Collin Callahan was born in Illinois. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Slice Magazine, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. Collin is currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at Florida State University.
Collin’s poem “I Hummed Her Address Until it Existed in Front of Me” appears in the Summer 2020 issue of Carve. Order your copy here.
What I find compelling about this piece is that it almost reads like fiction – there’s suspense, a point of view, even conflict. What is your approach to writing a poem?
I guess I’ll start with what approach didn’t work for me. So, Dean Young was the first poet I fell in love with, and I wanted to write just like him—tangential leaps and logical tightropes from one line to the next. It felt so random and fun and perfect. But I tried and I just couldn’t do it.
I figured out that I need a place for my poems to exist in—a place with people and noise and movement. The Stardust Bowling Alley or Candlelight Motel, for example.
I also realized that my narrator is a little bit of a scumbag, which has been wonderful. It has led to some sketchy interactions, which has allowed me to introduce more characters and insert some bits of dialogue into what I hope is a manuscript. My poems can feel a bit dislocated, so it has been helpful to populate them with characters—most of whom are based on friends or pot dealers or family members.
But in regard to the actual writing process, I collect images in a notebook—puzzle a few together and add some sort of action or movement. Once I have something substantial, or even a few lines, I ask myself well, okay, where are we at? And what happens next?
There’s such wonderful play with imagination and reality in this piece. How do you decide where to blur the line?
Thank you, I appreciate it. I think the title gave me a lot of room to meander. Originally, each section of this piece was its own poem, until I realized they needed to be smushed together.
The second section was actually inspired by identical twins, Justin and Graham, who have autism. We spent four summers or so together while I was working at a day camp in Illinois, and I was always interested in their routines and the attention they would pay to certain things that a more neurotypical brain would maybe overlook. Anyways, I would guess our perceptions of realities are all very different—or at least the line that separates reality from the imagination. This concept too of flexible realities is fascinating to me because I have a familial history of Schizoaffective disorder, and I have had conversations with my sister about what the hallucinations can look and feel and sound like. I think my poems are a personal attempt to challenge, or expand, the notion of reality, and they often feature characters who perceive things a little differently.
On a line level though, I think it mostly depends on what the image wants. I do believe that it is useful to offset absurd tangents with some concrete actions or definitive statements—footholds of some sort.
“I Hummed Her Address Until It Existed in Front of Me” is really the perfect title for this piece. How did you find it?
I used to deliver pizzas on the northside of Chicago for a place right across from Wrigley Field. So, I spent a lot of time taking addresses over the phone, and then driving around the city trying to find them. On weekends I would clock out at three or four in the morning, and then have to find a parking spot for my Mercury Grand Marquis, a boat of a car I inherited from my Great Aunt Colleen (I still remember the graveyard of filters smudged with pink lipstick in the ashtray). Anyways, that was always a nightmare, but once I got back to my place, I would drink beers on the front porch. The city always felt so empty then, it was my favorite time of the day. Those are the hours in which the poem takes place.
For a title though, this one was unique. I usually don’t like to come up with a title before the poem, because it usually is too much of a summary—too obvious. But about five years ago, not too long after junking the Grand Marquis, I wrote a poem that started with, “She left me her address / in wet hair on the shower wall.” It was the best thing I had written, I knew right away. I was like, whatever this is, this is what I want to do from now on. In this poem, it was time for the narrator to go find it.
Have you been writing (or not writing) in the last few months?
I have been told my poems feel apocalyptic, but despite that I haven’t been able to write about the present-day apocalypse. That’s probably okay though, there is a lot to digest. It has been difficult, but I am trying to focus on the positive changes in my day-to-day. It is much easier to sneak into the pools of nearby apartment complexes, for example. I also live near a field dedicated to tailgating, and without football games it has been claimed as a neighborhood dog park. My partner and I take our Italian greyhound there at sunset to throw a frisbee and watch the bats.
As for the writing, yes, but slowly. For me, I feel the best about myself and the world when I have a poem under construction. The golden hour is the days and weeks after the first draft, when I can spend time tinkering with lines and breaks on my front porch (which is hidden like an egg inside a bamboo patch, or forest, or whatever you call it). The scariest time for me, though, is the purgatory between poems, I feel restless and bored and anxious. That’s why it’s kind of a tragedy that my poems are all so short. Some poet friends seem to be overflowing with ideas for the next one, or the next collection. I am always jealous.
But I think it’s natural that we all, or most of us, are struggling for words—are struggling in general. I honestly don’t feel super overwhelmingly depressed or anxious, but also my partner tells me that I am having night terrors, and I haven’t really had those since I was a kid. So I’m like, fuck. I guess I am burying these things and that can’t be healthy.
But at least in my notebook I can build a city where the skyline is malleable, and maybe escape to it.