We agree with Billy Collins that Clewell deserves “a gang of listeners for the truth of his insights and the sheer fun of the delivery.” So we called him up at Pearson House and bugged him to tell us about his new book, Almost Nothing to Be Scared Of.
Where did you find the cover photo, “Fallout Shelter for Sale, Los Angeles, 1961”? “I went to the demon box, this box on my desk, and started cruising through Cold War stuff. I found this image wasn’t all over the Internet. In fact, it was quite not all over the Internet—the only place I found it was connected to this magazine called Aqua, which is the trade magazine of the swimming pool industry. From there, I tried to find out from whence it came.” That turned into an international search—aided by the poet’s wife, Patricia Clewell—leading to the estate of German photographer Max Scheler, who also photographed The Beatles before Beatlemania and a young Martin Luther King Jr.
You have two poems with “Hats” in the title, “What If All Along We’ve Been Wrong About Tinfoil Hats” and “Trying on Hats with Rahsaan Roland Kirk.” What’s the connection? “We’re not writing chapters in a novel, obviously, but I always want a book of poems to be more than just the last 30 poems that guy wrote, and they kinda go together. I like a book that is a book, even if it’s not just one thematic thread. Those two poems were originally closer together. I’m always reorganizing and reordering. But the hat thing wasn’t lost on me. There was a Tom Waits poem that dropped out completely; that had a hat in it, too. With Rahsaan, that was primarily because it was in and around the same place where it was about the truth of the experience. And I’ve always had it in the back of my mind, ‘I gotta write this guy down somewhere’—not because he hadn’t been done but because I’ve just loved him for so long.”
The maxim that “Clewell don’t do haiku” is no longer true. “There was somebody had once introduced me and prepared the audience by saying, ‘Strap in! These things aren’t short.’ It was done very sweetly, of course. The notion is, people shouldn’t expect these things to go by fast. So I did actually write a haiku…my only known haiku.”
Clewell’s new book is available from local independent bookstores and from the University of Wisconsin Press.
