“Examine Every Atom”: The Capacious Career of Poet, Editor, and Critic T. R. Hummer

 

T. R. Hummer, as he is known professionally but Terry to his wide group of friends, has enjoyed a remarkably multifaceted literary career over the course of the past fifty years as an editor of five eminent literary journals: Quarterly West, Cimarron Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and Georgia Review. Hummer has written as ambitiously as he has edited, authoring eleven books of well-received poetry in which he has found increasingly adept ways of distilling mystical and mythological themes into lyrical poetry. He has also written a book of incisive literary criticism titled The Muse in the Machine: Essays on Poetry and the Anatomy of the Body Politic.

As both a friend and admirer of his poetry, essays, and music, I had entertained the idea of interviewing Hummer for years, and then finally did at his home in Cold Spring, New York, where he and his wife, the author Beth Cody, welcomed me with warm hospitality. We talked for almost two days straight. Our distilled “talk” that appears here consumed as many hours of editing as our prolonged conversation, yet seemed must shorter.

Chard deNiord: As a child of the Deep South, where you were born in Macon, Mississippi, you spent hours harvesting winter peas on a Massey-Harris combine, harvesting acres and acres of fields. You wrote an essay years back about this farmwork you engaged in your youth as a kind of metaphor for the art of poetry, specifically how it mimicked poetry. When did you have time to read and develop an interest in poetry as a teenager when you were so busy with the chores of planting and harvesting?

Terry Hummer: Part of me cringes at the phrase “a child of the Deep South” when applied to me. I am, for what ought to be reasons that are obvious (but aren’t, to many people), allergic to much of my past. I was born in 1950 in remote rural Mississippi, isolated in ways that are hard to imagine now, and even hard for me to remember. The farm where I spent my childhood can look Edenic in hindsight, and in one dimension it was. Until I was six years old or so, I was a very happy child—though whether I was a human child is another question. In those years I was largely feral. The extended family owned 2,400 acres of rich black prairie farmland. Though like all the other children who lived on the farm—I had six cousins plus my brother living in close proximity—I had chores; everyone did. But I was never required to work terribly hard. The combine phase was spread over three summers, and really I drove no more than six weeks in each of those years. The Black children who lived on our farm, children of tenant farmer families, would have had to work exponentially more, under worse conditions.

What mattered to me most, before I started school, was the land itself. My parents thought nothing of turning me loose, when the weather permitted, to roam that place for hours on end, completely unsupervised by anyone except the family collie (“And a collie supervises,” as Elizabeth Bishop wrote) who was, it must be said, an excellent babysitter. To this day, I tell people, “I was raised in the woods by dogs.” As a child, I loved that place.

The first inkling I had that the world was larger than I knew was on the first day of first grade. My mother walked me to a classroom door, gave me a gentle push, and left. There I was, in a room with twenty-five or so complete strangers. I had no idea there were that many children in the world.

The elephant in the room—in that classroom, and also in this part of the interview—was Jim Crow. 1956 Mississippi was teetering on the brink of the Civil Rights Movement, but it hadn’t arrived yet, certainly not in that remote place. It wouldn’t really arrive for another twenty years or so. Our county was about 70 percent Black, but white people owned just about everything, and were in control of everything. I don’t want to rehearse the obvious—we had “white” and “colored” drinking fountains in public buildings, and yes, when I was four, I wanted to drink the colored water, much to my parents’ chagrin. All those facts about the Jim Crow South, which have become tropes in period movies, were absolutely true. Most people will already know what those are, so we don’t need to enumerate them.

The consequence of Jim Crow that I have rarely seen treated as fully or clearly as I would like is the impact it had on public education.

But the consequence of Jim Crow that I have rarely seen treated as fully or clearly as I would like is the impact it had on public education. Macon, Mississippi, was the county seat; the population of the town was around three thousand. It was a small place, and the population was dwindling already by then, largely due to the Great Migration, which took many Black people north. The school into which I was dropped like an aspirant in Outward Bound had a student body of perhaps five hundred, for all twelve grades. So far so good. However, our tiny town insisted on maintaining not one but two consolidated schools, and you will understand right away that one was for Black students, the other for white.

deNiord: So heinously segregated.

Hummer: Not only were the students segregated but the funding as well. That meant that even though the white people were getting more than the Black people, always, none of the kids in the whole school system were getting what they should have. Everybody was losing. It was a self-destructive system. But in the white community, nobody questioned it. That, we thought, was how it had to be.

deNiord: And had always been.

Hummer: And that didn’t change until federal marshals came and enforced new laws, desegregating the Mississippi schools town by town, and of course the marshals went to the largest population centers first, far from us. I was four years graduated from high school by the time they came to Macon. I graduated in 1968 and the school was still segregated. I think it was 1974 before real enforcement set in—and by then the county had built a private school or two, so segregation continued in a new key. One consequence was that the public school system was abysmal, so I found it very easy. I was a mediocre to good student in terms of my grades, but I had little motivation to do what the curriculum required. I either did it easily or didn’t do it at all, which often went unnoticed. At that time, one student’s lack of motivation was scarcely noticed, much less addressed. But I was, from the start, hungry for something. I didn’t know what exactly, but reading helped. There was plenty of time for reading, and I read lots of books.

But I notice now that in that answer there is a huge gap between the individual and the collective. The logic of what I just said seems to be that, because our school was segregated, I became an avid reader. That is not what happened. It could, in fact, have gone quite the other way, as I suspect it did for many of my classmates.

In that place, in that time, white parents (with loving kindness in their hearts) were gouging out their children’s eyes, not consciously, but out of willful ignorance. We were in school to be educated, but if people had seen things clearly, if they had had one clear thought, Jim Crow would have fallen. Racism would have fallen. It does not stand to reason; it does not stand to emotional clarity; it does not stand in the face of the facts. If the children had had that one clear thought and rejected the status quo, they would have become the enemy. No one wanted their child on the wrong side of a red line.

deNiord: So you went to your own school, it sounded like.

Hummer: Pretty much.

deNiord: At home.

Hummer: Not altogether. I would often read the “wrong” book in class. I also had an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon with little to do but read. That was the time I spent every day on the school bus. I would read morning and afternoon, unless I was carsick, which did happen fairly often.

deNiord: When you say at the time, how old were you?

Hummer: All through elementary, middle, and high school. When I was in eighth grade, like everybody else in the country, we read a lot of Poe. I loved his stories. But we also read his poetry, the usual suspects: “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” “To Helen.” Many of my eighth-grade classmates were in love with Poe. That love soon evaporated, as far as I could tell. Eighth grade was about the limit for a person there to express a fondness for books publicly.

deNiord: To jump ahead to when you first became interested in poetry and writing poetry, was James Dickey an early influence at all? I only ask because of his southern sensibility and subject matter.

Hummer: Dickey himself had no farm connection. He grew up in Buckhead, Georgia; his father was a lawyer. His “southern” childhood would have been entirely different from mine. I didn’t encounter Dickey’s work, really, until I was in graduate school. I found it very different from almost everything else I’d been reading. I will also put on record that when I actually met Jim, he took a lot of air out of my enthusiasm.

deNiord: If you talk to practically any MFA student today, I don’t think he or she would know who you are talking about.

Hummer: I think he is scarcely taught. The same is true, for instance, of Richard Hugo, though perhaps for different reasons. He is also not taught at present, or well known; but he was a huge presence when he was alive. In fact, most of the poetry of the mid- to late twentieth century seems not that well known by younger poets, in my experience anyway. This is of course a gross generalization.

deNiord: Do you feel any particular sadness or loss about that?

Hummer: Most (though by no means all) of the prominent American poets then were white and male, which is part of the reason why the paradigm shifted. Rightly. I have no complaint about any of that, since for so long women poets and poets of color were “canceled” in advance. But it is sad to me (speaking purely for myself) that so much poetry from that period is currently neglected. There is much in those poets that meant and continues to mean a great deal to me personally. And therefore, I would like it to mean a great deal to other people. But, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Even James Wright has fallen through the cracks. And in the 1950s and ’60s, such luminary poets as Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen were nowhere on the radar of most white readers. Which poets are visible and which invisible in any particular period—and visible and invisible to whom—has different causes in different places. Some of those causes are aesthetic—tastes change. But many are political, as we know.

deNiord: You wrote a long essay for the Southern Review titled “Ex Machina: Reading the Mind of the South,” in which you discuss the influence of W. J. Cash’s book The Mind of the South. He referred to “the private thinking of the master group.” Cash’s thesis is similar to what Robert Penn Warren writes about in his essay The Legacy of the Civil War, in which he labels the South’s Civil War delusion as the great alibi and the North’s hubristic legacy as “the treasury of virtues.” I am curious why you quoted Cash’s indictment of the South without also including Penn Warren’s essay. I get the sense you think that Cash has a more profound take on the southern view.

Hummer: I don’t know that Cash has a more profound view than Warren. I do think that, in its time—in Cash’s time as well as Warren’s—Cash’s book was more widely known and more influential than Warren’s excellent book. The two are of a similar age—Cash was born in 1900, Warren in 1905. Warren comes from Kentucky while Cash is a South Carolinian, probably a bit more in the thick of Jim Crow. And tellingly, Cash published The Mind of the South in 1941, quite early on for a book of that kind, while Warren’s was published in 1961. Cash takes chronological precedence. Cash’s book, I think, had and maybe still has a larger footprint than Warren’s. It was a book that the southern intelligentsia paid a lot of attention to at the time. Many of my teachers in college—most of whom had cut their eyeteeth on the New Criticism—were very familiar with it.

The Mind of the South is by now an old book. A lot has gone down both north and south of the Mason–Dixon line since he wrote it, and a lot has come out that white writers in particular weren’t aware of in the early 1940s, things that Cash wasn’t aware of either. From that point of view, the book is a fossil, you might say, though still very interesting and very well written. But, revisiting it as I did while living in the Pacific Northwest—in Oregon, where I wrote the essay in question—was an interesting experience. I was rereading it after many years and re-pondering some of the issues he raises and realizing how differently I felt about so much of it than I had when I first read it.

deNiord: Cash writes that the white man was absorbed in the southern experience and in love with it, despite its deceits: “Was there ever another instance of a country in which the relation of master and man arose in which virtually the whole body of the white natives who had failed economically got off fully from the servitude that in one form or another has almost universally been the penalty of such failure, in which they were parked as it were and left to go to the devil in absolute enjoyment of their liberty.”

Hummer: The essay you mentioned above began with my thinking about who did the bulk of agricultural labor on our farm, and who did what better than whom; all the farmhands were far more capable than I was, but their rewards were scant, far less than mine. When I was born on that farm, in 1950, there were probably eighty people living there, of whom about fourteen were our extended family. We were three families—my father’s and his two brothers’ plus my grandmother. By 1960, there were perhaps fifteen people living there. Everyone who left was Black, and they had very good reason to go.

The land became more and more depopulated, and more farmed by heavy machinery instead of human labor. Less human, more desolate. Things becoming more desolate is bad for a young person’s psyche, as every child on the planet now could attest.

Things becoming more desolate is bad for a young person’s psyche, as every child on the planet now could attest.

deNiord: Do you know what it was about fiction in particular that fueled your escapism?

Hummer: Utterly immersing myself in the world of the story, being somewhere else, not being me for a while.

deNiord: Because you didn’t want to be you?

Hummer: Well, let me try to come back around to that. My grandmother liked intelligence. She and I were very close because she knew I was a smart kid when no one else noticed. Many times she said to me: “Now you listen to me, you are not going to be a farmer; you are going to go somewhere else and do something different. I don’t know what it is. But it will be something wonderful. You are not going to stay here.” From the time I was small she would say that to me three or four times a year. She only stopped when I actually did move elsewhere. She didn’t like being a farm person. She herself wanted to go away. But she was stuck on that farm for most of her life. She died at ninety-three.

deNiord: As a woman of that generation, it would have almost been impossible for her to become a professional.

Hummer: It wouldn't have been possible in almost any scenario you could imagine. But she could have lived a different life—and tried to at one point. I don’t know how this came about exactly, but she and my grandfather moved to Hattiesburg and opened up a little grocery store. This apparently was one of the happiest years of her life. She was living in a town, among people. But the grocery failed after a year, so: back to the farm.

deNiord: It must have been almost torture for her.

Hummer: For her and in theory my mother too, who was as stuck in the country as my grandmother was. My father delivered the mail for fortysomething years—a rural carrier, mind, so his route was eighty miles long. Eighty miles of mostly unpaved roads. He used the family car for his work, and we only had one. He’d leave the house every morning at six a.m. to sort his mail for that day and return at three p.m. when he finished delivering. My mother was in the house all day, fifteen miles from Macon (which itself wasn’t much of a town). She was completely marooned most of the time. However, she never once complained of it in my hearing.

deNiord: How did she survive?

Hummer: Good question. When my dad died in 1994, my mother was heartbroken. I suppose one answer to your question is that she survived the solitude because of how much she loved him, my brother, and me. I feel quite certain that when he died, she thought she’d follow at any second. She lived another twenty-six years. When she finally sold our portion of the farm and moved into town on her own, she had a different life. It turned out to be a life she liked. She was much more herself, I feel, than she had been before.

deNiord: Your mother lived a long life.

Hummer: She did.

deNiord: She died three or four years ago?

Hummer: She died in 2020. She was almost ninety-seven.

deNiord: I know you were very close to her.

Hummer: Well, she was a very sweet person. She and I had our differences over the years but not in any terrible way. When I was in my late teens, I had very serious arguments with my dad. They were mostly over politics and race, once I reached a point where I understood what was going on in the community, in the state, in the whole South. Both he and my mother were deeply indoctrinated, for want of a better word. They didn’t drink the Kool-Aid; they were born in the pitcher. They lived in such a way that they rarely encountered convictions different from theirs, and so they never really had a chance to think other thoughts. I did have many such opportunities, partly because I was a reader. It would be easy to wax sentimental about the power of books, but the truth is that it was television that made the real difference for me. Television brought events into the house that wouldn’t have been in the house otherwise. Television was the antidote for escapism.

deNiord: And you came of age at the beginning of the television era.

Hummer: It’s fair to say that your generation and mine was the first to grow up with television as a constant presence. I remember very clearly the day Dad brought home our first television. It was a few days before Christmas of 1954. You would probably recognize that television. It was an RCA black steel cube that came to teach us like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Many people had the same model, a big metal block that sat on a rotating stand. Because we were out in the country my father had to go up onto the roof to set up the antenna. He had me downstairs watching the picture clear up.

deNiord: “Is it clear yet? Is it clear yet?”

Hummer: “Turn it, turn it!” I was four years old. The first thing I saw, when the picture resolved, was Eisenhower’s Christmas tree being lit. Which is not very impressive in black and white on a relatively small screen. But to me it was impressive. In fact, it was miraculous. For us as for just about everyone else, the television became a constant presence in our house. My dad was a news junkie, so he would always watch the evening news. In the 1960s he would sit in his chair swearing. Martin Luther King, or Robert Kennedy, would come on and my father would lean back in his chair cursing at the screen, under his breath more or less. “Goddamn, Goddamn” this that or the other, generally anything having to do with civil rights. I would be sitting there listening to Dr. King, let’s say. I didn’t say anything. But I thought, “You know, Dad, he makes a lot more sense than you do.”

Martin Luther King, or Robert Kennedy, would come on and my father would lean back in his chair cursing at the screen, under his breath more or less.

deNiord: Did you say that?

Hummer: No. I didn’t say so because at that point I was too young to venture into such territory. I was maybe twelve years old at that point.

deNiord: Do you think your reading led you to this kind of awareness?

Hummer: Partly. But if I’m being honest, I’d have to say what television brought in opened a good many more doors. It was so novel; it is so hard to imagine now how novel it was. We had radio, of course, and before we got the TV, we would listen to a lot of radio programs. But actually being able to see—this is what historians say about why the protest against the Vietnam War became so intense: people could actually see the bloody war. It was the journalists who brought these images back into people’s homes, and it changed many minds. Likewise, the Civil Rights Movement being reported thoroughly on television news was a very important part of how I came to think about politics. During that time, you’d turn on the TV . . .

deNiord: Oh yes, I remember.

Hummer: . . . and there was Selma, Alabama, which was just right down the road. Or even closer by, Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the three civil rights workers were killed; that was forty miles away. It was 1964; I was fourteen, a year when a lot happened in my head and in my heart. The Philadelphia killings really got under my skin. It could have happened in our backyard. A year or so later, Medgar Evers was gunned down in his driveway. I remember more or less charting the deaths. JFK, Dr. King, RFK. I remember the weight of so much bloodshed becoming more and more unbearable to me. But I didn’t say a word about what I was feeling to anyone else in the family, or at school, or anywhere. I instinctively felt it was not safe. I regret now not speaking out sooner.

We were very isolated on the farm, but as the 1960s rolled past, I was able to see, again through the window of the television, others of my generation and what they were doing in the world—in California, in New York, and elsewhere—and this too was important to me. I was beginning to understand the red line my parents feared I would cross, and to know that I had already stepped over.

I was beginning to understand the red line my parents feared I would cross, and to know that I had already stepped over.

deNiord: So, these influences and devices came together in an important confluence of stimuli that woke you up intellectually in a way that your parents weren’t experiencing.

Hummer: By the time they were witnessing this, my dad was so . . .

deNiord: Entrenched.

Hummer: . . . crystallized. He was not going to ever change. In that, he was like most of the white people in our community.

It’s important for me to say here that I’m excruciatingly aware that my particular problems in our household and in our (for want of a better word) tribe were first world problems. Any grief, any guilt I suffered was minuscule compared to what our Black neighbors lived with every single day, and also abstract by comparison. To tell the truth, I’ve spent years writing about these issues, trying to sort out how to do justice to what was going on there from my particular perspective, honestly, without self-aggrandizement or appropriation, and especially without any appearance of resorting to claiming victimhood: we were not the victims, we were the perpetrators. Audiences have not been especially interested, because seriously, who cares about the problems of white racists? But some of us white people who lived through that time in that place have to think very carefully about what happened. There is so much in our present situation that resonates with those crises of the past that understanding what went on then might help with what is going on now.

deNiord: Did you have any friends, peers, who were feeling the same way as you?

Hummer: Yes and no. I’m a serious introvert, so I never had many close friends at any one time. And I was guarded in what I said and to whom. What I did do with friends, peers, was play music. Music was another salvation for me.

deNiord: Well, I know you played the guitar.

Hummer: Eventually, but my first instrument was the saxophone. I started playing alto sax when I was nine. I fell in love with the instrument for reasons that remain mysterious even to me. At nine years old, I had no idea what a saxophone was, what it was for musically. I wasn’t thinking about music itself at that time. I just fell in love with the way the saxophone looked. Was that a problem? Probably, but everyone starts somewhere. A bigger problem was that there was nobody around who could teach me anything about it. The school’s music program got me started but offered almost nothing in terms of real instruction. All the band activities in the school, from about fourth grade through twelfth, were the responsibility of one teacher, and he—a failed trombonist—knew very little about other instruments. He could teach us how to march, but not much about how to play.

deNiord: You were able to pick it up on your own?

Hummer: Insofar as I picked it up, I did it on my own but in the company of other musicians, some of whom were far better than I. They taught me with the music they played.

deNiord: But you were committed, you were motivated.

Hummer: I was obsessed. After I fought the instrument physically long enough to be able to produce a decent tone, I began to pay attention more to music itself. Music was, for me, a language in which I had only the most rudimentary vocabulary. If I had somebody there to actually teach me the language, I could have learned faster.

deNiord: But you did learn it!

Hummer: In the Hemingway story “In Another Country,” the narrator, who is a wounded American soldier, shares a hospital room with a wounded Italian major. At some point the narrator says something like, “I told the major that I found Italian an easy language; he asked me why I did not then take up the use of grammar.” My musical proficiency was like that. I learned a little of that mother tongue, but not nearly as much as I could have under different circumstances—which comes back around to the failure of our school system, our community’s lack of interest in giving children the knowledge they—we—needed.

deNiord: Would you say the saxophone was a big part of the catalyst for you intellectually, culturally, artistically? So much of the music you were interested in was probably Black music.

Hummer: Almost all of it was. We were surrounded by living musical traditions, Black and white, that almost no one in my proximity paid any real attention to. By the time I was in high school, though, saxophone became my identity among my peers. We worshiped the musicians at Stax in Memphis, partly because it was more or less in the neighborhood; we also worshiped Motown, and electric blues musicians such as Muddy Waters and B. B. King. At that point I wanted to learn the music of the Memphis Horns, not giants like Getz and Coltrane—not yet. Being obsessed, I practiced, albeit chaotically. Others began to notice. My classmates, having little basis for comparison, said I was a “natural musician,” not realizing the hours of woodshedding I put in. In retrospect, I think I had just a tad more musical “talent” than everyone else. I was simply stubborn. But I let people think what they wanted. I didn’t mind their mistake; it gave me an identity I could hide behind in high school. I did a lot of hiding in those years.

I developed an identity that had to do with this instrument, and that was a very important thing for me. Not only did it give me a relatively cool high school persona, but it also set me on the path to being an artist, a course for which I had no immediate role models. But what you see here is one of the core problems with the kind of racist culture in which I was embedded: it usurps any other identity, it gives you what Marx calls a “false consciousness.” Many have pointed out how cynical elements in the culture used race—really any kind of otherness—to divide those who otherwise might have united in common interests. Music presented an alternative.

deNiord: In a different vein: did you read Faulkner when you were in high school?

Hummer: I believe we read “Barn Burning” in our American literature class junior year; before that, no, and after that, not until I was in college. Faulkner was an obvious literary icon, but we were not encouraged to read him. His personal statements about race were disappointing, to say the least, to people who were committed to civil rights; he tended to take the “moderate” white fence-sitter point of view, which in essence said, “There is great injustice here, but you must go slowly to make change.” That’s a way of saying “equality, but not until I’m safely dead and gone.” However, some of what Faulkner said about race outside his fiction outraged the white conservative community as well. He was too moderate in his pronouncements to please anyone. I think he tried to straddle the red line. His novels were far wiser than he was—or maybe they gave him a place to hide. I think that, like myself, he was a hider.

When I read The Sound and the Fury as a freshman in college—on my own, not in a class—I realized that Faulkner had used up just about all of the southern raw materials. There was no point in my trying to write fiction that encapsulated my experience. Faulkner had done it all.

The first time I can remember hearing his name was, oddly, from my father, who had bitter words about, as he put it, “Faulkner, that traitor to the South.” My father never read a word of Faulkner; he was not much of a reader. He must have picked this up from somebody else. Faulkner was controversial in the hyperconservative white South because he did not adopt the George Wallace line of overt segregationist politics. My father was not a Faulkner fan, then, to put it mildly—which is ironic, since my father’s life was like an outtake from Go Down, Moses.

My father was not a Faulkner fan, then, to put it mildly—which is ironic, since my father’s life was like an outtake from Go Down, Moses.

The transmission of racist culture from one generation to the next was, in my experience, rarely overt. No one ever sat me down and said, “There are white people in the world and there are people who are not white. We are real and they are not—not human, in any case. Behave accordingly.” I never received that sermon. Rather, it was all in the air, like radioactive fallout, like microplastics. It entered the minds and bodies of everyone, Black and white, but we white folks couldn’t see it.

deNiord: What was the moment, if you can think of the moment, when you broke away? Where you established your own identity, which must have been tough for your dad?

Hummer: I was very hard on that man when I was in my teens, and if I could do it over again, I would probably find kinder ways of navigating that troubled void. My father was in many ways a very nice person. I don’t want to give a false impression of him. He was not a heavy presence in any way; in fact, he was very self-effacing within the family. It was often as if he was not there. However, he was also full of rage—not a rage that presented itself within the family, but the kind of xenophobic, racist rage that we are seeing so much of again in the present. Public rage. Political rage. Rage was everywhere in Mississippi then. In fact, it’s fair to say that I was living in a war zone. The roster of the fallen was adding up, and however oblivious I may have been when I was in my teens, I was paying attention to that.

When John Kennedy was killed, I was at school. He was shot around noon that day. I was walking across campus to go to band practice on the football field. I had my trusty saxophone under my arm, thinking my own twelve-year-old thoughts, when I realized that there was an usual level of chaos on the playground. A lot of people were running.

deNiord: Everyone our age remembers that moment.

Hummer: Somebody ran by, one of my classmates, and I said, “Freddy, what’s going on?” He stopped long enough to say, “Well, didn’t you hear? They killed the son of a bitch.”

deNiord: Oh.

Hummer: That was how the news was received in my school. I was halfway to the football field where band members were gathering. I heard someone playing “Dixie” on the trumpet. It was a celebration.

I want to be as honest as I can here. I don’t want to present myself as a prodigy of moral clear-sightedness or wisdom of any kind. I was confused. I was twelve years old; I didn’t really know what to feel. Everybody around me was in a celebratory frame of mind. I was not, but I was not outraged at the act and disgusted by the response at our school, as I should have been. What I felt was a darkness rising around me. I didn’t know what to do about it. I understand now that it was a grief that, for me at that time, had no name. Having had my eyes gouged out, I was blind. Even though resistance to the community’s mandates were growing in me, I was far from all the way there. Growing new eyes is a long, slow process.

deNiord: That must have been a lonely time.

Hummer: It was. I really didn’t begin to meet my true peers until I was in college. In the meanwhile, we lived in our own self-imposed darkness.

When I was nine or ten years old, I fell into a depression. I didn’t know that’s what it was; nobody ever talked about depression in those days. I didn’t know I was depressed; I just thought I was unhappy, but I could not have said why. Looking back on it years later, I realized that my depression was a response to the latent and the overt rage that was all around me. And I also realized that it stemmed from a guilt that, for me at that time, had no name. That depression hovers around me still. It took me a long time to work out that it stemmed directly from Jim Crow. Childhood trauma is childhood trauma, as one of my therapists pointed out. My trauma was not inside the nuclear family; it came from the community. It was collective, and every child in the place suffered from it. But of course Black children suffered infinitely more than white.

There is an interview that Robert Penn Warren conducted with Malcolm X, fairly late in Malcolm X’s life. It seems clear to me that Warren was still struggling with his emotions—not his mind, which was clear, but his heart, which now was pronouncing sentence on him. This was not made overt, but I am convinced that Warren wanted Malcolm X to absolve him of his guilt.

“Is it possible for a white man to be innocent?” he asks at one point. Malcolm X wasn’t having it. “As long as there is one Black person on earth suffering from the consequences of racism, no: it is not possible for a white man to be innocent.” Warren grasps at an even more distant straw: “Is it possible for a white child to be innocent?” To which Malcolm, rightly unrelenting, makes the same reply: “As long as there is one Black child on earth suffering from the consequences of racism, no: It is not possible for a white child to be innocent.” I was that white child: ignorant but never innocent.

Not long after Malcolm X was assassinated, I began to discover poetry.

What poetry said to me—or rather, the way I interpreted what I thought poetry was saying to me—was: Here is something you can do that has nothing to do with anything in your life in the South. Become a poet and you will be doing something that nobody where you came from cares about at all. That much was certainly true. Reading had always been at least 75 percent escapism for me; now I proposed to escape completely into poetry.

The problem was (and is) that poetry will not let anyone escape. Poetry does the opposite. It makes you examine everything you have ever lived through. It makes you examine every atom of who you are as a human.

Poetry makes you examine every atom of who you are as a human.

I began to think of myself seriously as a poet when I was around nineteen. I had thought of myself as a writer—or maybe a potential writer—for a long time before that, but not specifically as a poet. When I was five years old my brother, who then would have been nine, had a question for me. “What do you think you might want to do when you grow up?” And I said, “I think I might want to write books.” I didn’t see anything surprising about that. I loved books already, and they were becoming my lifeline. If I had been pragmatic, I wouldn’t have become a poet. Which leads back to my story. My brother’s reply to my answer was, “Oh, no, don’t do that!” I said, “Why not?” and he said, “What if you write a book and nobody wants to read it?” which is a very good question.

deNiord (laughing): Welcome to poetry!

Hummer: Your comment is maybe more prescient than you know. When I graduated from high school, I went to Mississippi State University, which was not far away. It’s where all the kids in my generation of the family went. It was the land-grant school in the state, the one designated for future farmers. If you wanted to be a lawyer, say, you probably went to the University of Mississippi. Once I understood that, not wanting to be a farmer or a lawyer, I transferred in the middle of my second year, to the University of Southern Mississippi.

There were writing workshops even then, though they were run rather differently than they are now, as you might expect; we’re talking about 1969, 1970. I took two creative writing workshops at State taught by different instructors; both operated in the same way. No clear distinction was made between poetry and fiction; the courses were both creative writing courses. There was no poetry workshop or fiction workshop. The pedagogy was open-ended. Students brought in stories and poems whenever they wanted, indiscriminately. I set out to write stories; I thought I would be a novelist. I began to notice that when I brought in a story, I didn’t get much feedback. So as an experiment I turned in a poem. People immediately perked up. It quickly became clear to me that I was better at writing poems than fiction.

deNiord: So, this was the first time you really started writing poetry seriously?

Hummer: Seriously, yes. I had written poems when I was in high school, but I didn’t take them seriously at all. They were doggerel, although even in high school I was adept at form.

deNiord: Something happened, though, in those college classes.

Hummer: Yes, it became clear to me that this was the way I needed to go. This was what worked.

deNiord: You woke up to something you didn’t know, at least up to that point, that you were interested in.

Hummer: Rather, I woke up to something I could actually do. Part of that process was the epiphany that, because nobody from where I came from had been a poet, that was precisely what I needed to do. Poetry appeared to me to have nothing to do with my past life. Now I could get a new life.

When I was eighteen or nineteen, I wandered into the university bookstore and bought a collection of poetry by Wallace Stevens, which I read with utter incomprehension but with pleasure because of the poems’ music. As to their content, I felt as though I was reading a book written on Saturn in an unknown language that I struggled to translate. That was part of the process of becoming another person. Maybe I should have learned Ancient Greek instead. Likewise, I struggled to read Shelley’s “The Masque of Anarchy,” with which I collided in a survey of British literature when I was a freshman. I wrestled with Shelley’s language, delighted in his music, and repeatedly failed to “translate” the poem properly. I began to realize that I would have to become somebody else to read these poems with real understanding. There was nothing like this on the family farm.

deNiord: Did your parents have anything to say about this epiphany you were experiencing?

Hummer: I will say this about my parents: they were always very supportive of my doing whatever I wanted with my life, within reason as they saw it. Unreasonable would have been to cross that racist red line, which I began to do immediately and overtly in college, where I had peers who had thought more and read more about politics and ethics and history than I had. Furthermore, I had peers there of several races. Beyond that, I will also say that for a long time my family was unaware of what I was up to. I had always been secretive; I had to be. Although if they had asked, I wouldn’t have concealed my interest in poetry from them.

Poetry was so exotic to them that they wouldn’t have known it was dangerous. But then, neither did I, not for a long time.

deNiord: I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you about the impressive arc of your long career as editor of some of the most eminent literary journals in the country, including Quarterly West, the Cimarron Review, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, and New England Review. How did editing these prestigious journals over the course of four decades, during which time you were inundated almost constantly with thousands of submissions, influence and/or affect, for better or worse, your own writing? And do you miss it?

Hummer: I found—as all editors find, at least since the advent of the MFA industry—that there is a lot of work, poetry and prose, that is very competently done, poems and stories and essays that have all the elements you’d expect in a fine piece of writing, but still there was something lacking. I became interested in trying to define what that something was, and thinking that way sharpened my own writing. I also came to realize that there is a mass of writing that no one but editors ever see—work that will never be published; and yet that work too is part of the fabric of our literature. I took it as seriously as I could. There is only so much time in a day, and as you point out, the number of submissions is enormous (and increasing exponentially with the advent of digital submission and the general acceptance of multiple submissions), so the time I had to spend with each submission was minuscule and dwindling. It was fascinating to be in the middle of the stream, surveying the current. For my own writing, the longer I edited the more I valued strangeness as a virtue. There isn’t space here for me to define that or discuss the consequences.

For my own writing, the longer I edited the more I valued strangeness as a virtue.

To be clear, I was the poetry editor for Cimarron Review, not the editor-in-chief, as at the other journals you mention. To do real justice to this question would probably require me to write an essay, but briefly put: when I was young, editing was not really on my radar; I fell into it almost by accident, sometimes by being willing to take on tasks that others didn’t want. Once I’d done it for a while, I found it quite satisfying in terms of the work we published, and personally useful in terms of the work we did not publish.

I think some people are natural-born editors; others can learn the discipline but may not be able to learn to love the work. I confess I am in the latter category. I came to feel, after fifteen or so years of wearing the editorial yoke, that my practice as an editor had ceased to serve my own writing, and so I moved on. But I am grateful for the opportunities I had and for all they taught me.

deNiord: You’ve been remarkably prolific as a poet, especially given your obligations as an editor. You are also the author of two books of criticism, The Muse in the Machine: Essays on Poetry and the Anatomy of the Body Politic (2006) and Available Surfaces: Essays on Poesis (2012). Now that you have retired, are you finding it harder or easier to write?

Hummer: I don’t feel prolific. I feel like a slacker who hasn’t done all he could have. Do I suffer from imposter syndrome? You bet. And you need look no farther than the story this interview presents to see why. Retirement has intensified that feeling, since I no longer have the mechanism of academia to prop me up.

But, to address your question, the categories harder and easier are not really in my working vocabulary. True, Walt Whitman in Hell was excruciating to write, because I was in essence starting all over as a poet; that book was, for me, a special case. The others came as necessarily as breathing. That’s not always “easy,” but it must be done. It’s better not to write poetry if you don’t absolutely have to.

deNiord: Your last six books of poetry—Useless Virtues, The Infinity Sessions, Ephemeron, Skandalon, Eon, and After the Afterlife—have focused profoundly on metaphysical themes. What are you working on now?

Hummer: I have spent the past couple of years convincing myself to commit to a New and Selected Poems, and then writing and assembling it. That was a hard decision to make, and the labor was awful. It wasn’t difficult like digging a ditch; the problem was that there is so much in my earlier work that I seriously don’t like that reading through those first three books again, repeatedly, was psychologically awful. But I did it, finally. Eventually, Zeitgeist Lightning: New and Selected Poems will emerge from LSU Press.

Those are the facts, but your question implies a response beyond mere facts: metafacts. Alas, I can’t go there. I never know what I’m going to write next, and I tend not to think about what I just wrote, since that would get in the way of not knowing what’s coming. In short, the older I get (which is awfully old) the more I simply want to get out of the way of poetry. Maybe this is what is metaphysical about my writing: Poetry itself is part of the vast stream of the cosmos; my poems (if they really are mine) are almost nothing by comparison, and yet they are part of the current. Poet, step aside.