Dante Di Stefano: How did Press 53 come into being?
Kevin Morgan Watson: Up until 9/11, I was a writer of short fiction and some poetry, and was having some success publishing my work. After 9/11, the stress of being a full-time student—finally earning my BA in English—and being a full-time employee in the airline industry, with a wife and three small children at home, writing became impossible. To find peace, I began editing for other writers and teaching workshops. I found that I enjoyed this process and that I was pretty good at it, so after I lost my job in March 2004, I decided to start a small publishing company to have something creative to do until I found a real job. I opened Press 53 in October 2005 and by March 2006 it was clear that publishing was my real job.
DD: What changes in poetry publishing have been most notable for you since the press began in 2005?
KMW: I talked with my poetry series editor, Tom Lombardo, about this recently. Around the turn of the century (2000), there were only ten low-residency MFA programs, and today there are close to fifty, so there are a lot more poets with advanced degrees looking for work and looking to be published. Also, online journals were few and not taken seriously by many writers. The poetry community was vast but places to publish were limited. Today, almost every literary journal and magazine has an online presence. Places to submit poetry have grown wildly, and most magazines now accept simultaneous submissions. At our quarterly online journal, Prime Number Magazine, our submission periods run quarterly and we’ll easily receive more than 400 submissions for poetry. If our guest editors aren’t quick to read and respond, they can miss out on fifty to seventy poems that were accepted by other magazines or journals. As for publishing poetry books, we can’t publish all the fine collections that come our way, and where we used to publish five or six poetry collections a year, we are now publishing ten to twelve. That could be attributed to our growth at Press 53, but it is also an indication of how many people are writing and reading poetry.
DD: What do Press 53 poetry collections have in common?
KMW: We have eclectic tastes but one common thread is that the poetry we publish is accessible. We stay away from abstract, experimental poetry and anything overtly religious or political. An occasional poem in the collection crossing these lines is fine, but stay too long and you won’t make the cut.
DD: There’s an interesting line in your bio: “Kevin has earned awards for his own writing in both short fiction and poetry, but he no longer writes for publication.” How has the decision not to write for publication affected your writing life and your work as a publisher?
KMW: My decision to no longer write for publication came by default. I tend to run on one track all the time, so when I entered the publishing world, it became my focus. I still make notes or toy around with an idea for a story or poem, but it’s only for my own enjoyment. I rarely write anything down. I used to constantly think about writing, fleshing out story or poem ideas, piecing together the puzzle, but after almost fifteen years of editing and publishing, it’s hard to believe I was ever that person. I was a writer for most of my life, but the “writer me” is either gone or waiting for another lifestyle shift. I’m not sure which, but I do think the writer in me will only return if I make the decision to step away from the publishing business.
DD: What is something that most poets might not know, but should, about the work of small press editors?
KMW: In the small press world there are no deadlines, only undeadlines. For every project you complete another one has taken its place. They just keep coming. You’d better love editing, because that’s all your going to be doing; that and writing press releases, managing a website, overseeing layout and design work (if you are not doing it yourself), handling sales in-house and at conferences, managing inventory, doing the bookkeeping, and wishing you could read more for pleasure.
DD: Could you introduce Patricia Colleen Murphy and Bully Love?
KMW: Patricia won the 2019 Press 53 Award for Poetry, our annual poetry manuscript competition that is judged by our poetry series editor Tom Lombardo (Tom Lombardo Poetry Selections). Tom reads every manuscript that comes in, which was 414 for the 2019 competition, and he is the only judge. Patricia teaches at Arizona State University and is the founding editor of Superstition Review, and she has been a joy to work with. But since Tom selected Bully Love, I would like for Tom to make that introduction.
Tom Lombardo: There were two things that won the Press 53 Award in Poetry this year for Patricia Colleen Murphy: her series of hiking poems and her series of elegies. All of her other poems were very good, and they carried her submission into the final eight, then the final three. The hiking poems and the elegies were my “gut feeling” poems that surpassed all other submissions. My decision came, as it usually does, at the ninth reading of the finalists. The collection that continues to unfold its arms to me generally surpasses all the finalists. Murphy’s poems in Bully Love are grounded in the senses, and that appeals to me as an editor. Metaphor, synesthesia, metonymy, and irony come forth via sensory experiences. Level of energy of the writing and the figuration remains high throughout. I was lifted from the literal on each page. Patricia’s poems are landscape-driven—from southwestern Ohio to the southwest U.S. Her poems expose their bleak fertility and their bleak desolation and turn them into metaphors for her life.
DD: Trish, the title of your new collection comes from the last line of your poem, “Day Trip, Cave Creek Guided Tours.” The poem is about a guided tour through the Sonoran Desert with a group including “five women breaking / the monotony of mid-careers” and “three portly men in from Denver.” The poem ends with the following lines:
Our wonderfully conditioned
and well-mannered horses nod
across state trust land, their noses
quietly suffering our pats of bully love.
This poem ably deploys some of the key tropes that run through the collection: the desert, travel, love, and a kind of suffocating middle-class conformity to be railed against. Could you talk about some of these through lines?
Patricia Colleen Murphy: I spent 22 years in Ohio. I moved to Arizona when I was 22 years old to get my MFA in poetry at Arizona State. I moved also to escape many things: family dysfunction, snow, loneliness, and what I perceived as failure.
Arizona didn’t welcome me at first. I struggled with not only the landscape but also with the culture. It was harsh. It also seemed for sale. So much of the landscape and the history was offered up for the amusement of people who had no intention of engaging with it in any real way.
In this poem the horses represent that lack of connection; that lack of humanity. We pat the horses but we do nothing to understand them, to care for them, to sustain them or promote them. That image of the nose pat represents the offering of self-serving or insincere affection based on a selfish desire for personal excitement.
That was something I suffered as a child from my mother, who was capable of showing me love only when it served a need of her own.
I should say I have always adored horses. They recur many times in these poems as a reverent image. But for me there is something striking about selling this cowboy experience to people whose only goal is to be consumers of a culture they never intend to understand.
DD: Your incredible first poetry book, Hemming Flames, centers around the trauma caused by severe family disfunction (mental illness, abuse, attempted suicide). Bully Love still expertly contemplates the lingering affects of those traumas, but the emphasis in this collection shifts to an exploration of self against the backdrop of Arizona and the American West. You frequently return to the death of your parents, and your partner John’s parents throughout the book. John’s presence is much more significant in Bully Love than it was in Hemming Flames. Hemming Flames was also much more allusive, in terms of its direct evocation of figures like John Berryman, Anne Sexton, and so on. These are some of the differences I noticed between the two collections. Could you elaborate on these differences and talk about the differences between having a first and a second book published?
PCM: Bully Love was written first, but Hemming Flames found a publisher first. So in Bully Love you’re reading earlier poems. It probably took my parents dying for me to feel free to explore the more significant depths of the suicide attempts, the alcoholism, the abuse you read about in Hemming Flames. The poems in Bully Love are younger, more tender, more open.
In terms of the publishing experiences, there were significant differences and similarities. The editors of Hemming Flames did not want me to change a word, but the series editor Tom Lombardo for Bully Love had a strong hand and guided me through some revisions I could not have made without his insight. He was incredibly generous throughout the process. He pushed me to cut broken parts that I was hanging onto for sentimental reasons. He pushed me to develop themes I felt were clear but were not. I am grateful for his energy and insight.
As far as similarities go, both releases were very quick. Under six months. I have seen many colleagues wait two years so while I’m grateful for the speed, I also scrambled in some ways to get the book ready and to set up readings and reviews and interviews. Most outlets want six months in advance so by the time the proofs were ready I was already two months out.
DD: When I was reading Bully Love, I kept on thinking of two quotes that align with, and move in counterpoint to, your collection. The first one is from a Cid Corman poem: “It takes a lifetime’s blindness to see one’s father?” (You could substitute “mother” or “family” for “father.”) The second quote is from an old Paris Review interview with Stanley Kunitz: “All poems are love poems.” (I would like to believe this quote is true, but I’m not sure.) I was wondering if you would riff on these two quotes a bit?
PCM: Ah yes, the Kunitz quote is a favorite, but of course we can substitute “love” for other words like death or birth or family. I do feel that when a poet devotes the energy to a subject even that devotion is an act of love. It’s a generous act: to point the mind’s eye onto a subject long enough to make art from it. I talk to my students sometimes about “dropping the M-bomb,” meaning that as soon as you put a mother in a poem you have added not only your own layer of experience, but you are tapping into the reader’s most intimate emotions. There are some poems in this collection that draw on that energy.
DD: Your dogs make several appearances throughout the book. They offer one of several different types of love examined throughout the collection. How has being a dog owner influenced your poetry? What is your favorite dog poem?
PCM: I was never a dog person, and my first dog came when I was 32 years old. That was Buckeye, who was a gift from John’s mom Betty. Betty died in September of 2005 and then in January 2006 Buckeye drowned in our pool after I left the house for less than an hour. I came home and found him and fished him out. It felt like such a symbol of being completely alone.
We mourned Buckeye in ways we could not mourn Betty, though we felt her lack in our lives more profoundly than any other lack. She lived with us for two years when she was very ill and she got us Buckeye as an anniversary gift. My dogs have been a joy but also a challenge. That’s why they enter the poems, I guess, because they force me to face fears and failures.
I can’t recall a favorite poem about a dog, but the essay “Fourth State of Matter” by Jo Ann Beard is one of the most poignant pieces of writing about many things, dogs included, and I share it with students all the time. Beard truly captures the depth of comfort, companionship, and intimacy we have with our pets. Her old collie is dying at the same time she is suffering several other unspeakable losses.
DD: You are a prolific traveler. Could you list the top five places you’ve visited?
PCM: Galapagos
Kilimanjaro
Cadaques
Los Roques
Buenos Aires
DD: What travel destination has most impacted your work as a poet?
PCM: I might have to say Thailand. Two of my most weighty poems are about Bangkok and Phuket.
DD: Where would you like to visit that you haven’t yet?
PCM: I really want to go to Morocco. We tried in December but couldn’t put the pieces together. Other top destinations are Malaysia, the Philippines, New Zealand, and Chile.
John is really hot to go to Georgia. We are leaving now for Finland, Latvia. Lithuania, Estonia, and Ukraine.
DD: What are you working on now?
PCM: A memoir and another collection of poetry. It really helps me to move back and forth between prose and poetry.
DD: What are you reading now?
PCM: I have several going right now. Karen Brennan’s short story collection Monsters. Sally Ball’s poetry collection Hold Sway. James Comey’s memoir A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership. And Adam Johnson’s novel The Orphan Master’s Son.
DD: I’d like to end with one of my favorite poems in the collection, “The Same River Twice.” Could you introduce this poem? (Say whatever you want related to its composition, etc)
PCM: This poem underwent a major revision thanks to Tom Lombardo, who had a wonderful influence on the entire collection, and who pushed me to explore several themes more deeply. Here I examine the turn when a relationship moves from new and thrilling to safe and comfortable. And for me all those terms are good terms.
The poem started as a more abstract examination of our love. Tom pushed me to take it to image. Coffee time is a sacred time in our house. And we take the ritual with us wherever we go. More deeply I feel so grateful that our values align so closely. It is hard for me to imagine being with a partner who held vastly different beliefs about the universe.
John and I have been together for 25 years. When I first met him, I truly fell for him (I fell in love) and part of it had to do with how far out of my comfort zone he pushed me. Now he is my comfort zone! Truly. And what a gift. What a gift those years are.
Of course, the title comes from Heraclitus, who said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” I am grateful for the flow of our relationship and the intersections of our lives. I’m grateful that we have grown and changed and that we have done it together.
The Same River Twice
Mornings, we like to kiss then pour coffee.
When we met, he was studying fluvial
geomorphology—the way rivers transport
sediments. He tied flies under a hot halo of light.
When we hiked he explained rock formations.
Now there are several things besides love.
Two dogs who curl on couches with ears
fanned out like chenille throws. A city
full of climate-change deniers. Evenings,
it takes several hours reading in chairs
for us to feel human. We fall asleep at 8 p.m.
Mornings, we like to kiss then pour coffee.
Kevin Morgan Watson founded Press 53 in October 2005, and in 2010, with award-winning author Clifford Garstang, Kevin co-founded Prime Number Magazine. As a publisher, he has worked with writers ranging from first-time published authors to winners of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. Kevin has earned awards for his own writing in both short fiction and poetry, but he no longer writes for publication. He also serves as an advisor for student adaptation of short fiction to screenplays with the screenwriting faculty at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, School of Filmmaking in Winston-Salem, NC.
Tom Lombardo, of Atlanta, Georgia, is editor of Tom Lombardo Poetry Selections, a Press 53 imprint. Tom actively reads journals, magazines, ezines, and anthologies in search of poets to bring to Press 53 by way of his poetry series. Tom is a widely published and respected poet, and is a graduate of the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina. His mission is to bring 4-6 poetry collections to Press 53 each year. He has published two collections of his own poetry: What Bends Us Blue (WordTech, 2013) and The Name of This Game (Kattywompus Press, 2014). In 2008, Tom edited and published After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events (Sante Lucia Books), which features 152 poems by 115 poets from 15 countries.
Patricia Colleen Murphy won the 2019 Press 53 Award for Poetry with her collection Bully Love, published by Press 53 as a Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection. She founded Superstition Review at Arizona State University, where she teaches creative writing and magazine production. Her collection Hemming Flames (Utah State University Press) won the 2016 May Swenson Poetry Award, judged by Stephen Dunn, and the 2017 Milt Kessler Poetry Award. A chapter from her memoir-in-progress was published as a chapbook by New Orleans Review. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals, including The Iowa Review, Quarterly West, and American Poetry Review, and has received awards from Gulf Coast andBellevue Literary Review, among others. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019) and Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016).
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