By Annie Newcomer:
The Flapper Press Poetry Café features the work of poets from around the globe. It is an honor to share their work and learn more about their lives, influences, and love of poetry.
This week, we feature the work of Michael Harty.
For many years Michael Harty’s attention, and his writing, were focused on his career as a psychologist and psychoanalyst. Then, as he approached retirement age, he got more serious about his life-long interest in poetry writing. Since then he has published poems in a number of periodicals, including New Letters, Kansas City Voices, I-70 Review, Journal of the American Medical Association, and others, as well as in three chapbooks, Real Country, Twenty Stories, and The Statue Game. He lives and works near Kansas City.
We reached out to Michael to talk about his work, passions, and poetry!
Please meet Michael Harty!
Annie Newcomer: Welcome to the Flapper Press Poetry Café, Michael. We both belong to the Kansas City Writers Place and have taken workshops together for the past 10 years, so I am familiar with your work and I am a staunch fan of your craft. And finally I get to interview you!
I remember attending a library event where you were one of the guest poets. You passed out interviews in which you interviewed yourself. Michael, how does one go about interviewing oneself so that the piece is substantial and offers value as well as keeps a respectable tone?
Michael Harty: Maybe by putting oneself in the other’s shoes: what would I want to know about this person (myself), and what would others want to know? Most likely those questions would have something to do with my work and how it comes about, since that’s probably the reason for the interview. Of course, if there’s something I really want people to know, I’ll have the “interviewer” invite that topic.
AN: I try not to repeat questions, as I endeavor to customize each interview to the specific poet. However, recently I have been asking this same question to our poets who enter our "café." What is your poetic superpower? How does this assist you in your writing?
MH: I think the “power” I rely on most is vivid memory—the ability to go back and visualize a scene or situation in detail. I think arresting sensory detail is something I strive for in my poems, and I’m pretty visually oriented, so that’s what I often find myself searching for.
AN: You have shared that mystery novels influence your poetry writing. Might you elaborate?
MH: A good mystery holds the reader’s interest, both through a strong plot and through the element of surprise. I think there’s always at least an implied plot involved in my poems, and I’d also like to think they aren’t totally predictable—so maybe those similarities help add interest. I also like the fact that strong characters in mysteries usually encounter, and even embody, the darker strains of human experience and behavior, something I want my poems to at least be aware of.
AN: In an interview I read that you fondly mentioned the poets W. S. Merwin, William Stafford, and Naomi Shihab Nye. You added that as tastes change, you add more poets. In the 8 years since that interview, name some poets who you have added to your list and explain what draws you to their work.
MH: I’ve developed more appreciation for Walt Whitman—his expansive vision, the generosity and optimism of his view of America. I am very fond of Maurice Manning, a current poet of Appalachia, a lyrical, authentic voice for a vanishing culture and way of life. I also admire the late Tony Hoagland, who managed to be both funny and serious about the conundrums of modern life. And I’ve greatly appreciated the work of the late Jane Kenyon, and her friend Marie Howe, for the precision of their imagery and for their emotional authenticity.
AN: Michael, your mention of Jane Kenyon reminds me of a poem you wrote that is tender and profound like Jane Kenyon's poem "In the Nursing Home." I first read it in Kansas City Voices. This beautiful publication (soon to be renamed Kansas City Review) is open to all writers, poets, and artists for submissions. I'd like you to share your poem "Taking Him to the Shower" with our readers.
MH: Certainly, Annie. The scene in the poem is the last time I saw my father. Afterward, I tried in the poem to capture something of the person he was, right up until the end.
Taking Him to the Shower
After the second attack, the heart
already in tatters, still he stands
in the steamy cubicle, wields the washcloth,
suds sliding down his diminished legs.
I steady the IV pole, standing by
in case he loses his balance, hating
to see him so small.
Not much, really,
to wash away, no dirt from the garden
or charcoal dust from the grill,
no fish slime or quail blood, not even
the hair tonic he no longer needs
or the unfiltered Camels he’s had to give up.
Only the stale sweat of hospital days
and nights, sterile stink of antiseptic,
dried flecks of adhesive. Soon he’s ready
for the thick towel we’ve brought from home,
a fresh gown and drawstring pajamas.
I wheel him exhausted down the glossy hall
to where a bed is waiting. But before
he closes his eyes he has to ask
if everybody got their dinner,
and whether his doctors have been paid,
and are all his children safely home.
AN: I love and am poetically nourished by a comment you made on what makes a good poem: "A really good poem, to me, is one that rewards repeated readings—that reveals more layers of meaning the more one considers it. And it’s also one that communicates on less conscious, more emotional levels through sounds, rhythms, images, and the associations they evoke." Please share one of your own poems that fulfills this requirement and that you enjoy re-reading. I am asking this question because recently I have been asking myself which of my poems, if any, have stood the test of time. Also, I think that it is important how a poet sees their own work.
MH: I would choose one from a number of years ago, a “mother poem”:
A Quieting
Every day she skirmished with the wind –
always the wind, constant as her presence,
molding every tree to point
a steady northeast, scouring paint
from the south wall, decorating
barbed wire with tumbleweeds,
mesquite with candy wrappers and rags.
Familiar as a bedtime book –
the chinks never sealed,
dust-mopping twice a day but still
the powdery linoleum, still
the grit in the sandwiches.
Every day, until the day
I walked through a house full of silence,
stepped out a screen door, leaned
into a wind that wasn’t there,
staggered, almost fell.
AN: Michael, I know that you are a retired psychologist. In what ways does your profession influence your work? How does one remain ethical even in the retelling of another's story?
What advice would you give to poets who "tell other's stories"?
MH: I think my profession influences my poems more in an attitude than in content. By that I mean an attitude of respect for people’s struggles, an appreciation for the complexity of our lives, a sympathy for the difficult compromises we all have to make, a recognition of the unexpected depths we encounter in others. Certainly some elements of the personal stories I’ve heard have found their way into poems, but (I hope) always in a way that doesn’t give away anyone’s secrets without their knowledge. The specifics of an individual’s “story,” if they are going to be used in a poem (or other work), should, in my opinion, be disguised or altered so that the source isn’t identifiable. There’s plenty of room for the play of imagination. Speaking of which, I think we can get overly concerned about so-called “cultural appropriation”; I want poets and writers to be free to try to imagine themselves into the experiences of people who are ethnically or culturally different from themselves. If they do it badly or abusively, critics can make it known.
AN: How did your life change when you joined writing workshops and started publishing your poetry?
MH: I got over most of my shyness about revealing private thoughts and perceptions and developed a lot more confidence that other people might appreciate something I had created. Along with that, I became much better at accepting criticism, even welcoming it as a gift rather than an attack. And having some work accepted for publication was a morale boost and an encouragement to go further. Plus, I started to make some very interesting new friends.
AN: Why is publishing your work important to you?
MH: Although I guess I do write largely to please myself, it’s important and affirming to get some evidence that I’m connecting with others through my poems. Some of that comes from readings and from sharing with friends and family, but it’s a special reward to be recognized and selected by editors who see such a large volume of work. And then, of course, there’s the flood of cash that comes in when a poem gets published.
AN: If you could choose any poet from the past or present to spend an hour chatting about poetry, who might that be? And why this choice?
MH: I think it would be Ted Kooser. His poems and his advice in his The Poetry of Home Repair Manual are insightful in a down-to-earth, humorous, very relatable way. That’s how I would expect him to be in conversation.
AN : Thank you, Michael. Such an honor to interview you and all best with your poetic endeavors. Now it is time to share poetry you have chosen to introduce your work to our readers.
MH: Thank you, Annie and Elizabeth and to your Flapper Press readers.
Putin’s Mariupol
A blue and yellow flag amid the rubble
where once a city stood; where tanks and bombs
laid waste the avenues; where pick and shovel
seek out survivors, carve out makeshift tombs.
Mission accomplished! So the invader claims;
he spreads a map with redrawn borders, boasts
of territory won, all in the name
of erstwhile sovereignty, unjustly lost.
Let sycophants and lackeys sing his praise;
let power-worshippers surround his throne;
let flattery and posing fill his days –
more blue and yellow flags are being sewn!
They fill his nightmares, feed his deepest dread.
They are the scimitar above his head.
About the poem:
I’ve written quite a few sonnets and had some success in sonnet competitions. I like the challenge of working within a more-or-less-set form and yet trying to find a way to say something original. Also, the iambic pentameter line feels very natural to me; sometimes I can’t get away from it even if I try. Anyhow, this is a sonnet that won an award in a competition a couple of years ago. It was written soon after Putin’s ruthless invasion of Ukraine began, and I was finding it hard to think, or write, about anything else. It especially galled me that this war was being directed by a tyrant who not long before had been wooed and lionized by our own president. I tried to let the poem express my outrage.
(This was published online and in a chapbook of previous winners in the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest for 2022.)
Night Watering
There was a time before these mighty circles,
these wheeled pipes now scribing the land
with quarter-mile radii, a time when it was done
with square fields and straight ditches and shovels.
When a boy of sixteen was a man for the dry month
before the classroom would humble him once more.
When he would leave the café at two in the morning,
sugared coffee and dirty jokes on his breath,
wave friends to their own muddy trucks, and return,
headlights excavating the dark between fields,
until again the well squatted before him
on its concrete pad, unmuffled engine blasting
without a lull, butane tank behind it,
glowing silver as a grounded moon.
And the flash lit horizontal stream spewed out
from a million years underground, and the siphons
arced into the mother channel where they suckled
for the long furrows. And he’d step lively among them
in his gum boots, tending a border, building a dike,
the coveralled prime minister of forty acres.
He would stand in the pickup bed and see
crawling lights on the horizon ten miles away
that might be going anywhere, anywhere at all.
And then at last, the farthest trickle reaching the end
of the field, the night’s work finished,
he would take up the shovel,
slog his way to the toggle switch,
silence the hammering roar that had filled the world.
About the poem:
"Night Watering" is one of many attempts I’ve made to capture the experience of a farm kid of a certain time and place. In this case, it’s the responsibility, and the freedom, of tending the irrigation well all night. All alone, surrounded by fields, your body doing hard work but your mind free to follow those distant headlights wherever they might be headed.
(Published in my chapbook The Statue Game, 2014)
Knotty Pine
There’s no one to tell me stay away.
The back door sags open; slant ceiling,
wallpaper in shreds, lawn chair broken
in the bathtub. Quick flitting shadow
of a bat, like a memory that might not
be real. I pocket a four of spades
from a trash pile in the living room,
imagine a final drunken poker game
before the house was surrendered to ruin.
Long ago, another baby on the way, this house
already too small, my father decreed
there would be a new room:
just for us, my brothers and me,
paneled all in knotty pine,
tongue and groove, walls and ceiling, gnarled
grain full of wavy pictures, the color
of the whiskey he would taste on special occasions --
color of mountain cabins, beaver ponds in autumn,
fine boots primed with saddle soap,
staining the light all shades of gold.
That was a room with windows for spying
the yellow forehead of the school bus
two miles away at dawn. For awe
at the looming norther, dark as fear, boiling
with Oklahoma dirt, raging into the stratosphere.
A room for marbles on the linoleum, dreams of fishing trips
and home runs; radio stories on Saturday, lessons
from older cousins who knew dirty words.
The passage of years, other houses, other lives;
all of us grew up, some of us died.
Yet my feet have not forgotten.
I pick my way over ripped carpet
and fallen tiles to find that windowed bedroom
invaded by wind and rain and nesting swallows,
varnish blistered, sills rotted – but the walls
standing solid, the knotted wood alive.
It glows in the fading light, lines with gold
the cracked shell that is this house;
remembers all, contains all, patiently endures
all the way to the bulldozer at the end.
About the poem:
The weekend after my mother’s funeral, my son and I drove out into the country and found the house my family moved to when I was eight. I hadn’t seen it for probably forty years, and it was a wreck—but even then, full of memories. Probably every poet writes about visiting a childhood home, and I can understand why.
(Published in Naugatuck River Review, 2015.)
Annie Klier Newcomer founded a not-for-profit, Kansas City Spirit, that served children in metropolitan Kansas for a decade. Annie volunteers in chess and poetry after-school programs in Kansas City, Missouri. She and her husband, David, and the staff of the Overland Park Arboretum & Botanical Gardens are working to develop The Emily Dickinson Garden in hopes of bringing art and poetry educational programs to their community. Annie helms the Flapper Press Poetry Café—dedicated to celebrating poets from around the world and to encouraging everyone to both read and write poetry!
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