Dialogue:
Michael Rogner and Christopher Shipman
Michael Rogner in response to Christopher Shipman’s “Occasional Poem [Atmospheric]” and “Occasional Poem [When we were]”
It’s no wonder foundational abecedarian poetry was developed by those in deep conversation with God. It’s a cheat code. Your mind slips into a rabbit hole and then tunnels sideways into other holes, and after you’ve wormed through enough of these (and in English navigated the tricky “x” problem), you rise bleary eyed and muddy, back in the sun, and your brain thinks you’ve communed with something outside yourself. Christopher Shipman’s fantastic “Occasional Poem” begins in the atmosphere, navigates through “God’s invitation to begin in mystery,” “Wordsworth’s lost childhood…” and “your love for Elvis,” before finishing where it began. Some of the lines here stun: “Your corner of the world wearing / dawn like an old coat lifted from a trunk.” “Why bother saying / nostalgia is for suckers if it’s often what / opposes a certain dark slithering, if it’s not what / promises to save us. Isn’t that its job?”
For me, when I begin a poem I immediately begin searching for a way out, which is another useful reason to write in form. The clock is ticking. You have the ball. Everyone knows when the buzzer will sound. I haven’t spoken to Christopher about process – I only have his poems – but it’s clear form fits him. The speaker feels both relaxed and amped, giving us glimpses into something personal, combining specificity with lines that seem to be entering the world unannounced, and loops time and again to something we could call religion. It’s really good….
….then I got to the second “Occasional Poem.” Holy shit. I don’t want to clutter this thing with analysis. Just read the poem. It’s all there.
I’m reading this thing through the lens of my stage IV cancer diagnosis. Back when life was easy and I walked in blissful darkness, I never thought about running out of time and specifically how much would be left unsaid in this world. This is the joy and independence of not having children. Were I a father, this fear of the unsaid might be internalized to such a degree I couldn’t imagine other paths. But life was easy. Everything was golden. And then that thing happened. Now I think about this constantly. I think of my wife, and am desperate to find ways to help her if I’m not around.
In “Occasional Poem” there’s a nine-year-old daughter, and the speaker says “at some unknown point / down the jeweled chain that connects every quivering / event, maybe you’ll stumble into this poem / as if into a room” and instantly I feel a connection to that wanting that I probably would have glossed over in an earlier life, which to me – that trigger, like stepping into a stranger’s home and smelling your beloved grandparents living room from 30-years ago – is the whole point of this bizarre art form. “In one dark corner or another you might find / a question wrapped in colors as bright / as the sun. Holding the question by its feathery edges / maybe you’ll see yourself like I see you / now, in my imagination, standing where we gathered / at dusk.”
Like I said, it’s all there.
Christopher Shipman in response to Michael Rogner’s “Letter to Max” and “Annie Dillard Says to Write Like You’re Dying”
The opportunity to stumble upon a poet’s work that speaks to me in the ways that Michael Rogner’s work does is an opportunity ripe with wonder and a longing for wonder to never cease. I love a lot of poets and a lot of poems. After 25 years of reading and writing poetry in earnest, I am overwhelmed with gratitude to know that it still continues to save my life. At the risk of sounding insincere, I am grateful to say now that Rogner’s poems are among those that save my life. Neither of Rogner’s poems published in Ballast need to speak to me directly to speak to me directly. I’m not Max. I’m not Annie Dillard. It doesn’t hurt that I love the intimacy of the epistolary form—how it invites me to settle in—but these poems are also cinematic. Every image breathes with agency. There is a living closeness at work, even if the ascribed listener isn’t listening, that is akin to what Frank O’Hara might have filed under Personism. Frank loved going to the movies. And the images, pacing, and diction of Rogner’s poems create such a visual, emotionally resonant atmosphere that reading them is like reading short films in action. I actually misread the opening line of “Letter to Max” as “We open in a bookstore […]” rather than “When we open a bookstore […]” the first 10 times I read it. After many years I have come to understand that I look for three things in poems more than anything else: attention to the priority of the image, emotional resonance, and understated revelation. Rogner manages to accomplish all of this beautifully in his work. The result is that I am left flailing in the best way possible. Because, it turns out, I am Max. But I’m also the speaker questioning the void left in Max’s absence. I am Annie Dillard, but I am also the speaker, the speaker’s wife, and a rhythm guitarist from the 90s. I am a jazz drummer, a scientist, a bookstore owner, and a sick patient. I am sleeping in the snow. And I am waking. Best of all, I am me and I am every person I want to reach through time and space to hold so much more often than I am physically able. We should all be grateful that Rogner has afforded us all the wild wonder of that gift.
For each issue, ballast asks pairs of poets to read each other’s work and respond in some way. We hope these dialogues will sound the resonances contained within the issue as well as serve to foster a sense of interconnection and community among our authors.
If you’ve been published in a previous issue of ballast and would like to participate in a dialogue, please reach out to our editors at ballastjournal@gmail.com.