I’m so happy to share this conversation with Benjamin Myers—English professor at a small liberal arts college, former Oklahoma poet laureate, and my own longtime mentor and friend.
— Casie Dodd
Tell us a little more about your writing and teaching background.
I’ve been writing poetry since I was in middle school, at least. Both of my parents were writers, so it seemed like a natural thing to do. In high school I spent two summer terms at the wonderful Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute, studying poetry with B.H. Fairchild and Ellen Kort. After getting a B.A. in English, I decided to pursue a Ph.D. rather than the MFA. My reasoning was that I wanted to learn all I could about poetics and about literature (and history and philosophy). So I ended up studying the Renaissance at Washington University in St. Louis, though I also studied creative nonfiction under Charles Newman while I was there. I taught a couple of years in Arkansas after that, and I’ve been teaching at OBU for the last eighteen years.
And it’s fair to say Oklahoma is a large part of your identity?
Yes, absolutely. The human creation was formed from the dust, and the dust I was formed from is the dust of Oklahoma. I don’t accept the view of human beings as autonomous individuals. I believe a person is made up to a great extent by the people and the places that give the person shape. I try to keep this in mind constantly in my writing as well as in the choices I make economically and politically. My wife and I very deliberately chose to move back to the town we grew up in and root our family there.
I can certainly relate to that as a native Oklahoman who settled back closer to home. How have your teaching and writing careers informed each other?
Teaching at a small liberal arts college means I get to teach a wide range of texts and topics, especially in our Western Civ. core classes and in our great books honors program. This kind of wide reading in the best that has been written, I hope, keeps my writing grounded in a tradition and discussion longer, wider, and deeper than the literary trends of the moment.
How would you describe your primary values or priorities in your writing life? I know, for example, that you care deeply about cultivating an authentic sense of place—in other words, taking an incarnational approach—which shows up both in your own poetry and in your recent book, A Poetics of Orthodoxy.
Yes, I think “incarnational” covers it well. I believe poetry should be grounded in observation and in the physical world. We are embodied beings, and all our experiences are, in some way, embodied experiences. I don’t think abstractions have the power to really move us: emotion needs physical context. Poetry needs concrete imagery for the same reason true affection needs the embrace.
How have you seen these values evolve in your own writing? I’m thinking of, for example, the eclectic work in your first collection, Elegy for Trains, compared to your more ambitious sonnet sequence, Black Sunday: each informed by your Oklahoma heritage but taking distinct forms.
Well, I think my commitment to the concrete and embodied has stayed fairly consistent. What has changed is that I have become a more and more committed “formalist.” I rarely write free verse these days, though I often work in a fairly loose blank verse. I admire a lot of free verse poets still, but I find I need the tightness of the metrical line to give measure and balance to the melody of sound. I also prefer to speak within the longer metrical tradition. Free verse in its original moment got a lot of energy out of the act of smashing the dominant English iamb, but I think that energy is quickly waning. Free verse is a reactionary structure, and eventually it becomes self-cannibalizing, endlessly deconstructing itself into smaller bits and more “white space” on the page. Or it lapses into chopped up prose. The art of meter offers, I think, not only more staying power but also more pleasure for the reader.
That art has stood out to me recently as I’ve been diving into the work of a shared favorite of ours (and fellow Oklahoma poet), John Berryman—someone who often remained loyal to the iambic line despite his various poetic innovations. What made you decide to turn these observations into a book of criticism? How would you describe reactions to your poetic philosophy? I know you sometimes face resistance from people who think it’s too judgmental to declare certain poems as objectively “bad.”
Yup, I get a fair bit of “how dare you?!” But I felt like the suggestions and principles in the book would actually be useful to someone who wanted to improve his or her art. The book is based very much on what I have taught in my creative writing classes at OBU for the last fifteen years or so, and I have seen students again and again drastically improve over the course of a semester or two. So I thought the book might be useful, not just to people who want to write poetry, but also to anyone who might want to read poems or to think about how aesthetic standards might be grounded in theological principles. But if one is thoroughly committed to a bland equality in all things artistic, then this is probably a book to take a pass on.
Are there any major criteria that contemporary poets can generally agree upon for evaluating a poem? In other words, is there still a consensus around certain standards of craft despite the wide-ranging shifts that have occurred in American poetry over the past century?
I’d really like to say there are still widely agreed upon standards, but I would be very hard pressed to say what they are. So, I think I’d have to say that American poetry is in a state of nearly total aesthetic anarchy. There is a tendency to decry any suggestion of universal standards, coupled with a tendency to turn around and treat the merest whims of fashion or personal preference as if they carried the weight of a universal standard. I’d say that the lack of wider agreement leads to a sort of tyranny of the trendy.
I understand what you mean, but I will say I see a lot of heated debates about line breaks, at least. What do you see as the major challenges in teaching creative writing to students today? What would you like to see more of in your students’ poetry?
I’d say that the lack of shared aesthetic standards we were just talking about is one of the major challenges. A lot of students come in with the notion that the whole or art is simply to say how they feel. Of course, the best cure for that is wide and deep reading in poetry, in the best poetry. I have an advantage in this in teaching in an institution with a strong core curriculum that has them read Biblical poetry, Homer, the great Romantics, and so much more. Immersion in the poetic tradition gives a student the right kind of ambition for his or her work and should help to clear away the tendency to be too easily satisfied with one’s own efforts. A poet should want to read everything.
What approaches to teaching creative writing have you found particularly effective?
I have nothing against the workshop method, when the most experienced poet in the room (the professor, one assumes) is fully involved in the workshop conversation. I think, however, that the workshop needs to be balanced with days of more formal instruction: craft talks, lectures in the history of poetics, close readings of good examples, etc. I will usually balance a class that meets Tuesdays and Thursdays, for instance, by doing more formal learning one day and workshop the other. Of course, I believe in giving a lot of good reading assignments. If beginning (or intermediate or advanced) poets are reading only the work of their peers, that is bound to be a disaster.
Speaking for myself as a former student of yours, I can say that building a commitment to embodying a physical space in poetry has strengthened my own writing in many ways. By focusing on concrete images and letting them speak for themselves, I’ve often been surprised by the deeper sacramental meanings that can emerge within the space of a particular poem as I’m in the drafting process. Do you think this is a unique feature to poetry—or at least poetic approaches to language? I’m sure we could both list off plenty of similar examples in well-written novels or other creative genres. But what makes a poem special in this respect?
I think you are right to describe it as a feature of “poetic approaches to language.” To put that another way, the sacramental element in poetry comes from the attempt to bridge the gap between world and word, which can happen in prose too. Other arts work with embodiment in different ways, dance through the movement of the body, painting through the texturing of the paint, music through rhythm. That’s why, by the way, I think abstract painting can be sacramental in a way that abstract poetry cannot; the painting has physicality built in, while the poem needs to strive the other way, against abstraction. So, I think the goal of incarnation is the same in every artform but that poetry’s relationship to embodiment is unique because the means matter.
So why do we see so many poems hovering in a disembodied abstract or philosophical space? Is this approach always ill-suited to poetry or are there good examples of this strategy?
Well, honestly, I think one root cause of abstraction in poetry is just laziness. Observation of the physical world takes effort at attention. I think many poets also simply mistake what makes a poem powerful. They think using emotional words will result in emotion in the reader. But abstractions don’t move us. “I’m sad because we’re in exile” does nothing to me, but “By the waters of Babylon, we sat down and wept” puts me in the place where the emotion is felt.
I, of course, don’t mean that there is no place for abstraction. A lot depends on the length of the poem. A haiku has no room for anything but the primary thing: direct observation of concrete reality. Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction or The Four Quartets, because so much longer, can afford a little more abstraction, though I might hazard to say that both have a little too much of the abstract still. Very simply, the longer the poem the more abstraction can be sprinkled in, but the grounding in the concrete always has to take precedence.
Are there any poetic images that you think should be off limits for being too cliche? I had another writing teacher once who told me he never wanted to see another bird poem again, for instance.
Look, if I tried to make any hard and fast rules here, I would only end up breaking them myself. I don’t think the problem is that the images are worn out, but rather that they need to be seen from a new angle. Maybe we get tired of bird poems that show us nothing new, but a poem that makes us see something in the bird that we haven’t seen before, well, that’s something worth trying for.
How can poets resist temptations toward the abstract or cliche?
I think it takes effort and willingness to write slowly, by which I mean a willingness to take seriously “revision” as the poem process. It might help to think more about “building” poems than about writing them, since “writing” suggests something more linear than composition perhaps should be. It also helps if you learn to trust your reader. Abstraction and cliche are very often the result of being afraid that your reader will miss something if you don’t spell it out or make it glaringly familiar. Trust your reader and you can write better work.
Who are some poets we should be reading as strong examples of incarnational poetry? One of my favorite things about your poetic philosophy is how you appreciate writers across the formal spectrum.
Yeats and Frost are my great inspiration on that. Even at his most immersed state in a very abstract system of belief, Yeats is wedded to the concrete symbol. Frost is the master American poet of place. Jane Kenyon is superb in conveying feeling through image, in restrained and melodic free verse. I think Kenyon was one of the greatest poets of her generation. Elizabeth Bishop is wonderful at capturing the concrete image in language that reinforces it; I’m thinking particularly of “The Fish” but also “The Moose” and many more. I always recommend the Tang dynasty Chinese poets for this, especially Du Fu. Among our contemporaries, I would steer people to Andrew Hudgins, A.E. Stallings, and Joe Weil, for starters.
What kind of work are you up to these days? You have a new collection coming out next year?
Teaching and family life keeps me pretty busy, but I have some essays in the works on education and the liberal arts. I’m working on the finishing touches for a manuscript of poems that should be out next year. I’m still a little obsessed with sonnets.
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Benjamin Myers was the 2015-2016 Poet Laureate of the State of Oklahoma and is the author of four books of poetry, of one book on poetics, and of numerous articles, essays, and reviews. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and literary festivals around the country. Myers is a professor of literature at Oklahoma Baptist University, where he directs the Great Books Honors Program.
Casie Dodd lives in Arkansas with her husband and two children. Her writing has appeared in Fare Forward, Susurrus, Front Porch Republic, and other journals. She is the founder and editor of Belle Point Press, a new small press celebrating the literary culture and community of the American Mid-South.