Listen and read along as Kevin Nance discusses with the author “All These Ghosts," Silas House's first published collection of poetry. Courtesy, Eastern Standard and WEKU. Photos provided by Silas House.

Kevin:              I'm going to start by telling you that when you were announced as the Kentucky Poet Laureate a couple of years ago, I had to fend off friends of mine from out of state, not from Kentucky, who were not familiar with the practice of having poets laureate sometimes be fiction writers, not necessarily known for poetry. And somebody sent me a message that said, "Why are they nominating Silas House, who is a novelist, as a poet laureate?" And I had to explain that there's the tradition of that. Then the question was, well, has he published poems? Yes, I think he has. I've heard him read them. Has he published a book? And I had to say, well, no. And now you have answered your critics by publishing a book of poems, your first book of poems. Congratulations on that.

Silas:                Thank you. I also have to say you don't have to publish a book to be a poet.

Kevin:              That's true.

Silas:                That would be my response.

Kevin:              That's true. That's true. That's true.

Silas:                You just have to write poems.

Kevin:              That's right. Did your time as poet laureate at all make you think more about poetry or nudge you more in the direction of writing more poetry?

Silas:                Well, I've always written poetry ever since seventh grade. It's just that I haven't published as much of that as I have prose, but I've always loved poetry. Over the last few years, I have dedicated myself to learning more about the craft of poetry because I was mostly trained as a prose writer. And so, in learning more, of course that made me write more poems. While I was poet laureate, I was required to write more poems because you get asked to write occasion poems, which are very hard to do. That's my least favorite form of poetry simply because poetry should be organic, and when you're writing an occasion poem, you lose some of that freedom, you know. However, I ended up writing a couple of occasion poems I really love. Three of them are in the book. So, I was writing more poetry, and I also was being asked that question, why don't you have a book of poetry? And after my poem that I read at Governor Beshear's second inauguration got out in the world, I started getting offers from publishers specifically for a poetry book.

Kevin:              And this is the result.

Silas:                Yes.

Kevin:              I thought maybe I'd ask you to read the beginning of the book. It's sort of a prologue poem, and it's an unusual poem in the context of a book for reasons that we'll get into. But maybe you could read that first poem in the book.

Silas:                Sure. This is "Lost Place" and it's after A. E. Housman.

I hear a song that kills yet is a hinge 
from my country so far, so close. 
What is that green-remembered ridge?
 What trees? What pastures are those?

 I float above crowded porches and tables,
 all these ghosts just beyond my reach.
 I would love them more if I was able
 to go back in time and believe.

 I recall the wild places, fecund, rich.
 I wade into the creek, diaphanous
 myself, am I haint or witch?
 Listen to me. Once here was happiness.

 Now this is the land of the beguiled.
 I see it before me so plain,
 the little paths I trod as a child
 and will never mark again.

Kevin:              That's a beautiful poem. I think you said in an Instagram post that I happen to have heard recently that you were leery of including it as the first poem in the book in part because you didn't want to raise expectations that it would be typical in the book. It's not typical in the sense that most of your other poems don't rhyme, and they're not "after poems."

Silas:                Yeah. Most of my poems have embedded rhyme, but they don't rhyme at the ends of the lines, and you don't have that form. But my poetry editor felt that it was strong enough that lots of readers don't even notice that it rhymes at the ends of the lines, and so it wouldn't set up that expectation. It is an after poem, meaning that it's written in homage to or in conversation with an earlier published poem. “A Shropshire Lad” is one of my favorite books of poetry ever. It was posted in the very late 1800s by A. E. Housman, one of the earliest books to explore gay issues. Although subtly it's there. But even more than that, it's about love for a place and feeling conflicted about a place, and those themes show up throughout this book. So, it just made sense for it to be the prologue.

Kevin:              That poem also contains what became the title of the overall book.

Silas:                Yeah.