Q&A with Walt McDonald
 

~DARRYL TIPPENS~

EVIDENCE OF GRACE: AN INTERVIEW 
WITH WALT MCDONALD

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The following interview was completed August 6, 1999.

Darryl Tippens:
You are a successful and prolific poet by any standard, having published over 1,800 poems, many in the nation's most prestigious journals.  Yet your calling to write came rather late in life.  What prompted you to start writing poems in the late 1960's?

Walt McDonald:
A few years ago, my wife and I bumped into an old friend from the Air Force.  He asked me why I started writing.  We had been talking about years ago when we flew together ÷ the dog fights in the sky, night flights under stars and in bad weather, the thunderstorms we had flown around, and through.  I said maybe some of all of that turned me to poems.  I came to poetry late, though, as a middle-aged Air Force pilot.  After some of my friends went off to Vietnam, and one was shot down, then another, I felt a need to say something to them, or about them.  I had been writing fiction for years, and I turned to poems when nothing else worked; my first stumbling attempts were like letters to or about the dead.  Flying, and a war I went to briefly, are two of about five regions that I keep prowling; they're my background, part of what I am.

Tippens:
Poets compose and publish as they are driven by various daemons ÷ economic need; the fire of inspiration; moral necessity; the desire to entertain or legislate; vanity.  Do you write out of some particular need?  Are you on a search or a quest for something, to do something?

McDonald:
I write out of a paradox of needs: the enormous hope of discovery and the continual pleasures of play.  A failed novelist (I wrote six before turning to poems), I write for the pleasure of playing with words and finding stories in poems.  I write to discover, to follow an image and see what story I can spin from it, what tale develop.  Poetry is one of the activities in this fleeting world that brings me joy.  It is not a "popular" sport; but at its best, poetry is an ideal, a secular term reserved for the best and brightest in life.  A local spot promotion for the College of Architecture talks about the poetry of beautiful buildings.  Of football great Joe Montana, I've heard it said on TV, "When he was in a playoff game, he was like poetry."

Tippens:
To whom is the poet responsible?  When you write, to whom or to what do you feel an obligation?

McDonald:
As a Christian, why do I write?  I'm as vulnerable to vanity as Solomon and any buddy I know, often "Desiring this man's art and that man's scope," as Shakespeare said.  I go back to the book for assurance that working with words is all right, even a good thing to do: "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might."  I take heart from Paul's advice: "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord."  After his conversion, John Berryman wrote, "Father Hopkins said the only true literary critic is Christ. Let me lie down exhausted, content with that" [#10 of "Eleven Addresses to the Lord"].

Tippens:
You are not widely recognized as a "Christian poet."  Is that a good thing?  Does avoiding such a designation allow you to "fly under the radar" of secular editors, critics and readers who have a low tolerance for anything religious?

McDonald:
No, it's not a good thing.  The foundation of all my work is Christ; not one poem would have come without that rock.  But now, grappling with your question, I wonder if I was wrong not to make that apparent somehow from the start.  It never occurred to me to explain two decades ago that everything I wrote was an aspect of my "awful rowing toward God," to borrow Sexton's phrase.  I simply took for granted that whatever I did was his.  I've never tried to "fly under the radar," but only dozens of my 1,800 published poems have been in Christian journals such as America, The Christian Century, Christianity and Literature, The Cresset, Ellipsis: Literature and Art, First Things, Image, Inklings, The Lamp-Post, Literature & Belief, Mars Hill Review, Presbyterian Record (Canada), Radix Magazine, and Windhover.  Other poems with obvious Christian or Bible allusions have been in journals such as The Antioch Review, The Atlantic, Carolina Quarterly, College English, The Dalhousie Review (Canada), The Florida Review, The Missouri Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, Tar River Poetry, TriQuarterly, and Windsor Review (Canada).
    If Iâve done more poems in recent years with obvious ardor and affirmation of faith, it's probably because I'm able to accept the grace that I had felt for decades I had to earn. Lately, texts I read for decades begin to make sense.  "Throw all your worries on him, for he cares for you" (I Peter 5).

Tippens:
W.H. Auden once claimed that "there can no more be a ÎChristianâ art than there can be a Christian science or a Christian diet.  There can only be a Christian spirit in which an artist, a scientist, works or does not work."  Is Auden right or do you see your poems as forms of "Christian art"?

McDonald:
I feel like Paul in Romans 7:14-25 — completely dependent on grace.  All of my poems grow out of faith, whether set in my native West Texas or our other adopted home in the Rockies, in Air Force cockpits, or Vietnam.  None would be what they are without the habit of mind, the profession of faith I make daily.  I've never thought of myself as a chronicler of a region or apologist for a way of life.  I'm open to the facts of my life and the regions I know, but I don't set out to record them, or to argue for a creed.  The way I write precludes that — a poem at a time, discovering the game of the poem as I go along, finding whatever intrigues me.  A friend told me he can't stop writing about Vietnam and wishes he could — but war poems keep coming.  I can't squeeze off the flow of war poems, either — although I never set out to write about Vietnam or the guilt of surviving, or saving grace.  I never set out to write about a locale, a person, or an experience of any kind.  Whatever appeals, whatever comes to the fingertips onto the keyboard, I work with.  Whatever my hands find to do, I do it with all my might.

Tippens:
Many artists of faith have wrestled with the relationship of doctrine or dogma on the one hand, and the calling of art on the other.  Chesterton, for example, argued that poetry is not prayer.  And C. S. Lewis maintained that "the salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world."  How do you handle this tension between faith and art?  Do poetry and prayer live harmoniously within your soul, or are they rough-and-tumble neighbors?

McDonald:
I think Lewis was absolutely right.  I've heard that Faulkner claimed Keatsâs ode is worth "half a dozen little old ladies."  I believe the radically opposite is true: I believe Christ died for the worst of us, not for even the most splendid poems or sculptures or symphonies in the world — not for all of Keatsâs odes, not even for Beethovenâs "Ode to Joy."  I think Chesterton is right, also; poetry is not prayer — although prayer is daily and necessary sustenance for me and has been in every good thing Iâve ever done — flying, teaching, writing, raising babies.  I wouldn't want to start or finish work without prayer.  I have three children and seven grandchildren; if not one of them reads anything Iâve ever written, I'll not be bothered.  Prayer, though — salvation — that's what I long for, for all of my darlings.  For everyone.

Tippens:
What is the relation between your need to fashion words and your love of the Word?  Is your calling to manipulate language in any sense a product of your love of God, the Logos?

McDonald:
What does poetry do?  What is it for?  A good poem expresses some of the splendor we all need.  As James Dickey said of Roethke, "When you read him, you realize with a great surge of astonishment and joy that, truly, you are not yet dead."  Good literature is richly entertaining, a "moveable feast" — stunning, sometimes, and wonderful.  But none of the worldâs best poems or stories or films offers lasting hope, an actual escape from the traps of sin and fear and death.  Only "the greatest story ever told" does that, for disciples.  When did words first interest me?  I think back to my earliest memories of language, my earliest thrills over words.  I must have been three or four, no more than five: I was allowed to visit my Grandmother no more than once a day.  She lay in bed, propped up, and read to me from a big book the most amazing stories — Samson; Daniel in the lions' den; and a boy named David who grew up to be king — and I was hooked on language a year before I knew she was lying there dying of cancer.
    Then, in the first grade, Miss Crump brought a man to class — a man in buckskin, in moccasins without socks, a huge feather-headdress that fell all the way to the floor.  That man began telling stories, and I had never heard such things.  Magic!  Like all the others in that winter classroom, I sat there hearing amazing tales, thrilled out of my mind, believing every word.  I don't even know his name.  But I'll never forget the splendor of it all.

Tippens:
Your recent poetry seems to express more openly the quest for — and the mystery of — faith.  For example, in Blessings the Body Gave, you write that "what matters / is timeless dazzling devotion . . . the darkness beyond" ("The Waltz We Were Born For").  Do you recognize a change of emphasis in your own work?  Are transcendent concerns more pronounced in your recent works?

McDonald:
I think "the quest for — and the mystery of — faith" has been there all along, but devastatingly so, at times — a sort of begging for mercy.  In my first few collections, some of the more obvious examples of the quest are "The Cave" (Caliban in Blue); "Mirror Image" (Working Against Time); "Goliath, Night before Battle" (Anything, Anything); "Wrestling with Angels" (One Thing Leads to Another); and "Hauling Over Wolf Creek Pass in Winter" (The Flying Dutchman).  I expressed that need for faith more directly in "Seining for Carp" (The Flying Dutchman); "Charts," and the title poem in Counting Survivors; and "For God in My Sorrows" (Blessings the Body Gave).  If the healing mystery of faith is more pronounced in the last decade or so — and I think youâre right — maybe itâs because I have more of a feeling of grace, lately; for example, "Faith Is a Radical Master" — the poem that ends my 1999 book (Whatever the Wind Delivers).  Donne said, "All occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons" (John Donne, LXXX Sermons, 3, preached on Christmas Day, 1625).

Tippens:
Setting is central to much of your poetry.  You told Christopher Woods in a 1986 interview that "region" does not have to mean "geography," for it can signify "an attitude, or a posture towards certain events."  This seems to agree with Emily Dickinsonâs poem that to make a prairie one needs "reverie" more than clover or a bee.  In what sense is your art built upon a particular region?

McDonald:
Every poem is a metaphor of how it feels to someone to be alive at that time, at that place.  I didn't write many poems before I came back from Vietnam, so I may be wrong; but I think that's what poems become.  I discover poems from the regions I own ÷ or that own me.  I think a writer finds at least one region to keep coming back to.  It may be a place — Robert Frost's New England, for example, or James Wright's Ohio, or Eudora Weltyâs Mississippi; or in my case, Texas.  A poet keeps prowling a certain region until he or she begins to settle it, homestead and live on it, and eventually own it.  What we see is part of what we become.  I never worry about finding subjects or running out of poems.  The subjects come; it's just that simple.
    If my regions happen to be on actual maps, that's coincidental.  For example: I called my twelfth collection The Digs in Escondido Canyon — but "Escondido Canyon" is a place only in the sense that itâs a region in my mind, and in some of my poems.  There may well be one or more actual canyons by that name, but none that Iâve written about.
    Poems are little fictions, as freely invented as short stories are — at least the way I write, they are — and Escondido is one of dozens of places I've made up, adapted from dozens of landscapes I've seen and imagined.  Escondido: I don't remember when I first tinkered with the word, but probably I liked the sound, the taste of the sounds in the context of a poem; also, I liked the meaning, "hidden" canyon, something that has to be looked for, on the plains.  It's part of the imagined terrain of Texas that I keep prowling for images.  The canyon I had in mind is on no map, other than one that changes from poem to poem; I couldn't drive you to a spot and say "Thereâs the hidden canyon I wrote about."

Tippens:
Kathleen Norris and others have suggested that the Plains are a kind of empty space particularly suited to encounters with the Spirit.  In other words the prairie is a place where "desert spirituality" can flourish as it did in ancient times.  You have called the Plains "heavenâs tableland."  This hardscrabble, flat land is "where heaven starts," you write.  It is "suddenly fabulous," you say in one of your poems. Does this landscape inspire a kind of "desert spirituality"?

McDonald:
For several years, Colorado was our garden of Eden.  But after the war, we left it for the strangeness of flat Texas plains where we had grown up — those hauntingly wide horizons, the splendor of it all.  T.S. Eliot said, "The essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory."
    When my first book was published — mainly early poems about Vietnam — Donald Justice asked, "Where's Texas in your poems, Walt?"  I didn't know; I had never thought about it.  But I started looking around and, sure enough, I began to feel the call of that wild, semi-arid West Texas that I knew better than I knew Iowa and Colorado, better than Vietnam.  For years, I had not considered this world to be my home.  But when I let down my bucket in a plains region doomed to dry up, I found all sorts of water, all sorts of poems, even if I could live to write for forty years in this suddenly fabulous desert.

Tippens:
Considering your recent collection of poems, Blessings the Body Gave, I wonder if you are at heart a sacramentalist or an incarnationalist.  Many of your poems center on experiences in nature — on the ranch, in the Rocky Mountains, fishing, camping, etc.  Does your earnest and passionate attention to the material creation lead you to invisible realities?  Do you locate the holy or the transcendent in particular things, particular locations?

McDonald:
Maybe both, inconsistently.  I couldn't settle any debate.  Poems, for me, are "made things," made of sensuous details, the more vivid the better.  But I don't find either God or the devil in the details — only the evidence of grace, and the squalor and waste of evil.  My poem "Tornado Chasing" (All That Matters: The Texas Plains in Photographs and Poems) was only about some guy chasing a tornado — or at least thatâs what the start of the first draft seemed to be.  Once I found that voice, that cowboy out chasing tornadoes, I rode along, trusting (with a happy faith that goes with writing any poem) that whatever we found would be worth the journey.
    Starting the poem, I didn't know I would find evidence of supernatural "force" halfway to Plainview, but accepted it gratefully, like all writing, as a gift.  Louis Simpson said the aim of poetry "is to make words disappear."  I see, I remember thinking, when I saw the tornado emerge through words on the monitor, developing like film in a darkroom:

        They [People watching weather on TV]
        know the force
        I follow, the vacuum of black funnels
        in flashes. They gasp like me
        and breathe the name of God.

    When I came to that last line, I felt I didn't need to say another word.  The "force" I follow seldom leads me directly to words I expect to last, but always, I hope, to the Word.

Tippens:
Considering your life story (birth into a modest home on the Plains, your Protestant/evangelical heritage, your career in the Air Force; your late entry into writing and publishing, etc.) — do you now see these factors as helpful or harmful to your mission as a writer?

McDonald:
Afriend taught me to claim my own regions, which are all I'll ever have of God's plenty on this earth.  There's an old saying: "If Texas is your region, it's your region."  So I write about what I know, about what intrigues me — family, and my native region, flying, the Rocky Mountains where we lived for years, and still, sometimes, a war.  This way of writing works for me, and so I'll ride it the way I would ride an only, ugly horse — as far as it will take me.
    I grew up in West Texas, and regional images and Biblical echoes are in my blood; I grew up with a Christian heritage and embraced it as an adult, and it's simply there somewhere in me, evolving — I hope — from faith to faith.  I never set out to write a "religious" poem as part of decades of struggle.  My wife and I are in another Christian fellowship, now, rather than the one of our youth, and I've found a richer sense of assurance; but I doubt that I'm any less productive than those first years of work.  I believe that more songs of joy come, though.
    When we write stories and poems from our own regions, I think we find what we really want to say.  I look back from time to time and admit gladly that I've been doing the best I can do, prowling my regions ÷ sometimes my deepest obsessions and desires, sometimes the most haunting memories of my life.

Tippens:
What is the relationship between autobiography and your poetry?

McDonald:
Emily Dickinson said, "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant."  I like what the dictionary calls a poem ÷ "a made thing" (think of that: a made-up thing).  Always, I'm writing poems, not autobiography.  In the sense that poems expose some of my interests, obsessions, the regions of the mind I keep prowling, sure.  But almost only in that sense.  Some details are closer to the facts of my life than others, and biographical criticism assumes a mirror between art and life.  But it isn't so.
    I'm not there, frank and undisguised, in a poem or a short story.  Experience is valuable for what it is; then the writing takes over.  The persona is there, but not the actual person I was, or what I did — not the actual pilot, or a real boy leaping from trees.  I write to find something I didn't know I would find.  A friend asked me not long ago if all those uncles in my poems are really my uncles.  He grinned, aware it was like the naive query, "Is that a real poem or did you just make it up?"  Half wisecrack, the way friends talk, I said, "Yes, every one of them — and I can't wait to invent some more."
    Every poem is an invention, a made (and made-up) thing.  That's the wonder of writing poems, for me: every poem is personal, yes — but every poem is also a persona poem, a little fiction.  When I teach a Bible class, I never lie; when I write, I lie all the time.  When I ran across what James Dickey said about the possibilities of "the lie" — invention and metaphor and voice ÷ I felt thrilled that what I had been doing on my own seemed somehow extremely valid.  As far as I'm concerned, Dickey was right, and his insights are brilliant.  (Dickey's book: Self Interviews.)
    When the persona is there in a poem, and the mask is in place, the lyric and narrative can work; but the actual person I am is not there in the poem, or what I did.  Nothing could matter less. My task as a writer is to try writing so vividly that readers will feel it was this way, had to be this way, it was sure enough this way for them, when they read the poem.  I think the duty of a writer is to be interesting and clear, and in that sense to build a bridge — but it's a bridge between a poem that feels real and the reader, not between the poet's real life and the reader.
    Poetry is not autobiography, but art; not merely facts of actual lives, but invention; not confession, but creation.  Creative writing means discovery of poems we wouldn't have found if we hadn't begun to write.  If we rely only on facts that "really happened," we're limiting ourselves, writing only with "the left brain."  We might come up with a poem, but it's like trying to drill for oil with a cork screw, like trying to dig for gold with a plastic spoon, like searching for Noah's lost ark or the wreckage of Amelia Ehrhart's plane by reading essays about them.
    There's a difference between writing accurately about facts and events that "really happened" vs. imaginative or creative writing.  I believe in the possibilities of discovery, the rich and undiscovered oil fields and gold mines of the imagination — that reservoir of all we've ever experienced, heard about, or read, seen in movies, or glimpsed, all of it jumbled together and waiting to be found.
    Down there ÷ buried inside us ÷ are regions we haven't touched for years or decades, or ever, except in hopes or dreams or nightmares.  Those are the bits and remnants of all we've taken in — the lost cities of Atlantis, the elephants' graveyard, the forgotten playgrounds and bone yards of our lives.  Down there under the pressure and heat of living are the images we need for making poems ÷ some of them already diamonds, most of them coal waiting to stoke the furnace  —  and gushers of oil that would drive our imaginations' engines longer than we could write.

Tippens:
Your early work reflects a considerable awareness of your predecessors, various "precursor" poets like Eliot, Whitman, Roethke, Frost, Jarrell, and Dickey among many others.  Have you consciously and deliberately moved away from these literary "fathers"?  What writers today do you most admire?

McDonald:
Except for graduate school, I've been a random reader.  I'm excited by poems and stories, rather than by writers.  Looking back, though, I know that some have influenced me because of the joy I found in so much of their work: James Dickey, Richard Hugo, James Wright, Theodore Roethke — and other poets with strong imagery and stories and sense of driving rhythm and powerful, compelling sounds.  Earlier writers I admired even before trying to write poems were Frost and Whitman; Hemingway and Faulkner; Tennyson and Robert Browning; Donne, Hopkins, and Yeats; Steinbeck, Joseph Heller, and Thomas Wolfe.
    Decades ago, someone told me that T. S. Eliot was the poet; so when I began trying to write poems, I assumed that was the way it was done, and struggled along under a yoke of literary allusion.  My crude understanding of the art was to blame.  Reading widely in contemporary poetry gave me the excitement by the mid-1970's to get started toward how I write now.  I served as poetry editor for the Texas Tech University for twenty years, read journals voraciously, and loved every month.  In the last two decades, I've discovered with wonder hundreds of amazing poets; what a rich time to be alive.

Tippens:
Is there a connection between style, idea and place in your work?  I wonder: If Frank Lloyd Wright could fashion a "prairie style" in architecture and design, could there be an equivalent "prairie style" in writing?  Do you see yourself as crafting a particular style?  (Perhaps we could call it "hardscrabble" and "plains-spoken"?)

McDonald:
Writing is not a natural act, but has to be learned and practiced.  I remind myself to appeal to the senses.  I like words that sound natural, but juxtaposed to surprise or shock or delight.  Words of many syllables are weak, like swinging at a baseball with a willow switch.  The power of poems is in the single-syllable words, and vivid specific images ÷ not in vague, intellectualized abstractions.  Abstractions are easy to say, and usually flat.
    There's a difference between language that is utilitarian — merely for information ÷ and language that tries to pack the maximum pleasure in the words. Utilitarian language is explosive — useful but going outward and gone, like a puff of smoke (e.g., yesterday's newspaper, or instructions for assembling a toy).  Emotional language is implosive (e.g., poetry, fiction, and powerful non-fiction prose).  Emotional language doubles back on itself, or implodes, for maximum pleasure — sounds, rhythms, images that conjure our deepest emotions.  The best writers do that again and again, like good batters in the major leagues.

Tippens:
You once cited A. E. Housman's dictum that poetry is not the thing said, but a way of saying.  Is this to elevate form over content?  You are paying increasing attention, so it seems, to the feast of sounds (internal rhyme, assonance, alliteration, etc.)  Are you moving away from ideas to formal properties of poetry?  What is the relation of form to idea?

McDonald:
As a reader, I respond more to a lean, hard-driving or compelling rhythm that's almost accentual (Hopkins' "spring rhythm" is an extreme and brilliant example) than to a dull use of traditional meters laden with abstractions as filler and with forced or tired rhymes.  But ah, when English prosody works, what a wonder.
    I began in traditional meter, then spent years trying to muscle-up the kinds of free verse I liked to read.  In recent years, I've worked about half and half on rhyme and unrhymed poems.  In rhymed poems, I'm trying to keep the strength and ease of free-verse rhythms, although I work often with traditional forms, also — including sonnets and villanelles — learning the craft from the beginning, in a sense.  I'm still tinkering with rhyme and meter, adapting, working hard and often with joy.
    Rhythm is important, and clanging or soothing sounds — but most of all, in a few syllables I need more than catalogs, more than facts; I need to be stunned.  The best poems yoke images together in unexpected ways — flints struck together to make fire.  Such discoveries are the delights that a poem can give — a resonance that lingers, and that — in the best poems — takes our breath away.
    At the start, I don't worry about the taste of words or the feel of rhythm.  Writing first drafts is a wild adventure, and I'm just trying to spook up a poem, trying to lasso something curious and gripping to drag kicking and screaming back to the screen.  Later is time enough to trade and whittle words, trying to find the "right word, not its second cousin."  I labor a lot; indulgence is always a temptation: that is, lowering my standards, my goals — being easy on myself, winking at mediocre lines, thinking, "That's good enough."  I try to slam abstractions down, and stomp them; kick, stab them to death, and gouge out their eyes.  If they still crawl up my legs and bless me like the air I breathe, then I let them stay.
    I do the same for awkward line breaks, easy adverbs and neutral nouns; I hold a poem to the fire and try to burn away all chaff, all that isn't poem.  Rewriting is like tinkering with an old outboard motor that won't crank, just coughs and sputters; sometimes, I take whole stanzas apart and put them back in the poem, tugging the cord until at last it starts.
    I'm sometimes asked, "Do poems in forms have to pay as much attention to line breaks, content, and diction as 'free-verse' poems do?"  In other words, "What standards do you hold formal poems to — in terms of line breaks, significance, and intensity of language?"  Well, the answers are simple: the same high standards, the same impossible goals, in terms of intensity, rhythm, and sounds; vivid and appropriate imagery; clarity; and resonance.  To aim for less is too easy.
    A villanelle already presumes that what it repeats, in a narrow, limited range, is worthwhile.  Every new sonnet promises it'll be worth our time, a new thing, new wine in old wineskins.  A long poem (whether meditative, narrative, or experimental, like "The Waste Land," "Howl," or "Middle Passage") already presumes a great deal on a reader's time.  If anything, a formal poem, or a long poem, should be more intense, better crafted, than a poem of ten irregular lines that don't rhyme.
    What would we say to someone who justifies an awkward line break by protesting, "But this is a sonnet!"  Pound said, "A poem should be at least as well written as good prose."  Yes, and I think a sonnet should be at least as well written as good free verse.  How would we respond to a dude who refuses to pay his taxes because he's buying a Rolex; or robs a convenience store or mugs a little old lady, and protests, "But I need the money for a parking meter" or "to enter the good-citizen contest"?  There comes a time when the end doesn't justify the means.

Tippens:
Someone has said that at its core all poetry is elegiac.  Particularly through war, you have sustained many losses.  You have written, "I am old enough to value / loss" ("The Winter They Bombed Pearl Harbor").  You have also cited Faulkner's point that the writer has only one story to tell. Is loss your one story?

McDonald:
Isn't loss everyone's story, after Eden?  I think it was James Wright who said, "Everything we write turns into elegy."   Consider Hemingway's stories, Faulkner's, Hamlet, or King Lear.  Solomon said there's nothing new under the sun. How many of us have claimed what the old songs say — and meant it — "I'll be loving you, always" — even though we know, as Robert Frost said, that "Nothing gold can stay."
    Maybe it's true — "Everything we write turns into elegy."  It may be a simple lyric — about joy so intense we wish we could keep it forever.  It may be about grandparents, or children, or dead pilots, or friends missing in action.  Maybe it's music by Mozart, or a painting by Rubens or Rembrandt about someone so lovely it breaks your heart ÷ maybe a model, like Rembrandt's wife Saskia, who died long before the artist.  In my poem "Rembrandt and the Art of Mercy" (in Counting Survivors), I wrote, "What he loved and pitied most was flesh / that's caught but never saved by canvas."
    By having "only one story to tell," I don't mean being a Johnny-one-note; I doubt that Faulkner meant it to limit us, either.  Rather, I believe all writers are "limited" to the exciting capacities of what and who they are.  "I gotta million of 'em," good story tellers say.  There must be that many twists and variations on the one and only story each writer could tell.  Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks (Matt. 12).  Some people, for whatever reasons, mock or parody or satirize a variety of writers they despise; but ridicule probably reveals more about the scorners' hearts than the art or artlessness of the ones they attack.  If we're the offspring of Adam and Eve, we're also kin to Cain.  "I am a part of all that I have met," Tennyson's Ulysses said.  I believe what we want to write is already here, inside of us ÷ and what we write says something about what and who we are.

Tippens:
In "Was" from Caliban in Blue you describe a set of photographs of your children, "delicate pictures" which "stun [you] cold / with love."  Love, especially love of family, seems particularly pervasive in your works.  Are you also a "love poet" of sorts?

McDonald:
If any label fits, I would more gladly wear that than any others.  I love flying, a matter of life or death; but a good story or poem gives pleasures I find nowhere else.  But not nearly as much joy as holding hands with my wife in the park, or bending down to lift one of my granddaughters above my head and feel her hug my neck.  I know the difference between a poem and a person.
    Carol and I were kids when Franklin D. Roosevelt died in April 1945, and we had thought what an old, old man he was.  A couple of years ago, watching a documentary on President Roosevelt's life, Carol and I realized with a shock that we were now exactly the age that Roosevelt was when he died.  That night, we held hands a little longer; it goes so fast.  Life is grass, stunningly brief ÷ but abundant in so many ways.

Tippens:
You seem to face squarely the dark side of the human condition.  "We are such / stuff as jackals feed / on" you write. Yet the fact of evil ÷ the sheer hardness of life — does not seem to extinguish the possibility of joy.  How is this possible?  Is theodicy, the problem of evil, an important question for you?

McDonald:
Itake the conditions of evil as fact.  Paul quoted Psalm 44 in his letter to Rome: "We face death all the day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered."  But what enormous need and hope he combines in the context: "In all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us."
    Happy poems ÷ upbeat, affirmative — have come during times of crisis; and haunted poems, the darker glimpses, have come some days when I was giddy or even just staying alive, when nothing particularly good or ill was happening to me.  Yes, certainly the problem of evil is an important question for me.  I admire those who face the facts, wherever they are, and cope.  Those who overcome the everyday with simple faith are my heroes, also.  There is a beauty, a splendor almost everywhere, and sometimes even I can find it.

Tippens:
You are a professor as well as a poet.  How has the teaching of creative writing affected your calling as a writer?

McDonald:
One of the pleasures I enjoy as a writer who teaches is watching students discover with delight some of the best poems they've ever read, or written.  That's why I got into this work, to begin with.  As a young pilot, when I applied to teach English at the Air Force Academy, all I wanted to do was hang around some of the best-used language in the world, some of the most moving, exciting words I'd ever heard — and to share them with others.
    I feel lucky that for a little while, before the golden bowl breaks and the silver cord snaps, I get to hang around words and see what happens — my students' words, and words that spin off my own fingertips.  We've all seen students make amazing discoveries in words.  As teachers, we get to be there when it happens.  What writer doesn't want to move us to tears or chills or hugs or laughter?   What writing teacher doesn't want to pass along a thrill like that?

Tippens:
Do your own poems ever surprise you?  Are they ever "revelations" to you?

McDonald:
Always.  What keeps me going back to the keyboard day after day is a simple faith that words will show me the way.  For a while, I feel totally ignorant; I have no idea what's coming.  I like that silence: I can feel hair rise on my neck when I type a phrase that intrigues me — a sense of immediate complicity, as if the words and I are up to something.
    Frost understood the wonder of discovery.  "No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."  He said it's a false poem, it's no poem at all if it knows the ending before it starts; he said a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom; he said a poem is like ice on a hot stove — it proceeds on its own melting.  Of course we don't have to listen to him, God rest his soul, for he's dead.  But I think he was right.
    Writing is always discovery ÷ at least, that's the only way I can do it — and I never know what I'll find.  Until I'm into a first draft (sometimes only a line, sometimes many lines), I never know if I'll be writing about hunting or flying or about holding a joyful grandchild high overhead.  I'm curious, when I write, eager and willing to find some splendid secrets, hoping to make some sense of what I find — maybe something I've needed all my life, maybe something so awful I wonder how I'll ever deal with it.

Tippens:
Let us return to the place we began.  Do you feel a particular mission or mandate as a writer today?

McDonald:
I think of the late William Stafford's line on PBS: "I'd give up everything I've written for a new one, for a new writing experience. . . .  It feels so good to go through a succession of realizations through language, toward . . . what?  It's an adventure, an exploration, rather than crafting a predetermined object."   When I heard Stafford that day, the hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I said, "Yes, you said it."
    Someone claimed that writers are writers only when they are writing, and I believe that.  Therefore, no more summer school for me; I miss the money, but time is quicksilver.  Every spring and summer, I write as much as I can, and by August, I'm exhausted, but restored.  Every day is a gift.