Contributor Spoglight: Andy Fogle

“Killer Interiors;” “Epithalamium at Porrona for Priya & Fabio;” “Death, Burning, and Service” by Andy Fogle appeared in Issue 32 and can be read here.

We’d love to hear more about this set of poetry.

“Epithalamium at Porrona for Priya and Fabio” was written for two friends; one of them grew up in Italy and the other grew up in Delaware. They got married in Delaware one October, and have since lived in Philadelphia, but the summer before that wedding there was an extraordinary trip to Italy arranged friends and relatives. That trip changed my life, making me value slow quality in a way that I didn’t before. 

“Death, Burning, and Service” splices a nightmare I once had about my dad dying with actual experiences of my mom’s death 12 years after the dream of my dad. After my mom’s death, my dad and his wife came here to upstate New York from Martinsville, Virginia, and although he wasn’t really quite “speechless // wherever he goes for five days,” he was quieter, stunned, sad, mystified, I think. The light in the last line is part generic symbol of course, but also a sly tribute to my Quaker faith.

“Killer Interiors” is also related to my mom’s death, but there’s no dream, it’s entirely factual, and the time-frame is much tighter too, a period of less than 24 hours. It’s about friendship, fatherhood, food, health, mortality, and beauty. The first italicized bit is from a Mark Lanegan and Duke Garwood song “My Shadow Life,” which was playing at the time. The title is also a reference that not even Jeff might not remember, but it’s a phrase Mark Borchardt uses in the documentary American Movie.

What was the most difficult part of this set?

Nothing was particularly difficult about “Epithalamium.” I read it at our friends’ wedding and I think it was much longer, maybe even in sections, but these 21 remaining lines—which is really just a braid of fragments, images from Castel Porrona in Cinigiano, anchorless similes, and “as…” statements—were always the core of the poem for me, just chanting images. It’s not exactly “difficult” to decide, “Ok, that’s the poem, nevermind anything else,” but it is an oddity I decided was right. 

“Death, Burning, and Service” was just emotionally difficult. Stuff with my mom and dad has always been complicated. And I’m not proud that I got a little drunk as my mom died, but I did. Formally, there is another oddity: as the poem implies, I had the first 10 lines exactly as they still are for 12 years and was never sure if it was a poem or a beginning; my mom’s death answered that question. Somehow they fit together. They stretch time out, too. 

I guess the trouble with “Killer Interiors” might speak to the whole optimism theme within this issue: how do you write praise that isn’t lightweight, easy, or ungrounded? This was one of those moments in my life that was so simple and awesome (I think of the end of one of my favorite poems, “Amiel’s Leg,” by Tom Lux—“That / was all that was it.”)—how do you write about that and it not be lame or merely nice? The answer here and in “Death, Burning, and Service” is make sure there’s some darkness in there too. Emotionally speaking, light isn’t the “other side” or “opposite” of darkness; sometimes it’s in a way the result of the darkness. Or maybe it’s just the law of contrast. Would this moment have been as profound for me had my mom not been dying, or if Jeff and I weren’t so wild in our twenties? Nope. No way. And I wish my mom lived healthier and didn’t die, and I know my friend and I shouldn’t have been so nuts, so this isn’t to say, “Hey, when your loved ones get cancer or you and your friends drink too much, at least you get these poems!” That’s some weird transactional attitude about poets suffering for their art. Human beings suffer anyway, artists or not. But temporarily coming out of that suffering makes some things a little sweeter, and so being an artist, I made these poems, which seem sweeter to this artist because of what I and my loved ones suffered. 

Incidentally, with “Epithalamium” my way of writing “praise that isn’t lightweight, easy, or ungrounded […], lame or merely nice” was probably the fragmenting of it, avoiding any mention of weddings or love or “when they first met” or any human beings at all—just stripping all of that out, except for the title the suggestiveness of the first stanza’s olive tree. 

Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.

I’ll just go with the one I’ll finish when I go to bed tonight: Edison Jennings’ Intentional Fallacies, published just this year by Broadstone Books. Somewhat similar vibes to what I describe above. 

If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?

Martín Espada. I love his work, but mostly because I had barbecue with him once in 1999 at Bub’s in Sunderland, Massachusetts, and he was hilarious, so it would be great to just be doing that again, listening to stories, laughing, eating Southern food in western Mass. But the real reason is we were brought there by a late mutual friend and poet, Jeff Male (not the same Jeff that “Killer Interiors” is dedicated to). I’d want to talk about Jeff Male at some point. That might be sad over pork, collards, and dirty rice, but I’m pretty sure Martín would have me falling out laughing before too long. I sure hope so.  

What are you working on now? What’s next?

I recently received a grant from Saratoga Arts to write poems related to abolitionist John Brown, so I’m doing a lot of reading, some traveling, and some writing (in fits and starts). I’m trying to work through the massive amount that’s been written about him and his associates—and all of stuff, even just simply finding and reading it, is a worthwhile way to spend one’s time, even if only in the strict sense of feeding oneself with history—not to mention all the vast watershed of connections to America today (and always), plus a bunch of very-hard to wrangle personal experience and family history. 

A few found poems based on that appeared in a recent issue of Unlost at https://unlostjournal.com/tag/andy-fogle/  There’s another one indirectly related to the John Brown project at https://pinehillsreview.com/2021/08/25/andyfogle/

___________________________________