Michael Brownstein responds

Michael H. Brownstein: I reside in Jefferson City, Missouri where I live with enough animals to open a shelter. I am the admin for Project Agent Orange: http://projectagentorange.com. My work has appeared in The Café Review, American Letters and Commentary, Skidrow Penthouse, Xavier Review, Hotel Amerika, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, The Pacific Review, Poetrysuperhighway.com and others. In addition, I have nine poetry chapbooks including A Period of Trees (Snark Press, 2004), Firestorm: A Rendering of Torah (Camel Saloon Press, 2012), The Possibility of Sky and Hell: From My Suicide Book (White Knuckle Press, 2013) and The Katy Trail, Mid-Missouri, 100 Degrees Outside and Other Poems (Kind of Hurricane Press, 2013). I am the editor of First Poems from Viet Nam (2011) and First Poems from Viet Nam (2011). My book, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else: A Poet's Journey To The Borderlands Of Dementia, was recently published by Cholla Needles Press (2018). This is a few of the reasons poetry is important to me:

You're on the roof of your old house, the roof in serious disrepair, but you walk on it as if you're on a boardwalk -- a squirrel falls through where you just stood -- what is left to do but go to all fours, tread carefully until you're on safe ground, call the roofers (you can't fix this), and write a poem.

You're walking across a great field, firecrackers exploding. You swat away at dozens of mosquitoes. Near where you teach, the security guard tackles you and points out a sniper who has been shooting at you as you crossed. There is nothing else to do but conduct a poetry workshop in your algebra class.

You go camping, and a rattlesnake crawls into your sleeping bag. Prayer and poetry -- they really do go together.

On and on. Take a break. Write a poem.

DV: Have you always wanted to be a poet, or did the Change come suddenly?

MHB: I had a job in the public housing projects of Chicago -- a really dangerous place -- and someone did take shots at me as I crossed the field I had crossed numerous times to get to my classroom. Can't tell you why he kept missing. Fortunately, I made it to the door, told the class we would not be studying math that day, but instead told them we were going to have a poetry workshop. Poetry has always been inside of me. As a teenager I wrote the same crap teenagers write, but I found myself getting better and better as I grew older. I started publishing my work in my thirties and found my poetic voice in my forties. So, yes, change did come, but it came with inner discussions and a better grasp of imagery and substance. It did not come as THE CHANGE. It just evolved.

DV: I guess the sniper just didn’t have the focus and discipline of an experienced poet. What else do you think anyone needs to write a real poem?

MHB: The story ends rather strangely. He was aiming to kill and kept missing. He told his posse he was trying to kill me, but the bullets were magically bouncing away. I had worked in that area for quite a while (gangbangers were beginning to crowd me as I walked down the sidewalk, for example) but immediately after that incident, everything changed. People started making up incredible super hero stories about me and when someone asked if one story or another was true, of course, I told them yeah. He came to my class one afternoon, told me he was the one who tried to kill me and asked if he could join the class. And he did. Came for a few months and then disappeared. Poetry needs magic and the ability to change how we see things. After that shooting, I was one of the safest people in the area. No one even tried to mess with me. It was really strange. I guess that's the third element -- a kind of strangeness. We use words to convey everything and oftentimes those words are conveyed in such a way, you -- both the poet and reader -- have an ah ha moment. Connecting words to ideas, events, life's simple and complex happenings -- that's what a poet needs. 

DV: Plus, of course, super powers. I guess that’s why Dante and Shakespeare wore capes. But, as an ordinary mortal, I’m more intrigued by the third quality, the strangeness. What do you mean by that?

MHB: The quality of words or even the quality of wording. How do we turn a phrase and suddenly one thing is another? Here's a simple example:

SMUGGLING MARIJUANA OVER THE BORDER

grasshopper

What a simple poem. One word with a totally different meaning. When the sniper was shooting at me, I was swatting mosquitoes away. The mosquitoes were not mosquitoes, of course, but I did not know this. I heard the dynamic explosions, but I could not put my head around bullets coming at me. I'm sure if I had, I would have dove to the ground and may not have been as lucky. Out of this incident -- a strangeness. It's like the time someone tried to rob me by threatening to pee on me. They did, in fact, try. Now that was an experience in strangeness -- and quite a performance piece, a rather interesting poem.

DV: Is it yours?

MHB: I think so. Thought of it after reading about a poet named Aram Saroyan. Used it over and over with my classrooms. That was quite a while ago--but, yes, I consider it to be mine. Saroyan inspired the "grasshopper" piece. One of his most famous poems consists of one word:

aren't

That's the entire poem. His volume of poetry was read live by Johnny Carson on his late night show in a little more than one minute.

DV: Do you do much in the way of performing?

MHB: Used to. Did quite a bit in Chicago. You can actually find my piece, "Ten Times People Attempted to Rob Me" archived in the Chicago Museum of Modern Art. On occasion, I still do the one where the guy tried to rob me by pissing on me. I like writing much better. Now that you bring it up, I think I'll go to the local bar during their open mic and do a performance piece -- maybe.

DV: For years I was involved in an open mic in Seoul. I often hosted and almost always performed. Usually I read my poems, but I also did some stand-up comedy or joined the Kimchi Cowboys as their non-singing vocalist. I have the distinction of being the only one who was ever booed on stage (I was doing a tonal poem). I was sometimes a participant (though not a leader) in the more adventurous kinds of entertainment -- mime, "performance art," or the like. However, as part of Dan Godston's Chicago Calling series of annual collaborative events, Matt Barton (whom I never met and is now deceased, unfortunately) transformed a picture poem that showed a spatial relationship between sharks and swimmers; he revealed the world from the sharks' point of view. I never could have envisioned it as anything but a poem to be seen on a piece of paper, but he revisioned it and caused it to look out from itself. Art is transformative, even unto itself. Speaking of transformative, what does Project Agent Orange do?

MHB: When I was in Viet Nam a half dozen years or so ago (I did quite a bit of poetry workshops in Ha Noi with students from the Ha Noi University of Agriculture), one of my Vietnamese hosts asked me about Agent Orange. I honestly thought our country -- the US -- had helped to get rid of it. They took me around and I personally saw the results of what we did during what they call The American War. That war ended over forty years ago and children are still being born with major and horrific birth defects. Project Agent Orange, among other things, proved that arsenic in the water supply made the effects of Agent Orange even worse. The project raised money to give clean water to three Agent Orange impacted communities. In addition, the project also did a bit of economic development. Now three communities are self-sufficient. The project also went after Monsanto to do the right thing, but that failed. Monsanto would not budge.

DV: Monsanto! The Government didn't even start to seriously study Agent Orange effects on American veterans until the 1990s, and it still denies any connection with a long list of disorders and still limits its responsibility to some military personnel who may have been exposed to the defoliant. Did First Poems from Viet Nam deal with that issue? Did you contribute any of your own works to the volume?

MHB: I was in Viet Nam to assist my son with some plant research that was way over my head, so I ended up helping him, working in the lab and teaching English to three university classrooms. We decided to try haiku in English first and then poetry. I found poetry in English resonated with them. The published poems were all written by my students. This was their first attempt at poetry in English. Thankfully, my friend Russell Streur ran a poetry site, The Camel Saloon, and he published their work in an online chapbook (First Poems from Viet Nam). This was for my students so, no, I just helped them write, revise, revise, revise, edit and then publish the work. Agent Orange never came up in the process, but when I came home, almost all of my students joined with me in Project Agent Orange as researchers, bloggers, etc. One of them, in fact, got the entire engineering school involved in the water purification program. Interestingly, they bore no animosity to the USA, Monsanto, Dow Chemical and others for the disaster. They just hoped someone from our government would help out and President Obama was instrumental in getting quite a bit of money to assist in a lot of clean-ups and other humanitarian programs.

DV: In my own, very casual, contact with the Vietnamese, it seems to me that they really do mostly regard it as a “Viet Nam War” – i.e. a civil war – rather than as a foreign war. It’s almost as though the Americans are just a footnote.

MHB: When the scientists in the lab felt they could ask, they asked me about why we had the American War and I thought they were talking about our war of 1776. No, they explained. They wanted to know why we got involved with them. You have to remember, we canceled the elections when it was fairly obvious Ho Chi Minh was going to be elected as president. Then we placed in the south a dictator no one really wanted there -- our puppet. If we had not cancelled the election, would there have been a war? I don't know. In the Viet Nam history classes, it's called the American War -- a great victory for a great leader, Ho Chi Minh. This, too, is a lot of rewriting of history. Many terrible things happened under his rule. Still -- what if's are just that, what if's.

DV: You certainly seem to have an interesting resume – Can you fill it in a bit?

MHB: I taught in the inner city of Chicago my entire teaching career. I worked in one capacity or another in just about every housing project. I came to my GED classroom one afternoon to find the taped outlines of three people murdered there the night before. In another classroom, we kept the shades down so no one would fire at us. I was a very hands-on type of teacher. My discipline was not to use the office for help. I went to my student's homes -- for both good and bad news -- and I gave a series of tests every Friday. If a student received a B or better, I made a phone call to their home -- or a home visit -- to tell the parents how well their child was doing. Because the Chicago schools liked to strike, we opened a learning center called The RAMP and held class during all of the strikes. During the summer, we recruited non-reading fourth to sixth graders to get them to grade level with fairly impressing results. No computers. No whiteboards. Just hard work and engaged lessons. What's the best way to learn about potential and kinetic energy? Roller skating. Fossils? Go on a real dig. I learned early on my students lacked a lot of experiences so I tried my best to give them as many as I could. We did not use basal readers, but real books. We did not use a fourth grade math book, but one used for high school. After all, 3X=12 is a way to teach multiplication no matter if it's called algebra. 15/Y=3 is just another way to do division. The quadratic equation? Just math in a different order. Did I ever tell you about the big fight where the security officer did not follow me into the fray? Because the big boy -- taller and bigger than me -- was getting ready to body slam a much smaller boy and I was alone as the only authority figure, I did the only thing that could be done. I went for his underarms and tickled him until he put the other boy down safely. Then I walked him home. 

DV: Have you ever considered a doing a series of Inner City Reflections? Vignettes on teaching and related issues? Narrative paragraphs rather than fully developed essays?

MHB: Yes. I actually had a blog back in the day about my teaching experience. Tried to put it into book form, added stuff to it, but that is pretty much as far as I got. Don't know how to access it now. Ten Page Press which seems to have vanished from the web published my chapbook, I Was a Teacher Once. Now that you put it back in my head, I think it's a fine idea. When do you want to get started? 

DV: I'm ready to get started any time. (But, of course, you'd be doing all the work.) Was I Was a teacher Once a poetry chapbook?

MHB: Yes, but I can't find it anymore. Ten Pages Press was an online chapbook site. 

DV: The online world is inhabited by ethereal material. Sometimes it's eternal and other times dissipated into clouds. What inspires you to write these days, now that you're no longer teaching?

MHB: I never stopped writing. I wrote when I was a teacher; I write now. That's the short answer. The longer answer goes like this: When I let teaching go, I was at the top of my game. It's always best to let something go when you are at the top because you only have one place to go after that -- -and that's not the top. I decided I would like to write full time. We left Chicago, moved to this small city in Missouri -- -where we had a presence for quite a while (but that's another story -- -violence, prostitution, illicit drug addicts everywhere -- and my wife and I fighting back -- and winning) -- and I began to seriously write. Unfortunately, life kept getting in the way. I started rehabbing buildings and found I liked working with my hands more than I'd ever realized, began start-up kinds of businesses most of which went nowhere, ended up tutoring children and adults (the teacher never leaves), did time in a factory ‘cause I never worked in a factory before, but every morning -- just about -- I'd write. What inspires me? Clouds, a dusting of fog, water and rivers and streams and fish, smiles, angst, politics big time, an image out of nowhere and publications like yours.  

DV: I'd like to see one of your political poems.

MHB: Here are two from the political poetry site, New Verse News:

ONE MONTH AND WE ARE ALREADY EXHAUSTED

The eighteen wheeler tortoise stepped, jerked, fell back into place:
How can we do this day after day?
The Ozarks grow steeper, brush grass grayer, mice grow bolder inside our walls.
Some days you need to wear a helmet, fatigues.
Others, paper and pen well do, a tablet perhaps, a way to form context. .

Why not words to combat fallacy,
To write on a wall when there is no need for a wall,
Meditations to dissolve conflict?

In the battle of bullies and bullying leadership,
In the battle of superegos.
In the battle of grenade popping automatic weapon thinkers…
The semi reaches the top of the ridge,
Lowers its gears, slowly winds its way down to the hollow.


THE WALL IN QUESTION

A wall built on tumbleweed, spit, grasshopper larvae
Help us, people--help us understand—help us visualize--
I understand none of this. Is there a way I can know?
A wall built of bone marrow mortar and dog piss,
Violent thought and disconnection, the rapid fire
Of bullet cored brick. Help us understand where
This river enters the realm, where this river empties
Its blood to the valleys of snow, how the impact
Of dour men with raccoon hat hair suck away the core.

DV: I guess the “raccoon hat hair” does not refer to Davey Crockett.* Was it difficult for a liberal big-city denizen to find a comfortable home in rural, conservative America? Has poetry helped in the process?

MHB: So you liked the image of racoon hat hair. Chicago was the home of many things -- tolerance to different ideologies was one of them. Where I am now is the bottom of the barrel for tolerance. I have a group of like minded friends, but I have gathered others around me. It's a matter of can we talk politics or not. I have made it my business not to bring up politics first -- or even second. Does poetry help? Some days it's the only life jacket available. It may surprise you, but until I moved to this town in Central Missouri, I had never seen a gun close up used in violence -- this being the state with no gun control regulations -- and I never had anyone threaten to fight me because they thought I was talking negatively about a political candidate. This happened twice. Step outside, the guy said, and I thought it so funny I burst out laughing, but this guy was serious. Why? I asked. Do we no longer live in America? Don't get me started on the Christians who have no mercy for those who cannot afford healthcare (this state voted against the Affordable Health Plan in a nonbinding referendum) and still feel Christianity is the great white religion -- no one else need apply. So, yes, poetry is a very much needed release -- along with the occasional short story and letter to the editor. 

DV: Is there any “Jeff”-related material (the Ozarks, the Mound Builders, Daniel Boone*) that has inspired your verse, not your ire?

MHB: I don't write much about the people around me, though I have done a series on the bars and the people in this town who inhabit them. When I write about this area, I mostly write about its beauty -- the peepers hiding in the mud, the ghost trees during winter along the Missouri, the fogs and the sunsets. It's interesting to me how many people are environmentally involved with keeping the natural natural. Most of my political stuff is more on the national level.

DV: I want to thank you for all your time and candor. I enjoyed our conversation and hope to explore more of your poetry.

MHB: Thanks. It was fun chatting with you. Anytime you want to do this again. let me know.

*[Crockett was a popular 19^th-century American coonskin-wearing folk hero whose motto was “Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.”].