David J. Bauman (00:00)
My House by Micah James Bauman My house is slowly leaving me. Piece by piece. It departs. Soon I'll have nowhere to live, to sleep. My house is slowly leaving me. The wall left. It desired some time alone. The ceiling left. It reached an all-time low. The floor left. It couldn't handle the pressure anymore. The door left.

in search of greater opportunities. The roof left. It was feeling under the weather. The window left. It yearned to see the world. The stairs, they come and go, can never make up their mind. My house is slowly leaving me. Soon I will leave too. Not yet though. I'll stay here for now. Just me and the closet hanging around.

I'm David J. Bauman and this is In Three Poems and with us we have Micah James Bauman. Now Micah, some of the advice that was given to me about starting a podcast was to start with people I know. So I thought maybe you could tell the listeners how.

how we know each other.

Micah James Bauman (01:25)
What?

David J. Bauman (01:27)
I'm gonna

pass out ⁓

Micah James Bauman (01:31)
⁓ we, we,

We

We wrote a book together.

David J. Bauman (01:41)
Okay, but did we know each other before that? Okay. ⁓

Micah James Bauman (01:43)
We did. We've known each other

29 years.

David J. Bauman (01:49)
I've known you, not not all my life, but all of your life. So Micah is my youngest son and my poetry collaborator. We wrote a chapbook together published by Seven Kitchens Press called Mapping the Valley Hospital Poems. And we'll talk about some of the other things that we're doing and working on.

Micah James Bauman (01:53)
Bye.

David J. Bauman (02:09)
right now but back to that poem that I just read of yours you want to tell me how old were you when you wrote that

Micah James Bauman (02:18)
I was sixteen years old.

David J. Bauman (02:21)
And what were you doing when you wrote that first draft?

Micah James Bauman (02:22)
because ⁓

What was I doing or what was I supposed to be doing? I was 16, so I was in drivers and...

David J. Bauman (02:28)
What were you supposed to be doing when you were

Micah James Bauman (02:39)
and ⁓

David J. Bauman (02:39)
And did

you get in trouble? the teacher actually notice it?

Micah James Bauman (02:42)
Yeah, she thought I was writing notes, know, like some... ⁓

David J. Bauman (02:44)
Hahaha

⁓

And you're doing the word equivalent of doodling.

Micah James Bauman (02:53)
Yeah.

David J. Bauman (02:53)
Yeah. did she like it? Did she say it was any good?

Micah James Bauman (02:57)
She took it from me, yes. ⁓ But later on I think she talked to mom I think and said it was it was really deep.

David J. Bauman (03:00)
You ⁓

Well, I mean, I remember talking to somebody about it and ⁓ I know your thoughts were that it was kind of on the light side, that it was lighthearted. And one of the editors who was selecting it for that was originally published in Word Fountain Literary Magazine, which is

online, the online version of it, summer of 2016 is when that was published.

she was putting things in piles of the poems that were going to go in the collection. And she said she had like a deep pile or like a dark poems. And this was in the pile with the dark poems. And she said, are you kidding me? My house is leaving. I have nowhere to sleep, nowhere to live. I'm here alone. Of course, it's dark. But you didn't feel it like that when you wrote it, did you?

Micah James Bauman (04:02)
was just wordplay while I was writing it and sort of.

a lot of that, those extra meanings came after.

David J. Bauman (04:11)
Gotcha.

David J. Bauman (04:11)
One of the things I wanted to say about this poem,

aside from the fun of the wordplay up against what sounds very serious, know, homelessness aloneness.

The word play adds that lightness to it. But part of what really lasts about this, too, is I think the form that you chose, the repetitive lines, what they call anaphora where you've got to live to sleep the wall left, the ceiling left, the floor left, the door left, the roof left. So you've got that an afro building that chant. And each time for its reason.

that it leaves and it starts off innocent enough. You know, the wall left, it desired some time alone and I'm thinking maybe like when we put up walls and keep yourself alone, you talked about being bored in a white room staring at the wall like, you could watch the paint dry But it builds, in humor as it gets, darker as you become

more alone with yourself, the puns of the ceiling reaches an all time low and the floor couldn't handle the pressure anymore. And that part is all delightful. And then suddenly you do this turn. It's like a pause, an ⁓ moment where the stairs, come and go. And looking at the poem visually, that's actually looks like a little staircase. What was your thinking about that

Did you know what you were, where the poem was going to end? Did you know where you were going at that stage or?

Micah James Bauman (05:35)
No,

David J. Bauman (05:36)
Yeah.

Micah James Bauman (05:37)
That poem I was just making up as I went along, so...

David J. Bauman (05:42)
And so you knew something was about to happen here, but you didn't know what it was going to go and then the ending lines occurred to you.

Micah James Bauman (05:48)
the stairs had... well I guess they come and go.

David J. Bauman (05:52)
So it sticks with the theme, but it makes a turn there. And then you go back to the repetition of my house is slowly leaving me. And then it turns more inward soon. I'm going to leave too. And I'm kind of picturing like Harry Potter in the closet beneath the stairs at that point. just me and the closet hanging around. ⁓ it's good work.

Micah and you have done a lot of good work since We did a little collaboration that we mentioned earlier and you've chosen a poem from that collection to read.

Micah James Bauman (06:26)
Let me get up here.

Micah James Bauman (06:32)
Tools. Some of the patients had a few screws loose, which is not to say they were broken forever. They only required the right tools to put them back together. A kind man came into the room each day for group therapy. He taught us how to use tools in the real world. He had a brilliant analogy for this. Think

of a nail sticking out from a piece of wood. If you tried to use a wrench to pull out the nail, that may not be the best choice. On the other hand,

A hammer's claw, now that would serve you well. What kind of tools, he asked, do we have at our disposal? The man in the cowboy hat, the one who when asked about his goals for the day, had answered that he wanted to watch football, said. He knew about tools. I built a shed once. We used a hammer to pound nails into the

wood. We had to use a screwdriver to hang the hinges so the doors would swing. Yeah, I got tools back home, good tools, and I know how to use them. I can't wait to get back and build something again. Something as beautiful as that shed.

David J. Bauman (08:06)
Yeah. Now this one, this poem, and we'll put, I'll put links to these down in the show notes so people can, if they want to read along, can, they can look at that or read it afterwards. And one of the differences that's going to stand out is the form and how it changed. this is very, very even, close to even. Three line stanzas.

in the book, every other poem, basically one is in the voice of...

the son and one is in the voice of the father and I don't mean that religiously but and I say the because it's they're not they're kind of us because we were writing through our own issues you while you were in a hospital that you called the Valley and me when I was worried. Yeah, yeah and then me well I was like.

Micah James Bauman (08:53)
called the valley, that's right.

David J. Bauman (08:59)
feeling like a failure of a dad, not being able to help you. And so it's kind of us, but we also helped each other a lot in the editing afterwards.

I realized it as as we were getting ready for this podcast that a lot of that wordplay is still in this collection. you have the poem stitches where you play off laughter and actual stitches surgical stitches you know you had you had the kids in stitches but you also you know had the surgical stitches

And in this case, you've got a character. I hate to say character. I don't mean that to describe the man, but you have this man in the group with you ⁓ and they've got the kind of man who comes in every day to group.

Micah James Bauman (09:39)
character, you know,

they're kind of exaggerated versions of the people. ⁓

David J. Bauman (09:46)
And

you are such a kind young man because you were very concerned when we were putting this together because a lot of these things were based on actual patients that you met. I remember you said, I don't want anyone to read this and think I'm making fun of them, And I think you did a beautiful job of rather than making fun of them, of honoring them, through this journey that they're going through what you're going through yours.

So yeah, you've got this, the kind of man coming into the group, therapist, I guess, talking about coping tools. And here at first you're thinking this guy is taking things way too literally because he's talking about, yeah, hammer and nail screwdriver. But you had an interesting insight about that.

Micah James Bauman (10:30)
Now the feeling I get when I read the poem, how I take it, is that even though it sounds like he's going on and on about something that's totally besides the point and way out there, it's actually sort of related to what the therapist

David J. Bauman (10:52)
Mm-hmm.

Micah James Bauman (10:52)
kind

of man is saying. He talks about coping tools, he talks about watching football, for example, and then he goes on and he talks about the shed and pounding nails into the wood.

David J. Bauman (11:08)
Yeah.

And for him, that coping mechanism, that coping tool is imagining getting back out there and building something as beautiful as that shed again. Right? Is that what you're? Yeah. Even I'm thinking even his, I think you mentioned even his cowboy hat is like one of his tools. So while he may seem like somebody who takes things so literally, he actually is in his way very expertly applying.

Micah James Bauman (11:19)
Mm-hmm.

David J. Bauman (11:39)
those tools to his own recovery, which I think is just a beautiful poem, Micah. before we read the third poem, how would you say the kind of stuff we're working on? We jokingly call it the sequel. What we're, what we've been, yeah, what we're working on right now.

Micah James Bauman (11:43)
family.

a spiritual sequel.

David J. Bauman (12:00)
And a lot of it is, I think a lot of our, some of our traveling and exploring poems, definitely outside of the walls, outside of the hospital.

Micah James Bauman (12:09)
The

the first collaboration was called Mapping the Valley. This is about a different valley. This is sort of about the hills and valleys of Pennsylvania.

David J. Bauman (12:20)
Yeah, yeah. One of the poems that's going to be in that actually is again, for those who may be looking at a visual version, ⁓ I'll be talking with Jerry Wemple a little bit next week about he and Marjorie Maddox edited the Keystone Poetry Anthology full of poets from all over the state of Pennsylvania. And you and I are the only collaborative pair.

in the whole in the whole group. And we have a poem in there basically about the abandoned bunkers. near Allenwood. Yeah, in the old village of Alvira. And it seems like a lot of what we got ourselves caught up in writing now is about some of these abandoned places when we went to the Bayless Paper Mill, the Austin Dam, which is like, I guess the second worst

Micah James Bauman (12:49)
there.

David J. Bauman (13:05)
dam collapse in Pennsylvania next to the Johnstown flood, and we end up writing some things almost in a Spoon River anthology way from, from the point of view of some of those characters. Again, I'll use that, we want to honor that too, because these were people's real lives,

so that poem is going to be in our sequel, but it's actually we're hoping it to be a full length collection that we're hoping to get finished within the next year

Micah James Bauman (13:32)
Yeah.

David J. Bauman (13:34)
Next season, we're going to talk to JD Isip, who has an anthology coming out in July, the 250th anniversary of our very troubled country. it's 250 years of pop culture. And so we have a poem about that little town of Coudersport

That poem is about when Joan Crawford visited the town

Do you remember how this whole thing started?

You wanted to go stargazing.

Micah James Bauman (14:00)
That's right.

David J. Bauman (14:00)
You said

I think 2019, it was before the pandemic. And you said, we need to take a little vacation. And it was early spring. of course, I was hoping we'd go birdwatching, which we did do some of that. And you said stargazing. So that whole area up north is one of the darkest spots in the state of Pennsylvania, great places like Cherry Springs State Park

to view the night sky.

Micah James Bauman (14:25)
dark skies and ⁓ the ice mine. The Coudersport Ice Mine.

David J. Bauman (14:29)
yeah, in the ice mine poem.

Yeah, so that's kind of how we got into this whole thing. And we just kept going. What else, though? You're working on some other things. both of us, I guess, are working on some things that we've done separately that don't necessarily relate to our collaborative work. So I guess we both we try to encourage each other with that. We try to get together at least once a week to work on poems.

Micah James Bauman (14:51)
Yeah, and sometimes we do have things that aren't in the collaboration to show each other.

David J. Bauman (14:58)
Yeah, yeah, which is great. you're definitely one of my biggest first editors. you and Joel, who will also be a guest at some point, talking about starting a podcast with guests you know. Philip F. Clark is another one of those people and he's going to be a guest pretty soon too. So how does this word play?

relate to maybe how, is that how you got started writing poems, Was it the word play that was what attracted you?

Micah James Bauman (15:30)
I was a story, story writer, storyteller first.

David J. Bauman (15:36)
Mm-hmm.

Micah James Bauman (15:36)
I know when I was really young, it was just at my grandparents' house and from my grandfather, I'd just be creative, you know?

David J. Bauman (15:36)
You would march over-

around the room telling stories that your grandmother said.

Micah James Bauman (15:52)
using

my imagination to entertain.

David J. Bauman (15:56)
Mm-hmm.

Micah James Bauman (15:58)
So maybe that's part of and the word play.

I just really love words and what they can do.

David J. Bauman (16:07)
And you have a gift for seeing some of the silliness of some of the cliches that we use. And then you take those cliches or those metaphors to their extreme,

I wonder if some of that came about from some of the books that we read when you were real little, like some of the Shel Silverstein stuff. about eating a whale and where the sidewalk ends and too many kids in this tub and some of those kind of poems.

the poem that you chose to end things with. is also a bit of word play going on. So why don't you tell us about who the poet is and the name of the poem?

Micah James Bauman (16:45)
The poet's name is Robert Frost.

David J. Bauman (16:49)
A lot of people have heard of him.

Micah James Bauman (16:51)
The name of the poem is Fire and Ice. It's about the end of the world.

David J. Bauman (16:57)
Okay.

So we're back to the happy poems again.

Micah James Bauman (17:05)
I thought that'd be a good one to end on.

David J. Bauman (17:09)
Okay, you're gonna recite it for us from memory or?

Micah James Bauman (17:13)
I'm gonna try. I learned it a long time ago, so yeah.

David J. Bauman (17:20)
I've ever heard.

Micah James Bauman (17:20)
Some say

the world will end in fire, some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction, ice is also great and would suffice.

David J. Bauman (17:44)
Very, very good. And you know, what I kept thinking of is that Disney movie about all the emotions and the little, the angry guy, the guy who does anger, they had him up as like a flaming head, right? Like

But there are other people who have written about love being a fiery and hate being, you know...

There you go. Ring of fire. Johnny Cash, one of our greatest poets But you also got hatred being, feeling we use the term being cold. that was cold when you say something nasty to somebody, you know. yeah, yeah. All kinds of phrases like that.

Micah James Bauman (18:08)
Yeah

The cold shoulder.

David J. Bauman (18:29)
he probably, we had Robert Frost in the room with us, I wonder if he might say, well, especially, we'd probably get in trouble for, you know, exhuming him and all of that. But I'm sorry, one of the things that we discussed is that we're gonna try not to be funny because we think we're really funny. And ⁓ yeah, that.

Micah James Bauman (18:33)
That'd be scary.

David J. Bauman (18:51)
we might be the only ones who think that.

Micah James Bauman (18:51)
This poem

was in the Twilight movie, I should mention.

David J. Bauman (18:56)
⁓ I forgot about that. I thought you were going to say Twilight Zone. But you mean the sparkly vampire movies.

Micah James Bauman (18:58)
One of them...

Right.

David J. Bauman (19:04)
How was it used in that movie?

Micah James Bauman (19:06)
I know, didn't see that. I think Edward, maybe he read it to Bella in one of the scenes.

David J. Bauman (19:14)
Okay.

It could be, because he'd been around for like 400 years and was now dating this teenager. Right. Right. Well, I mean, I guess they age slower. In all fairness, they age slower. Vampires.

Micah James Bauman (19:19)
Right.

visible poetry fan.

and

George R. R. Martin. It was the inspiration for a song of fire and ice.

David J. Bauman (19:35)
⁓ yeah, yeah, yeah, But If he were in the room with us alive and we could ask him, he probably might say he was having some fun with some wordplay here, like you were saying with the My House poem.

And yet, it's kind of heavy by the time you get to the end. I know enough of hate to say that for destruction, ice is also great and would suffice. It's a pretty cool rhyme scheme with that poem as well.

David J. Bauman (20:02)
So is there anything else that you want to say about why you chose that particular poem?

Micah James Bauman (20:08)
I just want to say that I picked Robert Frost because when I was younger in middle school and high school, he was one of my favorite poets that was on the curriculum.

David J. Bauman (20:23)
Yeah. And you've been quite well read since then. ⁓ Richard Blanco, I think has been one of your favorite poets as well. You're constantly sending new... Yeah, I got to meet him. He was fantastic. was... He took time after a very long day to talk to you and even remembers the occasion. because I got to talk to him in the workshop that I was in with him.

Micah James Bauman (20:33)
I meant him.

David J. Bauman (20:46)
back during the lockdown period. But you're always sending me somebody new that you've read. We both do that. We send something new that we've read and send it to each other. you have gotten a lot of publications to your name. I can put that bio of yours in the show notes as well. But thank you for joining me on the podcast and being one of the people I know.

Micah James Bauman (21:12)
You're welcome.

David J. Bauman (21:14)
I appreciate it. And...

Micah James Bauman (21:16)
29 years.

David J. Bauman (21:18)
And so I will see you around in other places online, particularly in our Google Docs files next week.

Micah James Bauman (21:27)
Okay.

David J. Bauman (21:28)
Thanks, Micah.

Micah James Bauman (21:30)
You're welcome.

David (21:31)
Again, that was my son and collaborator Micah James Bauman. And this has been a conversation in three poems. Thank you so much for joining us. Next week, we'll be talking to poet Jerry Wimple. And I hope you'll join us for that as well. Thanks so much for all the encouraging comments and compliments. Reach out to us if you'd like on Instagram or you could message the show there in the show notes. We're also on Blue Sky and Facebook and you can even follow us on YouTube.

Thank you again and we'll see you next week.