Interview by Natalie Solmer
I have long wanted to interview Steve Henn, who was published in the very first issue of The Indianapolis Review almost ten years ago (and many times since!) I got the chance to do that with this last interview before I ‘retire’ next year. I first met Steve at the Divedapper poetry festivals, which were put on by his former student, Kaveh Akbar, who I knew during his time in the Butler MFA program. I have always admired Steve’s humorous, candid poetry, which provides biting insight into the world around us. We communicated over email this summer, and I got a preview of his next collection of poetry, which I feel is his strongest yet. You can read two of the poems from this new book, Deep Cuts, by navigating forward to the next webpage.
NS: I’m so glad I got the chance to read your forthcoming collection, Deep Cuts, which comes out with Wolfson Press later this year! There’s so much depth, humor, humanity, and richness to this collection. Most of all, it is authentically Steve Henn. Your voice is distinct and instantly recognizable, which I believe should be the goal of any writer, as well as any artist of any art form.
As I have aged and consumed vast amounts of poetry, especially now in the age of AI, I appreciate a style of writing such as your own, which is more narrative, humorous, and those dirty words, “accessible” and “confessional.” I actually think this type of writing may be the most difficult for computers to reproduce, especially humor, and I also think that it’s the most difficult for human poets to write well, despite what the ‘poetry world’ may seem to value, based on what they reward. I know this question is kind of all over the place, but I wonder how much you think about your poetic voice, your use of dark humor, etc? Did it take you a long time to develop your voice? “Finding your voice” is something much discussed in MFA workshops, but there seems to be no clear instructions for that endeavor.
SH: I’ve been writing regularly more or less since around 2002 or so, and sporadically before that, so the voice has come out over time. Both humor and negativity, darkside stuff, come naturally to me, although it’s true that I’ve had a lot of practice with both, too. Once I uncorked Lydia’s suicide and my long-ago suicide attempt as material, the darkness was inevitable – I think what jars people a bit is that it sits side by side with a dry humor in many poems. I’m trying to tell the truth. Not that I’m not trying to artfully use language, but that there is a raw and abrupt kind of feel to it – even to the joyful poems, and there are joyful poems, too. I don’t think very consciously about how I sound tonally or whatever but I do try to be honest. The search for truth and the willingness to say things that may be uncomfortable to say are underneath the voice.
NS: I listened to a wonderful interview you did with Rattle magazine’s podcast, and in it you mentioned how you had given up writing many times, but that any time you gave up writing, something would happen to get you writing again. One of those things was Joe Chaney from IUSB and Wolfson Press asking you to write a book, which became your collection, Indiana Noble Sad Man of The Year. In the last five years or so, you’ve published multiple chapbooks and full length collections, and it seems like you are really in your stride. How have you been keeping up your prolific output, and have you had any other setbacks where you felt like quitting poetry?
SH: I’ve not been producing at breakneck speed for some time now, and I have a vague sense that Deep Cuts will draw to a close most of my attempts to reckon with the past in poetry, so I’m not sure if a prolific output is in the works moving forward. It ebbs and flows. It’s true that every time I think I’m going to give up, the tides turn and something draws me back into writing poems. It does have slight spiritual undertones for me – like God’s tapping me on the shoulder, saying, hey, don’t forget, this is what I put you here for. I have an interest in songwriting and no natural affinity for music, so I don’t know if I’ll be stubborn enough for any of that impulse to become anything of much significance. I’m sort of trying to learn guitar in an extremely undisciplined way. I don’t know what I’ll be doing if the work turns away from the confessional, the raw. I didn’t always used to write like that, but it seems to be the main place I’ve been in going back several books and chaps now. I like to read a lot, across genres. I like reading stuff that trips a trigger in me and that I find encouraging – a spur to my own writing. I’m not sure how that’s working out lately. I read a lot more than I write for a couple years now.
NS: In that same Rattle Magazine podcast, you mentioned how you got your start by reading at open mics and noticing that people really paid attention when you were funny, so you wrote humorous poems, but they were more light. You stated that your humor got darker after you became sober and started writing about much more difficult subjects which you had been avoiding. In fact, you said you had to write about things you’d been through (such as the early death of your father, your struggles with mental illness, and the death of the mother of your four children) in order to keep going without drinking. I see poets in interviews often pooh poohing the idea that writing improves mental health, but it has played a large role in my ability to get by and try to make sense of life. Obviously, writing is no cure, but it helps (TBH, I don’t think there is any ‘cure’ for mental illness, personally. I only learn ways of coping and dealing). I appreciate the way you characterize and describe your struggles in poems like, “I Was a Weird Child. This Troubled My Dad,” “BiPolar Blues,” and “Columbia, Misery.”Can you speak more on the role of writing for you in regards to mental illness / mental health?
SH: I do draw on what could vaguely be categorized as “mental health experiences” quite broadly. The title of the LP I released to no applause in 2013 was, I am on Mental Health Pills, which at the time I considered a funny way to take on the stigma of diagnosis, though these days there are whole communities of people with various problems who are not ashamed to be “out” about them. Writing poems does help me reckon with things. I don’t know what to do with a lot of memories other than tell them. Sometimes I think I am very much a poet of shame and embarrassment. There’s a certain sort of juvenile attempt to shock, a teenage rebellion kind of spirit that maybe I’ve held onto because I work with kids. And I am the speaker of most of my poems. I can’t definitively say that the plot of each poem is a faithfully rendered personal experience, but I am almost always writing from a personal “I,” a sense of self, that I think has changed over the course of the published work. I like writing in my own voice, and I would like to believe that when voice changes over time, it signifies some growth.
NS: I read Deep Cuts as a sort-of soundtrack of your life, encompassing so many aspects of your life in a balanced way. I also enjoyed how it is laid out in the format of a double album. This is described eloquently at the beginning of your book in “A Note on the Text,” wherein the meaning of your book’s title is described as, “A cut buried deep in an album’s lesser-known tracks is a “deep cut.” A deep cut can also be a wound. . . . In this collection, fashioned after a double LP with sides a, b, c, and IV, Steve Henn explores his own deep cuts, twisting and bending personal experience into a raw, confessional poemscape, an attempt to articulate the topography of a wounded life.” There are many poems in this collection I recognized which you published individually a while ago, such as the three in Indianapolis Review: “Abs,” “Lunch Poem,” (which I did make an illustrated broadside of for Divedapper!), and “Dank Memes,” as well as many poems from your chapbook, Guilty Prayer. What was the process for you like in putting all of these poems together, and how did you come up with the concept?
SH: I like the idea of the “deep cut” in the sense of “difficult truth,” but the primary reference is to musical deep cuts, the term as applied to records, albums. If I could be anything, I’d be a capable songwriter, so the set up of the book is a way to sort of cosplay at arranging the work as if I’m making a double album. I had quite a lot of guidance from Joe Chaney when writing the poems as I followed a postgraduate class with David Dodd Lee at IUSB that produced much of Guilty Prayer with an independent study with Joe in which much of Deep Cuts began. Guilty Prayer is my best book topically in its amalgamation of poems about addiction, depression, Lydia’s suicide, my suicide attempt, grasping at spirituality . . . but Deep Cuts is my magnum opus. Maybe that’s why I keep feeling like I won’t have much more to say after it lives whatever life it will have as a book.
NS: I noticed that you opened and closed Deep Cuts with poems which feature your children: “Driver’s Ed” and “Single Parent.” Both of these poems encapsulate the anxiety, care, and insecurity that can come with parenting. I thought they were very relatable (also, my sixteen year old just started driving!) You mentioned in an interview with Fables Books that you checked with your kids first before publishing Indiana Noble Sad Man of The Year to make sure that they were okay with the poems you wrote about them. Was this something you continued to do for Deep Cuts? Do you ever feel that you can’t publish some of the things you write about them or about their late mother?
SH: After I’d produced a lot of poems around the time I was doing the extra independent study with Joe, I said, I think I have another book here, and he said I think you do too and I’m going to insist that this be the opening poem and this be the closing poem. So that was Joe’s idea. They’re great bookends for the work, good choices – Joe was the one who identified that, though. I write a lot less about my kids these days. My youngest is 17 and the older three are all adults and it feels more appropriate to limit their exposure these days. I think Sad Man is pretty harmless in terms of producing content about my kids when they were kids but going forward I’m not looking to mine those relationships as they continue for poetry fodder. I’ve realized enough about myself in the last near-decade of sobriety that I don’t exactly walk around with a dadbod-swagger. Some of that is dealt with in recent books but I do try to tread carefully. The Rosetta Stone of all my poems, “Dissociation,” which is in both Guilty Prayer and Trying to Catch a Flame in this Windstorm at the End of the World, ends with a request that God “spare my children. I do love them so.” In my opinion that’s the poem I’ve written that matters most.
NS: In addition to delving into your life and personal struggles, your book is very grounded in its Hoosier-ness. There are a few poems which get very specific about Warsaw (the town in Indiana where you live and were raised), but Indiana is constantly mentioned throughout the book (for better or for worse) in a way which feels very authentic and honest. I am always curious about Hoosier writers and how they feel in the context of the larger literary landscape. I sometimes feel judged or left out (probably mostly in my head) but this is also one of the reasons I started Indianapolis Review. What are your thoughts on the role of ‘the triggering town’ in your poetry and on Indiana’s perceived place in the arts?
SH: Indiana has the same problem the U.S. writ large has. Some people want to look at our problems honestly and act accordingly and some people think we don’t need to change any of our behaviors, we just need a really slick new-and-improved public relations campaign. I have a great affection for Indiana, warts and all, and a diminishing affection for Warsaw, as I’ve determined in the last few years that I don’t want to die still a resident of this area. The last straw for me was when the city council turned down passage of a bond to assure funding for the local library, where I first learned to love books. Imagine a city government that balks at funding its own library. That’s what we’ve got here in the seat of Kosciusko County. I’m sure we’re dismissed as flyover country by the coastal literati but what can you do? This is what I’ve known. So it comes out in the books. I’ve done readings all over the state but I’m not exactly celebrated as a local talent or a state-level talent, which is no surprise, really. If I could invent a career trajectory I’d have my books achieving some kind of cult-like status, like Pixies albums after they broke up, but that’s a form of wishful thinking that I try not to dwell on much. Nobody gets to define the quality of attention they will be paid by readers or listeners.
NS: Deep Cuts is not only thoroughly Midwestern, it is one of the most Catholic books I’ve ever read (this is coming from someone who went to Catholic school K-12). While I have many disagreements with the church, starting at a young age, I will always acknowledge myself as “culturally Catholic,” and I have my traditions: the prayers, the guilt and shame, the questioning (all of which are featured heavily in your book). I also agree with you in your poem, “a Worthy Ritual,” that the whole ‘peace be with you’ part of mass is the best (even though it always caused me the most anxiety as a kid)! At the same time, I applaud your boldness in calling out the Bishop (never thought I would see Bishop D’Arcy named dropped in a poem!) and also your own parish priest. Have you ever thought of yourself as a ‘Catholic poet?’ Have you had any reservations in writing about your religious journey? In one of your interviews, I know you stated that you had left the church “for the last time.”
I am culturally Catholic, too – I was raised in it, most of my immediate family remains in it. I wish I would’ve had the courage at age 15 to not get confirmed but I was often a fearful kid. I don’t, however, feel spiritually beholden by that confirmation. I don’t feel in danger of experiencing hell eternal due to my abandonment of the Catholic church after confirmation. That’s what our priest said would be the result, anyway. Churches of all stripes say a lot of bizarre things to kids that are more or less psychological pressure to comply.
There are multiple Notre Dame graduates in multiple generations of my family – I can’t imagine rooting for some other college football team. I can betray the church but I can’t betray Fighting Irish Football. And the poem you’re referring to, entitled “Since My Last Confession,” lays out in all its vagueness my late adult awareness of how a priest that was at our church and school while I was a child was abusing children there. Bishop D’Arcy was about as complicit as Pope John Paul II and the rest of the institution, which is that those who knew about such things at minimum let them happen, on an institutional level refused to reckon with the reality of it as much as possible. It’s probably more accurate to say that most of it was actively covered up. I remember being asked if anything happened to me by my siblings, not really registering the truth of it until I was told things in middle age. It appears to be a problem in most churches. I don’t think it’s true that it’s a problem unique to Catholics that hasn’t touched other denominations. Or faiths.
NS: You’ve mentioned in interviews that some of your biggest influences have been Bob Hicok, Larry Levis, and Mary Ruefle. You also stated in your poem, “Ars Poetica,” that you write to Bob Hicok sometimes and he replies. I surmise that that poem might also be dedicated to David Dodd Lee (“DDL”) as the workshop instructor who talked about breakthroughs. What are some of the lessons or advice which you have learned from these poets? Are there any other poets you would like to shout out?
Hicok is a wonderful person gracious enough to reply to emails. In the poem I say he “almost always” writes back but I can only honestly recall one instance in which I didn’t get a response. He’s grounded and honest and I appreciate his point of view as a fellow poet. It was David Dodd Lee who introduced me to Ruefle and Levis, and another IUSB connection, the poet/writer Ken Smith, was an undergrad in Larry Levis’s classes at Missouri and occasionally pulls some nugget from the memory bank and shares it because he knows how much I idolize Levis. Kaveh Akbar of course is a former student, whose main influences were to show me how to really delve deeper into reading (via his divedapper.com interviews) and also showing me by example that it’s possible to keep the poetry while ditching the booze. I count him as a forever friend. There’s a lot of Indiana poets I’ve gotten to know via hustling up readings around the state. There’s a cadre of small press poets around the country I’ve been intermittently in touch with whose work I’ve enjoyed ever since Don Winter, Oren Wagner and I produced 8 issues of a small press magazine called Fight These Bastards in the aughts. There are really too many to recount and appreciate without sounding like I’m giving an Academy Awards speech and the red ABORT light is flashing at me as I cling desperately to the stage. As I don’t expect any awards to materialize I’ll prevent myself from giving the speech.
NS: When can we expect Deep Cuts to come out, and will there be a ‘tour?’
SH: As of this writing no release date has been set. The cover is getting worked on. That’s the last thing. So, most likely sometime in 2026, worst case scenario spring 2027. I will plan multiple readings over the course of the next couple years following publication, probably, both around Indiana and at points beyond provided that I have the means and the time to afford travel.
NS: Any new projects which you are looking forward to or working on?
SH: I’m intermittently trying to play guitar and write songs. I still don’t know if I can do it. I spend a lot of time reading and creating not much of anything. I listen to records, constantly. I’m working on finishing packaging of the 25 or so remaining poetry LPs we never finished making unique covers for from 2013. I have this hazy unrealized notion that maybe I could just read from my body of work following Deep Cuts, kind of like how Ween made 8 or 9 albums and had material to play shows for a long time without being required to go back in the studio – until I’ve accomplished whatever such a process is supposed to accomplish and can retire peacefully at least as far away from here as the South Bend/Mishawaka area.
Steve Henn teaches high school English in northern Indiana. His previous books include Guilty Prayer (Main Street Rag, 2021) and Indiana Noble Sad Man of the Year (Wolfson, 2017). He’s proud of the children of himself and late American artist Lydia Henn. He roots for the Fighting Irish, played high school soccer, and gives poetry readings in all kinds of places, from Pittsburgh to Long Beach, travel conditions and money conditions and time permitting. His new collection, Trying To Catch a Flame in this Windstorm at the End of the World (2025), is available now from Arroyo Seco Press, Amazon, and other places. Deep Cuts is due out from Wolfson Press in 2026.
Natalie Solmer was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana, a granddaughter of Polish and Silesian immigrants. She worked in the field of horticulture for many years, including 13 years as a grocery store florist, before becoming a professor of English and creative writing. In addition, she is the founder and editor in chief of The Indianapolis Review. Her work has been published in journals such as North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Pleiades, Mom Egg Review, and Tab Poetry Journal. Her debut book of poems, Water Castle, was published by Kelsay Books. You can find her poems, visual poetry, and visual art at http://www.nataliesolmer.com