Linda Michel-Cassidy: Your poem "Anthem" is very focused geographically, with a real yearning back to a heavily romanticized recent American past. What led you to this time and place?

Scott Ruescher: This poem comes from a series, a vaguely chronological sequence of poems inspired by a visit to Graceland on a day when the place was closed. This happened about twenty years ago - I was there for a half-hour - and I've been thinking about it ever since. I think seven or eight of the poems mark my progress from the city bus that left me off in front of Graceland, to the gate of Graceland itself, to the private plane parked across the street (and the nearby car of a snoozing security guard), to the bus stop where I waited to go back to downtown Memphis a half-hour after arriving.

I have had to use my imagination, and occasionally my Google browser, to visit the actual grounds (they're fenced in, as you'd see in at least one of the other poems) and get into the house. I'm glad the place was closed, because I might never have started writing these things if the museum had been open, and it's been a stabilizing project for me. 

LMC: How does "Anthem" fit into this series?

SR: I started the sequence three or four years ago. All of the poems in this Graceland-inspired sequence evolved from one two-page narrative poem that moved breezily and rather glibly through several stages of the bus trip to and from Graceland and the few minutes I spent at the ornate gate of Graceland. I came to see each stage of the poem as worthy of its own sustained attention. (I might add that an earlier sequence about a road trip from Abe Lincoln's birthplace to the site of MLK's assassination began the same way: two pages of prose morphing into six long poems.)

"Anthem" is a long elaboration of one of those Graceland passages - an entire poem devoted to that single iconic man, a blue-collar Vietnam vet now probably celebrating his 70th birthday or so. I love the feeling of nostalgia, the painful ache and longing I have for things I never managed to experience in person. I was ten years too young for Elvis and the birth of rock 'n' roll - and for the equally enduring bebop jazz movement of the same era - and two or three years too young either to die in Vietnam or to be in the central part of the protest movement. 

LMC: How did your nostalgia take this particular shape? Why the automotive focus?

SR: My father was of an earlier generation, the one that came of age during the Depression and lived through World War II. He was an incredibly affectionate guy - with tons of emotional intelligence, especially noticeable given his macho demographic. During the last of the four decades he spent working in sheet metal fabrication at a coal mining machinery factory in Columbus, Ohio, he befriended a bunch of younger guys who came from the same generation and class as my iconic character in "Anthem." I was interested in evoking a hypothetical "type," a mild version of the anti-hero, not someone you'd see honored in a statue on the town green.

My father and his friends were practical with their minds and good with their hands, and they wouldn't be bothering to go to college to learn about the pathological causes of our involvement in Vietnam. But with guys like these, who were inevitably interested in - no, make that inextricably invested in - cars, you could always strike up a conversation by asking, "Hey, slim, whatchya drivin' these days?" or maybe, "What's under the hood, bud?"

I have been mysteriously drawn to cars in my poems ever since I wrote a short free-verse curse against Henry Ford, titled "Scrapmetal." And yet, cars are practically the root of all evil in the U.S., aren't they? They enabled the white flight from inner cities that perpetuated racism for good and their emissions are behind (or underneath) climate change. If I'm not mistaken, cars and the need to fill them up with gasoline are behind the often heinous foreign policy the U.S. has had in oil-rich countries. With their ability to isolate, with one person per hugely enormous car in unconscionable commuter traffic jams, they're also working to ensure that strangers, perfect and otherwise, don't have to talk to each other the way they would on a chicken bus in Guatemala, say.