Visiting with Julie Marie Wade
by Claire Guyton
I understand there is a real Elijah Pritchett. What made you want to write the poem “When Elijah Pritchett Goes to the Gym” about and for him?
Well, Elijah Pritchett and James Leary both—my “swolemates,” as they are affectionately called—are two friends I met in the PhD program at the University of Louisville. Elijah and James are both doctoral candidates now, and I’m edging toward candidacy at the end of the summer. Two summers ago, I went to Humana Gym to do some cardio and read for a class, and I ran into the two of them there and found out that they have a regular (and pretty hard-core) weightlifting routine. They invited me to join them, and so for the last two years, as much as possible, I’ve gone and lifted weights with these guys. Frankly, I was never very interested in lifting weights, but I like James and Elijah so much, and I figured the weightlifting couldn’t hurt me, but the best part has been the stories. We lift weights, and sometimes we also play basketball or work out on the treadmill, but we always talk, talk about everything, tell stories about ourselves and our childhoods, strange trivia we know, books we’ve read, music we like, and these gym sessions have been an extraordinary supplement to my education. They also seem to me the heart of what the Humanities is all about—a rich cross-section of interdisciplinary knowledge, the perfect blend of theory and experience, insight and humor.
So about a year ago, I remember announcing that I wanted to write a poem called “When Elijah Pritchett Goes to the Gym,” and Elijah laughed, but I think he has such a unique and literary name, and I just felt it belonged in a poem. Elijah Pritchett actually sounds like a character in a can’t-put-down kind of novel, but he’s also such a character in real life that I wanted a poem that could honor him and the friendship the three of us share. At the time, I was working on a new collection of poems, now finished, called Must Be Present To Win, and the poem also fit with the ethos of that collection overall, which probably influenced why I wrote the poem when I did. There’s no question, though, if you’ve ever met Elijah Pritchett and heard his name, you’d want to write a poem about him that uses his name.
When I sent the poem out for publication, it was accepted almost immediately by a literary journal, and then a few months later when they were going to print, the journal editors emailed me saying they had made a mistake and actually meant to publish a different poem from my submission—not “When Elijah Pritchett Goes to the Gym.” I was disheartened since I had already told Elijah and James and our friend Carol, who joined the gym posse along the way and actually coined the term “swolemates,” that this poem was going to be published, and then, at the last minute, it wasn’t. But when Hunger Mountain accepted the poem, it couldn’t have come at a more perfect time because the publication coincided with Elijah’s fortieth birthday and the honorarium paid for his seafood dinner at a fish camp outside Louisville. We had a terrific, meta-poetic time.
Tell us about your writing process—either generally or specifically with regard to the birth and development of “When Elijah Pritchett Goes to the Gym.”
With this poem, I knew it was going to be quirky and colloquial and very literally autobiographical. The people in it are real, the experiences in it are real, and the details are a kind of collage of our time at Humana Gym—just a few excerpts from so many conversations, inside jokes, and pieces of trivia exchanged. I had the title going in, which isn’t always the case, so I wanted the poem to match and respond to that title in a way that gives a glimpse of who Elijah Pritchett is (a person wholly unlike anyone else I’ve ever met and in the best possible way) and also a glimpse of who the swolemates are together. It’s a poem entirely composed of glimpses, not a sustained narrative at all, and certainly not any kind of “whole story.” James Leary is one of my very best friends, but I didn’t want to get sentimental about that, and Elijah Pritchett is someone I rarely get to see outside the gym due to his extremely busy schedule, but I didn’t want to get wistful about that either. So really, it’s a zeitgeist poem, a record of a certain time and place where our lives converged in a way that’s really meaningful to me.
Because we’re academics and don’t know where we’ll ultimately end up, find jobs, and so on, I came to the poem with the bittersweet awareness that we may not always be able to meet up at Humana Gym to lift weights and tell stories. Realistically, we probably won’t. But I knew I wanted to keep the poem light, fun, playful, the way our times together actually are, and not turn heavy and emotional and risk becoming maudlin. So this is meant to be a platonic love poem to James and Elijah both and a little time capsule of experience we can look back on fondly.
Do you remember your first poem? What was it about?
I didn’t start writing poetry seriously until I was in college. I had always written stories up to that point, even as I consistently referred to myself as a poet. So for me, I guess, being a poet didn’t necessarily mean someone who wrote poems, since I didn’t write them very often. It had to do with a certain orientation toward the world—a close attention to language, the sounds and connotations of words and the different possible ways of arranging them to maximize meaning. Also, I think, it had to do with a tendency to become fixated on small, perhaps seemingly random details and the connections I could draw between these and larger, more abstract ideas. But like most young people coming to poetry, I didn’t really know how to get “deep thoughts” or unique insights onto the page without becoming ridiculously melodramatic and/or rhyming like a Hallmark card.
I don’t specifically remember my first poem, but for good reason—I’m sure it was entirely unmemorable. What I do remember is taking my freshman college writing seminar with a curmudgeonly poet named Rick Jones who hated my work. Well, that’s not exactly right. He hated my poems. We had to submit a portfolio of work each month that could be single- or multi-genre; all that mattered was that we hit the minimum number of pages. I remember submitting poems and stories and various meditations “on” things, such as “On Cafeteria Food,” and Rick informed me after that first submission that I should stick to prose.
There was one poem he especially hated called “Faith,” which was actually lineated quite like the Elijah Pritchett poem as I recall but full of nothing but big pronouncements about human nature, the conflicting impulses to trust and doubt, and so on. And it must have had a very optimistic ending because all Rick wrote on the bottom of that page—and the words haunted me thereafter—was “Do you also believe for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows?” After that, of course, I had to write more poems if only to prove him wrong, but I stopped trying to take on such daunting abstractions as love or faith or grief and started using small details or scenes as a way to point toward those abstractions without actually naming them.
What’s the soundtrack to this poem?
Since it’s a pretty literal poem, I think the soundtrack would have to be the questionable music that plays at Humana Gym, which is also a source of frequent commentary among us. James and Elijah have a running joke about the “relative musical genius of Peter Cetera,” as mentioned in the poem, so there’d have to be some of his music. And there’d have to be some Eagles and CCR because those are part of the regular gym loop as well. I don’t know very much about music at all because I grew up in a house where we watched Lawrence Welk reruns on Saturdays and all our radios were set to AM 880 K-I-X-I, “Hits of the 40s, 50s, and 60s.” So for me, a song like “Do you know the way to San Jose?” seemed edgy and contemporary. My musical deficit is actually one of the major talking points at the gym. Elijah always knows whatever song comes on the radio and can usually tell me a lot about the singers and the band’s history. He also taught me that Stevie Nicks is a woman and other important basics like that. And since we’ve had quite a few conversations about the genius and madness of experimental composer Harry Partch, I’d want to throw in, for the poem soundtrack, a few interludes of Partch playing his cloud chamber bowls. I think Elijah would get a kick out of that. James too.
