Marcus Wicker on Poetry and Collaging
This interview has been edited lightly for our Epiphany 10 interview series and newly illustrated by Kendra Allenby. Marcus Wicker is this year’s Poetry Guest Judge for our 2020 Beakout 8 Writers Prize, currently open for submissions.
Epiphany: William Trevor began his adult life as a sculptor and later described his writing as chipping away at a block of marble. Are you a chipper or a builder? In other words, do you chip away at a block of writing, or are you more methodical, building up the block brick by brick?
Marcus Wicker: Here lately, I suppose I’d describe myself as a collagist. I collect slim notebooks of overheard language, odd images, possible poem frameworks, & run-on thoughts that keep me up at night. I let the mood of whatever I’m consuming—an Arthur Verocai LP, New Yorker profile, dashcam video, or One Tree Hill rerun—dictate a starting point, then mix & match corresponding notebook fodder over a period of several days until a draft emerges. Now that I think about it, this weirdo process has provided me a small amount of solace during this necessary but anxiety-inducing period of social unrest. Like maybe I can make something coherent of my quarantine daymares and coping mechanisms for dealing with them.
EP: What was your first publication?
MW: An empty, end rhymed three-page ode to Mia Hamm in my high school newspaper. I’m really glad those issues weren’t digitized.
EP: What are five books you are reading or thinking about now?
MW: John Murillo’s Kontemporary American Poetry, Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem, the centenary edition of Robert Hayden’s Collected Poems, Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and Approaching the Fields by Chanda Feldman.
EP: If you had to inhabit a fictional world, what would it be (i.e., the environment of which poem, novel, short story, song, etc.)?
MW: If I could distill the unadulterated funk, joy, & groove contained in Thundercat’s “Dragonball Durag” into a poem— Yeah, I’d be good with that.
EP: What's the most interesting day job you've had?
MW: The year before grad school, I sold high volume auto parts (poorly) to retail outlets and buyers around the globe. Maybe the only interesting thing about that job was the fact that I know nothing about auto parts. Most of my sales were executed by emailing & cold calling from a company script rewritten in my voice.
EP: What's the best advice on writing you've received?
MW: Not every lived dramatic situation or stray feeling is a poem. As one evolves as a writer, it’s not a bad idea to keep track of shifting obsessions & craft values for the sake of revision & self-imposed standards.
EP: Taking this as subjectively as you like, how do you understand the role of poetry in our world?
MW: That’s a big question. One I don’t have the bandwidth to consider at the moment. All I know is, each time I read a poem that seduces my senses—that moves me to catharsis or imparts its own unique brand of wisdom—I change a little. And this fills me with gratitude because, once I mark the page, I know exactly where to locate the feeling that poem roused when I need it. That’s the role that poetry plays in my world.
EP: How do you work? Are you disciplined? Undisciplined? Do you have fits and starts of writing mania, or are you slower and more methodical?
MW: I’ve been all of those writers. Typically, semi-disciplined, slow & methodical. But I’ve been at my desk more days than not since the first week of March.
EP: In a nutshell, what are you working on now?
MW: New poems, a burgeoning vinyl collection, & trying to curtail my screen time.
EP: What's an interview question you've never been asked that you wish had been?
MW: Q: John Coltrane or John Cheever? A: Coltrane.
Marcus Wicker is the author of Silencer (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper Perennial), a National Poetry Series selection. His awards include a Tennessee Arts Fellowship, Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships from Cave Canem, and The Fine Arts Work Center. Wicker’s work has appeared in Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, American Poetry Review and elsewhere. He is co-poetry editor of Southern Indiana Review, and an associate professor of English at the University of Memphis where he teaches in the MFA program.
