when performance poet Jack McCarthy steps up to the microphone, he’s playing to win—but not in the way you might expect 

Jack McCarthy is an unlikely success story in the world of performance poetry: he’s a Dartmouth-educated white guy who started competing in poetry slams at age 54. Then again, he likes unseating audience expectations, in person as much as in his poetry.

As Hope Jordan, a longtime writing colleague and Canterbury resident, says on his Web site, “McCarthy’s poems tap you on the shoulder, buy you a cup of coffee and start telling you a story. Before you realize it, you’ve laughed, you’ve cried, and you have understood the perfectly visible relationships between things you never before dreamed were connected. Things like longing and lawn chairs, cars and Catholicism, navigation and newfound love.”

His striking combination of warmth and talent have turned him from an ordinary, self-described “standup poetry guy” into a folk hero of the circuit. Since his start at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, Mass., he’s gone on to compete at national poetry slams and read at coffee shops around the country. The former Fremont resident and regular at Crackskulls’ poetry nights moved to Washington a few years ago, where he continues to perform regularly at age 67. He’s visiting the East Coast for a tour this fall, with a stop at Breaking New Grounds in Portsmouth on Monday, Oct. 9, where he and Dudley Lauffman will be the featured readers at the Stone Pigeon Poetry Series. The performance kicks off at 7 p.m. at 14 Market Square.

You’ve performed your poetry countless times, in front of rooms full of teenagers and auditoriums full of hundreds of the best poets from around the country. What happens to you—physically, mentally, emotionally—when you leave your seat and walk up to a microphone?

It varies wildly. Once in a while I’m convinced that I have the perfect poem and all I’m thinking is, “Why in the world did it take them so long to get to me?” But usually I’m trying to learn something from the audience, to stretch myself a little bit out of my comfort zone, maybe to stretch the audience.

My ethic says you don’t do a poem in front of an audience just to show it off; you do it to learn something about the poem or about the audience. And you may not like what you find out. So I’m usually at least a little bit nervous going up. If it’s a new poem, I spend the last couple of minutes cutting stuff out, thinking, “They’re never going to hold still for that.” In those last few minutes, you can see weaknesses you were never able to see before. It gives you a focus—like Mark Twain said about the knowledge that you’re going to be hanged in the morning.
 
You got your start performing at the Cantab, and you’ve said everything you needed to learn about this you learned there. What is it about that room, and what does that say about what makes poetry work?

I’ve often said that the Cantab has the best open mike in the English-speaking world. I’ve been around a lot, and if there were another one as good, I think I would have heard of it.

Maybe it’s the legacy of Patricia Smith. I know that I wouldn’t be the poet I am if she and Michael Brown hadn’t come to Boston when they did. She was so brilliantly talented that a whole generation of poets couldn’t help being influenced by her. When you saw Patricia perform, you knew what you aspired to.

The Cantab has a big, responsive, enthusiastic audience that will always find a way to tell you if they like you. There are always some very good poets there, but like any open mike, it’s a mixed bag, so the bar isn’t impossibly high.

Poetry thrives on intimacy, and the room is generally crowded. When people are wedged in together, sometimes a response can shoot through the crowd like an electric current. It’s a crowd that loves to be surprised into laughter—and it’s much easier for a poet to be funny than it is for a comedian, because a poet is free to move in so many other directions that the humor does come as a surprise.

I sometimes think I rely too much on humor. Laughter is the only way the audience can tell me that they’re with me, and I need that, probably more than is really good for my work.
 
Your life story is a bit of a jumble—you graduated from prep school (where you met Robert Frost) and Dartmouth College, you say in your poems and interviews that you’ve worked a series of what you describe as dead-end, numbing jobs. These various aspects come out in your poems—dealing with broken-down cars, alcoholism, Catholicism, libido, politics, baseball. Does writing that sort of poetry, accessible by choice, help you sort it out?

The prep school was Exeter, which I got into on a substantial scholarship. I like to say it didn’t leave a mark on me, but I probably wouldn’t be a poet today if I hadn’t gone there.

As to selecting topics, I once heard a poet say, “We don’t choose our material; our material chooses us.” And something inside me shouted, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

And sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t. My batting average is pretty good, but I have a lot of failed poems in my Unfinished folder; the idea sounded good, but you can never be sure until you write it. And even then, you have to try it out before you really know you have a winner.

Many of my poems deal with situations that are essentially painful. But by turning them into good poems, it’s as if I get power over the pain, I WIN! There’s something redemptive about art in that respect; but at the same time, kind of cold-blooded, as if the events of my life don’t matter as much to me as the poetry I get out of them.

How large is your repertoire? Do you adjust it for various audiences of different ages, in different parts of the country? And does a sense of your audience in turn influence your writing process?

I have about 1,100 pages of keepers now. Maybe a third of that oeuvre is eligible for performance. The ones that aren’t eligible are generally bumped because I have another poem with the same virtues that’s more audience-friendly.

I plan my sets very carefully—not just what poems I’m going to do, but what I’m going to say between poems. Part of that is professionalism, in order not to go over my time; but part of it is my abject fear of standing in front of an audience and not knowing what I’m going to say next.

I still slam pretty often in Seattle and Bellingham. I keep track of what poems I’ve done and I try not to repeat myself too often. There are over 50 poems in my slam repertoire, of which maybe 40 are memorized.

You are recovering from open heart surgery, a quintuple bypass, on Aug. 9. What has poetry meant to your life, especially entering the performance world at an older age?

I’ll answer the last part first.

When I first got serious about my writing, I submitted to a lot of little magazines, and I was very quickly made aware that the fashion in poetry in the early 1990s was compression. Whatever gift I have involved expansion. So I could either try to learn compression, or I could “follow my bliss” toward expansion, and hope that there was a little sliver of audience for it somewhere. If I had been in my 30s, I might have tried the compression route. But I was in my 50s, and I didn’t think I had time for that. So expansion won. And it does have an audience.

This has been far and away the most exciting period of my whole life. It’s as if everything before was ordained to lead up to this. I know that the odds are very much against my having any impact on “American Poetry,” but I’m having the time of my life, and that’s enough for me. And the audience response I get convinces me that I’m onto something, I’m doing something right.