1.) Who taught you about manhood?
My father, through his own thoughts and actions, but also through those fathers he introduced me to, like Bugs Bunny, John F. Kennedy, Groucho Marx, Mel Brooks, Jackie Robinson, Luke Skywalker, John Coltrane, Richard Pryor, Frank Sinatra, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Joe Montana, Steve Martin, Bob Dylan. My father also facilitated my meeting poetic fathers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, John Berryman, John Ashbery. Like most fathers of poets who aren’t artists themselves, he didn’t—still doesn’t—understand exactly what I do, but I know he’s proud of me.
Humor teaches you to be both tough and tender. One must have great empathy to be funny. My father has a great sense of humor; my mother did too. Hers was a dry, dead-pan New England sensibility, veering towards the tall tale and vaudeville, very often surreal. My father, growing up in Brooklyn in the ’40s and ’50s, has more of that Italian/Jewish/New York sense of humor, also dead-pan, very dark, caustic, with Borscht Belt undertones.
2.) Has romantic love shaped you as a man?
Absolutely. My relationships have taught me never to take a woman for granted (though I sometimes do), to be honest with her (I always try to be, even when I shouldn’t), to treat her as an equal (metaphysically impossible for me to do otherwise), to not hold her up too high (I always tend to). I’m definitely a romantic.
My mother and father were great models for me. They had problems like any couple, but they also had a great partnership. They were very loving with one another. A man needs someone whom he can rely on, can be weak around, can reveal all his insecurities and doubts to, who will love him no matter what, will give him the space to catch himself. He should gladly do the same in return. When you’re in love, it’s easy.
3.) What two words describe your dad?
Intelligent and organized.
4.) How are you most unlike him?
Less purely analytical, more outwardly passionate, which, I know, is odd to say about an Italian-American father. Most of the men on my dad’s side of the family are quiet, unless sports are involved.
My father’s father, my grandfather, was a supply sergeant in the U.S. Army during World War II, deployed before my father was born, in 1942. He didn’t see his first-born son until the war was over. My father grew up in a working-class household with a large extended family that had lived through the Great Depression. He was driven to get that high-paying white-collar job, to provide for his family all the things he never had. While I certainly wouldn’t turn down a $100,000 job offer, as a poet, that’s just not a salary I can realistically expect to receive in my lifetime, unless the Weinstein brothers want to option some of my poems. I’m grateful that my father gave me the time and space when I was a child to get into the habit of creating: poems, stories, songs, paintings, drawings, movies. It’s the habit of artistic creation that keeps me alive.
5.) From which of your mistakes did you learn the most?
My DUI in 2004. No injuries or damage to personal property, but embarrassing and definitely a wake-up call to slow down.
6.) What word would the women in your life use to describe you, and is it accurate?
Intense. Men and women, once they get to know me, have often relayed that they were intimidated by me at first. Sometimes at second and third, too. I can be quiet, shy really, and I think this, coupled with my natural tendency to observe what’s going on around me rather than run my mouth, causes people to think I’m aloof or unapproachable. I’m not. I’m just taking it all in.
7.) Who is the best dad you know, and how does he earn that distinction?
Besides my own father, I’d have to cite my friends like Mark Horosky, Daniel Nester, Brad Vesneski, Gennaro DeAngelis, Matt Hart, and many, many more. They’re just young dads doing their dad thing the best they can.
Douglas Crase must also be mentioned. Not only has his own writing been a direct influence on mine, but his advice and counsel since we’ve known each other have brought me tremendous joy.
I also appreciate the exploration of fatherhood that Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim engage in on their show Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job! You just have to watch it to understand. Or not.
8.) Have you been more successful in your public or private life?
Private life. I have so many friends and family who support me through good times and bad, highs and lows. I’m proud of the friendships I’ve forged with my close friends. I have no real concept of any kind of “public life” I may or may not have.
9.) When was the last time you cried?
In August 2009, my father suffered a series of seizures brought about by sleep apnea. I flew down to Florida to be with him and did a lot of crying in those first few weeks. I was reliving my mother’s death (1995, breast cancer) and facing the possibility of having to care for my father for the rest of his life. He’s since made a complete recovery, due in no small part to his own fortitude.
10.) What advice would you give teenage boys trying to figure out what it means to be a good man?
Read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Not because they’ll teach you to be like Emerson or like a certain kind of man, but because they’ll teach you, in fact, that you don’t need to take your cue from anyone. Remember when you read them that Emerson was a Yankee through and through, had a wicked sense of humor, is as self-deprecating as he is self-confident. This is an aspect of American Transcendentalism that many people overlook.
I think of this passage from the famous (and oft misunderstood) essay “Self-Reliance”: “There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard of height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever were. A singular equality may be observed between the great men of the first and of the last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than Plutarch’s heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no class. He who is really of their class will not be called by their name, but will be his own man, and, in his turn, the founder of a sect.” We should not feel unworthy or intimidated by the distant past or even our immediate forefathers, for every thing that was available to them is available to us.
For Bonus Points: What is the your most cherished ritual as a guy?
Hanging out with other guy friends, shooting the shit, trying to verbally one up each other. I love having conversations comprising solely in-jokes, Simpsons or Aqua Teen Hunger Force references. Annoying to others? Sure is.
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Michael Schiavo is the author of The Mad Song. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, The Believer, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Yale Review, LIT, jubilat, Forklift, Ohio, Seneca Review, The Awl, and elsewhere. He is the founding editor of The Equalizer, an occasional poetry journal that will launch in 2010. He is also an editor of Tight and contributing editor to CUE. He lives in Vermont and blogs occasionally at The Unruly Servant.
