by John Counts
John “Cal” Freeman is an old school songster sort of poet you’d find shelling peanuts at the end of the bar, a ballgame on overhead, jotting lyrics in a journal with a pint of lager or cup of coffee. He sings of the tavern, the donut shop, the bowling alley, the diner, the way-out spots you’d never think to go. He sings of home – Detroit, Dearborn, Downriver – with the working-class spirit of Philip Levine and the autobiographical confessional bent of Robert Lowell. The poems in his new book The Weather of Our Names take you down the long avenues of Wayne County to Norton Shores on Lake Michigan and up the road less traveled to Lake Huron in the Thumb. But his work transcends place. Along the way he finds people, businesses, pavement, waters, creatures. He also finds himself. The poems address traumas both public and personal and seemingly ask that eternal question of literature – “What exactly are we doing here?”
I first met Freeman when I was an editor at the Great Lakes Review literary journal along with my wife, Meredith. We are prose-centric writers ourselves, but that never diminished our enthusiasm for poetry. Finding a Freeman in the slush pile was like finding a diamond covered in green slime from the Rouge River where I ill-advisedly used to swim as a boy while also growing up in Metro Detroit. Freeman is both poet and fierce local literary advocate. He shows up. He’s a tall fellow usually in a corduroy jacket (he sings of those too), blue jeans, and a Detroit Tigers ballcap. Always with a kind word, a smile and genial bearing. He brings a relatable, everyman approachability to his performances – whether it’s reading his poetry or performing music solo or with one of his bands – even if the work itself is anything but ordinary.
His new book is autobiography, elegy, longing for what’s been and an acceptance for what is. It looks back, yes, but it also looks forward. I’m excited to ask him a few questions about it.
John Counts: A poet can go anywhere in their work, but you choose specific contemporary places mostly southeastern Michigan and beyond. What function does place have in your poetry? And specifically places with water?
Cal Freeman: I love being from Michigan. I grew up in Detroit, but we had family friends who lived on Grosse Ile when I was young, and I loved driving over the bridge to get there and being able to look out at the Trenton Channel of the Detroit River and Gibraltar Bay of Lake Erie. It’s no place I could live, but the water there captured by imagination at a young age. My uncle, the poet Patrick O’Neill, was an early literary influence, and he lives up in Suttons Bay. As soon as I was able to drive, I’d head up to visit him and have him take me around the Peninsula. Pat knew Jim Harrison a bit and was the one who got me to see that Michigan had some great poetry. Pat also got me into John Berryman around that time. I grew up in Detroit as a child, then moved Downriver when I was a teenager, and I’ve spent most of my adult life in Dearborn. Living in a place with such a rich labor history has definitely informed the politics of my poems. My grandmother, Gwendolyn O’Neill, would tell me stories of her first cousin, Jim Sullivan, who was one of the leaders of the ’41 strike at Ford Rouge. He also served as one of Walter Reuther’s bodyguards during the late-30’s. His mythic presence has shown up in several poems and songs. In the last decade or so, I’ve really enjoyed heading up the Lake Huron coast to the Thumb. There’s nothing like Port Austin a couple weeks after Labor Day when all the tourists and summer residents are gone and there’s a lone tractor going up and down the beach to uproot the last few boat and JetSki lifts.
How did you structure the book? And what role did non-fungible tokens and Yelp reviews play in that structure? And please discuss the inspiration behind non-fungible tokens and Yelp reviews in the poems.
I actually used Robert Lowell’s Life Studies as a model. I knew I wanted this collection to include both lineated poems and some of the lyrical prose memoir I’ve been writing in recent years, so I put the title essay in the middle section and framed it with the lineated free verse poems. Lowell has that big chunk of prose, “91 Revere Street,” in the center of his book, and I really like how that can play against and complement the lineated poetry. When I did a reading in Macon, Georgia two years ago, Kevin Cantwell mentioned that he thought “Dichotomy Paradox as a Non-Fungible Token” was a great poem and that it should go near the beginning of a collection, but I should start the collection with a shorter poem that was south of a page. Kevin is usually right about poetry matters and has assembled a few of my favorite collections, so I took his advice and led off with the shorter poem, “Thought on Thought With Fried Chicken Getting Cold” and put “Dichotomy Paradox” second.
The NFT poems were my attempt to understand this digital phenomenon that both did and did not exist. I felt like poems could be like that figuratively when we memorize and internalize them; they take on a sort of permanent, mutable ephemerality, and poems can also be literally minted on the blockchain. The Yelp poems came about when I was cooped up at home during the pandemic. I’m a sucker for little shot-and-beer spots and quirky unassuming restaurants with good food. I was really wondering which of the spots I loved would be left when the world opened back up. I was also thinking of fictive places that I wished I could visit. There is no Tegmine on Telegraph Road, for instance, but I really wish there was. One spot I loved that didn’t make it out of Covid was Orchard Grove in Romulus. They had the best Lake Erie perch and these old tabletop video game machines. I’d ride down there with my late friend Jerry Rushlow whose horse farm was right down the road and eat lunch. It broke my heart that it was gone and inspired the start of the Yelp poems. Another early poem was about The Buccaneer Den in Port Austin, which is now something else. The Yelp poems are elegies, I guess, for the way places used to be, and I think I knew that they could border on the saccharine if I didn’t apply an ironic titling sequence and concoct some non-existent places.
I wish we both were around in the old days of newspapers so I could hire you to write poems for the Sports section. Athletics don’t often find their way into lines of verse, but sports – specifically Detroit sports teams – are a major theme of yours. You even have poems about Lions great Barry Sanders and former Pistons forward Adrian Dantley. What is the connection between sports and poetry for you?
Hah, thanks! That’d be a dream job. I grew up obsessed with basketball and was living in Detroit proper when the Pistons made their two championship runs in ’89-’90. And yeah, Dantley was my absolute favorite from that ’88-’89 team before he got traded. AD getting traded is the first time I remember experiencing real grief, ridiculous as that sounds. My father taught at Wayne State University during the 80s while he was finishing his PhD, and my memories of watching those classic games are wrapped up in memories of hanging out with my parents at Circa 1890s Saloon. Those Bad Boys teams were mythic and allegorical, and sports is at its most interesting when something allegorical is getting worked out through them. This team from the Rust Belt was fucking up the NBA’s coastal rivalries, and it was exhilarating to see them getting over on some of the league’s manufactured stars. There’s a lot of poetry in sports, and going back to The Iliad there’s sports in poetry too. I think of recent writing by Ross Gay and Hanif Abdurraqib on basketball as some of the best contemporary literature. I got to hear Ross Gay read from Be Holding a couple years ago, and that was at a point where I’d already written the Dantley poem, but it made me think how Ross Gay was doing more to honor the legacies of figures like Dr. J and Jamaal Wilkes than Jordan ever bothered to do with his media empire. Don’t get me started on MJ and all the rule changes that were enacted so he could succeed against the Bad Boys.
We have something in common in that we both followed our fathers into their chosen professions – me into journalism and you into academia. And it sounds like we lost them around the same time in our lives. Fathers and sons are big theme in literature (it even gave Turgenev a title), as well as family in general – you also allude to your mother, sister and wife in your work. Why do you choose to incorporate so much autobiography into the poems? And why do dead parents haunt us so much?
Poetry was really big in our household. My father was a scholar who wrote some poetry as a young man, and my mother came out of that Irish tradition of recitation and performance. She has a gift for remembering reams of what she’s read, and when I was a child, she would engage in these dramatic recitations that enthralled me at times and embarrassed me at others, but I still hear the poetry I read in her voice. When I was in 8th grade, I was failing English class, so my father gave me copies of Allen Ginsberg’s Reality Sandwiches and Jim Carroll’s Living at the Movies to show me, I think, that literature could be just as, if not more, subversive than rock n’ roll. This was life-altering for me and I was obsessed with becoming a poet.
My family shows up a ton in this book, mainly because my father died just before a lot of these poems were written. He died on January 7th, 2021, and because Covid numbers were high we couldn’t do some of the normal grieving rituals like going to a bar and telling stories, hugging people and crying into their shoulders. It forced me to turn to poetry to deal with my grief. I’d been rather estranged from my mother prior to my dad’s death, and I had to help her a great deal with financial stuff, faxing forms to various agencies and banks, visiting to make sure she was doing okay. Getting to know her again and appreciating her intelligence is a big subplot to these poems. My wife, Sarah Pazur, is a phenomenal essayist and fiction writer, and she’s also a phenomenal editor. She shows up in many of my poems, and her stories have begun to impact my poetry writing in both direct and oblique ways. As for your last question, it’s hard to put into words. My father published a lot of scholarship about recusancy and patrilineal hauntings in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and there’s always a ghost in the parapets of Elsinore, I guess.
You reference James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake a few times in the book. Like Joyce, you seem to be a collector and curator of strange and exotic words – boustrophedon, marmoreal, bilirubin, polysyndeton – just to name a few. How do you choose the language to to employ your vision and why? Besides Joyce, who else have you been influenced by over the years?
God, that’s one of my favorite things about writing and one of the main reasons I write, learning new words and trying them out in sentences and lines; it’s just so much fun! Language, especially hyper-specific nouns, can help us name the world (of course the Lacanian riposte to this is that language takes place over a loss, and, to quote the poet Robert Hass, a word is elegy to what it signifies), but language also creates its own occasion. That’s what we can learn from Joyce’s preposterous portmanteaus. I’ve mined Jerry Dennis’ book The Living Great Lakes several times over for a lexicon to characterize the Michigan landscapes and waterways that I continue to revisit. When I was 17, the Georgia poet Kevin Cantwell, my mom’s first cousin, came to visit my parents. I was reading Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems at the time, and Kevin asked if I’d ever read Philip Levine. When I told him no, he said, “It shouldn’t take your cousin from Georgia to tell a kid who grew up in Detroit to read Philip Levine, but you should read Philip Levine.” Levine was important for me for a long time. Diane Seuss, more recently, has been a huge influence. Carl Phillips, Jim Harrison, Dustin Pearson, F. Daniel Rzicznek, Virginia Woolf; that postwar confessional school, especially Berryman and Lowell.
My favorite fact about Finnegan’s Wake is that the Au Sable River and Lake Erie both show up its pages, and I have a theory that Joyce knew about those Michigan waterways because of his time spent around Hemingway in Paris. Nobody writes water quite like Joyce, and the water passage in Ithaca has probably influenced me more than anything else I’ve read.
You’re also a writing teacher at Oakland University. Can you talk a little about how your career in education impacts your poetry?
My time at Oakland has been incredible. I work primarily with freshmen students along with some upper-level students in my creative nonfiction classes. I learn a lot from my comp students and my colleagues about writing craft. When you’re atomizing writing skills and thinking about how to help someone improve, you’re inevitably thinking about your own proclivities and habits. There’s also the fact that this book is a hybrid collection that toggles between lineated poems and lyric memoir, and I certainly never wrote creative nonfiction before teaching at OU and being handed that class. My late mentor, Marshall Kitchens, taught me a ton about writing from lived experience in a way that could be both bitter and sentimental. I can trace the title piece, the essay “The Weather of Our Names,” back to him. It’s interesting. I think our culture’s picture of an effective teacher is an inspiring, iconoclastic figure who stands and delivers and helps young people find their passion. That’s not who I am as a teacher though. I think I meet students where their anxieties live and calm them down. There’s a lot of anxiety surrounding the writing process and just giving people space to learn through messing up is a real gift.
Cal Freeman (he/him) is the author of the books Fight Songs (Eyewear 2017) and Poolside at the Dearborn Inn (R&R Press 2022). His writing has appeared in many journals, including Atticus Review, Image, The Poetry Review, Verse Daily, Under a Warm Green Linden, North American Review, Panoply Magazine, Oxford American, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Advanced Leisure. He is a recipient of the Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes), winner of Passages North’s Neutrino Prize, and a finalist for the River Styx International Poetry Prize. Born and raised in Detroit, he teaches at Oakland University and serves as Writer-In-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit. His chapbook of poems, Yelping the Tegmine, has just been released, and his hybrid full-length collection, The Weather of Our Names, is due out this year from Cornerstone Press.
John Counts is a writer and journalist based in Whitmore Lake, Michigan. He’s published fiction in various places over the years, including the Chicago Reader, Joyland and Hypertext. His journalism has won numerous state and national awards. He’s currently the editor of the investigative reporting team at MLive.com. Bear County, Michigan is his first book.