“Hi Josh,” the letter begins. “Same old news with Frank, can’t or won’t get a full-time job, but of course if you sleep ’til 3pm, you can’t find a job like that…”
This is an excerpt from an actual letter Ware poet Joshua Michael Stewart received from his mom — one of many over the years — detailing his brother Frank’s life of alcoholism, jail time and custody disputes. It could have been crushing to open these letters time after time.
But instead of getting dragged back into the hopelessness of the hard life he’d tried to leave behind in Sandusky, Ohio, Stewart chose to write his way out of it.
And he succeeded. The poems in his new full-length collection, “Break Every String,” are proof.
Stewart will be reading from “Break Every String” on Saturday, April 16, 4:30 p.m. in the Neilson Browsing Room at Smith College’s Neilson Library. The book launch, hosted by Hedgerow Books, the poetry imprint of Levellers Press in Amherst, will also feature Andrea Stone reading from “American Spelling,” a short story in verse. Books will be available for purchase and signing.
There are seven “After Ohio” poems in the collection. Six begin with a letter from Stewart’s mother, the seventh with a letter from Frank. In various ways, the poems rise from beneath the weight of the flat-toned, depressingly cyclical letters.
In the poem printed here, Stewart finds a new language in jazz, a recurring thread throughout the book, and in the Hebrew he learns from his beloved.
In another, a guy who’s supposed to sell him a gun out of the back of his car doesn’t show up, and the poem’s narrator ends up in a bookstore, buying a book of poems instead.
“…if someone asks if poetry/ has saved your life, you know what to say,” Stewart writes.
“After Ohio” began as one long poem, Stewart says. The decision to break it apart came about as he worked through Hedgerow’s rigorous editing process. The decision was partly structural, to avoid having one large, ungainly poem that was hard to place in the collection.
But dispersing the “After Ohio” poems throughout the book creates an emotional effect that’s probably stronger than one long poem could have had. It seems not unlike what Stewart felt as he opened his mailbox to find yet another letter.
“Oh yeah, right. This doesn’t go away,” I say. “These letters keep coming. The past has a way of insinuating itself.”
“I got out of Ohio,” Stewart says. “I got out of that life. But I would always get these letters from my mom, or I would get phone calls from my mom, and emotionally be brought right back to it.”
When he first came across the batch of saved letters from his mom and brother, Stewart says he thought he might take lines from them to create a found or collage poem.
“I’m always looking for new ways to write,” he says. “Either inventing a form, or taking an old form and breaking it down into something else.”
Instead, he ended up leaving the letters almost verbatim — a few names have been changed, he says — and using them as springboards for the poems that follow.
“Is your mom still alive?” I ask.
“Yes, she is.”
“Does she know? Has she seen it?” I ask about the book.
“No she hasn’t,” Stewart says. “She has not. I don’t know how she would feel. I really don’t know.”
“I think it’s a question that a lot of us who have difficult families grapple with,” I say. “And many, many, many of us have difficult families when it comes right down to it. In different ways … The question is: How do you write about that and save the integrity — if that’s the right word — of the other person?”
We talk about it.
On the one hand, it’s reasonable to ask whether it’s fair to the other person. On the other hand, everything that happens, happens to both people in a relationship, so the experience belongs as much to the writer as the person he or she is writing about.
I tell Stewart that I don’t know what the answer is. It’s a struggle.
“That might be why I never really considered writing a book about my life, per se,” Stewart says.
There had always been certain poems in the manuscript that had an autobiographical bent, Stewart says, but he hadn’t set out to focus on himself. That happened in the editing process, as nearly half of his originally submitted manuscript ended up being replaced by other poems.
“The irony of this book is it’s very personal, and I’m not one who likes to talk about himself. I’m not that type,” Stewart says. “I’d much rather invent stories or talk about other people or other observations. So, to write a book that was more focused on me was a lot harder.”
It seems to have worked.
Ask for “Break Every String” by Joshua Michael Stewart at local bookstores or order from Collective Copies at https://store.collectivecopies.com/store/show/Lev024. To learn more about Hedgerow Books, visit: https://hedgerowbooks.net. To learn more about Joshua Michael Stewart, visit: http://www.joshuamichaelstewart.com
Trish Crapo is a writer and photographer who lives in Leyden. Crapo is seeking published poets and writers for her column. She’s interested in books written by Franklin County poets and writers and/or published by a Franklin County press. She can be reached at: tcrapo@me.com