They say that the best way to make God laugh is to tell them your plans. And as the world has seen repeatedly over the last eighteen months, even the most well thought out and well-intentioned plans can be upended in an instant. As was the case for the American poet, Don Agey. In 2004, Agey’s wife, Kerri, died in a car accident on her way to work. And after four years in the navy and nearly twenty years working as a security officer for NASA, Agey was forced to retire early following an injury.
These two losses impacted Agey deeply and changed his relationship to poetry. It transformed poetry from a hobby to a means of staving off negative emotions. As he describes it, “There was a pressure in my head and my heart that I did not know how to release until I wrote my first poem. I hold feelings in, and I don’t know how to articulate what’s going on. But that first poem opened a door, and I gladly stepped in.”
Agey is the author of two collections of poetry, his most recent being Second Harvest. Despite the loss and hardships that prompted Agey to take his writing more seriously, his poetry is surprisingly full of humour and moments of joy. In Second Harvest, Agey draws from his memories and previously unexplored emotions to create poems that speak to universal truths and remind readers that they are not alone.
Through his use of various styles of poetry — like haiku, limericks and free verse — Agey tackles challenging subjects like death, solitude, and retirement. The book was written before the COVID-19 pandemic, but many of its themes echo what many people have experienced during the past several months.
Agey was born and raised in Quartz Hill, California, where he currently lives a quiet, retired life alongside his two cats. Agey and I spoke in May of this year.
The thing that really grabbed my attention was the subject line of the email I was sent “Poetry Book Helps Others Through Life’s Unavoidable Obstacles with the Help of Cannabis, Cats, and Creativity.” How have cats, cannabis, and creativity helped you deal with life’s obstacles?
At the end of 2004, my wife died. And there were several emotions going all over the place, and writing poetry. I have been writing poetry on and off for a while but at that point I started writing seriously, just to get my feelings out so they didn't just dwell inside. We had cats and after she died they kept the house from feeling really empty. And the cannabis was just a joke. I've never tried it, I have no idea whether it would do anything or if it would help.
Do you have any cats now? If so, what are their names?
I have two cats and I got them on October 31st. A male that is all black except he has white paws up to his ankle, so I called him Socks. And a female who’s black and white and since I got them on Halloween day, I named her Boo.
Don Agey’s cats, Socks (left), and Boo. Photo courtesy of Don Agey.
Those are really cute names and they sound like really cute cats. How, if at all, has the pandemic influenced your relationship to writing?
The virus crap and new administration have been fodder for some of my more recent poetry. And I can guarantee you it's not flattering to them. It would have affected me a lot differently if I had still been working but I've retired. I had scheduled to see people but that dried up. I got really bad for a while because I was by myself and it was a struggle. But then a few of my friends and I would order food, eat outside and spend time together. So, it did affect me in some ways and it was really bad but in other ways. It just forced me to be more independent.
I found it really interesting that in Second Harvest, there’s an excerpt alongside almost all of the poems. Why did you choose to structure the book like that?
When I started writing poetry and I started deciding whether the poem was done, I came back to it and read it from almost an impartial view and I realized that it wasn't saying what I wanted to say. And even back then, I didn't want to offend anybody but I still had something to say, so I started out just wanting it to be like, “This is what I feel. This is what I believe. And this is how I see it. So it's no reflection on anybody else but me.”
What is it that drives you to write?
For a little over nineteen years, I worked as a federal security officer for NASA. I had planned on continuing to work for a little bit but one night at about 3 a.m., I was in a hurry and I got caught on a piece of asphalt and twisted my knee. I thought it would be temporary but when I went to the doctor, I found out I had torn the meniscus and something else in the knee.
I hadn't planned retirement and I had nothing so there I was, all of a sudden I was retired and I had to find a path to retirement and through retirement. And I didn't have any training or any materials so it was a struggle to get myself going in the right direction.
Would you say that writing played a part in you figuring out what that right direction might be?
Yeah, it pretty much calmed my mind when I was writing because I was focused on the writing. Something would come up and I think about it and maybe it was a possible path but I guess it just focused my mind so I didn't worry about the path as much as I would have.
You've injected bits of humour throughout the book and I'm curious about why it is important to include humour in your poetry?
Well, it’s like life. If you go down this one path humourless, sad and bitter or whatever, it's going to destroy your life. When I got out of the navy I went to college, and for no reason I can think of, I took a poetry class. And at that point, I was writing all this serious, serious stuff. Then I realized that these younger people that have never been in the service, didn't have a bad life, they had parents and everything, they were also writing this tear-jerker crap and I thought, “I gotta change this.” So I went to the library and I read E.E. Cummings, Robert Frost, Sheldon Leonard, and anything I could get a hold of. So I started writing the most ridiculous stuff and it got to be fun. And it kept me from, especially being retired and by myself, it keeps me from collapsing in on myself.
If you come across writer's block, how do you get out of it?
I usually try to work around it but if that doesn't work I just walk away from the poem for a while. Since I don't have any deadlines, I don't have a publisher yelling at me to finish the book, I can set the poem down and can go do something else and when I'm in a different state of mind, I can come back to it and most of the time that works. I think there were probably a lot of poems about writer's block in the book. What’s funny is a lot of times I'll get writer's block, I'll set the poem down but then a poem about writer's block will appear and I'll follow that, and finish that one and then I'll go back to the other one.
How did you go about choosing which poems would go into the book, and then choosing the order in which they appear?
There were a certain number of poems about one subject so what I did was I tried to choose the best poems to begin and to end the book. And I didn’t want too many really serious poems together but for them to intermingle with the fun ones. I try not to have political poems or religious poems or anything like that together. Some people have told me that they would’ve preferred for me to put them in sections which is okay, that’s their choice.
I don't know if this is too personal of a question but with a poem like “Nightmares” with the lines like, “Shadows flit and flow from sight / Yet always hover near / A dark and angry, hungry night / I just might be the food.” When it comes to some of those darker poems and dark feelings you’re exploring, where do those come from?
We live in Diablo Valley which is 73 miles north of Los Angeles. I worked in Pasadena and my wife used to work there also. She was in a van for work, they had a carpool of eleven people, and one morning they signed up this one guy to drive the van and they didn't ask him about drugs. He was taking something that made him drowsy. It was 6:30 in the morning, they were on the road and he fell asleep at the wheel. The van rolled off the mountain, 275 feet, and killed three people. For the first two weeks after she died, I really had this desire to take her car up, where they went off the road and go after her. The only thing that kept me from doing it was my faith and my friends.
When you're writing pieces like that, is that you responding to a feeling you’re having or is that you reflecting on that time when that was what you were thinking and feeling?
Some of it is what I was feeling at the time and some of it is reflection, so it’s both.
What is your favourite poem in the book and why?
It’s been a while since I looked at all of them but there were some that were just a lot more fun to write. Like, I can't say this is my favourite, but one that was really fun to write was “Athlete's Foot”. I kept procrastinating when I knew I needed to work out, I needed to get healthier but when I got out the door to go running, I would find every excuse. You know, it's too hot or there’s a breeze or the dog down the street is barking at me. Maybe I'll try it tomorrow. Then it just went on and on but when I actually got out there, it took me a while to get up to speed and get myself moving.
What do you want someone to take away from reading this book?
It wasn't written so much for somebody to take something away from it, just to be entertained, no matter how your life is. This isn't a book where you have to read it from the beginning, you can pick a page, read it and go away. But if it helps somebody feel better about themselves, and they enjoy that moment, that was all I really wanted. And for me, I’m always proud of myself when I finish a creation and I realize that I actually created this.
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