10 minutes with B.H. Fairchild

By Samantha Court
Collegian Reporter

B. H. Fairchild, the Lorraine Sherley professor of American literature at Texas Christian University, has published several books of poetry, including The Arrival of the Future and The Art of the Lathe. His literary awards include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the California Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. His works have been published in Poetry, The New Yorker and Southern Review, among others.

Fairchild delivered his speech “A Way of Being: Some Thoughts on the Ends and Means of Poetry” Wednesday in Phillips Auditorium. Fairchild will be reading his poetry tonight at 8 p.m. in Phillips. A reception and book-signing will be held afterward in the upper lounge of the Dow Leadership Center.

Samantha Court: What was it like being a technical writer for a nitroglycerin plant?

B.H. Fairchild: It was kind of boring. The various stages in the process of going from the raw material to the final product were actually located in different houses, spread far apart, so if there was an explosion in one house, it wouldn’t blow up the whole plant. I was always driving from one house or another interviewing the workers and writing the process in language that would satisfy both the insurance company and, I guess you could say, the intelligence level of the workers. It was a repetitive, fairly monotonous process.

SC: What are some things that, for you, define good literature?

BHF: I guess good literature to me, of whatever genre, would be literature that truly captures the essence of that genre. I think there are perfectly good reasons why we have different genres, and each one has an essential way of going about the business of embodying the human experience in a way that has significance and that manages to get at the greatest of all mysteries in human experience, which is simply the mystery of Being. All forms of literature attempt to get at that mystery.

SC: How was it being an English tutor to the University of Kansas basketball team?

BHF: They did have prevalent writing problems. They had a great point guard named JoJo White, who later went on to fame as the point guard for the Boston Celtics. I came in one evening, and he wasn’t there. Instead, there was a very beautiful young woman sitting in the front row. I said, “Well, I’m sure you can’t be part of the basketball team. Why are you here?” She said, “Well, JoJo is having his photo taken by Sports Illustrated, and I came here to be tutored in his place.” And of course I asked, “How is that supposed to work? Are you going to make the same mistakes in writing that he would?” It was pretty absurd.

SC: Your poem, “Two Photographs,” is an interesting parallel between you and your father. What prompted you to write this?

BHF: Who knows what prompts anyone to write a poem. I do write about my father quite a lot. It may have been instigated by simply my often revisited memory of having taken a different direction than my father did in my life.

SC: You use phrases like “Winter light. It rises from his white shirt,” “tense little prayers of reach” and “cloud swags running the moon under” in your poetry. Do statements like this flow quickly, or do they take you awhile to think of?

BHF: It happens both ways. “Cloud swags running the moon under”—I remember that one coming to me, and I particularly liked it. You’re just looking for a description. Light metaphors appear quite frequently in my work, as a student pointed out. I wasn’t aware of it, but she was.