Tyson Miller: We read a bunch of your work, and I think in the end, “Bells and Whistles” and “Memorial Day” were two of the editorial team's favorites. Five of your poems we read about Ohio. So I'm wondering about your connection to the landscape and the physical location in your poetry and how living in that place and your connection with that place has influenced the writings that you've written.
Michael Henson: The place I grew up is a small factory town in the middle of the cornfields. It was a lovely place physically. I had some issues with it, I still have issues with some of the politics of the place. But the land and the people are really special to me. I've lived in cities most of the time since I left, but I keep going back to that sort of place in my writing and physically too.
Tyson Miller: So what is it about these places that keep bringing you back? It sounds like, on one hand, there's not a lot there for you. But is it the beauty of the physical landscape, or is there something else that keeps you coming back to these places?
Michael Henson: Well, it's the beauty of the landscape. Anybody would love it, I think, to look at it. There are a lot of contradictions and there's a lot of exploitation. Growing up, I noticed a lot of racism. I saw a lot of poverty and felt strong class discrimination growing up.
And so there's all this mix of culture and urban and rural and migration and land use. It's pretty monocultural in terms of the agriculture around. You look at these vast fields of corn, vast fields of soybeans, vast fields and you just think of how the land is being misused. I think of how the land is being converted to suburbs. It was just a lot to think about.
Tyson Miller: I'm curious; you grow up in this sort of an atmosphere. Was this an atmosphere that encouraged creativity and the arts, writing, and some of that stuff? Or did you feel like when you started to get into writing and some of that, that it was outside of what your family was used to or what would have been encouraged.
Michael Henson: It was very much outside. It was very hard, I had to leave. I got to be 18 and I couldn't wait to get out of there. Most of the people that I grew up with, if they were going off to college, they went to Dayton, Ohio, which is about 40 miles down the road, but I went a little further. I went to Cincinnati and, except for my little jaunt to Chicago, I stayed for a while in the Appalachian part of Ohio.
But [Cincinnati] was a place where I could feel comfortable reading books, and I didn't start out thinking about myself as a poet. I was more interested in journalism starting out, but I got more and more into it as the years went on.
Julian Kanagy: That's an interesting journey. I think that goes well with what I would call a perceptiveness around growing up and seeing the exploitation of environment, of each other, etc. That comes through in your poetry. I think of the nameless foundries and the river fouling tanneries – those images call to mind to me an awareness of the relationship with nature that is journalistic or coming in from that angle. Does that ring true to you?
Michael Henson: There were a couple of bridges in the town, and I would have to cross one of the bridges, just south of the tannery. I would go past a little factory, and then cross this bridge, and we would look to see what color the tannery was poisoning the water with that day. Yellow, green, red. And then, you know, I watched my grandfather slowly dying of red lung that he got working in the foundries – it was just everywhere around me.
It wasn't as dramatic as, say, a coal town, but it was there. It was obvious.
Julian Kanagy: I wonder too, when you write your poetry, do you consider your audience and attempt to make it approachable to individuals of any origin? Or is it you write what you write and it comes out as it comes out?
Michael Henson:That's a good question. I feel very strongly about poetry being accessible. I dropped my subscription to Poetry Magazine years ago because I never could understand what they're doing. And I think I'm pretty well educated. I should be able to understand it but it made no sense to me.
I think it's important to me to write a poem in sentences, and that the sentences make sense. On the other hand, I'm very frustrated with so-called poems that I think are simply essays that somebody just broke into short lines.
I've written a lot about this. I've got an unpublished book of essays about poetry and what poetry ought to be doing. I really think a poem needs to have rhythm, needs to have imagery, it needs to have metaphor. There needs to be a story, and there needs to be precise and resonant language. Those five elements, to me, make a poem.
Tyson Miller: It's a good segue into something else that's very related we want to talk about, which is Carter Bridge. Your bluegrass, kind of Americana band, that you play in. One of the things that we noticed was this, sort of, sense of musicality in your poetry. So I'm curious how your poetry and your music overlap, how you find them to work similarly or differently in your mind?
Michael Henson: I had a period a few years back where I was writing songs. Just bang, bang, bang. I had, like, eight songs in a row, and then it just dried up. It just stopped. And I don't know why. Maybe I'm just not working hard enough at it. I actually have a novel – I guess it's more of a novella. The second book that I ever published was called “A Small Room with Trouble on My Mind,” which is a line from a bluegrass song, and it's about a bluegrass musician. I like the phrase, an African American poet, I only got to sit down with this guy once … but he talked about feeling like he knows he’s got it right when the piece that he's writing starts to sing. I want that. I want that in whatever I'm doing.
If it doesn't sing … it might as well be a grocery list.
Michael Henson
Michael Henson is author of six books of fiction and four collections of poetry. His best-known work is Maggie Boylan, a collection of linked stories centered on a woman struggling with poverty and addiction in rural Appalachia. He is a member of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative and plays guitar with the Carter Bridge Bluegrass Band.
Comments