Listening to Grace Cavalieri's Recent Interview with George Bilgere (by Nin Andrews)

In my recent interview and classroom visit with Nicole Santalucia, Nicole and I talked about confessional poetry, and her students joined in the conversation. I was so interested in her students’ questions and comments, I am still thinking about them. One of the questions that stuck with was about the difference between autobiographical and confessional poetry.  I am paraphrasing here, but the student seemed to be asking, If you write about your life, then aren’t you a confessional poet?

The question came at the end of our time together, but I would have liked to have answered by talking about poets like Frank O’Hara, Billy Collins, and George Bilgere, poets who serve as a nice contrast to confessional poets. Or better yet, by playing Grace Cavalieri’s recent interview for The Poet and the Poem with George Bilgere in which Bilgere talks about his teaching method, his young boys, his writing process, and ideals. “The challenge for me,” Bilgere explained in the interview, “is to try to write interesting poems out of a commonplace life.”

About George Bilgere, Grace comments, “He can take an ordinary event and make it a knife through the heart.” The interview is short, entertaining, and so worth listening to, I want everyone to hear it. But if you don’t have time to listen to the whole thing, be sure to listen to the unpublished poem, ““For the Slip and Slide,” that is about twenty minutes in. It’s a masterpiece.

Below is the title poem from his most recent collection.

 

Blood Pages

 

Someone gave my little boy
this illustrated book about whales
and every day he carries it to me,
demanding we read through its pages
about the biggest whales, the blue ones,
and the fiercest whales, the suave
orcas in their tuxes, and the mild
sperm whales with their baleen
and blow holes and benevolent gaze.

 

Which is fine. Everyone likes whales,
but of course being a boy
he wants to focus on the "blood pages,"
as he calls them, just two of them
inserted like an accidental dose
of reality in the middle of the book,
where the great whales are hauled up
like minnows onto the decks
of the Japanese trawlers, their strength
broken against the diesel winches,
blood pouring from the smoking wounds
where the harpoons struck and exploded.

 

I want to page forward to the dolphins
somersaulting above Sea World, but he
wants to see leviathan stripped
of his lordliness, skinned
alive on an ocean of blood
by small men with their scarlet blades,
their watch caps and cigarettes,
making good money on the long cruise
but nonetheless longing for home,
for the touch of their wives,
for their own children on their laps.

 

George Bilgere’s seventh book of poetry, Blood Pages, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2018. Bilgere has received grants and awards from the Pushcart Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress, and the Ohio Arts Council. 

He has been awarded the Midland Authors Prize, the May Swenson Award, the Ohioana Poetry Prize, the Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature, the University of Akron Poetry Prize, and a Creative Workforce Fellowship through the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture in Cleveland. 

Bilgere is familiar to National Public Radio listeners from his many appearances on Garrison KeillorÍs The WriterÍs Almanac and A Prairie Home Companion. He teaches at John Carroll University in Cleveland and hosts a weekly poetry radio show on WJCU.FM called Wordplay. He has a marvelous wife and two incredibly cute little boys.

Comments

[David Graham]

A fascinating and often-discussed topic, & one dear to my heart. But when Kate Sontag & I began researching our essay anthology, AFTER CONFESSION: POETRY AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Graywolf, 2001), we were kind of surprised to find there were no equivalent anthologies available on the subject. Far as I know, it's still the only such book. https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/after-confession

[Nin Andrews]

Hi David,

I will have to check out that book! Thanks for letting me know!

[Grace Cavalieri]

This is a huge topic becase it traces the trail from Lowell, Sexton, and how that poetry was disabused and came back again rinsed off with respectability. That you Nin for your inveterate columns which I'm catching up on your TYPEPAD.