Interview by Natalie Solmer
Curtis L. Crisler was born and raised in Gary, Indiana. Crisler, an award-winning poet/author, has a new book called Doing Drive-bys on How to Love in the Midwest. He has six poetry books, two YA books, and five poetry chapbooks. He’s been published in a variety of magazines, journals, and anthologies. He’s co-editor of poetry for the museum of americana. He created the Indiana Chitlin Circuit and the poetry form called the sonastic. He’s the Indiana Poet Laureate and Professor of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne (PFW). He can be contacted at www.poetcrisler.com.
NS-Congratulations on your appointment as Poet Laureate of Indiana! I was lucky to be on the committee which made this decision, and your long history of teaching and publishing poetry with your self-described uMs (urban Midwestern sensibility) made you an obvious choice. In a wonderful interview with Mitchell L.H. Douglas (who is on Indianapolis Review staff!), you talk a little bit about how uMs mirrors Cornelius Eady’s “urban pastoral,” and how your take on this specifically examines the people of the Great Migration, African Americans who migrated north between 1915-the 1970’s and from whom you are descended. You also stated you are working on a craft book about uMs. I am fascinated by how a region or a place can shape writers and how their work ends up becoming linked or even known as a collective. What characteristics or similarities do you see for the uMs? Are there specific things related to craft which mark a writer’s work as such? Can you name any other poets writing in this vein?
CC-Natalie, thanks for the love about my appointment. I really appreciate it/you/the committee, and The Indianapolis Review for everything you contribute to making the arts in Indiana flourish.
I’ll start by saying, I think the first paragraph of my unpublished manuscript, Playbook for an Urban Midwestern Sensibility (Crafting Work Cross-Genres), answers your first two questions, when I purport:
“The impetus for writing a book about the crafting of urban Midwestern sensibility (uMs) comes from three urges I will address shortly. I want to start by stating that every impulse about why I create or do what I do derives from my need to examine relationship/s, be it examining my surroundings—the environment, artifacts—the people—community—local, regional, and global. I believe artists “magnify the minute (my-noot).” Magnifying the minute means exploring EVERYTHING (e-v-e-r-y l-i-t-t-l-e t-h-i-n-g) around us because it amazes us, and life speaks to us through our being amazed by the body, the air—the inner and outer manifestation of what and who we are. We have a relationship to humanity, yes, but we have a relationship to the earth, wind, oceans, and stars—everything around us, along with everything within us—it’s what makes us who we are. B-r-e-a-t-h-e! Inhale. Exhale. It’s why we are alive.”
Seeing that I’m not above quoting myself (lol!), here is a deeper dive into ascertaining my uMs via specific midwestern regionalism. To be more specific, I can creatively craft how the mills brought bodies to Gary and Chicago (The Great Migrants, Polish, German, Mexican, Greek, immigrant, displaced, etc.), and how there was nothing but swamp land and shanties before a mass myriad of churches and more people came. I can address the picketing for better working conditions at the mill. I can address the Delaney Projects we stayed in that’s been bulldozed down—nothing but fenced in dirt now. I can address how people ventured to Gary to shop due to Sears, Montgomery Wards, and other big retail stores (along with smaller stores like Save More, The Chicken Shack, barber shops, banks, and open vegetable and fruit markets)—staples that made Broadway a cornucopia for business. I can address the parades everyone attended, high school drill team competitions, Easter Talent Shows at West Side High School, the basketball Holiday Tournaments, the high school Football-O-Rama and track competitions, free concerts in the parks and at the beach. I can address Disco Enterprise hosting at the Genesis Center or one of the largest skating rinks, Screaming Wheels Disco Roller Rink. I can address the U.S.A.’s first Black mayor (Richard Hatcher), white flight, high school closings, continued mill layoffs, big retail stores relocating to malls in Merrillville (now Hobart), how elders told us to leave Gary and go where there are jobs, how Atlanta became a “Little Gary,” how Gary has become a trucking hub. How Gary went from “The Magic City,” “City of Steel,” “Little Chicago,” to “Murder city,” and “Rust Belt City.” All the above are inlets into a larger water mass that’s uMs (via the Black Midwest or the Midwest in general). Even with about two-thirds of the Gary that I knew gone, there are still a million stories to unearth about my origins in Gary, IN (cue up The Music Man or “I’m Going Back to Indiana”).
I believe Terrion L. Williamson, director of the Black Midwest Initiative (Illinois), Hanif Abdurraqib (Ohio), Aaron Foley (Michigan), Tamara Winfrey-Harris (Indiana), avery r. young (Chicago, IL), Duriel E. Harris (Michigan), as well as Aisha Ford, bree grant, and DeMar Walker, are just some of the writers/artists/activists I met at The Black Midwest Initiative (2nd Biennial Black Midwest Symposium) and are addressing the Black Midwest in their work. Many, many, more have paved the way for us—think Gwendolyn Brooks, Dudley Randall, Mari Evans, Etheridge Knight, Carolyn Rodgers, Margeret Burroughs, Haki Madhubuti, etc. etc. etc., who’ve given us roadmaps to newer voices like Cave Canem or Aquarius Press, where Black Midwestern voices continue to grow and flourish.
NS-You were born and raised in Gary, Indiana, and in the aforementioned interview, you and Mitchell discussed the importance of not being ashamed of where you come from and advocating for that place. (I recommend to readers to look up your poem, “Return to Boomtowns,” published in Belt Magazine, which eloquently and imaginatively describes a memory about place from your childhood.) With another one of our staff members, Lydia Johnson, you also discussed growing up in Gary in an in depth video interview for Indiana Humanities. You stated how, “there is a Gary that I know that no one today knows.” And as Mitchell stated, you’ve never been afraid to write about that Gary and to stand up for your hometown, ever since your first book, Tough Boy Sonatas. As someone who grew up in a somewhat similar place (though on a smaller scale, South Bend has always been connected to ‘The Region’), it took me a really long time to give myself permission to write about South Bend and my immigrant (mainly Polish) grandparents who I grew up around. How were you able to give yourself that permission so early on and to take pride in Gary and the Midwest when so often we are taught that real writers and artists must all be from somewhere like New York or Paris or move there?
CC-To answer this question, I’ll start with this: the only thing that any of us own is our story. In the beginning was Gary. Gary is my origin-story. South Bend is your origin-story. How can we deny ourselves that? How can we permit others to obfuscate what belongs to us? Ban our truths and histories and myths and legends? Why must I be ashamed of my past, our past, to where I want to dislodge it from the history books and libraries? And if I can’t tell my origin-story, who will?
Why does any of the above matter? Because it’s my story—my voice—my history (our history). It’s good, bad, and ugly on so many levels. But, it’s mine. “I” have a voice. “You” have a voice. “We” have permission to tell our stories too. People can decide how they feel about us when they read us. So, let them read us. Usually, that’s how it works, even if New York and Paris are meccas of industries in literature, cuisine, fashion, and the like—where they birth or draw visionaries to them. We just have to work harder at it, applying our Midwestern values of course.
I’d like to know your story. I’d like to see where things connect/overlap. For example, many people work in Chicago and live in Indiana. They park at train stations in Gary, (I think Valpo), South Bend, and Warsaw because they take the South Shore line into Chicago. At the end of the day, they take the South Shore back to their cars and go to their homes in Gary, (Valpo), South Bend, and Warsaw. Amtrack stops 20 minutes outside of Fort Wayne, at Waterloo station. Many people travel from Chicago to Fort Wayne, this way. Jobs and travel have been intertwined—fluctuates. I wonder how you and your family engage in all this matriculation-instability?
NS-Congratulations on the publication of your new book, Doing Drive-Bys On How To Love In The Midwest! I’m fascinated by the structure of this book and its myriad of forms. It’s a sensory and sonic experience where every so often we turn the book sideways and read rivers of poems both epistolary and surreal. I especially loved your poems to Zora Neale Hurston and Emmett Till (which won a RHINO editor’s prize!) I read in an interview you did with Naoko Fujimoto that actually the sideways, twisty-turny poems are a form you are calling your “tornado” poems! What could be more Midwestern than that? Can you speak about your process on putting this book together, in particular when it comes to forms?
CC-So true! Lol! When crafting, formatting, and laying out Doing Drive-bys on How to Love in the Midwest, I was enthralled with the symbiotic nature of life and death. Noticing, death scares us into not seeing it’s the other side of the same coin. The ying/yang—life/death. We look at death as finality, which may be why we search for an afterlife, or now, an AI induced replication of those who died and how we can upload some form of them, instead of seeing death through the eyes of the living—through the heart and mind of the living—connected to the living, even after death. We cannot outrun death. I’m talking impact and the experience of knowing those we’ve lost, and their fixed foci of connectivity within us. Our dead speak to us on many levels. When down, a dead sibling says, “Why are you down about this?” When we hear the song representing our dead. How that song takes us back to indelible moments when they were alive. How a smell transplants us back to the kitchen Nana baked her peach cobbler. I wonder, if one has dementia or Alzheimer’s disease or other neurological defects, are their memories still stored? Even if the mechanisms in the brain are functioning or not functioning standardly? This was my thinking.
After that, I wanted to have intimate-poem-sounding conversations—giving up the confessional or what is more intimate in a relational context. It begins with the precursor intimations of each section. In those /////, you hear the older-self (narrator) talking to the younger-self, to supply a skeletal-conversational-attitude. Then, the Epistolary poems, the tornado poems (prose-like poems in a funnel cloud), invoke a confessional tone. Poems talk to the newly dead. Poems replicate a bullet striation format (“A Bullet Hole in the Soap Dish” for Breonna Taylor, and mother, Tamika Palmer). Poems talk to those who have been dead for a while (“Looking for Hurston in a Triptych” for Zora Neal Hurston and “Fifty Something Years of Letters Laters” for Emmett Till). The poems are a gumbo of Afro/African Futurism, surrealism, and confessionally conversational in their presentations and beats. At least to me.
Also, as the old saying goes, “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.” I felt I could better examine uMs by taking on racism; death; living; aging; body politics; COVID; birth; hope; the future; loss; reality/mother nature; being in love with your pillow, quilt and bed; depression; uncertainty; childhood; evil ballerinas; what bullets do; what addiction does; and how imagination lives inside of us (even in restrooms); to mention some themes and tones. I created these themes and tones from a POV that plays on my humanity. Instead of bum rushing the initial creative image, head on (being didactic—referring back to the above saying), I believed the humanistic approach to making all those themes and tones came from the intimacy of our human condition, which I felt was a more available nuance. These were themes and tones I couldn’t escape, so I had to let them breathe.
The book is dedicated to my Great-Uncle Mack and my dear friend, Jon Tribble—two amazing people and artists that I carry with me (conjuring Miss Celie carrying Nettie with her in The Color Purple).
NS-Doing Drive-Bys On How To Love In The Midwest contains so many different aesthetics. You talked a little about this in the video interview with Lydia, about how you have been influenced by narrative poets, surrealists, and also the Black Arts movement. I also have very eclectic tastes, but can be a real sucker for poems with a more ‘confessional’ bent. I noticed several poems in this collection that lean towards the confessional and that deal with the body of the speaker, in particular with aging. Poems I am thinking of are, “Old Dude,” Tao of Aging,” and “Skin Rash.” I loved the intimacy and strength of voice in these poems and guts in writing about aging which we don’t always see. Another thing about “Skin Rash” I loved was the anaphora of “My body” which I felt was very powerful and a great change from the many poems I have seen that refer to people simply as ‘bodies’ or ‘black bodies.’ This poem takes ownership and declares, “My body protest/ My body confess / My body undertow / My body thrash / My body hot take / My body burning bush.” Can you share any thoughts on your process of writing these works?
CC-Yes. Sure. I am no more a threat than any other man who works and provides for self, family, and community. “Skin Rash” elicits a narrator taking possession of his body, moving it from “other” and “outcast” to “seen.” Currently, but not only, many Black men die on video in so many forms and fashions that I felt, “when did I become a threat just by walking out my front door?” “Me,” precisely. This is “me,” not anyone else. The narrator of “Skin Rash” supplies a memoir of confessional body politics in a short spurt of reverence for his own acceptance of self, an amalgamation of nature, spirituality, and philosophy. Recently, an audience member asked about the ending of “Skin Rash,” which states, “My body burning bush.” She wasn’t getting it. Then, I couldn’t verbalize “theophany,” which basically means “a manifestation of God, in the Bible, that is tangible to human senses.” The narrator in “Skin Rash” hyperbolizes and implies that even if he’d manifest “theophany,” he wouldn’t be “seen,” “accepted.” He’s filled with questions: “Why can’t I tell my story, address my validity, without someone saying I’m not real or it didn’t happen or that I shouldn’t be seen? “Why can’t I address MY life?” When did MY body become the ownership of narratives that paint me threat?” Especially, in a time where so many across the globe are validating the legitimacy of their bodies/lives/breaths/mortality?
“Old Dude” and “Tao of Aging” mirror narrators fighting the aging process, especially how their bodies have morphed into new bodies/beings. Yet, the focus must be turned to their internal inclinations as father and grandfather in “Old Dude,” and a maturing man not wanting to accept the aging process he’s not really ready for in “Tao of Aging.”
NS-Can you speak about the five poems labeled “/////” which act as sort of preludes to each section of your new book? What was your process in creating these surreal and haunting pieces? These lines from the first one in particular stood out to me in their lyric navigation of holiness, grief, mothers, and gun violence, “The lie is you. The lie is me. / The lie is us grieving for some gold dust from our mother’s mouth, as if prayer / It’s just that prayers and hopes, these days, seem disbanded through the barrels / of freshly smoking guns.”
CC-Yes, the ///// are thematic “preludes”—lyrical mines. They are similar to larger roman numerals addressing the subheadings of an outline. In this case, the book. In these sections the narrator talks to his younger self in the midst of their life experiences. I like how you say they are a “lyric navigation of holiness, grief, mothers, and gun violence.” You can see how each ///// theme reveals itself in the section to follow. With the first section, I believe the “lyric navigation of holiness,” and “grief” are represented in all the poems. The “lyric navigation of mothers and gun violence,” are in the poems “Sometimes it Snows in April” and “where do all the fucks go?” and “‘A Bullet Hole in the Soap Dish’” and “Fifty Something Years of Letters Laters.” I relied on this skeletal format to unite these individual sections like an outline, without numbering them. In doing so, it cemented the formatting of the book. The sections became synecdochic in nature.
NS-As poet laureate, I know you have a series of pop up readings which you are organizing, the Indiana Chitlin Circuit readings, and you also mentioned working on an anthology. Where can readers go to learn more about the events that you have going on as poet laureate, and is there anything you want to promote for now?
CC-Anyone can access my website (www.poetcrisler.com) and click on my EVENT page. There’s a calendar with upcoming dates. You can email me for specifics, if needed. The website is updated frequently. We plan to do a Pop-up Indiana Chitlin Circuit each month. We plan to have more community engagement with Hoosiers throughout our counites. If people can attend events on the EVENT page, please come out and represent the Pop-up ICC, or the workshops, or the individual readings, etc. We believe you’ll enjoy all of them.
Currently, I’m observing a manuscript by a Hoosier, displaying a benevolent audaciousness that I never foresaw with what I wanted to accomplish with the above-mentioned anthology. Now, I’m thinking about helping said author get their book published. Now, I’m thinking about creating something not redundant and still inspiring for my fellow Hoosiers.
NS-My last question is always the same for every featured poet: what are your thoughts on Indiana’s place in the larger literary world, and do you have any special Indiana locations, organizations, etc. that you wish to shout out?
CC-I think Indiana is doing well in the literary world. The poet laureates before me are acclaimed and accomplished and continue to value poetry and what it can do for Hoosiers and humanity. I believe each and every one of them continues to contribute to Indiana’s legacy. I have seen or been in contact with almost all of them. With younger poets like Aalihya Banks, winning the state contest for Poetry Out Loud, and Paij Rhymes, selected as the first Gary Youth Poet Laureate, we are in good hands. I’m blessed to discover new people, places and things, every day, with this appointment. I’ve visited so many counties, with so many to come in my first seven months, providing vast opportunities for Indiana poetry and poets. I’m proud to be a part of Indiana’s legacy. Being the Indiana Poet Laureate keeps me on my toes! I’m on it! All for it!
I would like to shout out ALL THE LOVES to everyone in these trying times, starting with my family, the Indiana Arts Commission team, the Indiana Humanities team, Poet Out Loud team, INverse, Purdue University Fort Wayne (PFW), the Department of English & Linguistics @ PFW, COLA @ PFW, Erica Anderson-Senter, Detrick Hughes, Nandi Comer, Joyce Brinkman, Norbert Krapf, Karen Kovacik, George Kalamaras, Shari Wagner, Adrian Matejka, Matthew Graham, Mari Evans, Etheridge Knight, Scholastics, Hyde Brothers Booksellers, Tall Rabbit, Bryan Utesch, Brett Griffiths, Melanie Dusseau, Mary Morris, Melissa Converse, Brett Elizabeth Jenkins, Steve Henn, MariJean Elizabeth, Dr. Sarah Sandman, Shanté Howard, Carrie Adams, Ella Abbott, Julia Meeks, WBOI 89.1 FM, the museum of americana: a literary review, Let’s Just Write!, Bruce Kingsbury, Firefly Coffee House, John Guzlowski, Terrion L. Williamson, Angela Narciso Torres, Naoko Fujimoto, RHINO, Fulton County Public Library, David Hazeldine, Franklin Central High School, Wunderkammer Company, Andrea Change, Blanc Gallery, April Gibson, Karol Dehr, Hardin Aasand, Robert Brewer, Genevieve Dickinson, Writer’s Digest, ACPL Genealogy Department, ACPL, Kahn Davidson, Paul J. Ricketts, Michael F. Patterson, Ketu Oladuwa, BIPOCA Incubator and Gallery, Dr. Janet Badia, Dr. Carl Drummond, Dr. Shannon Bischoff, Dee Dotson, Larry A. Brechner, Ester, Art on the Air, Lakeshore Public Media, April Gerard, Katherine Hess, Off the Bricks, Abbett Elementary School, Stephanie Anderson & Studio A, Adam Henze, Siren Hand, Tony Brewer, Hiromi Yoshida, Blake Sebring, Cave Canem Reading (AWP), C&R Press Reading (AWP), Baseball Card Reading (AWP), Herron High School The Towne House Retirement Community, Three Crowns Coffee, Brick Street Poetry, COLA Summer Camp (PFW), Bokeh Lounge, Jonathan S. Baker, Justin Hamm, Arizona, Akilia Terry McCain, Trent McCain, Paij Rhymes and Gary Youth Poet Laureate Society (GYPLS), IAC Summer Institute for Creative Teaching, Nightjar: a poetry series (@ Tube Factory artspace), Regional Art Partners, The Indianapolis Review, and for those I have not mentioned, know you are on this journey with me and I couldn’t do it without you—you are not forgotten.
Thanks so much for this interview Natalie. I can never say enough about all the work and time and patience TIR and you, individually, put into establishing a place for artists to thrive. Carry on my wayward sister!!!