Faculty member Maurice Manning interviewed by Amanda Newell (poetry ’17)
An excerpt from an interview with faculty member Maurice Manning published by Plume:
I had the pleasure of speaking to Maurice Manning about his forthcoming collection, Railsplitter: Reflections on the Art of Poetry Composed in the Posthumous Voice of Honest Abe Lincoln, former Pres., U.S. (Copper Canyon, October 2019).
AN: I am interested, first of all, in the title of Railsplitter, subtitled, “Reflections on the Art of Poetry Composed in the Posthumous Voice of Honest Abe Lincoln, former Pres., U.S.” Early in his campaign for presidency, Lincoln was nicknamed “The Railsplitter,” which was, of course, a nod to the kind of physical labor he was known for in his youth and a way of appealing to the common folk by reminding them of his own connection to the land.
To my mind, Railsplitter embodies both the physical and the abstract. Can you speak a little about this, and how you view the title as a way of framing our experience of the poems?
MM: You’re opening question is a great one. Here’s my effort at a response.
In responding to queries from my editors and copy editors at Copper Canyon, the matter of the title came up. Should this book be called Rail Splitter or Rail-splitter, versions of the word that various style manuals prefer. In the end—as all along in my work on this book—I decided to keep the single word formation, Railsplitter. This is indeed a version of the word that appeared in some of Lincoln’s campaign material.
But I also like that the object (rail) is fused to the action (splitter). It suggests a kind of double-meaning or doubled effect, and poetry in general makes use of familiar tools that have a doubling or multiplying effect (such as imagery, simile, and metaphor).
To my thinking, “railsplitter” is also an unintentionally ironic term to apply to Lincoln, who as we know put preserving the Union ahead of all else. In other words, the action of splitting rails out of a log is divisive, even though Lincoln’s political actions were focused on maintaining the Union. So, perhaps the title is an effort to introduce dramatic irony to the reader from the start. Over and over in my reading of Lincoln, his life, and his moment in American history, I stumbled on one ironic fact after another.
Many poems in the book, I think, highlight some of this irony. The great and humbling surprise to me was to realize I did not have to create any of this irony. It’s already there, a feature of our national history. And I imagine that the ironies of our national history were everywhere evident to the real Lincoln.
One of his personal challenges must have been to learn how to live through the ironies that have shaped our country. I do hope the title brings together the physical and the abstract. That seems to be what irony does—it presents us with a reality that cannot be separated from its abstract shadow.
[… continue reading at Plume.]
