Frank Lehner is a poet and native Pittsburgher. He’s a playwright whose work has been produced in New York City, an award-winning book designer, and a folk artist. His chapbook, Some Kingdom, was published by GTA Press, and his poetry has appeared widely. He earned a BA in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh and an MA in psychology from Duquesne University. He is one of the founding members of the literary magazine, 5 AM.
When I heard of the publication of Mrs. Nussbaum’s Monkey, I was excited to see it, looking forward to what might arise from the inscrutable mind and open heart of Frank Lehner. Our paths have crossed in the writing and university community over time, and I knew that his poetry would bring surprise, leaping, wild ideas, and humor—but all living in a world of tenderness with an unstoppable mind. What is at work in a Frank Lehner book? The spinning possibilities of being human in a world alive with incongruity—the strange, the bizarre, the everyday absurd—presented with a deep love for the working class and colloquial speech. And there are ghosts.
Beatty: I’ve been a fan of your work for many years. I’m not sure that people know the depth of your experience with poetry, playwriting, and design. You were the Marketing Director at the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1995 when my book, Mad River came out. But I want to say that as a young poet, I remember going to readings to hear you and to be madly inspired. I’m so happy to see this book coming out. I know this might be the unanswerable question, but what made this full-length book emerge now—after a number of years of you working in various other areas?
Lehner:
Jan, thank you for that. That’s amazingly kind of you to say. And it’s really wonderful to be having this dialogue with you. I’ve always found you and your work to be so brave, and I mean this lovingly—relentless and not to be denied. Touching and heartfelt, so much passion, and always a call to renewal, and I believe hope and love of possibilities. Your work is always so powerful. And it works because of your voice, your honesty, and your refusal to let the reader or the world off the hook. So, it’s good to be with…
Actually, the late Peter Oresick (a friend and damned fine poet) was the Press’s Marketing Director at the time. I was Assistant. I was designing poetry books— covers and guts. And I was pushing for the Press to do more books on demand, backlist, and niche titles—which we did. We did what I believe was the first academic book in America on demand. But that’s another talk. I remember how thrilled I was to design your Mad River book when you were—without the world yet to know—letting your fire fully loose.
We were all part of the scene then. And what a deep writing community Pittsburgh was and still is. You, John Repp, Kevin Rippin, Judith Vollmer, the late Tim Russell, Marc Harshman, Nancy Koerbel, Patty Dobler, the amazing Lynn Emanuel and, of course, Ed Ochester—the Lynchpin. Stern was around. Li-Young Lee was in classes. Dorthy Barresi. Michael Chabon was in school. Jim Daniels came to Pittsburgh. Diane Ackerman was there. Galway Kinnell was there. Much of this took place in the Hemingway’s Reading Series that carried on with the late, rock-solid fellow Jimmy Cvetic and now with Kristofer Collins and Joan E. Bauer. The list goes on for what was happening in the community: The International Poetry Forum, just reconstituted with Jake Grefenstette as Director. Michael Wurster and The Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange, which still carries on strongly. And of course, that torch Jane Coleman lit, Pat Dobler developed, and you carried forward with the Madwomen in the Attic group, which is still flaming brightly. Pittsburgh remains an important center of poetry and voice. Right?
So, why now? Yes, it’s a long tale. And a tale where in one or more chapters I should have my own ass beat. I was writing the whole time, but was in business, always doing something creative. Writing, graphic design, creative director. I worked with a company that provided assessments and training, then came to Pitt for the writing and the connection to poetry and publishing. I was involved in an on-demand printing startup, then went to Duquesne to get my master’s in psychology because I wanted to start a consulting business. It was at Duquesne that my life shifted and integrated. The curriculum was one of the few places that did psychology from and through Continental philosophy. So, with that, I worked with companies and individuals on narrative and storytelling. That work and perspective turns up in my work often directly and indirectly—the existential gaze. But saying that makes it sound too present and thought out. I think it shows up in my work through the animated present, rich with the voice of our surroundings. The integrated presence of place, full of song and lament of the past, and the kind of prophetic wonder of the yet-to-come. Does that make sense?
You probably know I have a tag line I often add to things: “We are lucky, We are.” That’s recognizing the demand to be attentive and spooked or haunted by the voice that turns me to the paper to speak what I hear. And all along I was writing and making art, but….
Again, not answering your question. The short, it was time. Maybe I was arrogant with my time. Maybe I was trying to prove the wrong things. As I said, maybe I should have had my own ass beat. But this caught up with me, and I had to get this out. And with good fortune, Larry Smith believes in my work, and Mrs. Nussbaum’s Monkey is here. It’s a bit of a weight off my shoulders. But it’s humbling, really.
Beatty: You’re a master of the long line. You support them with a rhythm and sound that are so difficult to sustain. Can you talk about the craft of that movement and the choice to write so many long-lined prose poems in this book?
Lehner:
Well, the long lines have come to find themselves over the past couple of years. I think they were waiting for me to listen. What happened, Nancy Koerbel said to me, ”You need to write longer lines. You seem too jammed up.” And she was right. My poems have always relied on rhythm, cadence, and speed.
Extending the lines came naturally. It allows room for the voice. The characters and situations find connection, and the longer lines offer the runway speed for the intersection and flow at a pace, a tangle, and leaps that pull the poem from where it’s calling to be seen. The poems want to sweep you through them while at the same time stopping you with and through the dance of sounds and the twists of language. Or, that’s what I hope. Or this is what I need to do now because that’s what I’m responding to, what I hear. But, again that sounds a bit heady or abstract, no?
At a reading recently, someone asked me what’s up with these long-line poems? What do you call them? I hadn’t thought to call them anything. So, I said they are Brush Poems. Poems where I sweep a brush across the moment’s page. The poem is what’s seen through and under and behind and because of or in spite of the color or the dust left or not on the paper. The poem is what reveals itself then and there. Often, there might be more to be seen or ties to be made, but that seems like a moment disclosed for another poem or a related poem. What’s emerged here is what is calling to be heard or seen—from where, who knows? So, what’s showing is what’s available, what’s disclosed, what beckons.
These poems most often emerge in a single go of attention and listening and come largely intact in that sitting. Revision does not remake the poem but clarifies it, removing obstructions, sharpening what’s been disclosed, honoring what’s been shown, and listening and being open to those places that call for more clarity, revelation. So, if this is a craft question, the craft resides in the readiness to receive and the discernment to reveal what the “brush” has made visible.
Those are blessings. I think you can see in some of those in the book and the new poems, maybe more should or could have been said, or that was an odd leap. I’m trying to leave those, as was had or given— thankful for the page and the poem poem-ing. Otherwise, there’s too much noise from the page screaming that I was not listening. Who wants that?
So, the long lines have opened up a means for the intersections and the entangled nature of what’s beckoning to be sent and seen and heard, the breathlessness of that patient wait. The Brush Poem is in respect to that. And it’s just a name that works for now.
And now that I’m thinking about it, the speed part of it is from my earliest works when I stole so much from —I owe him almost everything— Frank O’Hara. This is where getting most of the poem quickly and in the moment arose, in that energy. It’s from O’Hara’s “I do this I do that” style. And the place is Pittsburgh, and we have all that Pittsburgh voice/school going on.
As a quick aside, there’s a wonderful piece, Homage to Ed Ochester, in a recent issue of The Pittsburgh Review of Books, Kris Collins’s lovely unpacking of the Pittsburgh School/Voice and the deep influence Ed had on American poetry. It’s must-read if you’re interested in the centrality of Pittsburgh’s influence on poetry.
The craft we were talking about, as above, is the work to keep that speed going, understandable, smooth, connected, immersed, and interesting, without making it obvious what’s going on. For mostly what’s going on is what’s going on or coming to be seen, and wants me to let it breathe, then sigh, having been heard.
Yeah, and some of this leads to prose poems and the long-line poems. And I guess the prose poems, justified on the page and running as prose, are something related but different? I’m curious what you think? I’ll have to get Nancy back in on this.
Beatty: One thing I love about Mrs. Nussbaum’s Monkey is the movement of humor and empathy in the poems. Can you discuss the challenge of combining both in some of your work?
Lehner:
Wow. Ok. That’s a good, good question. I’m buying time here. How to answer? (pause) Well, maybe one way to answer is, what’s going on is a cross between Emmanuel Levinas and the Three Stooges.
Levinas, the amazing 20th-century philosopher who grounded his Ethics in the primacy of the Other, the unknowable or ineffable, which is experience in the encounter with another’s face. And in that face, who we recognize as another as we are, we hear the plea, “Don’t kill me.” In this, there is the demand for radical hospitality and the obligation to care for the other. So, this extends to the face-to-face with what’s before me—you, the neighbors, the squirrels, other life, and all that which comes before and after me. So, the empathy is my obligation to, my claim by, the other.
But, again, that’s kind of heady. Empathy is my response to being called out by the world around me and offering love’s wonderful abyss by calling and demanding attention from me. This “now” is desperate for me to see and experience being loved-to—and the enchantment and wonder of all this, “holy mackerel.”
In this sense, the poems are prayers that are answered as relics.
And the humor, well, are the lines in poems and friends and myself saying to the bit I’ve just said to you: “Seriously?” “You’re gonna pull that?” “You’re buying the beers!” “Relics, really!”
I think it’s growing up in the City and getting your chops busted constantly by friends, teammates, kids on the street, or in a more place-putting ways, the “who do you think you are?” slights. All this is wrapped up in the humor and twists of lightness.
Also, the relief and a kind of crazy affirmation offered up by The Three Stooges fits somehow. When I think of them, they’re always getting into something, and that something gets out of hand because you get into it in ways that you didn’t think through. So, the humor or slapstick undercuts, in an illuminating way, recognizes the folly we find ourselves in. And the affirmation is, well, I understand that, recognize that, but I’m not that bad, at least. Or I know enough not to do that, of course. But I might have. It’s a back-handed learning. They’re really parody and satire, and comedy, low as it is, that unmasks the social and economic circumstances of class and culture.
Ahh…I’m digging a hole here.
Like, right now, I’m thinking to myself, “Damn, Frank, couldn’t you have at least chosen to use the Marx Brothers?” Oh well, too late.
It’s a good question, Jan.
But let’s try something else, here. I think there is also a huge community aspect to this—both in the empathy and the humor. Maybe it’s a Pittsburgh or Western Pennsylvania or Blue-Collar thing?
I feel obligated to connect with, and help, and to give as I can, as I remember, as was the case growing up. I felt totally immersed in that world. This is just the way it is. Good and bad.
And maybe it was growing up on Mt. Washington, well, Duquesne Heights really? One side of the hill was fully open to the view of the City, the river valley, and what was on the other side—the neighborhoods over there, and then the hills and the horizon. We lived on top of the hill, but the whole view was sort of a bowl. So, we had this place we lived, and that was what it was. Such a Pittsburgh experience. The tightness, the ubiquity of the community.
So, it feels like I see that world vanishing into oblivion, so maybe the attunement and attention of others of all ilk, footed, winged, or otherwise, is a way to recognize I’m with you and we are, hell, making a go of it together. And much of what’s being driven to darkness is determined to go kicking and screaming. All of this drives the poems, or girds the poems.
From off stage (he mimics): “Hey, Frank, you left Jesus out. What about Kumbaya?”
You see what I’m dealing with here.
But there was something about the more collective and community aspects of the neighborhood that influenced this. And, more directly, my father taught me the wonder of nature, the gentle respect for others, and my mom taught me to fight for what is right and just. She was a union activist during the war. So that’s mixed in with the empathy and attention thing.
And there’s another component to the neighborhood thing. Each neighborhood was its own world with its own style and comportment. Yeah, we knew each other in school or via sports, but when someone acted one way or another, it was often attributed to the neighborhood they grew up in. That’s because, or what do you expect, he grew up in Brookline, or Beechview, or Sheraden, or Knoxville, or The Mount. We’re all the same, but there’s the style imprint of these tight neighborhoods. Pittsburgh.
And the humor is also tied to the absurd and tragicomedy. Most of the plays (see Four For Cheese) I’ve written are absurd and one-acts. When I was in junior high, a traveling troupe came to our school and put on Eugene Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros.”
We were marched quietly to the auditorium, and then everything changed.
If you know the play, the characters turn into rhinoceroses. So, there in what’s really a parlor drama, the cast members, one by one, turn into rhinos snorting and stomping and just stampeding mad all over the stage. Of course, it’s a political piece, about man’s inhumanity to man, and the hegemony of conformity.
But it was the fact that I had never seen anything like this. Was it permitted?
And from there forward, I’ve carried this attunement of the absurd. I think you will find it in some form across most of my work. It’s also the reason I chose to go to Duquesne—simply because they had an existential program. It seemed close enough, no? And it’s small steps from Ionesco to Fernando Arrabal to Buñuel to Dali (a 4th-grade life changer by Ms. King), to Beckett, to Sartre, to Camus, to Adamov, to Richard Forman, to even Caryl Churchill. And, Jan, there’s a young, special-voice playwright in Pittsburgh, Mora Harris, who falls into this arena.
What I would give to have seen Rhinoceros in 1961 with Zero Mostel as Jean.
But it is that mix and mess that I offer as an answer. Hopefully, this makes some sense. You’ve known me for a long time.
Beatty: There is a loyalty to Pittsburgh in this book—in its language, its references, its grounding in place. You begin the book with two quotes: “In Pittsburgh, beautiful, filthy Pittsburgh, home…” Gerald Stern, and “She’s got Yinzer cred,” Nancy Koerbel. Why focus so intently on Pittsburgh to frame the book?
Lehner:
Yeah….Pittsburgh. I touched on the claim of Pittsburgh earlier. Pittsburgh is the lot to which I was cast. And Pittsburgh shaped me. And Pittsburgh is what callouses our skin. And it’s Pittsburgh that leaves gentleness and caring and connection to live under and in there—even if we often show off the thickness of our skins as bravado. It’s our defense to the world that wants us to be used and shaped and broken to the wills of work, the mills, old and new, the bank….
Pittsburgh is our team colors. Pittsburgh is the water we swim. Pittsburgh is something we hold onto and recognize we have something in common, something that connects us. We might all be lost out here, but we have Pittsburgh—we have one another, or we believe we do. We’re not stooges. We’re Yinzers, all of us.
Something Pittsburgh turns the moment wonderfully eternal when the sun blares over the City and screams golden-white down the Mon, blinding you as you merge East onto the Fort Pitt Bridge at 8 a.m. on a December morning. You go on faith. You don’t stop, and no one crashes into you because they understand and have been there. And, if there’s a wreck, nobody gets anywhere. It’s only out-of-towners who dare stop, confused by the give and flow. And we forgive them, for they know not what they do.
There’s a poem in the book about one of my friends crawling into a small abandoned mine opening, then needing to be rescued. The damn hill wants us back, to take in from whence we came.
Pittsburgh has shaped my tongue and talk. Listen to me. I try to temper it, the accent, some. But it’s having none of that. My values. My esthetic and propriety. Pittsburgh! Stern’s love of the City, filthy, beautiful. Lehner, shaped by some hand of this coal hill I am set loose upon. It’s the incline that takes me to hell and brings me home to heaven. We’re here, smashed and held by these hills. Come please, we’ll sing you a song and buy you a beer, or something like that.
And it’s being immersed in this. Living this. Knowing this. Carrying this. Loving all this as it loves us or doesn’t. It’s a worldview.
This is what Nancy saw when, in a spark, she coined the term “Yinzer Cred.” This is something that is worn well, a way of living and knowing, and done so with pride for all the faults and shortcomings. And if yinz understand this, then yinz know.
Yeah, that’s a bit romantic, I know. But I’m sticking with it.
But of course, in this enthusiasm, I do not overlook the many uglinesses that have gone/go on. Carnegie, Frick, Mellon, the union busting, the classism and racism, the destruction of the Hill District, it goes on. Thank God for August Wilson. For Teenie Harris. And thank God for the filmmaker Tony Buba. I carry the byproducts of a lot of this, but I never knew this growing up. Again, another conversation.
Beatty: Can you talk about Gerald Stern, Tim Russell as influences on your work? Who else would you name as influences?
Lehner:
Oh, where to start with Stern? Stern is the first Pittsburgh poet for me. When Ed Ochester had us read Lucky Life, I felt like I had come acrossa voice that offered up a Pittsburgh I knew. A Pittsburgh that I was trying to capture. Or at least capture the feel and knot of being immersed in all that is Pittsburgh. For the most part, I was writing O’Hara poems that worked to capture the flair of the moment, using the City and swoon as content—fast and respectfully flippant and out of their minds with spark, when they worked.
Then, like Ionesco, along comes Stern, and I’m different. Stern offers a sort of mysticism and animism. His poems are so rich with place and setting and detail. They’re fleshy and are sticky with a world that is active, assertive, insistent, persistent—there’s no distance, we’re reckoning. The plants, flowers, animals, rivers—everything is alive, of wonder. Stern pulled that from me—or like, Ionesco—had me ask: “Is that permitted?” I heard me in him. I let him teach me.
And what else Stern did was bring in the spiritual, the divine, the quiet that is sensed and partially grasped through the animism of place and the rhythm and cadence of his lines. He has the deep Jewish tradition that fills him and informs him. He opened me to claim that mystery in my poems. There was little direct religious community history in my upbringing, but mystery and theology always had a hook in me, an itch. Stern’s poems are incantations; they conjure, they demand the moment of doing, reveal the wonder we’re burdened with, what we hopefully suffer well. So, via Stern, I hang my hat. He stole my heart.
I guess, in some ways, Stern’s poems are “I do this I do that” poems, but in a manner that he’s letting God know he knows what God knows, but God can only know when Stern lets God know by doing it.
This is how I see Stern, mystic, who had little choice but to sit at the scarred tables at the Carnegie Library, and let forth what he’d taken in. When he wrote of the streetcar, I cried. My streetcar, my beautiful, filthy home, too. He let me know I could use my world and offer what I found rich and alive and animated. Yes, my squirrels do speak.
But Stern also offered the relationship and the twist of the political, the historical, and the percolation of people trying to make sense of where they find themselves. People I saw from a different generation, but the same people. Bread lines, protest marches, keys lost on the beach, being fitted for a suit, immobile and hypnotized by a spider’s web strung between the iron filigree of a bridge.
Li-Young and I didn’t steal a draft of “Joseph Pockets” from Stern’s desk (501 Cathedral of Learning) for no reason. We had to. And I read that over and over and over and knew friendship and knew fear, and I knew loss and resurrection and refusal, and I knew joy, and I knew someone else knew what I knew —Pittsburgh— “you will love this place.”
I only hope my poems and voice, so informed and let loose by Stern, honor what he’s given me. “Oh, lucky lucky life. Lucky life.” Right?
And when I last spoke to Jerry, he was at Peter Oresick’s house for the release of Poems for Jerry: A Tribute to Gerald Stern. There were so many of us there, and we read our poems to Jerry, and he did his Stern snort and stammer, and said something gracious about the poems, and we ate finger foods, and we had fun.
And as for Tim Russell. So underrecognized. While he was not a Pittsburgh Poet, he was in the Writing Program at Pitt. That’s where I met him. He was from Toronto, Ohio, which could just as well be Pittsburgh. He’s an Industrial Poet, if looking for a term, but we all are, writing out of Pittsburgh.
Tim worked in the steel mill in Toronto, and folks who knew him in that world still call him “Mad Dog.” Tim’s poems have a clarity, honesty, and tightness to them that continue to leave me stunned. Jack Gilbert-y in their power. It’s that that got me and gets me. We were writing about the same stuff, but damn, I always chased the succinct nature of his work and the amazing twists and leaps. Then he had his whole Haiku side. He’d been to Japan a few times after winning prize after prize in the genre. If you’ve not read Tim Russell, please pick up a copy of In Plena Vita: The Collected Works of Tim Russell, and there’s a lovely tribute to Tim by the poet and Bottom Dog Press publisher Larry Smith (my publisher and Tim’s). Tim left us too too soon.
Beatty: There’s a wide-open heart that lives in the lines of these poems. Would you say that a deep humanity drives your work, or that it rises from your commitment to the poem’s guidance? How would you describe it?
Lehner:
(pause). I went quiet there for a moment, trying to sort that question. Not to be namby-pamby—I think these two pieces work entangled. And I touched on this earlier, it’s my perspective, or immersion, my response to being taken over—for all its good and ugly—by Wonder.
(Again, pointing away) You can hear my buddies off stage getting ready to give it to me!
That’s the perspective part, or the part of the landscape and connections that well up in what is and what was and what we often never questioned. Again, maybe romantic. But this whoosh of the now, to which I am obligated to respond, and in the best case, through and by love. Back to Levinas, or Christ, or Ubuntu. Or coach Marino, teaching us football. Some obligation to hospitality, for Justice.
But at heart, it’s the poem’s guidance that reigns. Well, the poem is what turns up. The intermediary. The artifact. The snatch of language and lines had from the listening, the bespoken, the claim. The poems are hauntings. They are what turns up when I respond to the call, the beckoning, the voice, the demand, the command, the solicitation, the saying.
And back to Levinas, the Saying is always more than the Said. The poem is said, but only a mere snatch of the saying. Now we’re back to the Brush Poem notion. I don’t know what is calling me, weak as it may be, but it pleads to be heard, for me not to abandon the beckon. For me to offer it recognition and welcome, and for now the snippet had, the poem, is a welcome of love, awe, of presence, of hearing something struggling to be heard.
So, your humanity question raises questions about my ethics. Which I offered as my obligation to the other. And, the voice—I know not where it arises—is perhaps the call from the dead to the not-yet living. I’m thinking of the saying, attributed to Walter Benjamin, though I first read it via the theologian Howard Thurman—the permutation I know: “We are the ones that the dead are waiting for—to bury them, to make right the wrong done to them.”
I know Benjamin or Thurman, both, were referring to the injustices of the Holocaust and Slavery and Jim Crow, the point is the responsibility for others, me and you, to live prophetically and solicit and welcome the Justice to come, for those gone unjustly—workers, those unrecognized, those refused entrance, or place. These poems find a way through this space. But, Jan, without this abstraction. In the moment, I listen and respond. Of course, I have opinions and beliefs, but through and for all of that, the poems cry to be heard.
Jeez Louise!
Beatty: I like the ghosts that walk around your poems. Some that seem alive, some just visiting. What are they doing in your poems?
Lehner:
Yeah, the ghosts are part of the animism of what’s going on. So much is speaking at once. The plants, the animals, the insects, the birds, the neighbors, the trinkets, all that turns up in the poems as having something to say or show. These voices and gestures come to help me, come for me to help them, come to chit-chat, for they have some time on their hands or have some obligation to love—to me, or in many instances to point out my knuckle-headedness.
Some of the ghosts live here: the dogs, parents, aunts, grandmother, buddies, and people gone. Many turn up when they choose to. I mean, a whole throng live on my hill. They are happy here. Some were here when we moved in, and some have turned up, some pass through. They hang. They home.
I guess they often act as the chorus. Intermediaries who have the right to intervene and speak and say what’s what.
But the dead are not gone. They are not moaning and chain-rattling ghosts. Thankfully. Though there are some jagoff poltergeists that move something just to be jagoffs.
Ghosts of sorts have been in my life since I was a kid. My grandmother, nearly blind, had some kind of clairvoyance going on. It was uncanny. You could never lie to her. She knew what you were thinking, where you had been. She held my hand and listened. It was amazing stuff. My mom had a similar knack for dreams and premonitions. I have some watered-down version of that. I know this sounds twee. But the ghosts are part of the madness going on around me. For the most part, they’re protectors and keep me grounded in what is and what’s still.
Beatty: You often pay attention to the “very small” and the “very quiet” your poems. What is it that you want to create in these moments of noticing?
Lehner:
Well, again, this has to do with what’s calling me. But I’ve found that the more specific something is, the more universal it becomes. The things and details within the poem offer, even if you have never seen them or done them, some access to the reader’s world, who then might find a connection. That’s all I have.
I’m so often immersed in some scene that the details and particulars demand to be brought forth and carry what’s up with what’s going on. Around these things and details, the rest of the world gathers, and in that moment, the meaning and significance of something or other is found.
The most insignificant thing can open up a whole world. Sidewalk gum, Mrs. Meshell’s white dog, a grub, the school bus, the burnt toast, the stolen stop sign…
These small things tie things to one another and show me, and offer me ways to illuminate something that has, hopefully, something to capture the moment, whatever the moment may be, and how it may be tied with things here, gone, or in the future. Or to get back into the phenomenological: Things thinging. that speak to the reader, you.
Beatty: Paying homage to those who came before is a central theme in the book: the workers, the veterans, the cooks, the families, the neighbors. Of course, Mrs. Nussbaum’s Monkey is part of the Working Lives Writing Series by Bottom Dog Press. The sense of a debt owed, an integrity from the past rises strong in these solid and sometimes reverential poems. It’s as if you’re creating another sense of place through memory and story. Can you talk about this idea of paying homage in your poems?
Lehner:
Yes, I think that’s a good way to put it. The book is a homage. I am otherwise if not for all of the characters and events in my life. Mrs. Nussbaum’s monkey is a great example of this. She had a monkey, and that was that. No one thought twice. We spoke of this earlier. The community was all there was. I know that sounds provincial, and I guess it is. This place and its people—we— swell in my flesh and heart. I learned to live here. We were all, for the most part, just people trying to figure it out. Especially as kids. Learning to pick teams at the park. Playing some made-up game in the street. Knowing Mr. Walters sometimes drank too much. Knowing if you didn’t help Mrs. Rectenwald with her groceries that was wrong. Getting your ass beat because Rocco Magrino could. Listening to the records in Big Guy and Rogue’s house because no one was home. The veteran’s parade. Fireworks in the park. The five-and-dime and the ring I bought Miley. My father, his radio, and his box of war stuff he kept locked up. Thomas’s drug store. The A&P. Johnny Horseley, Clarence Waldschmidt, Victor Verzi, Jeff Clement, Jiggers, Flash, Nubs. The flame of the mills. Mount Washington with the clouds touching us and the neon ALCOA sign changing colors, lighting the world one way then another. I am obliged to love this, to show you this—We Are Lucky, We Are.
Hear Lehner read the poem “Thin Silence” from Mrs. Nussbaum’s Monkey
