This is Robert Harrison for entitled "Pinions."
We have a two-part show in the works
about the literature, film, music, and photography
of the American road.
We'll be posting that new episode next week.
My guest is Kai Carlson-Wee,
whom I'll introduce more extensively
at the start of our next episode.
But as a prologue to our extended conversation,
we're offering you today a very interesting segment
in which Kai speaks about how he first became a poet
and reads a few poems from his new book, "Rail."
I know you'll enjoy what follows today,
as well as our romp through the 50s, 60s, and beyond,
that we'll air next week.
Now, can you tell us, Kai, about your own career as a poet
and something about this collection called "Rail"
that you published?
Sure.
Well, "Rail" is a book of poems
that I published this last year,
and it's been out for just about a year at this point.
And it's about a period in my life after college
when I was going through a pretty serious depression.
And I was traveling around the country a lot,
and I started hitchhiking.
I started taking road trips with friends.
I started hiking in the mountains a lot,
and I started hopping trains.
And the freight train culture and the experience of that
really kind of captured my imagination
in a pretty critical way, I think.
And there are depictions of train hopping
in various ways in American culture,
various things.
There have been some photograph projects done.
You see it in some films.
But there's not a lot.
There hasn't really been a lot of investigation
into that aspect.
And I think when I started doing it,
it was for me just to escape something in my own life.
I was heavily medicated, and I was seeing a lot of therapists
and sort of in that institution trying to heal myself.
And this kind of travel where you're traveling without plans
sort of became a way for me to heal my mind a little bit.
And especially when you're hopping freight trains,
there's this really intense sense of the American past
and the American industry.
And this sort of inability to control one's fate
that I really, really dug.
Yeah, of course.
And yeah, especially if you weren't in control of it
at the moment.
Right.
I mean, you're riding-- when you're riding a freight
train, you're riding on a 5,000 ton machine
that has no consciousness.
It feels like it has a consciousness
because it's so large and it's so big.
And it's so powerful that when you're riding a freight train,
you start kind of talking to it, and you start praying to it
in certain ways, and you start treating it like a god almost.
Well, it seems to have a purpose because it's going somewhere.
It seems like it has a reason to get somewhere.
Right.
It does.
And you have no idea what that destination is or that reason
is.
And part of the weird and fun and sort of terrifying thing
about riding a freight train is,
they do weird stuff.
It's not like airplanes where things are scheduled,
and you can kind of predict when they're
going to leave or when they're not.
Trains will stop in a random town in the middle of Montana
for two days, and you're stuck on that thing.
And you don't know if you're ever going to leave.
Sometimes they'll be going one direction,
and they'll box swap in a yard, and they'll just start
going the other direction.
And you're like, OK, now my journey's going backwards.
Were you on them legally?
Or were you hiding out?
Very illegally.
Illegally.
Yeah.
OK.
It's a very illegal thing.
However, I will say when you're doing it,
and you're kind of engaged with the workers in the yards
and the conductors that drive the trains,
they have a sense for the history of it, too.
And although the bulls who are the cops of the railroad
yards do try to catch you, and they
will rough house you a little bit in ways that other cops
won't, because in every railroad yard,
they're on railroad jurisdiction, and it's under railroad law,
which is not federal law.
It's separate.
And that's one of the reasons you hear
about these violent things around railroad yards
throughout the history of them.
It's because the bullcops aren't subject to the same laws.
But despite that, they do have a sense for the history
of train hoppers.
And there's sort of a tenderness to that dynamic.
Even though you are doing something illegal,
it's definitely wrong.
There's a feeling, a thought, that goes back to the 30s,
that if there's a hobo on your train,
it's a good luck thing for the train.
So a lot of conductors actually don't mind people jumping
on the trains and riding.
And you kind of play this cat and mouse game that is
affectionate in a certain way.
So how many times were you caught?
I've been caught maybe like four times.
Four times.
OK.
I mean, I'm pretty good at hiding on these trains at this point,
but I have been caught a few times.
The funniest situation was when I was caught in Minneapolis
a few years ago.
And the guy handcuffed me and was kind of trying to intimidate me.
And I said, this is the first time I'm doing this.
I'm sorry.
I'll never do it again.
I'm trying to talk my way out of it.
And he took my idea and went and typed something
into his computer and came back.
And he said, you say, this is the first time I ever doing this.
And I said, yeah, clearly I got caught.
I don't know what I'm doing.
And he said, well, what about six years ago?
And I was like, six years ago.
I don't know what I was doing six years ago.
And he said, well, I know what you're doing.
You're hopping trains because I'm the one that caught you
last the last time you were doing this.
And was that true?
It was true.
Yeah.
I had forgotten that this guy was the same guy.
But it was pretty embarrassing.
And I almost was put in jail that time,
but ended up talking my way out.
That's great.
So do you have some poems that you've chosen for us?
Sure.
Yeah, this-- I'll read two train poems, because we're
talking about road trips.
And we're talking about these kind of journeys.
I'll read the title poem of the book, which is called "Real."
And this is about a trip-- or it's set on a trip
that I took with my brother across the country
when we were a little bit younger.
And it's partly about this American landscape that--
you see in films like "Easy Rider" in ways.
And you see in films like "Badlands,"
this sort of detritus of the American West.
However, on a train, you see a side that's
just not visible from the highway.
It's a little even more in decay.
So it's about that landscape.
I'm going to go to the railroad rail.
I find it here in the wild Elthelfa,
head full of anticycotics and blue rain.
Twenty years old on a freight train
riding the soy fields into the night,
leaning away from the short grass prairie,
the black Mississippi of dream.
My brother asleep on the well, well beside me,
nodding his head to the sway.
What home are we leaving?
What distances blur the electric fence?
What hundred low, thundering wheels of darkness
are coming to carry us there?
Rain and the singing wind over the auto racks,
staring out west at the stars of our gods
and the lonely dark stars of our hearts.
Bored it up storefronts, burned down apartments,
highway signs that only name the dead.
We cross the station tracks, the broken legs of Sunday chairs
left rusting in the yards.
We know the way the story ends.
Still, the whistle blows.
The flare stacks whip their excess methane candles
against the night.
The wheels that brought us this far still role,
still churn the polished iron ash.
The road goes on.
The highway turns a deeper shade of black.
And as the sun sinks down on the eastern Montana hills,
peppered with horses and gunshot cars,
the rails still lead us somewhere else
and shine in the falling light.
That's terrific.
That's bad lands territory, right?
That's right.
Yeah.
The eastern Montana.
So how did you become a poet, kind?
Because that's really accomplished poetry.
And the rhythms are--
it has that feel of the chucking alone.
Exactly.
Well, I'm glad you picked up on that
because not a lot of people do.
The rhythm in a lot of these poems is anapestic meter.
So it's too unstressed and then stressed.
And so it sounds like--
did it, did it, did it, did it, did it.
And I did that because I wanted
to replicate the sound of trains and sound of that clic-clacking.
Sound and also feel when you're on it,
you probably are moved in that rock-me-baby,
like a Southbound train.
It's that feeling.
Well, I started writing when I was young,
when I was in elementary school,
because I started writing love poems to people in class
that I had crushes on.
And that's honestly how I started.
And it was awkward.
It was sort of a creepy thing to do, I think, in some ways.
But it was effective sometimes too.
You kept 'em to yourself, or you--
Well, I would give 'em to these people.
I would leave 'em in there.
If you give it, it's not creepy.
Right.
Well, it just--
It would look creepy back at it.
It could have come to yourself.
I would put 'em in their desks or in their lockers.
And sometimes this did work, and sometimes it was a little weird.
But that's how I started.
There's a funny story about--
I don't have to go into it.
There's a funny story about what really kind of kicked us off
from me in poetry, but I know we're short on time.
Go ahead.
Well, when I really, really realized that poetry was something
that I wanted to take seriously was one of these instances
with a love poem when I was in fourth grade.
And there was a girl in my class named Jill,
who I developed as crush on.
And on the last day of school, I wrote her this eight-line poem,
"Love Poem."
And I left it in her locker.
And I didn't sign it, and I thought, maybe she'll know it was me,
maybe she won't.
But anyway, I want her to know that I'm thinking about her
in this way.
And I left on the bus, and the last day of school,
and went home, and didn't hear anything over the summer.
And I was sort of expecting her to call or something.
And next year in fifth grade, I didn't hear anything.
And even though I saw her, and we were still friends,
sixth grade, didn't hear anything.
Seventh grade didn't hear anything.
And just, I assumed either she didn't get it,
or she didn't like it.
She thought it was weird.
But my family moved when I was in ninth grade up to Fargo.
And so I left that town behind.
And my dad's a Lutheran pastor.
And I am required to do stuff.
Or I was required to do stuff with the church when I was a kid.
And when I was a sophomore in high school,
there was this youth group trip that was going down to New Orleans.
And everyone in my church had to go.
And I had to go, because I was the pastor's kid.
But we loaded this big van up and drove down to New Orleans.
And it was kind of a road trip along Route 61 down south.
But I was sort of a bad kid.
And I was skipping the required things in New Orleans.
And hanging out with some friends.
And I ran into my old church.
And some of these kids recognized me and said,
hey, Kai, how's it going?
Do you want to come back to our hotel room
and we're having a little party?
I said, sure.
So I go back to the hotel room.
And this girl, Jill, is there who I haven't seen for many years
at this point.
And we kind of reconnect a little bit.
And she asks me how my life is.
And I say, well, it's not so good,
because I'm living in Fargo now.
And I miss everyone from home.
And she says, well, do you want to go into the bathroom
with me and smoke a cigarette?
And I said, sure, because people smoke cigarettes back
in this age.
But we go into the bathroom.
And she takes out this new port menthol cigarette,
because that was the cool cigarette of the time,
a sort of minty, fresh.
And she starts stuffing a towel beneath the door
and she turns on the light.
I mean, the fan in the bathroom so that the smoke
can get sucked out.
And I see her shoulders start to sink.
And I can hear her breathing heavy.
And she seems distressed.
And I say, Jill, are you OK?
Like what's going on when she doesn't say anything?
And I say, Jill, is everything all right?
And she turns around to face me and there are tears in her eyes.
And she says, I have to ask you a question.
And I say, OK, what is it?
And she says, did you write a poem for me in fourth grade?
And I said no.
And she said, well, it was a weird thing in high school
to be writing these poems.
And it wasn't cool to be a poet back then.
And it's always cool to be a poet.
Well, I was a little sheepish.
I didn't know how she was going to react.
And she looks at me a little harder.
And she says, I know it was you that wrote me that poem
in fourth grade.
And so I fessed up and I said, yeah, that was me.
And she proceeded to recite this back to me.
Word for word, line for line.
Just off the top of her head.
And I was totally blown away.
Because I hadn't heard that many people memorized poems.
We did it in class, but it wasn't really a thing.
And I burst into tears.
And she started crying.
And we sat down in this bathroom and smoked
this cigarette together.
And we didn't really talk that much about it.
We kind of hugged and kissed a little.
But it wasn't much more than that.
And we smoked this cigarette.
And I just had a kind of--
it was a turning point in me as far
as the way that I related to poetry.
So I realized how powerful it could be and how intimate it
could be.
And the relationship that it could have privately
within people.
And I also realized that writing these poems
that I had done in the past to kind of get dates, I guess,
wasn't really about me and achieving something.
It was about what other people needed to hear.
And what they carried with them in a private way,
away from these poems.
And so I started taking it a lot more seriously
after that happened.
A kind of poetry that's aware of what it does for others.
More than--
Exactly.
This kind of solopistic self-referential poetry.
Exactly.
And even if the poetry is about the self,
is about the inner weather of the self,
and a lot of poetry is, it still is--
it's purpose is to find a place inside somebody else's
imagination or somebody else's soul.
And I think that's one of the things that drove me
later on to want to really become a poet.
And because to become a poet is a long process,
it's really annoying.
And it takes forever.
It's not like you get inspired and you practice writing
for a year and then you start publishing poems.
It just is a very difficult sort of contentious world
and it's full of drama and everything like every other art
world is.
But I don't know if that created some kind of idea of a call
in me, but I do think about that moment
when I think about what I'm doing with my life,
like scribbling notes in a cafe,
trying to write these poems.
Do you still have that poem?
I remember what it was about.
I mean, it was about the girl's show,
but I didn't remember what it was until she recited it
back to me.
And then I remembered the lines that I had written many years
ago.
It was very objectifying.
It was like--
I was midwestern, so I was comparing her to farm stuff.
So I was like, your hair is golden-weeed and that type of thing.
So you can't read it for us, obviously.
Right.
Well, it was probably terrible, to be honest.
Did you study poetry formally?
Yeah, I got my MFA at University of Wisconsin Madison.
And I studied it in my undergrad.
I just took classes and I went to--
The most important influences for you
with the poets that I studied with.
Well, that you-- that you most influenced by.
Well, I'm in some sort of lineage, I think,
that goes back to the sort of automatic,
inspired occult writing that Yeats did.
And then some of the Whitmanian sort of exuberance
and very Americanness of Whitman, that then extends up
through Theodore Ruttke, that goes to Robert Bligh and James
Ruttke, and the deep images and Larry Levis in the '80s.
And it's sort of a confessionalist style
that also is really propelled by the sublime and ideas
of inspiration and musical cadence that carries the lines.
Well, can we hear another one?
Sure.
I can read either a love poem or another train poem.
Well, I just read both.
OK.
Start with the love poem in the moment.
All right.
And with the train poem.
This is a much more adult love poem
than the one that I wrote for Jill.
But this is about love after a relationship is over.
And the love is gone, but it's also still lingering there
somewhere.
It's called Secret Air.
I know no God, no ghost, no code that
turns the burning engine back.
I know a highway field stars above the sleeping corn.
The river rolls the world spins alone.
We are not promised love like this.
We don't decide what brighter angel comes,
what water climbs the banks.
It could have been a different year, a better pill,
a weird forgotten dream, a song I heard behind the neighbor's
door, the barking dog again.
But it was you, the only one to make it last,
to hold my head like this, to lead me back inside myself,
to know, to be the sadness of a summer horse unbridled
on a hill, departing air, the farmhouse crumbling
in the wind.
I could have lived 100 lives and never known a real kiss.
I could have gone without your winter stars,
your street light tinted breath.
But it was you, the one who made the darkness real,
the highway blue, the roses hollow thorn.
I know we die alone in separate rooms with cancelled eyes
and some disease inside our hearts.
But still, we knew a love like this.
We knew.
And all the nights I sleep in someone else's arms,
the rhythmic dark, the drifty San Francisco
nights I wander with the crowd, from here
to there to somewhere else.
The Safeway lines and subway lines and traffic streaming west.
I return again.
I remember you and only you like this, your careless grip,
your pale eyes beside me in the corn,
the sheet of plywood for a bed.
It is what is.
Among the crickets song, the muddy river rising up the banks.
I meet you there.
I turn to hold you in the secret air that only you will know.
That's great.
That also has a very distinctive rhythm,
not the same anapestic heavy anapec--
yeah, I'm really impressed with your poetry kind.
I have to say the rhythm, the cadences, the images,
and it doesn't ever flirt with either a mockish sentimentality
or a kind of poetic grandstandings.
That's great.
Thank you, Robert.
Yeah, it means a lot.
How about one last train poem for us?
Sure.
This is a poem that I wrote.
After I had done a lot of train hopping
and people would sometimes ask me why I was doing it
or what it was about.
And this is an attempt to kind of explain in a poem
why it has been significant to me.
It's called Where the Feeling Deserts Us.
I wake somewhere on the outskirts of Portland.
The crickets are singing.
The train is refusing to breathe.
Often the distance a truck gears down on a service road
bordered in trees.
The river beside me, babbling kind.
Headache, earache, all I can see of the field
dissolves in a stale white blanket of moon.
Nothing moves.
Even the cold machinery seems to be riding itself
in a dream, sliding away from the steel retainer walls,
box cars stalled on the next four strings.
The train is my shepherd.
I finger a dead leaf.
Starlight stance in the field beyond my cage.
We are never returning to the field itself, only the mystery
hidden inside.
Night after night in the speed of your leaving,
soft of your vamed hands tracing my thigh.
The flavor of dust or the feeling diserts us
may be the blonde heads of needlegrass, swaying,
bodies of cows in the next field over.
I pull up the blanket to cover my bare arms.
Cool air filled with the pressures of falling do.
This is the best I can give for a reason.
The metal accepts you, whoever you are.
The train you are riding will only go forward.
The straight line is perfectly clear.
We've been listening to Kai Carlson.
We read his poetry from his book, "A Rail,"
and he's joined me for this extended conversation
on the American road.
And it sounds to me like the American road
has a lot of road ahead of it with that kind of poetry
if we're continuing that tradition.
So thanks a lot for coming on to Entitled Opinion's Kai.
And all of you listeners of Entitled Opinion's,
stay tuned.
Bye-bye.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
♪ This is the motor running ♪
♪ Head out on the highway ♪
♪ Looking forward, damn sure ♪
♪ In whatever comes our way ♪
♪ Yeah, I'm not in trouble ♪
♪ Maybe it happened ♪
♪ So well in a loving place ♪
♪ My all of the guns ♪
♪ Come on, son ♪
♪ It's loaded to space ♪
♪ I like talking like ♪
♪ Every bit of fun ♪
♪ The rest of the wheel ♪
♪ And I'm feeling that I'm ♪
♪ Yeah, I got it for me ♪
♪ But I'm running ♪
♪ People world in a loving place ♪
♪ My all of the guns ♪
♪ Come on, son ♪
♪ It's loaded to space ♪
♪ And I'm the true of the nature's child ♪
♪ But we were born for the divine ♪
♪ But we can climb so high ♪
♪ I never want to die ♪
♪ Born to be wild ♪
[MUSIC PLAYING]
♪ Born to be wild ♪
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(rock music)
♪ ♪
Head out on the highway
♪ But look at forward venture
♪ And whatever comes away
♪ Yeah, I got a gold make and have fun
♪ Check the world and the young and the brave
♪ Fire all of your guns and guns and it's loaded with space
♪ Said I took two on the nature's shine
♪ We were both brought to be right
♪ We can climb so high
♪ I never want to die
♪ But won't you be wild
♪ Won't you be wild
♪ ♪