Where We Went Wrong
The poems of South Carolina’s Ray McManus explore how boys become men—in ways healthy and unhealthy—perhaps better than any poet in the South.
South Carolina poet Ray McManus may have started his journey to become a poet unconventionally—by stealing a book of poems from his high school library—but the theft didn’t prevent him from winning a 2023 Governor’s Award for the Arts, the state’s highest honor for the arts.
Earlier this year, Hub City Press published Ray’s fifth collection, The Last Saturday in America. (Four of the collection’s thirty-nine works, including the title poem, were first published here in Salvation South in 2022.) Before this latest release, Ray authored four collections and one chapbook of poetry in one seven-year stretch. The first, Driving Through the Country Before You Are Born from 2007, won the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize. He followed that up with Left Behind, which won the South Carolina Poetry Initiative Chapbook Prize, and two more collections, Red Dirt Jesus (2011) and Punch (2014), which won the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Award for Poetry.
That’s a tremendous output in seven years for any poet—especially one in the first decade of his career. But Last Saturday, Ray admits, was “a long road,” one that took the better part of the past decade to travel. During this time, his concept for the book evolved as the world seemed to shift around him: Trump and MAGA, George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, the pandemic, and other events from a decade of fiery history make their way into the poems and influence the eventual trajectory of the collection.
But the poems at the heart of Last Saturday explore how boys learn to become men—all too often in unhealthy ways.
“These are poems about boys listening to men who were once boys who listened to men, the blind leading the blind leading the blind through the dark,” the acclaimed North Carolina novelist David Joy writes in his introduction to Last Saturday. “Some boys grow up. Some men never do. Ray McManus has chipped away at the pageantry and performance, the stupidity of the lie, the outright futility of it all.”
It’s a damaged veneer designed to cover a broken system, but Ray’s poems ask a key question: how does one break this cycle? And when everything feels like it’s falling apart, can the center continue to hold, and if so, what might provide that sticking place?
Ray and I sat down to talk about Last Saturday—his inspiration and intention for it and his development as a poet. Along the way we talked about the influence of women in his life and in his poetry, his mentors, his process, as well as vasectomies, blowing up stumps, and wrasslin’.
“I was afraid if I left the book on the table and it got put on the shelf, I'd never find it again. So, I stole it. And I spent the next twenty-five years going back to it.”
Here’s our conversation, edited for clarity and length:
Chris Nesmith: So, this book you stole from the library at your high school…this started you down the path to becoming a poet? How did that come about?
Ray McManus: I kind of mouthed off to a teacher one day and ended up on in-school suspension, where we had to sit at this table and read books and write a one-page synopsis about what you read. For whatever reason, the librarian put a book called Sound and Sense on the table. So, I started thumbing through it and immediately was pulled into these words. I loved it, the way the poets were playing with meaning by leaving out certain words or using particular words that had more than one meaning. It was later I figured out it was the poet’s work, the economy of the language, how one could hit at these huge high moments of life and the low embarrassments of living and do so in these tight little stanzas. So even then, I could see where they were playing around with lines and movement, and I was fascinated by it. So much so that when we were supposed to leave, I was afraid if I left the book on the table and it got put on the shelf, I'd never find it again. So, I stole it. And I spent the next twenty-five years going back to it. I could not have known, then, that stealing that book of poetry ultimately saved my life. Where I grew up, the idea of going to college, the idea of being a writer, or anything beyond going to work at Michelin or at some type of manual labor job, just was never a thought.
CN: But you went on to the University of South Carolina as an undergrad, where you continued for your MFA and your doctorate in English, and that’s where we first got to know each other. As an undergrad, were you already writing poetry? Were you far enough along by then to know that becoming a poet was what you aspired to?
RM: I had a professor or two or three who grabbed me—the way they read poetry and talked about it in class. One day, I just got up the nerve to ask if they would be willing to look at some things I wrote. Whatever it was then, it was horrible, but to their credit, nobody told me to burn it and never write another word. Instead, they encouraged me to read other poets or to be more concrete or to use my own voice to tell my story. I can remember a guy by the name of Steven Gardner circling one single word in some long, one- to two-page poem saying, “This is your poem. Start here.” But it was an advisor at USC, another English professor by the name of Carolyn Matalene, who gave me two of the most important pieces of advice I could have been given. She told me to quit coming to class stoned, and to take Ed Madden’s poetry workshop. Taking that one class with Ed fundamentally changed my life. From that class, and through Ed’s encouragement, I got into my MFA program and got to work closer with Ed and with Kwame Dawes, and that’s when things really (sort of) took off.
CN: So that reminds me of a story you told me once, about an encounter you had with Nikky Finney, when you said something to her like, “I don’t know if I’d call myself a poet,” and she said something back to you about that. Can you tell that story?
RM: Sure. It was a defining moment for me, even if I can’t quite remember exactly what took place. I remember this, though: Nikky told me not to play with it, so I didn’t.
We were having lunch. It was the Fall Festival of Writers at USC, and Nikky was one of the writers visiting. She was in Kentucky at the time, and Rice, her first book, was out (which is a phenomenal book, by the way). I was in grad school for my MFA and was invited to join the writers for lunch. At one point, Nikky leaned over the table and asked me if I was a poet, and I, thinking I was cute, said, “No, ma’am, I just write poems.”
“It’s a blessing to be a poet, and it’s a curse—and an addiction, an obsession, a compulsion. ... If you are going to be a poet, you have to accept that the poem—the words, the lines—will haunt you until you chase it down.”
In truth, I don’t think I felt all that comfortable calling myself a poet then. I had accomplished nothing as a poet, and certainly wasn’t fully invested as I should have been. Well, Nikky didn’t think my comment was all that funny. She was kind to me and polite, but as we were leaving, she leaned into me and said, “Don’t play with it, Ray. You know what I’m talking about.”
And even though I don’t think I knew at the time quite what she was talking about, it was very clear shortly after. What she was saying to me, or at least how I interpreted it and how I live it today, is simple: don’t play with being a poet. Either be one or don’t, but if you are going to be a poet, you are going to be all in. It’s serious work. It requires constant attention, awareness of the opportunities of witness, and devotion to the craft. It’s a blessing to be a poet, and it’s a curse—and an addiction, an obsession, a compulsion. You don’t get to pick, and you don’t get to “sit one out” because you want to. If you are going to be a poet, you have to accept that the poem—the words, the lines—will haunt you until you chase it down, muscle it up, and work the traces for that little gain, to be able to say what is true, to hear someone else was able to connect with it. It’s all for that one reward—to have created the successful poem. Of course, there is more to it—the joy of reading it, learning it, sharing it with others. But writing it, being it, that’s a decision only a poet can make, and when he or she makes that decision, that’s it, there is no going back. From that day forward, Ray McManus became a poet—when he decided to no longer play with it. Nikky was the first person to talk to me that way. She’s a true badass. I listened to her and took her words to heart.
CN: So along those lines, let's talk about your influences.
RM: My earliest influences were songwriters—they still are. But in terms of literature, I was influenced by the Beat Generation early on. I loved the honesty and the freedom of Allen Ginsberg’s writing, even at a time that was anything but free. I loved the feeling of spontaneity and absolute high-octane speed of [Jack] Kerouac. I liked the surrealism of [William S.] Burroughs.
I also liked the political aspect, of course. I thought they represented an amalgamation in my mind of all the things that a poet can do, even though Kerouac was primarily fiction. And then I started reading who they were responding to and/or conversing with, and discovered William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, going back even further to Walt Whitman.
Later, I became better acquainted with contemporary poets closer to my generation. So, Li-Young Lee and Sharon Olds were big influences on me early on. Carolyn Forché was another one, especially her early work. Louise Glück, who we just lost not that long ago. Naomi Shihab Nye and Eavan Boland. So, there's a pattern here, right? Those are powerful women poets, and they were probably the most influential on me early on as I'm developing my own voice—because there I was, raw, with all the intensity, but still afraid to go into areas that I thought I should go into. I wasn't sure how to do that, and then I read Sharon Olds. And that was a straight-up, brave voice that could make even the ugliest thing somehow beautiful. As a writer, as a poet, especially here in the South, trying to discover the beauty of even the ugliest situations was and still is an important reason I want to write.
CN: That’s an interesting list, Ray. I would have expected women poets to be there, of course, but I wasn't expecting them to be your primary influences—and partly because, you know, your themes focus on masculinity and manhood. So just tell me a little more about that, about these women and how they influenced you.
RM:I think a lot of it was just where I grew up. Southern boys are introduced to masculinity in some rather ironic ways. One thing you realize as you get older is that the men who were so influential were simply performing reproductions of a performance they had seen. The women I grew up with weren’t performing a damn thing. They were doing, and they were outworking the men when it came to raising most of us. I joke that I’m a wooden spoon survivor, but it’s not a joke. My mom refused to let me be lazy. Seemed like all our moms and aunts and grandmas were on that mission And they would let us [boys] know something about ourselves in a variety of ways that were not at all subtle. The men could talk all the shit they wanted to out there with their buddies, and when you're a boy, you see it, but then you see them acting totally different when they're at home. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I had influential men in my life—good men, hardworking, honest, kind, but who could also beat your ass if provoked. They were men I could look up to and learn from, but it was simple, and in many ways foundational. It was women who taught us how to be better men, as that identity became more complex. So I think I learned just as much, if not more, about how to be a man from women than I did men.
“This long tale of sons doing what their dads did, and their dads doing what their dads did. And most of it was stupid, sometimes cruel, and most of the time completely unnecessary. A model built on bullshit.”
CN: So when did the overall concept of that take shape, and how did that come about?
RM: 2016 happened. It really hammered home what I was just talking about. There were men that I grew up with that were a part of my raising that I saw as good, decent people. They didn't make racist jokes. They didn't make sexist jokes. They didn't cheat people. Some of these guys I worked for were good at what they did, and I had a profound respect for them. And then Trump comes along and suddenly I see people I had loved and respected do 180s and act out the opposite of what they had many of us believe. And that was heartbreaking to see. So, I started writing about that. Then there's all kinds of other shit going on. I mean, you got protests and riots and stuff breaking out all over the place, a lot of anger. And there were the juxtaposed images of the millions of women marching for their rights and this handful of incels in polo shirts and tiki torches screaming about how nobody loves them and how they will not be replaced. I know I’m simplifying, but the difference could not have been more noticeable in the two images playing out on the television. It was a tumultuous three to four years, to say the least. And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, here comes COVID.
So I'm writing these poems. I'm going into all these directions about masculinity—here's what we mess up, here's where we go wrong. Look at the futility of this, look at the stupidity of that. There was a lot going on and a lot to write about. But I think the driving force behind this collection of poems was trying to find out how all of this ends. What is the redeemable quality here? What do we salvage from this? And it's going to sound cliché, but it was love.
I mean, we're at home scared to death to go anywhere at the time, because there’s no vaccine for this and people we know are dying. But I was home, being there with my kids, being there with my wife, and I watched her really take control of things, balancing her job, knowing the demands of my job, balancing three kids at three completely different grade levels, all having to learn at home. It was another moment in my life where I was witnessing another badass woman taking care of everything that truly mattered. At the same time, I was rereading Beth Ann Fennelly’s micro-memoir collection, Heating and Cooling, and The Second O of Sorrow by Sean Thomas Dougherty and Jessica Jacobs’s Take Me With You, Wherever You’re Going, and Fanny Says by Nickole Brown. All of what I was seeing and reading was impacting me and helping me see through the moment with greater clarity.
“Love is what really got us through, and that's what helped me to shape this book toward the end, where it's not my voice dictating anything, rather the voice of a speaker witnessing.”
Love is what really got us through, and that's what helped me to shape this book toward the end, where it's not my voice dictating anything, rather the voice of a speaker witnessing. The speaker’s wife is the one who is the badass here, and so the shift goes from him to her. And then that last image, when the whole world is burnt down around him, he's looking in the rearview mirror at his kids and his kids are looking forward, and they're listening to her. He’s not talking. He’s simply witnessing. And the thing that I was searching for, the salvation in any of this was right there beside him the whole time. The whole idea of masculinity, the whole idea of culturally prescribed gender roles is bullshit. We should have tossed the script a long time ago. What if we burned it all down? What beauty can we cultivate as it grows from the ashes?
CN: You mentioned the last poem, “Diehards.” The title poem comes just before that, and it covers a lot of the themes in the book, which include male friendships, but maybe you could also say male rivalries and conflict. That one ends with a bit of tension, and then you have “Diehards,” which is a kind of a resolution with a sense of redemption and hopefulness. So let me ask you a little bit about the title poem, and then come back to the collection itself. First of all, why did you choose that title?
RM: Saturdays are almost the quintessential masculine day, right? I mean, that’s the day when many men manicure their lawns and smoke meat and watch football and hunt and fish and sit in the recliner doing absolutely nothing. It’s what many of us aspire to get to Monday through Friday. But when we were in the middle of COVID and were all home during the day, during the week, a Saturday didn't mean anything anymore. It was just another day. So, this idea of Saturdays being a sacred sort of space for men, I think, in many ways just died along with this idea of the quintessential masculine man. Maybe it died a long time ago, and we’ve been dragging it around. Either way.
But with the penultimate title poem, that really was a culmination of the themes in the book, if you will—kind of wrapping everything together and ending with that last line of his wife watching him. And the speaker is not going to tell him that his wife is there watching him because that's part of what I think perpetuates the masculine cliché—men covering for other men because they think it will help. News flash: it doesn’t. No, the neighbor will mess around and find out the same way the speaker found out. And maybe he will learn, maybe he won’t; maybe he ends up blowing up the whole damn neighborhood because he's trying to blow out a stump. Either way, it can’t be the speaker deciding the future of someone else by dictating how events transpire in the present.
CN: Looking at the structure of the collection overall, I had an initial impression as I was reading the first section and what it was about and was trying to say, and then section two continues some of those things, but there is a noticeable shift. There's a different voice, and a lot of different elements. And then again in section three the focus shifts again, as you mentioned, and I did pick up on that, certainly.
RM: Yeah, the voices or the voice in those three sections does shift, because earlier on it is definitely very limited, very singular. That section deals a lot with the origins of where a lot of this stuff comes from. The second part is more of the sort of domesticity that most straight boys are inevitably going to grow into. They grow up, they get married, they have kids, but they haven't really addressed anything, they just move up a level, never questioning it until they are confronted with it. That confrontation can go either good or bad. And then the third section really calls to question all of it, and at that point nothing is as simple. I wanted to make it simple because I think the road toward a solution is rather simple – either cut it (which makes the vasectomy poems work more for the larger metaphor now and less of the individual procedure) or burn it down as the neighbor(s) do, or both. If we let something new grow from the ashes or sprout from the cutting, what the “new” things grow cannot be decided by the speaker. It shouldn’t be decided by the speaker. That would continue the cycle that he is trying to break. That’s where the speaker’s wife comes in.
CN: I also noticed in the first section there's a lot of questions and a lot of repetition of “because” clauses. “Because this happened…” and so on. So it's like this idea of seeking meaning or asking, Why is it this way? But there’s also a little fatalism built into it, right? And then in the second section there're some discussions about evolution and survival of the fittest and these kinds of concepts as well. Tell me a little about where that comes from and what you were thinking of with that.
RM: I can remember asking questions, usually defiantly, and getting a response of, “Well, because I said so.” There was always this authority behind the answer I got, but it was never a satisfying answer. When we are younger, everything seems fatalistic, right? I mean, it certainly was for me looking back. At any point, I could have taken a right turn instead of a left and I wouldn't be having this conversation with you. That is the reality for a lot of Southern boys, and I guess the ultimate question to ask is, well, why? Why is it like this? And I felt like my survival depended on a lot more than “because I said so.”
“I can remember asking questions, usually defiantly, and getting a response of, ‘Well, because I said so.’ There was always this authority behind the answer I got, but it was never a satisfying answer.”
It's because we are not given the answers to these questions early on. It’s because we are not encouraged to find the answers to these questions early on. Being told and being allowed to find out for yourself, depending on the age, can produce fatal results, especially without foundational, critical thinking skills. That's a conscious thing that I wrestled with concerning my own son. I wanted to make sure, when he asks me questions, even if they were uncomfortable, he would hear answers—because if I don't give him that, then he’s going to look for answers wherever he can find them, and most of the time, because we're young, that's always in the wrong places. And that’s presupposing that he even looks for answers. If I tell him what I think I know, how will that shape his worldview before he even gets the chance to witness for himself?
The landscape of the South can be fatalistic growing up. Most of the time, we don’t even realize it. So, a lot of those poems, wrasslin’, or camping, jumping off bridges, hurricane season when hurricanes make their way inland and they don't do anything, the fields, the roads, all are very benign areas and yet something terrible always happens in them. It’s like the whole place is cursed for it.
So, that's why those last two poems, the “Dale Earnhardt School of Human Experience” and “Calculus for a Disappearing South” are juxtaposed with each other. One says this is how to live, and the other this is how to die. Either poem could go either way and there isn’t a thing anyone can do about it because life, because the South, because death is inevitable, often in terrible, violent ways down here. I think that is the acceptance many of us have growing up in the South. I’d say that’s pretty fatalistic.
CN: Then transitioning into the second section, it’s suddenly as if there's an opening. There are choices being made, or something is happening that is different somehow. And I think if we take the speaker throughout the work, it's a different speaker—or maybe if we kind of think of it as, again, an evolution, there is a progression there in the speaker. I think there's a boyhood aspect to the first section. Then there's the young father aspect, and then there's a wise father. Maybe. I don't know if that's what you were going for, and I may be way off.
RM: No, that’s very astute. Well, with the second one it is a new father, but what I was talking about earlier about the sort of reproduction – which I'm also playing with as a concept, you know – there's the reproduction of having children, but then there's also reproduction of values, if you will, of “how much am I doing this because this is the right thing to do for my own kid, or am I doing what I was watching as a child and just repeating that?” And honestly, the latter of those two choices is more common than not. So much of the second section is about seeing. The speaker sees how much of himself is an actual reproduction of how he was raised and then looking at that against all the others that are around him, and in this case his neighbors, and it pushes him to want to change that.
CN: Let me shift a bit to ask you some questions about your process and your approach to writing. Generally, what is your process? Where do your poems come from? Do they come at once, do they come in pieces, how long do they usually take to complete, and how do you know when one's finished?
RM: That’s a good question. More people need to hear about process so they, perhaps, can understand their own process. I mean, process, for writers, is a very personal thing. I know when I was younger and started writing I'd hear about other people's process and I'm like, I don't do any of that, so I guess I'll never produce great work. And if you are worried about how somebody else does something and whether you do the same thing, then you probably won't produce anything great, maybe reproduce something great, whatever that means. But I do like to get out of my comfort zone and like to hear what other people do, and I like trying new things and seeing what that generates.
“That poem is going to haunt me until I get it right, whatever ‘getting it right’ is required for that given poem. So, I have to be very careful how I carve out that time. I’m telling you, it’s a sickness.”
But for me personally, I think there's two things that I've learned to accept about my process. One, I don't write every day, and I know that there are a lot of writers and poets out there that probably shake their head to hear that. Like, how can you openly admit that? But the truth is, I don't sit down and try to write poems every day. Which leads me to the second thing I’ve learned to accept – so much of the writing that has to take place starts in the world around me. I can’t not observe things, any more than I can look at a word and not read it. So I'm constantly observing, listening, questioning, jotting down lines here and there, grabbing still-shots of the ever changing environment I’m in. And I’m moving. Always moving. My brain is just wired that way. During the day, every day, I'm making notes. I mean, I'm seeing stuff. I'm getting it on my phone. I keep a little notebook with me. I'm writing things down. There are times when it builds up until I can't stop it. I have to go write something. There are times when I haven’t, and my wife will tell me I need to go write because I’m driving them crazy. Eventually, I am going to need to sit down and pour out what I’ve been holding, what I’ve been collecting. If I sit down and I start working on something, I'm going to get to an end. I have to get to an end. And then once I've done that, that poem is going to haunt me until I get it right, whatever “getting it right” is required for that given poem. So, I have to be very careful how I carve out that time. I’m telling you, it’s a sickness.
I don't really have writer’s block; if I need to write, I can write. But I can’t force a poem to do anything it doesn’t want to do or isn’t ready to do. Some people will probably freak out as a poet if they hadn't written a poem in a month or two. But I might go a month or two without writing a poem, and then that weekend I'm going to write four, you know? It's not the kind of process that one could necessarily subscribe to, other than spending the majority of your time trying to pay attention to everything, and good luck with that. That's the haunting reality of being a poet: you don't get time off. I can take a vacation from reality, but I can't escape being a poet. It just means I'm always working on something, even if I'm not sitting down physically writing about it. I'm always thinking. I'm trying to get to the right words, the right noun that's going to fit with the right verb. And it's constant. And it’s lunacy.
CN: You talked about how the theme of this collection first came to be. Once you start putting a collection together, do you find you can then think of what you need as you’re writing a poem or, or perhaps as you're thinking about a poem, how does this one fit in? Or how can it be shaped to fit in?
RM:I suppose anything can happen as I’m pulling it all together. Inevitably, there are going to be gaps between poems when one thinks about groupings and the order of things, because bringing poems together that are coming from different places at different times are not going to just fall in place into some natural order. I mean, I wish it did, that would be wonderful—just write poems, put them together, and then—bam!—magic happens. But it never works that way. There are always going to be gaps, and the gaps are where the magic happens (if there is any). It’s in those spaces where I can write poems that are immediately going to bridge one poem to another, or maybe write a poem because I had some poems early on expressing an idea or ideas and I feel like I need to echo something from those poems in a later section, or I need something more toward the beginning that forecasts or more toward the end that pulls the collection more together.
Then there are times where I might have done all that work and then ultimately end up killing it, because it either just doesn't work or it's saying something that I've already said and it's not saying it any better. I just keep trying. That’s all we can do, right? Just keep trying.
CN: So let me just say right here, Ray, that this collection is so rich, there's so much depth to it that it will reward multiple readings, and not all poems will do that, as you know. And so, I just want to applaud you and congratulate you on it. I think it's really a fine collection.
RM: Thank you. This book was a long road. Driving was published [in 2007], and about three years later Red Dirt Jesus [2011], and three years after that, Punch, which came out in 2015. So, what's that? Eight years later this was accepted. So, I spent a lot of time with it and to get this one [edited] down, which I think was at one point about eighty-seven pages. So, there's a whole bunch of other poems that might find their way into another collection or something like that.
To tell you the truth, there were a couple of times I thought about hanging it up. I just couldn't find the overall voice. I couldn't find the groove. I couldn't find the voice that I've always felt has governed me with my writing. With me sometimes it's Kwame Dawes’ voice in my head. Sometimes it's Ed’s [Madden’s] voice, sometimes it's Lindsay, my wife’s, voice. I've always let that be the guide. If I try to push the work and ignore the voice, I know the work’s not ready and I'm going to reject it as much as any publisher will. So, to hear that means the absolute world to hear. And I've heard it from others too. I don’t take that for granted. I mean, it is poetry, and this is America. But David Joy wrote a beautiful introduction to it and I think he captured what I hope people will do when they read this book – to talk more about what they thought being a man was when they were a boy versus how they are as older humans and have more conversations about that, to question more, so that hopefully we realize the idea of toxic masculinity is small and stupid, as it should be, and not what we saw in 2016, 2017, where toxic masculinity became the moniker for all masculinity. The best way I know to work through problems is by continuously talking about it, and, more importantly, listening, sharing, and hopefully reading poems and prose that help us find understanding through empathy rather than insecurity disguised as judgment. That’s how we can better define our place in this world.
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CN: What do you think is the place of poetry in society today?
RM: I think there's more being published now that's much more inclusive. So, you're getting a wide variety of voices, which I think is fantastic. There's so much more to celebrate that way, and there’s so much more to interrogate that way. And you know, we're seeing more of it in advertising. We're seeing more of it in film and music. I mean, it’s been there, but we’re seeing more artistic choices, more poetic moves. So, it's becoming part of our everyday life and it's exciting. It's exciting to see it happen, to be a part of it.
CN: One more thing I wanted to talk with you about before we go is your award. Last year, you were awarded the South Carolina Governor’s Award for the Arts. First, congratulations on it again, and tell me a little about learning about it and what that meant to you and anything else that you want to include.
RM: Thank you. It’s humbling. So many people wrote such beautiful nomination letters. Some folks I didn't even know had done that. And then when I got to watch the video, the montage, it was hard to watch because I was just taken aback by it and kept wiping my eyes. I held everything together at the actual awards ceremony itself at first, and then I got up on the stage and I looked out into the crowd, and everybody was giving me a standing ovation. My friends. My coworkers. And I could see my wife in the front row. I could see my daughter, who's pregnant with our grandson at the time, and our future son-in-law, and my son and my other daughter. I lost it a bit; I’ll admit it.
What I didn’t lose in that moment was when I was young, thirty to thirty-five years ago, sitting on the front porch of my parents’ house watching dump trucks and road scrapers going up and down the dirt road thinking maybe I can do that. Maybe I could drive a dump truck. I could scrape dirt roads. Given some of the limited choices at the time, it didn’t seem terrible. What a dream that was! And to remember how far that journey has taken me, and how I had to chop my own wood to get to where I am, and to know that it was poetry that took me here, is beyond wild, man. I didn't get a scratch-off ticket and win the lottery. I didn't have some uncle I didn't know about dying and leaving me millions. I stole a book of poetry out of the library, which put me on a trajectory that I could have never imagined. That trajectory led me to a fascinating career, and at the age of fifty, I received the highest award bestowed for the arts in South Carolina. Not bad. Not bad at all for a kid who grew up on a dirt road and spent the better part of adolescence looking for a fix to get high and a spark to burn the whole place to the ground. What a long, strange trip. And I think I’m just getting started.
About the author
Chris Nesmith is an associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina-Palmetto College. As an undergraduate at the University of Mississippi, he took creative writing courses from Barry Hannah and played bass with blues legends Johnnie Billington and Bobby Little in the Mississippi Delta. He has worked as a bartender, newspaper reporter, photographer, and for UPS, and has lived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, in Charleston, Columbia, Salt Lake City, and small-town Virginia and South Carolina. He and his wife currently live in Charlotte with their Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, LaRue.