Kevin Prufer : part one

Kevin Prufer’s seventh book How He Loved Them (Four Way Books, 2018) received the Julie Suk Award and was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize.  His eighth book, The Art of Fiction, was published this year by Four Way Books.  He teaches in the graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston where he also curates the Unsung Master Series, a book series devoted to bringing great, forgotten authors to new generations of readers.

Photo credit: Emy Johnston

How did you first engage with poetry?

I went to a classy boarding school—ivy-covered red brick, wealthy kids, grave faculty masters who doled out punishments for dress code violations and other misbehaviors.  We ate dinner in our green school ties beneath ancient portraits of faculty masters of the past.  I had one teacher who required that we memorize a poem each week.  Every Saturday, we sat in class and wrote the poem out longhand.  For each error—a missed comma, a forgotten word—we lost a grade.  And every poem he gave us was longer than the previous one.   I’m not sure what the objective of all this was.  Perhaps we were meant to learn comma rules this way, because no one could memorize the placement of every comma in “My Last Duchess”; one had to know the rules.  I don’t think these assignments awakened any interest in the other students, most of whom seemed to me to be destined to go on to great jobs in banking, medicine, or law.  And I complained like everyone else, though the poems took root inside me and grew there.  The rhythms, the odd rhymes, the wonderful pair of ragged claws scuttling across the silent sea floor.