Author Spotlight: Jeffrey Spahr-Summers
Cherries...Bing, black, but don't call any of the scrumptious poetic fruit in The Cherry Poems artificial maraschino. In reading this collection of sassy, tart poetry, you sample cherry pies left alone to lose their warmth on the windowsill, the unfulfilled promise of cherry juice, the pit of regret you are commanded to spit out. Jeffrey Spahr-Summers, who published several of my poems in The Poetry Victims just porduced The Cherry Poems. One taste and I was hooked. I went cherry picking for the poetic truths in Jeffrey's mind.

Interview: The Cherry Poems

Kristin Johnson: These poems are as much about cherries as William Carlos Williams' "This is Just to Say" is about plums. The word "cherry" is, of course, slang for virginity. Cherries have many associations. I think the Japanese achieved mastery of cherries and cherry blossoms as metaphor.

In your poetry I see longing, desire, and only brief fulfillment. Like fresh cherries themselves, your poems speak of ephemeral satisfaction--what Julian Barnes calls "the pleasure of anticipation." Is this how you truly see life and love or is this just one aspect for you? Is it a social commentary?

Jeffrey Spahr-Summers: Anticipation, yes! And virginity! They speak of the newness of desire unfulfilled... when it is the most acute. This is the anticipation. I admire the Japanese affinity for nature; a longing for perfection, a longing for love. I suppose 'this'is a social statement, but really it is about the very personal experience and expectations of love and affection. Never the same twice. Never the same again. One might even call it regret eventually. It is not unlike the experience of the perfect Japanese Haiku. This is the nature of the metaphor.

Kristin: Why did you choose the cherry as a subject/metaphor, because of established poetic tradition or a personal association?

Jeffrey: I wrote and published the first Cherry poem in 1991 and wrote the rest a couple of years ago. Erica Jong was an early influence on me (as was Frost and Shakespeare) ... all lovers of nature. But I met Erica, and I exposed to the sensualness of fruit as a child. I think choosing cherries for poems were from personal association. You know, cherries re-visited!

Kristin: Like Marcel Proust. In your book of cherries, I love the sequences that are more evocative than descriptive:

blushing
luscious
subtle
beauty
expectant
wild child
hesitant fire
bashful
sharp
sigh
ripe
desire
demure
flashing eyes
coy smile
hiding
mysterious
raucous
raw
red cherry sunsets
blazing
brazen
tangy
tart
lingering
tingle
rapture
delight

It's like a poetry workshop exercise made into Rodin's THE THINKER. How do you create poems like this? Do you have a special technique you use?

Jeffrey: The poems have to be evocative when dealing with such intense emotions as anticipation or desire, and virginity (in and of itself) is by nature evocative...even provocative. Do you see? 'The Thinker' is an interesting analogy. After years of poetry workshops a person certainly becomesw a thinker, more willing to experiment and take chances. When I write I edit ruthlessly to rid myself (my poems) of unnecessary words. I can simply describe the cherries, or I can flaunt the emotions that the cherries evoke.

Kristin: The book and poems are short, but you have the urge and desire to read them again and find new meaning in between the lines--what's not said as well as what is. Did you deliberately design the collection this way?

Jeffrey: A little mystery goes a long way in poetry, which I suppose is my motivation for exploring alternative perspectives. When I facilitated poetry workshops in the Chicago School System, I encouraged the children to consider different perspectives...imagine yourself as the subject of the poem itself...tell us 'why' we want to know what you have to say. Yes, this is deliberate.

Kristin: When do you feel a poet overwrites a poem? What about poems that look clever and sleek but have no real substance?

Jeffrey: I think a poem is over-written once it strays from its own ambitions, does that make sense? Different poems have sifferent ambitions; some aspire to touch our emeotions, some aspire to simply please our sense of sound, others aspire to do all three, and more.

Kristin: Some poems try to describe fruit, but give us pictures of fruit or wax fruit or canned fruit. Your poems leave a tast of fullas cherries themselves. Incendentally, a med student poet named Tony Yadao in my college poetry group wrote a poem about a fly scraping the rind of an orange. You felt like you were that fly tasting that orange. How do you avoid cliches? How do you get beneath the surface of the cherry pie?

Jeffrey: I feel like I fall victim to cliches all the time. I do consciouly re-write or do away with passages that I think are cliches, but what I see as a cliche others may not and visa versa. Getting beneath the surface of the cherry pie requires imagination I think, putting oneself in the place of the subject of the poem. Thinking from the inside out, instead of from the outside in.

Kristin: You certainly have a talent for that. Hoe did you get started writing? Have you always been a poet? I have enjoyed and been published by your Poetry Victims (which I love). You have an impressive publication record.

I started writing poems while living in South Africa. Robert Frost's poems were core subject material when I was in elementary school before we went to Africa, once we arrived in Africa Shakespeare was pounded into us in high school in a big way. I started writing seriously when I was fourteen. I was inspired, and I have been publishing for many years now.

Kristin: Poetry is an undervalued endeavor these days. What gives you the impetus to continue writing? Have you ever thought of writing in any other genre?

Jeffrey: Writing is such a part of me now, I go through writer's block on occasion but I always come back to it. When I was in my twenties I wrote a handful of short stories and children's stories, but they really weren't very good. In my thirties when I lived in Chicago, I was convinced by Gwendolyn Brooks that I should write about my experiences in Africa, so I planned out a series of short stories. Once I started writing them, they kept coming out as poems anyway, so I gave up.

I like the 'poetic license' as people say...I can write and experiment however I want, it's much more satisfying to me. Poetry is my release. I write am inspired by others' poetry that I read, this keeps me wanting to write more. My ego has something to say, so I write.

Kristin: What do you want to say next? What's next for you?

Jeffrey: What's next? I am preparing to revitalize The Poetry Victims by adding permanent blogs based on the newsletters. I am considering doing a couple of anthologies "The best of The Poetry Victims 2004 and 2005" etc. I have a couple books of [poetry] in mind yet to do, and I want to edit a book of traveling diaries written by my grandmother in the 1920's. I am also brewing on some 'new' magazine venture, and publishing more of my photographs in journals now as well. I recently married, and my wife is taking on the Herculean task of typing all my poems into a database. We're getting organized, you see, so no telling what might strike my fancy.