William Carpenter Interview
conduced by Kevin Sweeney
Kevin: I guess that I should begin, in this unprecedented era, by asking how you and your family members are doing. I like to believe we are at less risk right now in Maine, but I sometimes wish I’d acted on my retirement fantasy of moving to Moosehead Lake since Piscataquis County still has no one who’s tested positive for the virus.
William: Thanks for asking. We are quite sustainably sheltering in place in Stockton Springs, though we just spent the time from Passover to Easter in darkness after losing power in the heavy snowfall Thursday night. When we saw the lights out we fled up north to the New England Outdoor Center (yes, in Piscataquis county) and spent the day skiing their wilderness trails on the southern shore of Millinocket Lake. Superb conditions with over a foot of spring powder and April temperatures, and we were the only skiers there. So we could forget the world’s problems for a day in the beauty of northern Maine. Then we returned and had our little two–person Seder in the dark. It made us realize why so many people want to leave their city apartments in this time of sickness and come to Maine. As my son Daniel said, “where the social distance is six miles.” Our house was once an old inn and is quite spacious for one couple, but our hearts go out to Daniel and his partner Moyang, who live and work in a two–room apartment on Broadway and 145th Street in New York City. They are in the epicenter and we applaud their courage and spirit. We have been playing online Scrabble with them in the evening, giving us the wonderful illusion of being all together at home. It’s not how I envisioned my first year of retirement, but this is what’s given to us and we must make the best of it.
Kevin: I don’t know if all poetry fans will find this a meaningful question, but I want to ask you about growing up in Waterville. I’ve read some bio notes that said your father taught at Colby. Was there a town–gown thing back then, and what about Waterville today? Is it just one more town where a number of people have drug problems and violence ensues?
William: When I grew up in Waterville there was a great chasm between the gritty factory town and the prosperous self–contained college on the hill. Colby kids had their fraternities and we rarely encountered them in town. Even as a faculty child I rarely laid eyes on any Colby students and was only on campus to use their tennis courts, the only ones in town. The wealthier Waterville kids went off to boarding school and came back summers needing to play tennis, and being part of the Colby family, I could provide access to a court. Of town–gown relations, I could say there weren’t any when I lived there. There were two cultures with no middle ground. After I left, as the sixties unfolded, students got restless in the ivory tower and began taking apartments downtown where they could get a taste of reality. Railroad Square Cinema is one of the legacies of that town–gown breakthrough. Now, of course, the factories have largely vanished and Colby is a huge presence in Waterville. The college has recently built a boutique hotel worthy of their well–heeled donors and parents, as well as underwriting a major initiative to convert the former blue–collar community to an arts mecca. Colby began right in Waterville on College Avenue, then got really estranged for a while, now it’s back in town.
Kevin: I should point out to readers that while I’m a fan of your poetry, I also like your fiction. Lucky Lunt, from your novel The Wooden Nickel, is a memorable character with whom I spent a number of enjoyable winter nights this year. Was he at all based upon someone you knew growing up, or might be a composite of various traits you’ve observed in various Maine men?
William: Lucky Lunt came to me as a whole character out of the blue, following a boating encounter in the Rockland area. I had been thinking of a waterfront novel and I had the landscape and setting but I lacked a main character. Then I happened to be sailing from Castine to Monhegan with another family in two boats. On the way we anchored overnight in a sheltered cove and before setting out we rafted the two boats together for an alfresco breakfast in our cockpit. It was an idyllic Maine morning, totally calm water and the sun burning off the fog. Then we heard an engine coming closer and it was a big diesel lobsterboat headed deliberately at us at full throttle and they did not swerve or slow down. Their wake practically sank us both. It shattered the teak cleats that tied the boats together and overturned the cockpit table. Food, juice, coffee went everywhere. It’s a wonder no one went overboard. The name on the stern was “Bazooka,” which was appropriate for what hit us. Breakfast was ruined. To those lobstermen who had been hauling traps for 4 hours while we were enjoying scallion omelettes, we must have looked like the quintessence of privileged idleness and deserved to be sunk. This macho lobsterman, burning with territorial outrage and class resentment was just what I needed for the book, and thinking back in political terms, it was the beginning of the high–horsepower proletarian grievance that in a decade or so would bring us Donald Trump. I’ve always wanted to thank those guys for their inspiration and I would have dedicated the book to the crew of the “Bazooka,” but my publisher’s lawyers wouldn’t allow it. Maybe yours won’t either. I could name a few other waterfront characters that had some influence, but that guy that waked our breakfast came as a gift from the sea. With his arsenal of guns and his thirst for Rolling Rock, Lucky is my exact antithesis. But as W. B. Yeats said, we create art not from our own personality but from our hidden opposite, and that describes Lucky and me.
I should have a note about Lucky’s language. I know of upstanding Maine citizens who have thrown the book away after a few pages because of the vulgarity. When I signed a copy for my mother I had to say, “Mom, you can’t read this,” and I am certain she never did. She would have washed my mouth out with soap if I talked like that. I’ve always loved the poetry and cadence of downeast profanity, which is a coastal cousin of the unfiltered Waterville street language I spoke growing up, so easy for me to write. I used to sit on my sailboat and eavesdrop for hours on the lobstermen’s radio channels, plus I had a great informant in my COA grad student Phil, who was an intern at an MDI lobsterman’s coop. I had Phil come to my office every afternoon and quote verbatim from the wharf talk he heard all day. “Every other word is a swear word,” Phil would say, “and the rest of them are too.”
Kevin: While I plan to move onto poetry questions soon, I have to ask you how did you learn so much about boat engines? I kept thinking how does a guy who went to Dartmouth and taught at the College of the Atlantic — and is a poet — know so much about this stuff? I know you’re a sailing person, but did you ever work on a lobster boat or maybe attend a vo–tech high school before you realized you were more a liberal arts type?
William: My boatyard manager came to one of the readings and he asked in the Q & A, “You don’t know a damn thing about engines, I don’t know how you wrote all that stuff.” My only answer is, it’s true I don’t know much about marine engines, but my character does. Characters come from your unconscious, which picks stuff up on its own and knows more than you think. We have inside us people very different from ourselves. When I would sit down to work on that book I would close my eyes for a moment and let myself be inhabited by Lucky Lunt, and though I never spent time on a lobsterboat, I would know what Lucky knew. I didn’t want my character to be a visitor with a PhD, he had to be a native. I assembled Lucky from scraps of knowledge picked up subliminally from being kind of a wharf rat around boatyards, attending the lobsterboat races with my ears open and my radio on, and from keeping an ancient 30 hp Atomic 4 alive on our own sailboat, crowding in our tiny engine compartment with my very eloquent mechanic, Burkie Billings.
One summer weekend we had sailed out to Matinicus and were tying our dinghy up to the float when I saw a cluster of lobstermen staring at something in the water. It turned out to be a bright green John Deere diesel engine, lying on the ocean floor. A lobsterboat racer had failed to win his class and in his anger and disappointment he had hoisted his engine out and sunk it. The extravagance of gestures like that established the value structure of the book. A Massachusetts reader who owns a marine engine business sent me a brand–new carburetor as a gift. I managed to install it, but I had to follow the written instructions step by step. Lucky Lunt could have done it in his sleep. Whitman says we contain multitudes, and though I had some help from the “Bazooka,” the way I really found Lucky was to look inside.
Kevin: I’ve also lately been reading your novel A Keeper of Sheep and love the character nicknamed Penguin, a young woman who was described by the San Francisco Examiner as “a feminist Holden Caulfield for the era of AIDS, global nuclear weapons, and environmental destruction.” Some say male writers can’t create believable female characters, although I once read that Larry McMurtry was an exception, but I think Penguin is an engaging young person. Have others agreed with my assessment? Was her expulsion from Dartmouth in any way a political commentary?
William: I had written poetry for a while, but that was my first novel and I knew I had to move away from the more or less autobiographical viewpoint of poetry and take an antithetical perspective. By that point in life I was tired of myself anyway, so ventriloquizing in another voice was a treat. The best way to get that distance was to change something big, in my case two things, age and gender. I had two great resources. I taught Autobiography at COA and every year supervised a dozen eloquent life stories by college–age women, and my teaching method was to read students’ work out loud to them in my own voice, so I absorbed their impulses and cadences as I read. Also, my son Matt was a Dartmouth student who had been into campus politics deeply enough to get arrested, so I had a pipeline to that very activist generation. Penguin begins as a militant campus feminist suspended from Dartmouth for burning down a fraternity house, who ends up as hospice companion to an AIDS victim at the end of life. The story deepens as she moves from the political to the personal. I never had a daughter in real life, so it felt satisfying to draw this young woman out of myself, who must have been in there somewhere, along with the rest of the multitudes.
When you think of it, any writer has to be able to inhabit other genders, social classes, ethnicities, and backgrounds if you’re going to portray a diverse community. The idea that you can only write authentically about your own human subgroup denies the essence of fiction and leads to a diminished and fragmented literature, eventually to a diminished culture. As Jung says, we have these characters inside us, all of them, we just need to gain access to the completeness of our inner selves. To write about others is simply to know yourself. My current novel involves two characters, one from working–class Maine, the other from the summer elite. Finding a common language for these two opposites has been harder than I ever imagined.
Kevin: I’ve always had a thing for epigraphs, especially those that don’t seem obviously connected to the theme of the book. When I first spotted your choice for Rain I was just blown away by it though I couldn’t say why? Here it is:
It is raining in Macondo
Anything you’d like to share about this one?
William: Macondo is the name of the remote South American village in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Marquez’ novel came out in 1970, the year we started the College of the Atlantic. We all read it and loved it at COA, I think because we associated Macondo with our own isolated community in Bar Harbor. I used it several times as one of the texts in an annual COA course called “Bread, Love & Dreams.” I chose it as an epigraph for Rain because at one point in Macondo’s history it rains nonstop for four years, eleven months and two days. The quote is actually a telegram of despair sent from Macondo in the midst of an endless and stalemated civil war. At the time of its appearance Americans could sympathize; we were in a similar quagmire with Vietnam.
Kevin: Your poem “At the Foxtrot Motel” is set in Presque Isle, a place for which I have a certain fondness. You go from talking about Marsden Hartley in the bar with art history professors from the University of Maine at Presque Isle to kicking the TV in your room, trying to get a “blue movie” to come in clearly. Not to sound like a devious prosecutor, but have you ever watched or tried to watch pornography in Presque Isle, Maine? Maybe at the Foxtrot Motel?
William: That poem pretty much tells it as it was. Professor Gail Scott of UMPI was hosting a Marsden Hartley conference and I had come to speak on the subject of Hartley’s poetry. He is a renowned Maine painter but not many know that he’s one of our top poets, too. “Lewiston is a Pleasant Place” is a small–town masterpiece in the vein of E. A. Robinson’s Gardiner poems but more fluid and personal. They housed me in a motel which I think is now the Presque Isle Inn, I don’t know what it was back then but for the poem I gave it a livelier name. I got back to my room late at night and the cable channels were boring talk shows but there was this one other channel with some very colorful activity, the only problem was, it was scrambled like a kaleidoscope so I only knew what was going on by the colors, which were predominantly shades of flesh. I banged around with the set but never got the movie unscrambled, and like most poems, this one was born from my inability to make things work in reality. We make art out of the things we can’t achieve in life; poems are like dreams in that way, wish–fulfillments as Freud said. If I had watched the movie there would have been no poem. The main action, of smashing a TV, came from my old pal the late poet Terry Plunkett. Terry was trying to live offgrid in Head Tide but he gave in and got a small black and white TV for when his kids visited, and they had been up there on New Year’s Eve watching the ball drop in Times Square when Terry lost it and threw his shoe at the screen and it exploded. That was the action I needed and I’ve always been grateful to Terry for the gift.
Kevin: I think your poem “The Ecuadorian Sailors” is not just one of my favorite Maine poems, it’s one of my favorite poems ever. I love the line “. . . emotions like blue rain–/forest parrots that no one in Bucksport has ever seen.” I think I could explain this poem to students based on my experience growing up on Peaks Island. Aren’t you telling us something about life in Maine in this poem?
William: My guess is that life on the Maine coast has always been spiced up by visits from sailors from foreign climes. Like any organic thing Maine isn’t quite complete in itself and has to be occasionally fertilized or pollinated from the outside world. When I moved to Bucksport in the eighties and the railroad spur was still active, there was a lot more shipping activity, and the crews of those big ships, often from tropical countries, would pour into town on shore leave and hit the stores and bars. There were at least three live–music dance venues in Bucksport including the Jed Prouty, which also featured slot machine gambling and another right on the waterfront near the town dock. They drew people for miles around. On summer nights drinking and dancing would spill over into the parking lot and the night that sparked that poem included a mix of townies and tourists, as well as a professional dance troupe from Penobscot and a complement of Latino ships’ officers from one of the tankers in their crisp white uniforms. I watched a handsome officer “cut in” on a local couple and I saw how eagerly the girl switched partners and boogied on with this suave–looking mariner while her boyfriend had to stand aside. I thought of pale quiet New Englanders (me included) and flamboyant toreadors, and how this girl would go on to marry her high–school sweetheart and become a teacher and have kids, but she would never forget that one transgressive dance on a summer night. I had recently come back from a bird trip to Puerto Rico so the color difference between dazzling rainforest birds and plain Maine winter birds was a natural metaphor.
Kevin: So if I were to lead a class discussion I think I might group “Love” and “His Holiness” together. If my class had read some Frank O’Hara, I might use him as frame of reference. Now I think “Love” is funny while also disturbing, but — maybe because I’m Catholic — I think “His Holiness” is hysterical:
I wake one morning to find myself the Pope
. . . and now I am infallible.
By the end you are driving a “miraculous blue Toyota . . . towards Bangor.” Any help you might offer me to sustain this discussion or correct my mistakes?
William: “His Holiness” is another debt to Terry Plunkett, my inseparable companion from those days. I don’t know where he got it, but Terry had in his possession a white silk stocking that had been worn by Pope John XXIII and once in a while after a few drinks he would take this artifact out of its display case and pass it around. I’m not a believer but I believe religion has evolved as a human universal and I instinctively use religious imagery to resonate emotionally with readers, even those who consider themselves thoroughly secular. Sex and religion often go hand in hand, so the Pope drives over to his girlfriend’s to take his clothes off and reveal his body with wounds — maybe from self–flagellation? — and properties of death and resurrection. That would make a good religious slogan, the way they say Keep the Christ in Christmas. “Keep the erection in resurrection.” I was thinking of that old soldier’s pickup line: “let me show you my war wounds.” We are all sinners but there’s something infallible in us too.
“Love” is also kind of a religious poem. It’s based on Genesis and the Fall of Man. At that point in my life I was trying to figure out the dynamics of love triangles. A married couple and a single guy camp out in Paradise and in the night the wife’s hand snakes into the bachelor’s sleeping bag. The next day the three of them run the rapids and smash up their one canoe and their food is gone, so in order to survive, the wife and her new boyfriend cook the husband and eat him. They are very much in love, but their nourishment comes from the ex–husband and they couldn’t exist without him, so it’s really a triangle, or that natural trinity of Eden: man, woman and serpent, which was me. I never thought of these poems as related until your question, now I see they are both using religion as a way of understanding love, which is the title of one poem and the last line of the other.
Kevin: I’ve noticed that some Maine poems by Maine authors seem to say, “I’m more Maine than thou,” but my first experience reading you left me feeling entirely drawn in. I might say that Bill Carpenter writing about Maine is like Richard Hugo writing about the Pacific Northwest. Your work never seems to boast, “I’m not from away.” You even have a poem titled “The Tourists” but you avoid calling them names. Is it simply that you’ve been a Maine guy most of your life and it all comes naturally?
William: I moved to Maine when I was nine and left when I was seventeen and never wrote a word till I moved back to Maine in my thirties. I published my first work in the Maine Times when Gordon Clark was poetry editor. So I owe a lot to Maine and I could never write a word in any other environment. I’ve tried. I got a fellowship to Venice and took an apartment over a canal with a funeral home on the ground floor and black hearse gondolas docking up all day long and I still couldn’t write a thing till I got home. Maine is an inspirational place in that what else is there to do here but read and write? The emptiness forces you to look inside. And as Emerson said, nature is all metaphor and there’s nothing but nature here, at least where I live. Nothing but nature and the humans that work with nature, lobstermen, boatbuilders, landscape painters, farmers and guides and park rangers and photographers. One of the best poets in Maine, Chris Barter, is a trail boss in Acadia National Park. They work and live within the metaphor and reality of nature and have not succumbed to the digital totalitarianism that dominates our culture. Even under the current quarantine where the culture centers are closed down and everyone’s screenbound under house arrest, we are so blessed to be out there on skis or in the canoe, six miles of social distance but in intimate touch with reality all day long. As for “from away,” everyone in Maine is from away except the indigenous peoples that greeted our immigration in the 17th century. We are all immigrants, whether you’re an old Yankee dairy farmer or a Somali cab driver in Portland. Paul Lepage, salt of the earth, is a second–generation immigrant from Quebec, and now a Florida expat. People come and go, we’re all Mainers, we’re all from away. Some of the best Maine poems were written by our tourists and summer residents: John Berryman’s “Henry’s Understanding,” Wallace Stevens’ “Variations on a Summer’s Day,” and the best of all Maine poems, Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour.” If you start off in Maine you need to go away and then come back, as Marsden Hartley did. As T. S. Eliot said, the point of all travel is to return where you started and know the place for the first time. The depth of perspective is from the going and the coming back. I felt so privileged to be able to return to Maine and have a living here. Most of my writing is a celebration of that lucky break. You can say the same of artists. Those who have seen Maine the most clearly are our visitors: Edward Hopper, Paul Strand, the Zorachs and the Wyeths and Fairfield Porter and John Marin, Natives like Hartley and Kosti Ruohomaa spent a lifetime away from Maine before they came home and saw it for the first time.
Kevin: I sometimes wonder if you could teach an introductory art appreciation course, maybe include a couple of lines from your poem “Girl Writing a Letter’’ in the syllabus. It’s when the thief enters the Gardner Museum in Boston:
The thief sticks the point of his knife in the guard’s ear.
I haven’t got all evening, he says, I need some art.
Art is for pleasure, the guard says, not possession
I’ve been just getting into your book Speaking Fire at Stones in which you have written poems prompted by the drawings and etchings of Robert Shetterly. It made me recall that Marcel Duchamp quote about the “onlooker” completing the “creative process” and having “the last word.” I think you would bring an interesting approach to such a course (not that you’re looking for work). Any thoughts?
William: My dad was the chair of the Colby art department for many decades, and he started the museum there which now has such a colossal presence on the Colby Campus and in the state of Maine. So I grew up in an art household, and everyone in my family could draw like angels, except me. My sketches look like I did them with my feet. I got into writing because I couldn’t draw. But I have always loved art and I’m drawn to artworks as subjects for poetry, like “Girl Writing a Letter” and Rob Shetterly’s ingenious images that inspired our collaboration. That’s a good quote about “completing the process.” An unperceived artwork is incomplete, and I imagine that the paintings in all the locked–down museums right now have a feeling of incompleteness that won’t be healed till their viewers return.
For many years after Speaking Fire at Stones, I team–taught a class called “The Eye and the Poet” with Dru Colbert and Doug Barkey at COA. Students had to do both the artwork and the poetry and we had some unforgettable collaborations. They got to know their own creativity better by simultaneously engaging both the verbal and visual areas of the brain.
Kevin: When you were still a novice writer were there any special poets (or fiction writers) whose work helped show you the way? And what about now; are there poets you enjoy?
William: I’m still a novice and I’m still blown away by the scope and power of other writers. Talk about the creative process, I am in awe of the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard. His 6–volume autobiographical novel is the best self–examination of a writer’s life since Proust. In local terms, the book that opened up the Maine experience was Carolyn Chute’s The Beans of Egypt, Maine. Carolyn looked in the windows of the junkyard and trailer dropout roadside life of Maine and showed the heart and poetry inside. I had grown up in mid–century Maine but had never seen it till I read that book. I had a joint reading with Carolyn in the 80s when she chose a passage from The Beans of Egypt, Maine with some profanity in it that she didn’t want to utter, so when she came to the offending words she had me pronounce them. That showed me that you have to go beyond your own limited self when you write, even if it requires outside help.
In terms of poetry, I was an English major who grew up on W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, but poetry didn’t get under my skin till they got cross–pollinated with international poets like Pablo Neruda, C. P. Cavafy, Fernando Pessoa, Cesare Pavese and our own Charles Simic who gave the first poetry reading ever at COA and opened my eyes to Eastern European surrealism. They showed a simpler and more egalitarian poetic that could reach the heart of the reader without requiring an elite education. The surrealists were often Marxists and it mattered that their poetry could reach the working man. An image for that would be the Orozco mural in the Dartmouth library of a steelworker lying on a girder, reading a book of poetry on his lunch break. For 4 years I studied under that guy. A formative event for me was Allen Ginsberg reading at the University of Chicago when I was teaching there in 1970. He showed the power and possibilities of writing so hearers get the full impact at a performance. The Beats reminded us that there are limits to inscrutable modernism, that poetry can reach the audience at the first hearing and without having to see the page.
In poetry today I look for an expansive vision that rises above subgroup identities into human universals. The current pandemic has the potential to bring us together in a common cause. Campbell McGrath’s long poem in praise of the spirit and valor of New York City is a great example: “At the Ruins of Yankee Stadium” in the April 20 New Yorker. It reminds me of Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” or Galway Kinnell’s “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World.” A poem like that rising from this god–awful affliction is proof that poetry is essential work.
Kevin: Was teaching at the College of the Atlantic a significant life experience? My stereotype of well–regarded poets is that they get Poet–In–Residence gigs that don’t require much classroom time but do provide plenty of writing time. It seems your experience was different, particularly considering how long you stayed there.
William: I’ve only had two jobs, one at the University of Chicago where I never wrote an original word, and one at COA where I started writing as soon as I got there. Its location, its intense close human community and its underlying inclusive philosophy have been great nutrients for creative writing. They have no publish– or–perish or departmental regulations, no departments at all. You’re free to develop and synthesize. Ideas flow into each other from art and science. It’s hard to avoid creating something in that environment. Both in teaching and publication, you are encouraged to find and follow your own direction regardless of what you were hired for. I came as a Yeats scholar and immediately discarded that ancillary role and started writing my own work. They generously gave me freedom and time to write, with the exception of one period of crisis where I served as Dean and that didn’t allow time for anything. I quickly dropped that job when things improved. As COA grew larger and more demanding, I stopped teaching the fall trimester so I had 6 months on and 6 off, which was ideal. The only time teaching and writing got into conflict was when I was teaching my novel class and I’d have to remember 15 or 20 ongoing student novel plots and I would often forget my own. But COA offered academic freedom, natural beauty and a receptive community. I taught there for 48 years. If I had stayed in normal academia I would never have written a thing.
Kevin: I believe you’re a novice retiree. Any observations about the experience thus far? Do you have any new writing projects?
William: Retirement was a very difficult decision. COA was my life for all those years, and the small office building I shared with three longterm colleagues was a second home. But as it happens, it was well timed. Our college went online this spring because of the pandemic, and I’m happy to have avoided that. The COA learning style doesn’t allow for social distance. Education is like an iceberg, words exchanged may be the visible tip; but as in poetry, the important intellectual currents are deep and often unconscious, and they exceed the bandwidth of Zoom. I worried that time would be empty without teaching, but it quickly filled with writing projects. I’m doing the final revisions of my current book with an astute but demanding editor. It’s a PTSD novel called Silence that takes place on a Maine island, due out in the summer of 2021. Hopefully we’ll be comfortable with readings and book–signings again by then. I’m also working on a screenplay of The Wooden Nickel, including some updates for the current climate. I had hopes of an idle and dreamy life in the pastures of retirement, and I still do, but I haven’t arrived there yet.