Once in awhile one of my poems (literallyone--"Deer Hit," from my second book) gets taught in a high schoolsomewhere (I heard from a student in Australia this summer, even), and oftenthose students are asked to dig up some biographical details and maybe someinsight into the poem's creation, intended meaning, etc. So, to make theirlives easier, here goes:

I grew up in Athens, Ohio, a college town in Appalachiansoutheast Ohio, in the wild and woolly '60s and '70s (yes, I'm old). My fatherwas a Yale-trained artist who taught painting and drawing at Ohio Universityfor thirty years. I attended Athens High School, and completed my BA at OhioUniversity, where I majored in drinking beer, playing in bar bands, andcreative writing.

After college I worked at a variety of shitty jobs, toparaphrase Phil Levine: construction, landscaping, retail (including a brief stintat a porn shop, from which I was fired), and so on. I started writing poemswith some seriousness during this time. Then in 1989 I won a grant from theOhio Arts Council, which changed everything.

In 1991 I was accepted, by luck, mostly, into the Universityof Virginia's MFA creative writing program. Not long after graduation I won awriting fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, which wasfollowed by a year as the Halls Fellow in Poetry at the University ofWisconsin-Madison. After that I moved around a lot: back to P'town, then toFlorida, then Atlanta, and back to P'town again. I published my first two booksof poems (Vanitas Motel and The Pleasure Principle) during this period, bothfrom Oberlin College Press.

In 2003 I moved to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, of all places,where I still live with my wife, the fiction writer Allyson Goldin Loomis (alsoa former UW-Madison writing fellow), and where we are both associate professorsof creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. From 2003 to2010 I wrote and published three detective novels set in Provincetown (HighSeason, Mating Season and Fire Season), originally out from St.Martin's/Minotaur but soon to be re-released on Kindle Direct. In 2016, Ipublished a third book of poems, also with Oberlin College press, called TheMansion of Happiness.

So that's the detailed bio.

Regarding "Deer Hit," here are a few things youmight say to your teacher:

1.It's written in second person, which is kind of weird.Who is the you? Is it the reader? Is it some specific person the poet isaddressing? Is it a younger version of the poet himself?

2.It's a narrative poem, which is a fancy way of sayingthat it tells a story. Not all poems do this.

3.It also has a lot of imagery (it mentions or describesphysical things one can see, touch, hear, smell or taste), and a couple ofpretty good metaphors/similes.

4.It's written in present tense, but it's set in the past(a "Fairlane wagon" is a car from the 1960s). So it purports to bewritten in/from memory.

5.The poem's action begins and ends in moments ofviolence: first the son hits the deer with the car, then the father hits thedeer in the head with a cement block, presumably killing it (this happensoffstage, however). The final three lines are a bit of meditation--the poem'sspeaker trying to sort out what it all means.

6.The poem isn't just about youthful mistakes, or theevils of drunk driving (duh), or cruelty to animals, or a young person'sidealistic desire to fix things he's broken. The phrase "all yourlife" in the last line is key. It may be possible to exist for a humanlifetime without hurting people and breaking stuff if you're a Buddhist monk orin a coma, but most people don't, even if that's something they care about,which for most people it isn't, at least not always.

7.A reminder: many poems that have the feel of confession(relating a personal thing that happened to the poet) are, in fact, drawn frompersonal things that happened to the poet. But not all of them are.

8.If something in "Deer Hit" struck you asfunny, that's on purpose and it's okay to say so.

I hope that's helpful. The poem can be found here, ifyou're interested:

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