Michael J. Henry
Audio By Carbonatix
Denver poet and Lighthouse Writers Workshop co-founder Michael J. Henry got his first gun at the age of five. It was a gift from his grandfather, and it was no comic-book-back-cover Daisy pellet gun. This was a full-on .22 caliber rifle. Henry recalls that he didn’t shoot it until he was 12. He went hunting once with his grandfather, who shot at and missed a woodchuck, and that was it. Eventually, Henry’s grandfather took the gun back without a word and put it on his own gun rack behind his recliner, where it stayed.
That story suggests the underlying foundation of Henry’s new collection of poetry, simply titled Gun Poems. In these verses, the titular Gun is a character, fully personified, and serves as Henry’s proxy in commenting on the socio-political context in America that gives Gun both life and pedestal-posed prominence.
Henry says the idea for the collection’s central character really started when he and his wife, Andrea Dupree, first moved to Denver. “That was right before Columbine,” Henry recalls. “And I remember being saddened and fascinated and sort of perplexed by mass shootings and gun violence in general. That never really left me, and by 2016, I was worrying about the direction the country was taking and the continuing issue of mass shootings becoming way too commonplace, and I was writing about it. But a lot of those poems were just sort of flat, sort of morose and self-involved. They didn’t have a lot of juice to them.”
Henry admits he didn’t have an idea for how to write about the burgeoning Trump era and all its “broken machismo” until he remembered how much he admired Ted Hughes’s “Crow,” in which Hughes employed the eponymous mythological figure to explore life, death and the absurdities of existence in the aftermath of his wife Sylvia Plath’s suicide. “I loved that trickster figure,” remarks Henry. “They can sort of do anything. And I couldn’t write about gun violence and be so on-the-nose about it. So the idea of Gun being that trickster figure, and could inhabit these sorts of ideas — that appealed to me.”
But make no mistake, Gun Poems is a work firmly focused on our current American era of deeply flawed masculinity. “That’s what Trumpism is all about, right?” asks Henry. “It’s all, ‘I’ll take what I want, thank you very much. And fuck you.‘”
That turned out to be the conceptual key that opened the lock that became Gun Poems. “The poems just started spilling out,” Henry says, “and the revisions of those older, sad, morose poems that needed a spark, that was really fascinating. If Gun is a mass murderer, he’s also the object that’s used to murder. And what if he were that insecure, shy, thoughtful, sensitive boy?”
Once Henry was well into the project, he realized the core of what he was working toward. “I wanted to break down that dichotomy between the old statement that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, and the reply that, well, sure, people with guns kill people. I wanted to collapse that dialectic, and just get rid of it.”
Gun Poems is dedicated to the memory of former Denver poet laureate Chris Ransick, who passed away in 2019. “This was right around the time that he had his book Mummer Prisoner Scavenger Thief, which was also kind of a dark book,” Henry says. “We swapped manuscripts and gave each other feedback. It was invaluable. But also, he was just a mentor and a good friend. I loved the guy.”
Another poet, Seth Brady Tucker, will be appearing alongside Henry for a reading and launch party for Gun Poems at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, April 3, at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Tucker’s recent collection The Cruelty Virtues (also a Best of Denver winner for this year) is taking on similar subjects concerning modern masculinity. “It’s so weird, Seth and I have been writing about parallel stuff since our early books,” Henry laughs. “It’s not intentional — it’s just happened that way. His new book comes at it from a different perspective, but our collections are totally in conversation with each other. It’ll be great to be able to read with him and talk about where those connections are, and why.”
In the last poem in the collection, “Gun Remakes America,” the reader finds Gun tired. “All his love and patience/worn to dust, his sweet memories/of childhood, frayed, faded postcards.” Still, by the final lines of the collection, Gun continues to roll over America, “tearing and rending.” And then the conclusive image: “Night falls. The people lie down/in the tracks of the dozer/they sleep under suddenly new stars.”
But what Henry hopes readers of Gun Poems take away from the experience is different. “What I would love to see happen is a new awareness of how we got here, and where we are,” he says. “That last poem is hopeful in the sense that there’s possibility again, after all the destruction. We asked for this, and now our world is crushed. We sleep under the stars, but we’ll wake up in the morning. And then the question becomes: Okay, now what? We have rebuilding to do.”
Michael J. Henry will read from his new collection Gun Poems alongside Seth Brady Tucker and The Cruelty Virtues at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, April 3, at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, 3844 York Street. Admission is free for Lighthouse members and $5 for non-members. For tickets and more information, see the Lighthouse event website.
