Photograph courtesy of F. Keith Wahle.

When the poet F. Keith Wahle was first published in The Paris Review, he was working at the Cincinnati Public Library. He’d lived in Cincinnati for almost his whole life. A conscientious objector during Vietnam, he completed his service as an orderly for two years in a psych ward at the same hospital where he was born. The only time Wahle didn’t live in the Cincinnati area was when he attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he studied with the poets Donald Justice, Mark Strand, and Larry Levis. And then he was back in Cincinnati, where a librarian named Beth, who later became his wife of fifty-two years, helped get him a job. They worked in the same building for three decades.

The first poem he contributed to the Review was “Sonnet”—a poem that is not a sonnet but takes up the sonnet form as its subject. The Review published three more of his poems in the mid-to-late seventies, during Michael Benedikt’s tenure as poetry editor. Much of Wahle’s work is unsettling. When I mailed a copy of his 1998 collection A Choice of Killers to a filmmaker friend in Baltimore, she told me she couldn’t read it at night, which is not something you often hear about a poetry collection, outside of, maybe, Poe’s. At the same time, the poems are colorful, hallucinatory, and incredibly funny. They’re full of gags (Wahle is a fan of Laurel and Hardy and of W. C. Fields); they’re sometimes cartoonish (he’s an avid collector of Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic strip); and they’re often, as he puts it, “erotically obsessed.”

Photograph courtesy of F. Keith Wahle.

In the years since his poems appeared in the Review, Wahle has published chapbooks and full-length collections with small and micro presses, but, to this day, his work has never gained a wide audience. I visited Wahle in Ohio this year, just four months after his wife died. We sat in his living room, surrounded by stacks of DVDs (many still in their original packaging) and Christmas decorations (it was June). A couple of hours into our conversation, I realized that Beth’s urn was sitting in a velvet drawstring bag at our feet. Wahle held up the bag. “When I carried this in from the funeral home, I thought, This is the kind of bag that a magician would make live doves fly out of.”

Later that evening, Wahle showed me a couple of home movies on his television. One was sixteen-millimeter footage he’d taken in the seventies of various lovers trying on brightly colored underwear or emerging from bubble baths covered in suds. Another was from 2011—a recording of a Beckettian piece Wahle had written and performed in his hometown, titled Can Anyone Hear? The show begins with a blindfolded Wahle crawling onstage in front of a live audience and describing a series of haunting scenes: a woman on the street who pees her pants for money, two men in overcoats walking into a lake until they’re consumed by the water, a woman with a pair of scissors protruding from her forehead. Every few minutes, Wahle pauses and calls out, “Can anyone hear me? Can anyone hear what I’m saying?” By the end of the performance, he is completely nude except for his blindfold.

Photograph courtesy of F. Keith Wahle.

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever find that your poems and your real life bleed into each other?

WAHLE

I don’t write from experience, except on a few rare occasions. But, on the other hand, I’m always writing from experience. When I start writing, the experiences come in little bits and pieces. I could have a one-page poem and buried in there is something that actually happened and another thing that might’ve happened and another thing that happened in a movie I saw. Experience is not always just what you’ve done. It’s also the movies you’ve watched and the plays you’ve seen and the music you’ve listened to. In my poems, there’s a sort of uneasy mix of the personal and the impersonal and the improbable. Every poem I write is completely personal, but that doesn’t mean it really happened.

INTERVIEWER

I imagine working in the psych ward must’ve had some impact on your writing.

WAHLE

Some of the extreme things I saw did feed into what I was doing with poetry. We had a lot of alcoholics on the ward, and they’d get the shakes in the morning. But only a few of them really flipped over into the heavy-duty hallucinations, and that was very weird. If you ever saw a person having delirium tremens, you would never think of having an alcoholic drink again.

There was one guy I was trying to feed, and I couldn’t get him to eat anything on his tray. But he had some ice cream in a little insulated dish, and I thought, “I can maybe get a few spoonfuls of this down.” So I gave him a few spoonfuls of the ice cream. But he kept touching his tongue and saying, “There’s dog hairs in this.” At one point he looked over, in the corner of the room by the door, and he said, “Is that a grizzly bear over there or is that just Smokey the Bear?” 

INTERVIEWER

Were you able to write on the clock when you worked at the library?

WAHLE

I wrote all the time. I stole time from the library like crazy. I had a typewriter at my desk. I had legitimate letters I needed to type for library business, but I also wrote a lot of personal correspondence and rough drafts of poems. I tried to fly under the radar. I wasn’t that nefarious about it. I think I was a pretty good worker, actually. But if I had a slump time, I didn’t go looking for stuff I could’ve been doing. Sometimes I would just jot something down. I wrote most of the poems in those “unpoem” collections during my lunch hour. I would usually go up and get something out of the vending machine. Some of the tables were library carrels, so you could have some privacy.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you call them “unpoems”?

WAHLE

A lot of my poems are pretty long, at least two or three pages. Like “Sonnet,” and “Secrets.” At the time, I was finding myself more and more driven to write longer and longer poems. They would get to be pages long. And I’d realize they were total crap. Nothing went together. They weren’t going to be salvageable, as far as I could tell. So I thought, One remedy might be to deliberately write short poems. 

Because I was writing them during my lunch hour, I was writing by hand. Previously I’d almost always composed on the typewriter. I started thinking, Let’s see if I can write a poem in just one sitting. And, Let me try to write a poem in one sitting and then not revise it, not even think about revising it. I rarely do more than three or four revisions, anyway. But the idea was to push that even farther—not doing any revisions if possible. Or if I did, one word or one line.

I did revise some. I broke all my own rules. Sometimes I’d work on a poem for two or three days, or I’d write a poem quickly and then still do some revisions. But I called them unpoems because I thought they were the opposite of what people would consider a well-made poem.

INTERVIEWER

Is doing no more than three or four revisions a general rule for you?

WAHLE

In general, if I did more than six revisions, something was really wrong. At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, people would say things like, “Oh yeah, I revised this about thirty times.” There was one guy—I don’t remember his name and that’s probably for the best. But every time he turned in a poem for a workshop, before he read it, he would say, “Oh, I made a couple of revisions on this.” We were supposed to get out our pens and cross things out and add things in. But the revisions were always something like, he’d changed a line break by three words or he’d changed one word in the whole poem. On some level, I felt like he was kidding us, that this was like a technique of his to get us to take his work more seriously. Maybe more seriously than he took it. 

But I had this image of the well-made poem, and that was never what I thought I was doing. With the unpoems, I was deliberately moving myself away not only from the way I had worked for years but the way I thought other people worked.

INTERVIEWER

You decided to lean into what was making you feel self-conscious.

WAHLE

I was feeling more and more separated, like, Everybody who writes poems does this more carefully than I do. Which I think is not true. But I had this feeling that everybody else was trying to polish their poems to jewellike clarity and I was just typing!

Truman Capote’s famous statement about Norman Mailer was something like, He isn’t really a writer, he’s just a typist. In my mind, I was more of a typist than the other poets, who I imagined were taking twenty minutes to polish a single line. I was pushing myself to write faster, to be more spontaneous. I wanted, a little bit, to be saying, I’m not really a writer, I’m just a typist. Saying, in other words, that these were just spontaneous imaginings and improvisations.

INTERVIEWER

Tell me about the origin of “Sonnet.” The poem begins, “You realize, even as you start this / that it won’t end up as a sonnet.” 

WAHLE

I had all sorts of prejudices about putting titles on poems. For example, a lot of modern poets like to make the title of the poem the first line. I always thought that was a horrible idea. I always thought the title should be a title and the first line should be a first line. I also rebelled against titles that were simply a description of what kind of poem it was. So, a sonnet called “Sonnet,” I thought, was kind of ridiculous. Or a villanelle called “Villanelle.” Or a poem that’s just called “Poem.” And perhaps the silliest of all, a haiku called “Haiku.” Then, I went to a poetry reading that John Ashbery did and he read a sonnet that was thirteen lines long. And I thought, There you go! 

So the next step in my thinking was, the title of the poem doesn’t have to describe what the poem is. I can write a poem called “Sonnet” that is not a sonnet at all, but it’s about the idea of a sonnet, or about poetry in general. It could start out talking about sonnets and then that would lead into Chinese poetry and it would lead into Pound and Yeats and go all over the place. 

INTERVIEWER

What do you like about sestinas? You’ve written quite a few.

WAHLE

I think the sestina form is particularly fun to play with. One thing about a sestina—this is giving away trade secrets—but if you get a good idea for one, you just need the first stanza and then the rest of the poem writes itself. At that point, you’re just filling out the form. It’s a very pretty form, or it’s intended to be. So if you write a sestina about something that’s not pretty, that’s boring, or outrageous, or silly, then the tension between the form and your content is—well, in some ways it’s the whole poem.

INTERVIEWER

You have a poem, “The Caller,” that’s a sestina about phone sex.

WAHLE

I had the idea, could you write a pornographic sestina where each of the six end-words would be an obscenity? I fiddled around with that for a while, but it was just not going anywhere. Because it was obscene for no reason. It wasn’t funny and it wasn’t interesting. And it wasn’t poetic. It wasn’t anything. So then I wrote “The Caller.” And with that, I thought, Do it another way. Think of a pornographic or semipornographic subject and then write a sestina on that subject. So then there are provocative words all the way through. You know, naked and masturbate.

That was just a complete exercise in being as outrageous as possible. You know, the poem starts out saying, “I will admit, I like to masturbate when I talk to women on the telephone.” That’s not really true. I’m not an obscene caller or anything. Part of the reason I made the title “The Caller” was to convey that this was a fictional character, even though the poem is told in the first person. But the other side of the coin is, I’ve had really intimate phone calls with women about various things. And I’ve talked to somebody on the phone when I didn’t have any clothes on or something like that. So there’s a grain of truth that I’ve exaggerated. I just exploded it into something slightly insane.

INTERVIEWER

When was the first time you disrobed during a poetry performance? 

WAHLE

I have two poems with the same title, “Naked At Last.” They’re poems about being naked, although they’re not particularly erotic. They’re more imaginative. I always thought that the way to perform those was to be naked. But I was still being fussy about such things—and I also thought I should be sitting in a chair, knees together. 

I wanted it to be obvious that I was completely nude, but not showing what Monty Python would call “the naughty bits.” I thought that would distract from the poem. I was really overthinking everything. I had all kinds of concerns about how to get on- and offstage. But then, after I’d done it, I was much more relaxed about it. As I look back at my life, I think I’ve always had an impulse toward exhibitionism. But I resisted that impulse for a long time because I didn’t want to get in trouble or offend anybody.

Photograph by Joseph Grantham.

INTERVIEWER

There’s a lot of disturbing imagery in your poems. In “The Killer on the Radio,” we have a child serial killer calmly describing his “theory of torture” on afternoon talk radio.

WAHLE

Some of my poems are spoken by people whom I would probably not admire if I knew them in real life. I don’t think I’m a very interesting person. I hope I’m an interesting writer. Maybe that’s why so many of my poems deal with such extreme subjects, including the attitudes toward sexuality, because I’ve never been impressed with myself. But I think it’s part of an artist’s responsibility to shock or rattle people. Sometimes somebody sees a play or watches a movie or reads a poem or a story, and they think, Oh my God, I would never do that. The artist should give them the chance to see that those things do exist in the world. 

INTERVIEWER

The speaker in “Secrets” is a kind of absurd confidant, assuring the reader, “You don’t have to worry. / Your secrets are safe with me.” Did you keep your poems and your performances secret from your wife? 

WAHLE

I didn’t share my work with her, but I wasn’t trying to hide anything. I was just trying to not show certain things. “Secrets” is total wacky fantasy, but it’s grounded in the fact that everybody has things they don’t want to share—they have things they don’t want certain people to know, and they have things they don’t want anybody to know. I’m not even always conscious of things that I’m keeping to myself. Sometimes it’s not even a particular decision that I’m making. In a way, maybe, I wrote that poem to keep from writing a poem about a real secret.

INTERVIEWER

Let’s talk about “A Man.” It’s a nine-line poem about a man who decides to wear a baby on his head instead of a hat. You’ve told me you don’t care for that poem.

WAHLE

Obviously, when I submitted to The Paris Review, I had some faith in it. I was probably sort of amazed when Michael Benedikt took it, but delighted. Most of the magazines I was submitting to were just tiny little offset magazines with circulations of five hundred. I was not submitting to what would’ve been considered the prestige magazines—I figured I’d be wasting the postage. I might’ve been wrong. The Paris Review was the only really good journal that I submitted to. I’m not even really sure why, other than that I liked the magazine.

Anyway, I sent that poem, they took it, I was happy. But I think it’s just very slight. For one thing, it’s a one-joke poem. I think part of what made it funny was the scatological language, which was sort of shocking but also a joke. I’m not sure I would put that in a poem now. I’ve since thought maybe it would’ve been funnier to say “pee-pee” and “poo-poo” or something. At the end of the day, the more I thought about the poem and the more it was part of my publication history, I just thought, That was really nothing. 

But if even one person likes it … and obviously more than one person liked it. You liked it. Michael Benedikt liked it. You cast your seeds into the field and see what they produce.