The Accidental Poet: Alan Berecka

Interview by Grant Compton

Alan Berecka was raised in New York. He was inspired to write poetry when he heard Rudyard Kipling’s “If” read on NFL Films. He first read Ogden Nash's books, as a child. He attended the University of Dallas, where he became enamored with poetry. After working as a telephone operator, he later decided to go back to school, as a graduate student. After suffering some frustration in poetry, he decided to take a creative writing class, hoping to be asked to quit writing. But instead, he did great in the class and won the University’s poetry contest. He would later finish his MLS at Texas Woman's University. After some time at North Adams State College. Alan then spent some time at McLennan Community College. He then became a Librarian and began to write less and less. Being conflicted about not following after poetry, he began to seek spiritual counsel. After a powerful sermon on the parable of talents, Alan felt a greater desire to continue writing. He then started to attend workshops to improve his craft and finally surrendered to poetry for good.

I have read your bio and poems on Texas Poetry Assignment, and I‘m wondering, what else you might want readers to know about you and your background as it relates to you and your poetry?

AB: I’ve always thought the bio for a publication should be as short as possible. A journal is all about the poems. As for me, I am the grandson of 4 immigrants from Eastern Europe (two from Poland, two from Lithuania). My father was a tough kid from Utica, a high school dropout who joined the Merchant Marines in WWII. He made a living as a welder. My mom was a dairy farmer’s daughter from Marcy; she was a psychiatric RN. When I was in middle school, she was inflicted with a facial neuralgia that she suffered from for the rest of her life. The intense pain led to addictions and institutionalizations. A real-life tragedy that was not easy to witness because it was misdiagnosed so often. When she finally was getting relief from the pain, she contracted a rare cancer and died in her early 60’s. I grew up in rural Central New York and left to attend the University of Dallas in Irving. After working for the Southwestern Bell for two years as an operator, I went to the University of North Texas where I had a Teaching Fellowship in the English Department. I got an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies. It was the degree you got if you wrote a creative thesis before they started their MFA program. I met my wife Alice while there. She was working on a Master's in ESL. After a year of being unable to get a teaching job, I went to Texas Woman’s University and got an MLS. I worked as a librarian at North Adams State College in Massachusetts, and McLennan Community College in Waco, before settling in for 26 years at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi. I reached the rank of professor. Along the way, Alice and I raised two great humans. Rachael is married and a web engineer who lives in Portland, Oregon, and Aaron is a photographer/videographer/gaffer who lives in Austin and is in a long-term relationship with his partner Maddy. I retired in 2023, and retirement is by far my favorite job ever.

Are there other experiences in workshops you want to share?

AB: I have been lucky enough to do workshops with B. H. Fairchild, Scott Cairns, Bridget Pegeen Kelly, and Mark Jarman to name a few. I had given up really writing, just played at it, when I began my career as a librarian. Dana Gioia came to the MCC campus when I was working in Waco. I was in charge of driving him around town during his visit. I’d really do anything to get out of the library and everyone seemed frightened of him, so I volunteered. We had several discussions about poetry, Elizabeth Bishop, and Howard Nemerov. He invited me to his poetry festival in West Chester, PA. He wrote to me after he left Waco, and eventually convinced me to attend. I took Jarman’s workshop on narrative poetry, and Jarman taught me quite a bit about line theory. That was my reentry into poetry.

Are there experiences in readings that you want to share?

AB: I love doing readings. I’ve read at countless open mics and featured at them Shawnee OK, Hot Springs Arkansas, (I ran one for years at DMC), at festivals in Texas, such as several times at the Kelton, the Windhover festival at UMHB, The Scissortail Festival in at East Central University. I have been featured at festivals in Georgetown, TX, and was the Art Saltzman Visiting Poet at Southern Missouri University in Joplin, and the Oswald Distinguished Author at the University of South Carolina Aiken. I have also read at the PEN poetry festival in Vilnius and Druskininkai, Lithuania (2010), and I have read at the Lithuanian Writer’s Union Poetry Festival which has events all over the country in Lithuania(2022). I’ve read to paying audiences Chatters in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, NM, and storytelling festivals in Wimberly, TX (paying audiences are scary) and in houses and to organizations from Santa Fe to Corpus, to a park in Albany, NY.

Are there any publications beyond Texas Poetry Assignment you want to share?

AB: They tell you when you start out as a poet to keep a submission log. I guess they tell you that so when you get asked how many times you were published and where you can give a cogent answer. I never have kept a decent log. So this is a partial list. I’ve been in the Texas Review, The American Literary Review, The Concho River Review, The Windhover, The Red River Review, The Blue Rock Review, New Texas, Ruminate, The Christian Century, The San Antonio Express, The Windward Review, The Penwood Review, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry. I remember some more, but that’s enough. My work has been translated into Lithuanian and Chinese. I’m quite proud of being included in the Trilobite Press Chapbook series that includes the likes of Walt MacDonald, B. H. Fairchild, Naomi Nye, and Albert Goldbarth.

How would you describe your origin as a poet?

AB: As close to one as I can remember, it was an NFL Films Production at halftime of a NY Giants game. They clipped highlights and put in some schmaltzy background music as John “the voice of God'' Facenda read Kipling’s “If.” If I remember right, The last clip that played to the line …you will become a man my son…was Joe Namath running off the field with his finger raised after the Jets beat the Colts in the Superbowl. And that was my introduction to poetry at around the age of ten. It really caught my attention. I grew up in a lower-middle-class family. My mom read mysteries and romance novels; my dad read the paper. The first poetry book in the house was my older sister Janis’s copy of a Rod McKuen collection.

What are your first memories of reading?

AB: Another moment in a high school class…We were reading “Song to Amarantha” by Richard Lovelace. I should say I was not a good student. Years later, much too late to do anything about them, my wife figured out I had some fairly serious learning disabilities, but on that day as the class was reading that god-awful old poem, I happened to be staring at the back of a pretty blond girl’s head across the room, and as Mrs. Watson read: Like the sun in early ray,/But shake your head and scatter day. The sun hit this girl’s hair in such a way that I swear it scattered the day. I thought wow, there’s something to this stuff.

What are your first memories of writing poetry?

AB: I filled many notebooks as an undergraduate and punished my friends with the stuff. I couldn’t spell or punctuate long before word processors were invented to help, so none of it ever made it to the school’s literary magazine. In graduate school at UNT, I came in to be a Shakespearean scholar. The school needed to offer a creative writing class or it would have to take it out of the catalog. I took the class figuring that Rick Sale would tell me to just try, which would be a great relief. We read Hugo’s Triggering Town. In it, he says you should never write about your mother. Never tell anyone who is Polish or Lithuanian not to do something. I wrote a poem about growing up with my mother and the horror of one day wishing she would die. It won the school’s writing contest that year, and a later draft was published in the American Literary Review. Rick Sale began encouraging me to do a creative thesis at that point, and the rest is history.

Which people, teachers, and poets, were most influential to you in the beginning?

AB: I come from a family of storytellers, my parents were ill-matched but both had great but odd senses of humor; a Franciscan Friar Emile Kransawitcz encouraged my intellectual endeavors, which was unusual in my blue-collar childhood teachers. A high school teacher, Barbara Watson, saw past my inability to read fast or spell or write without missing letters or words, and tutored me in basic grammar when she could, she also encouraged me to think. Dr. Cherie Clodfelter, the head of the education department at the University of Dallas encouraged my creative writing, Dr. Louise Cowan asked a kid in her class barely making C’s to be an English major because she thought he had an affinity for understanding literature. The poets Rick Sale and Les Palmer at the University of North Texas, both took an inordinate amount of time to foster and encourage my writing(both became great friends as well), and Dana Gioia for pulling back into the craft. In high school, I read way too much Ogden Nash, but I’m a sucker for wordplay. As an undergraduate, I studied the poetry of D. H. Lawrence. It's his slightly elevated diction that helped form my conversational style. In graduate school, I was introduced to the work of B. H. Fairchild at UNT. Rick Sale had just published his first chapbook. I saw how the blue-collar world of my childhood was fodder for poetry. I also fell upon the work of Elizabeth Bishop, what a master. Also, Scott Cairns' work freed me up to take on religious and spiritual matters. I also became a fan of Howard Nemerov's later work. They were so funny and to the point.

How would you describe your writing process when it comes to poetry?

AB: It’s hard, and I’m probably lying, but the closest I can come to describe it is there’s an itch, an idea or story that just keeps growing and if the itch can be mated with an image, the poem begins to take shape. Occasionally a line pops in my head, but that is much rarer. The line “You don’t have to Atlas to know this world is a heavy place,” was the last time that happened.

How do you know when you are ready to write a poem?

AB: It’s finding the image that can be drawn from as the poem grows, once I have that, it’s a matter of building on that as the poem grows.

How does the drafting, revising, and editing process work for you?

AB: At UNT, Les Palmer was a hard taskmaster. He was a beautiful and kind man, but when it came to poetry, there was no room for being nice. He always had two things to say when he looked at a draft, some line was too easy, or that I could find more poetry in there. So as I revise I channel him, looking for cliches and looking to see if I can show something that I might just be telling instead of showing. After Les died unexpectedly 20 years ago, my writing process was in a tailspin. I met the poet and now noted Flannery O’Connor scholar Angela Alaimo O’Donnell at the conference at UMHB at the time of Les’s death, and we became each other’s first readers for many years. She was as harsh as Les, and I beat up on her drafts. We are still friends. She runs the Center for Catholic Studies at Fordham. Anyway, now I channel Les and Angela, but it’s always great to have another pair of eyes to keep you from making a stupid mistake.

What topics or issues frequent your poems?

AB: Religion/spirituality, family, work, and sports are the main ones with an occasional social justice poem.

Have those changed over time?

AB: I started out as a Catholic poet, and now I’m a liberal Episcopalian so the accidents of the religious poetry have changed, but I believe the essence has remained the same. My kids are grown, and I’m a lot older, so one’s experiences change. Since I’ve mainly mined my life and beliefs for poetry the subjects change slightly as well.

I have read your poem, “Remembering the Body.” What do you recall about the inspiration for this poem?

AB: I’ve always had a problem with the idea that the body was the seat of sin, and that religion somehow purified us through denial. I’m thinking a lot of that was added baggage given to us by Augustine. I know as a kid, I bought the party line and it messed with me pretty well. I got to thinking of the expression of celebrating mass, and the true presence is body and blood. You can tell that the poem is rather old with its reference to the Yellow Pages. I guess I’d use Craig’s List if I wrote it now. I worked on it quite a bit at a workshop in Ouray, Colorado with Scott Cairns. I know he helped me hammer out the last few lines, but I forget what’s me and what’s him. I think the collaborative nature of poetry is a secret to those on the outside of the craft. When you get immersed in it though, all that matters is the poem.

How does it reflect the choices you regularly make in crafting your poetry on the page, shape, and line?

AB: I naturally fall into a 8-12 syllable line and try to keep the lines to similar lengths unless I want to call attention to something, like the word joyous, but to say I’m conscious of this might not always be true.

How does it reflect the choices you regularly make in crafting your poetry on music?

AB: I’m not really good at scansion, so I write for flow, often using hard consonants to create rhythm. To me language is like a drum set, b, g, d might be like a bass drum, th f sh are like the cymbals. I play with it until I think it sounds decent. I forgot to include Hopkins up above. I love his alliteration. “Oh, if we knew what we do when we delve a hew” from Binsey Poplars is my favorite example. It’s something that comes naturally to me, but I learned I needed to tone it down for a modern reader. It can seem comical if it’s overdone. For example too many f’s and you end up sounding like Elmer Fudd. Comparison and Contrast seems to lend itself to poetry. Pinging from one stanza to the next, sets up movement in a poem and pulls a reader in.

How does it reflect the choices you regularly make in crafting your poetry on balance?

AB: I wanted to add that in most poems I try to interject a bit of humor. To me humor is like a magician’s misdirection. It allows me to get somewhere that might be uncomfortable without it.

Were there any new craft choices you made?

AB: Not really, but I was writing this at the time I was breaking from the Catholic church. I had befriended a very liberal Episcopal priest, and I remember asking him to fact-check the theology for me. I was worried about Gnostic being correct.

What advice would you give to young people who are interested in reading poetry?

AB: Don’t worry if you don’t like or get everything. When you’re in a class you read poems from an anthology, normally. To me, that’s like walking through an art museum. As you go through the museum a painting might really grab you, cause you to stand at one place for a long period of time. We don’t think that’s strange. It’s the way art, new works, something in the viewer and the viewed clicks, and becomes in some way transcendent. The same thing applies to poetry. Learn what you can from all the masterworks, but when a work of somebody grabs you, go to the library and check a collection by that poet and dive in.

What advice would you give to young people who are interested in writing poetry?

AB: Be humble enough to work on your craft, know that you can always get better, but be stubborn enough to stick with it. I’d also add it’s probably not a bad thing to remember your reader. Give him/her a chance to understand what you are trying to get at.

What advice would you give to young people who are interested in publishing their work?

AB: It’s really hard to get a piece accepted. More importantly, the likely rejection is not a personal attack. More than likely the poem didn’t fit that issue, or the editor’s taste and your style don’t mesh. To give yourself the best chance, make sure each line of your poem has a reason to begin or end where it does. Think of each line like a poem in miniature. My experience as an editor and a judge of contests has convinced me of the importance of line structure.

If you had to recommend one or two Texas Poetry Assignment poets to other readers, who might you suggest?

AB: I might know half the people listed on the page and half of those are good friends, so it’s hard to pick one. Plus, the editor Dr. Musgrove is a hell of a poet. But that said I’m big fans of Larry D Thomas, Jerry Bradley, and Sister Lou Ella Hickman. Larry and Sister Lou are masters of concision. Larry mentored me when I was starting out in the Texas poetry scene. I especially like his collection Amazing Grace. Jerry was the longtime editor of the Concho River Review. Jerry is a fine poet and one of the rare ones who is gifted at using humor. Juan Manuel Perez, a good friend and fellow Corpus poet laureate, is really gifted in his use of humor as well. Sister Lou is a nun in Corpus, whose work just doesn’t get enough attention. Her collection, her: robed and wordless is just amazing, a retelling of stories of women in the bible. But truly you can’t go wrong with anyone on the list including the other two Corpus Poet Laureates on the list: Robin Carstensen and Tom Murphy.

How would you distinguish contemporary poetry from poetry from earlier eras?

AB: I’m really not sure, because there are so many schools of poetry these days. I see the poetry I write and that of poets I admire as a reaction against modernism. Fairchild, Bilgere, Crooker, O’Donnell, Collins, and Thomas have tried to make poetry accessible to a greater audience, to free poetry from the ivory tower and the poetry one needs a PhD is comparative languages to understand. I mentioned that I enjoyed the later works of Howard Nemerov. George Bilgere studied under Nemerov at Washington University in St. Louis. I asked George if he knew why Nemerov had transitioned from writing poetry in the modernist tradition to the wonderfully funny and accessible poems he wrote at the end of his life. Bilgere said Nemerov told him he felt it was a mistake to write just for other scholars and poets. I hope that story is true. I sure like it.

If you had a chance to ask a question to a poet you admire (living or dead), who is the poet and what would you ask?

AB: You know, every time I read a biography of a long-dead poet I admire, D. H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Bishop, or Gerard Manley Hopkins, I find out they were either mean drunks or really strange. Not sure I’d want to meet them. I’ve met Fairchild, Cairns, and Bilgere who are nice guys, especially George Bilgere. Maybe I’d like to meet Shakespeare, just to put that Andrew Marvell really wrote everything to bed once and for all. But I guess it would be Les Palmer; I’d just like to be with my old friend and teacher one more time. I owe that man so much. It would be great to say thanks.

Here's a good story for you. I love George Bilgere’s poem “Learning to Ride a Bicycle.” I once wrote to him and said I thought it was the best poem written in the last 50 years. He wrote back thanking me, but told me I was nuts, the best poem was B. H. Fairchild’s “Body and Soul.” So, I wrote B. H. (Pete) Fairchild and said, hey I know you never met him, but George Bilgere thinks your poem “Body and Soul” is the best poem in the last 50 years; Pete wrote back and told me to thank George, but he was nuts, everyone knew the best poem was Anthony Hecht’s “Grapes.” Mr. Hecht had died the year before, so I couldn’t write him, but no doubt the chain could have lasted forever.

Grant Compton lives in Abilene, Texas, and is completing the Professional Education program in curriculum and instruction at Angelo State University. He is currently an instructor at Cisco College, where he teaches psychology, education, and English.