Meet Bernard Henrie AKA Mojave - SplashScribe Soft Words Interviews The Poet

Splashers, here is your super-special New Year treat - An interview with the reclusive Bernard Henrie a.k.a. Mojave, our Splash Poet par excellence. A tiny peek into the person behind the poet reveals that the poet is the person. Mo has a sense of humor and poetry that is a pretty rare combination, something that runs through this interview and holds it together more than my questions do. Alright, I wont hold you back anymore...

SW: What brought you to SplashHall?
Mo: I came to Splash while floating on a mill stream; that is, relaxing. reading the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, a favorite of Heaney:

O commemorate me where there is water,
Canal water, preferably, so Stilly
Greeny at the heart of summer. Brother
Commemorate me thus beautifully
Where by a lock niagarously roars
The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence
Of mid-July.

It must have been a sign.


SW. What keeps you here, besides being Ax-happy?
Mo: We are all restless, irritable and filled with commitment phobia; those are our good points, of course; but I stay because of my bad characteristics: the desire for family.

SW. Your favorite Splashers?
Mo: I play no favorites --- learned that by having three god children in my life for 20 years now; no favorites, treat everybody the same, as Joseph Wambaugh says in one of his police novels. I favor the variety, the mix of different points of view; some of us like brevity, others never met a modifier we didn’t like. I like that some of my fellow writing students are from countries other than my own, younger, older; varied cultural backgrounds, urban and more rural. several people are quite short --- others quite tall --- just teasing.

SW. When did you start writing?
Mo: I started as a journalist in high school, never creative writing as we called it at that time; I was a copy boy on my local daily and worked up to reporter status --- I wanted to be a political reporter.

I edited my college paper. what I found was that I loved asking the “why” questions more than the how, where, when and who. I met a pulitzer winner who wrote feature stories, his work read like a novel; I realized how powerful that format could be, how revealing of human drama.

Journalism probably gave me my passion for the more factual, the metaphor, the poem that makes sense; literal sense, figurative sense, narrative sense; though I am not blaming my narrowness on an otherwise noble profession…

SW. I know you are absorbed in free verse poetry… have you ever experimented with other styles of poetry? Any special reasons?
Mo: not too much, but i think within "free verse" there is great variety -- Bukowski to Eliot, Berryman to an Irish writer like Patrick Kavanagh. Dylan Thomas to Sharon Olds. these writers have been able to stockpile such a treasure trove of images, metaphors that code my life:

like a patient etherized upon a table....fog on cat feet. the night coming in like little boats.

SW. Have your Ax-periences changed your way of writing?
Mo: sure. what doesn’t change us? provided we are conscious, listening, looking with our eyes and our heart, our experiences make us a new person every few months; someone in a new age workshop said, “insight comes in a flash, it’s the working out of implications that takes all the time;” I think we examine the implications here at Splash; love, marriage, divorce, isolation, struggle, the day job, identity. the implications; travel outside my country, taking financial responsibility for a child not your biological own, supporting the politician of your choice, and if you are lucky, work that you enjoy; spiritual development, but that for me means the arts – music, all that stuff.

SW. Favorite authors/poets (outside Splash)?
Mo: plenty, but I think of particular poems rather than the body of a poet’s work; early Wallace stevens, so much better than what came later; James Wright here:

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.


All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,

Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

--- James Wright

most of Eliot:

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps 5
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;

--- excerpt from Preludes

lots of Philip Larkin:

Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.
In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is -
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.

--- Philip Larkin - Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel

Pound, when he writes like this:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

--- In a Station of the Metro

a lot of Sharon Olds, and Elizabeth Bishop, some Adrienne Rich

Randall Jarrel’s poems, his essays also.

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

--- Randall Jarrel - The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

most of Eric Pankey:

There must be a word that means
To knock repeatedly
On a door to gain entrance
And yet not gain entrance.

Neruda, Heaney and all… all of Dylan Thomas.

SW. What do you think are the strongest influences on your writing (besides the Ax)?
Mo: my father, who never finished high school --- he could see stories, his loving acceptance of the weaknesses and eccentricities of others; Saul Pett, a feature writer with the Associated Press who won a Pulitzer; “Tell readers not only what happened," he would say, "but what it was like to have been there." ... my mom, who loved movies and took me each week – her image riding horses full gallop across the unfenced Kansas prairie, unafraid her pony would step in a gopher hole and break her neck with a terrible fall. she was a poem when she rode, free and anonymous. all the great film makers from france and italy, England and India in the 60’s and later.

SW: What are your other interests, hobbies and passions?
Mo: I’m a history buff and I like airplanes; sports, though I am now mostly a watcher --- only wish I could still play without embarrassing myself.

SW: I’ve never seen you on the forums besides the Ax… why not?
Mo: well, maybe another name? I moderated on one Forum, won an IBPC on a second, and posted on a third for more than a year.

SW: Tell me about your muse…
Mo: my daughter; and Kathleen; music and movies; art for the last few years – Vermeer to Rothko.

SW: Any suggestions you might have for Rg to improve on your Splash-ing experience?
Mo: Rg has created a wonderful world, he needs no advice from an amateur.

SW: Any words of wisdom for us?
Mo: write it down, write it down everyday and never stop writing and listening to others; if people see that you care and that you are trying to understand, they will tell you more than you ever dreamed; love your characters more than yourself; check ego at the door, finish your vegetables.

SW: Thank you for that insight, Mo. I'm sure all you Splashers enjoyed it too.