N o r t h C a r o l i n a L i t e r a ry R e v i e w
NC
R
L
Number 16
Published annually by the East Carolina University Department of English, Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences
and Office of the Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association
© COPYRIGHT 2007 NCLR
Commemorating 100 Years of writers and writing at ecu
Photograph by Sherryl Janosko
The Poet
& the Sea:
An Interview with
Peter Makuck
by Gary Ettari
1
Quotations in the introduction are
excerpted from Gary Ettari’s email interview
with Peter Makuck.
66
with photography by Sandra Carawan
When you ask Peter Makuck about the journey
he took from beginning writer to retired Distinguished Professor of Arts and
Sciences at East Carolina University, he inevitably mentions the people who
helped him on his way. When asked about his mentors, he responds:
2
When Vernon Ward, founder of Tar River
Poets, retired in 1978, Peter Makuck was
asked to establish a national literary journal. In an email to NCLR editor Margaret
Bauer, he explained that he “decided to
stick with the poetry format” but changed
the title to Tar River Poetry “in order to
reflect a change of emphasis from the
severely regional if not local. . . . Then
I started soliciting work from poets of
national stature, did several large direct
mailing ads, plus a few journals, and very
slowly our submission and subscription
base widened.” He also “added a review
section [and] later includ[ed] the occasional
interview, [and he] upgraded the layout,
printing, and quality of paper.” The Dictionary of Literary Biography has listed Tar
River Poetry as one of the top ten poetry
magazines in the country. Just a couple
of years before his retirement, Makuck
received for Tar River Poetry a grant from
the National Endowment for the Arts (and
just after his retirement, under the editorship of his former student and colleague
Luke Whisnant, Tar River Poetry received a
second NEA grant).
At St. Francis College in Maine, Hugh Hennedy was the first teacher who
caught my attention and forced me to start taking myself seriously. I had
him for History of Drama and Shakespeare. A great teacher, I owe him a
lot. Also Father David Flood, a freshman comp teacher, who recognized in
me a talent for writing that I didn’t know I had. Robert Parenteau was an
excellent instructor of French literature who whet my appetite for Rimbaud
and Baudelaire, Valéry and Verlaine. I also learned a great deal about poetry
from Al Poulin who went on to found BOA Editions, Ltd.. But Leslie Norris
was the mentor figure I was perhaps closest to; he was wise about many
things beyond the writing of stories and poems. We became good friends,
wrote to each other, and spoke with some frequency on the phone. He
very generously read many early drafts of my stories and poems and offered
invaluable feedback.1
The litany of names that Makuck provides is a testament to the fact that, no
matter how solitary the writer’s life may be, it takes a number of dedicated
individuals to make a writer. Makuck himself was a mentor to many young
writers during his tenure at East Carolina, and Tar River Poetry, the literary
magazine he edited for almost thirty years,2 regularly features new voices
alongside established writers of national reputation.
Between encouraging young writers and teaching a variety of classes
at ECU, Makuck managed to publish six volumes of poetry and two short
story collections, an impressive and eclectic output. One of the things that
distinguishes Makuck’s work, particularly his poems, is the variety of both
North Carolina Literary Review
Number 16
2007
Commemorating 100 Years of writers and writing at ecu
After high school I went to St. Francis College (now University of New
England) in Biddeford, Maine (a French Canadian enclave), which was
owned and largely staffed by Canadian Franciscans. When I arrived there,
we were only a handful of freshmen who didn’t speak French. The foreign
language atmospherics of the place apparently triggered interest and
before long I found myself with a fellowship to study at l’Université Laval in
Quebec. I lived with a French family, and made a promise to the university
to avoid English for the duration of my stay. Quebec City really agreed with
me and I spent two glorious summers there. I taught French from 1964
to 1966 at Norwich Free Academy in Connecticut. Since I refused to take
those nonsensical education courses, the headmaster wouldn’t renew my
contract (even though I had won a teaching award my first year!), so I went
to Kent State University for a PhD, which is where I met Phyllis, who had
a desk next to mine in the grad student bullpen. After the students were
killed on May 4, 1970, the Kent campus was a very depressing place to
be and we wanted out as soon as possible. I had always wanted to write
about Shakespeare but knew the research would take far too long. Faulkner
as a dissertation subject would be quicker, so I wrote on Faulkner and we
got out the following year. Next came West Liberty State College in West
Virginia where I was an assistant professor for four years. Then the Fulbright
to France where I lectured on Modern American Poetry. Then ECU.
As a writer who has spent a good deal of time in
North Carolina, Makuck is quick to recognize the many
ways that the state supports the arts, and he seems very
fond of his adopted home, especially once he got over
his self-described “Yankee paranoia.” He is a writer who,
perhaps because of his travels, seems at home wherever
he is and whatever he is doing, and that feeling of being
comfortable regardless of one’s circumstances often
infuses his poems, even when they tackle risky or tragic
subjects. In addition to his other accomplishments, he
has co-edited a volume of essays on the work of Welsh
poet Leslie Norris and spent a year as a Fulbright lecturer
in France. He now spends most of his time on the
Bogue Banks of North Carolina with his wife, Phyllis. The
following interview was conducted via email over the
course of a week in early fall 2006. Responses have been
edited for length and clarity.
Photograph by Leanne E. Smith
setting and subject matter. A poet who is intimately acquainted with the world
he moves through, he has penned poems on subjects ranging from working
construction to sledding in the French countryside to diving on wrecks off the
Carolina coast. The variety of settings mirrors the winding journey he has taken
as a writer, which he traced for me:
Peter Makuck on his last day teaching at ECU,
2006. For a story on Makuck’s retirement,
written by one of his graduate students,
Leanne E. Smith (who provided photos for this
interview), see the ECU Department of English
newsletter, The Common Reader 24.6 (2006):
www.ecu.edu/english/tcr/24-6/default.htm.
“What you can’t teach is
easy: curiosity, motivation, raw
material of close observation,
imagination, talent, love of
language, the sounds of
language (not just our own)”
Gary Ettari: What has your teaching experience revealed to you about what
can and what can’t be taught in a creative writing classroom?
Peter Makuck: What you can’t teach is easy: curiosity, motivation, raw
material of close observation, imagination, talent, love of language, the
sounds of language (not just our own), etc. I studied Spanish, French,
and Latin and taught French at the beginning of my career. Some of my
writing students confessed to hating their foreign language courses, a red
flag for me because their poems, in terms of sound, were – no surprise –
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Commemorating 100 Years of writers and writing at ecu
“I’ve had moments out
on the big blue that are as
close to heaven as I’m
likely to get, moments that
are productive of poems
and stories. “
flatliners. And, of course, because they also didn’t like to
read, what you often got was a Dick-and-Jane vocabulary
– weak verbs, pale nouns and adjectives. But for the students
who are motivated and do read and produce promising
work, you can show them what their strengths and weaknesses
are, show them how to improve lines breaks, how to capitalize
on and strengthen the stresses and musical patterns already
in their work. I’m simplifying here, but you say, “Do less
of this and a lot more of that.” My students were no
doubt sick of my no-ideas-but-in-things mantra. So many
beginning writers have a fondness for TV clichés and bloodless
abstractions. I’d keep telling them that all good writing is
an assault on cliché. I never had a creative writing course
myself. I learned by reading closely, trial and error – the
slowest way to learn anything. If nothing else, I suppose
we save serious student writers lots of time.
Mark Strand once remarked that during his time at the University of Utah the
landscape of the West had a profound effect on the way he wrote poetry. You
spend a great deal of time on the barrier islands of North Carolina, and I was
wondering if you experience the same thing. That is, how does the geography
of your surroundings, beyond providing you with something to look at, affect or
influence your writing?
Good question, but I’m not really the one to answer that. It presupposes
that I’m more aware of my own creative process than I am, that I spend
time looking at what I’ve produced and come to conclusions about
how, say, the regular sound of the ocean across the street works its
way into my lines. I think it was Yeats who said that the mind creates
the world, and perhaps it was William Carlos Williams who suggested
that the world creates the mind. The latter view might be closer to my
own. I’ve never cared for egocentric poets who babble on about their
inner feelings. My gratitude is to poets who show me about myself by
way of the world around me. For me, the outer world is so much more
interesting. It’s the best kind of objective correlative for whatever might
be the inner drama. I grew up in a rural home without a TV until I was
a senior in high school. I spent much of my time in the woods and
streams, hunting, fishing, and trapping. My father, a farm kid, taught me
about birds and animals. I’ve written about the local outdoors wherever
I’ve lived: Maine, West Virginia, Utah, France, and North Carolina. One
of my best poems, “Back Roads by Night,” is about sanglies, wild hogs in
France.3 Without necessarily becoming paysage moralisé, outer landscapes
or seascapes eventually move inward, tell us about ourselves, our human
limits, provide us with a sense of awe. The natural environment for
me has always been about awareness and renewal, about forgetting the
greedy ego that keeps us from seeing.
You mentioned the ocean in your response, which reminds me that many of
your poems are set near, on, or in water. Why does water seem to be such a
trigger for you?
3
“Back Roads by Night” is in Makuck’s
Where We Live (Rochester: BOA Editions,
Ltd., 1982).
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On the Connecticut coast where I grew up I had a ten-foot row boat
with a tiny egg-beater motor on it and remember some haloed moments
catching fish, either alone or with a friend. Ever since moving to North
Carolina in 1976, I’ve continued my love affair with the ocean by scuba
North Carolina Literary Review
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Commemorating 100 YEARS
cOMMEMORATING
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OF writers
WRITERS AND
and writing
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ECU
diving and fishing the Gulf Stream. Melville, that great poet of the sea,
tells us that water and reverie are forever wedded. Substitute “poetry”
for “reverie” and you’ve got it. The ocean has great mystery and beauty.
I’ll never forget the first time losing sight of land (about fourteen miles
out), not another boat on the horizon, an altering perspective, a Pascalian sense of your own smallness. I’ve had moments out on the big
blue that are as close to heaven as I’m likely to get, moments that are
productive of poems and stories. And a few moments of terror too when
you get caught in a storm. These moments remind you who you are and
what’s important.
4
Against Distance (BOA Editions, Ltd.,
1997) was reviewed in NCLR 7 (1998).
5
Michael Parker reviewed Costly Habits
(Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2002) in NCLR
12 (2003).
Besides water, a number of your poems also deal with the concept of home. In
Against Distance, for example, your poems “Close” and “French Doors” are
set, at least initially, at home.4 In both poems, however, the speaker or other
figures in the poem seem to be passing through the domestic realm on their
way to somewhere else. What made you want to complicate the notion of the
comfortable domestic space?
Well, I want to complicate the notion because “home” is often a
sentimental idea, a Norman Rockwell construct with the loveable
grandfather, say, carving the turkey at Thanksgiving. But what if the
grandfather is an alcoholic and makes everyone’s life miserable? It was
Heidegger, I think, who said that “home” involved movement to a
place of dynamic stillness and that poetry was always an attempt to get
home. It seems to me that both of the titles you mention work through
domestic tensions and unsettled issues toward a stillness or distance that
promises renovation and restoration, even if short-lived.
You have not only written five volumes of poetry, but also two books of short
stories, including the 2002 release, Costly Habits.5 As a writer who is chiefly
a poet, what is it that attracts you to prose? What does prose allow you to do
as an artist that poetry does not?
I’ve always written essays, reviews, and stories in addition to poetry. I
don’t remember deliberately choosing such a habit, but working different
genres gives you perspective and keeps you writing. If you get stuck on a
poem, say, put it on the back burner and go back to work on that essay
or story. Right now I’m working on a long piece of fiction about losing
an engine fifty miles offshore and having to send out a May Day. Well,
there are simply too many characters and too much detail for a poem to
digest. Some poets are very good at getting characters into poems – Louis
Simpson, for example. I’m not. I need more space. Another advantage
of writing fiction is that it allows me my sense of humor. I’ve written
very few funny poems. That’s a gift I wasn’t given. I’m envious as hell of
somebody like Bill Trowbridge whose King Kong poems will make you
laugh until your stomach muscles ache. But I do like to laugh and fiction
is an outlet for my comic impulses, allows me to have characters interact
in humorous ways. It also allows me to have characters quite unlike me
say things that would be considered didactic if found in a poem.
You were editor of Tar River Poetry from 1978 to 2006. As someone who
has been in the business of publishing poetry for thirty years, how do you
feel generally about the state of poetry in America? Is it still seen as a
marginalized, arcane art, or is it your experience that contemporary
American poetry has garnered more readers lately?
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The cover of the spring 2004 issue of Tar
River Poetry featured photography by Sandra
Carawan, a former student of Peter Makuck whose
photography appears throughout this interview.
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Photograph by Leanne E. Smith
Commemorating 100 Years
COMMEMORATING
YEARS OF
of WRITERS
writers AND
and writing
WRITING at
AT ecu
ECU
Peter Makuck at the 40th anniversary of ECU’s Poetry
Forum, a bi-monthly writers’ workshop founded in 1965
by Vernon Ward and directed from 1978 to 2006 by Peter
Makuck. Under Makuck’s direction and with ECU Student
Government Association funding, such poets as William
Stafford, Carolyn Kizer, and Louis Simpson have visited
ECU. North Carolina State University poet John Balaban
(pictured left) visited for the 40th anniversary celebration,
2 Feb. 2005. For more information on the ECU Poetry
Forum, see www.ecu.edu/org/poetryforum/history.html.
6
Breaking and Entering, a collection of
short stories (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1981)
and Where We Live, cited previously.
You’ve shoved a tempting soapbox in front of me, but I’m not sure I
should step up. I’ll just say that poetry will probably always be a marginal
art. My first book was fiction, the second poetry, within a year of each
other.6 Friends and family were quick to talk about the fiction, but one
uncle put up his hand and said, “Man, poetry is way beyond me.” An
intelligent man, why would he say that about narrative, fairly accessible
poems? Education, I think, is the answer. Poetry was badly taught when I
was in high school, badly taught when my son was in school, and it’s still
badly taught, students given nonsensical assignments and sent on symbolhunting expeditions, learning to hate it. Last year a parent I met in Barnes
& Noble tried to get me to talk her daughter (one of my best students in
years) out of majoring in English and studying poetry. Why? “Because
I was an English major,” she said, “and poetry never put any money in
my pocket.” For the most part, this woman’s values reflect a turn away
from the liberal arts and are typical of what our society considers most
important: money, stuff, and power. Such willful ignorance, not poetry,
will always have a brilliant future in our country.
Has the marginalization you mention affected the business of publishing poetry
more than usual in recent history? Is it easier or more difficult these days to
publish a book of poems than it was, say, twenty or thirty years ago? What
does the current book publishing landscape look like for poets?
For me, that’s a tough question because I’ve done no studies, nor do I have
any statistics. Impressions will have to unreliably suffice. It’s fairly obvious
that creative writing programs, both graduate and undergraduate, have
mushroomed in the last forty years. As a student I was only aware of Iowa
and Johns Hopkins. Now nearly every university, college, and community
college offers creative writing programs, so I’d have to say publication is
more competitive than ever. On the other hand, I’m also aware of more
journals and presses. The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses lists
upwards of fifteen hundred journals, not to mention electronic journals.
Also excellent new presses like Cavankerry and Autumn House cater
Deo Gratias
by Peter Makuck
Behind a skirt of hydrangeas
was a crawlspace door that led to a crypt
where the bones and skulls of old pastors
lay scattered about,
or so we believed,
until candlelight for the first time wavered
and vault covers lay in a row.
The eighth grade altar boys made us do it.
Like sneaking wine before Mass,
or munching down a host or two,
but this ritual was after novena
when Mr. Marino, the old sexton,
locked up the church.
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North Carolina Literary Review
As if on a mission,
we’d emerge from the crypt
into the basement hall
where Boy’s Brigade marched us
in tight formation on Friday nights
toward this about face,
this passing through the kitchen
up spiral stairs
to the vestry, sacristy,
then down the main aisle –
the nave quiet with outside wind,
the ghosts of black widows
whispering Aves in loud Italian –
past the holy water stoup,
up to the choir loft,
twisty bell tower stairs,
and the chortle of pigeons.
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Commemorating 100 YEARS
cOMMEMORATING
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WRITERS AND
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exclusively to poets. There seem as well to be more contests for both books
and individual poems. I have to believe that good poems will eventually
see the light. I was always delighted to find and publish solid poems by
previously unpublished poets in Tar River Poetry.
As a follow-up to your story about the mother of your student not wanting her
daughter to major in English, does that extend to the practice of teaching at
all? In other words, do teachers of creative writing have an obligation to inform
their students about just how marginalized an art poetry is? There are those, for
example, who suggest that graduate programs in the humanities in general end
up doing a disservice to many grad students because of the very long odds of such
students obtaining gainful employment in their chosen fields. Do you think that
is a valid criticism and do MFA programs fall under that umbrella as well? Is it
possible to both discourage and encourage young writers simultaneously?
“You are at the
university to be
broadly educated,
not necessarily learn
a job skill.”
We need to make a distinction between education in the best sense of
the word and education as bottom-line job training. I’ve never seen myself
as a career counselor and don’t see it as my responsibility to point students
toward “gainful employment.” You are at the university to be broadly
educated, not necessarily learn a job skill. Admittedly, the way universities
are routinely backing away from the liberal arts, mine is an old-fashioned
point of view. I still believe and have been told by many graduates that
English is a wonderfully versatile major for lots of fields. My wife, with a
graduate degree in English literature (seventeenth-century English poetry),
has had a good position for many years in the office of North Carolina’s
Department of Revenue. Her communication skills, her ability to read,
write, speak, and think clearly were assets that got her the position. I
never had a plan, never thought or cared about gainful employment, no
doubt to my parents’ chagrin. I studied French, for heaven’s sake. At the
dinner table one night, my father asked me what I was studying and what
I was going to do with it. I didn’t know. I told him I liked the sounds of
French nouns that ended in “euil.” There was a squirrel on a limb outside
the window. I gave him the French word for squirrel, écureuil. His face
Once, slightly drunk, in my mid-twenties,
something brought me back,
then as now,
for one final climb above the dark
habits of nuns, the slaps,
the catechistic drills and Latin responses.
I saw that the wooden locker for my cassock
and surplice was no longer there,
but everything else exactly the same.
I watched myself
step up to the parapet,
staggered under a skymap of stars,
blessed by the sight
of that hometown seaport glittering
like the jewel box of a bishop
flung open at my feet.
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Roy
by Peter Makuck
At the gym when I see him
for the first time in months
shuffling toward me,
he’s bald, paler than pale,
cheeks sunk in shadow,
but eyes full of spark,
and his voice
that sandpaper rasp:
Did you hear? Man,
Carolina just put a hurtin’
on Kentucky.
Thir-teen points!
We always talk and joke
but I’ve never confessed
I’m a lapsed believer,
sick of sports clichés,
the student-athlete fraud,
fan brawls, pay-offs,
homicidal hockey dads,
obscene salaries . . . .
Yet to Roy,
Jesus pulls for Carolina
and promises victory
over the darkest powers.
When the black hole
of a pause yawns open,
I growl, Tarheels forever!
trying my damnedest.
And he comes back
with a coughing laugh,
an incredulous headshake
and a great chemo grin:
What a hurtin’!
Can you believe?
Lord, have mercy!
72
went funny – I thought he was having a coronary. My father had a gas
station, serviced and repaired cars – work that I myself enjoyed. If nothing
turned up, I always figured I’d go into business with him, which I think he
wanted me to do anyway. College was my mother’s idea.
Writing poetry and fiction was something I was drawn to. It was
never a career plan. You can study poetry and write it – as did Stevens,
Williams, Eliot, and many more – without it being your day job. I just
taught a workshop at West Virginia University and only one of the
eight people in the workshop was a teacher. I’ve had very talented
doctors, lawyers, and computer people in my classes and I think you
can encourage young writers without promising them they will be able
to support themselves as poets or teachers.
Since you have spent the bulk of your career in North Carolina, I was
wondering if you could reflect for a moment on what that has meant for you
professionally. North Carolina seems to be a state that supports and nurtures
the arts. Have you found that to be the case?
North Carolina does nurture the arts in a big way. As a state, it has few
rivals in this respect. The Arts Council and the North Carolina Writer’s
Network do a great deal to help. And writers here invite you into the
fold and tend to support one another. I didn’t live in the state for very
long before, as a Tennessee Williams character puts it, “the kindness
of strangers” put an end to my Yankee paranoia. And let’s not forget
the independent booksellers, like Nancy Olson at Quail Ridge Books
in Raleigh, who sponsor readings almost every week. Also extremely
important are state newspapers like the Charlotte Observer, the Raleigh
News and Observer, the Southern Pines Pilot, and a number of others
that review the books of in-state fiction writers and poets. Given the
scaling back of book reviews in major newspapers across the country,
it’s remarkable, say, that the News and Observer has the kind of Sunday
book section it does.
Most of the time, you seem to write in free verse, with little attention to more
rigid forms, but in your latest book, Off-Season in the Promised Land [BOA,
2005], there is a villanelle titled “Another Art.” Can you talk about how this
poem came to take the shape that it did? What, for you, are the advantages
that a more formal structure offers?
I have used forms now and then and find that sometimes a subject is just
right for a particular form. The villanelle you mention is loosely based
on three pathological liars I’ve unluckily known. When someone like this
lies, it isn’t a one-time-only phenomenon. Hence the refrain in a villanelle
is perfect for a serial bull-thrower. Rhyme also adds to the humor, as it
does in limericks. My poem isn’t meant as a parody of Elizabeth Bishop’s
famous “One Art,” but I did use that poem as a point of departure. To
return to your earlier question about what can be taught – forms, for
example, can be taught. You can teach someone the formal requirements
of an Italian or Shakespearean sonnet, and the student will fill them out,
but there is no guarantee that the poem will have a heartbeat. What is
required to make the poem viable is what is not teachable.
You mentioned the importance of reading in the context of the creative writing
classroom. What have you been reading lately that you have enjoyed? And,
just for fun, what is the first poem you remember reading?
North Carolina Literary Review
Number 16
2007
Commemorating 100 YEARS
cOMMEMORATING
Years of
OF writers
WRITERS AND
and writing
WRITING at
AT ecu
ECU
My wife and I met in a graduate course in the Victorian novel and one
of the first assignments was George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which we spoke
about with much excitement. For more than thirty-five years I’ve been
wanting to reread that book. Well, two weeks ago I finished it and found
it much more rewarding the second time through when I wasn’t pressed
to write a paper about it. We also watched the BBC series based on the
novel. Simply delicious. The scene where Bulstrode watches his dying
blackmailer Raffles has the kind of psychological power and subtlety
that rivals Dostoyevsky.
The first poem I recall was Milton’s “On His Blindness.” This was in
high school. I didn’t so much read the poem as memorize it and stand
before the class and recite it, much to the amusement of my crotchgrabbing buddies in the back row. Everyone had to do this – our teacher’s
brilliant idea of how poetry should be taught. I hated it, but oddly
enough I can still recite the whole of it these many years later. Quite
a sonnet, needless to say. But the first poem I remember reading in
college is Edward Arlington Robinson’s “Mr. Flood’s Party” as well as
some of his other poems. That might have been the beginning for me.
Regarding Robinson, I was wondering if that “beginning” that you mention had
to do more with the effects of rhythm than content? More than one critic has
made the point that as human beings developing in the womb, we
are able to hear the sound of the mother’s heartbeat before we can
see anything, hence the almost primal, instinctive affinity we seem
to have for rhythmic language. Was this the case for you with
Robinson? Or was it something else that caught your attention?
“North Carolina does
nurture the arts in a big
way. As a state, it has few
rivals in this respect.”
Rhythms and sounds were certainly a part of it, but there’s
also a strong narrative dimension to “Mr. Flood’s Party” and
some of the other poems that interested me, and a sense of
drama that sometimes verges on the sentimental. But that
would also have appealed to the teenage romantic that I was
at the time. Robinson was a start, but we also read some Frost
and Eliot. I remember being knocked out by Eliot’s “Prufrock” even though
I didn’t know what the hell it was about until I read it a dozen times and
we discussed it in class. This, I suppose, proves Eliot’s notion about a poem
making an emotional connection that often precedes comprehension.
Peter Makuck appearances in NCLR:
I want to ask a question about a particular poem that appears in your early
volume, Where We Live. It’s called “The Commons” and it refers to the killing of the four students at Kent State, in 1970. You were there, I know, and
I wanted to ask about the process of writing about an especially emotionally
charged event. Did you approach the writing of that poem differently than you
would, say, a poem about the neighbor’s cat? And if Keats is correct, that the
poet must possess negative capability, must dwell continually in uncertainties,
how is that possible when a poet has witnessed the truly horrific?
I’ll never forget that day, the tear gas, the masked faces of the guardsmen, the panic, the running for cover, but I have little recollection of
how that poem came to be written – I mean, the process. Maybe I’ve
blocked it out. Months after the killings when I saw the construction
machinery on the commons, I remember thinking – conspiracy: those
bastards want to change the look of the place so people will forget the
horrible thing that happened here. I can’t let them do it. Obviously,
though, when you write from experience, the experience comes alive
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“Egret” and “On the Blue Again” in NCLR
2.2 (1995)
translations of “Le Chat [Interieur]” (“The
Cat [Within]”) and “Chat” (“Cat”) by
Charles Baudelaire in NCLR 5 (1996)
a review of Black Shawl by Katheryn Stripling Byer in NCLR 8 (1999)
biographical entry in “Dictionary of North
Carolina Writers” in NCLR 9 (2000)
interview with NCLR founding editor Alex
Albright for the 10th anniversary issue,
NCLR 11 (2002)
North Carolina Literary Review
73
Commemorating 100 Years of writers and writing at ecu
again in the writing process, even if imaginatively modified, and the
hurt will hurt again. This is true even if you are writing about parents or
a loved one who has died.
You co-edited a collection of essays on the work of the Welsh poet Leslie
Norris.7 What is it about Norris’s work that attracted you to that project?
Courtesy of Peter Makuck
I was teaching high school French when I encountered one of Norris’s
powerful stories in The Atlantic. I continued reading his stories and poems
with great interest as they appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere, never
dreaming that one day I would meet the man and that he would invite
me to be Visiting Writer at Brigham Young University where he taught
for a good many years. I was initially impressed by his attention to detail
and his interest in animals and the natural world, his ability to create
characters. Norris is a great describer, an extraordinary storyteller and
poet, but he was also a modest man who was in no way a self-promoter
or networker. As a result, he unfairly fell into the category of neglected
writers. Eugene England, my colleague at BYU, had the idea we should
promote Leslie with a book of essays, and we did. We had no trouble
getting essays from high profile writers who knew Leslie’s work and
realized its worth.
And finally, as a fisherman myself, I must ask: What’s the biggest you’ve ever
caught, and where?
A sixty-three pound wahoo. Phyllis and I were trolling sea-witches and
ballyhoo about five miles south of the Big Rock (a miles-long underwater
structure that runs from northeast to southwest), about fifty miles out
of Beaufort Inlet. On twenty-pound test line, it took a sweaty hour and
fifteen minutes to boat it, Phyllis at the helm, very skillfully keeping
the fish off the stern quarter. Quite a workout, like pumping iron. A
memorable day because we had already put about two hundred pounds
of dolphin (mahi-mahi in restaurants) in the fish boxes and knew our
freezer would now be full until after Christmas. Since it’s a two-hour trip
out to the Gulf Stream, we usually fish until three pm, but after this big
wahoo, we slowly headed back to port around noon, eating lunch as we
went, gorgeous cloud formations all the way.
7
An Open World: Essays on Leslie Norris,
co-edited with Eugene England (Columbia,
SC: Camdem House, 1994).
Gary Ettari is an Assistant Professor
at the University of North Carolina at
Asheville. He teaches creative writing,
Shakespeare, and Humanities courses.
Peter Makuck was his first creative writing
professor at Brigham Young University
in Utah. Ettari has published poetry in
Poetry Northwest, the Lullwater Review,
and Tar River Poetry, among other journals, including NCLR 15 (2006) and is
currently seeking a publisher for his first
novel, set in Las Vegas.
74
In Peter Makuck’s “fish story,” one can get a glimpse of how he constructs
his poems. Note how he models much of what he said earlier can be taught
to young writers, especially curiosity and paying attention. His description of
the fight with the wahoo, the weather, the sea, and the struggle against and
with nature demonstrate the first rule of poetry: pay intense attention to the
world around you. The sharpness of the details, the way the fisherman poet
so easily recalls the specifics of the day speak of long practice and of countless
hours spent observing his environment in order to construct poems out of his
experiences. Even in retirement, he is still teaching us lessons.
North Carolina Literary Review
Number 16
2007