Fly on the Wall (part 2): A brief interview with 2011 Washington Prize winner Mike White (by Leslie McGrath)

Yesterday I blogged about judging the Washington Prize. 2011 was The Word Works' first year using an electronic submission method, which resulted in about a fifty percent increase in submissions. Once the decision was finalized by the judges, we learned that we’d chosen work by Mike White, a native of Canada who earned his doctorate at the University of Utah, where he now teaches. Though his poetry has been widely published in literary magazines, this will be White’s first published poetry collection, entitled How to Make a Bird with Two Hands.  I asked him to describe his experience with book contests, as well as to talk about his title and aesthetic.

 

How long had you sent your manuscript out to the contests? About how many contests did you enter? Did you revise the manuscript during the process?

 

I’ve been sending out the manuscript for about five years, though the current

version of the manuscript scarcely resembles the original. Before winning the

Washington Prize, I probably entered 20-25 different contests, some on multiple

occasions.

 

Had you entered the contest for the Washington Prize prior to this year?

 

I’d been a semi-finalist at The Word Works in 2010. Following the announcement of that year’s winner—Brad Richard—I received written feedback on my manuscript from the judges. I couldn’t possibly assimilate all of the varied comments and suggestions, of course, but it was really rewarding (and ultimately constructive) to get a snapshot of how the manuscript was being received once I sent it out into the ether.

 Your collection is unusual because of the number of short poems (ten lines or less) it contains. What is it about the short poem that attracts you?

 

What attracts me to the short poem is the sense of risk involved. Even at a purely

physical level, the short poem is surrounded by white space, islanded. There’s

no place to hide in a short poem, no room for what William Carlos Williams

called “ornament and encrustation,” no time for meaning and significance to

slowly accrue. It all has to happen in the blink of an eye. For this reason, I think

that the best short poems, whether written by William Carlos Williams or Issa,

draw our attention back to words, to the inherent strangeness of words and their

potentially magical combinations. Here’s Issa, for example, with his unique

fusion of humor and pathos:

 

In spring rain,

how they carry on,

uneaten ducks.

 

The successful short poem enacts an interesting paradox: on some level, the

poem seems most obviously a gesture of humility, but there’s also great hubris in

thinking that a handful of words can generate a complex, rich experience.

 Would you talk about the significance of the collection's title, specifically its ambiguity.

 

The title How to Make a Bird with Two Hands suggests, broadly, a creative,

transformative act. More specifically, the title could hint at origami construction,

as well as the shadow puppeteer’s crude magic, a minor God-like capacity to

project winged movement onto a screen; but the title is also meant to evoke

simultaneously the image of a two-handed bird, a human-avian hybrid figure.

Likewise, in the poems, identity is shown to be fluid; it can be shaped and re-

shaped, formed and deformed; it can challenge our established categories.

The poems often explore the complex interactions between humans and other

creatures, whether a crow or a tree or an angel, or, as one poem would have

it, the “tentacled motherfucker” who lives beneath our urban wildernesses.

I’m not sure all of that is captured in the title, but it’s a start! I also liked the

monosyllabic solidity of the title, which reflects something of the collection’s

aesthetic emphasis.

 One of your manuscript's great strengths was its organization. You were able to include short meditative lyrics alongside poems with titles like "Death for Bad Guys Tastes Like Candy" (a favorite of mine.) How did you arrive at the book's order?

 

This is not a book that is tightly organized around a particular subject matter.

There is also no consistently identifiable “I” in the collection. All of which

presented a challenge in terms of producing a cohesive manuscript. In the course

of much shuffling and reshuffling, I was striving always to link the poems through

thematic resonance. Ideally, I wanted a reader who was moving through the book

not to know what was coming, to be constantly surprised, but also to recognize

the echoes of preceding poems. Meaning accumulates, I hope, in the interplay (with an emphasis upon play) between poems in the collection.

 

 **

I leave you with the final poem in How to Make a Bird with Two Hands, which nods toward Auden’s great poem, “In Memory of WB Yeats”:

 

 

Beggary

 

To peel an orange

by its own light

 

is to make nothing

happen

 

and the scent of orange

on my hands

 

that is nothing

as well

                                             

                                (originally published in The Evansville Review)

 

 

Comments

[Damon McLaughlin]

Hey Leslie. Interesting insights into the judging of this year's contest, and I like how you describe (in part 1) White's poems as having a simultaneous Zen sensibility and postmodern worldview -- paradoxical, to my understanding. Looking forward to the book when it releases.

[Leslie McGrath]

Hi Damon. Thanks for the comment.
They *do* seem paradoxical, don't they? And yet White has found a way for his poems to hold them both. It's one of the reasons good poetry works. It can hold truth, the quotidian, paradox, the whole boxful of our felt existence.

[IrishPoetry]

The other post won't accept my response Leslie, so I'll post it here.

[Scall Jah]

Oops, I fink I got it wrong again dad..

Sorry Leslie, I worked out what was going on, I wrote a response to you on the other post and it wouldn't appear, until I cottoned on it was because the post was, way, way too long. I had fun writing it though, these last few hours, watchig Anderson on CNN.

I love the short poem as well. It's interesting to hear how Mike took on the detailed feedback from last year and changed the manuscript to suit the taste of the judges. 20-25 attempts, at $25 a time, is 500 bucks. He could have two out from Gatza for that. On which point, I thought the guy giving out about BlazeVox and the subsequent hooha, was great fun to read. There's a whole army of poets in America out here, all playing this game that what their poems are somehow written atop of holy altars by the hand of god, instead of at cramped desks at the dry and dusty academic sausage factories churning out these deluded people who come across more like accounts than poets. The deeply serious manner in which we must consider their works, the funniest being that half of 'em have all sorts of filth and profanity in it, poems about two people getting it on, that leave us wondering, is it me, or is this just all very poor quality. Oh no, it's ironical and it must be good coz the person who wrote it is a seventh degree Langpo expert who can tell you where every comma in Meltzer collides with the white space in the No Name poem by Carles Bernstein. Oh, look, they are wearing rectabgular glasses without rims and a scarve around their neck, with a frown on their face, reading with all the showbiz skills of an accountant at the altar delivering a weekly breakdown of the numbers. It must be AmPo at it's best.