Fresno Famous

Born in Norfolk, Virginia, essayist, novelist and (ex) poet Richard Katrovas grew up under difficult conditions of poverty as the oldest of five children. He later became an accomplished writer and the influential creator of an international writing program in the Czech Republic.

Katrovas has written six books of poetry, a book of short stories, a memoir, and a novel. He will read from his work on Wednesday, April 25, at 7 p.m. at Fresno State, as part of the English Department's annual Visiting Writer Series, hosted by the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing and the San Joaquin Literary Association.

Katrovas was adopted by relatives and lived for three years in Japan during his teenage years. He later graduated from San Diego State, receiving a bachelor's degree in English in 1977. He then was a Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia, and received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writer's Workshop in 1983.

His first book of poems, Green Dragons, was co-winner of the New Poets Series from Wesleyan University Press, which published his next two books of poetry, Snug Harbor and The Public Mirror.

While on a Fulbright fellowship, Katrovas lived in Prague and witnessed the Velvet Revolution. Later, he became the founding academic director of the Prague Summer Program for writers.

He is married to Dominka Winterova, has two children and divides his time between Prague, New Orleans, where he taught for more than twenty-five years, and Michigan, where he is a professor of English at Western Michigan University. Katrovas' second
memoir, is the newly released "The Years of Smashing Bricks."

Katrovas, who considers himself an ex-poet and now concentrates primarily on writing prose, was interviewed recently by Stephen Barile.

You had an inauspicious childhood, being the oldest of five children, living in squalid conditions, having a father who was a felon, etc. How have these early experiences shaped your poetics?

The glib answer, which is probably the best one, is that my response to the chaos of my childhood has been to embrace formalism as an adult artist. Actually, I consider myself not a poet, but an ex-poet. I now write prose exclusively. I love poets and poetry, credit the world of American poetry with saving my life, but I don't feel as though I have anything more to say than I already have, at this stage of my life, in verse.

How have your wide and varied academic experiences helped or hindered your writing? When do you find time for poetry writing and how does academia help your poems?

Well, I'm very much a creature of English departments, having spent more than thirty-five years, as a student through the seventies and subsequently as a professor, under the foul though loving wing of one or another English department.

When I first came into the profession, there was still palpable tension between some old-guard literature professors and us yahoos who deigned to call ourselves "poets" and "creative writers." Ironically, with the ascension of "theory," which early on I consumed voraciously and which almost murdered my soul, writing workshops became a haven for old-fashioned literary study.

Suffice it to say, I love my job, as a teacher and as an administrator of the first and very best study-abroad program for writers, the Prague Summer Program. I feel incredibly blessed. I'm at a stage of my life and career when my English department at Western Michigan, where I've taught since taking early retirement from the University of New Orleans, is so incredibly decent and supportive that I feel a great responsibility to give back to my institution and to the profession as much as I can. This sounds maudlin, I know, but it's true.

At San Diego State, where you received your BA, you were a student of Glover Davis, one of the original Fresno poets, who is now retired and living again in Fresno. What was your experience like as his student? What did Davis equip you with that helped form the basis of your writing career?

I cannot stress too much the positive effect that man had on my life. On the first day of the first workshop I ever took, he kicked me out of the room for arguing with him! Then he gave me a C as a final grade! Of course, such tough love was precisely what that foolish, narcissistic, emotionally scarred kid needed.

Glover was one of the blessings of my life. He was big brother, father, and mentor rolled into one. He's one of the best poets of his generation, and if he weren't so incredibly modest and flat-out terrible at self-promotion, more folks in the poetry world would know his work.

Glover, and my other Fresno mentors in San Diego, Robert L. Jones and Bruce H. Boston, gave me access to the Fresno ethos, a set of values, a collective character, shaped by their teachers, Peter Everwine, Bob Mezey, and, of course, the incomparable Philip Levine. They gave me access, too, to C.G. Hanzlicek (Czech spelling, with a "v" over the "c"!), and of course, Larry Levis, David St. John, and so many others.

In other words, through Glover I was given access to a community, one in which I would never reside, except on the page.

Poet Gerald Stern has likened your poetry, especially your choral lyrics in Dithyrambs (Carnegie Mellon Press) to that of a "contemporary W.H. Auden." How do you feel about such praise?

Yeah, well, he's also likened my prose to something between Mark Twain and Henry Miller, and in other contexts, in other blurbs, I've been likened to Hemingway, Saint Augustine, and Walker Percy. Of course all such comparisons are utter silliness. Auden was a great poet. I'm not.

But in Dithyrambs, especially, one may find, if one is at all interested in doing so, the best writing I've ever done and may ever do. The book may be a complete failure, it's ambition simply beyond my reach, but there are patches of writing in that book that transcend my talent and intelligence. There are places were I quite simply was able to be better than I am.

I feel so lucky to have written that book, and of course am pissed off that, though it received some very nice reviews, etc., it was largely ignored within the poetry world. That book should have won some sort of flippin' award, been put in a position to get more widely read. Oh, well. I don't feel like that about any of my other ten books, only that one, and any poet who reads this will snigger and grunt, "Join the club, chump."

Who are some of the contemporary poets that you return to with regularity and recommend to readers of poetry?

There are so many damned good poets, and I hire so many of them for the Prague Summer Program, that I really don't want to tick off a list and leave anyone off. But let me simply say that Gerald Stern and Philip Levine, of the older generation, remain for me the most vital, even essential.

When you turn to our poetic forefathers for impetus or inspiration, who are they and why do you return?

I don't teach poetry workshops anymore, but I do teach a course in prosody. I teach graduate students a very subtle scansion method, one that acknowledges secondary and tertiary stresses and which seeks to show how no verse that's worth a damned is "free." If folks would simply scan Whitman, even, they'd see that great chunks of blank verse are embedded in his lines, that there is dynamic tension between prose and, yes, quite tradition verse within his lines, that that's precisely what we're hearing and feeling, that tension, not "free verse."

Everyone speaks of Emily Dickenson as being somehow prosodically one-dimensional, but Lord, she isn't! "There's a certain slant of light/Winter afternoons/That oppresses like heft ..." Well, it's that second line that fascinates me. How does it scan? If, like me, you will not admit two-stress feet, you're looking at an anomaly, one that is obviously quite consciously contrived given that it repeats within the stanza pattern. Not "on" winter afternoon, which would have rendered a perfect trimeter line. Instead, we have a stress/unstress/stress/unstress/stress pattern, which seems to me, for all the world, like a trilogy of stresses, a rather ironic one at that, given the subject of the poem, doubt in the midst of faith.

My point is simply that I'm most interested in that which is most prosodically compelling, and that can be anything from Keats's incredible odes to Yeats's incredible prosodical feats throughout his career. I'm less interested in Hopkins's sprung-rhythm silliness than I am in his actual verse, which has little to do with what he said he was doing.

Anyway, I don't think about forefathers and foremothers; I think about poems.

What advice to you give young writers, what can you add in the way of wisdom to make poetry writing more pertinent, if not immediate?

My advice is that of an ex-poet and it is simply that they should be thinking, engaged, voracious readers of everything they can get their hands on. The composition and consumption of verse should be in the service of understanding the world, and the human heart, better. Literary ambition that is not tethered to a native curiosity is worse than evil; it's banal.

Finally, please talk a little bit about your efforts in creating a world community of writers and your continuing work as academic director of the Prague summer seminars.

First of all, it has been named the Prague Summer Program since I moved it from the University of New Orleans in 2003. I formed it out of desperation in 1993. I'd promised my (now ex-) wife that I'd find a way for us to live in both countries.

Imagine this scene in 1992: I walk into my dean and say, "Hey, dean! I want to start a study-abroad program for writers! I want to advertise nationally, internationally, and pull in between 100 and 150 or so aspiring writing each summer from all over America! I want to throw together a half-million-dollar operation and have as my faculty some of the most important writers in America and Central Europe! All I need is about fifty grand to get this baby rolling! What do you say, dean?"

Well, when he finished laughing ... I did eventually find a way to pull it off, and I'm deeply proud of what it has become over the years. By pioneering this concept with my friend and colleague Robert Eversz and a sweet, wacky young guy named Trevor Top, I've not only given the profession something pedagogically solid, indeed essential, but have spawned numerous other such programs, other opportunities for aspiring writers to live and study abroad for a while, to begin a process of shedding American provincialism which is, right now, after Muslim and other forms of religious extremism, the most dangerous condition in the world.

Richard Katrovas will read Wednesday, April 25, inside the University Business Center, Room 194, 5245 N. Backer Ave. on the campus of Fresno State. See the MFA website or call (559) 278-2553 for details.