Once in awhile one of my poems (literally
one--"Deer Hit," from my second book) gets taught in a high school
somewhere (I heard from a student in Australia this summer, even), and often
those students are asked to dig up some biographical details and maybe some
insight into the poem's creation, intended meaning, etc. So, to make their
lives easier, here goes:
I grew up in Athens, Ohio, a college town in Appalachian
southeast Ohio, in the wild and woolly '60s and '70s (yes, I'm old). My father
was a Yale-trained artist who taught painting and drawing at Ohio University
for thirty years. I attended Athens High School, and completed my BA at Ohio
University, where I majored in drinking beer, playing in bar bands, and
creative writing.
After college I worked at a variety of shitty jobs, to
paraphrase Phil Levine: construction, landscaping, retail (including a brief stint
at a porn shop, from which I was fired), and so on. I started writing poems
with some seriousness during this time. Then in 1989 I won a grant from the
Ohio Arts Council, which changed everything.
In 1991 I was accepted, by luck, mostly, into the University
of Virginia's MFA creative writing program. Not long after graduation I won a
writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, which was
followed by a year as the Halls Fellow in Poetry at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. After that I moved around a lot: back to P'town, then to
Florida, then Atlanta, and back to P'town again. I published my first two books
of poems (Vanitas Motel and The Pleasure Principle) during this period, both
from Oberlin College Press.
In 2003 I moved to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, of all places,
where I still live with my wife, the fiction writer Allyson Goldin Loomis (also
a former UW-Madison writing fellow), and where we are both associate professors
of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. From 2003 to
2010 I wrote and published three detective novels set in Provincetown (High
Season, Mating Season and Fire Season), originally out from St.
Martin's/Minotaur but soon to be re-released on Kindle Direct. In 2016, I
published a third book of poems, also with Oberlin College press, called The
Mansion of Happiness.
So that's the detailed bio.
Regarding "Deer Hit," here are a few things you
might say to your teacher:
1.It's written in second person, which is kind of weird.
Who is the you? Is it the reader? Is it some specific person the poet is
addressing? Is it a younger version of the poet himself?
2.It's a narrative poem, which is a fancy way of saying
that it tells a story. Not all poems do this.
3.It also has a lot of imagery (it mentions or describes
physical things one can see, touch, hear, smell or taste), and a couple of
pretty good metaphors/similes.
4.It's written in present tense, but it's set in the past
(a "Fairlane wagon" is a car from the 1960s). So it purports to be
written in/from memory.
5.The poem's action begins and ends in moments of
violence: first the son hits the deer with the car, then the father hits the
deer in the head with a cement block, presumably killing it (this happens
offstage, however). The final three lines are a bit of meditation--the poem's
speaker trying to sort out what it all means.
6.The poem isn't just about youthful mistakes, or the
evils of drunk driving (duh), or cruelty to animals, or a young person's
idealistic desire to fix things he's broken. The phrase "all your
life" in the last line is key. It may be possible to exist for a human
lifetime without hurting people and breaking stuff if you're a Buddhist monk or
in a coma, but most people don't, even if that's something they care about,
which for most people it isn't, at least not always.
7.A reminder: many poems that have the feel of confession
(relating a personal thing that happened to the poet) are, in fact, drawn from
personal things that happened to the poet. But not all of them are.
8.If something in "Deer Hit" struck you as
funny, that's on purpose and it's okay to say so.
I hope that's helpful. The poem can be found here, if
you're interested:
