Eliot Schain: California Poets Part 8, Three Poems

January 8th, 2025

California Poets: Part VIII

Eliot Schain

Three Poems

WILL

The 49er nearly died pushing himself up over Donner Pass

one thick shoe after another through giving snow.

When he finally crested and smelled the West

he invented me and all the diggers who’ve come since.

One wants to give a name, like Bill or Sam—

think of armpits reeking despite the freezing cold.

We’re so small and yet we’ve changed the world

nearly as much as God.

It took him another two weeks to get down

and build his cabin near the river.

He was sweet no longer but stuck around

and now a noisy freeway passes close to where he died.

But what of those he sired? scattered up and down the state,

burning up their rubber.

It all began with putrid sweat and hardship like a brother.

THE LINGERING

In the seventies Shane loved Dexter Gordon

the cool jazz player whose sound was like warm sand

after swimming a broad cold river.

The world needed steadying

and his horn was steadying

which is why Shane asked his nearly mute but undeniably cool friend

to play saxophone at the going-away party

when Shane, along with everything else, was going away.

The friend agreed but never showed

so midway through the outdoor event

rich with artists and ex-lovers

Shane moved a shabby lawn chair into the thicket of high anise

to sit with a lit joint between his quivering fingers...

it’s still there today, as if his friend had made it,

as if he’s still out there bellowing under the eternally western sky

as we all keep disappearing, as everything keeps disappearing.

BRIEF THAW

Everett was in the parking lot of a big supermarket

in one of those corners of America that drive him crazy

just minding his own business

when some woman wearing a ridiculous t-shirt over an unruly body

pointed and called for him to look to the sky

which he did to witness a bald eagle overhead

and traced with his forefinger the rest of the bird’s flight

through its vast arc

as if he were teaching the young to understand how the white crown

white tail feathers, a black body how such a bird plying the wind

is proof that most of us can too

if risen above the pain of being American

then Everett said Thank you Ma’am instinctively, genuinely

as if joining her for a moment in some beautiful and faraway place.

Interview

April 20th, 2025

California Poets Interview Series:

Eliot Schain, Poet, Psychotherapist, Recording Artist

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: I’d like to start with your latest release, Drive, They Said, in collaboration with Harrison Flynn. Blending guitar compositions with your poetry, you’ve managed to create a dinstinctive American voice. Could you talk about the composition of the pieces and the recording process?

ES: Thank you for saying a “distinctive American voice.” That’s a great compliment. Re: the composition of the pieces, I’ll say something about my writing process, which is anchored by half an hour every morning, right after I get up, before doing anything else, and while the unconscious is still active. (Revision happens at all times, whenever I can find time.) I sit there, try to focus, search for a deep emotion, or clarify an interesting idea, or picture an image, or pull up a memory. Then I write fluidly, without thinking too much, and with faith that the next line, and the next line, and the theme will emerge, and ultimately comes some kind of resolution.

Because I’ve always felt it was my duty to be a writer of the American experience, many of my poems return to this subject. When it came time to record a second album, I chose poems that clustered around the American story. Thus, Drive, They Said became about both individual and collective American experience, the title a spin-off from the Robert Creeley poem, “Drive, He Said,” which expresses the mood of the late-last century, in the words of a Beat-adjacent poet. I was profoundly influenced by the Beats.

Re: the recording process (it’s happened twice, two years running). I did send the poems to Harrison in advance, so he could mull them over, a few weeks before I traveled to L.A. Then we met at a recording studio in Highland Park, and were ushered through the process by a terrific engineer, Andrew “Mud” Murdock, with whom Harrison had worked before. Once set up, I tried to lock into the here-and-now, so we could do jazz (even though blues is more accurately the mood). I would call out which poem I was going to read, briefly reiterate the theme or feeling of the piece, then wait for him to pull up some musical phrase that might be appropriate. How that part happened, you’d have to ask him. He’d play a few bars, I’d find a place to enter, then off we went, each attuned to the pacing and intensity of the other.

DG: Drive, They Said is not the first time you’ve collaborated with Harrison Flynn. The Distant Sound also features poems and guitar accompaniment. To what extent were the collaborative dynamics similar here and to what extent were they different?

ES: The dynamics for second album were very similar to the first one in 2023, except that we did not go to Laurel Canyon beforehand—for a cappuccino at the Canyon Store, and to soak up the still-60’s vibe.

DG: You now work as a psychotherapist in Berkeley. The standard question to ask would be how this work influences the poems you write but it might be more interesting to know whether writing poems affects the way you approach practice psychotheraphy. Is it useful to think along these lines?

ES: Yes, I am a psychotherapist in Berkeley, and yes, being a poet comes in handy. Metaphor opens up great possibilities for alluding to the complexity of human experience. I try not to pontificate with my clients, but noting the mysterious bridge created by the perfect metaphor triggers growth in the client, and a secure way to contain complexity. Of course, if the client is an artist, or trying to be, I attempt to say something useful about how to do it.

DG: You worked as program director for the Poetry Society of America. What responsibilities did this role entail and, conversely, what role should poetry have in society?

ES: I worked as Program Director for the Poetry Society of America for one year in the mid-80’s. That was my title, but in essence I was an assistant to the Executive Director, Dennis Stone. We worked out of the old National Arts Club in Manhattan’s Grammercy Park, and it was a wild, intense time. I had just graduated from Columbia’s M.F.A. program, which under Daniel Halpern was also wild and intense, and Dennis snapped me up. But I didn’t much care for full-time office work, which is one of the reasons I left. Also, working at the center of the poetry world confirmed my suspicions about po-biz, and because I was still young and rebellious, and cocksure of my artistic vision, I chafed. Still, there were some marvelous moments, including the birthday celebration we hosted for Robert Penn Warren’s 80th, which Warren and many other luminaries attended. This was a particularly meaningful project for Dennis, because he was also from the South.

The role of poetry in society? Well, it would be nice if it would open people to the breadth of their dimensions, attune them to moral responsibilities, and motivate them to seek joy instead of money. Not sure that’s happening.

DG: You’ve placed poems in prestigious magazines. After the first draft, do you revise intensively or do you trust the first impulse?

ES: Revision is a tricky one. Yes, I revise. But I also believe first word is most often best word, if you are writing clear of hyper-conscious detritus. Except, of course, first word, best word is not always reliable. I do believe my best poems come in a burst of creative, energetic, semi-rational streams, rich with the unconscious; this allows the executive functioning mind and mysterious impulses from the deep to entwine instinctively. When I go back to revise, a small percentage of those revisions make the poem better. But most are written in a different head-space, as we used to say, and do not improve the poem, but rather make it disjointed—in tone, in syntax, etc. Some words that come the first time are just place-holders, as a poet-friend of mine calls them, but you can feel those cases, and work to find a better word later. If I’m truly in the flow, then yes, first word, best word. Having said that, there are some poems I am proud of from my youth which I wrote by coming back day after day, to deliberately build stanza upon stanza. I rarely do that anymore.

DG: After a poem has been initially rejected, do you generally embark upon another round of revisions or continue to send it out the same way?

ES: After a poem has been rejected, I stick in back in the drawer. I don’t revise it. I send poems out only when I feel they are done, and I respect done. I have never much trusted criticism, although I am in two fine writing groups, and am learning to listen to suggestions in a way I never used to. But those suggestions rarely make the poem at hand better, rather they divert me from my authentic voice. Yet the criticism gets digested, and hopefully educates me as to how to better connect to the reader in the future, when I am writing the next poem.

DG: To what extent do you show your work to people before sending it out—a large group, a small group, or usually no one?

ES: As you can tell from my answer to the previous question, I am very private in my process. I do, however, appreciate the basic principles of the Community of Writers workshops, up in the Olympic Valley of the Sierra Nevada. Those principles of critique were developed by Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell, and others over fifty years ago. They stipulate participants in the workshops should share only what excites them about the poem being examined—where they feel the heat. I think this is wise, as it recharges the poet’s inner drive and wisdom, which is of course the gold you can count on.

DG: Your fondness for W.S. Merwin is well-known and you’ve reviewed two of his books. Are there any pieces of his in particular that you turn to consistently?

ES: This is what I would say about Merwin: I did not like his voice when I was young, and when he was young. Others did, so I respected him, but couldn’t find a way to enter emotionally. Then with his last three books, something clicked for me, and his voice became the clearest, wisest, most authentic voice out there, which I desperately wanted to ingest. So I read, and read, and then wrote about it.

DG: You received an MFA from Columbia and have also taught various subjects like history, religion, and psychology? How has education—from both sides of the aisle—helped with your poetic development?

ES: Education and poetic development are synonymous for me. Many of the allusions I use in my work come from studies in high school, college, and from teaching primarily literature and history in a working-class high school for twenty-eight years.

DG: What are you reading or working on these days?

ES: I am usually reading about twenty books at a time, and these days rarely finish any of them. The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, which is a novel, is particularly exciting at the moment, though more for the subject matter than poetic style. I am always reading Emerson and Thoreau. For poetry, I mostly pull the books of my favorites off the shelf and reread them, to steady my own voice. That list would be long.

Working on these days? Always new poems. And envisioning more albums.

Author Bio:

Eliot Schain’s poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review and Santa Monica Review, among others, as well as in a number of anthologies including America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience and The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed. His newest collection The Distant Sound was published by Sixteen Rivers Press, and selections have been released as an album in collaboration with guitarist Harrison Flynn, available on Apple Music and Spotify.