Jeffrey Franklin is a poet, scholar, editor, and teacher. His poetry collections are Where We Lay Down (2021, Kelsay Books) and For the Lost Boys (2006, Ghost Road Press). His poems have appeared in many literary journals, including Arts & Letters, Crab Orchard Review, Hudson Review, Measure, New England Review, Rattle, Shenandoah, Southern Humanities Review, storySouth, and Southern Poetry Review. A poetry manuscript of his received the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and individual poems have appeared in Best American Poetry. Since 2000 he has served as the poetry editor for the North Carolina Literary Review, selecting the finalists for the annual James Applewhite Poetry Prize.
This interview was conducted via email and by phone between February 18 and March 25, 2022.
Jim Clark: You and I are both about the same age, and we both grew up in Tennessee. So how does, in your case at least, a Tennessee boy become a poet and a man of letters?
Jeff Franklin: If I may, I’d first like to thank you for taking interest in my work and giving it such careful and caring attention, as well as Terry Kennedy—a former student of yours!—for his consideration and generosity. My friend and former colleague, Jake York, helped start storySouth, in which he chose to publish two of the poems that appear in Where We Lay Down.
In answer to your question: The Faulknerian sentence. The first paragraph of All the Kings Men. The deep richness and terrifying violence of Southern literature. The great high school English teachers who assigned it (at the Baylor School for Boys, as it was). The Southern accent—multiple diverse accents—for which Rodney Jones wrote “Elegy for the Southern Drawl.” The loosened blank-verse line T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Donald Justice—the line as a unit of sound and therefore meaning. Appalachian Scotch-Irish ballads and Delta Blues, the rhythm, the stories, the history. I could go on. I’m thinking you would agree?
Clark: Yes, absolutely. For example, it’s amazing how much can be accomplished by simply paying attention to line breaks, whether the line is end-stopped or enjambed. We’ve both been teaching long enough to witness major changes in the technology of learning and communication. In your estimation, how does internet access affect a young person’s exposure to poetry these days. Neither you nor I had that, growing up; now, it is omnipresent and inescapable. Does it have a positive effect on a young, aspiring writer? A negative effect?
Franklin: Man, you’re setting me up to give the grumpy old man answer and get dismissed by our students! The internet globalizes poetry, challenges the “Western tradition,” and introduces all of us to the panoply of world voices. That’s gotta be good, right, for the future of our planet? But, reading poetry that one loves—any poetry, style, language—and imitating the best poets one finds, is still the necessary apprenticeship and key method for becoming a good poet. And, reading, especially poetry, remains a slow pleasure, slow work. No technology can speed it up. The internet poses big challenges for those now aspiring to become poets. It can overwhelm us with too many voices and confuse what lasts with the popularity of the moment. It trains us to go faster, when what we need is to slow down, read with the care that the poet put in, over and over, preferably out loud, relishing and absorbing.
Clark: It’s almost de rigueur for an interviewer to ask a “southern poet” about place. Many of the poems in Where We Lay Down are suffused with a sense of place, but not in an obsessive, sentimental sort of way. In fact, the section called “Homing” contains some of my favorite poems in the book, moving from coastal Georgia, to Mississippi, to New Mexico, to Sydney and Canberra, to the west of Ireland. In “The City that Chooses You,” one of my favorites, we find these lines: “It dawns that life has been one long commute // from almost home to not yet home.” And in “The Persistence of Place” the speaker muses, “I sometimes think we are the places we’ve lived,” and circles back around and restates those lines just mentioned in “The City that Chooses You,” “. . . but I’m not home. Yet. Again.” You’ve mentioned that Elizabeth Bishop is a favorite poet of yours, and your use of place reminds me very much of her – whether her poem is set in Nova Scotia, or New England, or South America, she renders the details of place so vividly. So, what can you say about the role of place in your poems?
Franklin: What a lovely compliment, pairing me with Bishop, which I cannot live up to, but thank you. Yes, a cliché, but true, that Southerners have a strong sense of place, and maybe a love-hate relationship with home, or I do. Each of the six sections of my book is themed, and the theme of “Homing” is the lifelong search to find home after one has chosen to be an expatriate from the originary home. Childhood alone has multiple “homes.” I carry a deep ache in my chest for some. But, as I write in “Kosciusko, Mississippi” (my father-in-law’s family home), “How can we, and how can we not, / close it behind us with the click of a brass box,” especially given the living history of slavery. As Thomas Wolfe put it, You Can’t Go Home Again, “back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.” Yep, guilty on both counts.
Clark: Before we leave the “Homing” section, I want to mention the poem “The Walls of the West of Ireland,” which I think is brilliant. Since Ireland is the only international destination I’ve ever traveled to (aside from a quick flight to Toronto, once, for an MLA conference) I’m sure I have a personal reaction to this poem. However, I love the way you contrast those walls to “the fence lines of America,” and explore the hidden, coded order of the language they speak (“Each rough syllable / wedged into the syntax of surface and edge”). I couldn’t help but think of Robert Herrick’s lovely little lyric “Delight in Disorder,” when reading this poem – those rough stones placed just so, exhibiting “a wild civility.” Any thoughts on this poem, and perhaps what it says about place?
Franklin: Maybe we crossed paths at one of those Toronto MLA meetings. Thank you for loving my poem—most of us don’t get enough of that, or I don’t. I had to look up the Herrick poem (read last in puberty, and so with less understanding of how sexy it is). The male speaker finds his lover’s “wild civility” in dress more attractive than clothing “too precise in every part.” And that does seem akin to what my poem says about the walls of Ireland, that their “crazed patterns” “articulate something everywhere / and secret,” in contrast to the rectilinear fence lines of American industrial farming. We concur: Irish walls, “cemented only by the untold crannies,” are sexier!
Clark: Since you mentioned the book’s organization and design, let me just say that it’s a very handsome book. The cover is lovely, and you incorporate drawings by your father, an architect and artist, to preface each thematic section.
Franklin: Thanks. Yes, the poems in Where We Lay Down span fifteen years or so and are quite varied. The thematic divisions, I hope, provide some focus and structural unity. I also wanted to pay tribute to my father’s art, so I went looking for pieces of his that seemed to reflect the book’s themes. Much of his work is held in private collections in the southeast and in California, where he lived for a time, so I sorted through my own collection, and hit up family members, until I came up with the drawings contained in the book. It was an interesting process working with the book’s publisher, Kelsay Books, to incorporate the artwork effectively into the book’s design.
Clark: Most of your poems are formal. Some are in specific forms, such as sestina, villanelle, Petrarchan sonnet, while others merely exhibit formal qualities – syllabics, rhyme, etc. How do you “fit form to function”? Do you decide at the outset that this subject matter, or speaker, or whatever, would work well as a sestina? Or do you begin writing the poem and at some point discover that you are moving in the direction of a villanelle, or a sonnet?
Franklin: The short answer is “both.” Sometimes I give myself a formal assignment and write to it, and sometimes I begin writing a poem that falls into meter or seems to want to be in ballad stanza, for example. If the poem is coming as comedic, I might try triple-syllable meter or get corny with rhyme. I might reread a poem by Larkin or Murray, analyze the form, then try to imitate it. My go-to form is blank verse; I love the rhythm in itself and the creativity to make the variations break up the rhythm and serve the meaning. The formal poets whom I love are not form literalists. They use form as inspiration to find what they would not have found without it, and they break the rules when doing so serves meaning. My goal is to write well enough that my readers may not notice or care that the poem is formal, just enjoy it.
Clark: Several of the poems in Where We Lay Down are dramatic monologues – we have poems spoken by Huck Finn (a wonderful poem!), D.H. Lawrence, a female National Geographic photographer on assignment. I’ve always enjoyed experimenting with other voices, and no doubt each presents its own challenges. What are your thoughts about the dramatic monologue – its perils and its pleasures?
Franklin: The pleasures include speaking as someone other than yourself. As yourself. Perils might include indulging in self-projection and misrepresentation. Part of the challenge is to try to (fool yourself into believing) that the character is speaking directly through you—as in a séance. I love the great dramatic monologues of Shakespeare and the Victorians. I’m glad to encounter poems that take a break from self and the details of quotidian personal life.
Clark: I suppose many poets can point to a specific mentor that has had a great influence on them. I was fortunate enough to work with and learn from Fred Chappell, while you sought out Donald Justice, whom I greatly admire. What are some things you learned from Justice, and what would you say about his overall influence on you as a poet?
Franklin: When I first read Justice, I didn’t know how he was doing what he was doing, but I knew I wanted to do it. I had the good fortune to catch him at UF in his last two years as a teacher. I don’t think I was prepared enough to fully benefit from what he had to offer. He was largely reserved, subtle (kind? enigmatic?) in his feedback, knowing that most of us were not able to implement what he likely thought but didn’t say. He was an ambidextrous poet who mastered both form and free verse. As Mark Strand wrote, Justice believed poems should be beautiful, “and all of his are.” I took on these aspirations, which, I realize, may make my poems sound old-fashioned now.
Clark: You are a scholar, as well as a poet, having written several books about Victorian literature. Is there a connection between your area of scholarly study and the poems you write? Does your scholarship inform your poetry in some way? Or are they simply two different manifestations of your interest in literature?
Franklin: More the latter. I’m a cultural historian of unorthodox in 19th century Great Britain and focus on prose. Buddhism—I’ve been practicing for about 25 years—has influenced both my scholarly writing and my poetry. Buddhist philosophy colors my conceptions of identity, the shared human experience, and the interconnectedness of all beings and things. My deep engagement with this spiritual path cannot but inflect my poetry, as it has my last two scholarly books.
Clark: We both have an interest in Eastern religion and philosophy, though you have pursued that interest much more assiduously and intentionally while I remain more the dilettante. Buddhist concepts such as “right livelihood,” “emptiness,” and “anatman” or “no self,” are apparent in several poems in the book. Can you speak to how your interest in and practice of Buddhism informs your poems and/or your writing life?
Franklin: I’m a poet who happens to be a Buddhist rather than a Buddhist who writes poems about his religion. One poem in the book, “Anatman”—“no self,” in high contrast to Western individualism—is about a meditation experience many years ago. “Living Right” mentions the Middle Way but is about middle-aged married sex, not Buddhism. The final section, “Full Emptiness,” a translation of śūnyatā, is where I work with loss and identity, both loss of others to death and of the sense of my own autonomous self, an illusory construct that generates immense human suffering. As with writing formal verse, my hope is that readers enjoy my poems without wanting to reflect, “oh, this is formal” or “this is Buddhist.” I’d rather they say: “Yeah. I like that.”
I look forward to sharing a beverage or a meal with you and talking further about some of the above, perhaps on my planned poetry “tour”—a glorified term for me driving a rented car from town to town—April 19-26. Cheers, Jim.
Clark: It’s been a great pleasure spending time with you and your poems, Jeff. I look forward to hearing you read when you head back to North Carolina. Who knows? Maybe one of these days I’ll revisit my old grad school stomping grounds at the University of Denver and pay you a visit out west.
