Get to Know a Local Poet: Brian McGuigan

Brian McGuigan wears so many hats he could have been a milliner. He's done every job at Hugo House except run the place, he curates the renowned Cheap Wine and Poetry series, writes poetry and prose and comedy and funny e-mails, and I hear he's a champion Wii bowler.

I got to know Brian because he showed me the ropes when I first started working at Hugo House in 2006, and got to be best friends over years workshopping our poems together. Brian's poems celebrate the city while remaining suspicious of urban renewal and nostalgic for the sense of home that gentrification blithely erodes. They, like Brian and his Yankee baseball cap, wear their origins proudly. His poems can be sensitive and macho at the same time, which reminds me of Richard Hugo and Kanye West, who by no coincidence are two of Brian's favorite wordsmiths.

One of my favorite lines of Brian's is in "Notice of Land Use," a poem published in the anthology "Hill Poems," where he describes the sky over a soon-to-be-razed building as "a tavern of cranes." It's a sad but perfect description, one where the instruments of construction are related—by class, by habit, by posture and by function—to the working class people displaced by that construction. I think of that phrase every time I walk past the gravel pits that pockmark Capitol Hill nowadays.

Kate Lebo: Richard Hugo made no apologies for being obsessed with certain words—in his case wind, water, and stone, which appeared something like 17 times in his last collection. Which words do you use in your poems over and over? Why those words?

Brian McGuigan: As Hugo did, I mustn’t apologize for my obsession with certain words either, though an apology may be in order once I list the words I’m obsessed with—mainly “shit,” “fuck” and “piss.” Though I do eschew the crow, the poet’s bird of choice (If I see another “crow” or “salmon” in the work of a Northwest poet…), pigeons often appear in my poetry, particularly the poems that make up my manuscript in progress, “Eat the Rich.”

I’m drawn to these words not for the shock value of vulgarity, but for the way the words sound—the terseness fills my mouth and ear with the tastes and sounds of the worlds I’m writing about, mostly 1980’s Queens, the era and place in which I grew up, and the quickly gentrifying neighborhoods of Seattle, where I’ve lived for the last seven years. Plus, there are many words that rhyme with “shit,” “piss” and “fuck.”

KL: In addition to being a poet, you’re known around town as a producer of great literary events. What’s the relationship between curating poetry events and writing your own poems?

BM: The relationship is an odd one. I started “Cheap Wine and Poetry” almost five years ago because I had a hard time fitting in when I moved to Seattle. The poetry scene seemed more fragmented then, and as a 22-year-old with a slightly turned Yankee hat and a thick NY accent, I wasn’t exactly getting my foot in the door with ease. People thought I was a slam poet or a high school kid getting extra credit by attending a poetry reading. So, I decided to start something that would give me an opportunity to share my own work as well as the work of the local writers that I love, something that everyone could enjoy, where people would feel comfortable and have a good time.

But once “Cheap Wine and Poetry” became successful and I went from part-time to practically living at Hugo House, my writing time evaporated. As much as I am inspired by the readings I curate and attend, sometimes I just want to go home, throw on some sweats and watch SportsCenter after putting in a 12-hour day, or a 50-60-hour week.

I’ve had to adjust my writing practice—though for awhile I stopped writing entirely. I’m thankful that I’m a morning person, which affords me a couple of hours on Saturdays and Sundays to write; I’m inspired by what Rebecca Hoogs said in her interview a few weeks back—that she schedules time for writing as she would anything else in her life. I may have to give that a shot.

KL: One of the first things I learned about you was that you like to po-jack. How do you define po-jacking? How do you spell po-jack? Who do you most like to po-jack? How does it work for you, exactly, when you’re writing a new poem?

BM: Po-jacking, in short, is taking someone’s poem and using it as a template for making your own. I was introduced to the idea by Elizabeth Austen and have used it to create almost all of the poetry I’ve written over the last four years.

How it works for me: I’m a firm believer that you can’t write unless you read, an age-old cliché of creative writing teachers that always rings true. With po-jacking, I often start by reading poets I love—Hugo, Dorianne Laux, Terrance Hayes and Kim Addonizio are a few that I’ve “jacked;” sometimes a line or an image sticks to my ribs, but often it’s the entire poem. And I’ll go line by line through the poem dissecting the breaks, diction, imagery, metaphor, etc., and once I feel like I have a handle on it, I’ll begin rewriting it—reconstructing lines using my own diction (Here’s where the “shit,” “piss,” etc. come in.), metaphor, etc. until I have a draft. It’s in the revision process where the poem begins to take flight, where the imitated poem loses its original authorship and becomes mine, like inheriting a recipe from a great aunt that needs a pinch more salt or a splash of chicken broth instead of water.

What I most like about po-jacking is that it gives me a start line and provides parameters. For me, there’s nothing worse for my creative process than a blank screen (I rarely handwrite.), so having a line to begin from or a template to use is helpful.

Oddly, I only use the po-jacking approach when writing poetry. Prose seems to come differently and my process for generating new prose is less precise, though my revision process is a lot like my approach to revising poems. I tend to get lost in the lines and focus on compression. Every word should count.

KL: What’s this I hear about you writing a novel? Have you gone over to the dark side or what?

BM: I had my house robbed in June, 2009 and everything I had ever written was stolen (Everyone in Seattle asks me, “Didn’t you have a back-up?” Yes, the back-up was stolen, too.) After the insurance check came, my wife and I replaced the electronics and all the other stuff, but I couldn’t replace the writing. I was in the middle of working on several poems in “Eat the Rich” and had just begun revising a short story; after losing it all, I didn’t have the heart to pick up the pieces at the time, so I thought: What do I do now? Then I started writing a novel.

Right now, I’ve stalled out at about the halfway mark, 28,000 words, but I expect to pick it back up this summer after I’ve completed and performed my multimedia piece about being a fat kid at Central Cinema on May 19. I don’t want to say too much about the book itself (I’ve taken to calling it “this-thing-I’m-scared-to-say-is-a-novel.”), but it’s about a boy who worships a drug dealer that lives across the street from him. I haven’t gone over to the dark side, although I have accepted that there are only a handful of poets that have made an actual career in poetry. The odds are slightly better for prose writers.

KL: Who did you have to kill to get a job at Hugo House?

BM: Ha! I wish it were that easy. Back in 2004, I started volunteering at Hugo House and basically said that I wouldn’t stop until the House hired me (I’ve always been a persistent one.) Somehow that worked out, and in the last five years, I’ve answered phones, taken registrations, processed memberships, stage-managed events, etc., and now I’m the big mouthpiece (Emphasis on big mouth) of Hugo House and part of the programs team, a position I’ve settled into nicely in the last couple of years.

KL: What rules of poetry do you like breaking?

BM: I’ve never been one for rules, so I don’t subscribe to very many in poetry, and therefore there are few that I follow and even fewer that I break. I write free verse, which basically means I live beyond the “rules.” It’s a nice place; take a load off and stay awhile.

KL: What’s the best thing about Seattle’s poetry community? And the worst?

BM: Best thing—We have a very rich literary scene for such a small city. On any given night, there is often at least one reading going on. We have several great local bookstores, a small press-only bookstore (Pilot) and a poetry-only bookstore (Open Books). And, of course, there is Hugo House, and many reading series draw upon the wealth of local writers. My favorite is  “Cheap Wine and Poetry” and “Cheap Beer and Prose” naturally; there is nothing in any other city in this country like either.

Worst thing—This is something several poets have mentioned in their own interviews: Despite the richness of the literary scene here, it is also quite fragmented. There are a lot of cliques in the poetry community, and, as Daemond mentioned last week, few opportunities for the varying cliques to work together. I’m a big believer in “the coattails approach.” If we all work together and one of us makes it, in a sense, we all make it.

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