Poet Adam Scheffler: Gets to the Worm in the Heart of the Matter

Interview with Doug Holder

Recently I caught up with poet Adam Scheffler.  He is the author of two books of poetry--the latest being "Heartworm," which won the 2021 Moon City Press Prize, and "A Dog’s Life," which won the 2016 Jacar Press Book Contest. He grew up in Berkeley, California, received his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and his PhD in English from Harvard. He teaches in the Harvard College Writing Program. He is a member of the New England Poetry Club.




George Looney wrote that in your work you "praise the mundane world." Do you find beauty in banality?



I’d turn the question around and say I find banality in beauty, or at least in epic adventure: just try watching all 31 Marvel Movies and you’ll see what I mean. Whereas I think poetry gives you an excuse to savor the details of your actual, supposedly mundane life (peering at a spider web, singing in the shower, noticing the full moon suddenly emerge from behind a cloud) and, to quote my poet-friend Mande Zecca, that’s where the magic is.



I also really enjoy writing poems about unpoetic, silly, or even gross subjects: I have different poems in this book, for instance, about Jeff Goldblum, a cockroach, and my dog finding a used condom in the park. It’s a fun challenge trying to find beauty in something seemingly trivial or off-putting. There might even be more room for failure due to the novelty: if you’re going to try to write another pretty poem about trees, you better nail it.



The title Heartworm—seems to be taken from an affliction suffered by dogs. Did you get inspiration from your own dog?



Yes, from my poodle-mix Bee Gee. You have to give your dog a pill once a month, so parasitic worms don’t form in their heart and kill them. And I was thinking about how Bee Gee does a version of that for me when I’m unhappy: offering me the "treatment" of her company for a more metaphorical kind of heartworm.

And it’s not just dogs: there’s something about the sheer, surprising presence of animals that can amaze you and shake you free of whatever demons are clinging to you. As my former advisor Peter Sacks was rumored to have said, during a talk in a crowded lecture hall: “If a cow were to walk into the room right now, we would all come to attention.”



In your poem "Checkout" you use the setting of a Walmart store to explore what a poem can do and can't do. Explain.



Hmm, well in that poem I was feeling particularly angry and sad during a trip to Walmart around Christmastime: the whole store seemed to be staffed by 80-year-olds wearing reindeer hats. It's awful that this is how we, as a society, have decided to treat the elderly (forcing them to work for minimum wage to make billionaires richer). Poetry couldn’t really teach me how these employees feel: after all they were stuck there for hours and hours, and I could put my poem down whenever I wanted. But I did think it could help me perceive the whole situation more keenly and, as I say in the poem, place a little curse on the Waltons.



I loved your poem "Facebook." You examine the sizzle but no steak of the platform—the snake behind the false teeth smile—and how it defines universal yearning and need. Can you comment on this?



Writers, and particularly poets, have to engage in self-promotion as nobody else is going to do it for us. But the scary thing about Facebook is how it conflates the personal and the public so that each social interaction you have becomes publicly viewable and recorded as if it takes place on an enormous stage. This often makes people behave in a falsely polite way as if each of us were a PR representative for ourselves.



We then come to be more skeptical of each other online because we feel in some sense we’re encountering a “brand” not a person, and that we’re not getting the real truth from anyone. But there’s still that visceral drive to connect: beneath everyone’s online persona is still a complex, needy, ugly, fascinating human vacillating between wanting to be truly seen and wanting only the perfected avatar of themselves to be seen.



There seems to be a theme of looking to be saved from the clutches of the material world. Is poetry a life raft?



I wish! I was once in a graduate seminar in which the professor told us, wonderingly, that Wallace Stevens couldn’t enjoy poems anymore when he was dying. And I remember thinking of course he couldn’t enjoy poems, he was dying! I can’t enjoy poems when I’ve slept badly or have a headache, so expecting poems to save me from the clutches of the material world might be a tall order.



But that said, I do think reading and writing poetry fills a basic need for me like sleep or sex or food. When I go too long without it, I start feeling depressed and scraped out. Or maybe the world starts seeming scraped out. Returning to the theme from the beginning of this interview, I think poetry at its best can restore the material world to us as a place of wonder, a place that no longer makes us ask, like Peggy Lee, is that all there is?



Why should we read this collection?



Well, it’s short! Seriously, though, I tried to trim this collection down, so that it only contains poems I’m happy with, so it doesn’t waste your time. I think of writing poems as hatching thousands of baby sea turtles, most of whom get picked off by gulls, or get distracted by highway lights and wander off in the wrong direction. However, a few of them make it to the ocean/ into the collection where they can grieve their lost fellows and ride the white surf of the page.





Florence, Kentucky

So what if the old man
on the bus is trying and
failing to remember his dead
mom’s face, as if the past were
not a cartoon tunnel scratched
on a wall?

He’s still trying,
and when did we forget our
cattle-shoes and feather-parkas,
how we carry with us a lowing
sadness, an extinguished memory
of flight?

Today I’m going to count all the
blackbirds between the prison
and the Walmart where, right
now, in its galloping sadness
a bald man who sounds like
a car horn is hector-lecturing
his infant-hushing
girlfriend—as her unhappiness,
radiant as a cleat, sharp as an ice
skate, sprays to a sudden stop.

Right now, at the emergency
crisis center right next to the
gun store, the nurse feels entombed
in hours like a fly in amber
as the waiting room TVs
spin despair’s golden honey—

and I think of the ice I waded out
on as a kid, of how often the world
seems like it’s going to shatter,
but then, miraculously,
mercilessly, does not.

--From    "Heart Worm"