Poet Curtis Crisler is an instructor at Purdue Fort Wayne and, for the next two years, will serve as Indiana's Poet Laureate, tasked with representing poetry for the Hoosier state. (Ella Abbott / WBOI News)
Indiana chooses a poet to represent poetry in the state every two years. This year, Curtis Crisler began his term as Indiana Poet Laureate.
Crisler is a native of Gary, Indiana, who currently teaches at Purdue Fort Wayne. Crisler spoke about growing up in Indiana and how it’s affected his writing, beginning with his debut semi-autobiographical book of poems 'Tough Boy Sonatas,' to his new work ‘Doing Drive-Bys on How to Love in the Midwest,' which is available now.
He'll also be doing a reading at Hyde Brothers Books in Fort Wayne on Saturday from 5-7 p.m.
I want to start by congratulating you on being selected as a Indiana's Poet Laureate, how are you feeling about that?
Curtis Crisler: It's been a whirlwind, my life has changed so much in the sense that I'm kind of a low key person. Not anymore. So I've been on TV, and just to get through emails and texts, and phone calls has been crazy. And I'm still teaching. So it's kind of like, I have to teach too. I'm not a morning person. And everything has to be in the morning. So then they're taking pictures and I have bags under my eyes and I don't feel like- I just got three hours of sleep. And it's like, Okay, we'll do this. Yeah, it's, it's kind of cool, you know, to represent poetry for the state.
And what was the selection process like for you?
CC: This is my second time going through it. The first time I went through in 2020 it was more they got the questions to you, and then if they liked the questions, you went on to another round. It was still that, but this time, they had a Zoom, and I'm looking at, like, 15-20 people and it's like, wow okay! And everybody gets to, you know, ask questions and stuff. It was cool.
I thought I flubbed the last question. And so I was trying to get it out of my head. And I didn't want to have it in my head that 'what are they thinking about it?' So it was like 'aw, I flubbed the last question, so it's over.' And I talked to a friend of mine who was on a panel, and she's 'Oh, you'll be okay, whatever.' And then I started detecting 'What does she mean by that?' And then the director had said, 'Well, I want to have a call with you. I want to do a zoom call with you on a Friday, blah, blah, blah.' And I was like, okay, so then the internal stuff start coming. So I, I just wanted it out of my head. And then we had the meeting. And she said, 'Well, you're going to be the next Indiana poet laureate, if you so please.' And I was like, 'Yeah!' You know, so it was really cool. In a 10 year period, where my friend, my colleague, my mentor, George Kalamaras, was that I don't know if any school that had two poet laureates and so that's really, I think, unique. And hopefully, says something about our program.
On your poetry, I had a chance to read Tough Boy Sonatas, which paints this really interesting picture of young boys growing up in Gary. Can you tell me about the inspiration for that book, and how growing up in Indiana has affected your writing?
CC: Well, that was my thesis for grad school, it was the first time I had, I was in a place where I could just write and focus on that. Although I had to teach too and take two classes. My writing process is chaos, in a sense. And when I get down to addressing stuff, I just get so focused that I drown out all the white noise because I'm focused on what I'm writing. But in that place, I was able to do that for a long stint. So it was really a powerful time. I don't know how I got to the first image. But I just started thinking about where I came from. And each section that's in the book was actually the name of the book at one time.
So this everything that's happening with this book is happening out of me, being in that space in grad school, and coming up with images of my mother getting us out of the projects. And I think, LaRoy, that poem addresses that where she saw, it says something about she saw me 'spick-and-span' or something like that. She saw me clean. And she didn't get us out just because of me. But in the poem, it goes that way. And she got us out because she saw something in us, you know? But it's it's showing that trajectory of going from the Delaney projects, to the suburbs.
That kind of jumps me ahead a question. Related to that is that a theme that I've noticed in your poetry is is sort of like odes to mothers? Can you tell me about like, what makes you write so passionately about moms?
CC: Well, it's always about my mother, I think it's um... I'm trying to think one of the books George gave us and the author says, the voice that he hears in his head is the voice of his mother. And that's the voice that's in my head all the time because there was a time my mother and I had that it was us. I remember the night my sister was born. So, I was three and a half. I remember a time with my mom, before my sisters came. My mom is just there, her voice is in my head. I'm saying stuff that she says sometimes to my class, or classes, and 'oh my goodness, I'm sorry, I sound like my mom right now,' you know. And so I don't think I can get away from it.
It's so weird. So many people know my mother, because I talk about her because she's such a fabulous person and a character so to speak, that they know my mother before they even meet her. And so when they meet her like 'Oh, so, you're the one Curtis is always talking about.' So she's just this shining star in my life. Good, bad or indifferent. She's always been there. And so yeah, that's just the voice that's in one of those rooms in my head.
In Dreamist a recurring theme throughout the main character's story is death. His grandparents die early in the book, he contemplates the loss of friends from home, and at one point he does consider his own death. What made you want to ruminate on that in that story?
CC: It was weird, because all the poems are so disparated in the way that they are in and of themselves. But I brought them together for Malik. And I wrote a story around Malik. So, when he gets to Southern California, and he is unpacking and he finds the portrait book. It just starts, all the images start running back to him. And through those images, that's how he's writing the poems. So that book has the, you know, the prose and the poetry. And so I'm trying to fit, I tried to fit that together, as well as tell the narrative of his story. And I think what just what happens is, I never thought about death a lot, but death is always around me. The new book has a lot of life and death in it.
So I think I'm trying to answer questions for myself, or trying to get to questions in that book, you know. Death and life seem the same side of the coin. So you have that yin-yang aspect of things. But we always address life, life, life, we never think of death. When we think of death, we shrouded in this shadowy darkness and things like that. But you know, we do lose people, we lose our family members, we lose our friends and stuff like that. And so I wanted it to be a real showing of Malik's life and what he's seen and what he inhabits in his in his daily life.
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(Left) Crisler's debut collection, Tough Boy Sonatas, acts as both creative nonfiction and a tale of Crisler's upbringing in Gary, Indiana. While the poems follow several boys growing up in the projects, Crisler says, really all of them are a projection of himself.
(Middle) Crisler calls Dreamist a "mixed-genre novel." In it, a boy named Malik flips through a photo album while unpacking at college and revisits key moments from his life via the photos he finds.
(Right) Crisler dreamed up the idea for Don't Moan So Much (Stevie) following Michael Jackson's passing. Inside, the poems look at Motown, loss and what it means to be an icon through the eyes of Stevie Wonder. Crisler followed it up with another collection following Prince's passing, called The Grey Album.
In both Dreamist, and obviously, more specifically Don't Moan So Much (Stevie), there's call outs to some great musicians. What's been the impact of music on on your life and then ultimately, your writing?
CC: Well, the reason that dumb on so much Stevie came about was Michael Jackson died. And I was like, wow. Michael and the Jackson Five have been, or J-Five, have been soundtrack to my life. Then I thought about Stevie and Stevie has been the soundtrack to my life than I thought about Motown. Motown has been the soundtrack to my life. There has not been a day in my life there has not been Motown.
So in thinking about that, I was like, because I tell people when you know, what kind of music you like, I never say Motown because Motown is a default. It's always been there. So I always mentioned everything else and it's like 'what about Motown?' It's a given. Motown was there. So I didn't think anyone had written anything about Stevie. And I wanted to write something about him before he passed. So there's the poem in there that addresses Stevie thinking about Michael. But then when they came, because I had a whole nother aspect for the cover and stuff and it's like, 'Ah, now we can't do that, blah, blah, blah,' and all this. And that stock picture of Michael looking over Stevie's shoulder is kind of just played into the whole thing. And, so they did that and then they have the double exposure where you see Stevie, you know, over that as well. And it just opened up the whole aspect of looking at Stevie move from fingertips all the way to what he's doing now. And then it was another aspect of writing about what I call an urban Midwestern sensibility in Detroit. How Detroit had this, from the late 50s to the early 70s, basically, you're making cars. And when the cars come off the line, and people turn on a radio, they're turning on Motown. So the aspect of what Detroit was, is still to a certain extent, but it was a conglomerate to the African American experience in that sense. And I thought that was really powerful.
So I have hit like, the poem where Barry Gordy is talking, 'you need to be Stevie, you need to do your Stevie stuff.' And, you know, there's all these different things that I was just thinking about. And I just took out all my Stevie CDs and read everything in the liner notes and stuff like that, and looked up certain things, and found out the certain things about them. And then I just start thinking about practical things. What would it be for someone who's blind to visit their cousins or something like that? And how would that be, when you're in the house, you hear sounds that you're not used to, the house settling or whatever it is, the commode or whatever it is, and trying to get in his head and address that. So some of the poems tend to play.
I never, it's not like I never go headfirst into the theme or the content. But sometimes, it's like, what if I go at it at a veer and come at it like this? So Stevie's in his house for the first time staying with his cousins, but he doesn't know the house, he doesn't know anything there, because it's all different. And he's blind. So now he has more stuff that he has to do with everybody else. They, you know, they can see what's in front of them, they can hear, and all that, and they just go to sleep, but he's listening. And he's picking up the sounds. And they say Stevie has synesthesia. And so I say Stevie sees the notes. And the notes are his friends. And to the extent where he's actually just playing with them, you know, Hey, fellas, why don't we do this? And you get over there, you get over there, you give him an order. And it becomes isn't she lovely? And you know, it's that kind of thing, how he sees music, how he hears music, how he plays music. And so, yeah, so the whole thing came about after Michael passed, and then yeah, it was just kind of wanting to do something to honor that aspect of that soundtrack to my life.
In your work, you discuss race, and specifically being Black in America in a way that is not shy at all. What do you hope people who read your work get to take away from those observations?
CC: Well, this is my life is not something I'm making up. It's a difference now for me when I get pulled over, to be aware of what I do, how I do it, when I do it, how I talk, how I say things. It's a conversation that has been had for many generations. So when you look at Tough Boy Sonatas, it's said to be a lot of boys, but it's actually just me. It's actually just LaRoy. So this is what I found out; With LaRoy in Tough Boy Sonatas and Malik in Dreamist, I had to give myself to those personas. So the thing, the way it goes is I say my name is Curtis Leroy Crisler. But my mother used to call me, LaRoy and I said, so one day I did ask her, said 'my name is my name Leroy or LaRoy?' She said, 'it's Leroy but it's LaRoy when you piss me off,' and I was like, 'Oh, okay.' So LaRoy became the catalyst and persona for the book. And so once I gave everything to LaRoy, it it kind of veiled me and LaRoy took on everything and then I can move, you know, move around and play around with that.
And same thing with Malik. The problem I had with Malik at first was, I was still holding on to the poems. These were Curtis Crisler poems. And it's like, you have to give the poems to Malik. And once I gave them to Malik, again, Malik just ran with them, what he did with the pictures, how he saw the pictures, and I even changed there was a poem in there that I say would be my eulogy. And it has Savion Glover, tap dancing, but in the original poem, I say, Gregory Hines, I want Gregory Hines tap dancing on my ashes and all that kind of stuff. And so I had those things in there.
So most of like I say, 90% of Tough Boy Sonatas is creative nonfiction and the other 10% is just word magic. Because it's just my life. And if you can't see my life, or if you don't want to see my life, then you have a problem. There are black people all around us, you know, there are white, Latino, Asian, everything. And if we're not paying attention to that, then that's on us. Yes, we can move to suburbs and different places and all that, you're going to come into connection with someone at some point. So why can't I tell my life like Samuel Clemens, or whoever it may be? I have a life too. And I just want you to see it.
