Robert Fanning is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: Severance (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 2019), Our Sudden Museum (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 2017), American Prophet (Marick Press, 2009), and The Seed Thieves (Marick Press, 2006), as well as two chapbooks: Sheet Music (Three Bee Press, 2015) and Old Bright Wheel (The Ledge Press, 2001). His poems have appeared in many literary journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Atlanta Review, and others. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at Central Michigan University and the founder and facilitator of The Wellspring Literary Series.
His poem, “Man Flying Corpse Flying Man,” appeared in Issue of The Rupture.
Here, he speaks with Interviewer Victoria DiMartino about addressing wider human concerns, being tethered to mortality, and the fact that we are the ones being flown by the cycles of life.
While this poem carries a discernable dark image of a man flying a corpse as a kite, I found that while reading—specifically when I read it out loud—that the words are very lyrical and light, having a flow similar to a child’s rhyme. The poem felt like it was written to be read out loud. Could you talk about the inspiration for this piece?
Thanks for noting the musicality of the piece—I am a loud poet—and I love when people hear the musicality of my lines because it is a principal focus of mine. Here, yes, the musicality is somewhat at odds with the context of a man flying a corpse like a kite over a busy park. This poem is part of a series of poems I’ve been working on for several years—of a man called Man carrying a corpse called Corpse, sparked by seeing a drawing by 16th century drawing by Luca Signorelli.
This particular poem originated with the line “Who would fly such a dark kite on such a bright day?” which had been rattling around in my head for a while, long before this series of poems began.
The poem has a lot of play on words because of your choice to take the nouns man and corpse and make them proper nouns, Man and Corpse. Phrases like, “Man Corpse’s marionette” and “Corpse’s falling lifting Man” made me slow down and re-read them. Seeing how in this piece you play with words in a way that plays with the reader; would you like to talk more about how you go about this and why?
By calling this man, Man, and this corpse, Corpse, I’m removing their specific identities, obviously, in a sense to generalize them. But in doing so it allows me more leeway to address wider human concerns. For one, it reminds us all we’re eternally nameless—and yes, it also creates many delightful and surprising juxtapositions on the page, as the one’s you’ve noted—which also provide multiple layers of metaphor and meaning.
The imagery is this piece, while dark at times, is very vivid. The images are clear from description, but there is also a lightness and darkness that readers can see beyond just the surface description. Lines such as, “Man unrolls Corpse, spreads him on the grass, / ties
string round his spine and wrists, then releases Corpse / to the wind,” and “she points again, now singing her words, watching / as the corpse begins floating down toward her” carry detailed imagery that show exactly what is going both on and below the surface. Could you talk about how you focused on imagery to enrich the poem?
In poems like these—that lean more into the narrative but that also share a boundary with magical realism, imagery is utterly essential. To ground the reader in the scene, for one. I want this reader seeing (however fantastical) Man taking Corpse out of his pocket, rolling him on the grass and making a kite of him. Especially when one is working in an absurd mode—it is particularly delightful to have a reader watching closely, and believing, the magic, for a moment. And of course, in this poem—it is NOT intended to be surreal or weird for weirdness sake—the poem, dressed in dream as it is, is wearing a powerful human message: In moments of levity, on bright days, we can forget that we’re tethered to our mortality—as Man realizes here—when through the course of the poem a reversal happens, and Corpse becomes the one “flying” him. To me, on a deeper level, the poem speaks to a transformation that happens in middle age—when carefree days are changed by the weight of knowledge that our days are growing shorter, that we are in fact not holding the string, dallying in directing the dip and dive of our lifetime, but that we are the ones being flown.
Lastly, notice how the baby and the small girl in this poem both see (and delight in!) what their parents don’t want them to see. Nearer the eternal, infants and children are not weighted down by needless fears and shame about mortality. But here the adults are horrified and wish to shield them from the spectacle of this “dark kite” of a corpse. We learn not to look at our inevitable decline, our aging and dying, as a fluid and dancing part of a beautiful process of life—but instead as something that disturbs the peace of the bright and blinding day.
Is there anything you are currently reading that you think everyone should read, even if they are not into that genre?
Currently I’ve been delighting in John Cage’s Silence, that I should have read a lot sooner in my life. Though I’m neither composer nor experimentalist (to some degree), I’m enthralled by Cage’s focus on presence and his desire to elevate the ordinary, to inquire and re-define music, to make us question tradition and convention. In fact, as my current manuscript continues to evolve, Cage has found his way into the book as a character. At this juncture in my life and art and spiritual practice, he has pierced me like an arrow, reminding me as both human being and artist to trust the current, to remain always open to mystery.
What are you writing about right now that is really inspiring to you?
Having just published my fourth full-length collection, Severance, which was itself a wild departure for me, I’m lost in the woods—a good place to be—with a manuscript several years in the making, at that challenging juncture where my dissatisfaction with its direction has me striking it with many shaping—and unshaping—blows, to see what new directions emerge that I couldn’t have planned. Foolishly, I was thinking it was nearing completion, but the manuscript is telling me otherwise. And I’m listening.
Thankfully, there’s no rush—just one fabulous, cherished side-effect of being a poet outside the passing, momentary glare of the limelight. Lately, I’ve been working on a sequence of poems in tight forms, and, following a decade of much wilder stylistic play—it is deeply inspiring to be self-constrained again.