Justin Carter is an MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University & co-editor of Banango Street. His recent work appears in The Bakery, Hobart, Red Lightbulbs, & other spaces. He blogs about sports at Poets on Sports & never uses his blog.
His poem, "2003," appeared in Issue of The Collagist.
Here, he speaks with interviewer Christinia Oddo about dialogue, the moon, and subverting expectations.
Dialogue and image work closely together in this piece. Did the dialogue aid the development of the imagery, or did the threads of images help create the dialogue? Is the relationship mutual?
I think this was one of my first attempts at using dialogue in a poem, though. I was taking a class with Kevin Prufer & was obsessed with his poem “Churches,” especially with the way the poem moves across the page & the sort-of seamless way the voices in the poem interact. I’d been writing drafts of this for awhile, mostly these single-stanza messes, & I had the images down, but they were lacking something, some final tweak that would pull the poem together. Getting more voices into the piece helped the images pop more. There’s so much emphasis in the poem about the speaker not being present that getting the nurse & the grandfather’s voices in there helped it become cohesive.
The grandfather asks, “Do you want to know the score” “behind a hollow cough.” This is paralleled by the following funeral; at this point, “nothing is said,” and “The moon hides behind the sky.” What symbolic significance does the moon hold for you personally, and for the narrator?
I didn’t really think about the symbolic nature of the moon when writing this poem. The moon, in this poem, doesn’t really function much like the moon, really. Both times it shows up, it’s during an implied daylight—of course the moon is hiding at the funeral, because the funeral happens during the day. But, I suppose there’s some significance to this moon. Everything happens in cycles here—the seasons (both nature & football), the use of “then” to signify the movement of time. Everything is being pulled along by this moon &, when we see it hiding, we’ve reached a point where nothing is being pulled, when the world of the speaker quietly refuses to move. That’s one reason I used the asterisks here (which, as these little suns, are almost the moon’s opposites), because the sudden shift they represent means we never get closure on the previous scene. It’s still there, always, this funeral and this hidden moon. The second time we see the moon, well—it’s being sliced in half. In Texas, the moon shows up during the afternoon pretty often (my childhood bestfriend & I once wrote a song together with the lines I see the moon/ on a blue sky afternoon), & it’s less about the moon here than it is about the act of violence that the plane is doing. In this final moment before we return to the dream, the physical world has been physically altered, a reflection on how the speaker’s world has been altered by loss.
Everyone is alive in sleep, as in everyone has the potential to be tangible in dream. “Then we are asleep again,” and maybe the possibility exists that the grandfather may stay alive (in dream)—(Dallas, in this dream, has the potential to win). The end to 2003 leaves the reader somewhat hopeful, yet there is something sad about this essence of hopefulness. What signaled the end of this piece for you?
I wanted the end of the poem to provide a little uplift, even though it’s clear from the narrative that it’s an artificial uplifting. In undergrad, I took a class with Tony Hoagland & Tony kept telling me that my poems tended toward a depressed fatalism. When I wrote this, I wanted to do something to break out of that mold. It’s easy for a poem about death to be this hopeless thing, to follow this expected trajectory of “person dies, people are sad,” but sometimes poems need to subvert expectations. Am I sad that my grandfather died? Sure, but that doesn’t mean the poem has to wallow in that sadness. Anything can happen in a dream. Back in ‘04/’05, I had a recurring one in which I’d ride home from school & find my grandfather walking down the road, disoriented but alive, & he’d sit down at our dining room table & tell us how he got tired of the pressures of being the same person for so many years & just wanted to run away for a little bit. My goal at the end was for the poem to express that same dream hope.
What are you currently reading?
I’m perma-reading Lynda Hull’s Ghost Money book. Jane Mead’s The Lord and the General Din of the World & Andrew McFadyen Ketchum’s Ghost Gear have both recently slain me, just perfect collections. I flew down to Denton recently & read Anna Journey & Benjamin Landry’s new books on the plane. I’ve also been reading fiction lately, finally exposing myself to Michael Martone and rereading some Brock Clarke. I also just picked up a non-fiction book about fingers.
What are you currently writing?
I’m fleshing out my MFA thesis right now, trying to cut the bad & revise the mediocre & figure out what narratives are popping out & what I need to do to turn it into a cohesive project. I’m also working on two side things. The first is a series of linked prose poems called I Remember You Well In The Charlottesville Motel, essentially a novella about a couple who can’t find the home they want & have to keep moving around the country searching for it. The other is another series. I’m a huge Houston Rockets fan &, well, it’s playoff time right now, so I’m writing these poetic-reviews of each playoff game.