Slowing Down with Poetry

Michael Cervas is an English teacher and department chairperson at , and he is also a published poet. He has a new collection of poems titled Captivated and agreed to be interviewed about his poetry writing as well as why poetry remains relevant.

We just had Hurricane Irene, has she provoked any ideas for your writing? Do you use poetry to reflect on tragedy in the classroom? How do students relate to this if you do?

Ideas for poems come from almost everywhere for me (history, science, everyday life, personal experience, newspaper and magazine articles, things friends say in passing, etc.). I was reading Dava Sobel's book The Planets, and one thing led to another. I haven't thought much about Irene yet, though the aftermath of the hurricane is full of provocative images and metaphors. Literature in general is a great way of introducing students to the little and big tragedies of human history (poems and essays and stories make the facts come alive). Poetry is the most literal and factual encounter a kid can have with the world of experience.

In your poem “The Darkest Hour” you talk about emotional risks and relate historical stories of blind faith to travel on a “dark road.” Are you taking risks publishing your personal poems?

People do ask me sometimes about the emotionally risky act of making my own experiences public, but there is a kind of distancing that takes place for me when I write a poem and a kind of universalizing of the experiences. Many of my poems are not at all about me, and even those that are actually grounded in my personal experiences aren't really about me. They're about (what I hope are) universal human experiences. The "traveling on a dark road" metaphor is an intriguing one, though, since the most common way a poem happens for me is that I start with a line or a word or an image, and then follow it blindly for a while, until at last, in something like a sudden flash, I see where the poem wants to go. Then I start over again crafting the poem consciously.

You refer to squash and tennis and basketball imagery in your poetry, why do you think athletics are so important?

Sports are important to me personally, and they're a big part of our culture too. I joke sometimes about squash being a (physical) form of poetry, but in many ways I believe that's true. A lot of terms English teachers use to talk about poems can also be used to talk about sports (as in the cliché "poetry in motion"). Athletic images are very visceral. I can trust that my readers have some athletic experiences of their own, so I know that they can relate, physically and emotionally, to the experiences described in my poems. And thus they have direct access to any metaphorical implications in the poems.

After reading poems like “Love, Love” which talks about the sadness of keeping score in a relationship, how has this honesty throughout your poetry impacted your daily life? Has the candor in your poems changed you in any way since you started writing?

I suppose that the act of writing poetry, of attending very carefully to words and experiences, has made me a little more self-aware (though I'm sure you'd get a different answer from my wife). I also feel that as someone who reads poetry and tries to write it, I've become a more empathetic person. Poetry is ultimately all about the subtle implications of words and feelings and ideas, all about the inherent complexities of being alive, and all about becoming a more perceptive reader. That sort of stuff naturally makes a person a bit more open-minded and a bit more tolerant.

“Captivated" is the title of this collection and the final poem talks about people’s morbid curiosity for the Native American, do you think we are still captivated by our prejudices?

Even though we live in an increasingly interconnected global world, and even though our national rhetoric claims that we are all alike really, or more alike than we are different, we are clearly still afraid of, curious about, enthralled by all those people who are (we think) so different from us. The best example would probably be the feelings that so many Americans have about Muslims and the Islamic world.

What poet is captivating you right now and why?

A trick question really. The answer is whichever poet I am reading at the present moment. Because she will be reading at Westminster later this year, I've been immersing myself in Aimee Nezhukamatathil's poems. But I also spent time this summer reading new books of poems by Linda Pastan, Stephen Dunn, and Tony Hoagland. The one poet I would take with me to the proverbial desert island is Emily Dickinson, my favorite poet of all time.

Which poem do you think people respond to the most and why?

Of my poems, it's probably "The Annoying Age" from [my first book] Inside the Box. Naomi Shihab Nye told me she thought it was the best poem ever about the complicated relationship between a parent and a teenaged child. She was exaggerating, of course, but I appreciated her comment, and I still very much like the poem.

How do you discipline yourself to write and where do you see your writing going in the future?

I wish I were much more disciplined about writing (I am a high school English teacher who occasionally writes poems, not a poet who is stuck teaching high school English). What does happen is that when I have a hot new idea for a poem, I really focus intensely on it, and I get something on paper ASAP. Then I revise and revise immediately. So often I have a "finished" poem in a couple of days. This doesn’t mean that the poem won’t be completely revised sometime later on.

Why do you think poetry continues to thrive in our instant gratification and quick image society?

It would take me a book to answer this question. But the simple answer is that poetry is a way of slowing everything down and focusing only on the most essential facts and experiences and words, a way of making life simple again. This is exactly what everyone craves in our increasingly crazy world. There is just so much trivia and nonsense all around us. It's clear that one part of us wants the fast action and instant gratification of the internet world (we are social creatures), but another part of us, a deeper spiritual part, I think, knows that we lose our individual selves in this social media dominated world. So poetry works to keep us grounded and sane (we are also personal creatures too). People still turn to poetry in times of great crises. 

If you are interested in reading Michael Cervas’ new book “Captivated” email him at mcervas@westminster-school.org or go to www.AntrimHouseBooks.com.