ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com
Poetic Profile
Garin Cycholl
General Questions
1. Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?
I grew up on the northern edge of southern Illinois, a town of 5000 called Flora. As a kid, I read a lot of history and geography, particularly stuff on the American Civil War, Latin America, and World War I---trying to connect my great grandfather’s experience in a balloon over the eastern front to my own sense of place.
2. Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?
The strongest influences have come from the poets that I studied with in Chicago---Michael Anania and Sterling Plumpp, both of whom pushed me to rethink the play between language and place. Of course, Charles Olson is always around my work, the pieces in Maximus and the overturned prose. In the writing of “Blue Mound to 161,” C.S. Giscombe’s “Here” gave me a guiding impulse. More recently, I’ve been hanging around Clayton Eshleman’s most recent book, Juniper Fuse, as well as work by Chicago photographers Irene Siegel and the late Art Sinsabaugh. Irene has been working with translocating gardens, rethinking them through Virgil’s Georgics. I’m constantly amazed by how Sinsabaugh’s Midwestern and Chicago Landscapes force the viewer to revision the prairie.
3. When did you 'become' a poet? When did poetry become part of your everyday life?
I’ve always been a half-assed rhetorician---playing around with language. Poetry provided the kind of density of experience that made sense of life; it provided the vehicle for exploring two places at once. Like listening to Fred Anderson. Probably the reason that I can’t write anymore without thinking about jazz.
4. Where were you educated? Was this important?
I went to college at the University of Miami as a way of escaping the Midwest at that point. I did my masters’ work in phenomenology of religion and homiletics at Yale University, and my doctoral work in poetry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Important, but certainly no more so than coffee with friends and artists who have been so generous with me.
5. Your poetry is like William Faulkner meets Mark Twain meets Ezra Pound meets Francis Ponge what do you hope to do with work that is so multi-leveled and faceted?
As I noted above, I work to be in two places at once. The ancient Mississippi and the rocks that currently look down over it. The swamps along Lake Michigan and the bases of buildings along the Lake Shore. Hopefully, this recovers the memory that’s been forgotten there, recovering the story in song, its deadly serious play.
6) What is your favorite food?
Any kind of seafood that’s been rolled in butter, garlic or some kind of red sauce.
7) Sports team or Activity?
I’ve followed baseball as far as my memory goes back, the St. Louis Cardinals in particular. I grew up watching Lou Brock, Joe Torre, and Bob Gibson. Unfortunately, my memory is missing Curt Flood.
8) Vacation spot.
New Orleans. Under the United States flag from 1815 to the present, according to the riverfront plaque.
9) Curse word.
Horseshit.
10) Very few poets are also believers of any type and you are a minister does spirituality effect your writing?
It’s backwards, I think. I’m aware of poets who look for theological underpinnings in language. My joy comes in the inductive movements people make with texts---it’s difficult for me to distinguish the difference between what I do in sitting down with people around books. The history comes in backwards. Plus, the pulpit gives me the opportunity to get up once a week and say what’s on my mind, although it’s always in the context of texts and the memory (or denial) of those around me.
Craft Questions
1) How do you form a poem? Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?
Every poem seems to “blow up” on me, although I’ve been thinking about this question recently in the play between lyric and epic impulses here. Both seem necessary to take on the space we encounter in the Americas. The stuff remembered, dreamed, whispered, scrawled, etc.
2) Where do you write? Is ambience important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?
Between classes. In the margins of notebooks. On the backs of other books. To other poets.
3) In the balance between found language and created language where does you work fall?
Charles Boer noted this impulse called the “annalic” where the poem invests local things with epic weight. Giscombe does this in looking at the side of the boxcar, “LOOK AHEAD—LOOK SOUTH.” I hope that “Blue Mound to 161” does this with the lives of the miners. All poetry seems to invest found language with a certain gravity. I love those descriptions of local geographical features that take on a transcendent, yet playful wisdom of their own. I don’t know that there’s any other way to make sense of the Americas.
.
