David Norris responds

David Norris: I don't know how much of the story of my birth is fact and how much of it is made up. I was told that I was born in the middle of the night, in a thunderstorm, and that when I popped out of my mother's womb, my umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck. They called me a blue baby, and I was delivered into this world by a man of color who gave me mouth to mouth resuscitation all the way to the hospital eleven miles away. I owe every breath I take to Doctor Walter Johnson. May he rest in peace. I grew up in a small mountain town in Allegheny County, Virginia. I was raised by my grandfather Bud, the black sheep of the family, and my great grandfather Pop, who was known as the Old Gentleman. I have both of them in me. I've been told my daddy left my momma on the day I was born. I don't know how true that story is, but I do know that she left when I was ten, leaving me in the care of Pop and Bud. I consider myself blessed by those events. Those two old men raised me with love and wisdom, instilling in me at a young age a strong sense of independence. I learned to cook myself a meal, as well as wash my own clothes in our wringer washer when I was only ten years old. I could go to my grandfathers with any question (some of the ones that I asked Bud, I don't dare tell you in writing), and I would always receive an honest answer. I left the mountains at age 20, and I've been traveling ever since. 

DV: What got you started writing poetry?

DN: I wrote my first poem after my first kiss. I was 13 years old, and it had been at a church camp. I went there shy and devoid of confidence, but while there, I learned that when we are on the road, when we are away from the place that has a definition of ourselves, we can become anybody. The person I became while there was the polar opposite of myself back home.

DV: So you decided to be a poet in adolescence?

DN: I am the only one in my family to ever go to college, so I had no one to advise me when it came to choosing a school or a major. It's a bit of an odd story on how I ended up going to college in the first place.  I don't know how relevant this may be to writing poetry. Pop and Bud both died the same year, and at that time, I had to go live with my mother and her husband. This necessitated changing high schools in my junior year. At the new school, two students from the senior class took me under their wings and mentored me. One showed me how to wear a suit properly, and the other young man advised me on books to read. The next year they both graduated and headed off on their futures. I was a senior with no sense of direction or purpose. One of my two mentors was attending the University of Virginia and majoring in electrical engineering. He had come home for winter break, and we were riding around in his Rambler while drinking beer.
"Where are you going to college?"
I replied, "I ain't going to college! I'm going to go to work at the Paper Mill."
"Yes, you're going to college," he said emphatically.
"Why do you say that?"
"Because you are too smart not to."
I was a senior in high school, and that was the first time I had ever been told that. By the time school started again, I had decided that I was going to go to college. I had no idea what college actually was or what it would be like. I'd only been told, "You don't need to know nothing. All you need is that piece of paper on the wall." I looked around and asked the richest person in the family, Aunt Dorothy, who also had never been to college, what I should major in. She said, "If I were a young man, I'd major in business, because if you major in business, you will always have money." Then when I applied for college, all of the places to which I applied turned me down because I had not taken algebra or geometry or other college prep classes. Thus I ended up at the local community college, where I received, by the way, an excellent education. I had been quite fortunate once again. My mother often told me that I had been born to be an English teacher. I would reply, "Momma, teachers don't make any money." So that is how I ended up with my first college degree being in business. It was boring as mud, but by the time I had transferred to a four-year school and finished my third year, it was too late to change majors. At the community college, I had only taken economics and accounting. I had done OK in those courses, but I had excelled in my writing and literature courses. Well, if you do not follow your heart, you are doomed to failure.

DV: Most people think that business and writing aptitudes fit naturally in different brains (though of course Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive). How did you make that difficult transition?

DN: I learned that the hard way. Even though my first degree is in business, I don't really think of myself as a business person, other than in how I manage my own finances. Fortunately, the business training did teach me how to live on a teacher's modest salary.

DV: And of course the even more modest financial rewards of poetry….

DN: I will say this, I have never chosen to write a poem. I have never decided what the topic of a poem would be. Much like the way Anne Tibbitts says her poems come to her, the poems I have written have always chosen me. A radio goes on in my head. Over the years, I've learned to trust the radio and write down what the voice tells me. I don't always like what I have written. Some of the poems have actually scared me. For one poem, written about a child prostitute, it took ten years before I could put enough distance between myself and the poem to work on it. I have certain criteria for a poem. First, it must tell the truth, even if it has to lie to do it. Second, it must show a love, a respect, an appreciation for the language. Again, I firmly believe that a writer must reveal the ugliness in the world in any attempt to call attention to it. This is risky. I have one poem in particular, the one about child prostitution, for which I have been told I was a sicko for writing it. My point is that the angrier and more disgusted the reader becomes while reading the poem, the more successful that poem is in attacking this abominable enterprise. I did not enjoy writing that poem. I did not like its contents. It took me ten years to finish it. However, I felt it was my job, my responsibility to bring it to life.  It's been a bit of a tough road at times. I've been damned for it as often as I've been praised for it. There are times now when I think I tamed it down too much over the years. I may still be working on it without realizing it. 

DV: Where has your teaching taken you? Geographically, psychologically?

DN: At one of those low points in my life, when I had no job, no income, and was living in a tent near the McCredie Hot Springs just outside the city limits of Eugene, Oregon, drinking cheap scotch and reading books on art history by the light of a Coleman lantern, I applied for a job teaching on US Navy ships, something called the PACE Program (Program for Afloat College Education). When I look back on it now, in many ways, that was an idyllic time in my life, but at that juncture, my head was too fucked up to realize it. I spent the days soaking nude in the hot springs or lying on the rocky beach reading, and the nights alone by my campfire drinking The Black Prince and reading a book on the works of Jackson Pollock. I could never understand his paintings, and one of his works had recently sold for millions of dollars. I wanted to know why his work was so highly valued. There is an answer, but that's another story. Before I headed out to the campground, I left my contact phone number with a friend who was both a poet and a yoga teacher. One day while I was sitting nude on the big rocks on the side of the hot pool, my friend and her friend drove into the small parking lot, walked to the beach, stripped themselves of their clothing and waded out to where I was sitting and joined me. Joan leaned over and whispered in my ear, "You need to be in Japan by next Thursday." At that moment, my life had changed. I had never entertained the idea of traveling in Asia, and to tell the truth, I was a bit scared of what lay ahead. Shortly afterward, I headed down to Alameda Naval Station near San Francisco to pick up my travel orders. I had the first of what would turn out to be many similar conversations over the next years.
"You will meet the USS Towers, DDG-9, in Singapore," he told me.
"When will it be there?" I asked.
"Sometime within a ten-day window."
After he had given me those dates, I asked, 
"Where will I meet the ship?"
"Singapore has two harbors; the ship will be at one of those locations to refuel. You will have to find out which one."
"How long will it be there?"
"Long enough to refuel."
"What am I going to teach once I'm out there?"
"Just see what they need."
"Well, at least give me the name of a good hotel and a place to eat."
He mentioned the Raffles Hotel and the local outdoor food court nearby. Shortly after that, I talked with a young man who had been teaching on the ships for a few years, and he told me how to find the answers to all of the questions the supervisory person had not answered. I arrived at midnight in the biggest storm since Noah rode his ark, and checked into the Herman Hesse room, as the rooms at the Raffles Hotel do not have room numbers but instead are named after famous writers. At breakfast in the mornings, I sat in the hotel's courtyard surrounded by singing birds in cages. I found the ship with no problem several days later when it pulled in to refuel. I asked for "Permission to come aboard," and walked up the ramp to my future. I had never set foot on a naval vessel before, and it scared the hell out of me as I walked up that incline. We sailed through the Strait of Malacca and into the Indian Ocean and on to the Gulf of Oman. We spent 75 days patrolling there before sailing down to Diego Garcia. It was our first time on land in a long time, and we all had our sea legs, so we were walking around like a bunch of drunks. We had been given a classroom in a small building, and when we met, I looked out at their sad but polite faces. This was the last place in the world that they or I wanted to be. "Let's buy some beer," I said. We walked down to the hangar where beer was sold by the case, picked up some cold ones, and walked over to the outdoor basketball court. My students sat in the stands, and I stood midcourt with a beer in my hand lecturing on pronouns. I taught on four ships during the next two years: a destroyer, a frigate, an ammunition ship and an aircraft carrier, all stationed out of Yokosuka, Japan, except for the ammunition ship, which had joined the Japan Battle Group for a WestPac. This is how and when I learned my way around Asia. Although based in Japan, I spent little time on dry land. On the USS Knox, FF-1052, we sailed around the entire island of Honshu. On both the Towers and the Knox, I sailed into South Korea, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand, and Australia. I once flew from San Francisco to Honolulu to meet the USS Kiska AE-35 and sailed from there to Yokosuka and then from there to Hong Kong and on to Pusan, South Korea, where I left the boat permanently. For two years of teaching, I made less than $9,000 per year, but the learning experience could not have been bought for any amount of money. I learned many tricks about how to teach my students in almost impossible situations: sitting on the deck with our backs against the wall as crew members walked up and down between us, quietly lecturing in the berthing area with people yelling at us to shut up; once, as we sailed past Bali, we had class in the Crow's Nest, pausing to watch the windsurfers with a pang of envy in our hearts. Finally, I was assigned a cabin in which I could lecture while my chair slid back and forth across the deck. We once hit a wave so strong that it launched a student into the air, and of course, he landed on me. My last teaching assignment was on the USS Midway CV-41. I arrived in Manila the night before Corazon Aquino was elected president. I will never forget taking the hotel's elevator down to the Lower Ground Floor, to where the disco and bar were located. A sign at the entrance had these words written on it: "Check Your Guns and Knives at the Door." I got back on the elevator and went somewhere else that night. After two years, the college that held the contract lost its bid to another institution, who cut the salary by 30%. I decided it was time to move on. I told folks, "I feel like a Hank Williams, Jr., song: "I'm gettin' screwed, but I ain't gettin' kissed."  When I told the Educational Services Officer at Yokosuka that I was leaving, she said, "You're too good for us to let get away." She then picked up the phone and called the Director of the University of Maryland University College in Asia. The next morning, I had an interview at Yokota Air Base starting at 10 a.m., and by 2 p.m., I was a faculty member. That began the most rewarding years of my life. I was based in Seoul, where I taught for UMUC for the next 27 years at military bases all over South Korea. Ironically, when I was assigned to Korea, it was with an apology. It was the only location that needed a teacher of writing and literature, and the position had suddenly become available. Actually, it was my first choice. Seoul is a rich city culturally and a perfect hopping off place for travel to other countries, which I did: Philippines, Thailand, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bali, Japan, Saipan, and Laos, among others. How has it changed me psychologically? Whew! When I first arrived on the ships, I thought I was jaded; I was carrying a heavy guilt trip. I soon learned that I was an innocent. I had no idea of what lay ahead. Along that note, I've always felt that in order to write about something, we must first know it inside and out, have experienced it. I went into places where I was literally lucky to emerge from alive, and these were not places required by my work. It was my "research." There have been times in my life when I have befriended people others found odd, who were often outcasts. I would get inside their heads to see the world their way and to find their voices. (I know that some of you reading this will find that invasive and repugnant) When I am successful at this, the radio speaks to me in their voices. Unfortunately, my words have too often been misinterpreted because of this. At times, readers think that I am the voice and attitude found in the poem. This is wrong. As I said, I follow the rule that a writer attacks that which is wrong by revealing its ugliness. From my years traveling, I've learned to embrace the beauty of difference. I have come to the conclusion that our purpose for being on this earth is to learn as much as we can between the cradle and the grave. I can find no other logic for it.  I firmly believe that travel is the greatest teacher.

DV: Has living in Asia for 30 years while teaching writing and literature influenced or changed your writing?

DV: Both yes and no. The poems, when they arrive, which is less often, still arrive in the same way. A radio turns on in my head, and over the years, I've learned to trust the voices and write down what they say, exactly as they are said. I use the plural of voice because different voices will speak to me. Sometimes, I don't understand what they are telling me until I return to the poem later and then put a structure to it. However, there is a price to pay for writing in that fashion. The barrier between the conscious mind and that of both the subconscious and unconscious exists for a reason. We see more alcoholism, heavy drug use and suicides among poets and painters than anywhere else. They work in the same space. One paints with words while the other writes with images. Let me give an example. More years back than I want to say, I was sitting on the couch in my living room in San Francisco when a voice turned on inside my head. I quickly picked up pen and paper to write down what it said. Once it had stopped, my body was so drained of energy that I went into my bedroom and lay down for about half an hour. Shortly after I had sat back down on the couch, the voice turned on again. This time, when I finished recording what it had said, I was even more drained of energy than before, and I had to go lie down again. After I had returned to my couch for a third time and had written down what that third voice had said, I was so drained of energy that I actually fell asleep when I went back to lie down again. I was completely exhausted. Later when I looked at the poem, I realized it was three voices: that of my grandfather Bud, my absent father whom I only met once for the duration of one cigarette that we smoked in the snow, and myself. That became a conversation poem among three men titled "Humpty Dumpty: Three Men at the Heaven Bar, Barrio Barretto."

The Old Master Chief Behind the Bar

Essentially, we all wish
to live our lives as hedonists,
but life will not leave us alone.

We walk our walk.
We dance our dance,
low to the ground.

We sweep the sawdust from the floor.

If I must take my turn,
then I will stand and
recite the rules:

it is easy to love them;
it is difficult to let them go.

We pay a dear price for every
nickel and dime pleasure we find.

I can love a man because he
allowed me to taste the joy in his life
and live to reflect on it.

I remember her sweet body,
her generous gifts. After all,
I am a man, and a man never forgets.

*

The Handsome Lieutenant Standing in the Doorway

Have you seen the mermaid sitting in the harbor?
Have you looked in the mirror and seen
who was the fairest one of all,
and she was with you?

Do not lose her in the green river.
Do not let her drown in the deep water.
Her body may be bashed by the stones.
She may turn cold in your hands.

Do not lose her my friend.

She will never come again.
She is a bird who chirps,
hops, flies away forever.

She is such a tiny bird,
dressed in bright colors,
who flies so close to the ground.

I am afraid she may break
in your hands, her bones shatter and
fall apart like a porcelain mask.

And all the kings men
could not put her back together again.

*

The Young Second Class Petty Officer Sitting Alone at the Table

I have listened to the purr of a tiger
in the jungle. I have run with the horses
on the beach. I have seen the mind of a minx.

I had an angel who was
my luck, and she flew
too high for me to hold on.
I fell in the house built
upon rock, not sand.

 

I shattered into a million little pieces
the day she left.

I have the pieces now,
nicely fit together,
rearranged slightly.

One of the most controversial poems I have written is the one about child prostitution. I set the poem in two parts: a bar in Pattaya Beach, Thailand, and later in the room at his hotel, where the man has taken the girl after paying her bar fine. We see the poem through his eyes, but at the same time, with just a little alteration in our way of looking at the poem, we can also see the events through her eyes. I use the word girl because she is young, possibly as young as 15, and he is old, old enough to realize his days of virility are coming to an end. This poem attacks child prostitution, but not all who read the poem see this; instead they see the writer of the poem in that bar and hotel room, instead of the man who was created from a composite of three men I had studied. I once read the poem at a conference, and some of my colleagues were so angry they would not speak to me for a long time, while others asked for a copy of the poem. This is the price a writer must pay for telling the truth.

My Last Night in Pattaya Beach: At the Baby A-Go-Go

I 

She’s a sexual goddess. 
She breathes eroticism. 
She’s the foldout of my dreams.

Baby has her smile on. 
She can catch the eye 
of any man in the room.

She takes the gleaming chrome 
bar in her hands, 
slides down and up, caressing it.

I’ve never seen such a woman. 
Her body is perfect. It 
all feels surreal.

So I slap down my
250 baht bar fine, and 
10 minutes later,

back comes this little girl 
dressed in jeans and 
a baggy T-shirt,

makeup gone, 
face gleaming clean, 
a few freckles.

Damn! She is somebody’s 
Little sister or maybe 
an orphan with her hand out.

II
  
I take her back to 
my hotel, and after we
shower and crawl

into bed, I throw my 
arms around that little 
hook and pull her   
  
naked body up close to me 
And that’s how we 
lie all night long,

never even rolling over 
once, not even a 
kiss. I hold that

little girl as my 
only salvation, 
alone in the cruelest

of seas, the waves of 
age washing over 
me, the years

I have spent alone 
not letting anyone close 
to me. And here

we are, my last 
night in Pattaya Beach, 
five thousand miles underway,

just an old fool and his 
new Thai baby.

 

DV: You say your poems “arrive” less often. Do you rush them into print (like an over-eager nymphomaniac) or hoard them (like a middle-aged virgin)?

DN: I don't send my work out as often as I should. I find myself in a mood to send it out once or twice a year, while the rule of thumb is to have one's work constantly in the mail: when a piece is returned, immediately send it somewhere new. I can't remember the last time I sent something out. I think it was to a contest. Also, I don't listen to the voices as often as I did, and I believe this has angered them. However, with the price of listening being the internal emotional and psychic turmoil that comes afterwards, I had to force myself to stop listening to them. I am trying to welcome them back now. I have never set out to write a poem. The poems have always chosen me. I have talked to other writers who feel this same way. The poem chooses its author, not the other way around. I hear both women’s and men's voices. Sometimes, writing a poem is fun -- I laughed out loud while writing the "stalker" poem about prowling on Facebook, and I cried while writing a tribute to my mother. 

The Cranes Face Inward

My mamma knew she was leaving
this world when the special earrings
I had bought her, the golden cranes,
sculpted and placed upon a field
of smoky topaz, the ones that
hung elegantly from her ears,
complementing her auburn hair,
turned on their chains and faced inward.

When she told me over the phone,
across the ocean between us,
a cold wind blew upon my back
the windows in my house turned black.
In the morning, I left and drove
to Soraksan on the East Coast.
That evening I watched the sun
set, the mountains in front of me

the waves behind me, calling me.
I sat on the beach all night long.
Then on the second morning, I
climbed to the top of Soraksan.
All day I sat, eating chestnuts,
watching a pair of Ruby Throats
flitting among the gold and red
leaves, preparing themselves to fly

away from the nearing winter.
At sunset, I slowly returned
to my car. On the long drive back,
my mother’s sweet whisky-filled voice
spoke to me: “Those graceful earrings
you bought for me, that I do so
love, the symbols of a long life,
have somehow turned around backwards.

The cranes face inward. I took them
to the jeweler, but he says he
cannot fix them, does not know how
to make them face outward again.
You know how I love to watch the birds
here in Virginia. I am sure
you remember the red birds
that live in the woods near our house.

What I do with a poem has changed dramatically as I have matured in both vision and technique from teaching writing and literature for 30 years in Asia. When we live in another country, there is a constant edge that keeps parts of our mind awake, parts that would go to sleep otherwise. In Seoul, I went to the corner store and said, "Bang juseo," instead of, "I'd like a loaf of bread." Those times underway from our home port in Yokosuka, Japan, to places I had read about and seen in the movies, they filled my head with languages, tastes, sights and experiences, some of which I would have to write about elsewhere: swimming beside the ship near the equator while in the Indian Ocean. The various liberty ports provided me with sights and sounds, tastes and physical experiences I never knew existed, from the foul to the sublime, all of which eventually worked their way into my writings, and they still do. I like to blend English with the language of where the poem is set, creating textures. I love to play with languages, to taste them on my tongue; and some countries just have the right word, the best word for something. The Koreans have the best word for cold: Chuo (pronounced Chew Oh!, with the accent on the second syllable). The Philippines has the best word for nothing or without: walang. In Japan, the word for cherry blossoms is sakura. In the spring, the Japanese greet the cherry blossoms and thank them for returning. I first learned this while walking with a friend in a Tokyo park where I saw an old man talking to a limb of blossoms. Beside the cherry trees, small bushes of white flowers, in English called snow willows, grew. From this came my own version of welcoming the return of sakura. 

Konnichi Wa Sakura

Konnichi wa sakura 
Hello snow willows
It is so kind
to have snow in the spring
time

The birds sing

They love the snow
the pink snow
the white snow
It covers our sorrows
It veils us in happiness

Sing to the snow
Say hello to sakura

Konnichi wa
Konnichi wa

I like to work with approximate rhyme and add a bit of exact rhyme from time to time, in different places within the poem. I find exact rhyme too artificial; I want a natural voice telling the poem, and too often, rhyme is confused with poetry. Rhyme does not make it a poem; rhyme is one of the tools we use to create a poem. Here is a stanza from a poem that I wrote about the coloring of the fall leaves in Korea:

I walked today among the rocks
and foliage of Soraksan 
fall filling the air
stopping to eat a bit of gamja buchim 
to sip a little makoli with haraboji.

Notice the "ah" sound in rocks. It reappears in Soraksan twice, and twice again in gamja, and again in makoli and haraboji. I also work consonance in this stanza, the rhyming of consonants, with "foliage," "fall," and "filling." We again see assonance, the rhyming of vowels, with "walked" and "fall." 

DV: Do your voices come with these poeticisms, or do you massage their message?

DN: I like to work with my own little set of symbols, taken from different schools of literary criticism. For example, the seasons are symbolic: Spring is rebirth, new beginnings; Summer is dreams coming true after appearing to be lost, with love conquering all; Fall is the harvest and death; Winter is separation, with the ultimate separation being death. (Hollywood uses these in movies. On the first day of class, I taught my students how to know the ending of a movie within the first 30 seconds to two minutes, maximum.) Nature equals Eden, where we lost our innocence; thus, any time our story takes place in nature, we can work that in. Water is a symbol of the womb. Any time we have a character go into water, we will see rebirth. Sunrise is beginnings; noon is conflict (in the Westerns, when do they always have the shootout?), and sunsets are, of course, endings. Rain is sadness; the sky is crying. Black is the color of the unknown, and death is unknowable until we arrive there. Notice how often in movies and stories that people attending funerals are dressed in black, while enduring the rain. In myth criticism, the number three represents man. Look at how many times we see the masculine represented in threes: the Holy Trinity, the three musketeers, the three stooges. Four represents woman (though I personally find this a Eurocentric interpretation -- not all countries have four seasons) and the eternity of life, for the circle of the seasons. Seven represents the union of man and woman, thus the continuation of the species. Most of the time, I write in couplets, tercets, quatrains, septets and octaves. At times, I will mix them in a long poem to reflect the action/meaning within the stanza.  I use couplets two ways: to represent harmony, and also, for binary opposites (hot/cold love/hate) to represent conflict.  What destroys the harmony of a couple? A third party, of course. I will use tercets at times to represent conflict, at other times to represent the masculine. When my mother died, I wrote a poem to her in octaves, eight-line stanzas. She knew months in advance that she was going to leave this world, and there was not a damn thing she could do about it. She was "behind the 8 Ball." I wrote four stanzas of eight lines with eight syllables per line, except for one line that has seven syllables, representing a piece missing. I have a pocket full of other tricks of the trade as well, but these are enough to share for now.

DV: Whew! That’s a whole primer on prosody in a paragraph or so. I hope the readers of this interview appreciate all the wisdom you’ve imparted. I want to thank you for the many insights you’ve shared with us.