“Rock Polisher”: Six Questions for Chris Forhan
Chris Forhan was born in Seattle Washington on November 6, 1959. He currently lives in Indiana with his wife and two children, where he is a professor of creative writing at Butler University. He is the author of a memoir, My Father Before Me (2016), along with three books of poetry: Black Lept In (2009), The Actual Moon, the Actual Stars (2003), and Forgive Us Our Happiness (1999). Each of these books won a prize, earning Forhan the Barrow Street Poetry Prize, The Morse Poetry Prize, and the Bakeless Prize. Forhan has also received two Pushcart Prizes and a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts.
I originally chose Chris Forhan for my interview because I was intrigued by his poem “Rock Polisher,” featured in the 2008 volume of Best American Poetry. Forhan created such a strong sense of desperation and symbolism in this piece, that I found myself repeatedly flipping back in my copy of Best American Poetry just to read it again, and relive the emotions it induced as I was reading. I grew curious and began to explore his other poems. I found that Forhan’s ability to produce such raw emotion in his writing was not limited to “Rock Polisher.” His other poems, such as “Solo Act” or “Then Again” were able to address grief evoking universal themes and struggles, while incorporating his own experiences from childhood. Forhan’s style of writing is powerful and nostalgic, and the symbolism he uses in his poetry can be interpreted in countless ways according to the reader. Because of this, I was eager to interview him and discover what he truly had in mind when creating “Rock Polisher.”
Can you talk about any specific poems that were especially challenging or rewarding to write?
Occasionally a poem will arrive as if a gift; it will seem to have come with less conscious effort than other poems, and it feels like a nudge toward a new kind of writing, maybe even a new subject to explore. When I say “occasionally,” I mean every ten years or so. The most powerful example I can think of occurred in 2002, when I had grown weary of my poems; they felt smug and stilted, too content to curl in on themselves and to rely on the safety of irony and wit. Then a short, weird poem came to me:
Once
Once, a black panic of birds scattering from a tree.
Some finger flicked them.
Once, a fox at the far edge of a field:
my father, back from battle, back with plain talk.
In lamplight, in the pages
of my math book, a gold moth.
But it was he they eased down into the dirt—
I saw it—he never recovered. Once,
rain. After, a cold sun, earthworms
in the runoff. Pharaoh hardened his heart.
I liked that I couldn’t make complete sense of the poem. What was that moth doing there? And those worms? Why did my mind leap suddenly at the end to the Book of Exodus? More importantly, why was my long-dead father in the poem? I realized that the poem was constructed entirely of brief statements of fact and fragments: there was no subordination going on. I decided to try continuing to write with no subordinating conjunctions (no when, while, because, although, etc). The result was more meaningfully weird poems in which, without my expecting it, my father appeared. I realized that this new syntax, which involved only presentations of perceptions and mental or emotional conditions, no expressions of well-considered ideas, was removing from my poems acts of judgment and discernment. The analytical mind was muted, and experience itself—unmediated by analysis—was foregrounded. As a result, all kinds of important buried feelings came rushing into the poems. A whole book resulted from this.
As for poems that are particularly challenging to write, they tend to be those in which I feel myself straining to make them seem not to be straining—the poems that I hope lift off into meaningful mystery, and maybe they do for others, but that for me still have the sweat of effort clinging to them. I’ll keep the titles to myself!
How does your poem “Rock Polisher” use both personal experiences and universal themes to engage the reader?
I don’t think about theme, really. As the poem begins to take shape, I think about what the poem seems to be: what kind of utterance it is, what kind of movement and feeling it is relying on. If the poem ultimately is any good—that is, if it deserves to be called a poem—then it probably touches somehow on shared human experience; that is, the poem is as much about the reader as it is about me.
“Rock Polisher” appears in a book, Black Leapt In, that is in some ways quite personal, in that I excavate certain childhood experiences, mainly those associated with my troubled father, who committed suicide when I was fourteen. Yet the particular literal details of the poems, including those in “Rock Polisher,” are often invented. I feel little obligation to honor literal facts in a journalistic way. I think this is true for most poets. Of course, in writing a poem, it is difficult to avoid one’s personal experience, at least in the sense that such experience is what one knows: it is what stocks one’s imagination with imagery. Therefore, I recognize a few things in “Rock Polisher” from my own life. I was, indeed, on a PeeWee baseball team that lost every game. I have many sisters. The haircut I mention is pretty close to the one I had in junior high, and I have been known to love dumbly. But no girl on a track team ever touched my wrist, and my family never owned a rock polisher. However, a family up the street had one, and when a memory of it popped into my head, and when I thought about the beautiful absurdity of the thing—of the act of patiently making more beautiful that which is just fine as it is, in its natural state—I smelled a metaphor, and I followed its implications.
According to your poem “Rock Polisher” what elements do you believe contribute to how people view the world?
This is a hard question to answer, because it asks that I interpret my own poem, which I am not particularly interested in doing. Since I was in the middle of the making of it, in the belly of the beast, as it were, my perspective might be the least useful. However, I will say that the poem strikes me as being about an obsessive, and ultimately not very healthy, attempt to fix—or deny—certain aspects of reality. Life is hard; life is filled with mistakes and sadness. It would be lovely if it were otherwise, just as a rock that we have polished to a gleam is lovely—but then again, polishing that rock means leaving behind what it was originally, which might be a different kind of perfection. We live always, in some way or another, in the imagination. The imagination gives us art and culture, but it also is skilled at helping us evade meaningful mystery and avoid the unsettled feeling of existing within an order that is not wholly comprehensible.
Did formatting the poem “Rock Polisher” in free verse more accurately represent the emotional tone you wished to set? Why?
I never write poems in a formal meter, but I always care deeply about rhythm. Meter and rhythm are different things, of course. It is difficult to say that the poem being in free verse “more accurately” represents the tone, since if the poem were metrical it would be a different poem. If the poem’s rhythms occurred within a metrical context, the language would express at least slightly different feelings—but who’s to say those feelings wouldn’t be just as true.
I should also mention that I didn’t “wish” to convey any particular tone. It is more accurate to say that, as I wrote, and as I picked up on the poem’s tune, I began to sense what kind of rhythmic character the poem had and therefore what feelings it was expressing. In other words, I write poems not to express what I intend beforehand but to discover, in the act of writing, what the poem needs to express. When the poem works, that thing seems to be something I needed to express—or at least something I felt—without knowing it.
What are your thoughts on using enjambment in your verses? (Such as in “the way you loved dumbly / and do.”)
Rhythm, always rhythm. I hear a pause, a little hesitation, at the end of a line—at least the millisecond it takes for the eye to shift to the beginning of the next line. As the poet Li-Young Lee has said, “A poem is like a score for the human voice.” All kinds of things on the page—the stressed and unstressed syllables, the punctuation, the syntax, the vowels and consonants, as well as line breaks—affect how the voice utters the language. The hesitation created by a line break can do any number of things. It can help dramatize a literal fact of the narrative. (For instance, it’s no accident that the second line of “Rock Polisher” ends after “waited,” thus creating a sense of waiting before the next line begins, or that the third line ends with a period, creating a sensation of a longer pause before the next line’s leap ahead in time to a week later.) The hesitation can draw attention to a meaningful shift of thought—as is the case, to my ear, with that “loved dumbly / and do” moment. The line breaks can also just keep the poem moving at the right pace. For instance, with “Rock Polisher,” I found myself relying on lines that had either three or four strong stresses, and I didn’t want that flow interrupted. (The flow—the unrelenting rush of the language down the page—felt important.) Maintaining that pace also sometimes informed my decision about where to break the line, which meant that I was open to enjambing a line after certain words—such as a possessive noun or “that” or “in”—that I would never consider placing at the end of a line in another poem.