A Conversation with Jared Carter, Part 1
From the Midwest to Paris and Back
Editor’s Note: Jared Carter, like Robert Frost, didn’t publish his first full-length book of poems until middle age. Carter had been active in the Yale University literary scene as an undergraduate, and he spent years working in Indianapolis’s publishing industry, but he was forty-two before his first collection Work, for the Night Is Coming, won the Walt Whitman Award and appeared in 1981 to widespread acclaim. Also like Frost, Carter is a great narrative poet and a poet of place. His poems frequently appeared in The Reaper, the influential narrative poetry journal of the eighties edited by Mark Jarman and Robert McDowell. Many of Carter’s poems are set in Mississinewa, a fictionalized county in his beloved rural Indiana. Dana Gioia called Mississinewa “an imaginary landscape of small towns and farms that seems more real than most actual places.” Carter is one of the most accomplished narrative poets of his generation, but he has also distinguished himself as a writer of villanelles and as the creator of a rhyming nonce form—the Alexandroid. Regular readers of New Verse Review will know that Carter continues to publish excellent verse. We are proud to have published him in every issue of the journal to date, except for our special mini-issue showcasing graduates of the University of St. Thomas-Houston MFA program. We also published a review of Carter’s 2019 book The Land Itself.
Sunil Iyengar edited the recently published Colosseum Book of Contemporary Narrative Verse, which fittingly begins with two poems from Carter’s second collection, After the Rain (1993). In this in-depth and wide-ranging interview, Iyengar asks Carter about his life and work.
Without further ado, here is part one of their conversation.
Sunil Iyengar: To get us started, can you say something about your family life and childhood in rural Indiana? How did those factors shape your beginnings as a poet?
Jared Carter: I was born in the Midwestern state of Indiana and still live there. Indiana today is surprisingly wired and industrialized, but, in places apart from its few large cities, much of it remains rural and conservative. It has a fascinating Civil War history, and was an important swing state during the Populist and Progressive eras.
It has produced national political figures such as Eugene Debs and Wendell Willkie, and writers and artists ranging from Ambrose Bierce and Theodore Dreiser to Cole Porter and Twyla Tharp. (For good measure, toss in Kurt Vonnegut, James Dean, Larry Bird, Michael Jackson, Joshua Bell, Little Orphan Annie, and Garfield.)
An important distinction that should be made for this interview is that I grew up not on a farm, but in a small town—the same sort of close-knit, kinship-oriented, inwardly turned community, with agricultural and artisanal roots, that can still be found almost anywhere in the world. The place of my birth wasn't exactly rural; a more precise word might be traditional.
To reimagine my early years, then, think not of someone like Wendell Berry, with a team of draft horses, out plowing the “back 40”—although such activity certainly possesses dignity, and has a continent’s history behind it. Think, instead, of Sherwood Anderson, wandering on some windy night out beyond the streetlights of some small Midwestern town.
SI: Got it. Were you read poetry as a child, or made to memorize it in school? For that matter, when you began writing poetry, who were your models?
JC: I have memorized poems, certainly, but always of my own volition. My mother read children’s poetry to me and my siblings when we were very young—James Whitcomb Riley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Eugene Fields, A. A. Milne.
My paternal grandmother preferred the Fireside Poets, Browning, Tennyson. She was born in 1878 and could remember the Blizzard of 1888. Every winter, after the first really good snow, she would get out her copy of Whittier’s Snow-Bound and read it aloud to us. (I still have that book.)
SI: Were there notable storytellers in your family? Artists? Great readers?
JC: There was a decent amount of books in the house. I first began reading Ray Bradbury after finding a paperback copy of The Martian Chronicles on my mother’s shelf of books. I discovered Ruskin—The King of the Golden River—among my grandparents’ volumes. Along with Burns.
Everybody in my family read. My father was a small-town contractor, skilled in carpentry and masonry, just as his father had been. Both of them were excellent chess-players, as my older brother would prove to be. Both of them were good with any project involving concrete. My brother and I grew up lending an occasional hand at our father’s various building sites.
SI: What kind of work did that entail?
JC: Easy things—shoveling gravel, pounding nails—but we were the boss’s sons, after all. The workmen were kind to us. It was mostly a lot of fun, and always changing. As I got older, I particularly enjoyed those times when we set off some dynamite.
Every summer there was a concrete slab or an old bridge pier that had to be taken out. When I was still relatively small, at nine or ten years, and after the holes had been drilled, if there were close quarters, my father would have me squeeze in between the old slabs to set the charge and string the wire.
After we had retreated a safe distance, he would let me twist the detonator handle. I would shout “Fire in the hole!” and everybody would duck for cover. It was a “John Wayne” sort of thing to be doing, and the envy of the neighborhood kids. (For more dynamite foolishness, see my poem “Transmigration.”)
SI: Amazing. Clearly your father gave you a lot of responsibility for your age. What was your mother like?
JC: My mother was a homemaker, a church lady, and an excellent singer, with a fine contralto voice. She made her pin money by singing for local weddings and funerals. She partnered with a pianist from her church. They were the first artists I ever knew who made money from their art—something I’ve never been very good at.
But the most significant influence of all turned out to be that of a paternal great-uncle, who went off to Paris in 1903 to study art and had a fascinating life. His name was Glen Cooper Henshaw. He died in 1946. There were several of his oils and pastels in the house where I grew up.
It took a long time for me to understand what he had achieved, but it was to be extremely important for my interest in trying to become a writer. Someone in my family had already found his way to the Belle Epoque of Rodin, Rilke, and Loie Fuller. Maybe I could do something like that.
Certain of my poems pay tribute to this great-uncle—"Configuration” for instance, in my second book, which begins, “What I first knew of a life of art / was what he touched last.” (When I was at Bread Loaf in 1981, in Howard Nemerov’s seminar, Howard was particularly taken with that poem, and told the class it reminded him of Proust.)
SI: You attended Yale. Were there faculty or students who made an impression on you when it comes to poetry and the arts?
JC: In those days Yale College had not yet become coeducational. There were no classes in grammar or remedial English. If you hadn’t already learned how to write in secondary school, you wouldn’t have been admitted in the first place.
The majority of freshmen did not show up there expecting to be taught how to write, but to be introduced to Western culture. “We are far from able to instruct you about everything of importance,” the professors said, “but we can help you practice reasoning and the examination of evidence and sources. For the rest of your life, you’ll have to decide things on your own—everything from issues of war and peace to the art and literature of your own generation. Yale can get you started.”
I was a raw youth from the provinces. It was a wonderful place to be—excellent classes, great professors. At every turn there were dazzling visiting lecturers. I got to hear Frost, MacLeish, Styron, Bellow, Mailer, Ginsberg, Corso, dozens more. What B. F. Skinner, Ayn Rand, and Herman Kahn had to say still haunts me. But what Dwight Macdonald had to say about contemporary writers was eye-opening.
I remember listening to Robert Oppenheimer, introduced by Margaret Mead. They seemed to have stepped out from the chorus of a Greek tragedy. At lunchtime in my college, Saybrook, I might suddenly find myself sitting across from Robert Penn Warren or Harold Bloom.
I also had undergraduate friends at Harvard, Columbia, and Brown, who could put me up in their dorms. This enabled me to attend lectures by people on the order of Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, and Lionel Trilling. If I kept quiet, I could sit in on a seminar with someone like C. Wright Mills or John Kenneth Galbraith.
I took the train to Manhattan every chance I got, and saw plays and musicals: Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Long Day’s Journey into Night, My Fair Lady, The Iceman Cometh. At the 92nd Street Y I heard Isak Dinesen read (I sat behind Marianne Moore). My friendship with Terrence McNally, at Columbia, who was already beginning to explore the NY theater scene, led to my meeting Edward Albee and John Steinbeck.
Another friend took me to dinner with his friend, Jason Robards, Jr., who played in both Long Day’s Journey and The Iceman Cometh. Jason brought along his father, Jason Robards, Sr., a prominent actor in the 1920s, who told me how he and Tom Mix used to get some horses together and go out in the desert near L.A., where there were all kinds of abandoned movie sets, and shoot silent-film westerns. “We never had a script,” he said. “We made it up as we went along.”
In those days I was making it up as I went along, from New Haven and New York, to Boston and Providence. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven.”
SI: It sounds idyllic. And yet you seem to have left Yale, and enrolled at Goddard College, a place renowned for experimentation. How did this move come about?
JC: Like Shelley and so many others, eventually I had to “come down,” not to London, but to the real world. I simply hadn’t kept up with the work. (Oddly, I remember passing a class in logic, and failing one in existentialism.)
In those days, what would happen next was quite clear. Not staying in college or grad school, or not having majored in a hard science, meant that you were basically cannon fodder. You could be called up anytime the draft board back home needed a few more bodies to meet its monthly quota.
SI: So, before you even went to Goddard, the military called you. How long did you serve, and in what capacity? And how did this experience affect your writing journey?
JC: Shortly after I left Yale for the last time, in the early summer of 1961, things were heating up. Vietnam had been wobbling since the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the Berlin Wall was going up, and Khrushchev was pounding his shoe at the UN.
Bomb-shelter directions were posted in the subway stations; schoolkids were being taught how to duck. The future had never been so bleak. My first wife and I were married in December 1961. To tell the truth, things seemed so bad that we were not sure there would even be a future. We had just driven cross-country to San Francisco when my draft notice arrived. Remarkably, we were able to skate through those next few years and come out reasonably well. Chalk it up to Dame Fortune. I certainly sweated through a few spins of the wheel.
After boot camp at Fort Leonard Wood, and additional training in Georgia, I found myself in the Signal Corps, and unbelievably lucky to have been assigned to a company stationed in Fontainebleau, France. Not long after I got there, my wife was able to come over.
The two of us suddenly being together in France was like a fairy tale. Or a classic Hollywood film about garrison duty in your father’s old regiment in some romantic country. Maybe like the early pages of Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March.
Amazingly, I was not in Vietnam, on the other side of the world, where so many of my high-school classmates, and so many Army friends I had trained with, in Missouri and Georgia, had already been sent. Instead I was in what seemed to be, on first glance, some sort of laid-back, peacetime army. The sergeant of my platoon was a Korean War veteran; one of the older men had fought in World War Two.
More than that was the fact that suddenly, voilà, I was inadvertently following in my great-uncle’s footsteps. Incroyable! I can still remember that summer day the train from Bremerhaven pulled into the Gare du Nord, and I had my first glimpse of the streets of Paris. Lafayette, nous sommes ici!
The truth about being in the Army in France was more sobering. I had become an infinitely tiny, expendable cog in the enormous Cold War standoff between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations. If the balloon had gone up in Europe on the day I arrived (as it almost did a few months later, in October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis), my signal company would probably have been vaporized. But it never happened.
I was assigned a desk job and quickly learned what was expected of me. Things went well. My wife and I were able to live off post, in a small apartment in the village of By-Thomery, overlooking the Seine, at the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau. It was heavenly.
SI: I bet it was! Tell us more about your experiences in Paris from that time.
JC: A few doors up the street was a boarded-up chateau that had once been the studio of Rosa Bonheur, the celebrated nineteenth-century painter of animals. We managed to get the key. All of her things were still there, as though she had just put down her brush, and gone out into the garden.
In a cemetery nearby were the graves of Katherine Mansfield and the mysterious Armenian mage, Georges Gurdjieff, mentor of Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and Jean Toomer. A short drive through the forest took one to Barbizon, a cradle of pre-Impressionism, much loved by Millet, Corot, and Rousseau, and later frequented by Monet, Renoir, and Sisley.
Almost every Saturday morning we walked through the forest to the local station and boarded the train to Paris, to visit the churches and museums. For dinner that evening, in some small Algerian cafe on the Left Bank, we could each have a pris fixe of couscous, demi baguette, and wine, for five francs—about one American dollar.
In the winter, sometimes on an early Sunday morning, there seemed to be no one else in Louvre except the attendants. We could enter the completely empty Grande Gallerie, nod to the guard, and come up to within a few feet of the Mona Lisa.
I remember one time we were walking along with an elderly couple from San Francisco, friends and aficionados of Paris who were trying to find the storefront where the original Shakespeare and Company had been. They had known Sylvia Beach back in the 1920s. Coming along the sidewalk was this man about their age, with flowing white hair, in a white toga, and sandals made from flattened sections of a truck tire. “Raymond!” they called out. It was Raymond Duncan, Isadora’s older brother, who must have been in his eighties, and whom they seemed to have known in San Francisco back in the old days. They had not seen him since the war ended.
Raymond was delighted to see them, and to meet us, and began explaining that on August 24, 1944, the night before the Allies liberated Paris, he and a friend had gotten a couple of revolvers and climbed to the top “of that building, over there,” and had taken potshots at the frantic German soldiers moiling below. (He may have said the other person was either Jean Paulhan or Jean Cocteau, but I can’t remember now.)
On another occasion, in a different country, one morning in Venice we had taken a boat to the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal, hoping to be admitted to the Guggenheim Collection of Art. Out front was Marino Marini’s large bronze sculpture, “The Angel of the City,” consisting of a nude male figure, with outstretched arms, astride a horse. When we knocked on the door, Peggy Guggenheim herself appeared; the museum was just opening. She was holding a large metal phallus and proceeded to fit it into the correct place on the male figure. “I can’t leave it out here overnight,” she said. “Someone would steal it.” Then she invited us inside to see her collection.
Such adventures and encounters seemed never-ending. During scheduled military leaves, we managed to explore the Ile de France, the Lowlands, Italy, and the UK. In our last year we acquired a 1949 Citroen Quinze, a classic French automobile with front-wheel drive. (It was the getaway vehicle of choice in French gangster movies.) The crankcase held nine quarts of oil, the fenders were solid chrome, and two could sleep quite comfortably in the back seat. We drove it to Amsterdam and back, and from one cathedral town to the next.
When my time was up in early 1964, we didn’t return to the States, Instead, the two of us, carrying knapsacks and staying in youth hostels, hitch-hiked all over Europe—down the length of Italy and around Sicily, and from Greece and Spain to Edinburgh, Glasgow, and the Lake Country.
We had rolled the dice, then, during an extremely troubling, nerve-wracking time. When called, I had served my country; fortunately, my time in the military had turned out to be unbelievably positive. If only every aspiring writer might have such good fortune.
SI: Indeed. What brought you back to the States and to Indiana?
JC: We had managed our Grand Tour of seven months on a remarkable $5 a day for the two of us, but by mid-October we were broke, and we needed a rest. As for returning to Indiana, I think I had hoped to follow in the footsteps of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor, who had done all right by sticking fairly close to home and writing about what they found there.
SI: Many aspiring writers of your generation pursued jobs in academia by enrolling in MFA programs, which were starting to appear on the nation’s campuses at about the time you left college. Were you ever interested in doing that?
JC: Mark Strand, originally from Canada, was a grad student in the art school when I was at Yale College. He and a former roommate and pal of mine, Al Lee, were active in poetry circles on campus, and in 1960 they decided to go out to Iowa City and do poetry. They roomed together for a while out there. There was no way I could have gone with them. I had no money, and in those days I was trying to write fiction. I had won a nice poetry prize at Yale in my last year there, but poetry was far from my mind. My models back then were Faulkner, Hemingway, and Nelson Algren, none of whom had ever spent much time in a classroom.
Earlier, you asked about how I had enrolled at Goddard College. By 1967, back from Europe, I had G.I. Bill benefits, and thought I ought to finish up and at least get a B.A. degree. I was involved in protesting the war in Vietnam and had little free time. It made sense to enroll in Goddard’s non-residential program. I had to do three six-month cycles; it took a year and a half.
Goddard, with its emphasis on individual course of study and group discussion, was a marvelous place. Every six months one spent a couple of weeks in the Vermont woods, sitting in a circle with people who were seeking alternatives—in life, in learning, in service to others. It was definitely worthwhile. But I had to put food on the table. By the time I graduated, in early 1969, I had already found a job in book publishing in Indianapolis.
SI: What did you do in the publishing industry? Was the work congenial? Did you do any writing?
JC: I had already worked for a daily newspaper, so becoming an apprentice in the world of book publishing was not difficult. It turned out to be a wonderful place to learn. Bobbs-Merrill was an old-line publishing house, traceable to the 1850s, and the first such establishment west of the Alleghenies. By the 1970s it was the only publishing house in the country that conducted all phases of book production—raw manuscript to warehouse, and everything in between (except for typesetting)—in a modern, centralized plant in northwest Indianapolis.
Initially, I spent a couple of years in the boiler room, blue-penciling manuscripts. By 1973 I had another stroke of luck and was hired as managing editor of Bobbs-Merrill’s college division. I supervised the copyediting, proofreading, design, and production of texts primarily in the arts and humanities. The college division published about a book a week, and the entire company, called Howard Sams—consisting of college, law, children’s, technical, and trade divisions—published about a book a day. It was a great place to be, with a proud tradition of making books—books that had won Pulitzer prizes, and books that had sold in the millions. In the 1950s, the New York office had employed people like Hiram Hadyn, Louis Simpson, and Edward Gorey. It was a wonderful tradition to be part of.
In the Indianapolis plant, I could step out of the front office, wander across the factory floor past all kinds of web and flatbed presses, stapling- and perfect-binding machines, paper cutters and trimmers, all of which would be thundering away—and even a quiet, old-fashioned hand bookbindery—and go on out to the warehouse, and chat with the fork-truck drivers, who were stacking skids of finished books I had worked on.
It was an extremely rewarding job, one that involved a lot of writing—internal reports and recommendations, jacket copy, endless memos, correspondence with the authors, queries to copyright holders. I learned a great deal about writing and publishing from a host of talented colleagues—especially the director, a Marine Corps veteran and old publishing hand, who had gone to Harvard with the Kennedys.
SI: Did you come into contact with other poets who encouraged you or read or commented on your work in those days?
JC: My first day at Bobbs-Merrill in 1969 I wrote the dustjacket copy for the trade edition of Naked Poetry, and a few years later I supervised the production of a companion volume, New Naked Poetry, both compiled by Steve Berg and Robert Mezey.
There were trade and textbook editions of both books. They had silly titles but were serious collections, and quite successful. I got to know Steve Berg, Mezey less so. One day when I was in Philadelphia, Berg mentioned that he was going to launch a tabloid-sized magazine called American Poetry Review. He did, and it was a smash hit. (I never published in it, though.) By this time I had pretty much given up on fiction, after an agent in New Jersey had lost the original manuscripts of a bunch of short stories I had trusted him with. (I still have the carbons.)
This was in the early 1970s, right about the time of the fall of Saigon, and Nixon’s resignation. While working to produce those two poetry anthologies, and a third one compiled by Bill Heyen, I was in contact with a considerable number of contemporary American poets—Ginsberg, Bly, Kinnell, Levine, Levertov, Stafford, Creeley, Knight, Levis, McGrath, et al. I didn’t really get to know them at the time, although I was to meet most of them later on, in the 1980s. But I got a close look at their different manuscripts, with all their corrections and squiggles and marginal notes.
I should mention here, too, that I had become a father in 1969, that my marriage was on the skids, and that there was considerable conflict at home. Which led, eventually, to a divorce in late 1974. I didn’t do much writing of my own during those Watergate years, but at odd moments I kept trying. And things really weren’t all that discouraging.
By the time Gerald Ford was president, I was writing more, and beginning to read a few of my poems at a local hang-out in Indianapolis called the Hummingbird Cafe. I gradually became acquainted with two very different poets, Jim White and Etheridge Knight, who were already publishing their own books, and who gave me encouragement and advice—about writing, and about reading in public.
Such connections and influences increased my interest in moving from fiction to poetry. That impulse got a big boost in 1975 when The Nation published my poem “Early Warning.” After that, it was off to the races. The Walt Whitman award came five years later.
Another important part of that transitional decade was my meeting the young woman who became my present wife, Diane Haston. Her father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, as it turned out, had all been builders and contractors. (Their specialty, following the Civil War, had been barn-building.)
In 1976, with her support and encouragement, I left Bobbs-Merrill to try my luck as a freelance copyeditor and interior book designer. I gigged around for a few years in greater Indianapolis, and was fortunate to find part-time work with the newly formed Hackett Publishing Company.
By this time I had settled down somewhat, become a weekend father, and bought an old Victorian house (a fixer-upper, in the heart of the inner city, on the Near Eastside)—all of which may have had some sort of stabilizing effect. I had begun to think about writing what I hoped might be considered serious poetry.
SI: Now we get down to it. Please describe the process leading up to publication of your first book, Work, for the Night is Coming (1981), by Macmillan, and to its receipt of the Walt Whitman Award.
JC: It was simple. Laura Gilpin, whom I didn’t know and never met, had won the Whitman Award for a first book in 1976, and she was from Indianapolis. So it was possible. I entered the contest three years in a row, and kept trying to improve the manuscript, adding new poems and taking out inferior ones. The third time, in 1980, it was selected, from among 1,100 other entries, by Galway Kinnell.
Enormous changes followed. It was like shifting to warp drive. There were over a hundred different reviews, all favorable, notably in the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books. (The latter by Helen Vendler, whom I was to meet later on, when she arranged to fly me out for lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club, to interview for a job at Harvard.)
SI: And right here, with this first volume, Mississinewa County is born. The book is full of what we have to assume are local references, in poems based on clear and direct observation, but often with a discursive quality. At this early stage as a poet, why were you so compelled to give your surroundings a “local habitation and a name”?
JC: There were precedents, definitely. Think Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha County. Ross Lockridge, Jr. and Raintree County. Goldsmith’s deserted village.
SI: But how important should rootedness, or a sense of place, be to a working poet?
JC: For a few developing writers the old home place is important, for some, not so much, for others not at all. It’s hard to predict. In my case, professors at Yale, on learning of my writing ambition, advised me to go out into the world and experience something first-hand. They really didn’t say anything about going home again.
“It doesn’t matter,” they said. “Go find something to do. Anything. Anything at all, as long as it’s a safe distance from this campus.” They pointed at the gothic windows of the Saybrook College dining hall. “Go out west and work on a ranch,” they suggested. “Become a war correspondent. Start a mushroom farm. Whatever you do, whatever happens to you, that will be your material,” they said.
SI: Poems like “For Jack Chatham,” “The Madhouse,” “The Undertaker,” from that first book—were they all based on real events?
JC: Maybe what you’re asking about is the authenticity of such poems. They seem effortless and natural, so did the events they describe “actually” occur? But that’s the very illusion one must learn how to create. Somewhere Auden says that too many poets concern themselves with originality, when they ought to be concerned with authenticity. But how is it achieved?
I’m certainly no expert. In my own case, largely because I had been trying to write fiction for so long, I had already invented and populated Mississinewa County, many years before, even when I was living in France. In my mind, it was already a “local habitation.” There was a lot in the pipeline.
So my archives already contained this backlog—the submerged part of the iceberg—of names, places, tales, stories, genealogies, biographies, even a map, all intended for the fictional evocation of that Mississinewa world. I had been making notes on that sort of thing ever since I left New Haven. It was, in a word, very Faulknerian.
I realized, thanks to my long apprenticeship, that when I finally had a bit of success with free verse—which everyone else was writing at the time, all those well-known, successful poets in those three anthologies—I could use some of that stuff in my poems. By this time, of course, I was forty years old. Half my life was already over. It was time to do something.
SI: You sure did. And then, twelve years later, your next book came out: After the Rain (1993), which won the Poets’ Prize. Just as Frost made an advance on American narrative poetry between A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), so, in your second book, you achieve full maturity in this form. You also showed what can be done with the extended meditative lyric.
Because I’ve included “Barn Siding” in my anthology for Franciscan University Press (The Colosseum Book of Contemporary Narrative Verse, 2025), naturally I must ask you about it. How did you get the idea to write about the incident in the poem? Can you describe the form you chose, and how you arrived at it?
JC: As with any writer, it’s not so much “where do you get your ideas.” If one can be said to “get” ideas at all, it’s mainly from having read a mountain of books, and from paying attention to what other people say. When it comes to technicalities, however, I will acknowledge that if you look closely at “Barn Siding,” which is a fairly long poem of 650 lines, you’ll notice that every line contains nine syllables. Why did I do that? Where did I get that idea? Why not ten? Or eight? Is it some sort of structuring device? Not likely.
lt’s nothing, really. It wasn’t an idea that I “got” somewhere, in a workshop or out of a manual. It was just something I decided to do, maybe to see how it would turn out. Technically, it’s simply syllabics. There’s natural speech rhythm in those lines, but no meter. I may have chosen nine because I was bored from counting pentameter lines to see if they all contained ten syllables. Usually, then, the answer to the question, where or how did you get this idea, or that feature, is—someone told me. Or, I just made it up, on the of the spur of the moment. It’s nothing special.
As for the “idea” or “concept” of “Barn Siding,” there again, it was simply the result of having listened to someone else. I had this favorite uncle—my mother’s older brother. A defrocked Nazarene Church minister who for a second career had established a shop filled with farm antiques in a pole-barn in the unincorporated crossroads hamlet of Plumtree, in the south of Huntington County, not far from the reservoirs.
This uncle had always been a storyteller. He told me once that he had climbed up to the loft of an abandoned barn and was sliding out the floorboards when the whole thing began to shake and started to collapse, and almost killed him. I took that incident and developed it.
(Had my uncle been stealing those loose boards, like the narrator in the poem? One must be cautious with such terms. My uncle did in fact have many fabulous things in that King Tut’s Tomb of a shop in Plumtree. My father, who in his retirement refinished furniture and sold a few antiques of his own, bought several remarkable things from his brother-in-law in Plumtree. I, too, managed to “relieve” that uncle of—and most certainly did not “steal” from him—a museum-quality Jacquard coverlet dated 1846. It just happened to be there, in his barn, and I just sort of slid it out, for a few hundred dollars.)
SI: Wonderful. Now, can you talk about how form corresponds with meaning in your narrative poems? Does form help you find what you want to say, or is it more that you go in with a clear vision or outline of what you want to accomplish with each poem—topically and structurally?
JC: With all due respect, none of that. I may sense notions, or clues, or whisperings, but I don’t begin with ideas. The truth is that I make poems the same way my father built houses and bridges, and the same way my mother made a few dollars by standing near the casket, or next to the bride and groom, and singing her heart out.
I just find a way to fit different words together, and when starting out, almost anything will do. I build poems out of bits and pieces, recollections, country tales, ghost stories, paving bricks, and old zinc canning-jar lids used for ashtrays.
On many occasions, as a youth, I watched my father and his workmen walk out into an empty field, and three months later, in that same field, there would be a small factory or a pumping station. I try to do something similar with each new poem. Not from the top down, but from the ground up.
Click here for Part Two of the interview.
Sunil Iyengar lives outside Washington, D.C. and writes poems and book reviews. He is the author of a poetry chapbook, A Call from the Shallows (Finishing Line Press), and editor of newly released The Colosseum Book of Contemporary Narrative Verse (Franciscan University Press).
 | A guest post by
|
I am so grateful for this interview! I have been a Carter fan since I first encountered him courtesy of Mark and Robert. I feel such commonalty with bim (and just because we were both Saybrook Yalies and both Poet’s Prize winners. He applauds Auden’s emphasis on authenticity. Which his own work perfectly exemplifies!
How wonderful to read this interview with Jared Carter! I was an engineering student at Purdue University in the early 1980s, but already interested in and writing poetry myself. I got to hear Jared Carter read on campus (probably in 1982, I think), and he was GREAT!
As a bonus, they let us audience members read a poem or two that we had written, and I read one about a revival meeting I had helped with (playing guitar) in the tiny town of Mansfield, Indiana. Near the beginning of my 2nd stanza, I was able to get an amused grin out of Mr. Carter, and that basically made my entire year.
How wonderful to hear from him again, and to hear so much about his life that I'd never known before. THANK YOU!!