Chad Frame
Chad Frame’s work appears in Rattle, Pedestal, Mom Egg Review, Philadelphia Stories, Barrelhouse, Rust+Moth, and other journals and anthologies, as well as on iTunes from the Library of Congress. He is the Director of the Montgomery County Poet Laureate Program and Poet Laureate Emeritus of Montgomery County. He is also the Poetry Editor of Ovunque Siamo: New Italian-American Writing, a founding member of the No River Twice poetry improv performance troupe, and founder of the Caesura Poetry Festival and Retreat.
We met Chad a number of years back through various Bucks County poetry workshops and readings. We were immediately taken by the manner in which his work incorporates voice and a strong use of imagery. His contributions to poetry and poets on the county, state, and national levels speak for themselves. Chad’s poem, “Harmonica Man,” appears in Issue 3.1 of River Heron Review.
RHR: What is the best piece of writing advice you have ever been given?
Chad Frame: "Be more vulnerable." For a long time, I was too distant from my poetry. I treated poems as puzzles to put together, and I was engaging with the page and the reader intellectually, but not emotionally. A poem must necessarily do both.
It wasn't until I started writing from personal experience and really opening up that my work really resonated with an audience. It may seem like an overly simplistic mantra, but every time I follow it, I find success.
RHR: Tell us about your writing process.
Chad Frame: My process can vary wildly, but usually I have an idea or line I've been mulling over for a while that eventually troubles me enough that I sit down to write a poem. When I do, the poem generally happens in one sitting. I've been told this is an enviable quality by many poets, but honestly, it's always been how it happens for me. The tradeoff of this, however, is that I can't really schedule writing time--it tends to happen of its own accord. This makes it difficult when dealing with deadlines or focusing on specific projects, but I compensate by having several plates spinning at a time, so I can switch as inspiration strikes. I also do a lot of research for any given poem. I'm sure I'm not alone in having dozens of browser tabs open on my computer or phone at any given time, but it's become integral to the process. Of course, this is in addition to countless physical books (usually several at once), graphic novels (of which I'm a huge fan), and audiobooks (storytime while driving!) simultaneously, any of which could--and often do--spark ideas.
RHR: Does an idea for a poem haunt you or do you hunt for an idea? Usually the former, though I'm no stranger to the hunt.
Chad Frame: I'm fond of prompts, and love a challenge to write outside my comfort zone. I also write a lot of found poetry whenever I hit a wall with my more conventional work. Writing a cento, for example, is an easy way to still engage creatively even while otherwise afflicted with writer's block. I keep a lot of lists of quotes and found lines just in case I ever decide to Frankenstein them into a poem some day (with attribution, of course). Essentially, I won't turn down an idea from any source. I'm happy when they haunt me, but also happy to seek them out when they're less forthcoming.
RHR: How do you arrive at a title for a poem?
Chad Frame: I usually have the title in mind before I write a poem, strangely enough, and it tends to shape what I write. I'm not always sure where they come from. I'll get it in my head that I'm going to write a poem called, for example, "Two-Step Charlie" (which is the title poem from my forthcoming chapbook about my father's death), because I remembered a story my father told about his platoon-mates in Vietnam telling him after he woke up that a huge snake slithered over him in his sleeping bag. I researched all the indigenous snakes, and then read up on the fascinating lore surrounding the many-banded krait, which the American servicemen called "Two-Step Charlie," out of the mistaken belief that anyone bitten could only walk two steps before dropping dead from its venom. The phrase lent itself to a metaphor about his second bout with cancer being the one that ultimately claimed his life, and the poem sort of came about organically from there. Usually, I'll hear a word or phrase and decide it should inspire a poem, and then jot that title down and let it torture me until I feel I have no choice but to write the whole poem in one sitting.
RHR: Do you believe a poem can be overly crafted?
Chad Frame: In a word, no. But I do believe a poem can look overly crafted.
Craft, when properly applied, should look effortless. It's the equivalent of spending an inordinate amount of time styling one's hair to give the illusion of perfectly disheveled bedhead. I like to think of myself as a "sneaky Neoformalist." With few exceptions, my poems have strict craft rules I set for myself like syllabics (almost always, I write in ten syllable lines, regardless of stresses). I'm fond of literary devices and sonic cohesion, but I try to work these aspects in subtly. Just because I've studied an obnoxious amount of the Classics and happen to know what a synchysis, chiasmus, or zeugma is doesn't mean I'm going to make it obvious when I use any of them in a poem. I work very hard to sneak in as many elements of craft as I can while maintaining accessibility and the general cadence of speech in my poetry. The end result--I hope--is a poem accessible and aesthetically pleasing upon a cursory reading, but which rewards the close and studied reading with significantly more depth.
RHR: How do you determine what makes a poem successful?
Chad Frame: Well, publication is probably the most obvious measure, but I don't think it's the most accurate. As an editor myself, I know publications can reject work for any number of reasons, some of which can be as arbitrary as an unintended oversight in submission guidelines, or because they already have a poem about a similar topic accepted for a given issue. It may not be one editor's cup of tea, but may otherwise resonate a lot with an audience.
Ultimately, to me, what makes a poem successful is accessibility. I don't like writing poems just for other poets to read. I want to write poems that cause people to say things like, "I don't really read poetry, but I liked this." Or to say, "I went through something similar." I want poetry to resonate, to touch on both the personal and the profound, to demonstrate both narrative cohesion and crafted, lyric beauty. I never listen to feedback and think, "Well, you're just not the target audience." Frankly, my target is everyone.
With my most recent manuscript, I wanted to chronicle my father's death, ranging from childhood memories establishing our (at times strained) relationship, to terminal diagnosis, to hospice, to eventual death, and the aftermath. I think these poems are successful in that they served as therapy for me while all this was going on, they serve as a memorial for my father, they're pleasing enough (I hope!) as poems to anyone reading them, and they remain to offer guidance and support to anyone going through a similar loss. Successful poetry, I believe, attempts much and achieves at least a portion of that ambition. That risk is inextricably part of the process.
RHR: How do you know when a poem has reached an end?
Chad Frame: My writing tends to have a narrative to it more often than not, so I'll usually end a poem when the story I'm trying to impart comes to its end. When I'm writing more abstractly, I suppose I feel drawn to end on an impactful line. This may seem obvious, but it isn't always easy to recognize or determine. I try to bear in mind that it's usually the last line (or at least last few lines) that the reader remembers, and I try to make them count.
RHR: Should writers keep or discard their old notebooks over the years?
Chad Frame: I'd be mortified if anyone advocated for throwing away their notebooks! Why do that? Inspiration can come from anywhere, and even if I do tend to cringe at some of my older work, I can't say I won't revisit it from time to time to edit, rework, or even shamelessly lift one or two of my own lines for use in something current. Even if we don't treat everything as grist for the mill (and don't get me wrong, we absolutely should), that writing, those scribbled notes, and even the doodles in the margin should be kept as a chronicle of the time they were written. I may admittedly take this too far in saving just about everything, but I rarely have organized notebooks. Despite all the nice journals I've been given as gifts over the years, I still tend to do most of my writing on any scrap of paper that comes to hand. This is why I get paranoid if anyone ever decides to "help" me clean up. I even catch myself frantically going through piles and even the trash to make sure no "important" scrap of paper was discarded.
RHR: Whose name do you invoke at your shrine to poetry?
Chad Frame: Without question, the Roman poet Catullus has resonated with me more than any poet from any time. I studied and translated him extensively in high school and college, and still do to this day, and that his work remains relevant and accessible over two thousand years later is nothing short of miraculous. Catullus may not have started the Neoteric movement in his day, but he was certainly one of its most prominent practitioners. No poet since has been as good, in my opinion, at shifting from comedy to tragedy, wooing to invective, satire to earnestness. From the timeless and heart-rending beauty of his elegy-as-eulogy for his brother in Carmina 101 to the perfectly composed elegiac couplet of Carmina 85: Ōdī et amō. Quārē id faciam fortasse requīris. / Nesciō, sed fierī sentiō et excrucior. What else is there to say? I hate and I love. Why do I do this, you may ask. / I don't know, but I feel it happening, and I am consumed.
By itself, it's beautiful and profound. But in the context of his collection, it's the climax--the clutch in breath after the rhythm of in-out, in-out for page after page of alternating between longing, musing, and even throwing shade at other poets or men-about-town. He shows the full range of poetic technique and human emotion throughout his book, but also specifically in the microcosm of this one poem. It's brilliant.
Read him--in any language. You won't be disappointed.
RHR: Notebook paper or computer? Pen or pencil?
Chad Frame: Any and all! I write on the computer and my phone, I email and text ideas to myself, and I've even written poems on my smartwatch or gaming console, when we're talking digital. When it comes to analog, I write on anything I can. In margins, on scraps of paper, on receipts, and I even have one of those waterproof shower notepads. As I mentioned before, people like to give me nice journals for all gift-giving occasions. Truth be told, though, I rarely use them. I have some strange anxiety about writing in them, and usually default to a cheap college-ruled notebook or the aforementioned scraps when writing. I'm equally happy with a pen or pencil, but I'm particular about the type I use of each. I love the Bic .5mm mechanical pencils (the ones with the different colored clips) and Uni-Ball Signo black gel pens, and buy both in absurd quantities, then proceed to bafflingly lose them at almost the same rate.
Read Chad Frame’s poem, “Wisdom”:
Wisdom
The doctors for his palliative care
review options in a small room reserved
for this at the end of the hall, but I
stare past them at the painting on the wall
of a flaking farmhouse, a drab grass field,
an overturned white rowboat, basically
Wyeth's Christina's World if Christina
were an overturned white rowboat. Okay,
I hear someone say, and realize it's me.
We return to tell my father, wired
to the bed, gaunt as picked chicken breast, arm
raised, rattling chains from a hoist above him
like some Dickensian ghost. A beep sounds,
insistent, of something being released
in his bloodstream. He flips it off, finger
shaking like a baby bird, and grumbles
Blow it out your ass, voice heavy with phlegm
and pain. We're going to move you, I say.
I hold his hand as nurses wheel the bed
through the halls to his final apartment,
and he tells me a story—or maybe
it's the morphine telling me a story.
Either way, an old plumber he met once
gave him three pieces of advice. Shit stinks—
and I smile at this, long ago immune
to the mingled stench of bile and bowels
from colon cancer—Water flows downhill.
He pauses, drawn face twisting in a wince.
And the third thing? I prompt, when it passes.
Don't bite your fingernails, he says, eyes closed.
My other hand quickly drops from my mouth
to my side, fingertips still sore and wet.
Wise man, I say, giving his hand a squeeze.