Victor D. Infante is a poet, editor and journalist living in Worcester, Mass. His piece "Boys' Own Stories" appeared in the January 2012 issue of The Collagist. He is the editor of the online literary journal, Radius: Poetry From the Center to the Edge, and the author of City of Insomnia, a poetry collection from Write Bloody Publishing. His poems and stories have been published in numerous periodicals, including Pearl, Chiron Review, The Nervous Breakdown, Spillway, Word Riot,and Dark Horizons.
Here, Marie Schutt talks with him about swords, stones, and making fiction from poetry.
1. What inspired you to write “Boys’ Own Stories”? What was on your mind while you were writing this piece?
It’s funny, but it started as a 30/30 — 30 poems in 30 days — exercise for National Poetry Month. I had a rattlebag of themes I wanted to explore — the Arthurian mythos, the entwined concept of the hero as a symbol for a culture when war’s in the wind, issues of masculinity in the modern age and my own struggles with depression. It didn’t take me terribly long to realize that what I was writing was actually one piece, although it took me a while to figure out that it was stronger presented as prose than as poetry. That line gets terribly muddy sometimes, despite what any of us would like to think. (I’m actually of the opinion still that this is more poem than story, but others disagree with me, and I’m not terribly inclined to argue the point.)
Anyway, large swaths of it are autobiographical, and I wanted to take the time to look back at my being “downsized” from the job I had been working at in California and being forced to relocate to Massachusetts, and the emotional toll that took, that overwhelming sense of defeat. It was almost a decade until I was in a comfortable enough space to put myself back in that place, artistically speaking, and this was the result.
2. I’m very interested in your use of the sword in the stone to carry so many different meanings in such varied contexts throughout the piece. Could you tell us a little about what this image, this story of the sword in the stone, originally meant to you, and how that changed or grew as you were writing?
First off, I’ve always been fascinated by the King Arthur legends, and indeed, had written a series of poem based on them back in the early ‘90s, and revisiting those themes greatly appealed to me. I asked myself the question: “What makes the sword in the stone different than a rock with a piece of metal in it?” The answer being, of course, because it is, and suddenly, that lead me to the writing process, about what that sharp instrument of poetry has been in the hands of writers throughout time, how the poem can cut you and, yet, make you feel indelibly alive at the same time. That thought was very much on my mind when I began.
It wasn’t actually until I turned my attention to the stone that it all began to click in my head and I found direction. The thing that, for the most part, gets overlooked in the legend. “It’s just a stone” sounds a lot, to my ears anyway, like “it’s just a story.” It’s not important. But it’s the thing that cradles the symbol and, consequently, the emotional truth. Which means it matters, even if it’s easily taken for granted.
From there, I began laying out the other ways in which blades and stones could be used as symbols in writing, and began looking for connections, and ultimately that trail kept leading me back to the martial and masculine themes that I was interested in exploring. To be fair, they probably led me there because I was interested in them, but the point being, those two basic metaphors — which are something else entirely when combined — opened up the door for the narratives to emerge.
3. There is a clear narrative with a developed voice running through this piece, interwoven with a couple of sections addressing a second party, most directly at the end. How did these two voices develop as you were writing?
That was a bit of luck, really. I had two main narratives I wanted to play out: the first, somewhat autobiographical one, and then the less dominant (in terms of the piece) story of one of the 20th century’s most important writers, Jerry Siegel, who created Superman. Siegel’s a bit of a touchstone for me. We’re both from the Midwest (him from Cleveland, me from Pittsburgh, which is the Midwest no matter what geographers say), we both had family that were 20th-century immigrants, and we both lost our fathers to random violence at a young age (a theme I explore more extensively in my first poetry collection, City of Insomnia.) And he created the single most memorable fictional character of the 20th century, our most modern incarnation of King Arthur, which is a thought that hasn’t been lost on me, especially not since reading Brad Meltzer’s wonderful thriller, The Book of Lies.
But there was also a point where I wanted the voices in the poem (it was a poem then, remember, and maybe it still is) to intersect and blend, to re-enforce the idea that this was a story being told and retold down the line of history.
In his recent novel, The Magicians, Lev Grossman has a character observe that “the hero is the one that pays the price,” which is an idea I think I was dimly aware of when I was writing this, even if I couldn’t have articulated as succinctly as Grossman did. But it occurs to me that you also pay a price to be a writer, too. Or, really, probably to do anything, but writing’s what I’m most familiar with. I can only speculate the tithe to become, say, a plumber or an architect. In any case, somewhere along the line in writing Boys’ Own Stories, it became clear to me that I was very interested in the idea of the price of a life in writing, and to me, that seemed clearly to be the fact that to do it correctly, you have to willingly grasp the sword by the blade. It would cut, and it would hurt like hell, and there’s no real way around it. To write is to transform pain into something beautiful, but the only way to accomplish that is to go back through the pain itself. That was the point, to my mind, that tied the disparate threads together, and which linked the voices of writers struggling to find something beautiful and human across what’s been an agonizingly violent history.
4. Do you have any other writing projects in the works? Are there any recent publications or upcoming releases that you’re looking forward to?
I’m at something of an in-between right now. I’ve recently had poems published in Pearl, The Mas Tequila Review and the zombie poetry anthology Aim For the Head, among other places, but my work as an editor has been commanding my attention, lately. I’ve been a bit preoccupied with my ongoing work as editor for the online literary journal Radius: Poetry From the Center to the Edge; helping edit the forthcoming collection News Clips & Ego Trips: The Best of Next… Magazine, which comes out any day now and collects articles and interviews from the Southern California based poetry news magazine which I wrote for in the ‘90s; and serving on the editorial board for The BILiNE Project: The Best Indie Lit New England, all of which has kept me terribly busy. I’m also revising a handful of short stories and poems right now before seeking homes for them, and beginning to think about diving into my second poetry collection. You know. When I have a moment.