Pen Pal: An Interview with Michael Wurster

I went to the South Side Presbyterian Church Coffeehouse to see Michael Wurster read. Mr. Wurster leaned into the mic to a full house, and the people leaned in. The church was everything I wanted it to be: friends, great acoustics, and a top-notch performance. I am so amazed with Mr. Wurster and his work. His work is so vivid to me. Some poems are just a photo, some a series of photos, others are: the blues, rainstorms, flowers, gritty bar fights. There are several works that are oil on my hands and no matter how many times I wash my hands, I cannot get the oil off.

Mr. Wurster wore a dark blue blazer and light-blue collared shirt. He reminded me of the sky on a sunny day; the brown wood paneled walls behind him reminded me of the ground. His words spoken lay where the sky meets the earth.

A number of years ago, I was looking for a poetry workshop that would help critique my works. I found the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange on the internet. At the time, the group met at the Borders bookstore in East Liberty. There was no email listed on the website, so I phoned the number and I spoke with Mr. Wurster. I went to my first workshop and was so nervous. I read my work and received so much positive feedback, it was a bit overwhelming. I felt accepted even though my work did not fit the regular mold. Mr. Wurster re-read a line out loud from my work and said the line was trite. Well, I had no idea what trite was; I was thinking to myself, “My stuff is not trite!” So, of course, when I got home I looked up the word “trite.” I heard that same saying three times in the following week. The line came out.

I went back the next month and I think the thing that has always stood out to me was, Mr. Wurster remembered my name. Maya Angelou once said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.Mr. Wurster, even if I were to forget your name, I will never forget the way that felt. I still attend the workshop and am still nervous. It’s funny; though I have spoken in front of very big venues in many different places over many years, this workshop is where I am the most nervous, even to this day. There are so many well accomplished and fine writers in the group, it is a bit intimidating.

Michael starts out each meeting to put everyone at ease. We operate as equals, regardless if we are new writers or are seasoned; the critique is meant to be a help and not as an attack. I listen so intently to everyone’s inputs to everyone’s work. The feedback given during the workshop could be for or even against a stanza break, sentence, word, spelling or even the use or lack of a period.

I bring home everyone’s copies of their work that have been presented and passed out. For the weeks after the meeting I review the feedback, look up words, research poets (and movies and songs) and rely on my wife for definitions. If there is ever a place for a free education, it is with The Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange. I have always steered away from education for fear of a group-think mentality, but this group is geared towards freethinking. It is for the artist, though spelling counts.

Michael and other members often speak of poems and poets, songs and singers, actors and movies. Michael speaks of everyone, family, friends, and even enemies as being famous. I think that is what resonated with me at that second workshop: he makes people feel like celebrities. Michael is a founding member of the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange and for me, he is the reason this workshop has been and will continue to be such a great success.

I was once asked, if you could interview anyone, who would that be. I asked Mr. Wurster and he agreed. I met Michael on November 9 at Drew’s Restaurant for breakfast. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mr. Michael Wurster to the stage—and the crowd goes wild.

He starts by reading “Landscape with Gravestones” from his newest book, The British Detective. The poem is from a photograph by Sue Cuenca.

Michael Wurster (M): Rich Hurst taught at the Center for the Arts at the same time I did and we did a project with his class where we each took one of his student’s photographs and wrote a poem from it. That's the poem I wrote from a photograph by his student Sue Cuenca, and she was really thrilled that I wrote that poem. Now, Joe Karasek was in a class I was teaching—do you know Joe?

Edward Murray (E): Yes, I know Joe.

M: So anyway, Joe wrote a poem from a photograph by a woman who was a photographer who shortly thereafter went to Italy for some reason. I think she was going to a photography conference. She was so thrilled with this poem that Joe had written, well, she took it with her and it winded up being translated in Italian and published in a magazine over there. So Joe was thrilled too; he was happy about that.

He is a wonderful person and a wonderful poet. The first time I met Joe was at a reading at some sort of shop in Shadyside ran by a woman named Lily Chang, a Chinese woman. Joe was studying with Ellen Smith. I had never met him; he had his laptop in his lap like he was working on that, he seemed like a real wiseguy to me when I first met him. Then he took my class and we became close friends. He is a great guy.

E: We were just talking about photographs and we were talking about Joe—a lot of his works are very photographic to me as well. Please know I am not asking you directly, I am not exactly asking you to describe who Edgar [a character mentioned in some of Wurster’s poems] is, but kind of your relationship with him, what is your relationship with Edgar? Do you find that you are more like Edgar, you relate to him, are you his friend, the photographer. Your work with Edgar is very striking to me.

M: Well, Edgar was a con man and a junkie. When I lived in Shadyside, in the ’60s, I knew a lot of drug addicts. Because through my friend Flash, who I went to college with, I knew PL, and PL of course became a heroin addict and had lots of friends. Edgar also claimed be a musician. He carried a trumpet case—the trumpet in the poem (“Edgar’s Trumpet Case,” from The Snake Charmer’s Daughter).

He toured with Dodo Mamarosa [American bebop pianist]; he was a great jazz pianist from Pittsburgh. He was recorded a lot on the West Coast. They called Edgar “Tubby,” but he was not Tubby when I knew him. When Dodo went to Illinois to play, Edgar went along, and Edgar told me he played drums in that group and also sold shoes. So anyway, some years later I bought a CD by Dodo Mamarosa that had been recorded at the Midway lounge in Pittsburgh and had extensive liner notes, and in the liner notes Dodo reminisced about going to Illinois and he mentioned Edgar. Edgar was sort of the band boy but he worked at a shoe store, so whenever they got short on money for drugs, Edgar always had some money because he was always getting wages where the rest of them had to depend on the money they got paid for music.

I remember once — my first wife was sort of this character, and she took off. I think she went to New York or something and I was using her car at the time. I had not bought my own car and I needed it for work and her car was gone. So I am looking out the window and about an hour after I had discovered that the car was gone, I see Edgar pull up with a bunch of black guys in the car and they all got out and scattered. I ran downstairs; Edgar had stolen her car to go out and buy drugs.

Which poems about Edgar have you read?

E: I have read “Edgar’s Trumpet Case” and “Edgar the Painter” from The Snake Charmer’s Daughter.

M: There is another one where Edgar dies, when he died. He died of an overdose.

E: Oh, so he has passed away?

M: Oh, a long time ago. They put his body in the backseat of his car, they drove to Shadyside Hospital outside emergency room. They parked the car and went to a nearby pay phone to call the hospital. They said, you have a dead man outside in the back seat of a such and such type of car.

E: And he had already passed away at that time?

M: Yes, yes, he had.

E: And those were his friends that dropped him off?

M: Associates.

E: Was he a poet as well, or he just happened to be part of the scene?

M: See, I had always been involved with artistic people and the jazz scene. Edgar had been part of the jazz scene even though the trumpet that he had in that trumpet case in the poem the brand of trumpet was Conn. Coincidentally enough, the trumpet actually belonged to Danny Conn a local trumpet player, so he was an acquaintance. Edgar played drums a little bit, but he wasn’t really an accomplished musician. I don’t think most people liked him much. When you met him you were sort of impressed by him because he had a lot of experience, because he traveled and he had been around musicians. Pretty bright guy, but after you got to know him, with those people, it is all drugs, that is what they look for. And Edgar would get tiresome.

E: So you were good friends with him?

M: Well, we were sort of friends at that time, because we were living on Filbert Street in Shadyside and he hung out in Shadyside.

E: So you guys kind of met at the music level—that is where you intersected?

M: Yeah, I didn’t really start getting deeply involved with the poetry community until 1970. In the 1960s I was around a lot of jazz musicians, folk musicians, hung out in places like the Pizza Pub, the Loaves and Fishes (which is a coffeehouse), and things like that.

I wasn’t writing a lot then because I was in a very difficult marriage, so I was telling myself I was going to write poems but I did not. But after Shelly and I split up in 1970, what happened was, she inherited some property near Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. She took the kids there for the summer of ’69. That’s when I rededicated myself to poetry. It was 1970 that Shelly and I split up.

We split up on March 1st and then on May 20th I met Suzy, who was a blues musician. She became my second wife and through her I got to know more musicians and some poets. Lloyd Johnson, who is one of the founders of Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange, was hanging around Shadyside at the time writing poems and Suzy had gone to Pitt with a guy named Keith Milton. Keith went off to Boston and got an MFA. Keith was the one who is responsible for the workshop at the Northland Public Library that I was talking about the other night. Suzy and I had the occasion to manage the coffeehouse at the Lutheran University Center. She was running the kitchen and I was doing entertainment, so I put out a call for poets and that is how I met Dieter Weslowski and some of the other poets—August Wilson, Jerry Rhodes, and people like that.

E: So with Edgar, was he around for your first wife then or more your second wife?

M: First wife.

E: You had mentioned that you went back to poetry, have you written your entire life?

M: I started writing when I was four. I wrote sporadically all through my youth. When I went to college at Dickinson, I was the coeditor of the literary magazine. I did the poetry and my friend Rosenstein did the prose. I met a very smart woman named Kathy Rader who pulled it all together; she was the managing editor. So a lot of the people in my poems are characters I knew. And the reason they have poems about them is because they are different. I have never known anyone like Edgar; even other junkies were not like him. So the business with the trumpet: he used to always carry drugs in that trumpet case. We were sitting across the street when they busted him. Then he opens the trumpet case and there are no drugs; there is a trumpet. We just did not know what to do. The cops had to apologize and let him go.

E: So do you relate more to obscure type characters that you write about?

M: I like interesting people. You’re an interesting person.

E: Thank you.

M: I haven’t written a poem about you, but you’re interesting person. Sometimes I make people more interesting than they are. One of things that Richard Dillon, my ex-friend, resented about me was he didn’t like being mythologized, and he was just such a great character for mythmaking. Whereas Ziggy, for instance, enjoys being mythologized. So she is cool.

E: Do you enjoy it as well?

M: Making myths?

E: Being mythologized?

M: I am not one way or the other about it.

E: Do you find yourself an interesting character?

M: I guess I have a drive to be mythic, though I wouldn’t admit that, because that would mean I was an egotist.

E: Is it more of a humble aspect, like I really enjoy the attention?

M: Yeah. I think I am an interesting person. To some people I am much more unusual; where I live is normal for me but for other people it is very different. I live alone, I have an apartment full of books and CDs, I have no television set. I have two cats.

E: How are the cats?

M: They’re great.

E: What were their names again?

M: Dexter, after Dexter Gordon and Smoky because she looks that way—she is black and silver gray. They are Savannahs.

E: Is there a particular reason for cats, why cats? I know of Hawthorne and know you had many other cats as well.

M: Well, I like dogs, but I don’t think you can have dogs in the city. They take a lot of care. Cats are easier then dogs. I have always had cats, since I was 12. I love cats. I have always had Siamese cats, at least since 1970. This is the first time I’ve had a different breed. There were not any Siamese available. I like these cats; they are beautiful.

E: One thing I found remarkable was, in the book in care of Christine Telfer, “The Exchange, volume 1 issue 1, March 1995,” the poem, “The Red Coach”. In your other works you capture the cat in a very endearing way and in “The Red Coach,” the cat has a little bit more of a twist in that one. The cat is a friend of the enemy.

M: The enemy is not necessarily evil in this poem. He may be, he may not be—but he definitely has a cat.

E: How can an enemy not be evil?

M: Well, people may think they are your enemy and that does not mean that they are evil. Richard, I guess, might think that he was my enemy, but I don’t think he was a bad guy. I love Richard. I did find him an impossible friend. Dieter Weslowski, at one time, was the bad boy of Pittsburgh poetry. I guess could be called my enemy. Dieter is troubled but he is not a bad guy. Death, death is the enemy. Is death good or evil? No, death is neutral. Death is only evil depending upon your attitude towards death. In this particular poem, the enemy is not necessarily evil but he’s your adversary. Maybe I should have used the term adversary instead.

E: I think it is great; I was not insinuating that at all, I find it striking that a friend of my enemy is still my enemy and this cat is a friend of the enemy, so…

M: If you remember Edgar Allen Poe, there are always a lot of cats in his writing, and that is sort of true of me as well. Somebody said there are lots of birds in my poems; the difference is the cats are real cats, whereas the birds are of nature rather than birds that I know.

E: So would you characterize this cat of the enemy more of an endearing one as well?

M: No, he is just a cat of death. He is just a cat.

E: Have you come across an impossible cat yet?

M: Probably, but I do not remember him. These cats I have now are kind of wild. They have really gotten to like me, but to them playing means scratching and biting. Now once I have them spayed and neutered, I am hoping that will taper this off. Their claws are really sharp. They are getting their booster shots on Thursday; I am going to have them trim the nails. I usually do that myself but these two kittens are a little too wild to do that yet.

See what happens, Edward, is that for the most part these poems come to me individually. If you put them all together, and altogether we’re talking over 700 poems, if you put them all together you see that there are consistencies and there are narratives, things are learned, things are revisited. So the poems, for the most part, are related to the larger work but they are not written that way; they are written as individual poems.

E: So with your work, and starting to write when you are 4 years old, I have got to ask, why poetry? Why that specific outlet?

M: When I started reading, and when they would read to me, I looked at the page and I learned how to read from that. A lot of what I read was very poetic. Grimm, Andersen, Lang and the Greek myths, the Arthurian legends, Robin Hood. Very poetic, though much of it was prose. When I was real young I probably wrote more prose then poetry. The first poem that really hit me as a poem was “The Highwayman,” by Alfred Noyes, which was later made into a movie with George Montgomery. I love the movie. My first published work was in 1954 and I was 14: I had two stories published in the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star.

E: Where is Fredericksburg?

M: Virginia. One was a Thanksgiving story and the other was a Christmas story. They were not particularly good. I guess for 14-year-old they were pretty good, but I just sort of moved towards poetry for two reasons: it seemed to speak more to me and also when I write prose I pretty much know what I am going to say ahead of time. Writing a poem is always an act of discovery. I do not know what is going to happen until it happens. Writing prose actually kind of bores me.

That is why I like an interview, because people say, “Well you ought to write all this type of stuff down. It is tedious for me to do that, but I enjoy talking about it, so being interviewed is like an easy way out for me.

E: So you are from Moline, Illinois?

M: Born in Moline, I lived in Clinton, Iowa from ’41 to ’52 except for a year or so in the Washington area during World War II.

E: Washington State?

M: DC. My father taught cannoneering at Annapolis; he was in the Navy. My mother worked on the atom bomb with Vanever Bush at John Hopkins. They took me along. I spent part of that time in foster homes. My dad had a nervous breakdown and was in St. Elizabeth’s; my mother was working. Then in ’52 we moved from Iowa to the Fredericksburg, Virginia area. Then in ’55 we moved to the Philadelphia area in the Media area. I went to high school in Media, went to Dickinson College, and moved to Pittsburgh in 1964.

E: And in ’64 you were in your mid-20s?

M: I was 24, not yet 24.

E: And did your parents move along too, or did they stay stationary on one of those stops?

M: They stayed in Media. I started selling encyclopedias as a summer job when I was in college and when I graduated from Dickinson as an English major, I would have gone to work for Proctor and Gamble at a $75-a-week salary. I was already making twice that selling encyclopedias. It made no sense for me to do anything else. I stayed with the book business and I was working in Harrisburg. I was bored to death; there was not much going on there. I got a chance to move out of Harrisburg in ’64 and I had a choice between Pittsburgh and Towson, Maryland. I knew more people in Pittsburgh so I came here, not necessarily expecting to stay, but I did and Pittsburgh's been very good to me. One of the things I realized was, sales involved long hours, which changed one week to the next. You could not turn it on and off. You had to be a certain type of person. It just did not go with being a poet. In ’71 I left that and I put in applications in teaching, journalism, and social services. I was hired by the Welfare Department as a caseworker because I had minored in economics. That gave me 12+ credits in what they considered the social sciences.

E: In the caseworking, did you get to see a lot of pretty down and out cases?

M: Oh yeah.

E: Did some of that influence your work as well?

M: No, I have only written one or two poems based on that.

E: So it was more of a job or income?

M: Well eventually I got into employment training aspects, which was better, as I was actually helping people not just giving them money. There was not much extraordinary about the welfare job. It was what you would imagine it to be.

If you know my poem, “Death of a Caseworker” [from The Cruelty of the Desert], one year I did a big reading at the Three Rivers Arts Festival. And I was up on stage—the big stage, with a huge Iron City beer poster and a grand piano and microphone. My district director was a very distinguished African-American gentleman named James Addis, very high-class person, saw me read that poem and afterwards he came up to me and he said, “Well, Mr. Wurster, now we know what you think of your job.” [We both get a good laugh out of this]. He was a good guy; he is still alive.

E: Is he, you guys still in touch?

M: He was married to a woman named Maddie, who ran the social work program at Pitt for some years. She had died and even though he has since remarried, every year in the Post-Gazette there is an in memoriam on the anniversary of her death from Mr. Addis and his son Benji memorializing her. He is in touch with some people that work with us, but not me; we were never close.

E: “Death of a Caseworker” reminds me very much of a Carl Sandburg poem “Mill Doors,” and I love that work and I love “Death of a Caseworker” as well. So was there a—not necessarily Carl Sandburg, but a poet that was a mainstay for you that had some influence on you?

M: I had to write something about that job. I wrote several poems; that is the best one. I have read Sandberg. My parents went to Cornell College in Iowa. My mother was part of the bohemian crowd. Carl Sandburg was there; he was at Cornell at the time and my mother and her friends used to go over to his apartment once or twice a week. They would drink wine and he would play the banjo and sing his poems. So he was one of the poets that I came up with. I have probably read everything that he wrote except for the Abraham Lincoln books, because there were so many of those but I read most of his stuff before I was 10.

E: Do you think it stayed with you then?

M: My two main influences are Constantine Cavafy, a Greek poet, and Robert Duncan, an American poet. Cavafy for his restraint and erudition and Duncan for his erudition and passion—though many, many, many poets have influenced me: Rilke, James Wright, a lot of them—but those two would be the main ones.

E: That is very cool to hear about Carl Sandburg. When you were in Philadelphia and Harrisburg, did you get into any Walt Whitman?

M: I always liked Whitman. A big moment in my life was when I traded my edition of Walt Whitman to Alan Davis for Wallace Stevens Selected Poems. That was like a step forward poetically. Whitman wrote a certain kind of poem that was appropriate for his time, as an avant-garde poet. But Stevens came much later, 60 years later, and he was, of his time, an avant-garde poet, and they were each the best, or among the best of their time. Trading Whitman for Stevens was like moving from 1865 to 1925. See what happens, Ed, if you’re reading Stevens for instance, reading all these poets, you are not going to necessarily write like them but it gives you an idea for what the possibilities are, and that you can do these things. I consider myself a late modernist. If it had not been for the language poets there are things that I do that I would have never been able to do, because by falling off the page of what is acceptable in poetry, they showed me that I can do things I might not have done otherwise in terms of poetics. Among other things, write poems that sometimes don’t seem to make any sense. Because the language poets make much less sense than I do most of the time.

E: So do you appreciate all of the things that people bring to the table?

M: I do not necessarily like it all, but I appreciate it.

E: We talked about the movie based on the previous poem; would you classify that as your favorite movie?

M: I have a poem that is influenced by a movie. “In North Texas,” [from The Snake Charmer’s Daughter]. I will read it if you can guess what movie it is.

[Michael reads the poem]

Do you know what movie that is paying tribute to?

E: Initially I thought it would be a Clint Eastwood movie, though I cannot place it.

M: The Wild Bunch—and one of the things that interests me about that poem, is that this is obviously a person who rode with that gang, and his memory may not be where it should be. There is nobody in the movie named Barney. Both Ernest Borgnine and —I forget his name, his name is escaping me right now—play characters that could be named Barney but they are not. So I wanted to present a guy who is older, maybe 70 or 80, memory’s not perfect, some journalist is there, coming out every so often to take his story down. I thought that was interesting.

The Wild Bunch is my favorite movie. My second favorite is Last Man Standing with Bruce Willis, and Christopher Walken. My third favorite Bergman's The Seventh Seal. The Seventh Seal is about a knight returning from the Crusades. The knight is played by Max von Sydow. Death shows up and says, “It is time for you.” The knight says no, I want to get home and see my family. So they agree to play game of chess and if the knight wins, he does not have to die, and if Death wins, Death will take him. They have various adventures along the way and they pick up various people who are also traveling, members of a carnival troupe. This is in the Middle Ages, there is a squire played by Erland Josephson. So what he does, the knight uses tactics to delay the game; at one time he clumsily knocks a couple of the pieces off the board. He loses the game of course, but by the time he loses he is back home with his family and the last image of the movie is these people, the knight, his wife, his child, the troupe from the carnival, the squire and a couple others, they are holding hands and Death is leading them, just beautiful.

E: Each one of those movies and stories deal with death as well?

M: Death, stoicism, and doing things right.

E: Have you always had a feeling towards death?

M: Well if you read a lot, I was in a dysfunctional family, in fact I wanted to die at the time and not be there. A lot of literature had to do with death. A great classic, The Death of Arthur, even though that Arthur does not die until the end, but that is what it’s all leading to. Fairy tales, great Greek myths, so I guess it has been a subject for me.

E: In your works is it more or less a documentarian perspective, watching and documenting?

M: It is not about that, it’s about the new technology, what was new then. We always have this idea that we want privacy, and at the time, of course now with YouTube and everything there is no privacy, but at the time I saw society moving in that direction, where everybody will be taking pictures and videos of you.

E: Like Big Brother is always watching you?

M: Not just Big Brother but the person next door or people down the street. If you look at the incident in Steubenville, those boys raped that girl. But they not only raped her, they took a video of it and put it on YouTube. It was bad enough for the girl to be raped but they had to share it with everybody else, so that was a concern of that poem, seeing myself as someone documenting someone else's life and not making them uncomfortable.

That was inspired by the performance artist named Vito Acconci. He lived in New York. He would leave his home in the morning. He would pick someone on the street at random, he would follow them around and keep a record of what they did and take pictures of them. They never saw him. He would publish the results of his investigation. He wouldn’t name the people he was following. He did not know their names; it was like a nine-to-five job. He would pick somebody out at random at nine o'clock and follow them until five and leave. In New York, of course, there are a lot of people who do not work regular hours so it was not like somebody went to an office and he went and sat in their waiting room. The one that I am familiar with was somebody who had gone to a movie and he sat a few rows behind the guy.

E: A lot of your work speaks to violins and pianos. So much music in your work, does that speak to you?

M: I love music; I listen to it all the time. Very jazz oriented. I went to a great concert Friday night. Two groups: Buster Williams, a great bass player; and a saxophonist named Sonny Fortune at the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild, which is a really good place for music. Not a bad seat in the house.

One of the things that happened, Ed, when we moved to the Philadelphia area, we were living in Media, we weren’t really in Media, we were in Upper Providence Township. It was the suburbs and I thought it was very un-authentic. These people were not meeting authentic qualities; they insisted everything was fine but seemed to be living in fear. They were afraid of losing their jobs. So one of the things I decided, right or wrongly: black people lived authentic lives, maybe because they were poor they were closer to the earth and the primary art associated with black people at the time was jazz and blues. So we were living near Philadelphia, 36 miles from Center City.

As soon as I could figure out how to get on a trolley, I spent a lot of time hanging out with people who love jazz and blues, partly because I felt that these black people were living authentic lives and expressing it musically.

E: How old were you at the time?

M: That was 15 to 18, and then afterwards, I went to Dickinson. Dickinson was in Carlisle just a couple hours from Philadelphia. So I spent a lot of time in Philadelphia and I would go to New York when I was a kid and go to the jazz clubs. I would take enough money to get the train back again and then I would spend the rest of it in the jazz clubs and buy black records.

E: Did you have some good friends at the time too that you went with?

M: Not so much. See, what happened then: I did not hang out with poets; I did not go to New York to find poets because all the poets were dead. I knew the jazz musicians were alive so I went and found them. It was only later in college that I found out there were still some living poets. But I did have friends, yeah. The last poem I brought to the workshop [Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange] I mentioned my friend Cassidy. We stole the police car; he was somebody I hung around with.

E: I really like that work too; the name Cassidy is really reminiscent of Butch Cassidy. It goes to everything to fight, not knowing your friend Cassidy; associating the name to the poem is very satisfying.

M: Thank you.

E: When you moved from the jazz and you found out there were more living poets, was there one in particular that drew you, or heard that immediately drew you in?

M: While I was in college I took a good course on American poetry, contemporary American poetry, so I was introduced to Kinnell, James Wright and back to Eliot, all the 20th-century stuff, but what excited me was when I discovered the beat poets, because they not only seemed alive but they were out on the streets like me. I was not really out on the streets but I imagined myself to be out on the streets.

I remember we were trying to bring a couple of the beat poets to Dickinson. We were trying to get Ray Bremser because he only cost $100 but we did not have any money. I did make some friends in college who were poets; we did a poetry reading. It was a lot of fun.

E: So did you feel that the beat poets were more authentic as well; was that the draw?

M: Well, I was against, I was a rebel. They were rebelling against the status quo. That is not to say that I was right and the status quo was wrong but there were two, starting in 1950 there were two mainstreams in American poetry. The main mainstream, which is Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop and people like that and the other mainstream was Charles Olson and Robert Duncan and included the beats, the New York poets. The mainstream is what you were expected to like, if you were a responsible citizen. If you were a rebel you tended to gravitate towards the beats and the Black Mountain poets, the people who had gone outside the mainstream. So much of my life, sad to say, has been lived in the action against the status quo, that I was oppressed by, growing up.

E: With appreciation for the status quo as well?

M: Now, in retrospect, yeah. But a lot of the poetry I always loved. My mother had been a singer, you could call her a jazz singer; she was interested in the bohemian lifestyle. She had friends that were poets and artists; many of them died in the Battle of the Bulge. When she married my father, he squelched that. Supposedly he wrote poetry when he was young but when I knew him you would have never imagined that. He was an industrial engineer and like most people of his time, the boys growing up in the Midwest, he was haunted by Hemingway, grace under pressure. He was not equal to that. He wanted to get in the service for World War II and they wouldn’t let him in because of his eyes. Finally he got in, he wanted to see combat. Today that would seem strange to people—why would anybody want to go into combat? That is what was expected of a young man of his time in the Midwest. So they didn’t send him to combat; he ended up teaching

E: Did he continue on in the Navy or in teaching?

M: At the end of the war he was an industrial engineer. In Iowa he worked for DuPont, developing cellophane. When we moved to Virginia, he went to work for American Viscose Corporation. He was part of the team that designed the micronite filter; do you remember that? Kent cigarettes, they had a micronite filter; that was my dad.

E: Was that the little thing that was beyond the filter, a little plastic thing with holes?

M: Yes.

E: I do remember that. Do you have siblings?

M: I have one brother who I love.

E: Is he younger or older?

M: He is six and a half years younger and we reacted completely different to the same stimuli. I became a beatnik and a poet he has been extremely successful in business. I have been married and divorced three times and he is married happily to the same woman. He is a great guy; we love each other.

E: And he stayed around the Philadelphia area?

M: He is in Evergreen, Colorado. He has two sons who have families and I have two children, a son and a daughter who do not have families.

E: Are your two children local?

M: My son is in Eugene, Oregon and he is a book editor and plays guitar on the side a lot. He makes a good second income playing guitar. My daughter lives in Pensacola and she works for Booz Allen Hamilton designing computer programs for training, mostly for the Pentagon and she writes and publishes vampire novels in her spare time. So they both are involved in creative endeavors.

E: That’s wonderful; I am sure you are a great influence.

M: Yeah. Their mother was very creative too. She could not finish anything, but the creativity was there.

This is where I stop the tape. I thank Michael and we continue to have our breakfast together. It was a nice meeting, a nice meal, and a nice conversation.

I have heard Michael tell so many stories about so many people and he holds the people in such high regard. He is a great storyteller even when he is not telling stories. I have heard Michael tell how he thought people were informed in the past: he used to post flyers to telephone poles. That was how people would know about events, he would say. After attending a few meetings I started getting regular mail from Michael, which included flyers from upcoming events—he had upgraded from telephone poles.

I do go out of town for work and have had to miss the workshops. I don’t remember when, but we became pen pals along the way. I had to go out of the country for several months for work and it felt so nice to get letters from Michael. I have those letters amongst the things I hold dear: autographed books, awards, and publications—on a shelf in my office.

It is my hope you have enjoyed this interview as much as I enjoyed receiving letters from my pen pal.

Next in issue 11: The Less Early but Still Early Years of PPE