I used to think that I was interested in discovering what’s extraordinary within ordinary experience (what Wordsworthian Romanticism taught us to do), but now I think that it’s a matter not so much of discovery as of recognition (and I don’t equate the two). Many of my poems are narrative rhetorical studies; the speaker is usually a ten-year-old lower middle-class Southeastern American male growing up in the 1960s and inevitably influenced by TV, radio, comic books, public school, his Protestant church, and especially Sunday school thereat. He expresses his wonder about life’s absurdity though his naivety and (if I may say so) innocence. I myself did some of this when I was his age...and I knew little boys (and girls) who did so, too, and some of my memories of them have (to be a bit ironic here) “informed” my speaker.

My work has been criticized on occasion as being repetitive and even self-plagiarizing, but formulaic is, I think, a more accurate term. To put it another way: I always seem to be writing the same poem until I get it right. So far I haven’t. I’m a one-trick pony who still can’t master the one thing which he can do (or at least wants to do)—perhaps because it’s not a “trick” at all, but more of a performance of (I hope) consequence. Real closure, success—these would be the end of me, and I’m just peculiar that way and probably in many other ways, but that’s the peculiar way that counts.

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Gale Acuff

26 Nov. 2019