Kevin Griffith is the author of three poetry collections: Someone Had to Live (San Diego Poet's Press, 1994) Paradise Refunded (Backwaters Press, 1998) and Denmark, kangaroo, Orange (Pearl Editions, 2008). (Check out our review in this issue.) He is the recipient of two fellowships in poetry from the Ohio Arts Council and a Columbus Writing Award through the James Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio. He teaches creative writing at Capital University in Columbus, where he lives with his wife and three children.

Ghoti Magazine: The title poem of your poetry collection Denmark, Kangaroo, Orange describes a mind game. Where did you first encounter this trick? What led you to title the collection after this poem?

Kevin Griffith: A colleague of mine at Capital mentioned it to me years ago, though he now claims to have no recollection of it, so maybe it just spontaneously generated. I can tell you that that poem is a real crowd-pleaser. Denise Duhamel, the judge of the 2006 Pearl Prize, suggested the title after she had selected my manuscript as the winner. The manuscript was originally entitled “A Child’s Story Should Never Have a Sad Ending,” a completely dreadful and forgettable title.

I have always been bad with titles to my works. Back in the late 80’s and early 90’s, the very famous editor at Random House, Gordon Lish, who edited a now-defunct journal called The Quarterly, liked my work so much that he actually sent me a letter telling me to send him everything I had written and to give him a call at his office. (Yes, unbelievably, these things do happen.) When I called him, it seemed liked he didn’t remember me, but then he said, rather tersely, “Oh, yeah, you’re the one with the facile titles.”

That’s why I have basically given up and am calling my next book of poetry My Book of Poetry. (Some of it appears in Ghoti.)

GM: The book is separated into four sections. The first seems to focus on your working life, the second focuses more on religious and spiritual themes, etc. What was your reasoning for separating the poems in this way?

KG: Originally, the book wasn’t divided into sections. I find sectioning very artificial and often too clever. But my editor at Pearl Editions said that the book seemed to fall into sections naturally anyway, so why not do it? (For instance, the first section contains poems on poetry, more or less.) As a reader of books of poetry, I find sections distracting—aren’t titles enough? It often seems like they are used to pad a slim manuscript. The best organizational scheme of a book of poetry I have ever encountered is John Ashbery’s Can You Hear, Bird? , in which he just put the poems in alphabetical order. Then I didn’t have to waste mental energy trying to imagine why the poems were sectioned the way they were.

GM: Poetry tends to take itself very seriously. It's rare for me to laugh out loud when reading poetry, but several of the poems in Denmark, Kangaroo, Orange made me laugh. Have you encountered any resistance to the humor in your writing or found that people might write it off as having less to say?

KG: First, let me say that there is nothing funnier than a poet who takes him or herself seriously. And, oh . . . yeah, there are a lot of them out there.

And, as far as humor goes, most people are really appreciative of the humor in my poetry. I gave a reading at a small public library for National Poetry Month last weekend, and you could kind of tell that the audience—a few senior citizens, and moms who had dragged their teens to the event—were kind of expecting the worse. But as I began reading, there was lots of laughter, the tension broke, and it was kind of refreshing for everyone.

People appreciate humor, and good humor is hard to pull off. That’s why people like David Letterman get paid tens of millions of dollars a year. What serious poet does?

GM: Most of the poems in this collection are prose poems. What appeals to you about this form? Do you find it less restrictive? When does a poem stop being a poem and start being a flash piece?

KG: Obviously, prose poets don’t pay attention to line endings, but they do pay attention to form, just in the non-conventional sense. The title poem in my collection is a good example, as the arrangement of the lines ends up creating the title in the reader’s mind. Also, a prose poem can include all the musical assets of a traditionally lineated poem: alliteration, slant rhyme, etc.

In addition, I think that just as strictly metrical verse pretty much reached the end of its vitality about the time Robert Lowell began writing confessional poetry in the fifties, now, even lineated verse is reaching its end. The typical free-verse poem with a speaker in a specific place, one that uses lines that kinda/sorta approximate iambic pentameter or hexameter has become a cliché. Many poets still write that way, especially poets who rose to prominence in the 1970’s (Stephen Dunn and Phil Levine come to mind), but it’s falling out of fashion. Prose poetry simply opens up imaginative possibilities that free verse doesn’t.

All that aside, though, I think what the prose poem offers is more opportunity for the writer to get at what Keats called “negative capability,” the ability to weave into a poem an ineffable, strange quality. The prose poem seems to be a good vehicle for doing this. Also, Kafka once said that creativity is “the ax that chops through the frozen sea of the soul.” For me, prose poetry is the best ax.

GM: There's a debate in the small press world (and there has been for quite a while) as to the merit of MFA programs (and the quality of writing coming out of them). As a Creative Writing professor at a university, where do you come down on this debate?

KG: Most certainly on the anti-MFA side. I don’t have an M.F.A., and many of the poets whom I went to school with and who are very successful don’t either. That’s not to say that I don’t encourage my students to pursue an M.F.A. if that is what they want to do. And some M.F.A. programs are simply outstanding, like the one at Bowling Green State, where the graduates who can’t get jobs right away are usually offered full-time positions as instructors. That’s called integrity, folks--making sure your students are taken care of—not given a degree and then left to fend for themselves as underpaid adjuncts at some godawful place.

But we have a real problem in the poetry world now, and it’s only getting worse. I’m no economist, but isn’t it a bad idea to overproduce a product for which there is only a very limited market? I mean, to get a book of poetry published, you not only have to provide the raw materials (the manuscript) but also have to pay a price if you want the company to ever use your materials. Publishers wouldn’t ask for reading fees if they knew they could meet their costs through sales.

Also, it seems like every day there is yet another new M.F.A program somewhere, or, even worse, a “low-residency” M.F.A. program, ready to take tens of thousands of dollars in exchange for a degree that confers what? So there is a market for people wanting to be poets, but not much of one for people wanting to read poetry. Sad.

It won’t be too long before the M.F.A. in creative writing commands about the same respect as an M.B.A.

Probably the best essay ever on this issue was Donald Hall’s “Poetry and Ambition,” written about twenty years ago. But instead of heeding his warnings about the growing professionalism of creative writing, it seems like the field decided to do the exact opposite. We now have even more McPoets turning out more McPoems.

GM: So I take it that you differentiate between the study of writing in a university setting in general and the MFA program setting. Most MFA students do both—study writing as undergrads, take a few workshops, and then move on to pursue MFAs. So where do MFA programs go wrong in the teaching of writing? (I realize how large of a question this is) Or is it simply that they produce too many graduates who are all vying for the same jobs, which are, in turn, teaching writing?

KG: Well, let me clarify. There is nothing wrong with a good, well-established M.F.A. program. And good writers will survive and thrive in those programs no matter how writing is taught or what the expectations are. I think there is an edge of exploitation going on, now, and we are seeing one new program after another popping up. Clearly they can't all be good. We all know about vanity presses--but I think there are clearly vanity M.F.A programs now.

Example: Over the years, many of my students have applied to various M.F.A. programs. I will let you in on a secret (or maybe it's not so secret). Never has one of my students been rejected from a program that requires them to pay tuition; that is, students have little trouble being admitted to M.F.A. programs where there are no teaching assistantships to offset tuition costs. Yet many of these same students were not accepted into any program that offers assistantships or fellowships. So, clearly evidence exists that standards of quality shift when the applicant is able to shell out big bucks for tuition.

I am really worried that, to borrow a phrase from politics, we are seeing the beginning of a "pay-to-play" culture in creative writing, especially in poetry.

GM: Do you find that teaching feeds your writing or by the time you've taught, prepped classes, graded papers, etc, is it impossible to find time to write?

KG: I always refer to Bukowski’s poem “Air and Light and Time and Space” on this issue. If you are a true writer, you will always find the time.

I am amused when I go to a poetry reading and have to suffer through a poet introducing his or her work by talking about how he or she spent ten weeks at Yaddo or something just to produce one lousy ten-line poem. I have three kids, so a “writer’s retreat” for me is being left alone for five minutes so I can go to the bathroom.

GM: You mentioned having to pay reading fees for book manuscripts (though I have a full length and a chapbook and didn't pay any fees for either). And many of these presses select manuscripts through contests. Time and again poets have told me that the award money offered through these contests is the only real shot at making money from their writing most poets have, and yet there's been such a rash of contest rigging (judges picking friends and even spouses' manuscripts) that it's difficult to have any faith in the integrity of some of these presses. Has this been a concern for you in trying to place manuscripts?

KG: Again, it's the "pay-to-play" worry. All three of my books were published through manuscript competitions, and, in each case, I thought the process was fair and legitimate. But, then again, I probably spent about $1000 to ultimately make $2000 total in award money. No big deal, because books bring more than just material benefits.

But where does it all end? How many presses are there? How many do we need? Some competitions are now charging $30 for a manuscript. How much would you be willing to pay? How desperate are people? I wish there was another way.

As for contest rigging (and foetry.com exposed clear cases of it)--it's fraud. No doubt about it.

GM: Influences? What are you reading now—any recommendations?

KG: Philip Larkin and Charles Bukowski would be the most influential. They didn’t know each other at all, but in separate interviews, each quoted Sartre’s famous line “Hell is other people” when asked about their attitude toward life. I am not an anti-social loser, but as you can tell from my poems, I do not like to play games or be a cheerleader for any poetic cause. I also like John Ashbery a lot. One time, when

Philip Larkin was asked what he thought of Ashbery, he said “I prefer strawberry.” But I like both flavors. Probably the best book I have read in the last three years is Loren Goodman’s Famous Americans, an extremely funny and weird book that somehow won the Yale Younger Poets Series.

GM: What's your experience with Pearl Editions been like?

KG: Utterly fantastic. I cannot say enough about what a fine editor Marilyn Johnson is. She does everything right. Even the proof copy of my book stunned people. Please support Pearl Editions! She’s been producing books for over thirty years now, and that’s a tribute to her absolute commitment to small-press publishing.

GM: It's national poetry month right now, and one of your poems bears this title as well. Many people feel that NPM is something like a Hallmark created holiday—it takes sincere art and emotion and turns it into a kind of marketing drive. What are your feelings on this?

KG: You said it all in your question. There’s a reason that there is no National Fiction Month, right? People still read and respect good fiction. It used to be that special “months” were devoted to bizarre diseases that people needed to be aware of.

To finish, I propose a National No-Poetry Month, preferably in September, when people start carpet-bombing magazines with work they've amassed over the summer.

During that month, no one is allowed to write poetry, submit poetry, run contests, start a new M.F.A. program or anything else. It would allow us time to gain some perspective on how much poetry really does matter in our lives and reflect on which poems we really couldn't live without.