Interview with Melissa Fite Johnson

Melissa Fite Johnson’s first collection, While the Kettle's On (Little Balkans Press, 2015), won the Nelson Poetry Book Award and is a Kansas Notable Book. She is also the author of A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky, winner of the 2017 Vella Chapbook Award (Paper Nautilus Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Sidereal, Stirring, and elsewhere. Melissa teaches high school English in Lawrence, KS, where she and her husband live with their three dogs.

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I can't put a date on exactly when Melissa and I met, but we both lived in Pittsburg, Kansas for a while and had a lot of the same "poetry people" in common. In June 2017, Melissa came to Downtown Poetry, a monthly poetry event in Joplin, MO, that I co-organize, and read poems from While the Kettle's On. On stage, she had no problem connecting with the audience always making them laugh or sit up straight in their chairs for the poem that followed. Her poems are honest confessions of  moments in her life that she shares as though having a conversation with you, yet they are also universal at the same time. I envy that in these poems. 

This interview was conducted via email.

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Interview with Melissa Fite Johnson

How do you define a poem?

I ask my high school Creative Writing students this all the time, often on the first day, and I’m still not sure I have a definitive answer. Ultimately, I think a poem is something that feels like a lifeline for both poet and reader.

How do you begin a poem (extra credit if you can think of a metaphor)?

Over coffee and breakfast, I read maybe a third of a poetry book, so I’m reading a new book every few days. I don’t put any rules on it; I just read to enjoy. I do find that this act works as a kind of primer, though. Those poems linger in my mind for hours, and that makes me more likely to sit down and write something that day. Because that’s the real answer: I decide to write, make the time.

Who are some of your favorite poets you find yourself returning back to?

My favorite poet is Sharon Olds. The summer I was twenty was a hard time for me. What got me through was checking out her books from the library and reading them in a downtown coffee shop. I read, stared out the window, wrote my own first hesitant poems.It’s hard to know where to stop when I start making lists of favorites: Lucille Clifton, Fatimah Asghar, David Lee, Linda Pastan, Rita Dove, Beth Ann Fennelly, Li-Young Lee. Honestly, a lot of my favorite poets are the ones I know personally—my brunch group of KC-area women, and my old workshop group of fourteen years. I’ve learned so much from them and their work, and I’m fortunate to have such support systems.

Who are you reading right now?

I am nearly finished with my friend Ruth Williams’ Flatlands (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). It’s gorgeous, so much so that I put off finishing it this morning because I wanted to savor it a little longer.

What are 2-3 poems from While the Kettle’s On that you hold above the others? What led you to write them?

Here’s something hard and honest: Some of the poems in that book are among the first I ever wrote. There’s so much I would change now. At the same time, these poems are also the purest I’ve ever written—by that I mean I wasn’t thinking about publication when I wrote them, and I never dreamed they’d ever be in a book. I wrote them before I knew to be self-conscious, and the girl who wrote them was proud of her work. Even though I’m a better writer than I was then, I don’t always know how to be proud now. The 2-3 poems I hold above the others: “The Dead,” “Vulnerability,” and “Good Housekeeping.”

Would you please read 2 or 3 of your favorite poems from your book:

Your family is a big theme throughout While the Kettle’s On, What was a poem in the book that was difficult to write in theme, subject matter or lines and why?

I remember “Fear Of” being hard to write—it was an assignment for class, a fear poem, and I wrote it as a catalogue as a way to blurt the thing that scares me the most without having to linger in it: “Worrying fifteen years / after my father’s death that maybe he died because / I didn’t call the ambulance in time.”

Your poem “The Dead” was a poem I messaged you about after reading your book. It stuck with me. I love the ending line: “because isn’t that nicer than sitting alone.” You have some great lasting images and lines in the book. Do you plan your poems before you write them, or do you kind of stumble along and wait to see what comes?

First of all, thank you so much for that. I love your work, and you! I still love Robert Frost’s line that was a mantra in graduate school: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” I usually begin with a scrap—a story, an image. I try not to force whatever comes next.

What are you working on right now?

I’ve been tinkering with my second manuscript for over two years. Sixteen of the poems in this collection are from my chapbook A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky, winner of the 2017 Vella Chapbook Award (Paper Nautilus Press, 2018).

1What advice do you have for aspiring poets?

When I first began writing, I had no publication goals at all; I didn’t send work out for a decade. I was writing to save myself. And when I read poets I admired, I didn’t feel envious or even competitive; I just read eagerly and learned. In some ways, I think we best know how to be poets when we’re just starting out.

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You can read a few of Melissa’s Poems listed below, or you can visit her website at:

https://melissafitejohnson.com/

“The Woman and the Wolf” at Rattle

“Neighbors” at Broadsided Press

“A Postcard to My Husband While I Vacation in California” at Rust + Moth

Julie Ramon is an English instructor at NEO A&M in Miami, Oklahoma. She graduated with an M.F.A from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. Among writing, her interests include baking, sewing, traveling, and garage sales. She is also a co-organizer of a poetry series, Downtown Poetry. She lives in Joplin, Missouri with her husband, sons, and daughter.

Teaching Us to Read: Stephanie Burt and the Slow Climb toward Poetic Literacy

review by Anthony Fife

Don’t Read Poetry — The white words on the pale violet cover caught my eye.  I crossed the library, toward the New Release shelf, to take a closer look.

The title sounded familiar or was at least reminiscent of things I read the past few years.  I recalled Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry, and erstwhile Ohio poet laureate Dave Lucas’s blog Poetry for People who Hate Poetry.  Provocative titles, all, and part of an obnoxious, yet somehow alluring trend.

Having passed the circulation desk and now close enough to see the quizzical subtitle, I resolved that the hardback volume was maybe worth a read.

Stephanie Burt’s Don’t Read Poetry: A Book about How to Read Poems, tells us that, while poetry is often off-putting and maybe even frightening to potential readers, an individual poem is an accessible snapshot that even those who “just don’t get poetry” can enjoy.  The book is strange, then, in that it is geared for those who simply don’t want to read it—in other words, those who need it most. 

Burt, who declined to be interviewed for this publication, has flooded her book with relatability.  For example, “Feelings,” “Characters,” and “Wisdom” title three of her chapters, labels that could just as easily be replaced with the more familiar poetic terms Lyric, Personae, and Didactic.  Likewise, popular references abound throughout the book, including Hufflepuffs, Black Panther and Alton Brown.  In short, the author has crafted a book that attempts to be accessible to those with little to no knowledge of the art form.

The greatest stride toward poetic accessibility, however, is Burt’s ethos that, A) we’ve allowed wrong-headed teachers to take us away from the study of individual poems; and, B) no two poems can be approached in the same way. 

“I am here to say,” Burt writes, “that anyone who tells you that they know how to read poetry, or what poetry really is, or what it is good for, or why you should read it, in general, is already getting it wrong” (7).  Burt, an academic herself, does not reject the academy and its place in literary discourse, but she does understand how the popular appreciation of the form has suffered at the hands of those who prescribe meaning or mode without letting readers decide for themselves.  Burt writes:

I started to write this book because I got frustrated with books that told their readers, and teachers who told their students, that poetry was one thing.  Sometimes the readers and the students learned to love that thing; sometimes they tried it and decided that this one thing—this major poet (say, Robert frost), this reason to read (say, mystery and the sacred), or this style of poetry (say, modern conversational free verse)—wasn’t for them.  That’s like hearing Beethoven, or hearing Kendrick Lamar, and not getting into it and then deciding you don’t like music.  There are other kinds of music and other ways to listen to music out there, and if you look and listen and ask the right people, you can probably find one that works for you.
            So: don’t read poetry.  Don’t assume poetry ever means only one thing, other than maybe a set of tools for making things with words, as music means a set of tools (beats, rhythms, harmonies, textures, instruments) for making things with sounds.  Instead, find ways to encounter kinds of poems and learn different reasons to read poems, realized in various ways by various poems. (7-8)

Therein lies the crux of the entire project; therein lies the way that even a novice can approach not poetry, but any poem.  Method aside, it helps to have a teacher with an infectious love of the subject.

The author’s dominant mood, not just in Don’t Read Poetry, but in many of her works, is enthusiasm.  The most appealing part of Burt’s work, in fact, is without question her willingness to praise that which she truly appreciates.  In his review of Don’t Read Poetry, Sunil Iyengar calls it “an unremitting geyser of praise for the many different ways a poem can engage readers.” 

Burt herself, in the preface to her book Close Calls with Nonsense, fully owns her own gratitude for the poets and works she loves: “[A]ll the poets I praise here have added something to the resources of the language, have made forms in words for experiences and attitudes not given effective shape in English before” (xiv). 

A healthy dose of negative criticism is certainly in her wheelhouse, but Burt would much rather share what she loves and tell why than tear down, however justly, what she doesn’t.  It is, after all, the critic’s code. “[T]he business of critics is not to assign stars, or to pick winners in poet contests,” writes Bert.  “It is to say what interests us, what seems trustworthy, inventive, memorable, new” (Close Calls xiii).  The poet/critic whose primary function is to praise and share, taking Burt as an example, should not be averse to seeking out work anywhere.

In The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them, Burt namechecks the Flarfists, the Black Took Collective, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and the Gurlesque poets, among many other groups many of us have never heard of, and broaches the concept of “the implicit gender of a poet’s voice, embracing identity as, if not the driving force in a poem or poet, at least something that we must understand if we hope to attain a deep understanding of the individual poem or poet’s oeuvre.  Identity is often a dominant force in many of Burt’s works.  This is an important feature in and of itself, but Burt takes accessibility a step further by showing how identity and experience, while different, are often two sides to the same coin.

Veteran, Latin@, Carny, Cellist, Chinese American, Sous-Chef: all the individual pieces that make a poet who they are, thereby shaping their poem, are also what make us a unique, potentially successful reader, and maybe even lover, of poetry.  But, as we recognize and maybe even come to terms with our multitude of identities, we must understand, too, that each (worthwhile) poem is equally unique and is therefore deserving of an individualized, intimate reading.

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Works Cited

Burt, Stephen.  Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry.  Graywolf Press, 2009.

---.  The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them. The Belknap Press of Harvard U P, 2016.

Burt, Stephanie.  Don’t Read Poetry: A Book about How to Read Poems.  Basic Books, 2019.

 
Iyengar, Sunil.  “Don’t Read Poetry Is a Literary Manual for the Instagram Era.”  The Washington Post, The Washington Post, 30 May 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/dont-read-poetry-is-a-literary-manual-for-the-instagram-era/2019/05/30/365a35f8-821f-11e9-95a9-e2c830afe24f_story.html.  Accessed 16 Mar. 2020.