“Common Flicker”: Six Questions for Michael Collier
Michael Collier, born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1953, received his undergraduate degree at Connecticut College and earned his MFA at the University of Arizona. Currently, he lives in Cornwall, Vermont, and is an emeritus professor of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author of eight books of poems, including The Clasp and Other Poems, The Folded Heart, The Neighbor, The Ledge, Dark Wild Realm, An Individual History, My Bishop and Other Poems, and The Missing Mountain: New and Selected Poems. He has received numerous accolades, such as two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Guggenheim and Thomas Watson fellowships, a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. From 1994 to 2017, he served as the director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, and he was Poet Laureate of Maryland from 2001 to 2004.
While reading the 2007 volume of Best American Poetry, I stumbled upon Collier’s poem “Common Flicker.” When I first read this poem, I was struck by the simplicity of it while still knowing that, like most poetry, it had multiple layers of meaning. One of its lines that caught my attention was “your song is your name.” This metaphor’s commentary on identity is particularly interesting to me, and it’s a topic I asked Collier about in our interview. Something else that really stuck out was the natural imagery in the poem with Collier describing a bird “pounding,” “drilling,” and “drumming.” To me, these choices are vivid, precise, and imaginative, and they pulled me into the poem. Because of his writing style, the ideas suggested by his work, and the imagery in the lines, Collier seemed a great poet for me to learn more about. [NOTE: Special thanks to Bergin O’Malley for the photo of Michael Collier.]
How did you first get your first poems or writing published and what advice would you give to those who would like to get their writing published?
I began secretly writing poetry in high school and at some point during my senior year I discovered that we had a literary magazine, called, pretentiously, The Tower. I knew one of the editors and confided to him that I had been writing poetry and wondered if I could submit some of it to the magazine. He took a few poems and suggested that I should join the editorial board to help with putting together the next issue. When I started college the next year, I got myself involved in the school’s magazine; its title was not pretentious in the least—The Owl. That’s how I first began to publish poems but more importantly being involved in the endeavor of working on a school magazine helped to give me something that’s crucial to being a poet, and that is a small literary community. Poems are written mostly in solitude but because they are in a medium that is shared and understood by a culture at large, they want to be shared, they want to be heard and read. Being part of even a small community of writers early on not only gives you a sympathetic audience but it also brings with it, I would hope, encouragement and critical response. While in college, I began to read poetry widely throughout the long tradition of verse-making as well as modern and contemporary poets. With contemporary poets, I would pay attention to where they had published individual poems by reading the acknowledgment pages of their books. This was an invaluable short cut to learning about the literary publishing scene of any given generation. I then began to submit poems to those magazines in which what were becoming my favorite poets were appearing in. While it’s important to be sending poems out for publication, it’s more important not to get too fixated on it too early. School and local publications are good and usually welcoming places to begin but once you feel you’ve made some progress, my advice is to aim high. Send poems to the magazines, both print and online, that you admire most. You’re likely to get rejected at first but if you don’t send to what you consider the best places, you’re implicitly telling yourself that your poems aren’t good enough. You always need to believe that the work you are doing is worth the risk of rejection.
You served as the director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences for over 20 years. How did working closely with other writers impact your creative process and development as a poet?
The main thing I learned through my association with the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference by working closely with a wide range of writers, especially the younger writers, was the enduring importance of literary culture, especially in a pluralistic society like the United States. For more than two decades, I had the privilege of observing “young” writers, ages 20 to 90, come together to hone their craft. As a human event, this was always profoundly moving, even if at times, it was like herding 250 literary cats. How did this influence my development as a poet? At the same time that my own idiom and style was beginning to solidify, let’s say, I was encountering younger poets whose work was either directly or implicitly challenging what I was doing by their own experiments with language and form. This kept me on my toes, so to speak, and reminded me of the need to keep questioning and interrogating my own processes as a writer.
I read some other poems from your book Dark Wild Realm, and many of them referenced different aspects of nature. Do you often write about nature or use nature as a source of inspiration for your poetry?
I wouldn’t say I’m a nature poet but nature is everywhere available to us and since the job of a poet is to pay attention to the world around us, nature lays an immediate claim. Nature’s cycle of birth, growth, aging and death is also the human cycle and as such it gives poet a readily available and constant analog to their own life. I don’t mean to sound as if humans are separate from nature. We are nature but writing about birds, trees, flowers, snakes, possums, bees—there are a lot of bee poems!—offers the distance poets need to stand back from their experiences in order to write about them. Any time a poet begins to write about “nature,” they are writing about themselves—more or less. This is partly why nature becomes personified so often, which is something we need to be careful about because we don’t want to use “nature” only for our own devices. It’s best to discover in nature an imagistic or metaphorical relationship rather than impose one on it.
Where do you usually write your poetry? Do you often write in an office or studio? Out in nature? At home? Or possibly wherever ideas come to mind?
Writing is a habitual activity, although that doesn’t mean I write every day, but every day that I can, I get up around 5 a.m., depending on how well I’ve slept, and go to my study, and sit. While sitting, I’m apt to write in a notebook or journal, or if I don’t feel like doing that, like this morning, I’ll begin to read something, most likely poems that are not my own but that I hope will encourage me to write something new or I begin to look at unfinished drafts of poems I’ve been working on with the hope that I’ll have an insight of some kind inviting me to re-enter the unfinished world of that poem. I try very hard, not always successfully, to avoid reading email and texts or looking stuff up online because it interferes with the concentration I need to disappear into the act of writing. While a poem might begin in the immediate world, it leads you away from it and into the world of the imagination. I have friends who can compose poems in their head. I cannot. The only place I write is at my desk.
In “Common Flicker,” when you say “your song is your name,” how do you interpret the relationship between self-expression and identity?
This is a terrific question. Self-expression? I think I know what you mean by this idea, that there’s an urgency moving us to write and create and that that feels like the expression of a self? Or maybe, you have in mind the notion that what the self feels wants to find a form in which it can be expressed? I suppose both are true but my own experience as a writer has led me to believe, and this is actually an idea that T.S. Eliot develops in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” that, quoting Eliot: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” Perhaps “emotion” and self-expression are not exactly the same thing but they are swings on the same swing set. Poetry wants to escape the self by going through or beyond its confines.
Identity? This is an incredibly important but also an impossibly fraught concept to talk about. Identity is something that we each need to define for ourselves, no matter who we are, and to resist the culture at large or others who want to define it for us. That being said, the tension between the way we want to identify ourselves and the pressure the culture can put on us is very fertile ground for the imagination.
In that same poem, what inspired the fusion of industrial imagery like “nail” and “hammer” with the natural aspects of the poem?
I have a simple answer to this question! For several years, on almost a year to the day, a common flicker, or one of its cousins, would come from wherever it had been all winter, in March, to drill its beak on a metal, wood stove chimney, protruding through the roof of my study. It sounded like an electric impact drill. It made it impossible for me to work. And each time, although you would think I should have been ready for its return, it startled and scared me. I would also notice how when it wasn’t drilling, it would thread its way up around the trunks of trees, pecking at the bark for insects. As a result the nail and hammer images came naturally.