Ask The Author: Gary McDowell

These Two Poems by Gary McDowell were in the January Issue. Read the wonderful poems and read this wonderful interview.

1. Why are poets so fascinated with autumn?

Fall.  The Fall.  Falling.  In love.  Out of love.  Darkness.  Leaves.  Leaving.  Squirrels burying nuts—I’ve always wondered, how do they find them later?  I mean, how do they find the ones they themselves buried?  Surely they could find someone’s buried acorn (maybe it’s olfactory?), but how do they know it’s one of their own?  It gets darker earlier in autumn, and so there’s time to research questions like this, and so we, poets, like the autumnal shift in light.  It’s harder to procrastinate when we can’t be out showing off our amazing athletic abilities like we do all summer.

For me it was this: “Their sons grow suicidally beautiful / At the beginning of October, / And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.”  Or maybe it was Wright’s other poem where at the end of summer, “in a field of sunlight between two pines,” as the butterfly slows down, the hammock swings softly, and the poet whispers, “I have wasted my life.”  Maybe James Wright is autumn like Plath is winter like Roethke is summer like Whitman is spring.  There’s the leaving, the already left feeling of autumn.  It’s the coming of cold that makes us cold, and poets like cold, vast, dark places.  I think.

2. How is loneliness solitude with a problem?

There’s a far too logical explanation for this.  It may be the least poetic thing in the whole poem, but in its ineptitude is its brilliant complexity (for what it’s worth, this is not my creation; it’s a line from a Matthew Zapruder poem).  So we turn to the dictionary.  Solitude: “The state or quality of being alone or remote from others.”  Loneliness: “Without companions; unfrequented by people.”  And so it seems to me that being alone or remote from others is a state brought upon by oneself, but being “without companions” or “unfrequented by people” feels more problematic or unintentional, as if the person without companionship didn’t make a conscious choice to be that way.  Like I said, simple.  Too simple.  But it felt like a brilliant distinction when I first came across it.

3. If you could deal something, what would it be?

Cards.  At a Blackjack table or a Poker table.  Somewhere without cameras and pit bosses.  I studied sleight-of-hand for years, paid my way through college working as a magician, and so I could clean up with bottom deals and phantom deals and other malassociated deviances.

4. What is your favorite cuss word?

I’m partial to the insertion of “fucking” into multi-syllabic words.  “Un-fucking-believable.”  “A-fucking-mazing.”  “Abso-fucking-lutely.”  Etc.  I also really dig “ricockulous.”  Seems just about right to me.

5. What would you wear as a cape?

I wouldn’t wear a cape.  IT seems to me that it’s just one more thing to leave behind at the scene of the crime/rescue.  I’ve always wondered how Batman or Superman or Robin or any other caped person hasn’t  caught their flowing cape in a closing door of one kind or another.  If you’re breaking the law or saving Lois Lane from the lawless, I say go naked, shave all your body hair, burn off your fingerprints.  Why leave anything to chance?  Prosecutors and their manic DNA machines are fucking crazy.

6. What does a perfect orange look like?

Like a Cutie.  I love those things.  They’re un-fucking-believable.