The poet discusses Denis Johnson, Larry Levis, Coos Bay, and the obsessions behind his latest collection of poems, Early Hour.

TRANSCRIPTION

Ben Evans: I’m Ben Evans and you’re listening to Fogged Clarity. This morning I’m pleased to be speaking to one of my favorite poets working today, Michael McGriff is the author of four books of poetry and a collection of stories Our Secret Life in the Movies which he co-authored with J.M. Tyree. He also served as translator for Swedish poet and Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer’s collection of poems The Sorrow Gondola. McGriff’s latest book of poems Early Hour was released in August of last year and takes its name from a painting of the same name by German Expressionist Karl Hofer. He teaches in the Creative Writing program at the University of Idaho. Michael, thanks for taking the time…

I wonder if you could explain the marriage of influences behind your latest book, Early Hour; I’ve heard it referred to as a meditative sequence of Hofer’s painting, but then we find the “Black Postcard” poems in homage to Tranströmer interspersed throughout—this with all the poems seemingly situated in this landscape of an almost post-industrial Northwest that has for a long time served as your backdrop. Can you talk about the tonal similarities you found in the work of Hofer and Tranströmer and how you found their respective aesthetics to align with the mood and geography of the Northwest you grew up in?

Michael McGriff: That’s…I’ll try! I think the way–your question, I think, describes the book “aesthetically”, perfectly. It is a synthesis of the section of so-called “Black Postcard” poems that are an homage to Tranströmer and there’s all the poems that are directly engaging the painting “Early Hour”, which is the name of the book. Of course, all the landscape markers are my obsessive aesthetic images which are images of my hometown in the Pacific Northwest. But the book…I had all these things cooking anyway, but the book sparked into life when I was at the Portland Art Museum and I saw the painting “Early Hour”, by Karl Hofer who was a German Expressionist painter who I really had no knowledge about, but this painting kind of caught me dead in my tracks. The more I looked at it the more I was totally overwhelmed by it, and mostly because it seems, on first glimpse, to be a pretty ordinary European painting. You know, it’s a naked guy and a naked woman in bed and in repose; they’ve got a dog at their feet. There’s a landscape in the background. But there’s just something spooky about it, and the guy starts to look really deathly the more you look at him. You know, then you look on the placard: it was painted in 1935, the guy’s a German, and then all of history sort of triangulates the foreboding tones. So, I wrote in response to that painting for quite a while. Or at least it was in the back of my mind while I was writing.

BE: Early Hour (Hofer’s) seems concerned with probing that space that exists between the woken man and the sleeping woman–to those unfamiliar with the piece we’ll post it alongside this interview–the separateness despite the intimacy of the circumstance seems a tension that propels a lot of the poems, and some have called Early Hour a book about desire. Is desire a product of the ultimate unknowability of an other, even a lover? Do you think desire is the yearning to bridge that gap?

MM: Yeah, I do. I mean, the book kind of situates itself like you’re saying. It’s got the apostrophic address: the speaker of the book reaching out to this other, this lover, however you want to characterize her. But beyond that, I think, it’s that and that component of the self or however you want to think about it, as well. But I think you’re totally right. I love that about the painting. They’re so physically close together, those two figures, but they’re really in vastly different worlds at the same time.