Edward Hirsch, MY CHILDHOOD IN PIECES: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy
[0:00]Hi, this is Zibi Owens, and you're listening to Totally Book to Zibi.
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[0:45]Edward Hirsch is the author of My Childhood in Pieces, A Stand Up Comedy, A Skokey Elegie.
[0:50]Edward Hirsch is a MacArthur fellow and has published nine previous books of poetry, including
[0:55]The Living Fire, New and Selected Poems, and Gabriel Oppoem, a book-length Elegie for his
[1:00]cent.
[1:01]He has also published seven books of prose, among them how to read a poem, and fall in love
[1:05]with poetry, a national bestseller, and 100 poems to break your heart.
[1:10]He has received numerous prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, a long
[1:15]time teacher at Wayne State University, and in the creative writing program at the University
[1:19]of Houston.
[1:20]Hirsch is now president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
[1:25]He lives in Brooklyn.
[1:26]Welcome, Edward.
[1:27]Congratulations on My Childhood in Pieces, A Stand Up Comedy.
[1:31]Congrats.
[1:32]Thank you.
[1:33]Feel to be ready.
[1:34]Oh.
[1:35]Okay.
[1:36]Talk to me first about the unique way that you told this story in little bits and how
[1:41]what the whole story ended up being about.
[1:44]I started out just by writing down things that my parents said to me, sort of as, they were
[1:49]just things they said, singers really that they gave me, but I realized that they were
[1:54]structured like jokes.
[1:56]And the very first one that I wrote was I called a conversation with my mother.
[2:00]My mother was stirring soup at the stove, and I said, you know, you really shouldn't make
[2:05]fun of me or my mother.
[2:07]And she said, don't be so short, kid.
[2:10]They're so harsh and funny.
[2:14]And I started just writing them down because it's also, I'm not sure why, but there,
[2:19]I guess maybe because they're gone now.
[2:21]And this kind of style is gone.
[2:24]And I discovered that I could structure my own statements and stories and anecdotes in the
[2:31]same way, but not just quoting them.
[2:34]And this enabled me to start opening up parts of my childhood that I had never written
[2:40]about.
[2:41]And I discovered that these microbursts with a title, these mini gross pieces had a lot
[2:48]of punch.
[2:50]And they also gave me a lot of flexibility in telling a story.
[2:53]And over time, I realized that not all of them needed to be funny.
[2:57]They all needed to have a punch.
[2:59]So through these short snippets and scenes, you end up giving us a depiction of a
[3:06]life that at the end, you say, your sister views as traumatic.
[3:12]And it never occurred you to think of it that way to tell me more about that.
[3:16]I guess this is temperamental.
[3:18]I mean, I have two sisters, but one of them, my sister, Arlene, and I went through
[3:23]everything together in our early childhood, the acknowledgement that you're talking about
[3:28]is that she went through psychoanalysis.
[3:30]So she remembers everything, but she doesn't think of it as funny.
[3:35]And so when I started writing this book, we were talking all the time, and she often
[3:42]say, well, this just isn't funny.
[3:44]And I go, well, I can make it funny.
[3:46]And that was sort of the job thing that went on, but she's immensely helpful because
[3:49]she remembers it, she remembers everything.
[3:52]So this is a sort of, this is temperamental, but it's also a strategy of different ways
[3:58]of coping.
[3:59]I do say she thought it was funny, too.
[4:02]I did say that her way was more expensive, required psychoanalysis.
[4:08]So your book basically takes us through your parents as sort of teenagers to you and
[4:15]you become close to their same age as when we start the book and you're going off to
[4:20]college and saying goodbye to the childhood era, even though we kind of know childhood
[4:25]extends beyond that now.
[4:27]But give us a quick preview.
[4:29]What happened after the book ended from like, what's happened since the book ended to
[4:34]now in your life?
[4:37]Well, the book ends.
[4:39]I just arbitrarily just ended it when I go off to college, because that seemed like one
[4:45]end to childhood.
[4:46]From the last piece is called childhood was going, and I was, I go off to Grinnell College.
[4:52]And then I went to Grinnell College and at Grinnell College, where I play football, I also
[4:58]became serious about writing poetry.
[5:01]There are sort of hints, I think of them as sort of bread crumbs, sort of leading you
[5:06]the way, sort of hints towards my future vocation, because I started writing poetry in high
[5:11]school, but I certainly didn't think of myself as a poet.
[5:15]But in college, I got serious about studying poetry and becoming a poet.
[5:20]So I did that.
[5:22]And then I started winning fellowships and I went to graduate school and got a PhD.
[5:28]I started teaching at Wayne State University.
[5:30]I published my first book and I was kind of on my way.
[5:34]And I guess the only other thing I'd add to this was at some point I also began writing
[5:39]about poetry and found my, another part of my vocation, which was part of it was writing
[5:46]poetry, part of it was teaching poetry, and then part of it was advocating for poetry.
[5:51]Do you view this book in a way as poetry in these short segments?
[5:56]I'd like to sell some copies.
[6:02]So I give a say, no, I'd say my editor said it's poetry adjacent and I'd say it's poetry
[6:12]adjacent.
[6:13]It's really not poetry, but it is, there are things that poems have in common with
[6:18]stand up jokes and that's that they have a turn and that that's the thing that the jokes
[6:24]have and that's the thing that poems often have, what an Italian poet's in, in the
[6:29]protarchic font they call the Volta or Turn.
[6:32]And so there are ways that jokes are like poems and in terms of the compression of language,
[6:38]this is like poetry, but it's really, it's really prose and it's more flexible than
[6:47]poetry I think in sense as it gave me access to a whole kind of vernacular experience
[6:53]that I just hadn't been able to capture in poetry and I think that's what was so exciting
[6:58]about the method for me, not being poetry, is it enable me to tell things and quote people
[7:04]and tell stories that I just hadn't been able to tell in poetry itself.
[7:09]And when you thought about accessing all the memories and all the scenes and all the
[7:15]stanzas or whatever, what piece of it kept driving you forward and saying like yes,
[7:21]I have to tell the story, was it your relationship with your father, was it your stepfather,
[7:28]was it your blended family, was it your siblings, was it all of it together, like your
[7:35]mother, you know, what pieces of it were you like yes, yes, yes, this has to be done on paper.
[7:41]You're doing really well right there.
[7:42]Okay, great.
[7:43]Great.
[7:44]You're doing really well, I'd say part of it was capturing my mother and her quirks, part
[7:50]of it was capturing my father, my biological father and his love for Jewish gangsters and
[7:57]his wild sayings, I especially like the one, what's a co-signer, yes, fuck with a pen.
[8:05]Yes, I schmuck with a pen, yes, that was harsh, a lot of his harsh sayings, also my
[8:11]grandparents, and capturing the world that they came from and I sort of that was where
[8:18]I started, and then my stepfather who adopted me.
[8:23]And then I was worried that it would sort of fall off after that, but I found that this
[8:28]also became a way as they became a little less important, I'd say, as I became more of
[8:34]a person myself, this method also helped me to tell my own story, basically how someone
[8:41]someone becomes a poet and how the traumas and stories of childhood wound you into poetry
[8:50]and how the difficult things that happened to me mixed with a sort of somewhat ordinary
[8:57]suburban high school experience of meeting girls and playing football and playing sports.
[9:04]And that mixed with this underlying, I guess grief was the shaping of me.
[9:10]So I saw it as the making of a person.
[9:13]I loved this moment when you were playing, I thought it was baseball, but I could be
[9:18]wrong with your, with Neil, and all of a sudden you call him dad and you're like, it took
[9:23]both of us by surprise, you're like, but then on, I called him dad, like when my mom wasn't
[9:28]around.
[9:29]Yes, my stepfather, you know, we learned he was our father because my mother went and
[9:35]got married and then she came back, she said, you should not call him uncle Kurt anymore
[9:39]as she called him dad, Kurt, that's how we knew.
[9:42]Oh, not Neil, sorry.
[9:43]What did I say?
[9:44]Neil and it's Kurt.
[9:45]I'm sorry.
[9:46]I always get names wrong.
[9:47]I'm so sorry.
[9:48]It's okay.
[9:49]Yeah, it was Kurt.
[9:50]I had four letters in my head.
[9:51]I got the wrong four letters.
[9:52]Okay.
[9:53]Keep going.
[9:54]It sticks with you because he said when he introduced himself, he said, my name is Kurt,
[9:56]that's Kurt with a cage.
[9:59]Yes, he.
[10:00]We called him Uncle Kurt.
[10:01]We felt this loyal to our father.
[10:03]And then he decided I was too much of a mama's boy
[10:05]and he should get me interested in sports.
[10:07]And what you're talking about
[10:08]is how he took me to the batting cages.
[10:11]And it was pitching and I slammed one, felt really good.
[10:15]And he said, good hit.
[10:17]And I turned around and said, thanks dad.
[10:19]And then we both look shocked.
[10:22]Then he said, I'm gonna pick up the speed on the next one.
[10:26]And so slowly we started calling him first daddy Kurt.
[10:29]And then we started just calling him dad.
[10:31]And at first my biological father, we called him dad.
[10:35]Then we called him daddy Ruby.
[10:36]And then eventually we just called him Ruby.
[10:39]So it was kind of switch.
[10:40]If you were to point out the most painful
[10:43]and the funniest moments in the book,
[10:47]what would you say?
[10:47]Where is the moment where you felt most exposed?
[10:51]I guess the rupture of our childhood
[10:54]was the court case where my father sued my mother
[10:59]over our last name.
[11:01]And I guess that was a fault line
[11:04]because of what happened.
[11:07]And certainly the most painful moment
[11:10]in our childhood was when our father lost the case
[11:14]or we thought he lost the case.
[11:17]And he screamed at us that we had betrayed him
[11:19]and we weren't his children anymore.
[11:20]That was certainly the most haunting break in my childhood.
[11:26]And I've never really been able to tell that story.
[11:29]And this method somehow enabled me
[11:32]to back into telling the story.
[11:35]And I think that would be the crux
[11:37]of what's not my sister and just like when it also is too
[11:39]because it was just a tough moment.
[11:42]I'm sorry that that happened to you all.
[11:44]It happened.
[11:45]And I'm glad to be able to tell this.
[11:47]I'm glad to be able to tell the story.
[11:49]It's not very funny, but the book is not meant
[11:52]to be entirely funny.
[11:54]The method became very flexible, I guess.
[11:58]And I felt excited by the way that what are sometimes jokes
[12:02]then becomes just turns
[12:03]and then enabled me to tell stories that weren't funny
[12:07]but seemed consistent with the rest of the book.
[12:10]I love that.
[12:11]Well, I found the format highly innovative.
[12:14]It's crazy when you read so many books and you're like,
[12:17]oh, well, why didn't anybody else do this?
[12:20]I'm really like a short section
[12:23]that each one has a title and the titles are often funny
[12:25]and then you know, a little bit of text
[12:28]and occasionally you got longer.
[12:30]There were like one or two sections.
[12:32]Like why did you decide to make these so much longer?
[12:34]I don't know.
[12:35]They could have been a couple of sections.
[12:36]What was, I don't know.
[12:37]So anyway, I found that quite original.
[12:40]I'm glad you felt that
[12:42]because I was very excited by the method.
[12:45]First I just started writing things down
[12:48]but I found it incredibly flexible
[12:50]and amazed that no one had done it.
[12:52]It just felt like a very, to me,
[12:54]an original way to tell a story.
[12:56]Yep, me too.
[12:58]And I'd always, it's sort of trying to channel
[13:01]how you tell an anecdote or you tell a funny story
[13:03]as you know from your family.
[13:04]We all have a lot of funny anecdotes
[13:07]from our family, family lore, I guess.
[13:09]And I figured out a way to channel those
[13:12]and tell them and I felt very excited by them.
[13:15]I'm excited by the pop and the method.
[13:18]Me too, very cool.
[13:20]And you have fabulous cover, by the way.
[13:22]Were you so excited when you saw it?
[13:23]Oh my God.
[13:25]I think the cover is so great.
[13:27]They had asked my opinion
[13:28]and I suggested cut up family photos
[13:31]and they go, yeah, that's very cliched.
[13:33]All memoirs do that.
[13:34]And then they came up,
[13:35]this is just a kind of art department.
[13:37]They came up with this.
[13:38]It looks like a movie screen from Chicago in the 1950s
[13:42]like a drive and movie.
[13:44]It's so witty.
[13:45]It's so good.
[13:46]Yeah.
[13:47]And a skokie elegie, I should have read that
[13:48]when I was reading them.
[13:51]It's a double subtitle, a stand up comedy
[13:53]and a skokie elegie,
[13:54]because it really tries to be both things.
[13:56]Yeah.
[13:57]It's both, I think the method is stand up,
[13:59]but it's also a portrait of a vanished world.
[14:02]Yes.
[14:03]Wow.
[14:04]Well, thank you so much.
[14:05]And we're just so great to talk to you about having read it
[14:09]and understanding your whole family
[14:11]and your history and everything.
[14:12]So thank you for sharing it with the rest of us.
[14:15]I really appreciate it.
[14:16]And I'm glad it was helpful for you.
[14:18]Real by your great responsiveness.
[14:20]So much appreciated.
[14:21]My pleasure.
[14:23]OK, take care.
[14:24]Bye.
[14:24]Bye.
[14:25]Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi,
[14:28]formerly mom's don't have time to read books.
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[14:38]Thanks so much.
[14:39]Oh, and bye the books.