Ron Mohring: An Interview

by

Daniel M. Jaffe

If there’s an award for poetry, sooner or later Ron Mohring will win it. His book of poetry, Survivable World, won the 2003 Washington Prize. His chapbook, Beneficence, was co-winner of the 2002 Pecan Grove Press competition; his chapbook, The David Museum, won the 2002 New Michigan Press/Diagram Award; and his chapbook, Amateur Grief, won the 1998 Frank O’Hara Award. Ron was the winner, in 2003, of the Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award, and the recipient of Bucknell University’s 2000 Philip Roth Residency and 2001-2003 Stadler Fellowship. He currently teaches creative writing at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, and works as fiction editor of their literary journal, West Branch.

“Right now, I quilt more than I write. But I’ve gardened, passionately, obsessively, all my life. Maybe after I’ve been quilting a few more years, the connection to poems will open. Of course there’s an obvious metaphor, but for me a poem isn’t necessarily ‘pieced’ together; it’s more like a sharp blow to the head (and the lingering ache).”

One of the most notable traits of Ron’s poetry is its accessibility to readers who might not read a great deal of poetry. “It’s a conscious choice,” explained Ron. “I enjoy reading a wide range of poetry, but the proof of a good poem, for me, is its hook. A poem must somehow invite me to come back and revisit, to dwell within its language again. So many poems can be off-puttingly vague or dense, or seem in other ways to devalue the reader. I don’t think a poem should be transparently clear about everything, or should always tell a story. The reader should be rewarded for lingering. But the poem should invite the reader to linger in the first place!

“I’m very interested in the borders of experience, the tension between the familiar and the strange, new or even unsettling. This has partly to do with the shape of argument, the rhetorical strategy of drawing a reader in—listen to this—in order to tell something difficult. Even in a more lyrical, less narrative mode, in a poem that depends more on tone and image than on story, I love playing with the tension between what a reader will recognize and what may seem initially unfamiliar. One of my poems, ‘The Centaur Eating Windshield Glass,’ arises from a wholly narrative scenario—a driver has hit a deer on the highway—but the scene is enacted via disconnected, surreal flashes of imagery. I wanted the poem to ‘track’ how the conscious mind ‘pieces together’ the aftermath of the impact, how what one sees, looks at first like something else, then resolves into the truth of what has occurred.”

THE CENTAUR EATING WINDSHIELD GLASS
Munches reflectively in blue coplight stammer,
tongue dripping. Like swallowing
your own teeth, a mouthful. His whitened eyes
separate: independent beams
grazing first the birthday cake
mashed in its flattened box, then, thrown
across the floorboards, you. You blink
The centaur is a cop
with the body of a deer:
giraffe legs that crumpled instantly
and heaved the rolling weight into the windshield's
collapsing hammock. Another cop asks
can you move? The first sweeps fractured glass
into his glove, appears to offer
a handful to the stag's blackened muzzle.

One of the hallmarks of Ron’s poetry is its ability to touch the emotions deeply. I asked whether he sets out, when writing, to elicit a particular emotional response in a reader. “If I think about the reader at all during the writing process—and I’m not sure that I do—then I frame that thinking in the most basic sense: the Forsterian dictum, ‘Only connect.’ The single most important response that I can hope to elicit from a reader is a sense of recognition. From that point, I don’t mind whether the ‘emotional’ response is one of empathy, laughter, horror or anywhere between.

“When writing, one is in service to the writing—not to the imagined reader. For me, there’s an urgency in the process. I often feel I am transcribing through a closing window. Writing prose involves a lot more thinking and planning; there’s time for me, Ron (as well as a houseful of other people in my head), to poke our noses into the process. Imagined readers, both dreaded and ideal. Doubts and questions. Second-guessings. Writing prose, for me, is labor. But even when I’m tinkering about a poem draft that hasn’t gone well, it doesn’t feel like I’m laboring to create something. It’s more like trying to catch a hummingbird with my bare hands in a pitch-dark room. I know the spark is there, in the room with me. I just have to connect to it.”

Many of Ron’s poems deal with the illness, death and loss of his late partner, David Wright. I wondered whether the process of writing them also helped Ron cope, first with the pain of losing, and later, of having lost David.  “Many of my new poems deal with other subjects and themes (thank the gods). I don’t want to distance myself from the elegiac, though it is a relief to move deeply into other projects. But the process of creating, through the poems in Amateur Grief, The David Museum and Survivable World some kind of document that witnessed the utter erasure of a significant population—my population, my tribe—was urgently, overwhelmingly important to me. I’m not finished with this subject (nor is it finished with me).

“Losing David—and knowing that I would lose him—propelled me, at times, into imagining that loss and writing it, almost as if the poems served as amulets. If I write it this way, make it exist on the page, then maybe it won’t come true in reality. One particularly difficult poem, ‘Telling the Family,’ spins out a litany of alternate deaths, and grew from my dread that I would have to be the one to contact David’s family.

“Then, of course, came the ‘afterlife,’ the after-his-death, that bizarre zone in which, however vividly I’d tried to pre-imagine things, the imagination utterly fails. You will never know enough about the person you love. You will never answer all the questions. At some point, the silence falls, and there’s no getting him back. In my poem ‘Inheritance,’ the speaker confesses ‘I’m ruled by this untangling.’”  

Has Ron noticed shifts in his style over time? “I do like to push myself to explore new forms, new ways of structuring the poem’s rhetoric. That’s been a fairly constant goal for the past ten years, and I think it characterizes my aesthetic: the presence of a lingering formal structure and/or rhyme in the free verse poems, the hint of narrative in poems that deliberately stop short of openly narrating or pointing out what’s ‘going on,’ what’s at the center . . . I want to maintain tension in the poem’s structure, imagery, and tone, and I do like to think about new ways to achieve this.”

Ron has been a writer since childhood. His earliest writing was “awful. I imitated Wordsworth. ‘Ode to a Dead Butterfly’ and ‘Lament on a False Spring’ are two of my earliest endeavors. Here’s the latter, which I wrote at about age eight:

O Lovely Buds, by what sad fate
Did you swell too soon, and find—too late!—
That it was only a False Spring?

(You’ve really got to read that break in line 2 with the properly anguished catch in the throat.)

“I have always been a voracious reader, since age six or seven. Fortunately, I was encouraged by some wonderful teachers in public school, especially by one high school English teacher, Margaret Ballard, who just kept asking for more poems. I finally wrote a poem for her last year; it’s in my new chapbook, Touch Me Not.

“As an undergrad I dabbled in creative writing, but I was an awful poet and a worse fiction writer—shocking my poor professors with graphic man-sex scenes that had nothing to do with character development—and I dropped out of college when I came out. When I returned to school in my mid-twenties, I was extraordinarily lucky to enroll in a poetry workshop with Garrett Hongo; this was, I think, in 1986. He challenged me every week: ‘This sounds good, but I don’t believe it,’ he’d say. By the end of that fall semester, I had completely focused on my serious apprenticeship to poetry.”

In addition to teaching at Bucknell and working as an editor of West Branch, Ron is involved with the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. He “was a Younger Poet in 1994, so it’s a program I’ve felt very close to for over ten years. I’ve served on the staff for four years now, and will direct next year’s program. We’re nearing the 25th year of the Seminar, and my next huge project—which I’m just starting to talk about—will be an anniversary anthology, something I very much want to shepherd into print.”

Ron is currently working on two poetry collections simultaneously, although he “didn’t intend it to happen this way. When I was nearly finished with my next manuscript (The Boy Who Reads in the Trees), I found myself writing several new poems that did not fit. Instead, they seemed to dialogue with much of the work in my third chapbook, Beneficence. Though it’s a theme I revisit frequently, I hadn’t consciously realized that these poems ‘wanted’ to expand into a larger collection. But that’s exactly what’s happened, and now it’s a sort of horse race to discover which book I’ll finish next. The working title of this book is Coordinate Joy, and I’m grateful to poet Nancy Eimers for providing that language.  

“I’m also writing some short prose pieces—fiction and personal essays—which I hope to work up the nerve to send out soon.”

Readers wishing to follow what Ron’s up to can peruse his blog
 

Dan is the author of The Limits of Pleasure, a rather controversial novel nominated by some for awards and by others for public burning (well, almost).  A former corporate lawyer, he shed his suits to become a rebel with a cause—creative freedom in life and art. Dan frequently publishes short stories and personal essays in literary journals and newspapers such as The Forward, Green Mountains Review and The Florida Review. He compiled and edited With Signs and Wonders: An International Anthology of Jewish Fabulist Fiction, and translated Here Comes the Messiah!, a Russian-Israeli novel by Dina Rubina. He also teaches fiction writing for UCLA Extension. Dan can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and his web site is http://danieljaffe.tripod.com