A Conversation with Philip Schaefer, by Joanna Acevedo
Joanna Acevedo: So tell me: I know parts of this book, Bad Summon, appeared in several chapbooks prior to them coming out as Bad Summon. You know I have Radio Silence, and we talked about hideous [miraculous]. Can you talk about the process of writing this book, and how it came together?
Philip Schaefer: Yes, definitely. I moved to Missoula, Montana from Chicago for my MFA about ten years ago, and I did not know anything about publishing. I started writing and getting workshopped and then eventually just started putting it out there. Little poems started getting picked up here and there, and eventually they sort of snowballed into what would be like ten, twelve, fifteen pages. Then I sort of wrapped a chapbook manuscript around that. And once those got published, I started to have a bigger picture of, okay, how does this form or formulate into a whole book. And it took some time to figure that out. But I kind of let the gods of the poems being published decide that for me. That was some sort of validation for what’s good, which it shouldn’t be, but that’s what naturally happened. I felt very fortunate to get all of these poems published. It's hard to believe that anyone's ever going to engage with your work that way. But luckily I got some people to, and I'm very grateful for it. That was sort of my process in terms of publishing it.
PS: In terms of writing that book, I started to quickly become obsessed with the juxtaposition between Chicago and Missoula. In Chicago, it's almost like people are dying every day as if on a marquee at a baseball game. And so it feels distant, even though it's right there in front of you. And in Montana, where there's a very small population of people and a very vast landscape, so when you would hear of certain deaths or crimes, or people missing, things like that, it was just very stark, and magnetic for me, and in a way that I found these stories to take on a life beyond their own. I wanted to write into, and from that energy, I didn't want to write about things, but inside of them, in a sense, so that became the obsession which became the sort of content matter for a lot of the poems in the book.
JA: That's so interesting, because now that you say that I feel like I understand the book so much better.
JA: Can you talk a little bit about your poetic influences, like who you engage with both daily and when you were writing the book?
PS: Yeah, it's actually a funny question for me personally. Because when I was sending this manuscript out I had gotten a handful of finalist nods. But you know, still waiting, and then I got the call from the University of Utah, saying they wanted to take it, and that David Baker had selected it. And I was elated by this. And then David first emailed me and I had never met him before. He sent me the forward for the book, which is very generous, and wanted me to look over it. But he called out my most immediate influences to a T without knowing them. Mary Ruefle, Jack Gilbert and Richard Hugo, and those are my sort of holy/unholy trinity in terms of the people. I revisit them all the time. They were very present in the writing of this book. Another person who has impacted me is Ocean Vuong. He really helped me understand the shape and what I wanted to do. So I sort of mimic his system for Night Sky with Exit Wounds, where you have one opening poem and then three sections. And I really like that. I thought it worked, so I said, I’m going to do that.
PS: Mary Szybist, and a guy named Christian Hawkey were also influential. Probably more than any of those would be Denis Johnson, though.
JA: Oh, I love Denis Johnson. He’s my favorite author. My Instagram byline is a quote from him.
PS: What is it?
JA: “Low-lying cynicism, occasional genius, and small polite terror.”
PS: Love it.
JA: It’s from The Name of the World.
PS: The Magnetic Fields also played a large role, as a band. My wife went back home to the Midwest to visit family, and I was alone for three days—a long time ago—and I started getting very melodramatic about what if she never came back. So I listened to that record over and over again, and that was really like the biggest muse for the section hideous [miraculous].
JA: Credit them!
PS: Oh my God, I would be too embarrassed.
JA: So I see themes of fire again and again in the book, and we just talked about violence a little bit, but I see grenades and gasoline, and Molotov cocktails just when I was flipping through. Can you speak to that through line? And how everyday violence shapes our lives?
PS: Yeah, sort of twofold. It’s both the bigger picture, which you just mentioned of seeing the contrast of like snow-capped mountains and missing bodies, but also there was this story where a couple was on their honeymoon in Glacier National Park, and they got into an argument, and she pushed him off. She went to jail. This whole thing unraveled right in front of me. I couldn’t believe it. I started hearing all these stories, and became obsessed with them. Because they were just blowing my mind a bit.
PS: And then on the other side of that coin is as writers we’re obsessed with certain words, images, impacts, and I'm no exception to that. I love the dangerous elements of language. Their implications. The way that the poet can twist them into new meaning. All of that kind of stuff, I find to be just like revelatory.
JA: Same question, basically, but death and dying are another theme that permeates this collection. Can you talk about that theme? And the way it appears and reappears for both the living and dead characters in this book.
PS: Yeah, I think every poet or writer is obsessed with the basics—death, love, loss, nature.
I'm no exception to that as well. I think that the death and loss components, the darker ones, the harder ones, the unknowable ones are so mystifying, and I am pulled in that direction because they make the nature and the love much more bright and complex. I want to write things that kind of terrify me. I want to write things that at the end of the page and at the end of the day kind of haunt me in a way that I'm uncomfortable with. I think that's a good process for getting outside of one's own skin.
JA: I think you got to this already, but there's an element of collective memory in this collection. I don’t know if I’m just picking this up, but the world of Bad Summon is kind of much larger than the first person narrative. It kind of expands out. Can you speak on that?
PS: Yeah, I mean, I think that the specific leads to the universal and vice versa. I think the first section and last section kind of bookend the first person narrative. And I wanted to have this sort of zoom out, zoom in, zoom out landscape to it. On a more specific level, when I moved here ten years ago, I had just gotten married a month before in a bar in Chicago, and we packed up, having never set foot in Montana, and I was one of, if not the only married person in my cohort—that means that my nightlife looked a little bit different than everyone else's. I still went out and got beers, and did all that stuff, but I didn't have all of the drama and unknowns happening around me. It was happening to them, and I'm an empath in a lot of ways. And so I took their hurt and their surprise and their disbelief and kind of harbored it. You know. It became my own in this sense. So a lot of the poems take their anchor from that sort of energy. The poem “My Friends,” was written about all my friends fucking each other and fucking each other over during grad school, and I was like, “Come on, guys like, let's get it together.” And so I just wrote this poem from a really dark headspace, but it terrified me. So I kept it. It's just one of those dark poems where I was like this feels kind of grimy and nasty to write, but I kind of felt like I had to write it, anyway.
JA: No, it's a good one.
JA: I think you're such a master of the volta. I think that's what initially attracted me to your work. Some of these moments are so devastating. Can you talk about how you find those moments of change? This is going to go back to Ocean Vuong, but can you talk about how form impacts your writing?
PS: I'm not a huge formalist, by any means. I think form is absolutely important, but I don't overthink it. I write based off a natural rhythm and flow, and what I think should go next. That said, the first form that really compelled me was the sonnet, and not for its fourteen lines, but for the volta for the turn. When I discovered that I was like, “this is getting body checked in a sport you've never played.” And what happens in the last two lines is how you respond, you know. And so that element of surprise and, not for like shock factor, or gore or porn, or whatever of it, but for, like true surprise to the reader. I just found the right language that I thought would kind of both fit and also slap you on the face a little bit.
JA: I read a lot of New York Times articles and in a lot of the Times, they end in a volta which I don't think that they're doing on purpose. I’m always fascinated by how to get in and out of things.
PS: Right, and sometimes it’s about leaning heavily into it more and other times it's like a screeching call. Or a shift in direction. It kind of just depends on what that poem is doing without you by it.
JA: You use humor and irony especially. I think humor is something often misconstrued in poetry or misused. Can you talk about your use of irony and how it functions in your work?
PS: When I was in my grad school workshops. I remember most of the professors kind of slandering anyone using irony. They thought it was a gimmick or magic trick for my generation. And I don't think they are necessarily wrong, because everyone wanted to be the next Ray Carver Bukowski. I think irony has a place, and humor definitely has a place. You just have to have sincerity. It has to be coming from something slightly true, even if that truth is all only in feeling form. And for me, because poetry is so often dark and darkly beautiful, we need to cut it. You know. Like, I can't just watch Game of Thrones my whole life. I have to watch Curb Your Enthusiasm here and there. You know. Like, you need to have comedic writing. You need to have pleasure in the world in spite of the dark, you know.
JA: So we're gonna finish up with the hardest question of all. I know you’ve published quite a bit since Bad Summon. What’s next for you? Another full-length? What are we moving towards? Are you writing a novel like every other poet I know?
PS: I’m not writing a novel. I actually have another manuscript that I’ve sent out quite a bit for the last three/four years. It’s been a finalist probably twelve to fifteen times, so it’s been really close. It’s a finalist right now, so fingers crossed. So I’m just not in control of that at the moment, and I put that book in the hands of the world. If it’s supposed to be, it will be. And at this moment, I’m really excited about a new project I’m working on. It sort of pulls from the same but very different energy as hideous [miraculous]. None of the poems have been published. I’ve just now started to send them out. I’ll always hope for it, but it will never take away from my need and desire to keep writing.
Philip Schaefer’s collection Bad Summon (University of Utah Press, 2017) won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize, while individual poems have won contests published by The Puritan, Meridian, & Passages North. His work has been featured on Poem-A-Day, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and in The Poetry Society of America. He runs a modern Mexican restaurant called The Camino in Missoula, MT.
Joanna Acevedo is a writer, educator, and editor from New York City. She was nominated for a Pushcart in 2021 for her poem “self portrait if the girl is on fire” and is the author of three books and chapbooks, including Unsaid Things (Flexible Press, 2021) and List of Demands (Bottlecap Press, 2022). Her work can be found across the web and in print, including or forthcoming in Litro, Hobart, and the Rumpus. She is a Guest Editor at Frontier Poetry and The Masters Review, Associate Poetry Editor at West Trade Review, and a member of the Review Team at Gasher Journal, in addition to running interviews at Fauxmoir and The Great Lakes Review. As well as being a Goldwater Fellow at NYU, she was a Hospitalfield 2020 Interdisciplinary Resident. She received her MFA in Fiction from New York University in 2021, teaches writing and interviewing skills through the nonprofit system, and is supported by Creatives Rebuild New York: Guaranteed Income For Artists.