"Enough Time to Love and Be Loved": An Interview with Marci Rae Johnson

Marci Rae Johnson teaches English at Valparaiso University. She is also the Poetry Editor for WordFarm press and The Cresset. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Redivider, The Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, Rock & Sling, The Other Journal, Relief, The Christian Century, and 32 Poems, among others. Her first collection of poetry won the Powder Horn Prize and was published by Sage Hill Press this year.

Her poem, "Mr. Rogers Is Flipping You Off," appeared in Issue Fifty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interview Elizabeth Deanna Morris about fathers, substitutions, and when the poem knows itself better than the writer.

The title of “Mr. Rogers is Flipping You Off” is from a Cracked.com article about unusual photographs of famous people. What about this one in particular inspired you to write this poem?

I grew up in that ancient time period when there wasn’t 24 hour television programming for kids, and Mr. Rogers was one of the few programs I watched regularly. I think for many of my generation, Mr. Rogers functioned as something of a substitute father, especially since so many fathers in the 70s were the only income earners in the family, and thus spent a lot of time at work. The way he uses his middle fingers also suggests, I think, a more innocent time. (Or perhaps more a desire to return to a seemingly more innocent time.) As soon as I saw this photo, I remembered my own father using his middle finger to point, with no awareness of what that gesture meant.

I think the father is an interesting character in this poem, because he arrives as a parallel to Mr. Rogers (both of them use “the middle finger / of his right hand without irony”). Yet, his relationship to the speaker is one of moral education, but a morality that is beyond the speaker’s understanding, to “not comet adultery.” Mr. Rogers, on the other hand, is playing with the speaker. Could you talk about relationship between these two characters and the speaker?

I think we often tend to look at our parents, and especially our fathers as godlike figures (whether you attend church and are familiar with the father language for God or not). And any time there’s an association with God, moral education, and moral judgment as well, comes into play. Mr. Rogers, however, represents the role I think children would rather have their fathers play: that of playmate. The person who not only sets up the train set, but plays trains with them. (He does of course, teach lessons as well, but I remember him first and foremost as playmate.) As a parent now myself, I think it’s hard to find that balance between being the authority/teacher and the friend.

I think that your use of the tercets is really interesting in this poem. I think of the idea of counting “1, 2, 3,” and the end, with the really beautiful line “Never / enough time to love and be loved,” with the idea of counting down “3, 2, 1.” Could you talk about your use of tercet in this poem?

I think the use of tercets in this poem might be one of those occasions where the poem knows more about itself than I do! As I wrote and then rewrote this poem many times, I changed the stanza length often, and in all honestly, I still wasn’t terribly happy with the form. I revised it again recently and turned it into a poem with no stanza breaks at all because I felt the pacing of the poem wasn’t quite right. I wanted to speed the poem up by deleting the stanza breaks, and I wanted to push the images together more dramatically so that the leaps between images and thoughts squeezed together and created more tension. After seeing, though, how the tercets might be working, I’m rethinking the poem again! It often feels to me as though poems are never quite done, and I know I’m not the only poet who will return to a poem and make changes even after it’s been published!

Have any books kept you particularly warm this winter that you can recommend?

Yes! I’m a huge reader and I count on books to keep me warm during the winter, especially with all the snow we’ve gotten in Michigan this year. I’ve especially loved Mary Syzbists’s National Book Award winner Incarnadine. Religion is one of my passions/interests, so I was thrilled to see this thoughtful religious work win the award. And then I recently discovered Karen Russell’s fascinating stories in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.

What other texts are you working on right now?

My first book of poems was released in November, so I’ve been focused on marketing that book—which for poetry primarily involves giving reads. And right now I’m also working on putting together my second book (which will include the Mr. Rogers poem). My second book contains mostly poems that are responses to other texts: books, pieces of art, photographs, weird stuff I read about on the Internet, etc. The book explores that idea that most anything we encounter can be “read” and responded to as a text. I also hope to start working on my third book soon, which is going to involve some research and travel to insane asylums from the World War II era. Most of those remaining are museums, though some still function as psychiatric hospitals (and many are believed to be haunted).