You've published your first collection at age 52. Explain if you would, your late start.

It would be nice if I could tell you I worked on the book for decades, but if you hear something like that, and then read the collection, you're going to be disappointed. I mean, we're talking about 29 poems— it's not The Divine Comedy, and despite the rewriting, I don't think it's a book in search of a voice. In that regard I'm happy. The truth is, I started writing in junior high school, and later I took workshops, I had my first poem published in Partisan Review when I was 23, but I didn't work in the academic world, and my education was and is autodidactic. My various employers didn't care whether or not I wrote poetry, if they even knew about it. There was no pressure to publish. Instead I spent a good deal of my adult life writing auction descriptions for various philatelic houses: stamps, postal history, and later, autographs, historical manuscripts, photographs. That was my career. I actually got fairly good at it, but this had no connection with poetry. I didn't keep that part of me alive the way I should have. Sure, every few years I'd take a workshop, usually at the 92nd St. Y in Manhattan, and I'd tell myself I was serious, for ten weeks anyway, but I had no idea what serious truly meant. There was also an attempt at a novel, and many periods when I didn't write, couldn't write. Sometimes the job was to blame— with auctions you're always writing with a deadline, but if I'd truly wanted it, I would have found a way around the long hours. And unfortunately there was always time for misbehavior, for being a fuck-up.

But at some point, didn't you decide to stick with it?

Every time I went back to poetry, I thought I detected an improvement. Maybe I was deluding myself, but there was some people who seemed to agree with the first assessment. When I started sending things out again in the early 1990s, I was embarrassed to mention that my last publication was almost two decades earlier. I felt like a lapsed Catholic who has returned. You know: "Father, it's been 17 years since my last confession," and there's this audible intake of breath on the other side of the screen. But  The New Yorker shocked me by taking a poem, and over the years Alice Quinn has been supportive. Peter Stitt at The Gettysburg Review was very generous to a complete unknown. By 1997 I had enough poems for a small book, so I started sending out Everyone Coming Toward You. Then in 2000, my father who had Alzheimers, passed away, and the same year my companion and best friend Margaret Reisner died very suddenly. After that, all my energies when into poetry. The manuscript didn't get any longer, but I think it grew darker. Certain poems were heavily reworked. By the time Campbell McGrath picked it for Tupelo in 2003, I already had enough new poems to keep me busy, so now a second collection is about done. As I said to someone in a letter, I feel like I haven't quite caught up to the present, but this first book will do for now.

Your collection of poems, Everyone Coming Toward You, was chosen by Campbell McGrath in the Tupelo Press contest. I know a lot of writers who are preparing their own first manuscripts for publication. Can you talk about how you organized the poems? Was "order" an element of the book that you spent a lot of time on? Why did you choose Father "Listens To The Artists" as the book's first poem?

If the manuscript which existed in, say, 1997, had been accepted in 1997, I would have to admit that the order of the poems didn't go too much beyond trusting in happenstance. But each time I sent out the book somewhere, I'd immediately have huge regrets and start reordering, rewriting, and ultimately tossing out some poems while adding new ones. So very gradually the organization became central. I mean, if you're handling poems this way long enough, anybody's poems really, after awhile you feel like you're trying to get to the bottom of some ever widening field theory. Even the sequence in the middle, "Afternoon Soaps," came much later, and was more serendipity than anything else at first, just having everything spread out on a table and realizing a number of poems arranged in couplets happen to take place in the afternoon. But once I had that section, or at least a crude version of it, the poems outside it took on a different significance, and I started thinking in terms of 3 acts, 3 movements, divisions in the day, anything to get me to believe there could be an over-all shape to the book, which in the end there was, or at least I feel there is. So, yes, a lot of time and thought went into shaping it, even if accident and luck are present right up to the end. Or to put it another way, and to answer the rest of your question, it's nice that the first poem in the first section gets things off to a confident start, and the narrator happens to be the youngest he will ever be, but the poet notices certain motifs, certain themes have been introduced, and even the very last poem echoes parts of the first poem, and suddenly you can't remember if you worked that out all by yourself or if someone left it under your pillow.

Your collection, in part, is focused on the narrative poem. It seems in recent years the narrative has fallen out of popularity in some circles. Why do you think this is? Why is the narrative poem still important to poetry?

Story-telling is so natural for many people, so much a part of everyday life, I never thought of it as gaining or losing popularity. Sometimes you'll hear someone, when they talk about a novel or a film, they'll say, "I need story," especially if it fails on that level, almost as though they were being nutritionally deprived. When I was in writing workshops, there were always a couple of people who felt narrative was out of place in poems— "Why don't you just write short stories?"— that kind of criticism. And there has always been experimental writing, whether it's prose or poetry, that eschews story-telling as too linear, too old-fashioned, too accessible, and there are always magazines and small presses which will support that contention. And that makes some people happy, and that's fine. On the other hand, there's no "School of American Narrative," no anthologies devoted exclusively to story-driven poems, and that's fine too, because it means you don't have to get defensive, you don't need to ban together to confront some public misconception or indifference.

I would describe your collection as autobiographical but not as "confessional." What's the distinction for you between the two?

I think of confessional poetry as something very private being set down on paper, and perhaps made public, the poet exorcising his or her demons, and I don't think of my own poems that way, and I don't think I ever will. I don't see these poems as on-going chapters in a life either. But if some reader perceives a poem of mine as sounding and feeling that way, I won't protest. At some level, autobiography— that "this really happened" element, enters into the poem somewhere, it has to, no matter what the poem is "about." And there's always the argument that when you write a poem, consider it finished, and later it's printed somewhere, its very presence is saying: This happened.

Tell me a little about how “Her Every No” came to be written.

That was in response to a friend I knew who was prone to clinical depression as she entered her thirties. The opening lines were just something said in conversation and recalled later on. The first draft is from around 1990, and I just found myself going back to it over the years. Even though the basic idea stuck around, it grew simpler, the observer became a few degrees cooler. But the real situation was far less neat. This was someone who periodically stopped working, stopped bathing, stopped putting on clothes even to answer the door, all of which is certainly more extreme than anything in the poem, but which at one time or another was in the poem, though sometimes over-the-top translates to just that— over-the-top, even if it really happened.

Reading your poems, I get the feeling that they are actual events in your life. This can be a mistake though, assuming a poem is a recreation of an actual event. How much of your poems are usually true to the facts? What’s typically more difficult to articulate, actuality or the fictional parts?

Some of my poems are autobiographical in the sense that they're about me and don't really stray from the facts, but others I think become autobiographical by virtue of being with me so long and going through so many changes, on and off the page. In a poem like "Show & Tell," it was meant to be make-believe, but over the years I arrived at something that could be called the illusion of autobiography which meant that I forgot I didn't really have a grandfather who was a semi-professional magician. And I never, as far as I know, touched Jackson Pollock's hand, as I say I did in "Father Listens to the Artists." But Nicholas Carone, who is also in the poem, really was a good friend of my father's, and Nick was close to Pollock in the last two years of his life. Whether my father actually met Pollock, I can't say. After I wrote a first draft of the poem I bought Naifeh and Smith's superb biography of Pollock, because of the extensive interviews they did with Nick. By the way, even though I don't know him and don't really remember him, I find myself saying "Nick" rather than Mr. Carone or Nicholas, because that's how my father referred to him. One nice surprise with the biography was a story where Pollock was babysitting, and how he enjoyed the experience, seemed to enjoy the responsibility in a way that had nothing to do with my image of Pollock as wild man. So when I read that I decided maybe my instincts here were O.K., even though the poem, though I didn't know it then, was a few years from being finished. By the way, since we're talking about facts, Nick Carone is still around and working in Italy.

But as regards the rest of your question, it's hard to say what's easier to do, the actual or the fictional. Sometimes the facts are messy or complicated, they get in the way. A person who's hopeless at telling a story, whether he or she is talking to a friend or a group of people, will almost always bog down in footnotes and backtracking. I know someone who has the habit of stopping himself in mid sentence, rolling his eyes back like he's having a seizure, all to recall something trivial: he's absolutely convinced the story can't go on until he clears up, let's say whether it was 1975 or 1974, and he'll go back and forth for 30 seconds arguing with himself, weighing the evidence. But obviously creating fiction is also work, if you're in the business of making people believe you. A poem like "Sunrise Escorts" comes to mind as something that falls somewhere in the middle. I never drove a car at the behest of a service, but I did drive for a friend who was a call girl and had me write an ad and bring camera-ready copy down to the offices of Screw, the sex magazine. For two years we lived together, drove all over the metropolitan area and had some very interesting adventures and misadventures. Now, almost none of that got into the poem, and it didn't have to. The poem was conceived pretty much from the beginning as being a kind of short story in verse. I like that in memory it feels a great deal longer than 45 lines. Even though it went through a lot of rewrites, it was always a rather short poem. One thing I should point out, to give proper credit, is that the title came from Nicholas Christopher, who conducted several workshops I was in. He hated the original title, "The Driver" —"Come on, you can think of something better than that!" He suggested "The Sunrise Escort Service" and later on I just shortened it, but obviously he was on the right track and I was being lazy and ho hum with "The Driver."

Who has been your biggest influence? What techniques did you learn from this person? What weaknesses in their writing did you also learn from and how have you tried to avoid them?

I would have to say Philip Levine and John Cheever, two very different writers certainly, but both great storytellers. I know I've absorbed certain rhythms, certain attitudes. If you're lucky, the things you respond to are the good things, and what you don't respond to you shouldn't respond to anyway, either because it's simply bad writing or it's something that isn't meant to be part of you, and would only infect or weaken the soul of your own work. But there's the flip side to what you love, and in Cheever you can get these mid-20th Century eccentrics that appear at times to be more willed than plausible, or a narrator who is a little too pleased with being a narrator. And with Levine, in some poems there's a drifting towards a heart and flowers resolve I don't respond to, or the last lines feel self-consciously solemn. On the other hand, he has these interesting ways of addressing the reader in order to include him or her in the experience of the poem, but that's something I also resist, not as a reader, but as someone with theft on his mind.

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You are reading Volume 20, Issue 1. A Menendez Publication.