How often had you sent
out Fuse before it was chosen for
publication in 2011 by Black Lawrence Press?
Looking back at my
submissions table, a quick count tells me that I sent out the manuscript to
around 90 places over the course of four years. In that time, it was a semi-finalist or finalist for about
20 contests or reading periods. In
fact, when Diane Goettel over at Black Lawrence Press emailed me to ask if they
could publish it (it had been a finalist for both of their full-length
collection prizes), I was right on the edge of retiring it and moving ahead
with other manuscripts I had been working on. The last year I sent it out, I sent it out to as many places
as I could; it wasn’t a total carpet-bombing of contests and open reading
periods, but it felt close.
Tell me about the title.
Had it always been Fuse? Did it go
through any other changes?
I first put the
manuscript together over the course of doing my MFA at the University of
Houston, and the original, working title was How To Stitch Flame.
This is the title of one of the poems in the first section (though who
knows what part of the book it was in then). I loved the hopeless absurdity of that notion, it seemed
like a great aesthetic signal flare.
Later, though, I had my mind changed. After meeting with Michael Dumanis over coffee to talk
manuscripts, he convinced me that whatever the merits that title had in terms
of the aesthetics at play in the collection, it might not be the most inviting
one I could think of. Eventually, I came up with the title “Fuse” after a
serendipitous encounter with the word in a dictionary my late maternal
grandfather gave me. Two of the
definitions for that word struck me as being true to my original understanding
of the “How To…” title, and these definitions found their way into the fulcrum
poem of the book, “Serpentine Fuselage.”
The first definition describes fuse in the verb form as “to stitch by
applying heat or pressure” and the second describes the noun form as “a continuous
train of combustible substance enclosed in a cable.” That choice did a lot to animate my attempts to order the
book and make it cohere.
It seems like there’s a
possible misconception among some poets who are trying to get their first book
published: that they must win a contest. Were you concerned about winning a
contest at any point? What advice would you give to poets sending their book
out now regarding contests versus open reading periods?
To start with, I’m proof
that you don’t need to win a contest to publish your first book. I’ve seen no little contention over the
contest system (systems?) over the last decade or so (i.e., when I started
paying attention), as we all have.
My humble take is that it might not be ideal, but it is a mechanism that helps support, if
not totally sustains, a number of small presses. As such, I have a hard time calling it out. I was primarily
concerned with getting my book published.
It would have been lovely and validating to win a contest, of course,
but my experience has been that having a book diminishes that concern. If you’re lucky to have anyone think
about your book beyond the year or two when it comes out, it seems beside the
point and damaging to boot to imagine that they would identify it primarily as
a “contest winner,” rather than on its own terms. Or this is one of the lullabies I let pet me to sleep.
Whatever the case may
actually be, my advice to poets sending their book out now (and forevermore) is
to make their main concern the catalogue and reputation of the presses to which
they offer up their work. Once
you’ve figured out those you respect and admire, send to them unceasingly, or
at least as regularly as is largely painless to you and to those presses. In
the end, sending over and over again to those presses, whether they had open
reading periods or contests (especially those in which the presses were
interested in publishing a finalist or two) worked out for me in a really
satisfying way. It took a while,
but I’m very happy with the end result.
What was the process like
assembling the book? How many different versions did it go through as you were
sending it out?
The process of assembly
was a long, semi-quixotic ramble.
I first started putting Fuse together
while I was in Houston, and it eventually served as my MFA thesis. I didn’t start sending it out as a
collection regularly for a couple of years, and over that time it underwent
about three significant revisions.
No, I’m not going to tell you about all the semi-quixotic parts except
to say some are in the book or I’m liable to explain them at length should you
buy me a drink or four. Anyway, to
me, “significant,” means largely that there were poems dropped and added, order
changes, and large and small revisions for individual poems. From the time I started sending it out
to the time it was picked up, I revised it as a manuscript about seven times,
though each time the revisions were more tunings with slight shifts of poem
order and little tweaks on individual poems. It took me what felt like forever to get the order to feel
organic to me, but by the Black Lawrence took it, I really felt like I had
carried it as close to being finished as I ever would.
How involved were you
with the design of the book—interior design, font, cover, etc.? Did you suggest
or have any input regarding the image that was used on the cover?
I didn’t have much say in
the interiors, but then when I got the soft proof, I didn’t have too much to
say: I loved it. The font and
layout felt really inviting, which was important to me since so many of the
poems were long, and could have been challenging to sort out had the font and
layout been more dense.
When it came to the cover
design, I was actually given quite a bit of input. I was allowed to discover an image for myself, which can be
a wracking process, since I didn’t really have anything in mind. I sorted through some images searching
for something that might represent the sensibility of the book, but I never
really came across anything that was perfect. Then my wife saw some paintings by Rob Funderburk, an old acquaintance of
hers from Chicago, posted on a mutual friend’s Facebook page. She thought they looked perfect, so she
pointed me in the direction of Rob’s pieces, and when I saw them I instantly
knew that I’d found what I was looking for. I mean, do yourself a favor and visit his website. He works in a wide spectrum and it’s
all a wonder to behold. Once I had
gotten Rob’s permission to use an image of his painting, we looked at ideas
from Black Lawrence’s design guy, Steven Seighman, and then Rob, my wife and I
fiddled with how we thought the cover should look. I decided I wanted the image to be of the whole painting,
rather than just a detail, and that it would look good wrapped around the front
and back, with the blurbs filling the leftover white space. We sent back a mockup to Steven, and he
put together a gorgeous cover, which to this day gives me a trill of
excitement.
What about the publication
of the actual poems in journals and magazines prior to the book being
published? Was there ever a concern for you to have the majority of the poems
published before you were sending out your manuscript?
I didn’t have it in mind
as a goal that all the poems in the manuscript should be taken. When I started reading contemporary
books of poetry, something I figured out pretty quickly was that in addition to
being magnificent vehicles for collections of poems, they were also wonderful
references for figuring out how poetry communities arrange and indicate
themselves and their aesthetics. I
learned a lot by paying attention to the front and back matter (and I’m glad I
did, as otherwise it would have taken me a long time to see the amazing
colophon in Josh Bell’s No Planet Strike). As I was figuring out how to submit
poems and learning what journals supported the work I was trying to do, I was
already subconsciously forming a goal for what an acknowledgments page would be
able to tell someone who might pick up the book in a bookstore or a
library. In the end it was more
important to me that I believed the poems in the book belonged there. Since it took a while for my book to
get picked up, I had plenty of time to send its poems around, and many of them
got taken thanks to the generous and supportive editors I’ve come across. There were a few that didn’t, however,
and one in particular—“Serpentine Fuselage”—is central to the book. Of course, that poem in the book is
like 14 pages long and scattered; I never expected it to be taken. But I would never for an instant have
thought to leave it out of the book just because it hadn’t been pedigreed by
publication. It was just too
important to what I understood the book to be.
How much work did you do
as far as editing the poems from the day you knew the book would be published
to its final proofing stage?
I think I probably went
through about two close readings that resulted in a few little tweaks here or
there. I had spent so much time
with it that I was largely satisfied, or at least, finished. The knowledge that
it would actually be published changed the editing process, but not as much as
I would have imagined. I lived with these poems for a really long time. I’ve
read almost all of them at readings at one time or another. The work I had left was basically
straightening ties, brushing dirt off shoulders, making sure they had their
lunches, and sending them off, trying not to worry too much and finally let
them be. I hope they aren’t
getting into knife fights or voting Republican.
What do you remember
about the day when you saw your published book for the first time?
It actually came at
night. I was walking to a bar in
downtown Columbia to have a few drinks with my friend Thomas when my wife
called and told me that my book had arrived. The bizarre thing is that at first, I felt like I’d just
have a look at it when I got home—I was already most of the way to the bar,
after all, and I am a ridiculous person.
Then, of course, the wise Camellia said, “Are you crazy? You’re not going to come look at your
book?” It is approximately at this
moment that I started walking back home.
Opening the box is a blur.
Looking at the cover and opening the book for the first time is a
blur. My wife’s smile watching me
be happy is one of the clearest images of that night. I’d had a chapbook
published by New Michigan Press a couple of years earlier, which I thought
would prepare me for this. It
didn’t, really. I could say I
carried it down to the bar or I could say it floated with me between my hand
and my eye as I went down to the bar and I couldn’t tell you which is truer or
more accurate. There’s nothing
quite like having a supportive and enthusiastic partner calling you home to the
lovely product of over a decade of labor, there’s nothing like having a
similarly enthusiastic friend who’s also a poet posted up in your favorite bar
to make an experience like seeing your book for the first time become realized
and elevated: I’m saturated with gratitude. Even today, if you see me walk down the street, you can
detect a slight limp. That’s from
gratitude.
How has your life been
different since your book came out?
What have you been doing to promote Fuse,
and what have those experiences been like for you?
It’s different in
degrees. The book itself offers
you a legitimacy of sorts in our niche community, however putative or imaginary
that legitimacy might be in terms of our larger culture, so having published a
book feels… a little different. On
the other hand, at this stage in American poetry culture, having a first book
doesn’t do too much to quantifiably change your life unless it’s one of those
collections that manages to receive a great deal of attention. As a poet whose collection has been
acknowledged very kindly here and there, but not on a scale that could be
called massive by most metrics, I feel like I can only hope that this is the
beginning of building a change in my life—a hot air balloonic rise into the
lower middle class, perhaps. It
has definitely played a role in broadening and diversifying my set of literary
friends and acquaintances, which I love, and this is where I talk about how I
promote the book, which means I talk about readings and give a casual nod to
social media:
Readings. Putting together readings that I’ve
been invited to or invited myself into or have otherwise just utterly lucked
into has been my biggest contribution to promoting Fuse, beyond Facebook (which has, of course, facilitated or helped
facilitate many of the readings in question). The readings have been pretty uniformly great, and each of
them has been very different. Over
the past year I did a few readings in Columbia, including an insanely fun book
co-launch with my friend Melissa, and then readings in St. Louis, Chicago,
Houston, Austin, Brooklyn, Lawrence, and Akron, all with dear friends or
acquaintances who are now friends.
All of those readings were good times for different reasons. One of the things I was thankful for
was the level of engagement at each venue, no matter what the size of the crowd
was. I hope that I’m right, and
that engagement tells me just how hungry pockets of us are in the culture to
chase meaning and significance.
I’m not claiming that my poems provide this, or are significant socially
or historically or spiritually, or whatever, but it is what I would like to do… and when I see people at readings who
talk to me afterward and ask me about the work or mention something they
thought was cool or weird, I feel not alone. For example, before the reading in Akron, I got to spend
like an hour and a half with the other writers I was reading with, a close
friend who made the drive up with me, and the awesome guys who put the whole
reading series together basically having one of the most hilarious, riff-filled
conversations of my life, and something
like this happened at each reading. I laughed a lot.
Short version: Huge,
shadow-punishing gifts, that’s been my experience.
If you struck up a
conversation next to someone seated on an airplane, and after a few minutes you
eventually told them that you were an author who had a book of poetry
published, how would you answer their next question: “What’s the book about?”
If I was in possession of
my faculties plus two drinks, I’d probably say that the book is about a speaker
trying to find a way to stitch as much of the vanishing, mutable world of
experience and imagination together into bursts and blurts of musical talk that
act for a reader/listener like batteries for empathy and excitement.
Actually, now that I’m
saying this, I have actually had this experience. My wife and I were waiting for a flight to New York (for a
poetry reading, as it happens) and trying to get something to eat in a crowded
airport bar. Eventually, we were
seated at the same four-top as a guy who, it turned out, was doing oversight
for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as they were struggling to recover from the
housing crash and the financial crisis.
At least, I think that’s what he was doing. He was pretty cagey about it, though in a perfectly nice
way. At any rate, he asked me what
kinds of poems were in the book. I
might have tried to explain for about five minutes, but it felt like thirty,
and I could just feel any interest just drain away like watching time lapse
photography of a campfire die down and disappear. I should probably just say it has fire engines in it, and
when there are no fire engines there is just fire. Also, one of the poems is about a salad, but not in the way
that you think.
What advice do you wish
someone had given you before your first book came out?
It’s advice I’m giving
myself and still failing to take: if you’ve got time and means in the year or
two before your first book comes out, be aggressive in finding places to read
and finding ways to get your book into the hands of those angels that write
about books in venues big and small.
We are all limited by time, money, circumstance, what-have-you, but find
a way to get out on the road, find a way to read your work out loud to people
who don’t know you.
What influence has the
book’s publication had on your subsequent writing? Are there any new projects
in the works?
Part of the happy
influence Fuse’s publication has had
on my subsequent writing is that I was encouraged to send more work to Black
Lawrence Press, and they decided to publish my second full-length
manuscript. Bewilderness is scheduled for publication in early 2014, and I’ve
spent a good part of the summer revising that and seeking blurbers, and looking
once more for covers, which is a not-entirely-terrible kind of harrowing. The other way that it’s influenced my
subsequent writing is interesting: on the one hand, it gives me more confidence
in the second manuscript I completed, Bewilderness,
and also in the third manuscript I have, Consolationeer. I tend to see these books as a loose
kind of trilogy, so the publication of the first (and the imminent publication
of the second) has given me the confidence that the third will be taken as
well. Having those projects
largely finished, gives me the terrifying and good impetus to try to do
something different, or at least to jump further out and get past my comfort
zone. It’s tough, as I adore being
comfortable.
Do you believe that
poetry can create change in the world?
Yep. I feel like poetry, at its best, can
make nothing actually happen, if I
may recklessly misread the famous Auden quote. It can hold fast to that which might otherwise slip from our
attention, our memory, our consciousness, our capacity to contain
multitudes. It can intensify our
relationship to the small and large things that make up this life and which
might otherwise be consigned to oblivion.
Enough will be consigned to oblivion, and certainly some of it should
be, but if we don’t manage to end humanity in the next hundred years, some kid
may stumble onto a poem, or a book of poems, that tethers her to the world and
sets her flying in a way she might only have feebly sensed before. How does she pivot back into life with
this new awareness? How does life
change because she has? Look,
poetry can’t save the world. I
don’t even know if people can, but if the world gets saved, it’s going to be by
the people who see and hear things in different ways, who see something where
everyone else saw nothing and who can make that something vivid and real. Poetry can be anything, and anything
can happen, and maybe it will.
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Marc McKee
received his MFA from the University of Houston and his PhD from the University
of Missouri in Columbia, where he lives with his wife, Camellia Cosgray.
Recent work appears in Sixth Finch, Jet Fuel Review, H_NGM_N, and Forklift, Ohio. New work is
forthcoming in Lumberyard and Barn Owl Review. He is the author of What Apocalypse?
(New Michigan Press, 2008), Fuse (Black Lawrence Press, 2011) and Bewilderness
(forthcoming, Black Lawrence Press, 2014).
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