An Interview with Poet Al Maginnes

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Ahead of his reading as part of Penn State Behrend Creative Writers Reading Series, poet Al Maginnes spoke with creative writing student Francis Gardiner to talk about his work.

Ahead of his visit to Penn State Behrend, poet Al Maginnes had an email discussion with Francis Gardiner, a student at Behrend, about his work. Al Maginnes' reading will take place Thursday, Mar. 21 at 6 p.m. in Behrend's Metzgar Center. The event is free and open to the public.

Francis Gardiner (FG): When did you decide to become a writer and what led to that decision?

Al Maginnes (AM): I started writing fairly young and mostly wrote imitations of the sports and adventure books I was reading. Poetry came in my teens, when it comes to everyone I guess. I wrote off and on throughout my teens and into my early twenties, but always figured I'd end up as a fiction writer. Poetry kind of ambushed me when I was twenty-five and finishing my undergrad degree, which I took a long time getting. I applied to some Master of Fine Arts programs and got accepted into a good one. That was really the beginning of my commitment to poetry. 

FG: In your 2014 collection Music from Small Towns, there is a special note to musicians who have nurtured and inspired you over the years. There is also an epigraph from Jimi Hendrix preceding your poem "The Night I Was Born: Slight Return." I also want to mention here your poem "Earworm," which captures the almost parasitic nature of having a catchy part of a song stuck in your head. Could you speak to how your love of music influences your poetry?

AM: I've been a music lover since I sat with my parents listening to their folk records, which grounded me in country music and the blues, two of my first loves. Later came rock and roll and jazz. I've heard people claim to use musical measures as a template for poems, but that never interested me as much as writing about how certain music makes me feel or telling the story behind a certain song or show. I've been lucky enough to be friends with some of my favorite songwriters though we never talk much about writing. I've wondered whether I would pursue writing as compulsively as I do if I could play music the way I wish I could. For me music is subject matter as well as inspiration. I can listen to Coltrane for a while, and it will spur me to write something just to acknowledge the act of creation I'm listening to.

"Earworm" was one of those gifts the world gives you sometimes. I was listening to a story on the radio about some band — this was in the early 90s — and the word earworm came up. Immediately I pictured this creature living in your brain and the poem came very quickly, as some do.

FG: How have you evolved as a writer over your career? What do you know now about writing that you wish you knew when you began?

AM: I wish I'd known how long it takes. I've been at it forty some years and I'm still not as good as I'd like to be. And I wish I'd been a little more cognizant of the internal rewards and less fixated on the external parts of writing — the publishing and prizes and favor seeking. Because, ultimately, those internal rewards have to sustain you. Publications and prizes are great, and I've been lucky enough to win some contests and to have published a lot of writing over the years, but I've gone through dry spells and times when no one seemed interested in what I was doing, and I had to depend on the work to pull me along.

FG: Perhaps related to the last question: what are some obstacles you've faced as a writer, and how have you overcome them? 

AM: I would say that the obstacles I faced as a writer are the obstacles I've had to face as a human being. For instance, in my twenties I drank far more than was good for me, and I had to learn to put the bottle away. I've had some health issues in the last few years, and those slowed me down for a while. And I've had times when I doubted my work because it wasn't getting published and wasn't the poem of the moment, as someone called it. So I had to trust the stuff I was writing and not worry about what was in whatever cool journal that had just rejected me.

FG: What are you currently working on?

AM: Like a lot of my friends who have retired — I left the classroom in 2022 — I've been writing far too much. I'm finishing up a book length sonnet sequence called Second Line, which took as its starting point the sudden death of a very old and dear friend. I'm also compiling poems for a collection I'll probably start putting together in the fall. And I'm working on a novel as well. I'm about halfway into a second draft of that, although some parts have been polished quite a bit more. I'm in the planning stage for another novel and hopeful that the poems will keep coming for a few more years.

Francis Gardiner is a junior in the B.F.A. for Creative Writing at Penn State Behrend