On August 12, 2005, I interviewed Michael Kriesel at his home west of Aniwa, Wisconsin, along Highway 52. I had met Michael in June when I was in Marshfield to see Linda Aschbrenner, the editor and publisher of Free Verse. She had invited Michael over for our get-together and it was "Poets Loose in Marshfield" for a day. Michael invited me up for a visit before we all go back to the things we do in the fall, and I surprised him by bringing my tape recorder along. He agreed to answer some questions. I wrote about the other parts of our day together at "Poets Loose in Aniwa." Michael's newest book, Chasing Saturday Night: Poems About Rural Wisconsin, was issued earlier this month by Marsh River Editions, $10. Available from Marsh River Editions, M233 Marsh Road, Marshfield, WI 54449. TM: When we talked in Marshfield, you impressed me with the things you said about how you've set yourself up to be able to devote your life to poetry - living in this house, which had been your mother's house, keeping your mornings for poetry, your afternoons for a job as a school janitor for some income. You are here for the poetry. Talk about how you've set yourself up to live a life of poetry.
MK: It started years and years ago. I started writing in high school, my last couple years. I liked it a lot. I went into military service, joined the Navy and became a journalist so I could make a living while I wrote. I was in the Navy for ten years, mostly broadcasting and three years of print journalism.
I got out when I was 28, in 1990, also because I wanted to write. It was hard to get out of the Navy - it was all I knew. They drum into you "How will you live on the outside?" It is a closed, sealed universe. You don't see civilians too much when you're on these bases or aboard ship. It was traumatic for me - a lot of soul-searching and hard work.
The big thing for me was: I didn't want to be 50 years old, sitting on a curb staring at some puddle of water with a rainbow on gasoline in it, thinking "I should have done this, I should have done that." Well, I got out. I wanted to be able to write, and I was sick of the Navy, the paranoia and fear. And they wanted twelve hour days from you. You didn't have time for anything else. You couldn't just go to work, go home, and write. They wanted twelve hours, fifteen hours of your day.
So I got out and went to live in Antigo, a small town. For the first time in my life I realized I could work part-time and actually pay my bills. This was a great revelation to me - so "Okay, I have time to write."
But I was writing in isolation. I started getting things published in the small press. I would correspond with two or three pen pals. But I wasn't meeting any other poets. I had no academic experience. I had earned a bachelor's degree while I was in the service, in literature - it was an external degree program from a campus I never saw. We took like five or six actual after-hours classes. So I didn't have any of the socializing, that valuable experience you get when you go to a regular campus, or that you get if you mingle with other writers. I was writing dark little poems, in Antigo, Wisconsin, a town of 8,000. I'd send them out to two or three small magazines with maybe circulations of 200 or 300.
A few years along, maybe in the early to mid-1990s, I started trading visits by Greyhound with Bob Penick, an editor in Louisville. He ran Chance magazine for seven or eight years and he was encouraging about my poetry. We traded a few visits and hung out and had some good times. That really opened it up: "Hey, this is a lot more fun, if you do it this way."
I lived in Antigo for about three years, with a girl for most of that. Then I went to a small press festival, a gathering of underground writers, at DePaul University in Chicago, in 1994. That was a lot of fun. I met a lot of small press people. After that, I moved to another small town - Wittenberg, Wisconsin, pop. 997. I said, "Okay, now here it is. I'm just going to live in this little room. I'm not going to work. I'll just do my things - I'll finally get serious about lifting weights and about my comic book collection. (I traveled all over the country buying and selling at conventions on weekends.) And I'm going to work on my writing and see where it takes me." I had my hours laid out almost like you would if you were in school - two hours a day for this, two hours for that, two hours for the other. I started seeing more progress. And there was a spiritual regimen of Cabala and meditation and chanting. They all dove-tailed together. I did that for about three and a half years.
Then in 1998, I moved here, into my mom's old house. She had moved out and it was sitting empty. Basically that gave me a nicer terrarium in which to develop myself, out in the country here. I didn't work or have a car for about three years when I was first living out here. It was a real hermitage. A bit of the dark night of the soul, too. A kind of sweat lodge - "Okay, we're going to sweat this out in purgatory for awhile...." I had a lot of anger towards my father, and that had been distorting my perceptions and behavior.
Gradually things came to resolution. And my writing got better as I got better.
One of the big things that came out of this: I got so rock bottom as far as the hermitage aspect, that I started corresponding a lot more with small press writers. And, lo and behold, one day I started writing reviews of chapbooks. That opened whole new vistas for me. All kinds of lines of contact opened up. You make all kinds of friends you might not otherwise - because they write different styles of poetry than you do. The smartest thing I ever did, unwittingly, was to start writing reviews - you meet tons of people, and you also get out of yourself.
Writing reviews is kind of an unselfish act. For me, at least. My ego-marbles are in the basket of my own poetry. I don't really have any great sense of vested interest in these reviews. I'm doing them because I like reading the books. I'm doing them to pay back for all the help people gave me for my writing over the years. It's a way to make you become more socialable, if you're not. It gets you out of yourself more, out of the rut of your poems and your own little circle. And it challenges you.
Continued at Part 2, next....
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