Eric Patrick McNeill Rummelhoff
Eric Patrick McNeill Rummelhoff graduated with a degree in Literature and Creative Writing from San Jose State University. He worked there as lead poetry editor and historian on Reed Magazine. He currently pursues a Master in InterAmerican Studies at Bielefeld University.
Entrevista/Interview
What was your first impulse to write?
I remember in elementary school putting words that rhymed together during breaks, but my first realization that what I did had the makings of something more was in middle school. My English teacher had us write short stories for the class. Many of the students created murder mysteries involving the fellow students, but I had taken to working solo. I wrote a story about the Iraq War and a man searching for his missing brother. The reaction of the teacher wasn’t necessarily one of praise, but it gave me the idea that I could elicit emotions from working with words.
What is your chosen style of literature and why have you chosen it?
I have moved towards the world of poetry in the last decade or so. I like the immediacy of the images and the playfulness with sound. I remember reading the phrase “priest’s wrists’ in a poem and being disgusted by it. The amazing thing is how that sound has stuck with me. In that way, I love finding combinations that are crunchy or smooth depending on the context. Poetry offers a comfortable place for those experiments.
How do your studies inform what you write?
Often the changes in my perception bring new poetic concepts out. In the poem “perhaps he didn’t know..”, I focus on the myth of Adam and Eve cutting their names to initials to hint towards the continents I have lived between. It was through my reading at Bielefeld that I came to this idea of the autocreation of identity through the initial encounter between Europe and America. I played with that concept to speak to the first creation of self in the mythological encounter from the Bible.
In what way do you relate to the name of the magazine, Interespacios?
I think people living in foreign climates creates a moving interespacio, one that I live in now. I think these liminal spaces are important for developing novel ways to understand the world and progress our perspective about the world. Without interespacios, we become provincial and narrow-minded.
perhaps he didn’t know
the lord had shilled him
for a rib to carve some dice
to decide the next moves.
the procedure surely put him
off his ways, stumbling,
and anesthetized
towards the fruits fallen
out of their boughs,
and there came a woman E
by whose appearance
defined A as a consequence.
the chemicals musta mixed
cause and effect
coincidence and the way things
can be a brutal chaos sometimes:
a visual white noise.
videt ergo sum
i like how the far distance takes focus
and the short distance a precision
unlike that while steel headed and aware
fully of the pleasures and sufferings
of life lived on the edge of it all unnumbed.
i like how crowds become meshes
of bodies that only need be penetrated
to mingle and joke and not be navigated
like a fish finding neon colors in its range.
i don’t like the disappointment in the eyes
of the ones who love me when i look up
my throat and mouth burning from
the recent expulsion of whatever
was in my belly and not liking its place.
i don’t like not remembering the lights
of a party and the thing that i have said.
i don’t like not holding the narrative
of the kind of man that i am.
My deodorant is called Denali
I assume the wilderness and white
wild of Alaska should inspire manhood.
Denali, the indigenous name
for Mt. McKinley, meaning tall
like the spruce trees
whose scent they say they added.
“Fresher than freedom”
I guess, but nevertheless
I feel freedom has grown stale
like some hoarder
in an inherited plantation estate
collecting every newspaper
and tech product
and comic book
and sandwich crust
and supermarket coupon
and vacuum bag
and aluminum foil ball
and plastic toy
and toilet roll
and bestselling book
and letter from lovers past
and empty mason jar
in a tall hill
to which no wilderness can rise.
my father always told me to do nothing
with my hands while i peed
imagine that i was some soldier
on a black hawk with a mission to save
matt damon or willam dafoe
suppress the enemy
then move on to the next step
what was the enemy?
the toilet, the water, the earth?
is my weaponry the expulsion of my filth?
the dead parts of me processed out?
yesterday i found blood in my urine
the doctor today told me it’s probably benign
but dad’s kidneys flunked out years back
and i wonder if now my weaponry
is the living parts of me
perhaps i’m giving it too much