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7/28/2008 [ interview ]
An Interview with C. Mikal Oness
by Sheri Allen
Q. Your first poem, “The Handworm’s Hipbone,” with its Old English epigraph, evocatively describes an act of unearthing compost and a decayed bird. It announces the project of the book as the unearthing of the dead and past to find the powerful and valuable in it. The poem reminded me of Seamus Heaney’s “Digging.” Was Heaney an influence?
I do like that poem by Heaney, but I can’t say that I had it in mind when I wrote mine, nor would I say that his poem was deeply enough embedded in my consciousness to have covertly influence that poem. At the time I was having an in-depth conversation with the Old English (OE) elegists and the particular charm that my poem alludes to.
Q. An essential part of the project of this book is your deep engagement with Old English texts, world-view, and wordplay. I’d like to know what drew you to Old English as a foundational element in your work? Did you have any misgivings about a contemporary reading audience being intimidated by a distant culture (in both geography and time) weaving in and out of your lyrical voice?
I was drawn to the OE language from the first day I learned it, and before that loved Beowulf, in translation probably, like so many others in my generation and since, because of Tolkien. What can be done in the inflected language poetically just can’t be done in modern English. It is really beautiful, and the clichés, the verbal formulas, are quite rich.
I’d like to think my poems reach a contemporary audience with or without that audience’s knowledge or interest in OE, but for those who do explore that tradition beyond my endnotes, there is even more to the poems for them. What I think is most important, however, is the Old English elegists’ sense of the fleeting nature of things, an acceptance of such an idea is helpful to have for modern day grieving and celebration.
Q. Your poems deal with the death of a close friend in a traumatic accident you survived, and, in the second half of the book, the birth of a much-wanted child. Yet the vehicle for these life-changing events is a kind of intimate song of the worlds of fishing and boating, the terminology of which is alien to many readers. Do you want us to feel ourselves on half-familiar, yet foreign soil, as grieving and birthing lie behind the boat parts and fishing lures? Do you hope the reader will look up the maritime lingo in poems such as “Sea Voyage,” or be merely “awash” in it?
Well, that’s what I did (or learned it from others), but beyond the language, the metaphors of craft in general, and standing waist deep in a wash of water fishing and observing every small thing around you, offer a perspective on loss. While the experience of the child we had helps give meaning and depth to the experience of the child we lost in the book, and vice-versa, the metaphorical exploration of craft and the art of fly fishing offer even more detailed opportunities to have access to the myriad human emotional complexities that attend loss and responsibility. I hope that tone and cadence carry that tenor as potently as the vocabulary, which the reader can gloss or not and still be engaged.
Q. You structure this book in a kind of “strophe-antistrophe,” (to borrow from the ancient form of classical Greek drama), of 4-6 line compressed lyrical pieces whose tone, voice, and syntax are very different from the longer narrative poems, such as the Ray Carveresque “August 1990” and the modernly Beowulfian “Sea Voyage,” with which they are interspersed. How did you come to move back and forth between these two forms?
The poems were written at different times as I was engaging in different formal projects, and then, like so many others who put together books, I emptied a large room and played several games of poetry solitaire with the poems, experimenting with arrangement. But I did not move between writing a shorty one day and using a different form the next. I wrote nothing but 5-line poems for an entire two years or so, and then found how that voice was informing/fulfilling the problems established in earlier work.
Q. I am curious about your use of unfamiliar yet evocative words for poem titles such as “Runian” and “Scapulimancy.” I know one of your concerns here is mystery. You seem to be choosing terms we as modern Americans don’t quite know in order to give us a sense of being in a terra incognita where language itself is defamiliarized. Are you doing this as a departure from overly analytical, psychologized reactions to major life events or to evoke a sense of the strangeness of the place that grief—and birth—put you in?
I had not imagined them as words modern Americans couldn’t know. They are words I knew or had come across as I read charms and books on divining. The really obscure ones I try to gloss in the endnotes, but I do not try to be obscure in order to set a reader off balance, though I’m not sure I would object to your very intelligent read above. For me, a poem title is like a free extra line, and it almost has the pressure of being a whole poem by itself if you are careful enough—such economy! That’s my real aim when titling: to introduce a vector of meaning-making onto the poem that isn’t possible with the language, subject, or argument of the poem. A title is like the heart of the artichoke…
Q. Which contemporary book of poems would you take with you on a boat trip?
Above the River, by James Wright, the complete poems. It has the second best poem ever written in English in it.
Q. Have you ever thought of doing a translation of Beowulf, or translations of other Old English texts?
Not for publication.
Q. What writing habit would you most like to cultivate?
Here’s a medieval reference for you—I’d like to learn to plow a field.
Q. What was your biggest obstacle in getting your work published?
God knows!
Q. When you are not writing poetry, what is your chief occupation? Are you really a boatman and fisherman? What do you like to fish and where?
I still fly fish for trout, but I’m a homesteader, a shepherd, and I have ponies and chickens. I’ve been remodeling an old farm house for a year and just moved in. I make literary fine press books (www.suttonhoopress.com). I have an antique tractor, an Oliver Super 55.
Q. Do you still live in the Pacific Northwest? Where, approximately? (Don’t worry, we won’t camp out there, a la Robert Lowell.)
I never did live in the Pacific Northwest. I lived in California, but have been in the Midwest for more years than anywhere else I lived. I live now in rural Minnesota, where I would recommend you do camp out. I feel like I finally found paradise. And my dogs have found plenty of deer parts.
Q. On the back page of Oracle Bones, there is a picture of you holding a black lamb with enormous ears. Is it yours, on your farm? If so, what has become of it? (It’s a wonderful shot.)
Yes, I raise Clun Forest Sheep: they have darling upright ears, only the face and feet are black. Readers might want me to say that that lamb is still in my flock making babies, and she may be, if she was the dangerous lamb Xanthos. I forget which one is in the picture. Most likely she has been eaten, unless it is a he, then he definitely has been eaten, but maybe not by me. I have a few blood-thirsty friends, and we all agree that the misbehaved lambs taste the best.
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Copyright © 2008 The Southeast Review
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