I meet Nick Courtright for lunch at the Monument Café in
I see the floor manager nod our way and say something to the
waiter. I imagine that it is, “See the
young man in booth 8 with the scraggily goatee?
He’s the voice of his generation, a national treasure, repository of
wisdom, guardian of Truth. Make sure he
gets an extra twist or two of pepper on that Cobb salad of his.”
Just an hour or so with the down to earth Courtright and you
know for sure that it was a common man who wrote William Shakespeare’s
thirty-eight plays and hundred and fifty-eight sonnets, not some embarrassed
academic or aristocratic dilettante. And if Shakespeare were around today, my
guess is that he too would drive a Mazda hatchback and eat at the Monument.
Nick Courtright grew up, the eldest of six children, in the
rusty industrial northeast corner of
His father is a civil servant and his mother is a home care provider working
with elderly people. Nick went to
it, and it was there that Robert DeMott and Jill Rosser helped him realize that
he was a poet. As a sophomore he wrote two hundred and fifty poems in two
hundred and fifty days and hasn’t stopped since. He went to
for an MFA because they had a good program and they offered him more money than
anyone else. During, betwixt and between he worked in gas stations, call
centers, and cubicles on all three shifts and as a copy editor, a door to door
salesman, and a music critic. And he wrote a lot of poems; today it’s hard to
find a journal in which he hasn’t been published. Courtright is currently a
visiting professor at
and he’s hoping “to avoid getting a Ph.D.”
Courtright surprises me by saying that nothing he knows
feels better than having taught a good class. This may be in part because my
son
sitting beside me, but it is more than that.
It is apparent to his reader that Courtright’s poetry is a classroom,
the kind in which people explore and examine and figure things out together.
“We are privy to substantial ingredients,” he tells us: “Story, peach, finch,
armoire, gunsmoke, tree.”
says that when you observe Nick’s class, you don’t know who the teacher is
unless he happens to be standing at the front. And yet there is an urgency, an
importance in his relationship to his students as there is in his relationship
to his readers: “Now, stranger when I
stare you down, what you do / is what becomes of us all. This is pale everything.”
But there
is no condescension in either relationship. Instead there is a sense of shared
discovery even if at times Courtright is taking you by your lapels: “Late at
night, a shadow becomes its own life / still on a wall or on a lampshade and
when it moves, a piece of everything moves with it. Is that okay?” God, yes, it’s okay. It’s as
if Einstein is a poet and able to express e=mc² in verse. It recalls the poems Courtright wrote with a
friend in childhood and the revelation they both felt when one day one of the
poems was good and they knew it. “Holy
cow,” they said looking at each other.
I have
that feeling often reading Courtright’s poetry. I frequently encounter the
“terror of possibility” in the “richness and ruthless center” of the mind:
“Somehow, desperately, street musicians dance to their tunes / and few have
embodied this so well as you, / you who do not have a name and never will.”
This is
vital stuff. This is real, and it’s happening right now. And when conclusions
are drawn, they are shared conclusions even if they are hard wrought and world
weary: “Crazed and priceless, what / is laid out as a possibility, faithfully,
is what we do best.” And when wisdom is reached, is too is ours as well as his.
“Half the world is lost in the canyon, half of the markets / and of the
lamplight, and half the raspy voices of children / who eat stones for
breakfast. Half the world is lost. / Do
not be worried. It was always lost.”
For
Courtright, writing poetry is a spiritual thing, a form of meditation.
Sometimes he does it to music, sometimes into his cell phone. He doesn’t like to write about his own life.
He doesn’t want the readers to be watching his life, but their own. He says that generating material is his least
favorite part of the process; he pours it out in raw form without line breaks
or titles or any knowledge of meaning sometimes as much as four thousand words
in a weekend. Then he can take a year to understand it, interpret it, and shape
it into verse. Revision is the part of the process he likes best. That’s what
he tells me over lunch at the Monument Café. But later I find a place in his
poem “
where he says it simpler and better: “Anything I can make good use of. Anything can be / put together and or taken
apart.”
— Peter Ferry