Ryan McCarty is a teacher and writer, living in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where poems live more or less comfortably beside their poet neighbors. His poetry and other writing has appeared recently in Door Is a Jar, Left Voice, Michigan Quarterly Review Online, Rattle: Poets Respond, and Trailer Park Quarterly. He’s on Substack at Politics of the Kitchen Table with My Family Crafting Nearby
You can read What Will Poets Do Now? in the April 2025 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
After Trump was re-elected and the inauguration came along, there was this understandable but ultimately useless moaning everywhere I went. But the folks in my town who really needed things – who were really in danger – got down to the business of taking care of each other right away. I was thinking about that one Sunday morning, surrounded by piles of poetry, and I was reading Irene McKinney and those last lines popped up: Are you finished / wringing your hands? / Definitely. I wanted that to be a place that I knew how to get to, so I worked backwards from there. The end thing ended up kind of reflecting the warp and woof of what was happening in my head while I sat with (in this order) Wilfred Owen, WB Yeats, James Wright, Charles Simic, Philip Levine, Ada Limón, Etheridge Knight, Diane Seuss, Martín Espada, Nancy Miller-Gomez, Jim Daniels, Russ Brakefield, Gary Snyder, and Irene McKinney.
Why was the poetic form the best fit for this particular piece of work?
While I was thinking, I just surrounded myself with all these other poets’ voices, because it seems like we’re all going to be in it together, and as I sat thumbing through things they were taking me step-by-step to the point where I wasn’t wringing my hands anymore. But I didn’t want to do a real-real cento, just cutting and pasting other lines together. I wanted it to be something that I was weaving and interacting with too. So I ended up with this sort-of cento.
Do you have a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone?
My poetry isn’t like Martín Espada’s, but I’ve got his “Imagine the Angels of Bread” (and probably a few others of his) taped up on the wall of my heart. It’s clear-eyed and vicious in its critique of the vile things of the world, but brings out so much hope in the process. If my poetry can ever walk somebody to a better day like this poem does, I’ll have made it.
How do you revise your work?
I’m really still figuring this one out. Sometimes I try tricks like taking it all back to one block of text, then playing with all the possible line breaks, rhythms, and forms I can imagine to try to see something I hadn’t before. I’m also at this point where I’m trying to learn how to take just one line and rebuild the whole idea new around that.
As a poet, what does creative success or achievement look like for you?
In Philip Dacy’s “Notes of the Ancient Chinese Poet,” the 4th recommendation is to “Write for one friend / you imagine seated / across a small table from you, / listening, sipping wine” – my wife is almost always the first person who hears my new poems and it’s usually across the table over cups of wine. When it really moves her, I figure I’m onto something and it feels like at least the start of some serious success.
We love the artistic underdogs, the experimentalists, the lovely weirdos — who or what might you get creative joy or energy from that others might not be aware of yet?
Everyone I ride the bus with is a voice in my ear. The people walking around outside who don’t know that they’re living, singing, farting poems. The stories people tell me, especially the people who don’t think of themselves as writers, and the ways that they look when they’re telling it.
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?
The best place to write is the bus going to and from work. I spend the first few minutes of that time listening to people or reading, looking for something to jump off of. It starts my early morning off in a meditative way and gives me a reward for making it through the work day in the afternoon.
What are you reading or watching or listening to lately that intrigues or inspires you?
I try to sing while I’m cooking breakfast every day, no matter how tired I am, and it seems like the days I sing most convincingly are the ones where the bus ride produces the best sparks of poetry. Johnny Cash’s later American albums get me to sing low, and the Mountain Goats’ Sunset Tree usually gets me to sing up high. I’ve been obsessed with Swamp Dogg’s Sorry You Couldn’t Make It lately. It’s such a mortal album, and my hair and beard have been getting grey so I appreciate that. I love Nancy Miller Gomez’s new book, Inconsolable Objects. My wife and I have been reading New York: It’s Upper Tens and Lower Millions, a 19th century popular novel by George Lippard about the evils of the wealthy graspers of the ruling classes. It feels familiar.