Michael Harper Speaks with Michael McGriff
Michael McGriff is an author, editor, and translator whose work centers on the intersection of surrealism with place, working-class narratives, and poverty in the rural American West. He was born and raised in Coos Bay, Oregon, and studied creative writing at the University of Oregon, The Michener Center for Writers, and Stanford University. He is the co-author, with J. M. Tyree, of the linked story collection Our Secret Life in the Movies, which was selected as one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014. His poetry collections include Inquest, Angel Sharpening its Beak, Eternal Sentences, Early Hour, Black Postcards, Home Burial, and Dismantling the Hills. He is the translator of Tomas Traströmer’s The Sorrow Gondola and editor of a volume of David Wevill’s essential writing, To Build My Shadow a Fire. From 2009-2014 he published and edited Tavern Books, a nonprofit literary press dedicated to poetry in translation and the revival of out-of-print contemporary classics. He is a former Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, and his work has been honored with a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice,” a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Poetry, Bookforum, The Believer, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Poetry London, and on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday and PBS NewsHour.
MH: How would you describe the spine of this collection?
MM: I'm not sure if there is one, at least not in any kind of focused way. I didn't write this book through a specific lens or in reaction to a specific event or narrative, if that's what you mean. As with most of my books, I wrote one poem at a time, seeing where each took me. I find that most of the writing is kind of like stumbling around in the dark.
MH: All your poetry books are clearly tied together through images and themes, but I found a distinct narrative running through this one. Do you see the book this way and if so, when in the writing process did you realize what form it was taking or should take?
MM: It's funny you say that, because all of my books feel like different ways of looking at the same things: where I'm from, the images that haunt me, the people and places that are important to me. The shape of this book is, in a large way, due to the editing of the poet Joseph Millar, who cut dozens of pages, leaving the ms centered on the more narratively anchored poems. It's always best to trust your friends who carry the sharpest knives and who will always tell you the truth about what they see working in your writing. It was through his hand that this book emerged, really.
MH: In your last book, Eternal Sentences, you use a form from a Larry Brown story in which every line is a sentence. Angel Sharpening its Beak is your fifth book of poetry to go along with a book of short stories and a book of translations. Do you feel that varying syntax creates opportunities to refresh your voice and open new spaces for your writing?
MM: The only book of poetry where I tried on different syntactical clothing, so to say, was Eternal Sentences. It liberated me, in many ways, from a rut I found myself in. I always write about the same things, so one of the proverbial questions is how to do so in a new way (or at least a way that feels new to me). I'm myopic and obsessive, as are the writers I tend to read. If I were a painter I'd likely paint the same landscape over and over, like Povel Wallander. So, as a thought experiment, I set out to borrow Brown's mode of writing in "Boy and Dog" from Facing the Music. I can't explain how revelatory that was for me. It was like being a kid and hearing Black Sabbath for the first time. Who knew that a shift in syntax could be so revelatory?
MH: Can you describe the perspectives in these poems? The early sections of the book feel like they come from a younger voice that is seeing both the possibility of the world and the cracks in or limitations of his experience, while the older voice appears to be looking back with a yearning for this time of unknowing, before identity had solidified. How are these voices working together and amplifying each other?
MM: Yeah, the book is vaguely chronological (quite vaguely). That said, I'm not generally interested in chronology, as I really don't think memory (or life) works in such a way. I like a book that stumbles forward, dipping in and out of time and space. All my books, really, are told from the same vantage point; the narrative voice looks back and sees what is found in the past, mining for bits of story and images along wthe way. But, if you see some kind of unified structure, good on ya. I can't claim any intentionality, really. Books just kind of form for me. I whittle them down and remove the bad writing until it feels like I've told a kind of truth that can't be boiled down and reduced any further. That might sound vague, but it's how my mind works.
MH: There are several poems in this collection dedicated to other poets. How do you see these dedications working? Are they conversations with another poet’s work or a sort of homage to their influence or something different?
MM: Both (homage and conversation), really. So much in writing is interconnected--one work always calls to another. The more I write, the more I see the ways in which all writing is connected. Richard Hugo's 31 Letters and 13 Dreams is a great metaphor for how I see this playing out for the poet.
MH: Was there anything you were reading during this project that influenced it significantly or any book you found yourself returning to for inspiration?
MM: I have hundreds of books on the shelf, but there are just a few authors I turn to when I need to hold the live wires of poetry. The more I age, the more bored I grow with most poets. When it comes down to it, I just read a few authors. The short enigmatic poems of Yannis Ritsos carry the whole world on their backs. He's a go-to.
MH: Your images often capture a sort of sharp definition inside of immenseness. There is this series of real-world images that make surreal leaps that feel like they open the everyday into conversation with something beyond their moment. Can you discuss the importance of images in your work?
MM: Images are all I care about, and I find that they often form at the intersection of the real and figurative. That's how I make a poem: stacking one image atop another. For me, that's poetry. It happens that my experiences of self are place- and character- and class-based, but image-making is the source of all poetry. Robert Bly's essay collection Leaping Poetry is the closest thing that describes my relationship to the image. He thinks of the image as a shared, human experience soaked in mystery, intuition, and a kind of collective subconscious. Sounds odd, but it describes my relationship to literature perfectly well.
MH: How does language or writing define the world and normalize or simplify undefinable feelings and concepts? Do you see a danger in this certainty? Do poems name things differently than other forms of language?
MM: I have no idea. I think real art resists normativity and orthodoxy of all kinds, regardless of style, tone, or modality. The expression of human subjectivity is where art lives. The quirky and transgressive poems of Russell Edson make me feel as deeply about the human condition as the unadorned poems of Anna Swir. I don't think poetry has any secret sauce, in terms of genre. It's just one mode for expressing what makes us human.
MH: Place in these poems isn’t a character per se, but sort of writes itself onto the characters, often literally through their work and the small moments in their daily lives. When writing about agriculture and industries like logging, I didn’t feel like there was a conflict with nature but instead an untamable aspect of it that demands a kind of respect and reverence. How do you see this relationship playing out in this collection and can you explain your relationship to writing landscape and nature?
MM: I think you've thought about this more than I have, or at least differently. There's a trend now to write a kind of didactic or polemical poem centered on the climate crisis (ie, "nature"). Regardless of subject, I find the polemical poem to be just about the most boring thing on the planet. I find the didactic or polemical person about the dullest creature to traipse the earth. The concerns of my poetry are psychological or existential or however one might term the mystery of being alive. I write about place because I grew up isolated in a particular landscape. Had I grown up in the suburbs, I'm certain that I'd largely write about the burbs. I don't find that the poet has a civic role or a moral imperative. Some of my literary heroes hold opposite attitudes. These attitudes and approaches are complementary, not exclusionary. I have a lot of students who worry about how much their poems can change the world or result in social change. I simply don't think that's how it works. To answer your question more directly, I don't think my poems are concerned with the natural world; rather, they're concerned with images and the psyche of the speaker in a given moment. My poems end up in anthologies about place and the natural world, but those are the boxes that others have put me in. I could care less about those categories, at the end of the day.
MH: You dedicate a poem to Denis Johnson in this collection and there is a sort of ambition in this book that reminds me of his writing. Everything I’ve read of his seems to risk something by searching for truth or significance inside even the tiniest particles of the world. Can you discuss your relationship to him and his writing?
MM: Denis Johnson was one of the most original and visionary writers of this century and the last. I was lucky to have known him personally. He was a loving, selfless person who wrote and lived in a way true to himself. He was interested, across books, to find the deeply human in both the most reprehensible and beautiful sides of a given life. I wrote "Men Keep on Dying" the day that Denis died. What else can a poem do than turn its gaze to what matters most?
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April 9, 2025
Michael Harper teaches at Northern New Mexico College. His most recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, X-R-A-Y, Hobart, Fugue, Terrain.org, The Los Angeles Review, and others.
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Listen to McGriff read two poems from Angel Sharpening Its Beak: "Sixteen with Blown Head Gasket North of Madras" and "Burned."
Photo Credit: Marcus Jackson
New from Carnegie Mellon University Press
