A Conversation With Ed Skoog

Ed Skoog talks like a poet. Even if you’re in a loud bar and on the TV Barrack Obama is delivering his State of the Union address, Ed Skoog still makes you feel — in a very good way — like you’re attending a poetry workshop.

Skoog uses the silences in conversations without creating awkward pauses. He gives you such rad responses it’s hard not to sit there kinda speechless and wonder if he’s, like, rehearsed everything.

Much like his poetry, (his first book, Mister Skylight, Copper Canyon Press, came out in 2009) Skoog is approachable and has a voice that carries enormous poetic endurance. Take for example the last poem in Mister Skylight, which stretches on for 17 pages. When asked how his poems manage to sustain such lengths — haven’t we all wanted to write that long poem, the one that is wonderful and long and doesn’t resemble a haywire novella? — his reply is that writing a longer poem is a natural occurrence, and one that takes place over time.

“Have you ever had a conversation with a friend or partner or someone else where you continue to talk about the same thing for days and days? My long poems are like that. Sometimes conversations aren’t just ended, they carry on, wandering. It’s another way of processing the world.”

That comfortably gnawing curiosity — we go to bed thinking about it, we wake up thinking about it — is exactly how we’d describe Ed Skoog’s poems. They’re sustainable, rock solid, muscular. Their vigorous physicality isn’t easy to come by or mimic.

That said, what are Skoog’s “rules” for the long poem?

“As with short poems, there aren’t any rules except that every line must be come by honestly. Long poems are works of the body as well as the imagination. They can also be symphonic, in the Mahlerian desire to include the whole world in each of his works, thunder and stones. I also think of concept albums, the big psychedelic prog rock masterpieces of Hawkwind and the Flaming Lips.”

Skoog uses the symphonic element to refer to the questionable “I” in his poems. There isn’t just one speaker, but rather a tapestry of narrative voices.

“I try to follow ideas and feelings as far as possible in a long poem, and to give myself the authority to go farther than is perhaps appropriate. At a certain point in the long poems I’ve written, the process moves from writing to listening.”

Skoog’s style is anchored in his belief that “poets are sole practitioners, and it’s not useful to generalize about what poets do, who they are, etc. And yet we do. The more I write the more I see the obligation to take the simple and personal path.”

And that, my fellow poets, is a path each of us should follow closely.

The World Is Bound With Secret Knots
by Ed Skoog

The different key is a terrible diving.

All of it rides across the bow, always beginning,
and your design ashes, gnashes, radishes

the half-finished process              bom bom bu ba bu
Celebrity of returning beauty, coming back
unable to believe a couple nights,

she falls off the stage in front of the label guys

in a funk to cover the body with.
Handclapping resists the machine.

After the record store he lives in the stone house
heightened. His feet catch themselves.
His head was interrupted.

I, on the other hand, admire the butcher

who has to win back his store in a fist fight
over and over. I would window into her shadow

blue as images of hanged beef
in parade rhythm through room
of tobacco and sweat, the poetry

inside my lone best ear,

silent living and its itinerant smells.
I keep the streets clean, that rise and fall,

repeating themselves. Sandman, meet me
at the turbulent window. We’ll shake
hands with all the groundhogs

shipping out. The sky is her eyes’ rascal

stranded by the creek at ten degrees,
an adhesive cold that nourishes me,

that blames and forgives.
Cowbell is the dominant sound of evening
at crest of loss in the dislodged country,

the same thing, bent, then, doubled,

a notional geography
what it sounds like is a steamship

crossed with wolf. The last standing tree

is her face looking in, her last message
smiled from her roe coat.

______________________________
Ed Skoog was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1971. He is the author of Mister Skylight (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), and individual poems in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and Paris Review.