Interview

by Michael Quattrone

In the fall of 2024, Michael Quattrone of The Westchester Review conducted an asynchronous interview with poet John Murillo. This is an edited excerpt of their conversation. 

MQ: Hello, John! Thank you again for agreeing to chat with me during a busy academic season at your new post at Hunter College. Can you share about your new position? How are you settling in?

JM: It’s still very new, so I don’t have much to go on. But so far, so good. My colleagues have welcomed me warmly.  And after commuting across state lines for over a decade, it’s great to finally be living and working in the same city. I imagine I’ll have more time to write once I truly settle in. All good things. 

MQ: I imagine the responsibilities of teaching compete for your writing time. Are there ways that mentorship and being in community with younger writers feed your writing, too?

JM: I’ve been teaching for quite some time now and, over the years, have had the good fortune of meeting some beautiful human beings. Many of them students with whom I am not only still in contact but hold close. And while I can’t say, honestly, that these relationships have fed my writing, they have been a source of great joy. And maybe even inspiration. The inspiration, though, has less to do with the writing of poems as with how I move through the world and the behaviors I try to model. Like my own mentors before me, I hope to serve as an example of integrity, seriousness, and devotion to this thing we love and live for. It’s a privilege to mentor, to teach. I love doing it. But, no. Nothing that takes time, attention, or energy from writing feeds writing. We tell each other that, right? It’s all part of it. You’re always writing, even if you’re never writing! It makes us feel good about our binge watching and partygoing, but it doesn’t help us do the work. Students, mentees, friends. Laughter, music, bread. All good, maybe even necessary for living. But it ain’t the work.

MQ: What are you working on right now? What subjects or forms have your attention?

JM: As always, just working on the next line. As for what has my attention, of late I’ve become obsessed with the short, associative lyric. Possibly because so much of what I’ve done has been in the long form narrative and lyric-narrative modes. We’ll see how much of this works its way into my own writing, but as a reader I’m all in.

MQ: I was fortunate enough to attend a poetry workshop you gave last summer at the Fine Arts Work Center. It was titled “Cut, Scratch, & Blend: Revision as Remix.” What called you to offer a class on what you described as “radical revision”?

JM: I actually took a workshop on radical revision myself at FAWC a couple decades ago, taught by Carl Phillips. It opened up a world for me. Ways into, through, and out of poems; how to play and risk and enjoy the process and journey of making. The work is still hard, the attitude serious, but there is also a lot of joy to be experienced along the way. The joy of discovery, of improvisation, of surprising oneself with one’s own resourcefulness, one’s own inventiveness. What’s more, teaching radical revision has given me the opportunity to reconsider my own pedagogy, to question traditional workshop models and methods.

MQ: I especially appreciated the way you encouraged us to practice craft for its own sake. In fact, you structured the class specifically so we would not be writing toward publication. Why is that important? 

JM: We hear it all the time, this old saw about how life, art, success, etc., is about the journey and not the destination.  Trust the process and the rest will take care of itself” and all that.  It’s corny, it’s cliché. But like most corny clichés, it contains at least a kernel of truth. Because here’s the thing: Publication is easy. Anyone can, and everyone does, publish. If you haven’t yet, you think doing so will bring you satisfaction, maybe even something like happiness. And maybe it does… at first. But whatever happiness is to be found in publication is short-lived. Anti-climactic like a motherfucker. You see your name in print, you hold your book in hand (maybe while shooting one of those cringey ass unboxing videos, "Oh my god, she’s here!”) and then? Kudos? Self-satisfaction? That’s cool, but it isn’t joy. At least, not to my mind.

But to write a good poem?  Or, rather, to get caught up in the play and process of making, to get deep in the weeds of a poem, draft after draft, and try to work your way toward something worth saving? To struggle and to give your whole self over to the struggling . . .  to go to bed thinking about a stanza, to wake up still thinking about it? To be learning new ways always and to know there is no end to the learning?  To be present and open and receptive and alive . . . does it get any better than this?

MQ: On the last day of class, you acknowledged that what we do as poets is "soulwork." Would you say more about that?  

JM: I don’t remember that moment exactly, but I imagine what I meant had to do with what I just described. Remember your Rilke and his Book of Hours: “When I go toward you it is with my whole life.” He was speaking to God, of course.  But I believe the “you” of that sentence to be less important than what follows. Total devotion. Body, soul. To give the whole self over to something that is not yourself. I ask, again, does it get any better?

JOHN MURILLO

John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie, finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award, and finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and the NAACP Image Award.  His other honors include the Four Quartets Prize from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award from St. Mary’s College of Maryland, two Pushcart Prizes, two Larry Neal Writers Awards from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, an NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, The New York Times, Cave Canem, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.  Forthcoming publications include Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters, and Poems For and About One Mr. Komunyakaa, coedited with his wife, the poet Nicole Sealey, and forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press; and Concerning the Angels, his translation of Ralphael Alberti’s poems, forthcoming from Four Way Books in spring 2025.  Recently, he served as associate professor of English and director of creative writing at Wesleyan University, where he founded with Wesleyan University Press, The Cardinal Poetry Prize, the first ever book prize for poets 40 and over.  He is a professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College.

Michael Quattrone is the author of Rhinoceroses (New School Chapbook Award, 2006). His work is included in The Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner, 2008) and The Incredible Sestina Anthology (Write Bloody, 2013). Recent poems appear in Poet Lore, New York Quarterly, and Salamander. Michael lives in Tarrytown, New York, where he serves on the board of the Hudson Valley Writers Center.