Dante Di Stefano: The poems in Crooked Smiling Light meditate on complicated family relationships. What are the advantages and the challenges of foregrounding the domestic and the autobiographical in your writing?
Alan King: The advantages to this approach is that the stories come off as being authentic since I’m pulling from my own experiences. These are opportunities to connect with readers on a real level because everyone has complicated relationships with a loved one.
The challenge is if my parents read my work, they’ll read it out of context and wonder why I’m “embarrassing” the family. My father and I made a lot of progress from those tense moments. There’s a chance he sees some of these poems and our relationship deteriorates, with all the work we did to get to where we are for nothing. So, there’s that.
DD: Much of this chapbook concerns itself with fatherhood. The book begins with complicated father-son relationship explored in “In Your Dream” and “Counter Punching” unfolds in dialogue with the father-daughter relationship explored in a poem like “The Land of Innocence.” Can you talk about the trope of fatherhood in your own work? Are there any father-son, father-daughter poems written by other poets that you find particularly compelling and instructive?
AK: Tim Seibles’s poems about his dad in his recent collection, One Turn Around the Sun, had a nuance that was lacking in my own poems. His poem, Ode To Your Father, really showed me how to humanize my dad while being critical of him at the same time. He tells the story of his dad that made me feel like I had a full picture of him. That’s what I wanted to start doing in my work.
DD: Who are your favorite poets?
AK: Aw man. That list changes, but the consistent ones are Tim Seibles, Destiny Birdsong, Kelly Harris DeBerry, John Murillo, Asha French, Jan Beatty, Kim Addonizio, Dorianne Laux, and Stephen Dobyns. Those are a few who come to mind.
DD: Like many contemporary love poems, “Gluttony” upends the notion of an idealized and exclusive beloved, meditating as it does on extramarital desire within a committed relationship. Why approach the love poem in this way?
AK: I felt the approach had to be real. Just because you’re married doesn’t mean you stop seeing attractive people besides your spouse or partner. Those feelings are natural, and the urges are what makes us human. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having those feelings. It’s up to the person on whether they will act on those cravings.
DD: The killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter Movement directly and indirectly provide a context for Crooked Smiling Light. Could you talk about how recent events have shaped your writing life?
AK: I think Steven Leyva explained this well in his “Nerd Volta” column for the Washington Independent Review of Books, when he said that my earlier poems “were always tempered…with a kind of whimsy.” In light of recent events, “the whimsy has largely given way to an often-unguarded lament,” of what he called “a licked chop.”
I alluded to things in my earlier work. Tim Seibles, who was one of my mentors when I was going through the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine, told me to stop hinting at things. Just go there. Sometimes a point-blank approach is necessary to drive the point home with readers.
DD: stevenallenmay, how did Plan B Press come into being?
stevenallenmay: Plan B Press started as the publishing wing of a 30-day poetry festival that occurred in Berks County, PA each April during National Poetry Month. The festival itself has been taking place in Berks County each April since 1999. The Press was meant to publish participants of the Festival, however over time that mission has evolved as the Press moved from Central Pennsylvania to Philadelphia, PA to the Washington DC area. The Press has been focused on giving voice to poets at the beginnings of their writing journeys since 1999.
DD: Can you tell us about your back catalogue?
s-a-m: We have published over 100 books in our 20+ year history and many of them have gone out of print for a variety of reasons. This is not an unusual occurrence for a small press which primarily publishes chapbooks. Our Back Pages is a visual blast of the journey we have been on as publishers as well. Some of the poets we have published have gone on to greater success (C L Bledsoe, Alyse Bensel, Jake Syersak, Michael Leong, and Robert Miltner to name but a few)
DD: What does the future hold for Plan B Press?
s-a-m: We hope to rise from the pillow to slay the ennui of life each day for the foreseeable future.
DD: What do you find most compelling about Crooked Smiling Light?
s-a-m: Alan’s voice. We had the privilege of publishing him in our most well-known book, Full Moon on K Street edited by Kim Roberts back in 2010. I have attended a number of readings of Alan’s since then and am always rewarded by his voice and delivery. He has quite a presence in a room when he reads. His work on the page is equally engaging as well.
DD: Can you end the interview by introducing a poem from Alan’s collection?
s-a-m: “Gluttony”, probably because there is a video of this poem which is a work of art in its own visual right. Plan B Press has always been interested in the presentation of poetry beyond ink on paper. And Alan W. King embodies a multidisciplinary approach to poetry that we welcome and embrace. It’s an honor to be working with him on this project.
Combing the bargain bin,
a woman, who's not your wife,
brushes beside you—asking
if the Roy Hargrove CD you're holding
is any good.
She's close enough for you to smell
her ginger-patchouli body wash.
The angle she gives you
in her leather bomber jacket—
the one unzipped, showing a white tee
retracing her athletic stomach and arms.
The jacket, with its collar flared,
makes her a bright blossom
booming its honey dew–scented tune
along her neckline.
And your father's voice,
from two decades before, warns you
about gorging on everything you see.
You were 16 the first time
he told you, when your hunger hovered
like that summer at Myrtle Beach—
sistas strutting the boardwalk
beneath a honey barbecue sun,
whose sweet light made each of them
a long stretch of marinade, a chromatic
scale of flavors along which
your tongue was burning to play.
And isn't temptation always lurking,
eager to hold our common sense hostage?
You tell the flower woman you're married
after she points to a flyer for a Roots show
and says y'all should go.
When she asks are you happy?
you remember a brotha once asking
how you could love one woman
when the world's a buffet—
the possibilities of pleasure
laid out like jumbo crab cakes,
lasagna rolls, and buffalo wings.
What's gluttony, if not a symptom
of our own hunger consuming us?
Wasn't Jack as careless, selling
his sustenance for a handful of beans?
You remember the story
of the stalk that almost made him
a hungry giant's grub.
You still hear the pastor preaching
about gluttons wearing the rags of drowsiness,
which is how your wife found you
stumbling through the days.
Your life before her was a string-less violin,
a dark garden of wilted sunflowers, a camper trailer
rusting against a moldy brick wall.
You were once a city of power lines,
boarded up clock towers, junked cars
and blazing drum barrel fires.
What she saw in you, only her heart knows.
Just like it knew you'd leave the temptress
back at the listening booth watching
the automatic doors close behind you.
At 16, you thought all there was to living
was filling your appetite—
too young to know love
is the everyday meal,
that the lack of it kills quicker
than the absence of food.
Alan King is an author, poet, journalist and videographer, who lives with his family in Bowie, MD. He’s a communications specialist for a national nonprofit and a senior editor at Words Beats & Life‘s global hip hop journal. King is the author of POINT BLANK (Silver Birch Press, 2016) and DRIFT (Aquarius Press, 2012). He’s a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Low-Residency Program at the University of Southern Maine. His poems and short stories appear in various literary journals, magazines and are featured on public radio.
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