November 2023

Caesura Presents…Max Heinegg

Max Heinegg is a poet, singer-songwriter, recording artist, editor, and literary critic. His previous collection, Good Harbor, won the inaugural Paul Nemser Prize from Lily Poetry Press. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, won the Emily Stauffer Poetry Prize and the Sidney Lanier Poetry Prize, and has been a finalist for prizes from Asheville Poetry Journal, Columbia Poetry Review, Crab Creek Review, Cultural Weekly, December Magazine, the Nazim Hikmet Prize, Rougarou Journal, and Twyckenham Notes. 

As a singer-songwriter and guitarist, his last five records can be heard on Bandcamp, ITunes, Spotify, and Youtube. His latest record, Through Traveler, adapted 14 poems from the public domain into songs.

He is the editor and founder of Panther Cave Press, a guest editor of Stone Canoe, and has published literary reviews in Rain Taxi and Atticus Review.

Born in Cooperstown, NY, he lived in Schenectady, NY before moving to Medford, MA, where he has taught English in the Medford Public Schools for 25 years and is the co-founder and brewmaster of Medford Brewing Company. He is married with two daughters.

Website:  https://www.maxheinegg.com

Max’s Music: https://maxheinegg.bandcamp.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=732450299

“Poetry Lives at the Level of Prayer”

John:

Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me about your meditative, grounded yet philosophical new collection, Going There! If you don’t mind, anti-intuitive as it seems, I’d like to start at the end. Your final poem, “Rejoinder,” begins:

            When we’re rewound, back to the roots,
            don’t let them say we made of music a private matter,
  a garden for no one

            to enter.

A foundational principle woven throughout the book, these lines imply we’ve lost, and are still in the process of losing, something essential about our beings. Yet there’s a sense of hope, if only we relearn to witness and appreciate. Each poem in Going There walks that tightrope of grief and idealism. What do these lines mean to you, and how do you feel they resonate across the collection?

Max:

These lines were written looking at my backyard, and are a contemplation of death and my decision, aesthetically, to be more accessible than I once was.  In the two years since my father passed, I have had a lot to think about, and little of it unique to me. There was a clear loss, but also the gaining of a hard-won-wisdom, i.e. the appreciation of every day that we have here and with our loved ones.

So my general goal of just writing a lot and finishing what poems emerge as good enough for me, or as Wendell Berry says, poems that don’t “disturb the silence” they come from, is tempered by the idea of working with relatable concepts and language that’s clear but also honed.  Where my first book, Good Harbor, was about my home and classroom as a place of supposed safety in an unpredictable world, Going There is more about the various places we experience and gain experience. I’ve chosen some of the places we all find ourselves: weddings, delivery rooms, work, vacation, hospitals, funerals, driving, running, swimming and let the movement away from the home lead to a new understanding of what’s valuable and worthy in life.

 John:

How has the process of writing these poems led you to a greater understanding of what’s valuable in your life? What did you previously take for granted or not contemplate much that has come into clearer focus while exploring so much human drama?

And, if Berry ends up being wrong about poetry’s effect, what kind of silence do you hope your poems disturb?

Max:

Writing about experiences, especially ones I shared with my family, create deeper memories. Deciding what we write about, if a draft isn’t just born from the daily process of musing and being playful, is a way of selecting the life I want to remember, even if it’s painful. Working hard on revisions can be a way of seeing how much one cares. I think writing elegies brings me back to the people I loved who have passed, and keeps that love alive.

I think Berry means to avoid artifice and to be authentic, but also that poetry lives at the level of prayer. I’m not religious as he is, but I think that’s a serious aim. (I’ve always kept that poem by him, “How To Be a Poet” in a visible spot in my classroom.)

I would disturb my own complacency as a person and my wont to forget what matters, whether it’s people I love or places and times in my life that matter. 

Some of the people and voices in my poems are meant to be satirized or disturbed, as are attitudes that take people, animals, and the planet for granted. I hope that even in a not overtly political collection like this that there is a clear humanistic vein.

John:

I love your comment that “poetry lives at the level of prayer.” I’m also not at all religious, but I wholly agree that writing authentic, vulnerable poetry is very similar to prayer. We’re opening ourselves up entirely to language and to readers and hope to move them on the deepest level possible.

And there’s a sense of our communal and personal ghosts, most notably in the poem “Father’s Day.” 

            In the weeks after my father dies,
            I see him everywhere alive.

Can you tell me how the past haunts your work?

Max:

Since my father passed in 2021, I’ve experienced what I’m sure anyone reading this has: a pitch blackness that gradually returns to the light of day. The way back was shadowy and my dreams were unsettling, but also full of lovely fragments of memory. He definitely has a strong presence in the work, but he isn’t an upsetting ghost anymore. His problems, I have come to believe, were his. 

In any life, there are mistakes and regrets.  I am lucky that I don’t have many, so I’d say in general, my past doesn’t haunt my work. Any adult has to come to grips with childhood damage, but I don’t use my published work for that. Mainly because I’ve done the psychological work to be an adult who is more centered in the living moment and focused on being someone my family and students can rely on.  The places I’ve been have generally broadened my perspective, and the years where I was a bit wild or self-destructive were nothing compared to other lives I’ve seen self-destruct. Perhaps the friends I’ve had who have died, for various unnecessary reasons, do pop up now and again. I keep their photographs on my writing wall. I’ve always, particularly when I record vocals for my records, imagine my dead peers in the room with me, so that I am genuine and as good as I can be. I imagine them there, ready to call me out if I’m anything less than authentic.

John:

I definitely understand the desire to understand one’s past and other histories in order to make sense of who you are while ensuring you focus your life and writing on the present. Optimally, the past should be a personal springboard, not anchor.

And your work consistently keeps readers in the moment. Many poems seem to break down intimate experiences into relatable details. Even poems involving the past burst with presence. You also have a number of poems exploring your family, children, and fatherhood. How has your work changed since becoming a parent? How has your larger perspective changed?

Max:

I’m very happy the poems read like that. That’s entirely the goal. I started as a fully lyric poet but now I think I’m more in the narrative camp.

In terms of family, it’s hard to remember what life was like before kids, now that they are 19 and 17, but having kids gave me perspective and purpose, and also opened up my heart in a way that I don’t think anything else could have.

John:

And there are all kinds of inheritances in your work, as if the poems themselves are being passed down generations. You show a great sensitivity to both myth and history. And, beyond the human, there’s a sense of inheritance as it relates to nature, the world, the earth and how its dirt gets in our nails. How do your poems speak to the comparison of human and natural “inheritances?”

Max: 

I am happy to hear you mention those aspects of the work. I’ve been reading the myths my whole life (I teach a monomyth unit to my high school classes), and they have always had a powerful effect on me. Every summer, I try to re-read a few books about human history and human evolution (usually Sapiens and Guns, Germs, and Steel), and I’ve always been very connected to animals, perhaps more than the woods, although I’m generally walking in the woods at least once a week with my wife. In terms of inheritances, I am lucky to be alive, to have been born into a family that encouraged my artistic development, and now I have the chance to do that for my own kids and students. I feel that I have a responsibility to cultivate and share what I can do with my writing and my teaching, and that although I won’t be here for very long (though hopefully as long as possible!) I should look to leave as much as I can. I think what we’re doing to the environment as well as to our fellow human beings speaks to how much the species isn’t thinking long-term, and needs to remember our connectivity and interdependence.  

While I try to avoid being didactic in my work, I hope there is a perceptible ethical strand that is pro-Earth / eco-sensitive, and links us to the physical world, even as we live much of our lives in constructed environments that play pretend / as if the context for our lives wasn’t the world.

John:

I definitely recognize the subtle, sensitive exploration of connectivity and interdependence, especially in lines like this, from your poem “Elegy”:

                    …       Even fallen,
the branch remembers flower. So,
love calls for you like a father,
to be sure you are there.

Can you speak to the delicate balance you achieve between the broken, the breaking, and, dare I say, the hopeful?

Max:

In “Elegy,” which I wrote for a highschool friend whose father had passed, I was trying to offer consolation by saying that the memory of love will not pass and will have to sustain us, because it’s what we have left.  I wrote this before my father passed, and I find peace in it as a reader myself.  I think we are, ourselves, broken, breaking, and hopeful. Most days something in us is being mended or wants to be. Writing poems is a way of mending or at least, by working through our dukkha, and the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” coming to a concord with the state of affairs as they are. As a person who had spine surgery last year and went from being unable to sleep or walk to being back on my feet, writing poems has been a way of keeping my spirits up, and even if it sometimes feels a bit forced, to try to see the good in things, even when the situation seems bleak. 

John:

What a perfect way to summarize realistic optimism. And your poems absolutely reflect that.

What else would you like me to know about Going There? What question do you wish I’d asked that you can now ask and answer now?

Max:

Perhaps how this book is different than Good Harbor (2022)?  This one is less domestic in its contexts; the family is still centered but we are often traveling.

It has a different cast of characters (some living, some legendary, many musical heroes, for ex.) and a wider range of experiences. This book has more death (!)

I’m trying to work with various forms including rhyme and meter, and also to begin to place myself, as I once did as a young person, in unfamiliar territories, and that I hope that by doing so, that I take myself and my readers to new places.

John:

Speaking of new places, what are you working on now? Do you have a new creative project in the works? What can we expect from Max Heinegg over the next few years?

Max:

I have two other books of poems that should appear in the next two years, as well as a new record next year. For now, I’m focused on getting my high school senior to launch, making new beers for my brewery, and getting into sweet oldish man shape to hike the Inca trail to see Machu Picchu in April. Goals, goals, goals!  

Read the Poems Max is Presenting Here!