Missouri Center for the Book

September 2003
Robert Stewart
Kansas City, Missouri

Robert Stewart was born in 1946 in St. Louis where he grew up a student of the Dominican nuns in Little Flower parish and the Brothers of Mary at Vianney High School. He attended seven colleges and universities in the odyssey of his college career, interspersed with service in the U.S. Navy and work among sewer lines, manholes, construction sites, and plumbing jobs in St. Louis and surrounding counties. He has lived in Kansas City, Missouri, since the mid 1970s and worked as an editor for several publications, a free-lance magazine writer, and teacher. His writing has benefited over the years from trips, often alone, to Ecuador, Brazil, Miami, Norway, Italy, and other places, and the related reading it took to understand both those locales and the nature of travel itself. Currently, he is editor-in-chief of the journal New Letters, its national radio companion, New Letters on the Air, and BkMk Press, all at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he also teaches.

His books include Outside Language: Essays, Plumbers, Letter From the Living, and Climatron. Poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Mangrove, Stand, Notre Dame Review, Literary Review, and other magazines. He has been a Breadloaf Scholar in Poetry and won the poetry award at the Wesleyan University Writers Conference. His essays on travel and language have appeared in The North American Review, Borderline, and elsewhere; magazine feature articles have appeared in Ingram’s, The Kansas City Star, The New Art Examiner, E: The Environmental Magazine, and other places. He has twice been a finalist in the annual Kansas City Press Club’s Excellence in Journalism Awards, and he was awarded Best Feature Article by the American Association of Business Publications.

Why did you avoid getting an MBA degree? Was becoming a poet a wholly (holy) conscious act? Are the MBA and poetic vision mutually exclusive?
I had a genetic horror of any business degree, of becoming a corporate fellow in a gray suit, like we remember from 50s-style movies. Being a poet now saves me from despair, so I am grateful. Once in a while, on a good day, I just might write something beautiful, something that will make a woman with auburn hair laugh, or decide, once more, to love her husband. Language is so powerful, I can't resist it.

My image of poets wasn't so good, either, back in the heyday of my youth. I was a media kid in the 1950s and 1960s, and the media had poets in black turtle necks, reading in smoky coffee shops. Like most of what is on TV, even now, poetry was just a cartoon life, not to be taken seriously. My becoming a poet snuck up on me. Emily Dickinson, of course, and my Grandma Giacopelli's stories of Sicily, and my father's stories of working with the plumbers, but also "The Cremation of Sam McGee," by Robert W. Service, which no great poet alive would claim to like. I was in high school then; my reaction to that poem was amazement that anyone could make words perform like that. "And there on the marge of Lake Lebarge / I cremated Sam McGee." That's from memory.

Since you raise the MBA (business) specter, I should say, I respect the small-business owner, the entrepreneur; and I try to run my magazine, New Letters, like a small business, even though it's part of a university bureaucracy. Small-business owners have guts and imagination; they work hard, and many of them I know like poetry. I have pretty good business instincts, myself, and at New Letters, we have doubled our subscription base in the past year. I'm proud of that.

I often tell my staff, when we work on promoting the magazine, "Marketing is poetry with results."

Could you elaborate on why (poetic) “language is so powerful” that you can’t resist it?
The poetic image and a miracle are the same thing. No difference. Think about what poetry does. It combines familiar things in unfamiliar ways. It creates a heightened, if not an entirely new reality. It unifies all things. I have a poem about old cars in the stream (the Black River in southeast Missouri), which ends, ". . . where trout lie / big as headlights." That's a small moment that knocked me off my chair when I wrote it. One of my plumber poems, called "Waiting for the Plumber," plays with the idea of appearance and truth, and ends, ". . . where the water itself begins / making false statements." Water becomes an expression of a particular truth, which is crazy, exactly like a miracle. You want more? In "Tree Shaking," a new poem, farmers shake the whole tree to harvest native pecans; I had this image: "Turtles turned and ran like zebras." I love the insanity of it. "Mysticism," Evelyn Underhill has written, "is seen to be a highly specialized form of that search for reality, for heightened and completed life."

When Christ told the story of the lost lamb, he used the vocabulary of the sheep-herder culture to tell the story of his transcendence. “Vocabulary” is a bad word, now. People hate it. Yet I mean something specialized by the term vocabulary. I mean words that can expand to include trout and headlights, lamb and soul, turtles and zebras, as if they were all part of the same reality. That's breathtaking. Whatever ideas exist in a poem or essay, exist because words have gone ahead of us to create a new story.

In your essay “Art Parts,” you discuss the activity and vocabulary of plumbing. After you’ve learned the craft and you’re standing over a ditch admiring your work, the man who taught you hands you a shovel and tells you to cover it with dirt. What does this say about writing and the writing process?
I'm tired of whiners. When a plumber works at the height of his craft then covers the whole thing in dirt—and a layer of gravel and six inches of concrete—it’s Zen. He also might go to the tavern at lunch and get drunk because that is Zen, too, not sanctimony. It's fine to be noticed, and appreciated, of course. Plumbers know, among themselves, who the great ones are, just as poets know among themselves. But it goes further—who’s a good person, tells a good story, and will take his turn in the ditch? It's all the same. Because I'm an editor, writers sometimes ask me how to get published, as if I know, as if there's a trick insiders have learned. Man. I'm a writer, too. I'm just out here working. Here's the answer: Write well. Read Henry Miller. Write a story or a poem and cover it with dirt.

Some of my literary heroes write in virtual anonymity. I'll mention Conger Beasley Jr., who has some prominent books, yes; but he's still thrilled when some obscure, small publisher brings out a little book of his stories or poems. That means as much to him as an Academy Award. I watch people like Beasley or my great mentor (he doesn't even know) Joseph Langland. I try to learn from them. They believe in the value of the work itself. "Beauty is its own excuse for being," Emerson wrote. I like that. Amiri Baraka once said to me, don't wait for some New York publisher to bestow approval on your work. Take charge of it yourself. Start your own small press (I did that, with Conger Beasley, called Woods Colt) or look for different outlets. Seek out like-minded friends. I wasn't always like that. I whined, believe me, a good-old victim of prejudice against Midwest writers, or so I thought—but I kept it to myself, mostly. Everyday, I have to fight to remember what matters. If the writing is good enough, it will find its life. If you ask what its life is, I'll tell you. Its life is its life.

Your father was a plumber, and in these poems you express an admiration and reverence for such work. Do you long for that physical presence in your writing? Do you ever worry that this is a romantic notion for a kind of work that is hard, knuckle-busting, filthy, frustrating, and sometimes dangerous?
Whenever I think that my work as an editor and writer is hard, as I click on the keyboard, I remind myself that I have heat in the winter and cooling in the summer; I have carpeting and a chair; I do not have a rocky hillside I need to bust up with a pick; I do not have 95-degree heat in a ditch no wider than my shoulders; I do not have flies bumping into the sweat on my neck. What a relief it was, back then, to be sent in the truck for a part or a tool, just to sit and ride for 20 minutes. We'd be outside, breaking up pavement with a jackhammer, and I'd look inside a café window to people sitting comfortably, with their yellow notepads, and think how soft and perfect it looked. Now that's me. This sitting-at-a-desk work is easy. The trick, however, is to write a poem or an essay where a reader feels the sweat, the fly, the rock that turns an ankle. The trick is in the writing, and it doesn't matter if that comes out of a romantic notion or not.

There are many religious references in your poems. In the poem “Roughing In,” you describe the plumber’s work as “seeking perpetual union,” as being “Like Dante’s fallen lovers/Paulo and Francesca.” Later stanzas evoke images of half-faced men and chalices of molten lead. What part did the Divine Comedy play in the writing of Plumbers? In what circle of hell do plumbers reside?
Plumbers are saints; they aren't in hell, at all. In the book Plumbers, Dante played only an indirect role—filtered through the teachings of nuns in my grade school, I later realized—except for his doomed lovers and their perpetual union, which seemed an irresistible image. So much of the terminology in real plumbing is male or female, depending on what is inserted into what. It's strange for us Puritanical Americans to have that language locked into the infrastructure all around us. I've always thought that the entire cast in my book of poems consists of plumbers, including my Sicilian grandma, my mother, my brother Dan, my son, everyone. They all are working to improve their own lives and the life of the world. The security guard, the optician, the pipefitter, the church volunteer. God bless them. They are plumbers all, and they are saints.

This is my first principle of writing. In parochial school, I couldn't imagine perfectibility, not in anyone I was likely to know. Sainthood was unreachable. The patron saint of Palermo, Sicily, is Santa Rosalia, the daughter of a duke, who began a hermetic life in a remote cave on Monte Pellegrino, high above the Bay of Palermo. That was sainthood to me, as a child—mythic and distant. I have developed a more gnostic view of sainthood, which is to say it is here among us. In the standard gospels, Christ says to the "good" thief, Dismas, hanging on the cross beside him, "This day you will be in paradise with me." That puts paradise in the future, in some distant place up ahead, perhaps Mt. Pellegrino. In the gnostic version, Christ says to Dismas, "You are in paradise right now." Right now. Try that as a poet. The Japanese poet says, "Lanky frog, / hold your ground. / Issa is coming." Issa and the frog are eternal right now. Look around. Everything we see and touch has infinite value. Such an attitude seems poetic at its heart. By poetic I mean having the quality of outwardness. A poet, any great writer, moves outward to the things of this world, as objects of wonder.

A theme that I see working its way through your book Plumbers is that life is a series of sacrifices built upon sacrifices until there is little left but the promise that God has a special place for those who sacrifice for others ("To My Mother: A New Line of Credit"). How has this sense of sacrifice shaped your life and writing, or not? Is poetry, for you, a way of turning suffering into song?
I believe in joy, which never has come naturally to me. I work at it, and fail often. At the sign of any severe storm, my Sicilian grandma would gather us kids in the basement, to kneel on the floor near the wall and say the rosary. My mother would beg her not to scare us like that, which it did, but my grandmother believed she was doing the right thing. That memory gives me great joy, now, because my grandmother was being exactly herself, her perfect and unstoppable self; at the time, the act deepened in me a respectful fear of God and a natural fear and loathing of catastrophe. So what? I have had time, growing up, to change how I see the world. I don't have to stay quite so fearful. My grandmother and my mother were living fully the truth they understood. My mother's life of sacrifice, in the poem you mention, existed; and for me to write about it—with some humor, I think—celebrates that aspect of her life as it was, not as I wish it were. It's a matter of acceptance, which is different from acquiescence. Acceptance allows us to celebrate each person and thing as a manifestation of creation. Any breakthroughs I've had, as a writer, as a person, have required first acceptance of what is, then celebration. It's hard for me, though; every time I fail, the poem fails.

Your poems evoke a family shaped deeply by religion. Religious metaphor is found in many, if not most of your poems, e.g., “a tornado had touched down--/basements lay open like public/confessions. . .” (My Sicilian Grandma). In the poem “Watching the Eclipse,” you write, “It’s easy to be confused,” as a woman stares at the sun and becomes a saint, but you write, “It’s easy to bow down and worship/the sun, or effigies of guardian angels. . . ,” and then you go further, suggesting something more than a confusion between spirit and matter in the concluding stanza: “Daybreak could be taken or ignored/as any other article of faith,/and we could look directly into ourselves.” Are you saying that religion is a reflection of self, created by self, eclipsed by self, or something else?
I used to tell people that I had no faith. Then I heard someone—sorry, I can't remember who—point out the difference between belief, which implies certitude, and faith, which implies the existence of doubt. I can't will to have belief, but I can will to live right. I can do my best. This is an idea I explore in my essays over and over. In San Francisco, I was living in an unreinforced building. The building, itself, was a monument to its own shaky foundations. Yet I lived there.

Do you think there is a discernable, definable, Midwestern poetic voice?
People think of that as a direct, plain-spoken voice, often rural or small town—Spoon River Anthology has some of it, and lots of other great poems and stories; but mostly, concern with a Midwestern poetic voice has less and less validity, I think. My friend George Gurley, a fine poet now living in Kansas, about 20 years ago wrote a great article about Midwest poets called "The Emperor's New Overalls," published in Chouteau Review. Gurley poked good fun at poetry that was, upon examination, so plain spoken that it just kind of laid out on the road and baked. Of course, the diction of the Midwest has as much validity as any other, and Daniel Woodrell, an Ozark-based novelist with an international readership, uses it in some books brilliantly. Diction varies, though. Let's face it, who could confuse a Dave Etter poem with a Donald Finkel poem, or a Mona Van Duyn with a Phil Miller? It's the individual, not the generic voice that counts. Literary critics and scholars are the categorizers; let them figure it out. These days, Missouri—the whole Midwest—is full of genuinely national or international writers, whose diction gives almost no clue of their mailing addresses.

To be even more geographically specific, how would you assess the state and health of poetry in Missouri? Do you see any new trends or developing styles?
Imagine a state with as many great literary magazines as Missouri? Per capita, we might lead the country. That's our clearest sign of health. River Styx, Laurel Review, Boulevard, Missouri Review, New Letters, and I'm leaving some out, mea culpa. The Chariton Review survives after a tough budget crisis. Every now and then, some arts bureaucrat will decide we all need to merge some of these journals, worried, as bureaucrats worry, about inefficiency or too many individual voices and talents on the loose; worse, the bureaucrat believes that River Styx and New Letters, for example, are somehow equivalent, that there is no important aesthetic distinction below the surface of the pages. This is art. Art needs more voices and more editorial approaches. Art does not need an editorial politburo; it needs individual voices all drowning each other out. It needs diversity and overlap. It thrives in wildness; and we have it here, in Missouri. The biggest writers in the country are sending their works to Missouri, full of anticipation; and young Missouri writers can meet editors and get introduced to the world of publishing. It's great. Less great is the condition of literary book publishing in Missouri, however, with only a few literary book publishers left. I'm not sure why that is.

In your book of essays, Outside Language, you describe yourself sitting in a Miami bus aswirl in languages you don’t understand but that you comprehend. Would you elaborate on, “The language becomes pure mystery; and in this state of incomprehension, I am welcomed home”?
I was not designed to become a poet, an essayist, a literary editor. I was designed—and my use of the term "designed," here, is garish, perhaps, folding into it whatever influences any person—to be a laborer, and I almost was. Even now, I'm a slow reader, a ponderous thinker. Writing gives me the chance to revise my stupidity into something better. Thank goodness. The summer after I graduated from high school, my plumber father came home one day and told me that he had enrolled me in a small local college. All I had to do was sign some papers and get advised. Tuition was $100 per semester, full time, and I could work for that much. If not for my father, I'm pretty sure I'd be driving a fork lift in an industrial park somewhere, good enough.

Yet your question exposes a fundamental dichotomy in my own intellectual life and that of many other people I know. Many people can't read literature. We have to accept this. When I read to an audience an absolutely brilliant poem by Mia Leonin (my former student), people mostly stare at me like I'm nuts. I am nuts, but people have to become nuts. In Mia's poem “Chica del Campo,” a girl from a village in rural Latin America says, “Only the machetes have noticed my new walk. / They flash their smiles at me. They are cutting me a path to the city.” The language is mad; and it takes practice to become that mad, to rise outside of our usual perceptions.

My experience on the bus in Miami took me to an emotional understanding, not a literal one. Of course, there are many literary readers—someone is buying books by Alice Munro, Bharati Mukherjee, Richard Ford—but many people also believe they need to understand everything in a logical way, or they feel lost. I can't help that. Artists can't stop for them. Artists have to advance the art, which means being able to comprehend emotional meaning though language, even though someone else is looking only for the conventions and easy redundancies of mass media.

Metaphor derives from two Greek words, meta and phores, meaning roughly “To carry over.” I imagine it as a kind of bridge. You tell the reader that metaphor “delivers us,” carries us over to that place Outside Language, the title of your book, where we go “to translate the ineffable.” You say poetry relies on metaphor with its “connecting impulse” that enables poetry to forgo narrative.
A great essayist and principle translator for Octavio Paz, Eliot Weinberger, once wrote, “With no news from abroad, a culture ends up repeating the same things to itself. It needs the foreign not to imitate but to transform.” I cited this in one of my own essays; I might add that metaphor, itself, is a kind of translation, as Weinberger says, “from the familiar to the strange.”
Walter, I remember the first poem of yours I ever read, “Beirut,” long ago, in which “blood flows out of a stoplight in downtown Columbia, Missouri” (that's from memory, which is how metaphor, when it carries us, reshapes reality). I love the insanity of it, yet that line has been triggered in my mind many times over the years. I comprehend it; and the moment one tries to place a coherent rationale on that image, the poetry evaporates.

Anyone who teaches poetry writing, whether to 18-year-olds or to true adults, must, at some point, give those students a little time to get past being conventional thinkers. The media culture needs conventional thinking, whether pop music or political discourse—and if you get below the surface differences in the mass media, you find the same basic conventions, as Milan Kundera once wrote, "the same ordering of the table of contents, under the same headings, in the same journalistic phrasing." A real writer, as I think of one, can't stand to recycle the old phrases; he or she seeks new connections, even if just a fresh word, the way a test pilot seeks to fly the most advanced machinery.

In the essay “Linear Lazarus,” you defend the book against those critics who claim that the book is dead with the rise of computers, hyper texts, and intertextuality. How do you see the book withstanding these new technologies, e-books, etc.?
I love the physical book. Publishers have been using a matte paper for covers that feels like silk on the hand; and the whole book—from cover art to typography—creates an aesthetic environment that is hard to duplicate anywhere. Some years ago, when I went to school in Columbia, Missouri, I would go to Ellis Library each December and check out an old edition of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, so I could read it with 19th-century binding and woodcuts. Yet, it is not the cloth and paper book I defend in my essay; it is language. The idea that language—used at its highest, most subtle level—needs hyperlinks and hula dancers, pop-up graphs and audio components, or that language is otherwise inadequate, seems to me morally corrupt. It's wrong, and people who believe that are fools.

In your essay “Art & Annoyance,” you make the argument that to make art—art that is worthy of the name and not just popular entertainment—that the artist must have a longing to create art, and that his longing comes from being annoyed. Could you elaborate on relationships between annoyance, longing, and creativity?
As you phrase your question, I hardly recognize my essay, which is a good and enlightening experience for me. I say there, I think, that annoyance is a positive quality, in life and in art—both by annoying others and by being annoyed—and I set off to try to understand that quality. What I came to, ultimately, in a more important way, is that art takes our best effort. I try to make the distinction between longing and “sufficient longing.” Mere longing shows up as sincerity, a good intention—that is, the desire to be on the right side of issues. As Paul Eluard has said, "Sincerity is not enough." A lot of people these days believe that art is concerned 100 percent with their feelings, or how we should feel; and e.e. cummings did say, "Feeling is first." Feelings, too, I assert, are not enough. Rarely do aspiring writers talk about technique, wit, strategy, and perseverance. All of those qualities show up in the people I have known, as writers, who, after decades, are still at it. They have shown me that we, as true seekers, have to stick with it, think things through, and get some training. We have to swat away politics and melodrama, the little insects of celebrity and wishful thinking. We have to have intellectual integrity. We have to be tough.

Interview conducted by Walter Bargen, Missouri's first Poet Laureate,  from Ashland, Missouri. His 10th book of poetry, The Feast, has just been published by Timberline Press. His poems have appeared in more than 100 magazines and journals including American Literary Review, Iowa Review, Boulevard, Beloit Poetry Journal, Notre Dame Review, and New Letters. He was the winner of the Chester H. Jones Foundation prize in 1997 and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts writing fellowship in poetry.

Books by Robert Stewart

Outside Language: Essays, Helicon Nine Editions, 2003.
Letter From the Living, Borderline Editions, 1992.
Climatron, Helicon Nine Editons, 1995.
Plumbers, BkMk Press, 1988.
Rescue Mission, Raindust Press, 1983.