Cal Freeman
Cal Freeman was born and raised in Detroit, MI. He has a unique approach to his writing, swaying between prose and poetry seamlessly, often blurring the lines between the two. His works have a musical quality, oscillating between tender, classroom thoughtfulness and the grit of working class fight songs. This is not surprising. A prolific writer, Cal spends his professional time as an instructor and poetry reviewer as well as publishing his own works. He is also a musician and champion of working class artists throughout the region.
I’ve had the good fortune to meet Cal through mutual friends like musician Ben Stalets and poet Dan Denton and working with him to publish an essay on Toledo music in the Museum of Americana. He is a kind and generous gentleman who’s easy to be around. His writing is serious business though. Cal’s content is familiar and accessible. Like many poets of our region, you can feel the sweet-hearted brutality of Phil Levine and Charles Bukowski lurking in the background, but Cal’s work requires work. He employs a vast vocabulary that challenges readers and avoids the classic tropes of emulating his inspirations to create something genuinely unique, original, and wonderful.
Cal Freeman is the author of the books Brother Of Leaving (Marick Press) and Fight Songs (Eyewear Publishing). His writing has appeared in many journals including New Orleans Review, Passages North, The Journal, Commonweal, Drunken Boat, and The Poetry Review. He is a recipient of The Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes); he has also been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and creative nonfiction. He regularly reviews collections of poetry for the radio program Stateside on Michigan Public Radio. He currently lives in Dearborn, MI and teaches at Oakland University.
You have a very narrative, prosaic, literary style to your poems. This is a quality I really love in poetry because, in part, I find it to be more accessible to (non-academic) non-poetry readers. What drives that inspiration for you and is there a reason you’re drawn to that style of writing in poems?
I started reading Philip Levine when I was in my late teens, and I suppose he’s pretty narrative. I’ve also been into poets like Robert Hass who write prose poems that draw extensively from the poet’s own multi-disciplinary reading life. I like peripatetic poems, poems that walk and think.
I don’t worry much about accessibility, and I think most times the very notion of accessibility in literature is a prevarication. I trust that readers come to poetry because they want to see language heightened and utilized in new ways. I also trust that readers will take a second to look up the meaning of a new (to them) word on their phone and that this act of stretching vocabulary and lexicon is one of the central pleasures of reading and writing, two acts that are inextricably connected in my mind.
Language is beautiful, and the job of the writer is to explore and use it. I don’t really trust the demotic pose in contemporary poetry; a lot of that stuff just strikes me as anti-intellectual bombast. I try not to be a personality in my poems; the poems become these sprung mechanisms that know how they want to operate more than I do. In most cases I don’t approach writing with any clear sense of what I want to do. It’s a lot of educated guesses about how to step out of the way of the poem and let it develop into its own thing.
The three poems here have a consistently in their voice and style but each strike me quite differently in their approach and narrative structure, reading from this sort of stanza’d history lesson to stream of consciousness hyper-personal reflection to this nostalgic cautionary tale of sorts. There are themes and connective tissue, and compelling interpersonal characters and relationships but something unique about each.
What is your writing process for poems? Is it consistent? Do you have a routine for how you structure these varying topics? What are your goals in editing and revisions?
It's not too consistent, but my poems always begin with pen and paper in the notebook. Drafting them involves a lot of reading aloud and tinkering. I like to recopy the entire poem by hand when I need to revise; it lets me get back into the cadence and retrace the neural pathways that were firing when the genesis for the initial draft came about.
Once I’ve written a piece through several drafts, I’ll type it up, and that’s the point where I start toying with stanza breaks. I’ve got approximations of line breaks in the notebook but most of the prosodic stuff involving line and stanza lengths happens in the word processor.
Sometimes this process becomes endlessly recursive, where I’m not happy with a draft because it’s bloodless and I bring it back into the notebook to recopy and revise.
I don’t write at a specific time of day, though, or have any set routine. I’m always writing notes in the margins of books I’m reading or in my phone. I compose parts of poems as I walk to the bar at night. Many of these annotations and notes make their way into poems or function as the occasions for poems.
When I read your works I see Detroit sort of always lurking in the background like a character more than a setting, even when you’re not directly addressing the city. Is that fair? How do you see the city involved in your work?
If it is a character of sorts, it’s changed quite a bit very literally since you were young, how do you think about the city aging with you, or you alongside it?
That’s a good insight. I spent most of my childhood on the west side of the city. Much of my adult life has been spent one town to the west, Dearborn, Henry Ford’s hometown. I’ve self-consciously tried to stop writing directly about Detroit in recent years, but it does creep back in, especially Warrendale, the west Detroit neighborhood where I grew up.
I remember that neighborhood and my family situation at the time as being incredibly idyllic. It was before my mother began to suffer from mental illness. My dad coached baseball; my mom kept score and took us all to Little Caesar’s for pizza. I remember our front porch as the place where I learned about poems and the power in their cadences. My mom would recite Poe and Noyse off of that porch, and I still hear poetry in her voice. We’d head down to the Gaelic League and hear my parents’ friend Larry Larson sing Irish ballads almost every Friday. But it is such a nostalgic version that I wonder whether it actually existed, or if it’s some kind of memory palace (that’s a term my aunt used when she read the prose piece “Taste”) I’ve created.
I end up spending a bunch of time in the city playing music and going to bars, but the stories of contemporary Detroit aren’t mine to tell. The old house has been demolished, yet I still occasionally drive down Vaughan Street to look at a double lot blanketed in snow and cry.
Bisbee Blue
She imagined the Lavender Pit would be full
of flowers and purple clay, she says,
as we drive along the shoulder of the chasm
where the Phelps Dodge Company
gouged low-grade copper from the belly of the earth.
The 1,000-foot canyon’s a tourist attraction now.
An eidolon, a name wringed of its bloodshed.
They come to stare so long into what posterity
cannot tell them. As we round the pit,
we pass the uncompleted border wall
on a desert berm overlooking Naco.
One can find such monuments anywhere.
On Miller Road in Dearborn, you can walk
the overpass where union organizers
were beaten by Henry Ford’s goons,
led by Harry Bennett, in 1937;
below that bridge a field of sunflowers
cranes into the sunset. Harrison Lavender
had 1300 miners kidnapped and deported
in 1917 for daring to strike.
Some suffocated in cattle cars.
Some, splayed out like saguaros, burned
in the desert sun. Some found their way
back to town on mules and quarter horses
to face billy clubs and firebombs.
It’s late June, early monsoon season,
thunderheads on the horizon,
and a small tumbleweed blows beneath an ocotillo.
History sounds like hyperbole
minus one syllable, and it’s never the land
or the workers that benefit from the spectacles
they must enact. Be careful on that rural road
near the Contreras Burn Scar when the deluge comes,
she tells me. The Santa Cruz River
can roar back to life and drag a slurry
of clay and stone down on you.
Tonight in Tucson, in the lobby
of Hotel Congress with a can of High Life
on a tabletop covered in copper pennies
of various vintages (one sprawling vintage?)
I’ll read Jim Harrison’s final poems
as hot rain pours down and think of
Harry Bennett’s pagoda house on Grosse Ile,
its scarlet roof dulled by sunlight, its pilings
crumbling into the Detroit River. There’s nothing
in the pit now, slag of byproduct turquoise
(Bisbee blue), a nothing song in arsenic
crumbling like slipshod gold.
Dichotomy Paradox as a Non-Fungible Token
I want a different year in clean white snow.
I want the rapid senescence afforded the possum
before trauma. Just before that moment of collapse.
It’s not for play. It’s so it can’t remember what befalls it.
A possum isn’t playing possum. I want my father back.
I want a different father with the same tastes
and the same loves. I want a different flower
than what blooms in the boxwood hedges
without germination. I want to read the book
Melville’s Final Voyage which my father owns in a dream.
I’m not a seafarer, but I’m not faring well,
I want to say. The snow that fell as heavy slush
early in the day has turned to eider down.
People move and of course the mounds of snow
drift and the plows drive like nobody exists.
When the streets are revealed, they’re irrevocably changed,
cratered like the moon or the bottom of a sea.
A neighbor offered me her snow blower,
but I prefer shovel marks knife-edge to the driveway.
It’s hard to imagine what the phrase “coming back”
must’ve meant once. To have it mean anything
one would have to watch the plow returning
and not have picked up the trajectory of the turn
before the vehicle began coming back.
One would have to want to have a different life
in clear white snow and want a different bloom
than the one created by the snow that February day
along the boxwood hedgerows with wine
in the decanter and thought-heavy thoughts
for the ones who left us in the garden. My voice hissing
through clenched teeth. I want a different echo
than the possum. I want a different name.
For as long as I can remember
I’ve been both annoyed and haunted by my name.
I don’t think this is a unique relationship
to have to one’s name. I imagine everyone
is at times annoyed and at other times haunted
by their names, but I dwell on mine far too much.
Others are even brave enough to change them,
and I’m not talking about some monosyllabic nom de plume
haphazardly applied, but legally change them.
My name is why it takes me so long to clear the car,
to broom it off before starting it and scraping the windows.
These are too many names and numerals for one life,
but they’re so indelibly correct that I hum them
in the cold snow and again in the warm car.
It’s what I don’t know back there at the root
and am too listless to learn that does the haunting.
It’s who I don’t know. It’s the theology of Jean Cauvin
and how he came to be known as John Calvin.
The prevenient grace some of them have been afforded.
I give up a little more every day. I drive to Bar 342
for corned beef sliders. I read Fanny Howe’s Second Childhood
as I sip Canadian Club whiskey and wait for my lunch.
The man next to me has a voice like a half-empty matchbox
rattling itself awake. He doesn’t know how
he’s doing yet. He’s here to retrieve a car
left in the parking lot. He asks if the Howe
is my AA booklet. John John John, and John I read
in “Between Delays.” I underline the four instances
of my name with a Keno pencil.
John is his name too, I find out, and his voice
isn’t like a matchbox I decide as I note the slack skin
around his throat, it’s more like an accidental whisper,
a light breeze over dying wheat. I tell him I’d have flunked out
within a few hours, but I’ve got step one down
(I don’t think you can actually flunk out of their program).
I read a poem called “Loneliness,” scarf down my sliders,
and pay my tab. There’s too much data in this place—
Keeno screens, an internet jukebox, a baby shower
with a chicken wing buffet. There’s too much data
in the enjambed lines of the book, what a friend of mine
has called “hangnail stanzas,” for me to latch onto
anything other than my name and this personification
of loneliness that might engage such a name in actions
like clearing snow and driving to lunch.
John follows me out. A green balloon is trapped
in the door handle. He warns me not to pop it.
He paraphrases the Book of John as he lights a cigarette,
says the truth will set me free. John’s my name, he explains,
and that’s from the Book of John and I should try to live
my life by the idea that the truth will set you free.
I thank him. I don’t tell him how homonyms ensnare us
or how the sunlight on ragged snow renders the romance
of hunkering down remote. It’s too easy to drive now.
For anyone to truly come back the road would have to adopt
a chronology of hours. I don’t want the road to adopt
a chronology of hours. I could be going out
for all they know. They who paved this road with too many miles.
The more of it they plow, the less of me spins out.
There’s an elegance to Zeno’s paradox that circumvents
the civic mind and a loveliness to leftover weather
that one mustn’t lose in the sun.
I need to have my tires rotated, something. A good barroom
needs good haruspices the way prophecy needs a self to fulfill
its self-fulfilling augurs. They don’t have to do much
but observe the damage and guess right.
I’ll heat my liver for a reading any afternoon.
Taste: A Brief Memoir With French Toast and Popcorn
My father made French toast by dipping Wonder Bread in milk and egg yolk then browning both sides in a skillet. “The world’s an oyster, but you can’t crack it lying on a mattress,” he’d joke, placing syrupy plates beneath our noses to wake us up for school.
Though he prepared breakfast, my father didn’t subscribe to the second-order myth of breakfast, which goes something like: Breakfast is good if the day itself becomes good, a good day is traceable to its most important meal. For my father breakfast was a tautologous, fatalistic exercise, and a delectable breakfast did not ensure that the day would elapse in any predictable way. To this I’ll add that a delectable breakfast isn’t necessarily a good one.
Taste, built in to warn us of poison or near-poison, to trigger cephalic phase responses such as peristalsis and mesenteric flow, gets refined until all mastication is an atomization of a slow, eventual doom, a reduction of graduated pathology into sublime epicurean moments willfully ignorant of their common course.
I’m talking peanut butter and jelly on Wonder Bread for lunch, the way such a sandwich crushed beneath a Red Delicious apple in a plastic grocery bag takes on the look of the hematoma on an old man’s shin. The way a crushed peanut butter and jelly sandwich looks like the hematoma on my father’s shin.
I’m talking syrup, salt, and butter; treacle, grain, and bitter; wheat waving in a field; exhaust smoke in the parking lot of a little Catholic school in West Detroit during afternoon dismissal (The head nun/principal scolded our mother when she learned that my sister and I didn’t have a bedtime).
In the evening, my mother’s stovetop popcorn would crack and blossom like thoughts that time had gleaned from the rest of thought. Nobody called such buttery fluff sustenance, yet there we were, long past the dinner hour, watching Meet Me in St. Louis or Field of Dreams on VHS and crunching. The windowpanes of that old house rattled with mysterious gusts of air. The dog Spot, named for the dog in the Dick and Jane primer, and the cat Bashful, named for a preponderant trait among most house cats, developed a taste for the butter-less kernels my sister and I tossed them.
We begin with everything and only learn what delimits that through the fastidious discipline of induction—a southwesterly breeze foretelling the extrapolation of matter by the coming storm.
When she was five, my sister fell in a stairwell at the university where my father teaches and fractured her skull. Part of me longs for an imprecise, fictive past, not a drive to the hospital in a ’74 Cougar while my sister projectile vomited against the windshield, not a toddler whinging (my mother’s word for crying) in the night, not Tegretol degrading tooth enamel, a visit from imaginary birds before an epileptic seizure.
I went to my sister’s therapy appointment with her this morning because she lives alone and her basement flooded and once she decides that the asbestos tile has become frangible and is wafting through her vents she’ll likely show up or call and I’ll need to know how to help defuse her polysyndetonic thoughts.
The woman she sees is a strict behaviorist who says that logical reassurances only make the fearful brain recoil and entrench into a circuit of abjection. While I waited to be called in for the last fifteen minutes of the session those insights read like descriptions of my or my sister’s brain.
I read in Wittgenstein that all systems persist until tautology or contradiction and a proposition’s truth is in its tautologous recursion, to which I am adding that wellness is a self-same set of habits whose end is equally certain, that in this sense it is impossible to logically divorce it from the illness.
I’ve mastered the stovetop popcorn my mother used to make. I often fall asleep with a bowl of it near the bed and a maudlin eighties movie illuminating the room, keeping me from my thoughts.
To this day, neither my sister nor I can fall asleep or wake according to a schedule, but we were children once. There were smiles with dimples to boot and the vague expectancy that comes with petrichor and waiting. The cruel genius of those times is that they are irrefutably present and yet gone, summoning and erasing themselves with salt and sweet in the blue hours between the night and morning.
Publication Credits:
"Bisbee Blue" — poem originally appeared in Panoply
"Dichotomy Paradox as Non-Fungible Token" — poem originally appeared in Pøst
"Taste: A Brief Memoir With French Toast and Popcorn" — lyric essay originally appeared in The Citron Review
