John Rybicki's poems and stories have appeared in North American Review, Field, Bomb, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Quarterly, as well as in numerous anthologies. He currently teaches creative writing to inner-city children in Detroit, and serves as a guest lecturer at schools throughout the country. His first book of poems, Traveling at High Speeds (New Issues Poetry Press) appeared in 1996, and his latest collection, Yellow-Haired Girl with Spider (March Street Press), was published in 2002.

Scott M. Silsbe was born in Detroit. He is the Poetry Editor of nidus and publishedArsenal Books in Pittsburgh.

The following conversation was conducted by phone and tape-recorded on the Rybicki-end.

Rybicki: April 7, 2004. Rybicki on his backside with his fractured leg up. Interviewed on the phone by Scotty-Boy Silsbe, the Punk in Pittsburgh. That's a good start (laughs). The Punk in Pittsburgh, I was very alliterative there, man.

Silsbe: Alright, first question. I'm calling you in Detroit. I know you're originally from there. I was wondering if you could talk about how Detroit as a city has influenced your work as a poet.

Very astute question, there, Silsbe (laughs). I better not be a smart ass because I know you. 'Cause that was a great question. You know, if there was a tow-rope wrapped around my waist and behind it the tow rope was tethered to a giant glacier, that glacier would be the city of Detroit . . . I guess maybe that's a bad beginning in some ways because it isn't like, I'm not like an oxen that drags that landscape across the earth -- it isn't a burden to me. It's in many ways a floating landscape . . . but it's my sacred homeland. When I roamed those streets as a boy, I got such a sweet sense of the bricks being like sponges and sponging up the history of my ancestors -- my mother and father, and grandfather and grandmother all walked those streets. And it's a fractured, busted-in-the-mouth prizefighter, ravaged and so beyond decay that in certain parts of the city, wildlife are moving back in, but it's my sacred landscape.
     And, I guess I'd have to go back to the genesis of my whole writing career -- the night Billy Goltz and I broke the world's record for the number of garages you can climb in an hour -- 63 -- I became a writer. We called ourselves GBHJ -- Garage Brothers Hell Jumpers -- and when we finished our night of paratrooper-plunging from roof-to-garage-roof and slinked out of the dark, all the other shadowy boys started tuggin' toward us 'cause we were these ethereal animals with steam coming off of our skin. Billy and I just tugged out of the shadows onto the street and all these kids were just magnetically tugged toward us. And there was this moment where this kind of epiphany happened, where it felt like the houses were unhouseled from their moorings and started kind of galloping in a circle around me or swirling in a circle around me -- this sense of delicious vertigo. And I was on the streets, and everyone had slapped their hands into our hands and congratulated us, and then they were adrift like strange night creatures far enough away from me so they couldn't hear what I whispered. And I felt at that moment God had rammed my spine into the earth to act as axis or pivot-point, and that the houses and all those boys were just swirling magnetically around me. And the words passed from my lips of their own volition -- "I gotta write this down.."
     So that was the moment, born out of wonder, when the beast was born. And so, the sense of writing to celebrate, and that sense of urgency, like E.B. White's stellar, sweet, talisman, "I felt charged with the safe keeping of all articles of worldly and unworldly enchantment, as if I'd be held personally accountable if a single one of them were to be lost." That was the night God reached down and put his fingerprint to my forehead and left his brand there, and whispered, "This is what you're called to do." So it began out of euphoria, wonder, magic -- feeling like God had planted a divine eye in my forehead or in my being. Later on, when the hormones kicked in, and love and the whole turbulence and torque of love began to assail my being, I began to write out of duress and wound and that turbulence and phantom-energy, unburdening onto the page to keep the body from burning itself alive, and writing to survive, writing while I was driving and getting pulled over by the cops twice for writing while I was driving.
     But it all began in Detroit, and immediately when I think of Detroit, it sparks my temper toward "Father." My being leans into the word "Father" and how remote and stoic and rough, and it seems as if Paul Bunyon's ax, if he swatted it at my dad's skin, it would have dented the ax and not the father, he was so tough. And I highly recommend to anyone, one of my favorite all-time poems is the Robert Bly poem, "Finding the Father" -- "lonely in his whole body / waiting for you." That sense of inaccessibility, and how do I find my way into the interior of this brick-man? . . . So what I did is I'd drive through Detroit as if I was burrowing in under his skin and that landscape, with all its devastation and the Uniroyal Plant getting torn down, and the gutted-out houses and fallow lots and packs of wild dogs, the physical destruction, houses and buildings that seemed like giants were having a fist-fight in the street and punching holes into those brick walls. That seemed like a mirror, a physical mirror that was commensurate more with the giant of my spirit or the giant of my interior, or the giant that I knew to be Father. Father, his little body, with a knife-wound slash like a strap from his shoulder to his opposite hip -- he sat on the sofa, but to me, he was a giant, to me he was the guy that could snatch ahold of the sun in the sky and sprinkle some of the sun's fire onto the rooftops of the city. As a boy, he was the giant. And I still, as you know, am fascinated with the vastness of the human spirit, and how it is pressed into this tiny little cartridge of flesh -- Emerson's, and I'm misquoting it, "I went to Rome and to Greece and sought to be intoxicated by sights and sounds, but I was not intoxicated-my Giant followed me wherever I went" (from "Traveling"). And from the moment I read that, I was like, "Fuckin' right on, man!" "My Giant" -- what a talisman for the human spirit. So, why do we gather at hoards at the edge of the ocean or the lake to gaze across that vast expanse? Because we see it as our larger body laid before us -- some physical, palpable, expansive representation of the interior beauty of our spirit that's mystifying and hard to lay hold of.
     So I drive through, I burrow under the skin of that city like I am driving through my father's body. And also, the sense of the bricks being like sponges -- you go to an old neighborhood, and yeah, different migrations of people have lived there and moved on and there's the latest herd floating through that landscape, but you get the sense that the bricks have sponged up that history. And how many wooden houses, old houses, old brick houses have the sense of character based on that quintessential mystery of, my God, the lives that have passed through these homes. And so the city, for me, was that gigantic fur-coat of bricks, and the darkness -- the shadowy, busted-up darkness -- seemed such a right-on representation of my father's nature. Philip Levine, to this day, still dunks his pen into that landscape, and finds that it loosens the river, and the rivers of language from his sleeve. So, I've only begun to swaddle my arms around this strange, busted-up, beautiful landscape. (pauses)
     Did I do okay? That was a long-ass, mighty Mississippi, meandering answer for that. I harangued my ass off on that bad boy . . . Okay, go ahead . . . question two.

You've taught poetry in inner-city grade-schools in Detroit. Talk to me about teaching the kids there. Maybe you could recite some of their poems.

When I was growing up in Detroit, at war with my father, in high school, dealing dope, dealing drugs, thrown out of the house, the cross to me at that point was a black seed and tossed behind the sofa, I was black about religion, I was in tumult. And the page was waiting, I was jack-hammering away at the page -- all the runs, all the hitting the heavy-bag, martial arts, wasn't enough to get out of the body that which was trying to drag it down.
     So, I love teaching kids everywhere, but the inner city kids, I know a lot of them are swimming for their lives -- they walk to school on broken glass. One out of four of my fourth graders have been proximate to someone who's been shot. And so I get to be especially brassy, and I want to ravage and dismantle their sense of language, I want them to discover that they're spiritual titans, that they're spiritually gigantic, and [I want them] to have a blast on the page -- to sing and celebrate. And I teach every one of those inner city kids from fifth grade on up, I teach every class like it's a college Creative Writing class, and if I have to pause to say what the word "incendiary" means, I'll write it on the board.
     And I don't know if I should say anything about my whole notion of taking objects from the ordinary world that are benign to the rest of us, hurling the light of our imaginations at those objects so as to alter or torque the listener's sense of the ordinary world. For example, Helena Markus, four years old -- snowflake, which is a pretty sweet, resplendent object already, but, Helena Markus writes, "Inside each snowflake, there is a waterfall / where God is taking a bath." Boom! Snowflake. One of my second graders at St. Clare Montefalco had:

     Nothing Happens in My Neighborhood

     Except the sun turns into
     snowflakes
     and it starts snowing
     and the snowflakes
     start building
     the World Trade Center again.
     The snow goes into Detroit
     and starts building houses again
          (Ella Stanley).

So, taking the ordinary world and torquing it. Window -- window's pretty cool if the sunlight's on it. But we flick our eyes, flicker our eyes past windows every day and aren't inspired to pick up the pen and write. Along comes [fourth grader] Cameron Penny the week before the attacks on New York and Washington, and he just tugs off the board, I put these words on the board, he tugs off the board, "window":

     If You are Lucky in this Life

     A window will appear between two armies on a battlefield. Instead of
     seeing their enemies in the window, they see themselves as children.
     They stop fighting and go home and sleep. When they wake up, the
     land is well again.

You and I were [at the Dodge Poetry Festival] when Marie Howe read that poem to 5,000 people and it was as if the audience became one human body, one human family, and that poem changed everyone's breathing pattern. The power of the poem to disrupt breathing patterns to rattle us out of our walking sleep, or as Robert Bly said at the Dodge, "That shock . . . I live for that shock the poem gives me." He sounds like a junkie on the street: "Dude I live for that high." Well, I do -- it's ethereal, it's transcendent. We sup on so much garbage, so much pain and calamity wearing these skins, along comes the inner city child, Peter Markus, Marie Howe, to give us that gift of language, where the poem sets fire to that veil of sleep that forms inside of us, and gets us breathing a higher octane oxygen. After I hear the Cameron Penny poem, I feel like I'm breathing the oxygen that was ours in the Garden . . .

     I want a heart that when it pumps,
     all the bullets fly out of all the guns
     and turn to dust.

Alvin Carter, eighth grade. He heals the world's wounds with that language. In the literal world, he can't do anything, he can't do very much to stymie the violence of the gun and the way it's ravaging our cities and especially African-American lives -- not exclusively, obviously. But on the page, he becomes a potentate, he breaks the laws of nature and he becomes a spiritual giant. And when those kids discover . . . 'cause so many things in their lives say, "You have no power" -- financially, their neighborhoods, the chaos in the schools, there's so much that could just tug them under . . . and all of a sudden a sentence is born out of them and a light goes off, as if someone grabbed their spine like one of those strings that hangs from a lamp, and gave a tug. And all of a sudden a light goes on, and they discover -- they become flamingos, birds -- they discover that they've got this power in them and that their wrath, and their anger, and their joy, they can toss it into the language in such a way as to ravage the listener, or move the listener. Eugene Smith, an African-American second grader:

     I praise my mom for blowing the moon
     off a bridge. My mom is a fish,
     swimming in yellow tea.

And that boy came up to me after he wrote that, and he read it to me, and I had to lean in real close because he was a whispery boy. And he gazed off over my shoulder at the wall as if there was an angel hovering there, and he didn't even say it to me, he said it to the air, "I don't know where that came from" . . . Isn't that beautiful? And us flat-footed adults have to work our asses off to reclaim that freshness of vision, you know? How many sentences do you and I have to scrawl to where we become skinless and weightless and get our intellect out of the way so that we're just channeling our higher nature or channeling maybe God's higher nature. And when you pull it off on the page, and these young ones do it. I mean, I went into my K College class last fall and said, "My fifth graders are kicking your ass!" I issued the dare to them.
     Okay, another second grader. I placed them up in a tree, and "close your eyes," and they were responding with nice sensory things based on sound instead of the visual. And then all of a sudden, I said, "Alright, it's a magical zoo kingdom in a tree." Every single hand shot up into the heavens -- because I said the word "magic." And one kid would say, "The daddy lions are driving their motorcycles along the branches. The mommy lions are flipping hamburgers on leaves." This one boy said, "The daddy lions are tense." Huge! And then, the quintessential, ultimate was, this one little boy, he said, "In this magical zoo kingdom in a tree, the elephants are 8,000 feet wide, and they're swinging from a rope 8,000 feet long for the rest of our lives." And, Billy-Boy Shakespeare is going to take that boy in his arms when that boy gets to Heaven because of that utterance. Go from room to hospital room and read that to the sick and dying and you'll heal them. Get rid of the IV sack, distill language down to IV fluid and pipe it in. The world needs that kind of medicine. I want to get a cargo plane, toss all the military hardware out of it, load it with the poems my young ones produce and air-drop it in every language in cities all over the world. You know, like the propaganda missions in World War II, only liter and spray the earth with poetry, and I would begin with the poems my young ones produce, even before my own . . . I'd slip a few of my own in there too, though.

Speaking of, let's talk a bit about your work. Your first book was Traveling at High Speeds (New Issues, 1996). You've now finished your second book, which I believe is called Fire Psalm. What are some of the changes you've noticed in your work from the first to the second book?

Well, thematically, in my first book I was courtin' my gal, and in the second book I was married to her -- and for the six or seven years I was creating that book, the cancer bells were jingling most of the time. So, we have cancer, we have her hair falling out, my giving her shots where she's shaking and trembling in my arms, a month in the bone marrow unit, three or four relapses now -- and that sense of jeopardy, where someone becomes molecularly a part of you and they're on the edge of a canyon and the wind is trying to blow them off this earth out of your reach. It produces both a mania and a fear and, frankly, an exhilaration, where you learn to savor every, blessed moment. She's been in remission for two years, and we haven't been as happy. Isn't that insane? We have not been as happy with her in remission. Financial woes, wanting the writing career to blossom and bust and bloom, the want for a child ravaging us. So that's one core thing.
     I feel like Yeats got better and better over time, and I'd like to think that I still am raw and wild and courageous, and all that, like I was in my first book. But you know, a lot of river, a lot of living has gone through my lungs and you get this strange sense of accruing some wisdom over time. Like, Rybicki isn't a bottle of wine that's been on the shelf since 1932, but I get this sense when I read a poem by a poet like Tony Hoagland, I get this sense that he had this epiphany, he saw into the heart of things, and he took this monk's vow of silence for, let's say a year, letting this epiphany accrue in him and gestate. The best poem is a novel distilled down to those choice syllables; poetry is a language of profound compression. And I read some of Hoagland's poems, and I get this sense of, my God, he just broke silence after ten years, fifteen years, and that beauty could only be rendered so. And when he pulls it off on the page -- and he's just writing about his mother -- he sings for the broke-down rest of us who all feel profoundly but can't express it. And I tell all my writing students that -- "You're holy-men and women in the making. Sing for the broke-down rest of us who feel profoundly but can't express it."
     The best writing is summoned out of those two extremes of wonder and wound. Faulkner in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech saying, "All this was summoned out of the human heart in conflict with itself, for that alone makes for great writing." Lish's stupendous insight, "Your grief is your fortune as a writer." I mean, my God, an abundance of grief? And I really think I'll rush into Vincent Van Gogh's arms before Shakespeare's, even though I'll have to get into a fistfight with about 25 million angels lined up to waltz with him, but out of his abundance of duress and vision, he left the world with a thing everlasting.
     So I wonder if my second book has enough magic and revelry and light in it -- I don't know. But I know that in the beginning, Psalm 38, verse 8:

     I am feeble and sore-broken.
     I have roared by reason
     of the disquietness of my heart.

That issues the dare for the book. And it's so resonant: "I have roared," the word itself roars. "I have roared by reason" -- and I love the repetition of the r-sounds. "I have roared by reason / of the disquietness of my heart." I mean, those lines right there, you could put those in a book, a four-hundred page book, and maybe put that sentence on page 200, and who could ask for more in a book? And so, I put that up front to issue the dare, and also because so many of my themes, in so much of my work I wrestle and wrangle with God. And I celebrate the skin, and "what I assume you too shall assume," -- I'm drunkenly in love with life, but there's a cost, and there's a lot of suffering that's commensurate with wearing this skin. So the book begins with that turbulence and torque.

You're also working on a book about teaching creative writing to children, I believe?

When I'm teaching, there's a gravitational pull towards the students that just begins to summon this wild-fire energy, and purity, and madness, and divinity in me. And when the transaction from me and the page is a silent one, I digress, I want to create these lavish bouquets, I want to pack into my writing so much lyrical mischief. When I teach, I still am acoustic, and speak with a galloping pony on my tongue, but it's way more aligned with narrative, and the river-flow of language, and surprise -- and I'm a great improvisational writer when I'm speaking. And so, I always got this sense of, God, I wish I could take a net to the air, and grab up all of the sounds that just fell out of my mouth. Well, finally, one day I started running the tape-recorder. I got to the point where, I purposely didn't align myself with a college. I thought, "I'm a sprinter, I'm a meteoric teacher, I don't have the long-distance runner stride. It would burn me alive to teach three classes at a college -- as holy of an enterprise as it is." So I was this kind-of Writers in the Schools guy. But I hit the brick wall, burned out on doing these year-long residences with Inside Out -- as much as those kids changed my life, and as much as I'd like to, if I had arms that reached into the sky, I'd like to dangle them above this earth with their poems in their hands like beautiful lanterns and have them sing their songs over the sore world. I still was spent as a teacher, and the one way I found to make another year-long residency new was to finally try to write a book about teaching creative writing to kids. Make it part memoir, I don't know what kind of animal it will be. But I ran tape when I was in my rickety-rack truck driving to Detroit, I ran tape staggering through the halls, in the classroom -- I was James Bond with my tape-recorder, lapping up everything that was going on around me. And I hope in the end it's gonna be a beautiful book. Ultimately, I want to bring this good news to the world. And it's the good news that the children have greatness in them. I write on the board for adult writers, "Unlearn." And children, you don't have to say "unlearn" with children because they haven't learned that moon isn't a big piece of popcorn in the sky or a loaf of stale bread. They are still so proximate to divine seeing.
     And this sore world where soldiers are getting killed and where kids are killing kids, and there's just a litany of things that could derail your sanity. Amidst all this, poets realize that poetry has the power to heal. It's medicinal as hell. It's born of the heavens. The finest poems, they're just words, but somehow, dunked in the fires of the poet's heart, they become super-charged and other-worldly, and imbued with a kind of sprinkly magic powder or dust or something that's just beyond language. And yet, the poet is using words like "and," and "bat," and "moon," and "tired" -- words that have been hammered and beaten by journalists throughout the ages -- but doing something new with them. But children especially, children especially. So I want to bring that goodness to the world.

Okay, switching gears a little. I've heard you make some interesting connections when talking about poets. I've heard you connect poets to comedians and autistic children.

You know, comedians will go into the bathroom . . . we'll brush our teeth and it's like, "Get me out, I'm gonna get this over fast." And a comedian will take the most mundane act or action in our existence and somehow conjure a kind of hallucinatory experience out of it that torques and dismantles and ravages, and prisms our eyes onto the absurdity of it or the humor in the kind of mundane whisk-broom living we're doing. So I think comedians really are creative writers.
     Autism's too huge for me. I should stick a cork in my mouth and reach across the earth, grab Gordon Lish from New York, tug him back to this microphone and have him preach about that. I know that I've learned so much about the sense of a singular fascination for an object. Eyes riveted upon that which the rest of us would dismiss. Gordon Lish, for example, at a marathon 12-hour session teaching in Chicago, he didn't get up to pee, he was about to retire, and he, by God, was gonna rip us alive, even if our heart was left like an idiotic frog lunging and lunging in our chest. He was going to prove who lifted the horn to their lips and blew with the mightiest breath on this earth. And I, half-way through, was in the bathroom doing push-ups and just coming out of my mind. But he did an hour/hour-and-a-half riff on autism, and how you can have an autistic kid in a theater where there's ballerinas and just a deluge of things that could divert their attention or absorb their attention -- and this autistic kid is just transfixed by the undulations of the curtain. And maybe the undulations of the curtains are folds of fat on a mother's belly when she sits down, or maybe a house breathes for an autistic kid, maybe bees sing to an autistic kid through the keyhole. All I do know is that us flat-footed fuckin' adults have to reclaim some of that sense of undoing, some of that sense of the obliteration of the rational world, and obliteration of what we've learned. You know, moon is not moon, it's a loaf of stale bread in the sky, and every night my mother coughs up fireflies in the dark, because saying my mom is a kind woman or a mysterious woman doesn't satisfy the poet or the listener.

Well that reminds me Jack Gilbert's "Poetry Is a Kind of Lying," a poem I've heard you recite. Do you think Gilbert's notion of poetry connects with what you've been saying about autism?

[The end of] Gilbert's "Poetry Is a Kind of Lying" [reads],

     Degas said he didn't
     paint what he saw. He
     painted what would enable
     them to see the thing he had.

And, come on. If you could hover over Noah's ark and whisper those words, magnolias would start to bloom, the wood on that ship would start to sprout dandelions or magnolias, flowers or bees, it would just flood across this earth. That's the gift of a single line of poetry -- it's got such amplitudes pressed into its folds and sinews that it should be able to create a Biblical flood that spreads across this whole fucking earth.
     And that doesn't answer the question in regards to autism. But yeah, I encourage my inner city kids to lie, my adults to lie. Of course the Magic Realists are great at that -- Stuart Dybek is a master, Rick Bass, on and on. And young writers aren't retrospective yet. You try and get them to write from experience, you can do it, but when I first stoke their engines, and I give them permission to lie on the page, to say their tennis shoes can high-wire walk across the electric lines of the city at night, their eyes just begin to ignite.
     So "poetry is a kind of lying." Sometimes the common tongue doesn't cut it. There are plenty of stories that tell the straight truth, tell the straight dope. And some moments in our lives are so extraordinary all we gotta do is tell the truth, and it will blow the listener away. My "Our Romance" story, bare-knuckle boxing with my dad -- it's all true. But, what is that Transtromer poem ("The Scattered Congregation"), where the visitors come and they say, "You live well. The slum must be inside you"? And later in that poem, aren't the bells ringing underground? A lot of rational people could talk for hours about what he compresses in "The bells are ringing in the ground." What the fuck does that mean? I don't know, but I need that kind of medicine.
     Gilbert's "I say moon is horse in the tempered dark / because horse is as close as I can get to it." And what does that mean? "Because horse is as close as I can get to it": if we had to analyze…I don't want to do it. "It": the colossal, majestic mystery that is our existence. I recited that to Gary Lutz and Gordon Lish in Chicago and I think one of them started jumping up and down on the bed like it was a trampoline. And Gordon turned into the wise owl and he just went, "Who said that?" He was like, "Wow!" And at that moment, I wished that sentence was mine. But it slapped him, it slapped him out of the mundane. We're gathering up our coats to go, and that sentence slapped him. And we all live to be smacked in the mouth like that.
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