Interview with Ron Koertge

Ron Koertge was born April 22, 1940 in Olney, Illinois. He is the author of many novels for young adults: Where the Kissing Never Stops, The Arizona Kid, Confess-O-Rama, Heart of the City, The Brimstone Journals, Shakespeare Bats Cleanup, Stoner & Spaz, Margaux with an X, and Coaltown Jesus, among others.

He has received many awards, including Friends of American Writers Young People’s Literature Award, New York Library’s 100 Best Children’s Books, ALA Best Book, New York Public Library’s Books for the Teen Age, P.E.N. awards 2003 and 2008. As a poet, his awards are grants from the California Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2017 he was awarded a Pushcart Prize. He is also part of the Best American Poetry series (1999 and 2006) and the author of more than a dozen books of poems. The most recent is Vampire Planet (Red Hen Press.)

He lives in So. Pasadena, California, and taught at the city college in Pasadena for more than thirty-five years. He now teaches in the low-residency program at Hamline University in St. Paul, MN.

Do you remember the very first time you put pen to paper?

I wrote poems in high school, but they were sentimental or derivative or both because the only poems I knew were poems from my high school textbooks. My parents never graduated from high school; they were blue-collar hard workers. They weren’t ignorant, they were just uneducated. Where I got any facility for language, I’ll never know. I was the only child and my folks were lovely with me, but I was glad for encouraging teachers in high school. When I went to the University of Illinois—this jumps ahead a little—I wasn’t the brightest kid in the world. The first years were hard for me. I had to work hard just to get B’s, but then I became an English major and at that point I thought, “Wow, I can get grades for doing what I’m doing anyway, which is reading and writing about reading.” It felt like a miracle. If we move forward in time again, we go all the way to the University of Arizona and Gerry Locklin. He showed me the Wormwood Review and a book by Edward Field. I could hardly believe that the funny and idolatrous things I was looking at were poems because the only verse I knew was what I was studying in graduate school, things that took a so-called expert to understand, much less appreciate. Ed’s poems were funny and easy-to-read. A handful were about the movies. I loved (and still love) the movies and poems like Ed’s jump started me. Apparently all I needed was permission to enjoy myself

Whatever happened to those early poems?

I don’t keep things, but I don’t throw them away in disgust. I’m just not an archivist about anything. I’ve published maybe 15 novels for young adults and galleys or various drafts tend to go to places like the Kerlan Collection. The folks there save those sorts of things.

One of first poems that I published was in some ephemeral magazine with staples for a binding. It came out once or twice. But I remember vividly getting the first center section from the Wormwood Review. Marvin [Malone] said, “I love these poems, I have so many of yours now that I want to do a center section.” I was honest-to-God thrilled, and I was only 27. The Wormwood Review was like the foundation of my poetry house in those days, and then I sort of built from there and added new rooms. The same things that I would be criticized for in academia—namely not being willing to shut up, not having much of the filter, being a smarty-pants—were good things in the world of independent magazines.

Did you try the little magazines when you were in high school?

I didn’t even know those magazines existed in high school. This is 1955 through 1958. They might have, Gerry knew about them in the early 60s, but not me.

So you were not submitting to the littles back then?

No, I didn’t submit until graduate school, until I was in my middle 20s.

Do you recall if your very first submissions were accepted?

Yes, they were. I didn’t get a lot of rejections because Gerry told me where to submit. I knew better than to try the Paris Review because I’d read some issues and they made me want to lie down. Although I was a year younger than Gerry, he was my model and he just told me places to try. By the way—I’m on an FBI list, or I used to be, because I published in magazines where three pages before my poems you could find instructions on building a bomb! The FBI was monitoring anything that was countercultural, so I was guilty by association.

A most dangerous poet!

I know, I was truly a dangerous man.

Were you encouraged by those early little magazine appearances?

Sure, I was encouraged. I thought, this is really cool because I can do what I like, which is write fast. I liked language, I had the models—the Edward Field and Gerry Locklin models—and also the magazines. Bukowski ruled the indie mags, A.D. Winans, Charles Harper Webb, all these guys, and I just saw how it could be done.

Then when I was in the business, so to speak, I wanted to stay in! Charles Stetler was Gerry’s office mate for a while, and Gerry turned Charles Stetler into a poet, onto writing, because Chuck was kind of like me, he just didn’t know the world of little magazines existed, and once he saw that—and he was a witty guy—he started to publish. So if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas: if you lie down with poets, you get up with submissions.

Poetry doesn’t sell that much. You submitted to the littles knowing you wouldn’t make a dime. How come?

I figured it out once. I’ve been writing for, let’s say 50 years, and I’ve probably made $50,000, including grants and prizes. I didn’t know anyone who made money writing poems, so an income from poetry never occurred to me. I was enjoying myself. I still am.

What about actual sales?

I make enough to keep me in gambling money. I like to bet on thoroughbreds and I’m a pretty good handicapper. Still, it’s gambling and like most hobbies it’s at least a little expensive. As far as sales of poetry books go, I clock in at a couple of thousand a year.

Could you live off that?

Clearly no, I had to teach. By the way, being a teacher is a wonderful job for a writer. I know it’s criticized in the sense of those who can’t write teach writing, but I can do both.

What are you teaching now?

I’m teaching in a low residency program at Hamline University for people who want to be picture book writers, middle-grade writers or young adult writers. I go there twice a year; it’s in St. Paul, Minnesota. We meet for 10 days, it’s really intense. But before that, I taught for 35 years at the City College up here in Pasadena. I taught everything. I taught Shakespeare, I taught Wordsworth, you name it. But what I really liked was remedial writing, basic college English. I liked older students who had screwed up their lives and who were coming back to school right out jail, out of the Army, out of bad marriages, and they hated and feared writing. If they’d cooperate even a little, I could teach them to put together a coherent sentence, a reasonable paragraph, and they could move on. Students would stop me in the hall and said, “Hey, Mr. Koertge. That class of yours wasn’t so bad, after all. I’m getting a B. in English 100!”

I’ve talked to other teachers who do what I did, and that is convince someone reluctant that what we’ll call college English is just a second or third language that they only have to use when it’s appropriate. I sure didn’t want them to go to some backyard party and say, “Hey, to whom does this AK-47 belong to?”

So when you taught them how to write, they really had no idea about it?

No, they were pretty sure what you and I call traditional English composition was a tool of the ruling classes. Or at least a snooty way of saying anything. They were smart enough, but their interests were in other places, and I would tell them, “I don’t want you to like to read and write like I do, I don’t want you to go to the racetrack and meet me out there. Live your own lives! But here’s a skill.”

I guess you don’t believe in the muse, do you?

I try to keep an open mind uncluttered by politics and quotidian bullshit. Most of the poets I know are hard-workers. I work every day, and that’s not for everyone. But I could make a long list of poets who write regularly.

Writing is a gift that needs encouragement. I know writers more gifted than I who got discouraged and went on to different things. I worked for TV a couple of decades ago, writing for a show called “Hill Street Blues.” There were some very sharp guys on that staff, and they had a kind of reverence for poets. (We might want to file something under Irony here since they were making a ton of money, but they seemed sincere.)

So you see writing as something you need to exercise.

Right. I encourage my Hamline students to write badly, just write something, because they’ll email me and say, “Oh, you know, I’m so stuck, I have writer’s block,” and I tell them, “There is no writer’s block. It doesn’t exist, not if you’re putting words down on paper.”

Let’s discuss your poetry now. I noticed that in your Making Love to Roget’s Wife: Poems New and Selected and Shakespeare Bats Cleanup most poems, which you picked for both collections, are fairly short. Have you always favored short poems?

The poems in my Shakespeare books (there are two of them) aren’t all that short. I used to, though, write a lot of short poems, at their best like flashes of lightning. When I started to write fiction for teenagers, the lightning flashes were replaced by regular weather with its hot and cold spells, its rain and sunshine. When I’m writing prose, I don’t (or can’t) write much poetry, but I know that because of poetry I’m a better prose writer.

I found the poems very well written, witty, and funny. Do you rewrite a lot to get that style?

It depends. Maybe once or twice in my life I’ve written a poem that was just one draft and that was it. Three or four drafts is typical, and more than that isn’t unusual. So I’d say I rewrite a lot.

I’ve got this file on my computer and I just go to it in the mornings and it’s like waking up sleeping children, I just see who wants the attention.

Nice image. You just wake them up. You go over them, saying, “Not you today!” or “Not him! Not her!”

And not you with that sour look on your face, either!

I also noticed that many of your poems are deliberately irreverent. How so?

I’m snarky, and I was always snarky before there was a word for it. I have trouble taking things seriously, even serious things, so is that part of the gift? I don’t know. There’s enough seriousness going around. No one needs me to grow a long, grey beard.

Bukowski used to say that poetry is too holy.

Some folks tend to handle poetry with kid gloves where poems that I love can only be handled with oven mittens. I’ll take a poem that’s indecorous or even oafish over something hushed and reverent every time.

Billy Collins can be irreverent. Sharon Olds. Dorianne Laux. Kim Adonizzio. David Kirby. There’s irreverence all over the place, but like in a color wheel there are different hues of irreverence.

Going back to your poetry, could you elaborate a bit on its reception over the years?

I’ve been part of a lot of readings since 1965. I tend to read with my like-minded friends, so we enjoy ourselves and that tends to spill over into the audience. If you mean how my books have been received, there’s nothing like productivity. If I publish a book of poems every four or five years that’s a lot of books in a couple of decades. I belong in a category that Miller Williams made up: Sass Poets. If someone likes that sort of thing, he or she will keep up with me.

In a 1974 interview for the L.A. Times, you told Jim Stingley that poetry readings were “the same dull crap […] Egocentric… pretentious… boring.” Do you still feel the same way about them?

Oh, I didn’t necessarily feel that way then. It’s a mistake to take anything I say very seriously. Including this interview. I was probably just being provocative. Between then and now I may have acquired a new patina of tolerance. But I’m still short-tempered about boring poetry readings, so I walk out on those.

You started out as a poet and somewhere along the line in your 40s you began writing for teenagers. Was there a reason for that change?

There was! I think for writers of my generation, if you’re a real writer, you’re a novelist, and if you’re a novelist, then you write for adults. I wrote and published one novel for grown-ups in my 40s called The Boogeyman, and I thought “Okay, this is the beginning of my bright career, New York is next, tall women, champagne…” and, of course, that didn’t happen. I wrote a couple of novels after that; they were embarrassing to think back about, so I forgot about them.

In 1970 or so I was talking to a friend of mine, Merrill Joan Gerber, who wrote for young adults, and she said to me, “You’re so immature. You should write for 16-year-old boys,” so I thought, “Why not?” She was right! I went to the nearest library, right to the young adult section. I got a couple of books and I read them, and I thought, “This doesn’t look that hard.”

I took one of the ideas from the failed grown-up novel and, like Frankenstein, I stitched pieces together and it sold the second place that it went for $15,000. I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

There really are formulaic young adult novels, and that’s usually a criticism—to go by the formula. But sonnets are formulaic, too, and inside the sonnet form you show what you can do. Well, inside the formulaic young adult novel you show what you can do.

I must’ve written 10 of those. Money kept going up every time and I was doing fine, and then I had a dry spell or a bad patch, and nothing I wrote was accepted. I could feel I was repeating myself and then I decided to experiment. I wrote what’s called a novel-in-verse [The Brimstone Journals] about a high school shooting.

After that, I sort of resuscitated my writing career because I hadn’t published for a few years. From then on, all my books for older teens have been different. The last one was a novel-in-verse about a boy whose older brother commits suicide, and he prays and says to God, “Help my mother, she’s so sad and depressed,” and instead Jesus shows up! It’s a very sweet and funny book.

When you sit down to write, do you know if you’re going to write poetry or prose or having no plans is your plan?

I do know what I’m doing. I don’t seem to be able to mix-and-match well. I put poems aside if I’m writing prose. If I’m writing prose, I do the old Hemingway trick: I write by hand and I stop for the day in the middle of the scene, so the next morning when I get up, I tend to type what I’ve written out—put into the computer what I’ve written out by hand—and then the momentum will carry me on to the next few hours. I’ll do four pages a day, every day, seven days a week.

When I go back to poetry, I have to take the muse out to dinner because she’s mad that I left her behind for a while to hang out with that fat bastard Prose.

Besides Edward Field and Gerry Locklin, did you look up to any other poets? Were there any other role models in the poetry world?

I always felt that I would find my voice (so here we’re going to switch metaphors, so hold on) by dressing up in somebody else’s clothes until I found a style that fit me perfectly. I admire Frank O’Hara—there’s so much energy in his work and though I know lots of his poems almost by heart I’m still surprised when I go back and read an entire book of his. Then there’s John Ashbery, as different from me as a pile of snakes is from a ruler. But that doesn’t mean I can’t learn from him.

I also taught a writing workshop at the City College. I would always take things in to read to my poetry writing class, and I would choose anybody. Longfellow. John Donne. I was very ecumenical. I’d go to the library across the street and blindly take out two or three books of poems. I’d bring them home and I’d look at them. I had a very unusual palette, I was an omnivore, I would read pretty much anything.

I like nerve and swagger, but I get tired of my own swagger fairly easily, and if I feel I’m repeating myself, then that’s it for me.

What about the heavyweights of literature? Shakespeare? Whitman?

I like Whitman a lot, I have a poem in the manner of Whitman in my last book. I think Shakespeare is what everybody says—he’s a fucking genius. Some of his poetry is phenomenal.

I recall an interview where you said creation was like an open door, and you’re standing by the door. What did you mean by that?

It’s the Platonic view, you’re standing between the infinite and the finite. Poems are out there and they are going to come through some filter to become finite, or palpable or real. I’m one door, Danez Smith is another. So is Barbara Hamby, Dana Gioia, all of them are available, so whatever door the infinite picks, (like on the old television show), it steps through and is transformed, made finite.

My job as a poet is to be available: here’s the infinite, here I am, and the wind blows through me and plays that mythological lyre.

In your poetry, there’s so much humor and witty imagery, that it’s really hard to pin you down. Is the real Koertge somewhere in there?

I apparently like to be slippery! I was reading at a school on the East Coast a couple of years ago, and after the poems there were a couple of questions like, “I really enjoyed myself, and I’ve never seen a lot of poetry like this, but now that the reading is over I don’t exactly know who you are.” And I said, “Poetry is not autobiographical.” I’ve even made up a child that I don’t have named Molly, and Molly turns up in a lot of different poems. Is that a lie? She’s real enough to me.

I read somewhere that Shakespeare Bats Cleanup and Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs are your hits, so to speak. Is that so?

They sell a lot of copies because teachers can teach from them. Librarians can suggest them to students who come in and say, “I have to do an essay, I have to do something about poetry, I need something that I can understand and it’s really short.”

Teachers adapt those books for their classrooms, but they weren’t written as textbooks; they are novels-in-verse, they’re for young readers, 13 or 14, and the boy narrator whom I made up loves baseball and poetry. They sold well, maybe 20,000 copies a year for a few years. A novel of mine called Stoner & Spaz is the most stolen book from many libraries’ YA sections. I probably shouldn’t be proud of that, but I kind of am.

I recently met Joanne Kyger and while talking about the small press scene, she told me that “no one is paying attention to the small press anymore.” Would you agree with that?

Look at it this way, Red Hen does 20 books a year. They’ll sell thousands of copies of those books, so someone is paying attention. And there’s a huge AWP [Associated Writers Program] conference downtown right now in the convention center: three days of readings, workshops, and that kind of thing. A lot of the presses there are independent presses: someone is paying attention. It’s an entire conference, people spend a lot of money to come and be part of it. I’m on panel with other Red Hen writers. There are scores of other panels. Big names give keynote speeches. It isn’t that I don’t know what Joanne means. Attention is a matter of degree. But look at the AWP conferences every years, look at all the books and all the presses. It’s hard to say no one’s paying attention.

Are you familiar with the current state of poetry in the United States? Do you read contemporary poetry?

Yes. I read poetry every day. I get a lot of interlibrary loans from my local library. I don’t want to buy 50 or 60 books of poems every year, I just don’t, so I borrow them… So, yes, I have a sense of the current state.

Are there any young authors that you especially like?

Almost too many to name. The Poetry Foundation website is a gold mine. That’s where I found Jennifer Chang, Fatima Asghar, and Emily Skillings. Let’s say I get 50 books out of the library in six months, and they are fairly new books: 40 of them don’t make any sense to me; 5 of them are okay, and five of them knock my socks off.

A final question to wrap it up: are you concerned about the future of the small press? Do you think the digital culture will wipe it out?

I just don’t have a clue. I have trouble thinking about the future anyway, but one way to look at is this, I read a lot of crap in online magazines. In a way, anybody can publish somewhere. That’s not so true of the independent magazines. If you take a magazine like the Beloit Poetry Journal or the Water-Stone Review or certainly Poetry (Chicago) or River Styx, those magazines are hard to get into. I just got a rejection from River Styx, and the guy—whom I know—said, “I wish I had more room! I have over a thousand submissions and I’m only going to publish 40-50 poems.” So that’s a sign of life to me.

Now, I’m sure some people are publishing good poems online, but I’m so old-fashioned that I like to hold things in my hand, and I don’t think that’ll ever go out of style.

Let’s hope so. Thanks a lot for your time, Ron.

Anytime.

Interview by Abel Debritto