Yawp & Circumstance
Author Steve Cushman on finding an identity outside of his J-O-B and why you (yes, you) should give poetry a chance to improve your relationship to the world.
As a high school junior and senior, I lived away from home—the quirky result of my parents’ move to North Carolina when I was 16. My aunt’s guest room in West Virginia was just big enough for the necessary late 80s and early 90s hair products and for the dozens of index cards I scrawled with favorite quotes and sentences I found while reading.
Though spare in name and amenities, that room was perhaps the most luxurious space I have ever known. Time stretched out long and lazy before me within its walls, and I read both Gatsby and Gary Smith from the top of a quiet hill in a quiet town where no one told me who I should become.
I also read poetry. A great deal of it, with no real foundation for understanding it.
And yet, without poetry — and perhaps without Todd Anderson’s sweaty-toothed madman in Dead Poets Society — the tiny thrills of writing would not have captured me the way they did. The look on Robin Williams’s and Ethan Hawke’s faces at the end of the “barbaric yawp” scene below shows what poetry does so well: It quietly awes. It connects you to a vibe well beyond your zip code in time, even if you are alone in a room on a hill surrounded only by index cards and the copy of Leaves of Grass you refuse to return to the school library. It’s a feast for the reader’s feels, a surprise for the writer’s brain, and it has the power to sneak into your cognitive and emotional functioning and improve the stuff going on in there.
It is always unexpected—perhaps especially for the people who create it.
Author Steve Cushman knows this well. After working for 15 years as an X-ray technician at a hospital in Greensboro, N.C.—often translating the emotional heart of his work into moving portraits on the page—the novelist faced a change in his day job that robbed him of longer hours for writing fiction.
So he reinvented himself as a poet. For 20 minutes each morning, before he drove his son to school and headed to work as a healthcare IT specialist, he created lines that condensed the stories he’d already been writing about fathers and sons, childhood friends, the longevity of relationships, and the joy and hardships of living. “I figured if you drafted a poem almost every day, that’s around 300 poems a year, and at least 20 or 30 of those would have to be good, right?” His first poetry collection, How Birds Fly, won the 2018 Lena Shull Book Award.
Cushman shared what he’s learned about the differences between working a J-O-B and belonging to a career, why poetry is an acquired taste for so many, and the practical way it can help us manage the chaos and struggle outside our windows — if we give it a chance.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Becoming a writer was not on your radar as a young man still living at home in Florida. You described yourself as ‘drifting.’
Yeah, I mean, I was 20 years old and had no idea what I was going to do. I worked in a record store. I was in a band, but the band wasn’t very good, and I knew that we weren’t very good. My mother had said, ‘Steve, we’re happy to have you living here, but … what are you gonna do with your life?’ My sister had brought home a pamphlet about a radiology tech program at the local community college. The application deadline was in two weeks. I saw it on the kitchen table, and I thought, Well, that’s as good as anything, I guess.
But when I was 25, I took a creative writing class. The instructor made the mistake of telling me I had talent. That was all I needed to hear, especially at that age.
How did discovering what you loved alter your relationship to work in general?
In a lot of my life, I started to feel like I was playing a role. I worked as an X-ray tech for about 15 years, and the job was fine. But I didn’t think about it at all. Certainly didn’t think about it when I left for the day. For about the last 12 years, I’ve worked in healthcare IT, and it’s the same thing. I go, and I do it, and I get good evaluations. But again, I sort of play a role: “I’m Steve, and I’m here to help you with this thing.” Which is what they want. But I’ve never had a job where I felt like, This is me. I’ve always felt out of place in most situations. Except for writing.
So, just that idea of belonging and looking for something. I don’t know if it translates for you into nonfiction and journalism and memoir writing, but every day, when I sit down to write, it could go either way. You could write something that’s pretty good. Or you could write some really bad stuff. But I’m okay with it because the writing is where I belong.
Until you become comfortable in the work, journalism can feel a bit like role-playing in a different way. It was often a buffer between the outside world and me. There was a wall there, so it was safe to write without revealing much of myself. A kind of in-between place of belonging. But, of course, that wall has to come down for a memoir.
Well, it’s true that you didn’t have to write specifically about yourself for journalism. But for all of your writing, whatever you write, isn’t it all really about yourself in the end?
Oh, without question, that’s a part of it. But I didn’t realize at the time. I look back now and see that while the questions I asked and the profiles I wrote were true to the person I was writing about, there was also some universal life knowledge I was searching for.
Yeah, something you were searching for, too. Exactly. I mean, don’t we all want to know how it works? I’m always interested in other people. I’m always interested in how people spend their days. And part of it is because I think, well, do I waste my days? The writer Andre Dubus said, ‘I didn’t know what I knew until I wrote it down.’ That makes sense to me: I don’t need to write necessarily to figure out what’s important to me, but what comes is what’s important to me.
Can we use poetry in a practical way to cope with the headlines, the uncertainty, the doom-scrolling, the things that worry and infuriate and exasperate us?
Reading poetry makes me a better observer of the world around me. One of the things poetry does, or at least the kinds of poetry I read, is that it takes a close look at different situations. I’m more finely tuned to the world because of it. That doesn’t mean I will go out and write about everything I see. But poetry, be it reading or writing, makes you slow down and view the world a bit differently, to simply pay attention.
And I like to write first thing in the morning, before I have a chance to have my heart broken again and again by the outside world.
A good poem can give you in one page what some novelists take 300 pages to do.
What is it about poetry that turns off a lot of otherwise voracious readers of fiction and nonfiction?
Actually, there’s a great poem by Billy Collins called “Introduction to Poetry” that gets to the heart of this. It’s basically about how high school ruins poetry for most people. One of the stanzas is:
But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it.
And that’s exactly what happens, right? There’s a sense that we’ve got to understand poetry at that level because it’s an academic setting. And it takes the magic out of it.
Let’s say I haven’t read any poetry or even thought about it since high school. But I could use a little bit of magic—or at least a calming of my nervous system—over the coming months. Where would you tell a lapsed poetry reader to start?
Poets who are pretty accessible to many people are Mary Oliver, Ted Kooser, and Billy Collins. I’ve gone to readings by Collins where there were 500 people in attendance.
A good poem can give you in one page what some novelists take 300 pages to do. I love novels for the length and expanse, but I love poems for how they can shine a light on a character or situation quickly and succinctly. Poetry allows us to get to the heart of the way we live and the way we love. ♣
NEXT WEEK: DeVetta Holman-Copeland shares how the power of community has informed her work as a resiliency expert.