{"id":174926,"date":"2026-09-29T10:00:24","date_gmt":"2026-09-29T14:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=174926"},"modified":"2026-09-28T14:08:42","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T18:08:42","slug":"naked-at-last-a-conversation-with-f-keith-wahle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/09\/29\/naked-at-last-a-conversation-with-f-keith-wahle\/","title":{"rendered":"Naked at Last: A Conversation with F. Keith Wahle"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photograph courtesy of F. Keith Wahle.<\/p><\/div>\n

When the poet F. Keith Wahle was first published in <\/span><\/em>The<\/span>\u00a0Paris Review<\/span>, he was working at the Cincinnati Public Library. He\u2019d 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\u2019t live in the Cincinnati area was when he attended the Iowa Writers\u2019 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.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The first poem he contributed to the<\/em> <\/span>Review<\/span> was \u201c<\/span>Sonnet<\/span><\/a><\/em>\u201d\u2014a poem that is not a sonnet but takes up the sonnet form as its subject. The<\/em> <\/span>Review<\/span> published three more of his <\/span>poems<\/span><\/a><\/em> in the mid-to-late seventies, during Michael Benedikt\u2019s tenure as poetry editor. Much of Wahle\u2019s work is unsettling. When I mailed a copy of his 1998 collection<\/em> <\/span>A Choice of Killers<\/span> to a filmmaker friend in Baltimore, she told me she couldn\u2019t read it at night, which is not something you often hear about a poetry collection, outside of, maybe, Poe\u2019s. At the same time, the poems are colorful, hallucinatory, and incredibly funny. They\u2019re full of gags (Wahle is a fan of Laurel and Hardy and of W. C. Fields); they\u2019re sometimes cartoonish (he\u2019s an avid collector of Walt Kelly\u2019s <\/span><\/em>Pogo<\/span> comic strip); and they\u2019re often, as he puts it, \u201cerotically obsessed.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Photograph courtesy of F. Keith Wahle.<\/p><\/div>\n

In the years since his poems appeared in the<\/em> <\/span>Review<\/span>, 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\u2019s urn was sitting in a velvet drawstring bag at our feet. Wahle held up the bag. \u201cWhen 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.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Later that evening, Wahle showed me a couple of home movies on his television. One was sixteen-millimeter footage he\u2019d taken in the seventies of various lovers trying on brightly colored underwear or emerging from bubble baths covered in suds. Another was from 2011\u2014a recording of a Beckettian piece Wahle had written and performed in his hometown, titled <\/span><\/em>Can Anyone Hear? <\/span>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\u2019re consumed by the water, a woman with a pair of scissors protruding from her forehead. Every few minutes, Wahle pauses and calls out, \u201cCan anyone hear me? Can anyone hear what I\u2019m saying?\u201d By the end of the performance, he is completely nude except for his blindfold.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"

Photograph courtesy of F. Keith Wahle.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

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INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

You\u2019ve mentioned that you don\u2019t use a computer at home. Do you own a computer?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

F. KEITH WAHLE<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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I have a laptop and I have a printer. My plan was to use the laptop to compile manuscripts. When I bought it, I consulted with a woman who used to work at the library. This was about a decade ago. She really knew her stuff. She said, \u201cI think you\u2019d be happier with an Apple.\u201d So I got an Apple computer. But I\u2019d already compiled the manuscript for No More Poems<\/em> at the library. And they have the Word program there. Well, when I opened up the laptop I\u2019d bought, it had a different version of Word, which wasn\u2019t compatible with the program I\u2019d been using. I would have had to correct a lot of poems.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

How long did you mess with the laptop before you decided not to use it?<\/p>\n

WAHLE<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

About a minute. See, I came up using a typewriter. And a typewriter has a lot of limitations, but it\u2019s very intuitive. Even an electronic typewriter, which has some quirks, is still mostly intuitive. My issue with composing, or even formatting things, on a computer is that there are too many options. It renders everything counterintuitive. I\u2019ve also found that, at the library, when I’m using the computer and something happens that I don\u2019t understand, all I have to do is turn over my shoulder and there\u2019s somebody who can help me. If the same thing happened at home, I\u2019d just be stuck. I know a lot of people would think I\u2019m a complete primitive. But that\u2019s the way I like it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Do you ever find that your poems and your real life bleed into each other?<\/span><\/p>\n

WAHLE<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t write from experience, except on a few rare occasions. But, on the other hand, I\u2019m 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 <\/span>might\u2019ve<\/span><\/i> happened and another thing that happened in a movie I saw. Experience is not always just what you’ve done. It\u2019s also the movies you\u2019ve watched and the plays you\u2019ve seen and the music you\u2019ve listened to. In my poems, there\u2019s a sort of uneasy mix of the personal and the impersonal and the improbable. <\/span>Every poem I write is completely personal, but that doesn\u2019t mean it really happened.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

I imagine working in the psych ward must\u2019ve had some impact on your writing.<\/span><\/p>\n

WAHLE<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

There was one guy I was trying to feed, and I couldn\u2019t get him to eat anything on his tray. But he had some ice cream in a little insulated dish, and I thought, \u201cI can maybe get a few spoonfuls of this down.\u201d So I gave him a few spoonfuls of the ice cream. But he kept touching his tongue and saying, \u201cThere\u2019s dog hairs in this.\u201d At one point he looked over, in the corner of the room by the door, and he said, \u201cIs that a grizzly bear over there or is that just Smokey the Bear?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Were you able to write on the clock when you worked at the library?<\/span><\/p>\n

WAHLE<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019t that nefarious about it. I think I was a pretty good worker, actually. But if I had a slump time, I didn\u2019t go looking for stuff I could\u2019ve been doing. Sometimes I would just jot something down. I wrote most of the poems in those \u201cunpoem\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Why do you call them \u201cunpoems\u201d?<\/span><\/p>\n

WAHLE<\/span><\/p>\n

A lot of my poems are pretty long, at least two or three pages. Like \u201c<\/span>Sonnet<\/span><\/a>,\u201d and \u201c<\/span>Secrets<\/span><\/a>.\u201d 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\u2019d realize they were total crap. Nothing went together. They weren\u2019t going to be salvageable, as far as I could tell. So I thought, One remedy might be to deliberately write short poems.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Because I was writing them during my lunch hour, I was writing by hand. Previously I\u2019d almost always composed on the typewriter. I started thinking, Let\u2019s see if I can write a poem in just one sitting. And, Let me try to write a poem in one sitting and then <\/span>not<\/span><\/i> 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\u2014not doing <\/span>any<\/span><\/i> revisions if possible. Or if I did, one word or one line.<\/span><\/p>\n

I did revise some. I broke all my own rules. Sometimes I\u2019d work on a poem for two or three days, or I\u2019d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Is doing no more than three or four revisions a general rule for you?<\/span><\/p>\n

WAHLE<\/span><\/p>\n

In general, if I did more than six revisions, something was really wrong. At the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop, people would say things like, \u201cOh yeah, I revised this about thirty times.\u201d There was one guy\u2014I don\u2019t remember his name and that\u2019s probably for the best. But every time he turned in a poem for a workshop, before he read it, he would say, \u201cOh, I made a couple of revisions on this.\u201d We were supposed to get out our pens and cross things out and add things in. But the revisions were always something like, he\u2019d changed a line break by three words or he\u2019d changed <\/span>one<\/span><\/i> 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

You decided to lean into what was making you feel self-conscious.<\/span><\/p>\n

WAHLE<\/span><\/p>\n

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 <\/span>typing<\/span><\/i>!<\/span><\/p>\n

Truman Capote\u2019s famous statement about Norman Mailer was something like, He isn\u2019t really a writer, he\u2019s 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\u2019m not really a writer, I\u2019m just a typist. Saying, in other words, that these were just spontaneous imaginings and improvisations.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Tell me about the origin of \u201cSonnet.\u201d The poem begins, \u201cYou realize, even as you start this \/ that it won\u2019t end up as a sonnet.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

WAHLE<\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u201cSonnet,\u201d I thought, was kind of ridiculous. Or a villanelle called \u201cVillanelle.\u201d Or a poem that\u2019s just called \u201cPoem.\u201d And perhaps the silliest of all, a haiku called \u201cHaiku.\u201d 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!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So the next step in my thinking was, the title of the poem doesn\u2019t have to describe what the poem is. I can write a poem called \u201cSonnet\u201d that is not a sonnet at all, but it\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

What do you like about sestinas? You\u2019ve written quite a few.<\/span><\/p>\n

WAHLE<\/span><\/p>\n

I think the sestina form is particularly fun to play with. One thing about a sestina\u2014this is giving away trade secrets\u2014but 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\u2019re just filling out the form. It\u2019s a very pretty form, or it\u2019s intended to be. So if you write a sestina about something that\u2019s not pretty, that\u2019s boring, or outrageous, or silly, then the tension between the form and your content is\u2014well, in some ways it\u2019s the whole poem.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

You have a poem, \u201cThe Caller,\u201d that\u2019s a sestina about phone sex.<\/span><\/p>\n

WAHLE<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019t funny and it wasn\u2019t interesting. And it wasn\u2019t poetic. It wasn\u2019t anything. So then I wrote \u201cThe Caller.\u201d 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, <\/span>naked<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>masturbate<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

That was just a complete exercise in being as outrageous as possible. You know, the poem starts out saying, \u201cI will admit, I like to masturbate when I talk to women on the telephone.\u201d That\u2019s not <\/span>really<\/span><\/i> true. I\u2019m not an obscene caller or anything. Part of the reason I made the title \u201cThe Caller\u201d 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\u2019ve had really intimate phone calls with women about various things. And I\u2019ve talked to somebody on the phone when I didn\u2019t have any clothes on or something like that. So there\u2019s a grain of truth that I\u2019ve exaggerated. I just exploded it into something slightly insane.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

When was the first time you disrobed during a poetry performance?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

WAHLE<\/span><\/p>\n

I have two poems with the same title, \u201cNaked At Last.\u201d They\u2019re poems about being naked, although they\u2019re not particularly erotic. They\u2019re more imaginative. I always thought that the way to perform those was to be naked. But I was still being fussy about such things\u2014and I also thought I should be sitting in a chair, knees together.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I wanted it to be obvious that I was completely nude, but not showing what Monty Python would call \u201cthe naughty bits.\u201d 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\u2019d done it, I was much more relaxed about it. As I look back at my life, I think I\u2019ve always had an impulse toward exhibitionism. But I resisted that impulse for a long time because I didn\u2019t want to get in trouble or offend anybody.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Photograph by Joseph Grantham.<\/p><\/div>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of disturbing imagery in your poems. In \u201cThe Killer on the Radio,\u201d we have a child serial killer calmly describing his \u201ctheory of torture\u201d on afternoon talk radio.<\/span><\/p>\n

WAHLE<\/span><\/p>\n

Some of my poems are spoken by people whom I would probably not admire if I knew them in real life. I don\u2019t think I\u2019m a very interesting person. I hope I\u2019m an interesting writer. Maybe that\u2019s why so many of my poems deal with such extreme subjects, including the attitudes toward sexuality, because I\u2019ve never been impressed with myself. But I think it\u2019s part of an artist\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

The speaker in \u201cSecrets\u201d is a kind of absurd confidant, assuring the reader, \u201cYou don\u2019t have to worry. \/ Your secrets are safe with me.\u201d Did you keep your poems and your performances secret from your wife?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

WAHLE<\/span><\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t share my work with her, but I wasn\u2019t trying to hide anything. I was just trying to <\/span>not show <\/span><\/i>certain things. \u201cSecrets\u201d is total wacky fantasy, but it\u2019s grounded in the fact that everybody has things they don\u2019t want to share\u2014they have things they don\u2019t want <\/span>certain<\/span><\/i> people to know, and they have things they don\u2019t want <\/span>anybody<\/span><\/i> to know. I\u2019m not even always conscious of things that I\u2019m keeping to myself. Sometimes it\u2019s not even a particular decision that I\u2019m making. In a way, maybe, I wrote that poem to keep from writing a poem about a real secret.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s talk about \u201c<\/span>A Man<\/span><\/a>.\u201d It\u2019s a nine-line poem about a man who decides to wear a baby on his head instead of a hat. You\u2019ve told me you don\u2019t care for that poem.<\/span><\/p>\n

WAHLE<\/span><\/p>\n

Obviously, when I submitted to <\/span>The Paris Review, <\/span><\/i>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\u2019ve been considered the prestige magazines\u2014I figured I\u2019d be wasting the postage. I might\u2019ve been wrong. <\/span>The<\/span><\/i> Paris Review<\/span><\/i> was the only really good journal that I submitted to. I\u2019m not even really sure why, other than that I liked the magazine.<\/span><\/p>\n

Anyway, I sent that poem, they took it, I was happy. But I think it\u2019s just very slight. For one thing, it\u2019s 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\u2019m not sure I would put that in a poem now. I\u2019ve since thought maybe it would\u2019ve been funnier to say \u201cpee-pee\u201d and \u201cpoo-poo\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But if even one person likes it \u2026 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Joseph Grantham is the author of the poetry collections\u00a0<\/i><\/em>Raking Leaves\u00a0and<\/i><\/em>\u00a0Tom Sawyer.\u00a0His writing has appeared in <\/em>The Believer, Bennington Review, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. <\/em>With Will Patton, he edits for the small press Bohannon, which will publish its first book\u2014a reissue of Stephen Emerson’s 1985 novel <\/i>The Wife\u2014this winter.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhen 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2713,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1188],"tags":[68919,5234,29107,68920,7408,24771,3400,426,5613],"class_list":["post-174926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-the-archive","tag-f-keith-wahle","tag-john-ashbery","tag-laurel-and-hardy","tag-michael-benedikt","tag-performance-art","tag-pogo","tag-sonnet","tag-the-paris-review","tag-w-c-fields"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNaked at Last: A Conversation with F. 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