MPR’s Marlana Benzie-Lourey talks with St Cloud Minnesota poet Bill Meissner about the characters within his poetry. Meissner also reads numerous poems, including from his book “Hitting into the Wind.”

Program includes various musical elements.

Transcript:

(00:00:00) Steve and I could see chalk lines all the way to the majors for us. Any long patch of grass was a roaring Stadium. Day after day. It was Pitch hit field run for weeks to catch a long fly dive for the tough fast ones. Just Out Of Reach come up tasting dust and grass stains and white leather. By midseason the two of us were a whole team. How could we know that 10 years later? We'd end up swinging shovels in factories pitching wastebaskets squeezing slow beers and bars ignoring the blurring ball game on the TV. Near the end of summer before freshman year. We sat winded on tin folding chairs at klug. He's gas oceans of sweat gone from the bills of our caps. We Sip strawberry sodas and stared Straight Ahead beyond the paint chips on the wall thinking only of the beautiful line drives of our futures Steve lion is a he was a great friend of mine still is we met at the high school reunions last summer and played baseball as usual Steve and I were true baseball Fanatics back when we were kids when we were about eighth grade ninth grade tenth grade. We put for instance. We played in the snow once and December went out with tennis shoes. We kept a kind of chart of how many hours we'd play and we paid either remember one summer. We played a thousand hours of baseball by the time we were done which is quite a lot of playing for four
(00:01:33) kids. There's a lot of First names that pop up in your in your book of poems and I was wondering are these all real people that populated the the towns of your
(00:01:41) youth for the most part. Yeah. They're either people that I New or small group of friends and I used versions of their real names. And again, when you do something like that, you have to make sure that you're not offending the person but sometimes it gives to include a childhood name a childhood friends name gives the poem what kind of energy I think so I do that rather than make up a name like, you know, Bob somebody rather that wouldn't that wouldn't give it as much as much power if I as if I use the actual name and picture the actual person and put him him or her into the poem.
(00:02:16) You're talking about in terms of your actual writing process terms of the writing of you to be able to visualize and be
(00:02:21) specific and I've even used a version of The Steve lion thing the baseball poem eventually grew into a three-page pro sketch. And then from there it turned into a 10-page short story and I did the same thing with another character. There's a character named Bill Keyhole who's in the scapular medal poem.
(00:02:39) Why don't you read that one? Okay, and
(00:02:40) that one? Then I'll tell you a little about how this one grew are or how it expanded. This is the seed for a much longer work and it's called the scapular medal.
(00:02:51) Well, maybe you can tell us what a scapular medal is.
(00:02:53) It's a little metal that was given out in grade school and it was given are routinely in our classes by by the nuns in a Catholic grade school. They weren't actual metallic metals. It was more like a plastic-coated little How would you describe it a little claw thing with
(00:03:08) plastic Combs and blest cloth and closed in the inside of this
(00:03:12) includes in like wearing my way. So it wasn't actually made out of bronze or anything like that and the nuns always I mean they at the the Catholic school or I grew up the Catholic mythology almost. Verged on Superstition and they would tell us that we should never take these off and kids would raise their hands and say what if we taking a shower can we take it off the end and they said well, you probably shouldn't something could happen to you in the shower solely. So anyway, there was a kind of superstition connected with it. And the reason I wrote this poem is that the character was in the poem Bill Kehoe was the first person from our high school graduating class to die was the first person to die and and the poem Chronicles the death of An actual incident so when I heard about his death, I went back to a rather nostalgic and slightly humorous seen in grade school of these scapular medal is being passed around and that's what started the poem and I wanted to go back to that time and kind of contrast the Early times with later time with the death the scapular medal. Put your scapular medals around your next children the nuns told the class. I looked at the chocolate colored string coiled in my palm tried hard not to think of nooses and hangman and The Gallows on that western movie when they strung up Randolph Scott and through his Indian friend Boulders tied to his ankles into the river where he did his last war dance on the bottom swaying side to side and chanting silently. Tom Pollard flipped his scapular over his slick hair and bilqis homemade a thumbprint before he slid his on. We looked at each other best buddies and smirked. How could we know that bill would be crushed by a hoist Ten Years Later in cashman's Auto Body the whole heavy car pressing and pressing on him until all the water squeezed from his forehead. Or that Tom who worked there too would carry bills motionless body back and forth until the ambulance came. So I Loop the string over my head tucked it into my t-shirt listened as the nuns told us never take it off. Not even when swimming because one day a grade school boy was swimming in a river and he got this terrible cramp in his chest. I sat at my desk Imagining the weight of his own pain pulling him under he struggled to the surface. They said one hand waving one clutching the scapular on the bank saved by a farmer the boy. Thank God and Jesus with words filled with river water. So, where are these to school tomorrow than unsaid wear them in the future wear them forever? After school, I stared at my bare chest in the mirror. The brown string was a little road traveling in a circle. How could I know I lose it somewhere in high school. The cool plastic picture of the saint stuck to my skin right where my heart was. That night I slept without winding myself in sheets, but some nights I dream of rivers and lakes have trying to keep my nostrils above water and feeling this great weight crashing me down from above. When I tried to kick my ankles turned to stone and a noose strong as a wrench tightened around my neck. Those nights I'd wake up dripping as if I'd been deep underwater and right away. My damn fingers would rush to the square plastic island of the scapular and I could almost feel it boiling me blowing me
(00:06:40) up. I just realized as I was listening this there's some. That in some ways. It's similar to The Steve line poem that you just wrote in that I just realized that actually the same length line occurs in both of them, which is you know, how could we know hmm that in this case, you know that this this boy, you know, this childhood friend of yours, you know would you know we would end up dying and in the Steve line poem? How could we know and then you imagine, you know, these two boys growing up? Yeah. That's a good kind of mundane jobs. I just wonder that that line I notice that you do that. I
(00:07:18) hadn't realized that that was both in
(00:07:20) both.
(00:07:22) Yeah part of it. Is that the innocence of childhood? That's why I like that subject as a subject for writing just the naivety and innocence and it's almost like you. Well, it's true. You don't know when you're 10 years old or 12. You don't have any idea where you'll be when you're 20 or 30,
(00:07:36) right? But the reason I like your palms is because they don't they're not nostalgic childhood memory poems, you know, they don't sketch these idyllic a small town lives that they do that and they talk about the innocence of childhood and there's usually some sort of a twist. That has something that's sobering something that's almost disconcerting in it. That speeds you, you know fast forward you up to the present
(00:07:58) moment. Hmm. That's a good point. Yeah, that's good observation it would you agree with that? Yeah, I'd agree with that door writer. I mean I write or meeting me doesn't think too much about that as I write. I don't think about you know, what major theme in my dealing with it's more like you try to focus in on the experience as clearly and as imaginatively as you can if I try to write it in terms of themes major Concepts, Let's say essential values of Life. It'll end up being a lousy poem and better off focusing in on these guys and the scapular medal being passed around and what the nun said and and hoping that the rest of the poem sort of reverberates from there or that the ideas come from that so in a way this is a metaphor I use once in a while on a Class A palm is a lot like a pebble tossed into a calm Pond and if it works, well the ripples go all the way out toward the edge or out to the sort of lap against the shore. And if it doesn't work, you just throw the pebble and it just lands and splashes and that's about it. So if that makes any sense, that's that's kind of the way I view it. But the initial the pebble is the initial experience the initial image that you want to convey to the reader and the ripples would be the meaning or the underlying ideas or the reverberations. Whatever you want to call those.
(00:09:12) Why do you think people will be asked? Why do you write poetry?
(00:09:16) Well, I'm that's a great question. Never thought about all my life for me. It's not a question of why do I it's just the fact that I do so it it's as if the words choose me. I don't just sit down and say okay. I'm going to start to be a poet now, but when I was around 18 17 1816 idea started coming into my head that I felt like I just had to express her or right on a page. I didn't know quite what they were about either. I didn't quite understand all of them. I just had an Impulse to put down this series of images that came to me
(00:09:49) like to read have you read one of your poems that's you know, it's a not as narrative more Pony. I guess you could call it which is the poem about your father the first stir the first kill sure.
(00:10:03) The first kill after Dad shot the Pheasant that flew into barbed wire. He eased the burden to the inside pocket of his hunting jacket. He told me he could feel the warmth fading excited. I looked inside a blood stain spreading. Before dinner we cleaned the bird in the basement down stuck to Dad's wrists like small grain puffs of smoke. A year later dad would sell the Shotgun by a 22 just for target practice. I blasted tin cans to feathers. Dad didn't talk much at the table. He was chewing the pain swallowing slowly his stomach accepting the meat. All through the meal he picked small black pellets from his mouth placed each on the side of his plate with a click. So for it for about 20 years, I heard that click which was an actual actual experience when he did this bird got caught in the barbed wire and he shot it from a distance of maybe five or ten feet and that he felt terrible about it, too. And then at when we ate the bird that evening, I was remember that sound as we pulled these extra bits of but Buckshot out of the Pheasant and he clicked it onto the side of the plate. So that's really what set off this bomb it. There's the sound or the idea of a sound on silverware on a plate or clicking on a
(00:11:25) plate you write other poems about your father and I gathered that from reading these that he was a some sort of a traveling salesman or was that a maybe that was a Persona that
(00:11:35) you know, he was he was so a lot of a lot of biographical information goes into these poems and some They often tell students. Some of it is true. And some of it is fabricated and you can use a character and invent details. So I have poems about my father that are 100% fictitious except maybe in their emotional tone and I've other poems that are about 90% true and I think that one of the beauties of poetry as you can stretch experience, too. To relate to what you the point you want to make you can invent just as in fiction, you can invent details so that some is true in some is not some is enhanced in order to make the true things more truthful or seem more truthful
(00:12:14) this poem doesn't you know reveal to me very much about your relationship with your father. I mean, it's somewhat elusive reading into this. That's true. Yeah, there's some other poems that intrigued me. I'm trying to member there's one about well, it's a son of the traveling salesman or it's something titled something like that and I don't Ben
(00:12:32) yeah, I know what's called. You
(00:12:33) mean would you be willing to read that one?
(00:12:35) Sure dumb, it's true. He was a traveling salesman when I was young and he would sometimes he was gone for weeks at a time. So and I see this maybe you don't see it this way, but I see it as a slightly Whimsical view of the relationship now the reserves a little commentary on traveling salesman and and the things they sell off appears in in this poem son of a traveling salesman. I knew nothing of him. But before I was born I could feel his hands turning me round and round inside the womb. After I got my license, I noticed a desire to drive smooth highways an unexplainable affection for vegetable slicers vacuum cleaners encyclopedias. In high school, I developed optimism optimism shining like pots and pans. That would not tarnish. I never let my Prides fingernails be bruised by slamming
(00:13:30) doors
(00:13:32) once drunk. I looked for him drove up and down streets block after block blurring Pages torn from a phone book. Father. Why? Did you leave your shoe in my door so many years? Daydreaming at my desk. I see myself at 16 the way my hands fit. So easily around the skeleton of a steering wheel. How much I seem to have ahead of me then each day was another door to be knocked on each morning and other strangers Smile as inviting and distant as
(00:14:04) luck.
(00:14:10) So what do you want to ask me about that one?
(00:14:12) I've I thought it was a sad poem. And
(00:14:14) yeah this kind of well, it's sad it's like a like some of the poems that I write it you can begin with tone of slightly Whimsical tone and then it turns serious on you, which is the way life. I think life affects me too. Sometimes I mean things we can begin in a light way and then eventually you see more significance in it or more seriousness.
(00:14:34) I remembered this poem, you know, and when you read the other one about your father, this one jumped my mind just because it left me with the sense of you know this relationship. That was somehow captures this distance relationship in some ways. Or what? I mean, that's maybe that's just what I'm reading into
(00:14:50) it. No, I think that's all there. Hmm and it's some and there's some of I'm sure we all absorb and it to its former parent. So some of his attitudes are there, especially at the ending with each day another door to be knocked on each morning another stranger smile. There's that kind of feeling of optimism. That's that, you know, the day will be our right things are going to be good and next week is fine. You know,
(00:15:10) that was it was he that type of
(00:15:11) person? Oh, yeah. Yeah, very optimistic and and rarely got down about or felt down about the things he was doing even though they were he had a whole series of very of crummy jobs like he did so he sold Maytag washing machines for a while and he sold banks for a while in a little kids banks that you put money in and he's sold other things new Trina dog food different things. So we had a whole series of jobs that were not all that
(00:15:41) terrific in your poems. I sense a in an affection for your this figure your father, but I wonder also there's a sense of not wanting to repeat his life and then I'm maybe I'm also thinking of what you wrote about wanting to leave the small town, you know wanting
(00:15:54) something else. Yeah. Definitely true. It's definitely a devil anse about well, just what you said about not wanting to about wanting to emulate him and his character but not wanting to end up being exactly like him which I suppose we all feel that about our parents. I don't know if we if everybody does but at least I do you want as in everything you want to take the best part of it and understand it but not necessarily become exactly like them because somehow that's a scary thought for four people writers are non-writers to think you'd become your parent now and act just like them and the parts about them that you didn't like that. You're becoming that that's I think that's a frightening thought.
(00:16:33) Would you ever say that writing is cathartic or
(00:16:35) therapeutic? So it's very cathartic for me and it can be therapeutic but more than anything else. I think it's a way of understanding everything going on inside you if you if you tap into the subconscious or to unconscious levels, which I try to do if you just again like I mentioned before if you just write about things that are outside you out there a tree at Sunset you're probably never getting into the real you.