By Elijah Sparkman

Peter Markus lives downriver. I live in Hamtramck, MI. Sometimes we meet in the middle and play tennis in southwest Detroit. We talk. A lot of what we talk about are the things said here. Peter Markus has a new book of poetry, The River at the End of the River (Dzanc Books). It is a book for readers who are new to his signature primordial sonics and it is a book for readers who are familiar with his other books, which are in many ways all one book. I asked him about Dzanc and Dan Wickett. And I asked him about animals and about listening and about being present. All types of things that I really cared about. I tried to ask him questions in the way I only could. And I think that he answered as he only could. And I hope it’s a nice thing to read before going and reading his new poetry collection and to read before confronting the river.

Elijah Sparkman: Alongside your father, this book is dedicated to Dan Wickett, who was a founder of Dzanc Books and a major champion of artists in Detroit and beyond. Would you say why this book was dedicated to him? What have he and Dzanc meant to you personally and to your understanding of literature? Is there any presence of Dan in The River at the End of the River specifically?

Peter Markus: I first met Dan Wickett at a reading I was doing at the legendary Book Beat bookshop in Oak Park, Michigan. At the time, I had two books out on Derek White’s Calamari Press, now known as Calamari Archive. A third book was also a part of the world through Ander Monson’s New Michigan/DIAGRAM press, which was based out of Alabama where Monson had recently finished up his time as editor at Black Warrior Review, which is how I first came to know him, when I sent the title story of Good, Brother (my first book) to Black Warrior.

I was happy when Ander said yes to the story. As for Wickett, he came rushing up to me after the reading at Book Beat with a sense of urgency in his face. Those who know Dan Wickett might be surprised by such a look. By nature, Dan was anything but urgent. If anything, Dan liked to be invisible, standing as he often did in the back of any room he found himself in. But on this occasion, he came up to me and wanted to know things, like why didn’t he know me, why hadn’t he read me, in other words, and did I have books that he could buy, which I think I did, and I’m pretty sure I reached into my backpack to pull out copies of Good, Brother and The Singing Fish, both published, as I’ve said, by the one-man micro-machine that is Derek White. Wickett then went right into telling me about the forming of Dzanc Books with his recluse pal Steve Gillis. This must’ve been back around 2005 or 2006, or whenever Dzanc was barely more than a glint in the eye of Dan and Steve, both of whom would soon become not only friends but trusted and generous readers of my next handful of books. They’d just put out Ken Kesey’s book and Kesey was a name I knew from a time when the internet was being newly baptized by strange new writers and writing. I’m sure I nodded with some enthusiasm when Dan mentioned Kesey’s name (no relation, as far as I know or knew, to the Kesey who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion). Wickett then went on to mention a second book that Dzanc had just gotten a hold of and were planning to publish by Yannick Murphy, a writer whose first book, Stories in Another Language, was a book I often carried around in my backpack. I’m sure my eyes lit up when Wickett said Yannick’s name. Wickett then asked if I happened to have anything unpublished, or something I was then working on, which of course I did. I imagine I unzipped my backpack to pull out a copy of Bob, or Man on Boat, which Dzanc ended up making into their follow-up title to Murphy’s In a Bear’s Eye. So yeah, Dan was an important figure in my pages finding a home out in the world. Maybe more importantly, Dan and I became friends and dare I say word-brothers, a phrase I don’t take lightly. He also was one of my first readers of whatever I happened to be working on. We had other bonds beyond books, such as Detroit sports and our children and even when my book of poems When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds was a book that Dzanc didn’t publish—they were happy to, even though they were known at the time as primarily a publisher of literary fiction—Dan did more to put that book into the hands of readers than anyone else I know. Dan made many writers feel like he was their biggest fan. He was an ideal reader and Dzanc, who is bringing out this new book of poems, The River at the End of the River, has been the ideal press for me, even with Dan no longer with them, in that they understand the writer I am and the ways the books extend a conversation between them that began back when the word “brother” became a word I claimed as my own. I do regret that Dan and I never spent any time on the river together, on my boat, or on the walks I like to take down to where the river ends or turns into the lake down at Pointe Mouillee. I used to sometimes tell myself, “Next time, reach out to Dan, see if Dan might want to go out on the river,” though I am the kind of person who prefers to fish and walk alone. He was a good man, a good friend, better than I could ever be.

Sparkman: This is your second book of poetry. Overall, you have written nine books. All of these, with the exception of Inside My Pencil (your book about teaching poetry to youth in Detroit at InsideOut), take place in the world of mud and rivers and fish and brothers and fathers and sky. Do you think of your work as belonging to a same universe in the Faulknerian sense: a Yoknapatawpha County? If so, then why are you able to return to the same place over and over? What keeps you returning? If not, then is there another way you see your books as related?

Markus: I do see my work or the books I’ve put out as being part of one bigger thing, one bigger story, even a book like Inside My Pencil and The Fish and the Not Fish, a book made up entirely of monosyllabic words that I wrote as an experiment/challenge to see if I could write without “river” or “brother” or “father” being a part of its lexicon. This new book of poems is more of the same, more river and more fish and maybe just a little less father and maybe more feathers and less grief and loss and maybe, just maybe, more gratitude. Faulkner was a writer whose books were in that backpack on the day I first met Dan Wickett along with the manuscript of Bob, or Man on Boat and also a copy of Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. Stanford did, like Faulkner, build myth through invention, and I like to think I’m in conversation with them both. Again, I’ve been lucky that Dzanc sees my work as being a single river, a single tree, with root systems and other branches and creeks and water finding other sources of water. I’d like to think that in the end the river at the end of the river is a kind of sky and maybe that’s what I’m trying to reach for.

Sparkman: This is your second book of poetry in a row. Are there things that poetry is allowing you to do that you had not been able to do otherwise? For instance, what has the line break come to mean for you? What has white space come to mean for you? Does it feel like you have access to the lyric, and perhaps emotion, in ways that prose does not permit?

Markus: Poetry allows me to be more honest and to make use of the world as I see and feel it. I miss the fiction and the lie that allows me to just make things up. I’ve got a new book of fiction coming out in the Fall of 2027 with Dzanc (Bob, or Bird with One Wing) that is more Bob but a different Bob, too, and more monosyllables with boys in the woods and not on the river in a boat though wherever Bob is, there is always a river near. But the poems allow me and invite me and challenge me to be more truthful and to say whatever I might say about the world that I’ve aged into as a fatherless son. As “a prose stylist with the ear of a poet,” not my words but words taken from a review that appeared in The American Book Review some years ago, I’ve always paid close attention to the sentence, to each word, each syllable, even the sounds between words if such a thing exists (it does). But the sentence and the box of the paragraph have been displaced in these last two books by the line and the single stanza and that has opened up to a plainer and maybe cleaner sense of breath. In my brother books, I often favored the single long paragraph with no room to breathe (come into my house, reader, and you’ll find the door behind you has not only closed but the hope is that it is locked). I realize this is maybe the surest way to lose a reader, though in truth, there is no reader, so where’s the loss. That might sound foolish or just silly—the notion that there is no reader—though I’m not the first to say it and I hope I won’t be the last to believe it. I certainly encourage my students not to be looking over their shoulders when they write, or forward out into something even more fiction-seducing than the notion of a marketplace. That said, I do think the poem is the surest way into the hearts of yourself and maybe to the hearts of others who might find their way to my poems. More than a few times I’ve had people say, “Thank you” for going there—into loss, into grief, through to gratitude—as a way of showing that there is indeed a way through. I’ll take that as the gift that it is.

Sparkman: The collection’s opening poem, “The River at the End of the River,” begins with the lines:

My father is waiting for me
down at the river. He is looking out
at the always moving water.
What if the river were made up
of words? What would it say?

A few pages later, the poem “There Is Always Something Making Some Small Sound” begins with these lines:

You can’t go down to the river
thinking the water is going to have an answer.
It’s true the river has a mouth
but it can’t talk. The voice you hear
lives inside your head. It’s not your father.
And your father isn’t some bird singing
or not. Your father is dead.

This poem ends with this image of two swans: “Their necks are curved into question marks. / What do you think you’re doing? their look is asking you. / Imagine that look.”

My question is about the interrogative form. These poems are populated with questions (In Matt Bell-like fashion, I counted sixty question marks over one hundred nineteen pages (of course, some questions aren’t really questions, and some sentences, question mark-less, are)).

There are questions our speaker only just realized were meaningful to him. There are questions he is afraid to ask. There are questions nature ignores. And often when nature does respond, the answer has little to do with the question. Nature, most of the time, simply (or maybe not simply) makes sound.

Did you think consciously about the inclusion of questions throughout this collection? What is the relationship between art-making and question-asking to you? Art-making and answers or answerlessness?

Markus: What Rilke says about living with questions might be the best way to answer what is maybe a beautiful but unanswerable sequence of questions. “Don’t search for the answers…Live the questions now.” That sort of thing. That’s the kind of walk I prefer to walk and the kind of talking that goes along with it. We say birds sing, but what if it’s just them talking, which it more than likely is. My second book is called The Singing Fish, and in the particulars of that world, it’s true the fish or at least the fish heads do tell the brothers what they ought to do. Not run. Not hide. But dig in. Stay. Live harder. Don’t take shit from anyone. Make the world as you want it to be. As a writer who has now taken to writing poems, too, I’m happy not to know. I can still say what I don’t know and allow those mysteries lead me on its own path, along river, through the woods, into marsh and out into bigger waters and an even bigger sky. I don’t know the names of most trees and most flowers and some of the birds I’ve gotten to know them by name but the knowing stops there. Heron, osprey, eagle, swan. Red-winged blackbird. Cooper’s hawk. Hunt. Eat. Seek. Each one, as Emily D. once said, a thing with feathers. That’s good enough for me. I envy the miracle of flight. Maybe they look down on me as the slow walker that I am. I’m in no hurry. That’s one thing writing poems has taught me. If the river says anything, it says, “Slow down.” Maybe also sit. Be quiet. Like in the Wendell Berry’s “How to Be a Poet.”:

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

Sparkman: This book is so rich in memory: of a father, of children, the land and the animals.

What do you think of the future? The future of the river? The future of the woods?

In the poem “What Was Never Ours to Take,” you write about building steps down to the shore of Lake Huron. After finishing the steps, you write:

How many times in my life would I make
that descent? I wonder if those steps still exist
or if they’ve become part of the sandy dirt.
We become what and where we are.
For good or bad. Earth and water.
Everything is borrowed. Even the sky.

Is the future borrowed? Are our words borrowed? Is anyone or anything borrowing from us?

Markus: I don’t think much about the future. Now and here is what I’m most about, as the good book wants us to understand. I’d like to believe that everything is gifted to us, not borrowed or even stolen. Maybe I should revise that line from my poem and change it to “Everything is gifted.” But I like to honor what I said and when I said it, believing there must have been a “why” and a “truth” behind it.

Sparkman: In “Birds, Fish, Dogs,” you write: “I talk more to birds and fish and dogs / than I do to humans. For one, / they are all three better listeners.” Later, you write:

In the end, birds and fish
and dogs only want to be what they are
and do what they do best. They are already
the poems we are looking for.
They would never want to be us.

What makes a good listener? Why is it necessary to listen to be? Is there a difference between being and making poetry? Were you being when you made this collection?

Markus: I’m not a good listener. I listen too much to my own head. The problem is there are too many voices. Maybe that’s what draws me down to the river. Maybe that’s what brings me to my affection and my affinity for dogs and birds. Dogs and birds and the river and sky, too—trees, fish, the mud, the moon, etc.—are happy being what they are. Not that I’m not. Not that we’re not. But thinking gets in the way, I think. Consciousness. Our search for meaning. It’s hard to just be. To really be in that “be” state is silence, is no voice, no sound. Maybe when we get to that place, nothing is there. That seems scary, but maybe that’s what Jim Harrison means when he makes the claim that his poems are “flowers to the void.” I do prefer to verb “make” over most other verbs when it comes to such matters as poetry and also of course peace and love.

Sparkman: How do you approach sequencing: how do you know which poem goes after the next? How often are the poems directly connected to one another? In what ways is The River at the End of the River one long poem?

Markus: The River at the End of the River IS one long poem, as is When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds, as are the books of fiction Good, Brother, The Singing Fish, We Make Mud, etc.

I think you’ll appreciate this. In the early 2000s, when I used to spend my summers in Brooklyn teaching with the Gotham Writers Workshop, I did a reading where an editor from one of the Big 5 publishing companies at the time approached me, and we got friendly, and like Dan Wickett a few years later, this editor asked me if I had or was working on a novel, etc. Here again, I reached into my backpack to pull out the pages that would eventually become (thanks to Dan and Dzanc) Bob, or Man on Boat. I was woken some days or weeks later by a phone call from this editor inviting me into the office building that housed this particular leg of what was at one time at least known by the nomenclature used above. I had the highest of hopes when I hopped on the F train out of Park Slope and headed into what was then for me the big city of literary dreams. Long story short, the conversation did not go as I had imagined. Long story short, the manuscript that would become (thanks again to Dan Wickett and Dzanc) Bob, or Man on Boat was not going to be a Big 5 book because, in the words of this editor and others who had also read it, “It’s more like an epic poem than a conventional novel.” Kudos and kisses to Dan Wickett and to Dzanc and other such small presses—kisses, too, to Derek White—for seeking out work that is less conventional and maybe even more epic or at least mythic. I know as a reader and listener I am most interested in such things.

So yeah, when I write and when I get to the point of putting pages next to each other, I always lean into the notion that water finds other water and that image links up with image and bird finds sky and fish find river and tree climb up from mud and father is born from father and that all of these “things” eventually fall into place. But yes, everything is connected and is made to be read and experienced in this way should a reader sit down and make the time to sit with this world and listen to it, which I would expect very few persons to be so inclined to do. Dan Wickett was one of a handful who saw reason to do so. Yet another reason this book is dedicated to him in memoriam.

Sparkman: How often do you read histories or scientific books about the river? Or read a Wikipedia page in the middle of the night about an animal that you encounter? Is there ever the desire to seek recorded facts about the natural world of your poems? Or in some ways, would these facts feel irrelevant to the learned world, the magical world of the river as you inhabit it?

Markus: I’m not interested much in facts, let alone information. Information is the death of story. Gordon Lish said that somewhere in some interview, or in notes to one of his infamous workshops. I don’t need a stone to talk, or to tell me what it is or what is isn’t or, God help me, what it might be thinking. Stones are made to be thrown. The ripple they make when they hit the water. That’s what I’m interested in.

If I’m up at three a.m., as I often am, I’m not fishing for more information. There’s too much of that. If anything, I’m finding my way to some song I am meant to hear at that moment. I recently came upon Vic Chesnutt and have added him to my list of singer-songwriter obsessions. I like what he has to say in his song “Sad Peter Pan” about “I’m just pushing the paint around.” That’s a good way of saying what I’m doing, here in this interview and also in the pages that constitute one long poem, epic or not.

Sparkman: For those who have not read it, Inside My Pencil is such a wonderful book. It has your signature sonics, repetition of words, often monosyllabic roll. It is about a theory of teaching. It is about you learning how to teach. And it is also a real, joyous narrative of a few weeks in a specific classroom. I am wondering if you ever consider returning to that mode of realist, auto-fictive writing? Would you write about the river or family via essay? Of have you felt that poetry was the only form for you to grieve your father and approach the river in your later years?

Markus: Teaching is something that I think I know or at least the classroom is the space where I find myself being most useful in the world (outside of my roles as father and husband and son and brother). I do enjoy writing about it and find great pleasure in the act of doing it. I chose not to fictionalize the loss of my father because why lie? Why make a fiction from that? Say it feelingly, as I think Gloucester puts it to Lear. Whereas my alliance as a fiction writer is to the saying being said sayingly (i.e., how or shape of a sentence over the what). All said, I like to think that both form and subject choose us. I’m open to whatever comes my way, which also means I’m open to much being thrown away. Not everything written needs to be seen.

Sparkman: You and I sometimes play tennis when the weather is okay in Michigan. What is the relationship between playing tennis and writing to you? Does it support your writing practice? Does it support your body or your mind for the purpose of writing? You and I never keep score. We just hit. Volley the ball back and forth. Are you ever hitting, volleying back and forth, when divvying out the words that belong in the poem? In these poems? In poems or prose to come?

Markus: Ah, so you’ve saved the best question for last, us brothers playing tennis. Yes, us having fun. Hitting a ball back and forth between us. Trying our best to keep the ball alive and continuous in that moment. Knowing, too, that eventually we will fail, the net will get in the way, the racket strings might even break, etc. You said it best with the sentence, “We just hit.” Which makes me think of Faulkner’s Benjy at the very opening of The Sound and the Fury, one of the backpack books that I had with me that day when I first met Dan Wickett. “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.” Why would we even begin to think to keep score? On the page, too, there is only hitting, there is only keeping the ball in motion, keeping the sentence suspended in mid-air, aloft. That’s why we do what we do.