OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS BOOK NEWS
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QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS WITH JOSHUA MEHIGAN, AUTHOR OF THE OPTIMIST: POEMS

Q: Why did you start writing poems?
A: I have no story of having discovered Sir Walter Scott when I was six. But my father is an inveterate and artful storyteller. You might spend the night in jail or flip a car, but if it made a good story and no one got really hurt it might be worth it (given time to forget the reality). My grandmother was much the same way, but more simply eccentric than extreme. Stories were habitual. My father and grandmother encouraged the objectification of all experience.
          Poetry was alien to most people in my hometown. But, when I was young, my mother read me Dr. Seuss and stories like John Collier’s “Thus I Refute Beelzy.” She was a reader, also a writer, but almost all prose, and she never specifically suggested poetry to me. She wrote me a lot of bedtime stories and narratives in crazy galloping meters about little boys who visited planets made of marshmallow. I soon found that I loved to write stories, limericks, and parodies of popular poems like “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”
           When I got a little older, I wrote lyrics for a fictitious punk band. Around the same time, my father encouraged me to read “The Raven,” which was the first real poem I ever liked. Later, I set another of Poe’s poems, “Alone,” to bad guitar music in the key of E minor. Then I finally started trying to do my own “serious” writing.

Q: Can you discuss the tendency in your poems toward dark themes and subject matter?
A: I hope my poems aren’t merely dark! Of course beauty, humanity, and love also exist in the world, and those things are very important to me, too. In fact they’re most important. Without those, who cares? But, to be candid, I think the other stuff is much more common. I’m often trying to approach beauty, humanity, and love through their antitheses. Sometimes I don’t reach my destination. My poems are usually based on my experience, and I always try to ground them in reality. It seems to me that most of my subjects and themes aren’t particularly exceptional. Maybe it’s the accumulation of dark subjects and themes? Well, I guess I think life is often an accumulation of dark subjects and themes. I haven’t had a hard life. But I don’t think it requires a hard life to wonder at people who are surprised by cruelty.

Q: What experiences in your life have contributed to the poems in The Optimist?
A: The town where I grew up is, in one way or another, the point of origin for three-fifths of the poems in The Optimist. For instance, I love to explore morality by writing from the point of view of morally complex characters. I love to challenge conventional morality because there was a whole lot of it where I grew up—very simple, very black and white, very inhumane. I make up morally complex characters because I was raised in a town where my parents and I didn’t fit in at all, and many people there whom I loved and accepted also did or believed things that were difficult for me to reconcile with my own values.
           In terms of subject matter, I can point to “The Pig Roast,” “Past Bedtime,” “Déjà Vu,” “In the Home of My Sitter,” and countless other poems that are based on real experiences I had in my hometown. I suppose growing up there, which was a dark experience in many ways, also helps explain the coloration of many of my poems.
           Although my basic sensibility was probably pretty much determined by my childhood, I should add that the experience of moving to Brooklyn has finally contributed a lot of new material in the past few years.
           There is one other experience I should probably mention: the MFA. To be one of fifty poets writing shapeless self-obsessed boilerplate, and to know that there are hundreds of other colleges like yours—well, I guess that really made me take poetry more seriously.

Q: What writers have influenced you?
A: I’ve been through many phases. And there are a lot of poets, fiction writers, essayists, etc., who inspire me to write. But now there are only one or two poets every few years that I think of as direct influences. It used to be more. Tone being the element most readily imitated by young poets, I suppose I started out obsessively emulating any writer whose tone appealed to me. Gary Soto, Alan Dugan, James Wright, and Elizabeth Bishop were all important to me for that reason. Like most contemporary poets, I also went through Williams, Eliot, and Stevens phases. These were my models until I was in my early twenties. But few poems I wrote then have made it into The Optimist. Still, the influence of those writers is there. Some more recent influences are Larkin, Borges (his poems), and Edgar Bowers. People tell me that a couple of my poems bring to mind Frost or Robinson—a tremendous compliment, as they’re both poets I greatly admire—but, really, I think what they’re hearing is my poor emulation of certain twentieth-century American fiction writers. There are also many writers whose ideas about poetry have influenced me greatly, from Coleridge to Valéry, and from Santayana to Timothy Steele. I’m probably more of a curiosity among the poets I know for the writers who haven’t influenced me—Blake, Wordsworth, Whitman, Hopkins . .

Q: You use regular meter and rhyme. Do you consider yourself a New Formalist?
A: The only poets I’ve known who proudly proclaim themselves New Formalists are to be avoided. But of course many poets are called New Formalists against their will, and with them and Shakespeare and Dickinson, and presumably most free verse poets, I share a love of the sounds made by skillfully employed meter and rhyme. The word “formalism” denotes an emphasis of form over content. It might better be reserved for poets like Christian Morgenstern or Charles Bernstein, or for artists like Agnes Martin, who deliberately embrace that kind of thing. If by “formalism” people mean “poetic form,” then I think it’s merely a misnomer that comes from a popular conflation of meter and rhyme with form. The villanelle is a form. So are quatrains. Nowadays, forms are commonly (if not usually) used with free verse. But, either way, I don’t know anyone who thinks forms are really the point. And you have to be severely parochial—parochial in place and time—to think meter is marginal enough to poetry to call its proponents by a special name. A lot of poets classed as New Formalists barely use meter or rhyme! And of course many poets who were never called New Formalists always use meter.

Q: Are there any poems you consider your best, and why?
A: I have different favorites at different times. But a few consistent favorites are “In the Home of My Sitter,” “Our Ancient Sire,” “Alexandra,” “Merrily,” and “Rabbit’s Foot.” I’m proudest of those because, in writing them, I managed to surprise myself. This is a cliché now among writers, but it’s true. I also like them because other people do.