Dialogue:
Jason Fraley and Jeffrey Hecker
Jason Fraley on Jeffery Hecker’s "NBC's A Visit with Carl Sandburg, 1958" and "Stale Double Stuf Oreo, 1974"
Of its many capacities, poetry conveys and poetry reintroduces. With clarity and great care, Jeffrey illustrates these attributes in his evocative poems.
In “Stale Double Stuf Oreo, 1974,” Jeffrey conveys a gathering that is simultaneously unique and shared. While Hank Aaron was before my time, I distinctly remember my dad’s fondness for baseball—the Big Red Machine in particular—and how my grandmother (Nanny) often fell asleep with the latter-day Reds on TV. The colorful Rubik’s Cubes of Jeffrey’s poems remind me of the neon aquarium rocks that filled a bowl in my other grandmother’s (Granny’s) living room. Maybe it’s the holiday season’s influence, but it’s almost impossible not to imagine a room teeming with relatives, smoke, aroma, and conversation. Are families interchangeable at some fundamental level? Jeffrey taps into a nostalgia that threatens our comfort with its warmth and haunting poignancy, whether that’s “Evel Knievel drowning on closed circuit television” or our own personal memory that is inextricably linked to tragedy. I imagine after reading this poem that our families’ apocrypha have many of the same dog-eared pages.
With “NBC’s A Visit with Carl Sandburg, 1958,” Jeffrey reintroduces me to Carl Sandburg, whose poetry I skimmed briefly in college but who, surprisingly, never featured prominently in business school curricula. Being from Appalachia, I appreciated and found resonant Jeffrey’s decision to highlight language’s idiosyncrasies throughout this poem—Carl identifying his interviewer solely from his accent; “Carl say[ing] Area long A, extends the initial A sound. A-rea in Carl’s mouth last[ing a] whole second. Where I’m from, vowels extend horizon-long like the goodbye—“it’s been good to know you”—that Carl offered. There’s a certain familiarity in imaging how Carl may have pronounced bye. Could he have stretched it so long that it became another hello? Another welcome back? I hope so. Jeffrey made me believe he could, anyway.
Returning to Jeffrey’s poems frequently over the past few weeks, I admire his attention to detail—the use of precise, almost clinical descriptors in one line followed by the intimately personal in the next. And it serves as an impetus. Too often, we serve as over-active narrators of our own personal history. Instead, Jeffrey’s poems implore readers (or at least me) to reintroduce ourselves to the tactile joys, the premature goodbyes, and all the foibles and sorrows that comprise who we are. In this way, we may convey something simultaneously recognizable, yet new to ourselves to appreciate and explore.
Jeffrey Hecker on Jason Fraley’s "Captain, the barnacle markets demand men]" and "[Provide an explanation for her silence.]
Unlike a debt-free Olympic ice skater, the poetic device anaphora rarely disappoints. Like Jason Fraley, I use it and I love it too. Like Jason Fraley, I use it too and I love it a lot. When we are young, repetition reminds us people are telling us goodbye and hello all the time, as if we are gods. No wonder we feel pressure as we age. How many baths and showers have we taken? The reiteration comes back as the identical morning cup of measured apple juice, as well as song choruses, and sunrises.
As adults these feelings remain, and thoughts become much more complicated. Luckily, complexity is another level of fun. I super enjoy how anaphora invites several interpretations of reprise as surprise. Is it a solo speaker and each line is one person’s deep dive detective investigation into an event or topic? Is it a lone speaker and each line is actually changing its hive mind, so the layering feels and reads more like organic surface dirt then topsoil then subsoil then plant material then bedrock? Is it different speakers, and each line is spoken by the next in line, like renga haiku masters taking dinner date turns on The Bachelor? What is especially nice: all possible scattershot attracts the same brain electromagnet and seems correct no matter who is saying what, whether each statement is weighted equally, or each line is a corrective of the last line, or none of the above.
Here is the awesome part. The hardest decision Jason or anyone has to make in the anaphora craft process is emotional sequence. Captain, I see your jawline in the distant cliffs. We can envision ultimately whenever that line became the sixth line in Jason’s 11-line poem was a joyous and pivotal moment in Jason’s afternoon. For instance, I once discovered the final missing jigsaw puzzle piece under the red oak cabinet my father-in-law stores sweet potatoes. What I am getting at is the day the sun set and Jason decided Explanation: over time, a light breeze thins her cheek. Not blush – a tongue almost free deserved fourth trophy placement in his 6 strophe poem, Jason’s evening ended seeing the moon as usual, but we know that midnight was brand new.
For each issue, ballast asks pairs of poets to read each other’s work and respond in some way. We hope these dialogues will sound the resonances contained within the issue as well as serve to foster a sense of interconnection and community among our authors.
If you’ve been published in a previous issue of ballast and would like to participate in a dialogue, please reach out to our editors at ballastjournal@gmail.com.