Biography
I was born and grew up in a small town in the American South: Jacksonville, Texas. I wasn’t actually a big reader when I was a kid; I was more interested in math. But I did, for whatever reason, start writing poetry in early adolescence. I’d write really terrible nature poems and send them to sham organizations who tried to get you to buy their anthology with your poem in it for $100. After high school, I moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where I thought I wanted to study to be a physician, but decided to study literature instead. Now I know, like Keats and Williams, I could’ve done both, but I would’ve made a tragically bad doctor. So thank god literature intervened. When I was deciding whom to take classes with, I came across the poetry of Mary Jo Bang who was a faculty member. One of her poems got me interested in contemporary poetry, where before, the most contemporary poet I’d read was Auden. After that, I couldn’t do much without being distracted by ideas for poetry. I worked for a couple of years after college before I decided I needed more time to write than a full-time job would allow. So I enrolled in the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which was an incredible experience that permitted me to finish a book and make a lot of like-minded friends. Now I’m still teaching in Iowa City on a postgraduate fellowship and living here with my wife, a soon-to-be-famous librarian-book-artist.
The Interview
So where did the book begin for you, how did the book come to be written?
The book began with a painting, Duccio’s “The Madonna and Child,” in which neither subject looks particularly happy, and the child looks like he’s about to gouge out the eye of his mother. The mother has a look of utter malaise, while the child looks at her with consummate contempt. I appreciated how Duccio could queer the conceits of a traditional Madonna and child painting without resorting to iconoclasm. This began a series of poems largely concerned with queering conceits as a way into tradition.
What was going on in your life while you were writing it?
I was transitioning. I was jobless. Then I was working a job. Then I quit the job in the middle of a global recession to become a graduate student in a poetry writing workshop. Then I was married. Now I’m trying to figure out how to support myself. Along the way I met a lot of new poets, made a lot of new friends, went to a lot of readings, read a lot of books, spent a lot of money. Packed my apartment with books while my bank account dwindled of funds. And most recently, I’ve been teaching and reviewing books.
What do you think were the real driving elements within the book — the things that moved it all forward for you?
The things that propelled the book for me were just the things I was thinking about as both a young poet and as a kind of adolescent. The title, Bastard Star, not only comes from a line in the book, but to me means a star that somewhat refuses to constellate. So I was thinking about the individual poet’s relationship to the canon as well as my own relationships to traditions, good or bad, that I was born into – namely, patriarchy. In different ways, most of the poems can be said to be about parentage, which can give shape, support, and direction, but can also set one on terrible trajectories that in the book lead to ennui, or at worst, fatal crimes. In short, the driving elements in the book were issues of tradition and the individual talent, patriarchy and gender, and also mainstream mediation.
How long did it take to bring it all together?
I wrote the earliest poem in the collection in 2006, and the last in 2011: five years, though the actual work came on and off. There was probably a whole year in there during which I didn’t write a single poem. Then probably half or more came from the final year of the five year period. And I’m still restless when it comes to rearranging and editing.
Who was important to you in developing your writing life?
I’m not sure I have a writing life. I’m the most undisciplined writer I know. I have no good habits that I can recommend, and honestly, I’d love suggestions for good role models in this respect. The poems in this collection came spasmodically over the course of five years. I’d write nothing for three months, then several poems in a week, then nothing again for three more months, or sometimes longer. But there were writers and works I’d return to loyally over this time. When I felt creative impulses but didn’t know how to get started, I could always begin by responding to Hamlet, for instance, or Wallace Stevens or T.S. Eliot. And a lot of inducement came from belonging to a writing community in Iowa City, Iowa, where people actually cared to see (or seemed to care) what (or that) I was producing, which is rare for a poet.
Where do you think you’ll go to next in your writing — what are you working on now?
Right now I’m working on a series of acrostics of words one might see in books that introduce children or language-learners to the municipal world: BANK, HOSPITAL, FIRETRUCK, MAILMAN, MAINSTREET, etc. It’s the first formal project I’ve ever done as well as the first time I’ve ever made myself sit down and write poems without feeling particularly compelled. There’s a phantom of a concept behind the immediate formal constraint that I can’t quite articulate yet but I can talk about. The form of the acrostic is in keeping with a child’s conception of the world. The idea implies that one’s surroundings are codified less arbitrarily – that each concrete noun is not just a reference to or stand-in for a thing, its referent, but further an acronym of descriptors of that thing. So far I’m just seeing where it goes, and I’m not trying to write descriptors of the marginal word; I’m only using the word as a primer, so my lines tend to organize around it as a more abstract concept. For me, this is a demonstration of how modern poets operate generally – one is always guided by an idea just to the left of the margin. I’m also thinking about a book of nonfiction, lyrical prose.
Some Lines about Last Night’s Weather
Methodically the storm turns,
Recasts, ampler, its vision
Recast. Its periphery glances
The wheat of the plains, say,
Mild flirtation at first, then more aggressive,
Its demonstration as crescendo
Or as tide, sinuous process––wind utters water
Utters wind––a partnership resisted until
Fields of wheat bend to it, bearing the signature of storm
As of a vast intaglio,
The Great Lake gossiping to the air
Before bleating like a beat lamb, waves
Reaching you transformed––like tradition,
Whose passage transcends only itself,
Its consequence inadequate,
Or else the storm is catastrophic.
Discover more about Micah Bateman
http://www.nyqpoets.net/poet/micahbateman
http://english.uiowa.edu/faculty/profiles/bateman.shtml
https://www.facebook.com/micah.bateman
POEMS
http://versemag.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-poem-by-micah-bateman.html
http://www.timberjournal.com/#!__poetry/micah-bateman
http://www.missourireview.org/content/dynamic/view_text.php?text_id=2731
http://www.superarrow.org/IssueTwo/ParableBateman.html
http://www.juked.com/2010/10/soliloquy.asp
http://www.nighttrainmagazine.com/contents/bateman_9_1.php
