By Sara Gilbert Frederick, Special to The Free Press
Edward Micus has a new book out — the first collection of his poems ever published. But many of the pieces in “The Infirmary,” Micus admits, are rather old.
“Some of them are 20 years old,” he says. “When I put them all together like this, they turn into an autobiography, in a way.”
The poems in “The Infirmary” deal with his youth in Fort Dodge, Iowa. They document the nine months he spent fighting in Vietnam in his early 20s, and the many months he spent dealing with that experience when he returned. They address fatherhood and friendship, hurts and healing, and other adventures, both literal and metaphorical, that happened along the way.
“There are many scraps of my life in that book,” Micus says. “But there are scraps of other people, too. A lot of these relate to other people in my life.”
Micus, who recently retired after more than 20 years as the assistant director of the Center for Academic Success at Minnesota State University, has been writing poetry since he was a teenager in Iowa. His mother would recite poetry as she rolled out pie dough, which helped instill a love of language in her son.
“I can still hear her voice in my head,” he says.
His earliest poems were “terrible,” he says. But when he was drafted to serve in the Vietnam War at the age of 22, then returned after being shot nine months into his tour of duty, he turned to poetry to help process his feelings.
“I felt almost an obligation to write about it,” he says now. “I felt that I was luckier than many veterans in terms of dealing with post-war trauma, and I felt obliged to write about it. For me, poetry was the best genre to do that.”
His poetic development continued when Micus moved to Mankato in the early 1980s. He had taken a job at the Center for Academic Success and decided to enroll in the university’s Master of Fine Arts program at the same time. Working with the faculty, and learning from the other students as well, gave him more confidence in his work. Eventually, he also taught classes for the English department, including everything from composition to creative writing and fiction writing.
During that time, Micus submitted many of his poems to various literary journals — and many were published. But in all that time, he didn’t put them together in a manuscript and try to publish them as a book.
“I just never considered it,” he says. “I was happy enough sending out individual poems.”
Eventually, however, Micus’ mentor, Richard Robbins, put a little pressure on his former student.
“Rick got on my case,” Micus remembers. “He wanted me to send it out. So I threw some together to send out.”
“Ed likes to revise and revise and revise,” explains Robbins, a faculty member in MSU’s English department. “I tend to get a little bit more aggressive about getting them out there. So I think I’ve been a voice on the other side for Ed, encouraging him to just get a manuscript out.”
Micus admits that revising his old poems was a necessary part of the process.
“The early ones had been hanging in the closet for a long time, so I took them out and punished them a bit,” he says. “It was kind of fun to pull them out again and work on them, because I didn’t have to suffer the energy of their creation all over again.”
He did try to be careful about not going too far with his revisions, though.
“That’s the thing about tinkering,” he says. “There’s always a concern about it, because if you tinker too much, you might do more damage than good.”
Although Micus never officially joined MSU’s faculty, Robbins says that he has been an important part of many students’ success. Micus would often take certain students under his wing and work closely with them on their poetry.
“Some of those students have really responded well to his attention,” Robbins says. “I always thought that we ought to give him a shadow position on the faculty, because he did so much for our students. A lot of it is chemistry, which he definitely had with some people.”
Micus, however, says he learned as much as he taught.
“Working with students always serves as a motivation,” he says. “It’s an instrument to help you heighten your craft, to fine tune your language. I enjoyed that very much.”
Micus will return to campus Nov. 19 as part the Good Thunder Reading Series. He will join two other MSU alums — poets Connie Colwell Miller and Christina Olson — for the MSU Alumni Reading.
