Discussing the Lit Blitz: J.S. Absher's "Mad Poet Passes"

Discussing the Lit Blitz, previous finalist Annaliese Lemmon talks with the finalists from our most recent contest about their work.

​This interview has been edited for clarity.

Annaliese Lemmon: Welcome everyone to the Mormon Lit Lab podcast. I'm Annaliese Lemmon, your host for this series where we discuss the 14th annual Mormon Lit Blitz. Today I'm joined by J.S. Absher, author of “Mad Poet Passes.” Welcome.

J.S. Absher: Thank you. Thank you so much. I’m really happy to be here.

Annaliese Lemmon: Thanks. And could you introduce yourself and explain what your experience is with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?

J.S. Absher: Okay, well I actually wrote this out.

Annaliese Lemmon: Okay.

J.S. Absher: Because its somewhat complex. I hope it's not too readerly when I read it. So we were in the early 1950s, we were living in a small town in the mountains of Southwest Virginia. My mother was tracted out by missionaries, and she was disposed to believe the Joseph Smith story because she had just had a dream of Jesus Christ. And she thought, well, if I can dream about Jesus, he can certainly appear to, you know, Joseph Smith. 

As a kid, my dad had frequently run away from home and one of those times he ended up with an LDS farming family in Jerome, Idaho and that was one of the happiest times in his life. So he was well disposed towards the Church and church members. He didn't join for several years and he was always kind of a Jack Mormon, but he always encouraged us to participate actively. 

I was baptized when I was almost 9 in the swimming pool of the YMCA in Fries,Virginia. The church was pretty short on infrastructure in the mountains of North Carolina, and Virginia back in those days. And in fact the church where my mom was baptized in Marion, Virginia is still a branch, although they have a building. 

When I was in grad school, at the end of the semester, just before Christmas, my dad killed himself. And that really figured mightily in the years that followed, they were, as President Kimball would call them, years that the locust has eaten. I was already struggling with about everything in my life, personal relationships, my marriage, many things. And that kind of gave me a reason and excuse for letting everything crumble away. So, my son was born then, my marriage crumbled away. I let it go, sadly. And I became inactive for more than 20 years, quit writing poetry for several years. I had to work two and three jobs to dig out of the financial hole I was in. 

A key moment came, this was just a moment of pure grace, unearned, undeserved. I was at work walking across the hallway, and suddenly an influx of intelligence just poured into me, and I had three promises: that I would find love, sufficient income, and success as a writer. Now, this didn't mean fame or fortune or anything spectacular. Just a satisfactory sort of life, which I didn’t feel like I had then. 

So like I said, it was a moment of pure grace, completely unearned and undeserved. I’ve never really forgotten about it for long. 

So as the years went by, I encountered missionaries on the street and started talking to them. My then girlfriend took the lessons and joined the church. I became active again and we were sealed in the temple 11 years ago. So, it's been up and down, but lately up.

Annaliese Lemmon: That's quite a story.

J.S. Absher: Hope that wasn't too much.

Annaliese Lemmon: Yeah, it's really interesting to see the ups and downs in people's lives and how people can overcome so much that they've gone through.

J.S. Absher: Yeah. Yeah. Even though at times you think you won't ever.

Annaliese Lemmon: Yeah. So you submitted this sonnet “Mad Poet Passes” and I really enjoyed it, especially because I actually tried to write a sonnet for this Lit Blitz. However, it did not turn out very well. The meter was just wooden and just didn't turn out great.

J.S. Absher: I have written many a very bad sonnet. 

Annaliese Lemmon: But it really made me appreciate the rhyme and the meter and the alliteration and that beautiful word, pachydermatous. So which phrase or line are you most proud of putting together?

J.S. Absher: It's kind of hard to say. I think probably the image I like the best of all the ones, the one that made me laugh out loud when I thought of it is the sophistic long johns with logical holes. I found that very amusing to myself. And then the sestet writing, you know, using the extended metaphor of the thread, going, you know, thread, thread count, threadbare, frayed, using that dominant metaphor in the sestet was actually a little bit of a challenge, but I enjoyed doing that.

Annaliese Lemmon: Nice, and I'm going back to the beginning. You start with this quote from the Talmud, and I'm familiar with Christ talking about a camel going through a needle's eye, but I'm not familiar with the Talmud. So how did you come to choose this quote to lead the sonnet?

J.S. Absher: You know, you had asked me that question in preparation for this chat. And I cannot remember where I found that quotation. I thought I knew where it was, but I looked, you know, at the eBooks where I thought I had it and I’ve searched and it's not there. 

So, I was, you know, the idea of the camel passing through the needle is obviously very familiar to those that know the New Testament. So I found this replacing a camel with an elephant account a little bit funny. And pachydermatous, I thought the epigraph sets up using that word, and that word justifies the epigraph. And I thought, that's a kind of funny word. I like that word, and it's a little pretentious and I don't mind being pretentious on occasion, but I kind of thought that would keep me from getting the poem published.

I thought the editors would stop at that word and not go further, but I was wrong.

Annaliese Lemmon: So you just thought that was too fancy a word for the Lit Blitz?

J.S. Absher: No. For any. I didn't really write it for Lit Blitz, but…

Annaliese Lemmon: Any publication?

J.S. Absher: Yeah, any, yeah, most publications that would just stick out as an unusually big, abstract, inkhorn term. So.

Annaliese Lemmon: Yeah, I've definitely heard advice against using too many of those, but I think just that one word, I think it worked beautifully there.

And yeah, an elephant just seems so much more mind blowing, that it would fit through a needle than even a camel. So, yeah, I think that works well. And yeah, I just love the imagery and metaphors that were used in this. So how did you go about choosing them? Did they come to you all at once or did you have to search, like, just following that thread of which things would relate to thread and thread count and things?

J.S. Absher: Well, that was the sestet and I don't quite remember the whole process of writing it. It's been a few years. Of course it's all governed by the fact that the mad poet is going to undress. So that kind of tells you there's gonna be something about clothing in it, or at least likely.

So I was shooting in the first, the octave, I found it at an earlier draft, which is really over the top in terms of what the mad poet is wearing. So I did kind of scale it back so it wasn't crazy.

But, you know, I wanted to have, as with learned leggings, a mixture of abstract and concrete. And also a mixture of eras so that he's wearing a hair shirt as we think of medieval aesthetics, a belt and sword frog, which would be any time that people wore swords, I guess, but didn't have a sword, just a frog. The pricked leather bag, which makes me think of hippies I saw back when I was a kid, or a young man at the college I toured.

So I was kind of make him, you know, and I have actually worked with a number of homeless people and this doesn’t, had really not inspired by them at all, but I have seen how they can put together an outfit from bits and scraps they pick up, you know, just because they find them. So I wanted that sense of here's a person that is somewhat outside the ordinary, so that he can see and say things that we might not otherwise say or see.

Annaliese Lemmon: And yeah, that could be why he would be considered mad because it's so out of the ordinary, but it often takes out of the ordinary to really point at truth.

J.S. Absher: Yeah. And of course here he is taking all his clothes off, right? So he's gonna seem pretty crazy to the people seeing that.

Annaliese Lemmon: Thank you. Did you have anything else that you would like to say about this poem?

J.S. Absher: This is a, yeah, it's one in a series of poems about the mad poet actually has, well, he doesn't have a name. There's a poem where he's admitted to a psychiatric facility and because he gives an absurd name, he's called Patient Doe. So most of the poems he’s Patient Doe, but that only works really in the longer poem or in a series where you set the context. So here he became the, just Mad Poet. But I use the Patient Doe persona to write about things I probably, outside my own experience. I don’t know why that works, but it seems to for me.

Annaliese Lemmon: Okay. So what is a piece of media or literature, any format or any genre that you would recommend for our audience?

J.S. Absher: Well, I thought about that. So, you know, I went to BYU then went to, I did get a PhD from Duke, but it was after a long struggle, and it was, even though I got the degree, I can’t say it was a successful period in my life. That's the period my dad died. So I was just outside the church culture and outside the Intermountain West culture for a long time. 

So one thing that surprised me when I came back is that how much the writers and readers are into genre fiction, which really doesn't, most of the time doesn't appeal to me. So my recommendation is going to be a little bit out there, I think, for most of the people listening to this, watching this. 

So, and I have a few. Lately, well over the last several years, Rilke is, of course, a world famous German poet, one of the best poets of the 20th century. At the end of his life, he wrote poetry in French, which I can read, although he is, I mean, I have to use dictionaries and other helps. So I have read and translated some of his French poetry, which I have found very interesting and inspiring. 

Memoirs that I’ve read several times and were deeply influential were by Elias Canetti, who was a Sephardic Jew, born on the Lower Danube in 1905. He eventually won the Nobel Prize primarily for his memoirs. I highly recommend those. 

And then an odd book that's hard to classify, Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch. I've spent a lot of time reading and rereading that. 

And then in terms of poets, I read lots of people, mostly older, W.H. Auden, Yeats, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Seamus Heaney, and Cavafy. Just some.

Annaliese Lemmon: Very nice. That gives people a nice, wide variety for people to choose from. And do you have any other projects or places to find you online that you'd like to tell our audience about? Like, you said you've written more of these Mad Poet poems. Could we find them anywhere else?

J.S. Absher: One was published in the North Carolina Literary Review a couple years ago. It's about when he escapes from the institution he's in and goes on the town and meets up with a person that at least in his mind has no head, or he is carrying his head. And they have a combative conversation about various items. A lot of the Patient Doe poems are about poets having the ability to write about anything and not be limited by political correctness, as we used to call it back in the day or other things. So that's one of the things that Patient Doe and the No Head Man are talking about, they’re arguing about really, is that. 

But of course I'm not gonna, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna remember the name of that poem, but it’s in North Carolina, if you Google North Carolina Literary Review, Absher, Patient Doe, it should probably come up.

Annaliese Lemmon: Yeah, if I can find it, I'll put it in the show notes. ["Patient Doe Escapes the Asylum and Goes on the Town" by J.S. Absher, North Carolina Literary Review Online Winter 2023 ]

J.S. Absher: Yeah. Now I have a website, www.jsabsherpoetry.com, so there’s blog post and poetry and more. So two other projects, not poetry. One is I've drafted a memoir of my father, 70,000 words that first go around, several publishers rejected it, so I probably need to revise it. But it’s been sitting in my inbox for well over a year. 

And then there was a 1895 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which was then a rising tobacco industrial town, there was an incident where a lynching was forestalled by the action of several African-American citizens of the town. And so one of my questions was, well, who were they? What were their interests? Where did they come from? Where did, you know, what happened to 'em? So I've written, scattered through my blog post, there’s quite a few articles about those guys, that situation, and to the extent I can figure out who they were, what their backgrounds or friendships or social networks, that sort of thing. 

So that's kind of, well, it’s not kind of, it is in fact well outside of my wheelhouse. So work on it has been very slow and I’m not super confident in my ability to carry it off, but it has been very meaningful to me to understand the kind of people who would put their lives in danger to protect someone from being lynched.

Annaliese Lemmon: I definitely would see that as a very worthy project to research, especially since it is a period of history that is often glossed over in the US.

J.S. Absher: The period between Reconstruction and Jim Crow, and this falls right in that period, is often overlooked. The full blown Jim Crow hadn't quite arrived in North Carolina in 1895. It had in the deeper South, but it was still, people thought it could maybe be avoided in North Carolina, but of course it wasn't.

Annaliese Lemmon: Okay. Well, thank you so much for joining us and sharing all about your poem and everything you've got going on. 

J.S. Absher: Well, thank you. Thank you. Enjoyed it very much.

Annaliese Lemmon: Yeah, thanks for talking with us and hope to see you again in the Lit Blitz.

J.S. Absher: All right. I hope so.

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