Interview With a Poet: Sam Magavern
Sam Magavern is a writer and public interest attorney based in Buffalo, New York. His literary work encompasses poetry, fiction, nonfiction, scholarly essays, a screenplay, and a comic book. In addition to his writing, he is engaged in civic life as the co-founder of the Partnership for the Public Good and a professor at the University of Buffalo Law School. He is also the founder of the Calamus Project, a multimedia venture revisiting some of Walt Whitman’s less familiar and most vulnerable poetry.
Tell us about yourself. What is your relationship to the state of Minnesota? In what capacity do you consider yourself a Minnesota poet?
“Healthy” is the first word that comes to mind when considering my relationship to Minnesota. I moved to Minneapolis from Los Angeles in 1990 and lived there until 2014. I worked at Legal Aid while developing my writing, and it was the time in my life when I felt like I started to figure things out. I wrote fiction and non-fiction set there, and my comic book Alphabet Orchard was a collaboration with the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The poems in my collection Noah’s Ark were written in Minnesota. I got to write the screenplay for a film called The Last Word, another Minnesota project starring local DJ Mary Lucia, as well as a musical novel with musicians John Munson and Matt Wilson. It’s a place where I not only wrote a lot of poetry, but also got to find really interesting people to collaborate with on other projects.
How have the places you’ve lived informed the themes and content of your poetry?
I was born and raised in Buffalo, but I have had the chance to live in a lot of other places throughout my life. When I was a kid, my family lived two different years in the Philippines, and in college I got to spend a semester in St. Petersburg, Russia. After college, I lived for two years in a very small town in Pennsylvania, then Los Angeles for a time and Minneapolis for 14 years. So I've lived in really big cities and really small towns, but have spent a lot of my life in Buffalo or Minneapolis, medium-sized cities, which is where I feel the most at home. So I think all those places enter into my poetry. The overall sensibility owes something to growing up in a post-industrial rust belt city that's faced a lot of challenges but is set in a really beautiful part of the world, western New York. There's really easy access to a lot of nature and natural beauty that inspires me. There are also some specific things about Minneapolis. I have a poem called Skating on a Frozen Lake that's probably my most Minnesotan poem. It reflects very directly living near Lake of the Isles and getting to skate on that beautiful lake all the time.
How has your voice as a poet changed throughout your career? Have your motivations for writing poetry changed?
I started writing poetry when I was 10 years old and never stopped. I do go through periods where I'm not writing poetry, usually because I'm working on prose projects, fiction or non-fiction, public policy stuff, or some combination of those things. I think you write poetry if you feel that urge to do it, and you don't know why necessarily. You feel like your life would not be complete if you weren't doing it. I started to feel like that after I first had the experience of writing a poem at age 10. You just really enjoy it and find it fulfilling. Then it becomes where you feel like you have to do it to help you make sense of the world and express yourself, and try to add a little beauty to the world. I think of poets as people who have a particular neurological problem where they perceive words to be more real than they are. Words are so real to me. I'm sure it's very similar for musicians or painters. Music is just so real to them, the visual world is just hyper-real to them. I think for poets we feel that way about words, they have this body and soul to them that we respond to.
You’re not on social media in an age where poetry increasingly exists in a digital space. How do you go about promoting your art offline in 2025?
I don't have a cell phone, which nowadays is unusual. Of course, I'm surrounded by people who do have them, I'm not a Luddite. I'm either at my desktop or on my iPad several hours out of every day, but social media to me is like the cell phone. I've never had the urge to do it so I haven't. I send poems out to journals and share them that way. I give readings and share my poetry live in person. I think it’s meaningful to let people see your face and hear your voice. I have a website that I recently reconstructed and I try and use that to share a lot of material. Last year when we put together our latest book, Ovid’s Creek, with artwork by my wife, Monica Angle, we did a book launch and some more traditional stuff of that nature. I also worked with a local filmmaker to make films of eight of the poems.
You are working on multiple projects focused on the works of Walt Whitman. What is your personal connection to his poetry?
This relationship has become a close, loving one over the past few years. Some years ago I happened to be reading his Calamus poems, and I was struck by how good they were and how much I was enjoying them, so I started delving deeper and deeper into them. That became the Calamus Project, where I've been working with a theater group here in Buffalo and other partners to share those poems. The theme of the Calamus sequence is the relationship between men and Whitman’s feelings towards men, which is a really interesting and complicated subject. To this day, a lot of people don’t understand that America’s most iconic poet was gay, and the Calamus poems are at the epicenter of how his work has been read in different ways at different times. More broadly, I think that Walt Whitman is a great poet to be reading right now because, in a lot of interesting ways, he is the antithesis of the neo-fascist version of America that is dominating the moment. The timing is good to reclaim a powerful voice of radical democracy and radical inclusion. I have been working with a theater group called Compagnia de’ Columbari on their project Whitman on Walls, a mixed media project involving short films and live poetry readings that we are trying to get to Minnesota in the near future.
One of the reasons we created MPC was to offer a space for young poets to share their voices. What advice might you give to someone at the beginning of their journey?
I think not listening to anyone's advice might be the best advice, but that's a bit of a cop-out so I'll do my best. If you are going to listen to any advice, my best approximation might be trying a lot of different things and not worrying that if most of them don't work. When I was in my early 20s, I wrote a lot of poetry and almost none of it worked. I probably went five years where I was writing a lot of poems, and none of them survived. I kept doing it because I enjoyed doing it and I enjoyed the process. I'm sure at times I kind of fooled myself into thinking they were working a little better than they were, but I just hadn't quite found the style that was going to work for me. I think that's common for a lot of people when they start. I'd love to be able to write long poems like Whitman or Allen Ginsburg, but it just doesn't happen to be the way I write. Being willing to accept that you might not be able to write the kind of poems you consciously want to write can free you up to find the styles that work best for you. I write really short poems, so it's kind of easy to do it this way, but I only end up keeping about 1 out of every 50. Be willing to say, “I'm going to write 50 poems and it’s okay if 49 of them don’t to work.” Give yourself that freedom.
