Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

BILL MEISSNER: "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 mid-season, 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 in bars, ignoring the blaring ballgame on the TV. Near the end of summer before freshman year, we sat winded on tin folding chairs at Klug's gas, oceans of sweat gone from the bills of our caps. We sipped strawberry sodas and stared straight ahead beyond the paint chips on the wall, thinking only of the beautiful line drives of our futures."

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Steve Lyon is-- he was a great friend of mine. Still is. We met at a high school reunion last summer and played baseball as usual. Steve and I were true baseball fanatics back when we were kids, when we were about 8th grade, 9th grade, 10th grade. For instance, we played in the snow once in December. We went out with tennis shoes. We kept a kind of chart of how many hours we'd play and we played-- I remember one summer, we played 1,000 hours of baseball by the time we were done, which is quite a lot of playing for kids.

MARLANA BENZIE-LOUREY: There's a lot of first names that pop up in your book of poems. And I was wondering, are these all real people that populated the towns of your youth?

BILL MEISSNER: For the most part, yeah. They're either people that I knew or a small group of friends, and I use 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 friend's name gives the poem a kind of energy, I think. So I do that rather than make up a name like, Bob somebody rather, that wouldn't give it as much power as if I used the actual name and picture the actual person and put him or her into the poem.

MARLANA BENZIE-LOUREY: You're talking about in terms of your actual writing process--

BILL MEISSNER: In terms of the writing of it, yeah.

MARLANA BENZIE-LOUREY: --for you to be able to visualize somebody specific.

BILL MEISSNER: And I've even used a version of the Steve Lyon thing. The baseball poem eventually grew into a three-page prose 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 Kehoe, who's in the Scapular Medal poem.

MARLANA BENZIE-LOUREY: Why don't you read that one?

BILL MEISSNER: OK, I'll read that one. And then I'll tell you a little about how this one grew or how it expanded. This is the seed for a much longer work, and it's called the Scapular Medal.

MARLANA BENZIE-LOUREY: Bill, maybe you can tell us what a scapular medal is.

BILL MEISSNER: It's a little medal that was given out in grade school, and it was given out routinely in our classes by the nuns in a Catholic grade school. They weren't actual metallic medals. It was more like a plastic coated little-- how would you describe it? A little cloth thing with plastic coating.

MARLANA BENZIE-LOUREY: Is that the blest cloth enclosed and then in sort of this plastic covering and you wear it around your neck?

BILL MEISSNER: Lamination, yes, so it wasn't actually made out of bronze or anything like that. And the nuns always-- I mean, they at the Catholic school where 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 are taking a shower? Can we take it off then? And they said, well, you probably shouldn't. Something could happen to you in the shower.

So anyway, there was a kind of superstition connected with it. And the reason I wrote this poem is that the character who's in the poem, Bill Kehoe, was the first person from our high school graduating class to die. He was the first person to die. And the poem chronicles the death, which is an actual incident.

So when I heard about his death, I went back to a rather nostalgic and slightly humorous scene in grade school of these scapular medals 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 the later time with the death.

The Scapular Medal, "Put your scapular medals around your necks, 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 threw 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 scapula over his slick hair, and Bill Kehoe made 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 10 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 Bill's motionless body back and forth until the ambulance came.

So I looped 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 scapula. On the bank, saved by a farmer, the boy thanked God and Jesus with words filled with river water. So wear these to school tomorrow, the nun said, 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'd 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 of trying to keep my nostrils above water, and feeling this great weight crushing 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 damp fingers would rush to the square plastic island of the scapula. And I can almost feel it, buoying me, buoying me up."

MARLANA BENZIE-LOUREY: I just realized as I was listening to this, there's some-- that in some ways, it's similar to the Steve Lyon poem that you just wrote in that I just realized it's actually the same line occurs in both of them, which is, how could we know, in this case, that this boy, this childhood friend of yours, would end up dying. And in the Steve Lyon poem, how could we know, and then you imagine these two boys growing up--

BILL MEISSNER: Yeah. That's a good point.

MARLANA BENZIE-LOUREY: --to kind of mundane jobs. And I just-- that line. And I noticed that you do that often.

BILL MEISSNER: I hadn't realized that, that that was in both poems. But yeah, part of it is the innocence of childhood. And 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.

MARLANA BENZIE-LOUREY: But the reason I like your poems is because they don't-- they're not nostalgic childhood memory poems. They don't sketch these idyllic small town lives. They do that and they talk about the innocence of childhood. And then there's usually some sort of a twist that has something that's sobering, something that's almost disconcerting in it that speeds you, fast forwards you up to the present moment.

BILL MEISSNER: Mm-hmm, that's a good point. Yeah, that's a good observation.

MARLANA BENZIE-LOUREY: Would you agree with that?

BILL MEISSNER: Yeah, I'd agree with that. Though, a writer-- I mean, a writer, meaning me, doesn't think too much about that. As I write, I don't think about what major theme am I 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.

I'm better off focusing in on these guys and the scapular medal being passed around and what the nuns said, 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 in a class. A poem 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 in and it just lands and splashes, and that's about it.

So if that makes any sense, 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.

MARLANA BENZIE-LOUREY: Why do you think people-- well, let me ask, why do you write poetry?

BILL MEISSNER: Well, I-- that's a great question. One I've 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's as if the words choose me. I don't just sit down and say, OK, I'm going to start to be a poet now. But when I was around 18, 17, 18, 16, ideas started coming into my head that I felt like I just had to express or write it on a page. And 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.

MARLANA BENZIE-LOUREY: I'd like to read-- have you read one of your poems that's-- you know, it's a not as narrative, more poemy, I guess you could call it, which is the poem about your father, The First Kill.

BILL MEISSNER: Sure. The First Kill, "After dad shot the pheasant that flew into barbed wire. He eased the bird into 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 gray puffs of smoke.

A year later, dad would sell the shotgun, buy a 22 just for target practice. I blasted tin cans to feathers. Dad didn't talk much at the table. He was chewing the pane, 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 about 20 years, I heard that click, which was an actual experience when he did-- this bird got caught in the barbed wire and he shot it from a distance of maybe 5 or 10 feet. And he felt terrible about it, too. And then when we ate the bird that evening, I always remember that sound as we pulled these extra bits of buckshot out of the pheasant, and then he clicked it onto the side of the plate. So that's really what set off this poem. It just the sound or the idea of a sound on of silverware on a plate or clicking on a plate.

MARLANA BENZIE-LOUREY: You write other poems about your father. And I gathered from reading these that he was some sort of a traveling salesman. Or was that-- or maybe that was a persona that you--

BILL MEISSNER: No, he was. So a lot of biographical information goes into these poems. And some-- as I 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 have other poems that are about 90% true.

And I think that one of the beauties of poetry is you can stretch experience 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 and some is not. Some is enhanced in order to make the true things more truthful or seem more truthful.

MARLANA BENZIE-LOUREY: This poem doesn't reveal to me very much about your relationship with your father. I mean, it's somewhat elusive you reading into this.

BILL MEISSNER: That's true. Yeah.

MARLANA BENZIE-LOUREY: Yeah. There are some other poems that intrigued me. I'm trying to remember. There was one about-- well, it's a son of the traveling salesman, or it's some titled something like that. And I don't even remember what page it's on.

BILL MEISSNER: Yeah, I know which poem you mean.

MARLANA BENZIE-LOUREY: Would you be willing to read that one?

BILL MEISSNER: Sure. It's true he was a traveling salesman when I was young, and sometimes he was gone for weeks at a time. And I see this-- maybe you don't see it this way, but I see it as a slightly whimsical view of the relationship. In other words, there's a little commentary on traveling salesman and the things they sell off appears 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 pride's fingernails be bruised by slamming doors. 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, another stranger smile as inviting and distant as luck." So what do you want to ask me about that one?

MARLANA BENZIE-LOUREY: I thought it was a sad poem in some way.

BILL MEISSNER: Yeah, it is kind of-- well, it's sad. Like some of the poems that I write, you can begin with a tone of a 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 can begin in a light way. And then eventually, you see more significance in it or more seriousness.

MARLANA BENZIE-LOUREY: I remembered this poem. And when you read the other one about your father, I this one jumped my mind just because it left me with a sense of this relationship that was-- somehow captures this distance relationship in some ways. Or what I-- maybe that's just what I'm reading into it.

BILL MEISSNER: No, I think that's all there. And it's-- some of-- I'm sure we all absorb attitudes from our parents. 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 the day will be all right. Things are going to be good. Next week is fine.

MARLANA BENZIE-LOUREY: Was he type of person?

BILL MEISSNER: Oh, yeah. Yeah, very optimistic and rarely got down about or felt down about the things he was doing, even though they were-- he had a whole series of crummy jobs. Like he sold Maytag washing machines for a while, and he sold banks for a while, little kids banks that you put money in. And he sold other things, neutrino dog food, different things. So he had a whole series of jobs that were not all that terrific.

MARLANA BENZIE-LOUREY: In your poems I sense an affection for this figure of your father, but I wonder also if there's a sense of not wanting to repeat his life. And maybe I'm also thinking of what you wrote about wanting to leave the small town, sort of wanting something else.

BILL MEISSNER: Yeah, definitely true. It's definitely an ambivalence 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 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 people, writers or non-writers, to think you've become your parent now and act just like them, and the parts about them that you didn't like that you're becoming that. I think that's a frightening thought.

MARLANA BENZIE-LOUREY: Would you ever say that writing is cathartic or therapeutic or--

BILL MEISSNER: Oh, 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 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, a sunset, you're probably never getting into the real you.