Christian Anton Gerard’s a woodworker and the author of Holdfast (C&R Press, 2017) and Wilmot Here, Collect for Stella (WordTech, 2014). He's received Bread Loaf Writers' Conference scholarships, the Iron Horse Literary Review’s Discovered Voices Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, Pushcart Prize nominations, and he was a 2017 Best of the Net finalist. His work appears in places like The Rumpus, Post Road, The Adroit Journal, Diode, Orion, and Smartish Pace. Gerard is an associate professor in the creative writing program at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. Find him on the web at www.christianantongerard.com and https://www.facebook.com/PoetmadeWoodworksandBooks/ or follow him on Twitter @CAGerardPoet
His poems, “Her and Christian Anton Gerard in an Argon Cloud” and” Christian Anton Gerard and Her Yet Without a Past,” appeared in Issue Seventy-Eight of The Rupture.
Here, he speaks with interviewer Courtney Flerage about honesty, welding, and using line breaks to say the unsayable.
How did “Christian Anton Gerard and Her Yet Without a Past” and “Her and Christian Anton Gerard in an Argon Cloud” come about? Did they have similar origins?
These two poems came about differently, but came to where I felt they were finished as I was courting the woman who is now my wife, poet Heather Dobbins. The difference between them is the way I worked in revising them. I had actually drafted “Christian Anton Gerard and Her Yet Without a Past” several years before I met Heather when I was studying in Prague as part of the Prague Summer Program (which I recommend everyone apply for). In that initial draft, I was imagining a love I thought only possible in poetry, but then I met Heather and everything changed.
I’m always writing about love and I’m fascinated by its intricacies. That sounds rather cliché, but that’s sort of the point. When I was talking to Heather about the poems and about love poems in general, I mentioned how hard it was to not be cliché. She said, “what about love isn’t cliché? That’s part of the wonder in how we write about it endlessly. It’s the oldest story and the one we can’t stop telling.” She’s totally right and she gave me a sort of permission to let myself be cliché and use the book metaphor, especially because I make books, so I suppose I can’t avoid the fact that the metaphor isn’t always metaphor for me. My relationship with Heather helped me find an emotional honesty in the drafts that weren’t addressed to a specific someone. I love the idea of the time when there is no past between lovers, but the feeling that a past, and thus a relationship, is being built kiss by kiss, conversation by conversation. That poem also had roots in thinking about Alan Shapiro’s poem, “Eggrolls,” in which the poem’s couple doesn’t make it, but every time I read that poem I want them to and wish they did, but they can’t or hi poem wouldn’t work as beautifully as it does. So I wanted to make a poem when love wins in a different way.
My wanting love to win is also what made “Her and Christian Anton Gerard in an Argon Cloud” happen. The poem was drafted fast and was written almost as an epistle to Heather. That’s how I think of it, at least. I worked in a factory that made boom trucks (cherry-pickers (sometimes called bucket trucks) that electric companies use) for a couple of summers when I was in my first years of college. I loved watching the welders and talking to them about how welding works. It’s an incredible science. When two pieces of metal are welded together, they’re no longer two pieces joined by a weld. They quite literally become one piece if the weld is done right and well. I wanted Heather and I to be like that. The thing about welding, though, much like a relationship, is that so many things can go wrong. Welders have to pay attention, constantly. Vigilant might be a better word. And the weld can only happen when the electricity that makes the arc that melts the welding rod that joins the two metal pieces takes place in a small cloud of argon because the oxygen content of “regular air” doesn’t allow the right conditions for the electricity and the metal and the welder to do all the things that need to happen so the weld can be nurtured.
The welder, though, can’t look directly at the weld as it’s happening because the light generated during the process will burn the eyes and cause immediate blindness. That kind of risk is what lovers risk in creating the context necessary in which they can be joined. That’s what “let us risk our sight” is all about; the risk and intimacy created in looking right at each other with no mask, nothing between us.
I’m curious about the way line breaks generate a sense of wonder in “Christian Anton Gerard and Her Yet Without a Past.” Throughout the poem, short —even single-word—line breaks add space and pause to the poem, as when you write, “Here is his breath on / her // hair.” Here, the stanza breaks before and after “her” read as a moment of wordlessness, so that when the image completes—“Her nails, / ten scalpels singing through his skin, / saying prayers inside a night making each from each”—the lines feel especially full, vibrant. Throughout the piece, you work in these subtle moments of withholding and answer, fitting for a poem interested in “us yet without a past.” Could you share about the lineation decisions you made while writing?
Thank you for your kind words in your question. One of the reasons I most love verse is what happens after enjambments. This poem figured out its content long before it figured out its form. I had been working in couplets often during the time of the initial draft, but no matter how I configured the lines in different lengths, I couldn’t make the couplets work to move the narrative while making lines that interested me. I was reading Merwin and H.D. and I think some of these decisions came out of trying to let the poem figure itself via Merwin’s long lines and H.D.’s short lines, especially in “Night,” where I borrowed those words “each from each.” Need is one of the poem’s largest un-sayables for me and the lines became interesting to me in how they might work to enact this need’s unsayable nature when they began to spool out and reel back in. I’m not often a poet that looks at form looking for a concrete shape or something that bears verisimilitude to an object in the 3-D world in which we live, but as the lines began their motion toward the final form I felt like the poem and I began holding hands; it felt like we like each other.
In this form, I was able to see a line like, “so he could jump above her house, parachute into her” as its own image of the need I felt the poem was working to say, but for which there isn’t a word in my lexicon. I also began to see in this form that the narrative allowed the poem to do things I didn’t know it would do, like moving from “Her” saying, “a story with an arc. A book overflowing / anything the mind can imagine. It’s as if,” which allowed the poem to imagine Christian Anton Gerard jumping from a plane into her/her room where they could be together in the most (un)imaginable ways that lovers want and need to be together.
I came to see that the longer lines felt to me like they were able to build energy like you might see happen when an electric stove’s coil is turned to high and the short lines stated to feel to me like the spots of energy you see when you put your fingertips on one of those plasma balls. I don’t know that this particular poem achieved such energy transfer everywhere, but in its making it certainly taught me something about how I wanted to feel with poems, just like answering this questions has taught me about the fact that maybe I’m more visual with poems than I’d previously thought. Thank you for helping me see that.
As in “Christian Anton Gerard and Her Yet Without a Past,” your poem “Her and Christian Anton Gerard in an Argon Cloud” makes use of your name, though the poem itself is in first person. In this way, the title of “Her and Christian Anton Gerard in an Argon Cloud” works to create a unique intimacy with the reader—with the “I” of the poem so defined, the confessions of the poem read with an extra tinge of risk, as when the speaker admits, “Sometimes I cry // thinking of the way you listen because you listen like that.” How did you decide to include your full name in these poems?
I think you might be one of the most ideal readers these poems could want for themselves. Really. Thank you. The name thing has a bunch of answers and they’re all true at the same time. One of the stories is that I was in the park with my son one day and (he’s always loved to listen to music) and he was two or so and I was playing The Smiths while he was climbing on some World War II artillery placed in the park. When he got to the top of the artillery piece, he started scooting out further and further on the barrel of the large-caliber gun and laughed and laughed as I tried to get him to scoot back to me. So there we were, both straddle-scooting the barrel of this huge gun, which I still love trying to imagine seeing.
“Sweet and Tender Hooligan” came on shortly after we climbed down. I started singing his name along with the line “He was a sweet and tender hooligan, hooligan” because he’d been acting rather sweetly hooliganish and I was singing along and stopped saying his name because that song’s “sweet and tender hooligan” does some terrible things though he keeps swearing that “he’d never never never never never never do it again. Not until the next time.” I started saying my own name and making the syllables work, which they kind of did if I dropped the line’s second “hooligan.” I hadn’t thought of it before, but the song reminded me a lot of the way recovered alcoholics talk about ourselves (if you haven’t read Holdfast, the book in which these poems appear, I’m a recovered alcoholic.). But it was also just kind of fun to think of myself as my own character in my own life and when my sobriety snuck itself into my poems, I had to learn how to let it in and using my own name was one of the ways I handled that.
Somehow, using my whole name instead of “I” (and I revised “I” out of a lot of the poems in the book) helped me to be more emotionally honest with the page than I could when I was using the “I” all the time and became enormously tired of myself in the “I.” All of the book’s narratives seemed to work better together (the risk you noted in your question was fun) when I was in the third person.
What are you reading right now?
I’m an insanely slow reader outside of the book’s I’m teaching (I teach books I want to read so I have time to read them), but I’m completely obsessed right now with James Geary’s Wit’s End: What Wit Is, How it Works and Why We Need It.It’s like Geary’s affirming what I’ve learned in the past 18 years while teaching me and entertaining me at the same time. He’s blowing my mind in my favorite ways.
Poetry-wise, I just finished B.H. Fairchild’s The Art of the Lathe (I’m totally late to the party on that one, but I’m more than glad I finally got there). I’m also reading Sara Henning’s View from True North, Geffrey Davis’s Night Angler, Darren Demaree’s Emily as Sometimes the Forest Wants the Fire, and Kathryn DeZur’s Blue Ghosts. I’m looking really forward to Tara Shea Burke’s Animal Like Any Other, Charlie Clark’s The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin,Christine Butterworth-McDermott’s Evelyn As: Portraits of Evelyn Nesbit, and Katie Condon’s Praying Naked.
What project(s) are currently in the works for you?
I’ve been writing sonnets, pseudo-sonnets, or sonnet-esque poems for the past two years centered on a character Heather Dobbins, the wildly amazing poet (and quite fortunately for me, my wife) and I have been calling “tough guy.” I’ve recently finished a draft of the manuscript I’m hoping will be my third book. Tough Guy’s not exactly that tough though, or rather, he is in some ways, but he’s self-aware and emotionally involved with his world in a way that belies his seemingly thick skin. He’s an amateur boxer, a hotrod drag racer, a small-town guy who’s in love and spends a lot of time walking a small stretch of railroad tracks just outside his town. I imagine him in the Midwest where I’m from and for where I long to be. These poems have been a ball to write. Some of them have found homes in some fabulous growing journals, which you can find here:
https://www.thehungerjournal.com/five-rounds-in-a-laurel-crown-gerard