the first rank. My builders became a little bit confused, but they rarely said anything. Add to this the discovery of another poet who maybe isn't a sissy either. Michael Earl Craig has a pretty dangerous job shoeing horses for a living out west in Montana.

CAN YOU RELAX IN MY HOUSE is Craig's first book of verse and was published by Fence Books in 2002. I have read through the book at least two times, if not three, and I have always been taken by the poem Montgomery. I think to myself that this is the poem I would highlight in this book if it was mine, and then being not at all surprised I notice it is the poem the editor chose to be featured on the back cover of the book. In 2006 Craig's second book of verse came out by Fence Books and was titled, YES, MASTER. The poem I always remember in this book is the initial one, This Is How An Anvil Comes To You. Now I am neither going to explain what I like about these two poems, nor deconstruct them. None of the poems from either two books beat the best of Gilbert, Allen, or even myself if you will allow me this one indiscretion. Of course the poems of Michael Earl Craig also cannot compete with Wallace Stevens or Emily Dickinson either. But that is not to say that Craig is not worth reading. He is very good. His poems are honest even if he's lying. He's a man with a hard and dangerous job who still manages to get out of himself as a farrier and into his art when time permits. I might even like him personally. He could be a loner like me. And if he doesn't go around reading his poems to everybody who will listen, and he refuses to wear the poet's cape and play the part of bard, chances are he'll stay a bit off the radar. But if he continues to write seriously he'll have a reader in me. And I will champion him, even if it means for him the kiss of death. There is meaning in Michael Earl Craig, and by gum, that says a lot about a person.… (plus d'informations)