Standing on top of an old spring house on the outskirts of Lovetsville, Virginia, Steve Scafidi looks down at the shimmering clear water. Hardly a day goes by that him or his friends don’t swim in that lake. He is wearing a shirt his mother made him, and sturdy pants which his father bought in town.
It is summer, and the blue gills in the lake are so hungry that he doesn’t even need to put bait on his fishing hook to land a catch. The blue gills are so small that he doesn’t even need a pole — he just throws a string in, pulls it back out, adds the fish to the bucket, and repeats.
It takes him and his friends only an hour to catch enough fish to fill up the bucket. Carrying the fish, they walk lazily across the Virginian countryside until they hit the Potomac River.
Setting down the bucket, Scafidi takes out his line and expertly slots a blue gill onto the hook.
He attaches the string to a pole and throws it into the water. This time, he is looking for a bigger catch. He is 10 years old.
Steve Scafidi:
Scafidi works as a cabinet maker in rural West Virginia. He takes the train up to Hopkins
twice a week in the fall and once a week in the spring to teach poetry classes. He has two books of collected poems published, the first of which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
“I’ve heard poetry be described as memorable speech, or the spontaneous overflow of
powerful feeling, which is what Wordsworth said,” he said. “But for the most part, I have a sense of natural bewilderment about the very thing I love most — it causes me to write, and it causes me to take great pleasure in teaching here, because I teach not necessarily from what I know, but from what I don’t know.”
One thing Scafidi doesn’t know is what it is like to grow up in a big city — he was born and raised outside the town of Lovetsville, Virginia, where his father worked as a pharmacist, and he categorizes his childhood experiences as a compendium of ritual and play.
“It was just country, and it was pasturelands and meadows and woods for the most part,” he said. “Me and my friends would just play outside, we’d swim in ponds and catch turtles and all that kind of business.
“There was something of the Nineteenth century in it for a while.”
Today, Scafidi stands over six feet tall. He has an accent with just the right amount of a
Southern drawl and has such a rhythm to his speech that it is easy to lose track of time while he is talking. He also boasts a substantial black and grey beard which his wife, Kathleen, once made him trim because he looked like a mountain man.
Early life:
“I had a happy childhood, and all that business,” Scafidi said. “I had a fun time growing up. It was a lot of playing outside, nothing out of the ordinary.
“I had a group of friends and we would go out to the woods, literally, in the morning, and we wouldn’t come out until supper time. Your parents would know where you were, but they wouldn’t be worried. It was a very independent life of a child.”
For Scafidi, childhood was a time spent outdoors, making his own fun.
“There were no video games — I heard of pong once, and I saw it at someone’s house, but he wasn’t my friend — so we were outdoors and our parents liked it that way,” he said. “We used to swim in the summertime — that was the adventure, finding a place to swim in the summer.
“One of my friends had a pond, and it had snapping turtles in it, so we’d get freaked out sometimes. I remember swimming once, and I put my arm out and touched what felt like a rock to me, a really big one that I hadn’t remembered before — but it had a rib and an edge, like a turtle shell. And I remember my arm just kept on going, like this thing was as big as me. I remember leaping the hell out of that water.”
As time went on, the place where Scafidi grew up changed remarkably — property values kept going up, and some of the trees and lakes which he would spend his days in as a child began to disappear.
“I’ve always thought that the landscape of our childhood is the landscape of our imagination,” Scafidi said. “So to see the landscape of my childhood destroyed in some ways has been kind of upsetting.”
Growing up:
As Scafidi left behind his childhood and began to mature, his adventures in the outdoors began to become less and less frequent, until they eventually stopped happening at all. Instead, new fascinations found their way into his mind: primarily sports and girls, but not poetry.
“I didn’t like poetry as a teenager — I didn’t like poetry in school — there was always a lesson I had to learn or some meaning I had to catch, and I wasn’t interested in poetry as a lesson,” he said. “But I did love language and words in an almost dumb way.”
What finally made Scafidi change his mind about poetry was a two week period in which he read the entirety of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass out loud.
“It was so fun for me, to have those words streaming through my blood and saying them aloud,” he said. “I felt like it changed me — it wasn’t a lightning bolt, but it deepened something . . . so I just started writing poems and reading poems like wild.”
Scafidi proceeded to get his undergraduate degree at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. He received a Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry from Arizona State University, which is where he began to teach.
He stayed in Arizona for a few more years, before returning home to Virginia.
Working with your hands:
Scafidi began working at Nick Greer’s Antique Conservation as a teenager, where he emphasized that he was happy to be learning a trade. He returned to the well regarded shop after he finished teaching at ASU.
“[The shop] is in a barn built in the 30’s on a farm,” he said. “Most of us grew up there and have known each other forever. There’s a great familiarity there so it’s very different from academia.”
Scafidi appreciates the contrast between his rural home life and the academic bubble of Hopkins.
“Before I started teaching here the only time I ever wore a suit jacket was to a funeral or a wedding,” he said. “Now I get to wear one twice a week, and that’s kind of nice.”
The cabinet shop is a critically acclaimed restorer and builder of antique cabinets and furniture, and has pieces in the White House, the Italian Embassy and The Natural Gallery of Art. The table which the Arab-Israeli Accords were signed on by then President Jimmy Carter was restored by Scafidi’s boss Nick Greer and his team.
Scafidi notes that there is some mental overlap between designing furniture with his hands and poems with his mind.
“I find that working on the lathe is something that I’ve never been great at, but it’s something that I love doing,” he said. “You have a chunk of wood, spinning at a high rate of speed in front of you, and you come at it with a chisel, and you shape something.
“There is a sense of magic of having this thing in front of you, spinning. It’s the only thing in our shop that really reminds me of writing — it reminds me of an engagement with imagination and with the world before me. Which is like having this wonderful thing inside me, y’know — my imagination. And then you make something with it.”
Scafidi works in a team of 15 people, some of whom he grew up with, and all of whom are his best friends. Greer is a master carver and has been working in the restoration field for over 35 years.
Finding it difficult to miss two days of work a week to teach at Hopkins, Scafidi takes a leave of absence from the shop during the fall. He returns part time during the spring and jumps back to full time over the summer.
Poetry:
Scafidi has a “natural bewilderment” regarding poetry — he describes his writing as an eternal quest to discover just exactly what a poem is — so how does he go about teaching what a poem is to university students?
He uses a technique which he describes as “teaching from the unknown.”
“I don’t think I do know enough, ever, to teach a class on poetry, ever,” he said. “I’m never convinced that I qualify. But I love poetry as a reader and a writer, and they’re all I have.
“I bring my questions to class. Like ‘what is a poem?’ And not in a rhetorical way, but in a hungry way — because I want to make one.”
So just what is a poem to Scafidi?
“Poetry is huge, poetry is large, and there are disagreements over just what it is,” he said. “I think that poetry itself is bigger than any of us and I don’t think that anything I would have to say about poetry — what it should be, what it is — I don’t think I could ever get to the matter of the question.
“It’s bigger — I’ve spent my whole life, and I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying, but I don’t think I’m going to get to the bottom of it.”
For Scafidi, there is an element of randomness and chaos which marks both his poetry and his personal life.
“On Friday, on my way to the train at five in the morning, a car passed another car in a way that he shouldn’t have and hit another car head on. That person was killed,” he said.
“Now I’m in front — how come it wasn’t me? That kind of question we could ask all day about all kinds of situations; why didn’t this happen, why didn’t that happen? There’s a great deal of sheer luck, or if you want to look at it as a kind of grace, to having lived long enough to find a kind of meaningful narrative of your life.”
Scafidi is currently working on a collection of poems which document the life of Abraham Lincoln, one of his all time heroes.
Dealing with cliche:
It’s tempting to consider Scafidi as a relic of a world gone by — a rural poet with a bushy black beard who works with his hands in the day and writes poems at night. He married his high school sweetheart and has had two children with her.
Scafidi, though, refuses to succumb to the cliché of the classic American poet.
“I work as a cabinet maker because I love the people I work with. If my boss [Nick Greer], who is also one of my best friends had instead been a carpet cleaner, that’s what I’d be doing — and that’s somewhat less romantic than being a cabinet maker,” he said. “But that is indeed what I would be.
“I just love these people very much — I like their company. I can’t hardly separate who I am from who they are in the way that I can’t separate my family from who I am — because I am them. I am also these people that I work with.
“You make up a life as you go. Who knows why you’re doing what you’re doing?”
Sometimes. Scafidi finds it difficult to remember how he got to this point in his life.
“It’s like having a paint can with one color, and you pour in a second color, and then you start stirring it to create a third color,” he said. “That transition from two colors to that other color is almost impossible to trace, because you’re stirring it up.
“Maybe if you could film it slow enough, you could see it happening, but our lives move too fast. Now that’s a cliché, but it’s also fact.
“And as you get older, it speeds up, so you lose track.”
******************
A 10 year old Scafidi stands looking out over the Potomac River in Lovetsville, Virginia.
His line has been in the water for no more than 15 minutes before he feels a small tug, and then another, and then a huge wrench which nearly dislocates his shoulder.
He pulls back with all his might, but he doesn’t have the experience to draw this behemoth in — he watches with reluctant acceptance as his line breaks and falls into the water, crisscrossing wildly as it sinks below the surface.
He walks to the bucket full of blue gills and carefully attaches another one to his hook. It will take him a while to catch that fish again, he thinks. But it is early, and he has all the time in the world.
