Blog Tour & Interview: THESE ARE NOT MY WORDS (I JUST WROTE THEM)

THESE ARE NOT MY WORDS (I JUST WROTE THEM)

Donovan Hufnagle

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GENRE:  Poetry

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BLURB:

Echoing Chuck Palahniuk’s statement. “Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known,” this collection explores identity. These poems drift down rivers of old, using histories private and public and visit people that I love and loathe. Through heroes and villains, music and cartoons, literature and comics, science and wonder, and shadow and light, each poem canals the various channels of self and invention. As in the poem, “Credentials,” “I am a collage of memories and unicorn stickers…[by] those that have witnessed and been witnessed.”

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Excerpt One:

Refurbished

Susan taught me that poetic energy lies 

between the lines, white noise scratching 

and clawing between images, ideas,

       things…

And like a poem, 

the chair was molded by my Tio’s hands, 

an antique wooden upholstered desk chair. 

My Tio moved from Durango, Mexico 

to Forth Worth in 1955.

He became a mason and wood worker. 

He bricked the stockyards

He built the signs 

He died in 2005.

Now, 

matted. Worn. Faded floral design. Wood 

scarred like healing flesh. 

The arms torn, ratted by the heft of his arms 

and the stress of the days. The foam peeks

out. 

The brass upholstery tacks rusted. I count

1000 of them. With each, 

I mallet a fork-tongue driver under its head.

A tap, tap, tapping until it sinks beneath the tack, 

until the tack springs from its place.

I couldn’t help but think of a woodpecker.

A tap, tap, tapping into Post Oak, 

a rhythm…each scrap of wood falling to the ground

until a home is formed. 

Until each piece of wood like the tacks removed 

shelter something new. 

I remove the staples, the foam, the fabric, 

the upholstery straps 

until it’s bones. 

I sand and stain

until its bones shine.

I layer and wrap its bones with upholstery straps, 

foam, fabric, staples and tacks. 

New tacks, Brass medallions 

adorning the whole, but holding it

all together—

its bones

its memories,

its energy.

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Interview:

What group did you hang out with in high school?

The poem “First Loves” in my current book highlights some of my neighborhood friends I hung out with growing up. I have some vivid memories of my neighborhood friends; they taught me a lot. In high school, though I did still hang with a couple of my neighborhood friends, we were all varying ages and mostly my neighborhood friends were older than me and went in different directions. In high school my closest friend was Aseem. We spent most of our days together in school and outside of school. We went surfing on the weekends and listened to Metallica. We zoomed to the local pizza shop during our lunch break and dreamt of our future after schools. We ate at each other’s houses, sharing with each other’s families. Aseem even lived with my family at some point. 

After I quit the high school basketball team, I stopped hanging out with most of the players. I found a great friend in Aseem, and with a few others in our group, we blazed our own trail. I wouldn’t be where I am today without Aseem and his influence. 

What are you passionate about these days?

I am currently in the process of assembling a variety of poetry exercises that have been or can be adopted and adapted to help foster a higher level of critical thinking for expository writing in a freshman composition course. My intentions are to compile a collection of poetry exercises that could be used in a freshmen composition course to help enhance prose writing and, more importantly, try to craft a poetic mindset when thinking about their writing. 

I have argued that the value of style, voice, conciseness, and language are more significant than the mechanics in a college level writing course. It is rarer to have communication hindered by the mechanics than the lack of conciseness in language, for one example. I don’t think students need to become poets; however, seeing how words, lines, sentences, and so on are used in different poems could assist in the critical thinking of writing and communication. In truth, I’m not really teaching students in a composition course how to write, I’m teaching students how to think about their writing and communication.

If you had to do your journey to getting published all over again, what would you do differently?

Simply put, start earlier. I was always nervous (and still am) to send my work out to the world. Though I have grown thick and hard callouses, rejection is always painful. However, in the writing world, we need to be prepared for rejection because like riding a motorcycle, it is not if you crash, it is a question of when you crash. In writing, it is not if you will be rejected, it is when you will be rejected. I didn’t send work out for the longest time because of this fear of rejection. I am not a big fan of reflecting on the “what ifs,” but if I were to do it again, I would remember that since rejection is inevitably and subjective for the most part, I would try to overcome this fear and try to publish my work much earlier. With all that said, I am happy where I have ended up at this point. 

Ebook or print? And why?

Both. My love for the physical book is never ending, but the practical in me knows that eBooks are probably more reachable. The smell and feel of a book are something everyone should experience, and no one can replace, especially with a laptop, iPad, kindle, or phone. Though I use them, I don’t really like how I feel afterward. My eyes feel exhausted after reading from a screen. Even my body feels less than. I guess we could compare it to music. I love having any song on my phone or having access to practically every song on my phone, but nothing beats the feel and sound of a record. As a child, I thumbed through my father’s records and fell in love with music as well as the scratch and hiss from the record and player itself. To this day, I still listen to music on a record player. I even describe an old record player wood cabinet in my neighbor’s house growing up in the poem “First Loves.” 

I grew up, though, on tapes and CDs. If you don’t know, we had to rewind tapes. We didn’t have the ease of clicking on a song and starting it from wherever we wanted or repeating the song endlessly. We had to rewind. And rewinding was a task. CDs, of course, were less of a hassle, but we still had to purchase the disc and maneuver within that arena. 

One thing my kids know is that we work hard for our successes. I wonder if we expect things to just be and be easier, do we gain enough out of it? If anything, my kids know that we must work for our dinner. We must work hard for our successes. And with that work, we appreciate our successes more. I wonder if that reigns true for music and books. But I digress. 

 I hope print never goes away. 

What is your favorite poem in this book?

Identifying one poem that I like the best would be like picking my favorite child, which is my…. Just joking. I love all three of my children. My new book carries different styles of poems, and these styles illustrate my evolution as a writing. My personal narrative poems such as “First Loves” hold a close place in my heart because my instincts are taking me closer to storytelling, But the blues and jazz poems such as “Bar Girl” and “86 the Mustard” share where I started my documentary poetry journey. I also love the WPA poems. These poems are villanelles formed from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) narratives recorded in the 1930s. Using someone else’s language to shape your own message and art is something I love to do and, simultaneously, expresses the core of this book, which is identity. My identity and your identity have been shaped by the many people we have encountered as well as the many things we have observed and participated in. Whether it is political and controversial like the poems that contain Bill Cosby or personal like the poems about family, we are all built on these experiences and ideas. Our identity is shaped by our experiences, and I hope that all the poems in this book, public or private, resonate this idea. 

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Donovan Hufnagle is a husband, a father of three, and a professor of English and Humanities. He moved from Southern California to Prescott, Arizona to Fort Worth, Texas. He has five poetry collections: These Are Not My Words (I Just Wrote Them), Raw Flesh Flash: The Incomplete, Unfinished Documenting Of, The Sunshine Special, Shoebox, and 30 Days of 19. Other recent writings have appeared in Tempered Runes Press, Solum Literary Press, Poetry Box, Beyond Words, Wingless Dreamer, Subprimal Poetry Art, Americana Popular Culture Magazine, Shufpoetry, Kitty Litter Press, Carbon Culture, Amarillo Bay, Borderlands, Tattoo Highway, The New York Quarterly, Rougarou, and others.

Website: http://www.donovanhufnagle.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/donovanhufnagle

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/dhufnaglepoetry

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/These-Are-Not-My-Words/dp/B0DBMN46M4/ref=sr_1_1

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