Face to Face with Deemer

Deemer goes Whitman in the following self-penned interview:

The publisher has suggested that I interview myself about the genesis of my book of poems, IN MY OLD AGE. A splendid idea! In a splendid tradition as well.
Whitman wrote favorable reviews of himself using pseudonyms. What I will do is split myself into two personae, Q and A.

Q. Talk about the origins of IN MY OLD AGE.

A. I need to start with the individual poems. First of all, I have written very little poetry through my career. My brother Bill Deemer is a huge talent, under-appreciated in Oregon, and one poet in the family is enough. At the same time, upon occasion I have met the day with poetry in my head, sometimes an entire poem, usually the beginning of one. I have no idea how these lines get there. I developed the habit of using them when I found them, getting them down before I forgot and working on them to some kind of completion. The most extreme case of this was a series of love sonnets I wrote to a particular female who shall remain unnamed, later collected as SEATTLE SONNETS. This was about twenty years ago.

Recently, in my old age, poetic lines began to greet my mornings once again. Many had to do with dying, or with failure, or with the aches and pains of getting old. I let them ride for a while, thinking they were a passing fancy, but they persisted so I started finishing them and putting them down in my blog, The Writing Life II.

Terry Simons of Round Bend Press suggested gathering them into a book. He'd publish it. I said, let’s wait and see if I have enough. They kept coming, and I did.

The first assembly for this book came in at 116 pages. I felt very strongly that I wanted a book with no duds, and I was writing a lot of duds. So I began going through the manuscript and eliminating poems. By the time I was done, I had a 62 page book. I own up to every poem in there.

Q. Are they still coming?

A. Actually I haven't written a new one since I started putting together the book. Maybe it's over. Maybe not. We'll see.

Q. What are your strengths as a poet?

A. I'm still not comfortable calling myself a poet. A writer who occasionally writes poems is better. I think my best poems are either very personal or very funny. The last two in the book showcase each mode: “Autobiography” is just what it says, however dark and sad. “The West Meets East Talkin' Misery Blues” is hilarious to anyone familiar with the culture of Maryland's Eastern Shore. This one, by the way, was written over 30 years ago when I lived there. I performed it as often as people would let me. Another pair might be “I'm Not Fit Company,” which speaks to generational changes in gender relationships from a personal perspective, and “Email Stress,” inspired by all the spam everyone gets. So I can be personal and dark on the one hand, and funny and witty on the other.

Q. Almost a contradiction.

A. I don't consider it a contradiction. When I look inside, I cry. When I look outside, I laugh. It's still a zero-sum universe.

Q. Several of your poems mention a zero-sum universe. What's that about?

A. Just what it says. It's really about yin and yang, an eternal balance, the conservation of energy, it's been put lots of ways. In my view, you can't explain evil in the world unless you accept it as a balance to goodness. Evil has no logic otherwise. But evil clearly exists. The question is why? Because we live in a zero-sum universe. Given all the goodness in the world, in which art plays a large part, there has to be considerable negativity, evil, to bring the sum back down to zero.

Q. Anything else you want to say about your book?

A. Yes. I love reading most of these aloud. They are much more fun to read than anything else I've written, especially the comic ones. I look forward to being able to do that.

Q. You have a reading scheduled at Blackbird Wineshop's First Wednesday on October 5.

A. Correct. And maybe there will be other readings, too.

Q. Thank you for your time.

A. My time is your time. Literally.


TS