The 25th Anniversary Season of the Final Thursday Reading Series
concludes with a special book release reading. Sean Thomas Dougherty and
J.D. Schraffenberger will be launching their new co-written chapbook
from Final Thursday Press, Dueling Shovels. This collection of
golden shovel poems was inspired by the work of James Hearst.
Sean Thomas Dougherty is UNI’s inaugural David C. & Patricia A.
Meyer Visiting Writer and the author of many collections of poetry,
including Death Prefers the Minor Keys (BOA Editions, 2023) and The Second O of Sorrow (BOA Editions, 2018). J.D. Schraffenberger is a UNI Professor of English and Editor of the North American Review. His work includes American Sad (Main Street Rag, 2024) and The Waxen Poor (Twelve Winters Press, 2014).
As always, open mic at 7:00 and featured reading at 7:30 at the Hearst Center for the Arts. The featured reading also will be live Zoomcast. Click to sign up for a link.
Interview by Jim O’Loughlin.
JIM O’LOUGHLIN: You two go way back. Talk about how you got to know each other and your connections over the years.
J.D. SCHRAFFENBERGER: We do go way back, don’t we! Has it been
twenty years? I remember first meeting Sean when he came to Binghamton,
New York, where I was doing a PhD, and we were hosting a writing
conference. Man, he was such a terrific reader, so affecting. I remember
that we also published a lot of his prose poems in the journal I was
helping to edit, Harpur Palate. It’s funny that a former student
of mine here at UNI, Hannah Carr-Murphy, ended up doing her PhD there,
too, and she was responsible for digitizing all of Harpur Palate’s back issues. So you can read all of those old pieces by Sean if you want to.
SEAN THOMAS DOUGHERTY: Yes, we met at Writing by Degrees, a graduate student creative writing conference in the 2000s. Jeremy was a student there, and I was teaching as a lecturer in Erie and working on my PhD dissertation for Syracuse University (sadly, I never finished it). I had a friend there, too: Cody Todd, who ended up dying a few years ago, and Joe Weil and Maria Mazziotti Gillan taught in the Binghamton program and advocated a poetry of life and dignity. I went back a number of years, and Jeremy and I ate, drank, and conversated. It was a nice time to be growing professionals. Jeremy was erudite and passionate about poetry and wrote in a day that I recognized the people in his poems from life. He was straight up and kind, as he still is. You could tell immediately from him a love of language and art and a belief in the idea that art can help us, teach us. That art could believe in us as much as we believe in it.
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| Sean Thomas Dougherty |
JO: Sean, I think it was your idea to write a collection of golden shovel poems. Can you explain the form and why you are drawn to it?
STD: I was fascinated by the form ever since Terrance Hayes first published his invented form as an ode to the great Gwendolyn Brooks. Jeremy and I had been going through a list of possible ways to collaborate. We discussed a theme, the use of sonnets, etc. I can’t remember exactly how we decided on the golden shovels and Hearst. I think it just came out of brainstorming. I am also attracted to rigorous forms that require right line repetitions, such as sestina or canzone, forms I’d written in extensively. But the golden shovel is different, as it is also dialogic. It asks to use the source material of the end lines but not to erase them, but to speak to them. I approached the lines I used for each shovel as a kind of epigram. The end words become a kind of ghost epigram in dialogue with the poem we write, as well as part of the poem itself. I also love how it asks at the end to read that line vertically, which isn’t a usual way to read in English.
JO: Jeremy, you were probably as surprised as I was when Sean sent us a fully conceptualized draft of this half of the collection. What was your initial response, and how did his writing inspire your own work on Dueling Shovels?
JDS: Yeah, I have always been blown away by Sean’s writing, not just how quickly he seems to tap into his own kind of poetic genius, but how everything in his imagination accrues meaning and culminates into a revelation or deep insight about the world. When he shared his poems, I admit I was intimidated, but I was also inspired. I saw how his poems were so daring and humane. I didn’t want to try to mimic his style because, well, I think it would only turn out as a paltry imitation. But at the core, I felt like I needed to embrace poetry as sympathy, poetry as compassion and care. I was also really impressed with how he navigated the formal challenges of the golden shovel. It felt like he was almost confronting the form, daring it to keep his words from moving freely and fluently into the next line. It gave me courage to face the form myself.
JO: Most of the source poems in this collection come from the work of Iowa farmer-poet James Hearst. Though the content of your poems is very different from Hearst’s, how did his work play a role in the poems that you wrote?
JDS: I’ve taught Hearst’s poems a number of times over the years. I’ve read all of his poems, some of them many times. So I had a deep familiarity with what his work is doing. I also know about Hearst’s life, the context of his poems, and the role writing poetry played in his life. So it took a lot, actually, to distance myself from some of that analysis for the sake of making art. Because I was writing mainly about the death of my mother in these poems, it allowed me to work thematically away from Hearst’s life and work while also, oddly, honoring and integrating it in ways that might be subconscious. There are some poems I chose to quote from that are directly related to what I wanted to write about myself. “Mother,” for instance, spoke to me immediately. “End of the Game” is another because Hearst wrote it for his brother, who had died quite young. It also happens to end with a reference to their mother, so that worked out nicely. I was tempted to use Hearst’s poem “Man with a Shovel” as a nod to the form, but I ended up thinking that that would be too cute and might undermine the poem.
STD: So many of Hearst’s poems at the core are tensions between landscape and human. So even though they are agrarian and my work is urban, it is actually quite complementary. Also, the language Hearst uses is a language of small words, often Anglo-Saxon in lineage, and devoid of much abstraction. His spiritual poems are not didactic but rise from the occasion of the moment. All of these elements speak to me deeply. So I approached the project as a dialogue with those themes of land and labor, birds and people, and beneath it all, the human spirit.
JO: I’m looking forward to your joint reading on April 30 at the Final Thursday Reading Series (in the former house of James Hearst), and I know you both to be great performers of spoken poetry (fun fact: many years ago, when I was living in Boston, Sean was a regular at an open mic and poetry slam I used to attend. We didn’t know each other at the time, but I have vivid memories of his slam poetry.). How do you both think differently about your work when you are selecting and preparing poems for the stage?
SD: I did not know that about the Cantab. How small the world is. That was a good time to be a young writer. Cambridge, Massachusetts, was such a vibrant space in the late 80s and early 90s. There was such energy and dialogue there at the Cantab, TT the Bears, the Middle East club, and good pints of Guinness and music at the Plow and the Stars pub. I rarely think of reading when I write but only afterwards. When I am preparing for a reading, I think of how to get to a place where the word opens the air. I think I’m more concerned with getting to the place where the veil is thin, where the language can take us to a place between word and breath that opens a door in the room, and together we all walk right through it.
JO: Though I regularly went to the Cantab to see the house band, Little Joe Cook and the Thrillers, I actually saw you perform at this bookstore in Somerville, where the poet Patricia Smith co-ran a series with a poetry slam. What was the name of that place? You just ran down some of my favorite watering holes back in the day. I can't believe we never got into a good bar brawl together. I'm also pretty sure at least one of us was also hanging out at these bars with David Foster Wallace and didn't know it.
SD: Jim that was The Bookcellar Cafe. They had the best selection of small press journals around. I used to spend so much time there. More people we probably drank with during that time: Ben Affleck’s father who bartended at the Cantab.
JDS: Oh, man, that’s so cool. I had no idea you saw Sean in Boston back in the day! Sean, your reading here in Cedar Falls a decade ago or so was my all-time favorite. You are such a great reader and performer. I can’t claim to be a great reader myself. I’m much more a poet of the page, but I am attracted to the stage, I guess. I like arranging a reading as an event, including music. For my last reading, in fact, as you know, Jim, I played piano and had a couple of friends playing sax and singing. I was also struck, years ago, reading the essay “Can Poetry Matter?” by Dana Gioia. He recommended that if we wanted to make poetry more vital in American culture, we should include other art forms in our readings. He also said that more poets should read other poets’ poems as part of their program. I’ve tried to do that over the years. In fact, the golden shovel form offers a perfect opportunity to acknowledge the past and the tradition while reading new work.
JO: Are there any questions you want to ask each other?
JDS: Yeah, I’d like to ask Sean what he thought the most challenging thing about writing in the golden shovel form is. To my mind, the hardest thing was trying to make my line breaks feel natural, or at least…comfortable. I was recently talking with my friend Eric Paul Shafer, a really terrific poet whom I’ve published a number of times in the North American Review. We were discussing line breaks and how you control them, how you can use them to your advantage. The golden shovel completely upends what I normally think about with line breaks! It’s similar to my aversion, or my inability to write sestinas. In that case, however, you get to choose your end words more carefully.
STD: Jeremy, for me, the hardest part was not erasing the form, you know, working within the rigid confines of those end words. We couldn’t even add much variance. I find Sestinas and Canzones easier because you can vary the end words with words that rhyme or have the same sound or variance that includes a word. For example, in a sestina, if an end word is “city,” the next stanza it repeats, and I might use “multiplicity” as a word. But the golden shovel asks you not to do that so you can honor the sentence you chose from the poet’s work. So, I agree completely, it asks us to see the line breaks and end lines in a completely new way. As such, I found it generative as I had to open a new place in my imagination to find new tensions I hadn’t worked before between line, line break, and narrative propulsion and pause.
Jeremy, how did this collaboration or form open you up to write such intimate poems about one of life’s greatest losses? In some ways, the project has such artificial parameters. What was it about those—or being in Mexico? Or both, that pushed you to write so powerfully about your mother’s passing?
JDS: You’re right to put it that way, Sean. I mean, the form really did open me up. I think it was exactly the artificial parameters that allowed me to hold grief and still be able to write, still be able to work at the craft of it. And then being in Mexico City was, in some ways, just happenstance. I had planned long before to go but had no intention of writing about my mother’s death. There’s something about being in a different country where you don’t really know the language, even if you know enough to get by. You end up being in your head a lot, which I think definitely contributed to these poems.
STD: I was fascinated by the form ever since Terrance Hayes first published his invented form as an ode to the great Gwendolyn Brooks. Jeremy and I had been going through a list of possible ways to collaborate. We discussed a theme, the use of sonnets, etc. I can’t remember exactly how we decided on the golden shovels and Hearst. I think it just came out of brainstorming. I am also attracted to rigorous forms that require right line repetitions, such as sestina or canzone, forms I’d written in extensively. But the golden shovel is different, as it is also dialogic. It asks to use the source material of the end lines but not to erase them, but to speak to them. I approached the lines I used for each shovel as a kind of epigram. The end words become a kind of ghost epigram in dialogue with the poem we write, as well as part of the poem itself. I also love how it asks at the end to read that line vertically, which isn’t a usual way to read in English.
JO: Jeremy, you were probably as surprised as I was when Sean sent us a fully conceptualized draft of this half of the collection. What was your initial response, and how did his writing inspire your own work on Dueling Shovels?
JDS: Yeah, I have always been blown away by Sean’s writing, not just how quickly he seems to tap into his own kind of poetic genius, but how everything in his imagination accrues meaning and culminates into a revelation or deep insight about the world. When he shared his poems, I admit I was intimidated, but I was also inspired. I saw how his poems were so daring and humane. I didn’t want to try to mimic his style because, well, I think it would only turn out as a paltry imitation. But at the core, I felt like I needed to embrace poetry as sympathy, poetry as compassion and care. I was also really impressed with how he navigated the formal challenges of the golden shovel. It felt like he was almost confronting the form, daring it to keep his words from moving freely and fluently into the next line. It gave me courage to face the form myself.
 |
| J.D. Schraffenberger |
JO: Most of the source poems in this collection come from the work of Iowa farmer-poet James Hearst. Though the content of your poems is very different from Hearst’s, how did his work play a role in the poems that you wrote?
JDS: I’ve taught Hearst’s poems a number of times over the years. I’ve read all of his poems, some of them many times. So I had a deep familiarity with what his work is doing. I also know about Hearst’s life, the context of his poems, and the role writing poetry played in his life. So it took a lot, actually, to distance myself from some of that analysis for the sake of making art. Because I was writing mainly about the death of my mother in these poems, it allowed me to work thematically away from Hearst’s life and work while also, oddly, honoring and integrating it in ways that might be subconscious. There are some poems I chose to quote from that are directly related to what I wanted to write about myself. “Mother,” for instance, spoke to me immediately. “End of the Game” is another because Hearst wrote it for his brother, who had died quite young. It also happens to end with a reference to their mother, so that worked out nicely. I was tempted to use Hearst’s poem “Man with a Shovel” as a nod to the form, but I ended up thinking that that would be too cute and might undermine the poem.
STD: So many of Hearst’s poems at the core are tensions between landscape and human. So even though they are agrarian and my work is urban, it is actually quite complementary. Also, the language Hearst uses is a language of small words, often Anglo-Saxon in lineage, and devoid of much abstraction. His spiritual poems are not didactic but rise from the occasion of the moment. All of these elements speak to me deeply. So I approached the project as a dialogue with those themes of land and labor, birds and people, and beneath it all, the human spirit.
JO: I’m looking forward to your joint reading on April 30 at the Final Thursday Reading Series (in the former house of James Hearst), and I know you both to be great performers of spoken poetry (fun fact: many years ago, when I was living in Boston, Sean was a regular at an open mic and poetry slam I used to attend. We didn’t know each other at the time, but I have vivid memories of his slam poetry.). How do you both think differently about your work when you are selecting and preparing poems for the stage?
SD: I did not know that about the Cantab. How small the world is. That was a good time to be a young writer. Cambridge, Massachusetts, was such a vibrant space in the late 80s and early 90s. There was such energy and dialogue there at the Cantab, TT the Bears, the Middle East club, and good pints of Guinness and music at the Plow and the Stars pub. I rarely think of reading when I write but only afterwards. When I am preparing for a reading, I think of how to get to a place where the word opens the air. I think I’m more concerned with getting to the place where the veil is thin, where the language can take us to a place between word and breath that opens a door in the room, and together we all walk right through it.
 |
| The Cantab Lounge |
JO: Though I regularly went to the Cantab to see the house band, Little Joe Cook and the Thrillers, I actually saw you perform at this bookstore in Somerville, where the poet Patricia Smith co-ran a series with a poetry slam. What was the name of that place? You just ran down some of my favorite watering holes back in the day. I can't believe we never got into a good bar brawl together. I'm also pretty sure at least one of us was also hanging out at these bars with David Foster Wallace and didn't know it.
SD: Jim that was The Bookcellar Cafe. They had the best selection of small press journals around. I used to spend so much time there. More people we probably drank with during that time: Ben Affleck’s father who bartended at the Cantab.
JDS: Oh, man, that’s so cool. I had no idea you saw Sean in Boston back in the day! Sean, your reading here in Cedar Falls a decade ago or so was my all-time favorite. You are such a great reader and performer. I can’t claim to be a great reader myself. I’m much more a poet of the page, but I am attracted to the stage, I guess. I like arranging a reading as an event, including music. For my last reading, in fact, as you know, Jim, I played piano and had a couple of friends playing sax and singing. I was also struck, years ago, reading the essay “Can Poetry Matter?” by Dana Gioia. He recommended that if we wanted to make poetry more vital in American culture, we should include other art forms in our readings. He also said that more poets should read other poets’ poems as part of their program. I’ve tried to do that over the years. In fact, the golden shovel form offers a perfect opportunity to acknowledge the past and the tradition while reading new work.
JO: Are there any questions you want to ask each other?
JDS: Yeah, I’d like to ask Sean what he thought the most challenging thing about writing in the golden shovel form is. To my mind, the hardest thing was trying to make my line breaks feel natural, or at least…comfortable. I was recently talking with my friend Eric Paul Shafer, a really terrific poet whom I’ve published a number of times in the North American Review. We were discussing line breaks and how you control them, how you can use them to your advantage. The golden shovel completely upends what I normally think about with line breaks! It’s similar to my aversion, or my inability to write sestinas. In that case, however, you get to choose your end words more carefully.
STD: Jeremy, for me, the hardest part was not erasing the form, you know, working within the rigid confines of those end words. We couldn’t even add much variance. I find Sestinas and Canzones easier because you can vary the end words with words that rhyme or have the same sound or variance that includes a word. For example, in a sestina, if an end word is “city,” the next stanza it repeats, and I might use “multiplicity” as a word. But the golden shovel asks you not to do that so you can honor the sentence you chose from the poet’s work. So, I agree completely, it asks us to see the line breaks and end lines in a completely new way. As such, I found it generative as I had to open a new place in my imagination to find new tensions I hadn’t worked before between line, line break, and narrative propulsion and pause.
Jeremy, how did this collaboration or form open you up to write such intimate poems about one of life’s greatest losses? In some ways, the project has such artificial parameters. What was it about those—or being in Mexico? Or both, that pushed you to write so powerfully about your mother’s passing?
JDS: You’re right to put it that way, Sean. I mean, the form really did open me up. I think it was exactly the artificial parameters that allowed me to hold grief and still be able to write, still be able to work at the craft of it. And then being in Mexico City was, in some ways, just happenstance. I had planned long before to go but had no intention of writing about my mother’s death. There’s something about being in a different country where you don’t really know the language, even if you know enough to get by. You end up being in your head a lot, which I think definitely contributed to these poems.
