Jerry Seinfeld has a Netflix show called \u201dComedians in Cars Getting Coffee.\u201d The premise is, that if you bring two comics together for unscripted talk, and put them in a cool car and then in a coffee shop, you will create some alliterative (c-c-c), thematic hocus-pocus, to turn their improvisational banter into sensible conversation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But what actually makes the show watchable, is that the host and his guest share a passion for comedy, and a mutual respect for each other\u2019s talent. Conversation around a common passion and mutual respect\u2014don\u2019t we all crave that kind of connection?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This story is about connection. For decades, Mike Finley and I have been on the verge of connecting. We both graduated from the University of Minnesota, both studied English, wrote poetry, knew the same professors and poets. When Gary Snyder read poetry at Weyerhaeuser Chapel on the campus of Macalester College in early 1993, we were both in the audience. But we didn\u2019t meet until late 2019, when we got together at Linda\u2019s Cafe in Rogers, Minnesota over breakfast, to talk about our mutual (and frequently inexplicable) passion for poetry. It could have been the pilot episode of Poets in Booths Getting Pancakes. But we ordered omelettes\u2014stuffed with scallops and hollandaise sauce for him, with turkey and broccoli for me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most relationships of long duration are complicated, bringing up feelings of dissatisfaction, even of hatred, as well as pleasant feelings of happiness and love. A lifelong relationship with poetry also stirs up a stew of emotions. Mike Finley has written approximately 10,000 poems. And yet, \u201cThere are people who are doing what I do who have been much more successful than me, and I\u2019ve always kind of envied them, with a somewhat angry \u2018that should be me\u2019 envy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I, too, have noticed that envy creeps in when poetry turns competitive. If we compare poets\u2019 publication credits, prize nominations, and awards\u2014the stuff that typically gets mentioned in poets\u2019 bios\u2014we make a hierarchy of status. Is this person a professional poet? Or is she\/he merely a semi-successful, lesser poet? Maybe this is merely an amateur, or, worse, a wanna-be poet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Competition and envy are among the things I don\u2019t like particularly like about the poetry world. I ask Mike whether he thinks as I do, that competitive poetry is a perversion of poetry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
He tells me competition and envy around poetry \u201care totally irrational because \u2014 what are you envying?\u201d We both laugh heartily. Almost all \u201csuccessful\u201d poets have invested more cash in the writing workshops, conferences, degrees, and submission fees necessary for building a poetry \u201ccareer,\u201d than they\u2019ll ever earn back from sales of their poems. And even the most famous poets are not generally recognizable. Stand on a busy corner anywhere in Minnesota and take a survey\u2014who knows the name Kirby Puckett? Practically everyone. Now ask who knows what Robert Bly (a Minnesotan, and arguably one of the most famous poets\u2014nationwide\u2014of the the late 20th Century) is famous for. You\u2019ll get a lot of blank stares and ????? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI have a very love\/hate relationship to poetry,\u201d Mike says. \u201cI hate the preciousness, the falsity, the dreaminess that you think you\u2019re going to be rewarded for all this, for what you\u2019re doing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSo what do you think poetry should do?\u201d I ask. \u201cWhat would you ideally want poetry to be?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSo what do you think poetry should do?\u201d I ask. \u201cWhat would you ideally want poetry to be?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWell,\u201d he says, \u201cmy approach has been, and this is for the last maybe 11-12 years, to have a ratio. If I write something mysterious and spooky, I have to then write a very dear, sweet love poem. It keeps me from getting too mysterious. It\u2019s very important to me to be grounded. \u201cThere\u2019s a way in which I don\u2019t want to be a quote-poet-unquote. And by that I\u2019m invoking a stereotype of someone dreamy, sitting under a tree, writing about the sunset. It\u2019s okay for people to do that. I just don\u2019t want to do it. I have a lot of love poems. I also have a lot of creepy ones. Creepy poems about my daughter\u2019s suicide, things like that. But I don\u2019t want to be absorbed in negativity. I want to win my way back into the world with love. I\u2019m not talking about \u2018i love you, i love you, i love you\u2019 poems. I\u2019m talking about the poem that shows some lovable detail about something. It doesn\u2019t have to be my spouse. It could be my friend. A tree. But it has to be an encounter with something that\u2019s not myself, something outside myself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Isn\u2019t that essentially what authentic love is, getting outside ourselves?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,<\/em> Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” Hobbies are one of the primary activities that take people into a state of flow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mike Finley tells me he doesn\u2019t think of his poetry as art. He thinks of it as a hobby. \u201cI\u2019ve always loved to do it. It makes me happy, it makes me feel good when I get a good one off. But that doesn\u2019t make it super special. Everyone\u2019s got hobbies. There are wonderful bakers. There are wonderful fly tiers. There are wonderful frog catchers. So I resist the hallowed kind of quality that people bestow upon people who write. It\u2019s just my hobby.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The IRS says that an activity on which you spend more money than you make, is not a business or profession. It\u2019s a hobby. According to IRS standards, most poets, no matter how \u201cenviable\u201d their successes, are hobbyists. There is something sweetly beautiful about a passion that simply cannot be made into an enterprise. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I ask Mike what he\u2019s writing these days. \u201cI don\u2019t write many spooky things anymore,\u201d he says. \u201cI went through a very sad period after my daughter died. It lasted for years. And then, when I was young, in my twenties, I liked macabre things. That was also the \u201870s, so there was a taste for the gothic. A lot of the surrealist poets were touching all these gloomy notes, and I got swept up in it as a very young man. But then, when true sorrow overtook me 10 years ago, I didn\u2019t want to go back and be like that. Even in my grieving I wanted something…better.<\/em> I used my grieving and writing to slowly climb the stairs out of my hatred and bitterness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And yet, poetry isn\u2019t the same as keeping a journal. Poets use tools and techniques to shape their writing, to make a little thing\u2014a word-object\u2014called a poem. While Mike Finley may not think of his poems as art, he has decades of experience honing the craft of poetry. His poem, \u201cTeaching My Dog to Read,\u201d plays with repetition, alliteration, and rhyme in the subtlest way, before tickling the reader with its feather-light, ironic wit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It has been a slow process,<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n her eyeing the page,<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n then licking the page,<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n then looking up at me. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n It does not help that she cannot say the sound,<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n not having the proper anatomy.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Still I\u2019m patient we will get to that in time.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Because when you love someone,<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n and you know that they love you,<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n you want them to read your books.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n This poem delights me for the complexity hidden in its simplicity. It is simultaneously true, funny, poignant, and surreptitiously skillful. But these days, when Mike Finley writes, he thinks more about the oral and aural performance of a poem than about what it looks like on the page. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe page is like sheet music,\u201d he tells me. \u201cIt\u2019s a key to something good. But it’s when you speak<\/em> it, the vibrations go into the air and it hangs there for a second, that\u2019s when it’s cool for me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first time I had a \u201cconversation\u201d with Mike, it was online, in the League of Minnesota Poets\u2019 Facebook group. He was talking about poetry readings, that basically it\u2019s just poets showing up to read their poems to the other poets who have shown up to read their poems. People who don\u2019t write poetry rarely show up at a poetry reading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThat\u2019s true,\u201d Mike says. \u201cAnd if you’re competitive, all those people are the enemy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAre you competitive?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI just want to do well. I don’t want to be the best, I don’t want to win a contest. I just want to touch. Communicate. Contact people.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n He tells me he has a lot of friends, people he calls noble, who have seen his wife and him go through a lot of tough things. He can count on them to show up at his poetry readings. \u201cAnd it’s very sweet to read just to them. But, they’re also my friends, so I get to sit and talk to them and be friends with them. It’s not just the poetry. It’s very kind of them. I don’t think they’re really poetry people by any stretch, but they come to my stuff.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Because he reads so often in public, he doesn\u2019t think about poems on the page anymore. \u201cI think about how is this going to sound in the air. Does this go on too long? I usually stay under 16 lines, and they\u2019re not really lines. Because my unit of writing is the sentence, is not like a sonnet that has 14 lines.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n I find it interesting that his form has become the sentence. One of my very favorite books is Annie Dillard\u2019s The Writing Life<\/em> (1989). In it, she tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student, “Do you think I could be a writer?” The writer responded by asking, Do you like sentences?” <\/p>\n\n\n\n Before he retired, Mike made his living constructing sentences. \u201cEditing, writing copy, ghost writing, being a journalist,\u201d he says. \u201cI fed my family and kept a roof over us, just by being a professional writer. I\u2019ve written like 1000 websites for law firms. But all this hack work really has helped me to think about, \u2018How do I have impact immediately?\u2019 So I don\u2019t want to warm up the reader, I go right to the thing, I make the sell (in advertising copy you\u2019ve got to make the sell), and it\u2019s more dramatic. The old thought about poetry, is that you work toward this passionate last line\u2014you see this, you see this, you see this…. aaahhh. That\u2019s the format for the Chinese poem from the 8th century.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n He tells me about his friend, the writer Danny Klecko with a tattoo on his arm that says, \u201cSee, see, see, sigh.\u201d That\u2019s his format for writing a poem. Whenever he gets lost in the writing of a poem, he can easily find his way through. The format is on his forearm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n About his own writing process, Mike Finley says, \u201cI start with a story or a thought, and if I think, \u2018I can give this to people,\u2019 that\u2019s good. If it\u2019s dour, and it just points out the spider webs in my soul, I can it. I don\u2019t want to make anybody\u2019s life worse than it is. I\u2019m an old man. I\u2019m going to be 70 in July. I\u2019ve got a terminal illness. I don\u2019t want to be a bummer to people. It\u2019s even vainglorious to say that, because I\u2019m only connecting with a couple dozen people. But, yeah, it\u2019s my mitzvah. I want to be a positive figure. I say I\u2019m positive, but I think most people would say I\u2019m funny. My stories have irony, and they turn on syllogisms in your head and make you contemplate the irrational. I enjoy it. I think other people enjoy it, too.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And here\u2019s another Mike Finley story-poem for you to enjoy: <\/p>\n\n\n\nTeaching My Dog to Read
Mike Finley<\/em><\/h3>\n\n\n\nMike Finley on Spoken Word and Poetry Performance<\/h2>\n\n\n\n