Interview with Seth Wieck, author of “Call Out Coyote”

Seth Wieck is an interesting guy. On his website, he describes himself this way: “In a sentence: I grew up on a farm in Umbarger, Texas, which had a Catholic church, a post office, a grain elevator, and a liquor store but lacked a school, so I went to school in nearby Canyon from Kindergarten through Bachelor’s, earning a degree in English and philosophy, before getting work in Amarillo as a technical writer, an ad copy writer, a high school language arts teacher, an appraiser of real estate, and a writer of the literary kind; however, the varieties in which a person makes a living are hardly a biography, so more weight should be given to the relationships I’ve maintained over the years, especially with my wife and three kids for whom the living is made.” Call Out Coyote (Wiseblood Books, 2026) is his debut book of poetry. He was kind enough to answer some questions about the book, poetry, and place.

How do you explain to people what this book is about? And what do you hope will come from this book?

Explaining what a book of poetry is about is like explaining what a fishing tackle box is about. This one here you use in early June when the mayflies are mating. This one here looks like a grasshopper and will make the trout rise in August. Oh this one? That's just a dried up nightcrawler that got loose from the coffee can. 

I guess an easy entry point may be the epigraph, from a lecture by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy: "Language is the victory over death." I don't know if that's true. The poems in this book seemed to be testing it out; to see if the phrase will hold water. I wrote and collected the poems over 20 years. In that time, I met and married my wife, increased our family by three kids, changed careers a number of times, navigated the raising of children, and watched an older generation of my community begin to die. I'm firmly in the middle of my life and feel the tension to pass on the memory of this place to my kids. To sustain a communal memory that only exists in our language, which isn't exactly a stable medium.

Some people love poetry, some people don't really read much poetry. How do you explain the nature and value of poetry to people who aren't so sure about it? And I'm not only thinking about young men, but I do wonder what you would say to them. It seems younger men often do not gravitate to poetry initially, even though so many famous poets are men.

Everybody loves poetry at some point. Find a kid who doesn't love a rhyme. I remember riding the bus home from school with my friend Chris, and we'd trade off reading aloud Shel Silverstein poems. No one was twisting our arms to enjoy ourselves. My dad was a farmer. His dad was a machinist and mechanic. 

The thinking usually goes: since kids are naturally drawn to poetry, something must happen along the way. Outside of poets, teachers, and literary industry folks, I don't personally know any adults--male or female--who regularly read books of poetry. I've heard teachers are to blame. Dana Gioia criticizes the New Critics who were too good at teaching poetry. I'd disagree with that assessment, but I think he means where poetry used to be considered a folk art--of, by, and for the people-- it's now mostly been sequestered by academic specialists. At the same time I have read and accidentally memorized crude poems scratched on bathroom stalls and dive bar walls, which means young men are indeed reading, memorizing, and writing poetry. I'm more apt to believe the handwringing isn't so much a widespread cultural problem as it is a publishing industry problem of supply and demand. The United States prints over two million titles a year of all kinds; more now that AI is "writing" books. We produced that same number over the  entire 20th century. How could we possibly produce a Robert Frost; a poet everyone knows and has by heart? It seemed like we had a literary culture in which everyone could recite the same poems, but there were so few books of poetry, and what else were you going to do back then? Books have competition now. Frost's first collection arrived a full decade before widespread radio use. I could go on. There's no end to the unmaking of books.

But let's turn our attention to my theory that poetry is alive and well. A few years ago, Wes Reeves (a local poet friend) and I did a makeshift smalltown poetry tour in our area. We read poems to farmers, pastors, bankers, mothers, extension agents, and engineers in towns of less than 3,000 people. Outside of high school sports, there aren't many events. A couple of out-of-town poets at the local coffee shop was a novelty. In one town, we opened the microphone and the mayor recited Wendell Berry and his daughters recited nursery rhymes. One of the farmers who attended kept in touch on Instagram and showed me a poem he wrote during wheat harvest, then asked me to pitch in a verse. Another example, I judged a poetry contest at a small regional university where the winner won a significant scholarship. The winner was a ranch kid from Roy, New Mexico. He was an ag major whose poem was full of clear observations about the natural landscape, presented with skill. It was evident that he'd grown up in the cowboy poetry culture. Poetry was natural to him.

All that said, yet here I am with a book of poetry that I'd like to sell to people who don't have a habit of purchasing or reading poetry. I think that kid from Roy will enjoy this book.

Why do you write poetry? 

Language is fun and endlessly surprising. All the musicality of language, alliterations and assonance, rhymes and half-rhymes and rhythms, plus the ropes of history tied to each word through different languages, cultures, and geographies. Of course, that's available to the prose writer as well. The poet and fiction writer, Sally Thomas, told me this about her own writing life, and I instantly recognized it as true. It's easier to write smaller, lyrical poems when you have full time commitments elsewhere. She returned to writing fiction when her kids had all moved out of the house because she suddenly had large passages of time available. I can knock out an early draft of a sonnet on a Saturday morning and then tinker in ten minute breaks at work or while I'm driving. At some point, I expect time to open back up, and I'll write some prose. That may be after I'm dead though.

A lot of these poems relate to parents and children. How does poetry, or writing in general, help you process your relationships? Can reading poetry also help people better understand their relationships and world? 

 Judging by the vast history of unhappy poets, I hesitate to say writing poems is a benefit for relationships. For me, I find that it can be helpful, but only as an extension of a deeper practice of remembering. I have a choice to make in response to any experience. I can remember it with gratitude, as though it were a gift, or else despise it. If I despise it, then I only carry the bitterness with me, or maybe I never even perceived the experience because I've begun to train myself for spite and it all passes by unnoticed. Like the Narnian dwarfs thrown in the stable at the end of The Last Battle. Poetry is a way to remember. Maybe capturing it in beautiful language makes the memory sweeter, but it still has to be received with gratitude. And if there's anything that parenting teaches the parent, it's that life moves exceedingly fast and your attention is divided in all the moments that it should be focused and then those moments are gone. How do I remember them? I'm writing this on my oldest son's 17th birthday and am especially feeling the abrasion of time.

Many of these poems are very personal. How do you manage being so vulnerable with readers? Is that liberating? Scary? Just necessary for good art? Do you ever run some things by friends or family before you publish them?

I run everything by my wife. She's not particularly literary--as in, she wasn't trained or stained by the academy. If a poem bores her, it's likely to bore everyone. If it harms her, then I've failed in my duty to her; I've failed to imagine her with charity. The same goes for any one else who resembles a character in the book. In terms of the poems being personal, I don't know. I'm not sure I classify them as such. By the time a poem winds up in a book, it's intended for anyone's use. I do hope the poems have emotional force, that the reader is moved, but I don't feel an urge to be known by them. I don't feel vulnerable. 

The book cover is very striking. Can you tell me a little more about how you ended up with this amazing cover?

My friend Jack Baumgartner, the farming artist from Kansas, carved the cover (and the interior illustrations) from persimmon and pear tree blocks and then printed them on mulberry paper. I've been collecting Jack's art for 15 years now and have been up to his place to visit a few times. There's no one else with whom I'd rather work on this project. He and I have several collaborations planned for the next 150 years or so. The cover is mostly a milo field (from the title poem) which turns blood red as it ripens. My wife has told me that she likes books with red covers, so in some ways, it's a nod to her. There's a line too that says, "our hearts skipped like rabbits in turn rows of ribs" and Jack somehow pulled that image into it. I asked him if he'd intended to do that. He said, "Intention is a funny thing. I'm sure it's there for a reason, but probably not by my intent." I've done printmaking before, but I have no idea how he achieved the gradient from black to red. 

More about Jack. He's a path with many stones. You turn one over and find a whole ecosystem of thought. Then there's another stone and another. He'll pluck a tune on a banjo. He'll build a cabinet. He'll deliver a lamb on a cold, spring morning. He'll perform a magical puppet show. He'll speak a blessing.

Many of these poems involve place and nature. How important is place to art? Can there even be placeless art?

I may reverse the question. I'm not sure a place can be a place without art. A natural setting certainly doesn't need human artifacts to exist, but for a place to become a place--for it to survive in human memory across a generational gap--I think it needs to have art. Wallace Stegner said a place isn't a place until it has had a poet. More specifically, until it has had that highest human attention which is poetry. A place has to be named and then that name has to be passed on. Stegner supposed it would take three generations in a place to produce a poet. In that way, I think poetry which forgets its duty to make a people and a place is useless. 

Why "coyote?" Is that related more to how the word is pronounced, which is regional, or to the nature of coyote, as a trickster, etc? Or is coyote just a choice based on experience? I know the phrase "call out coyote" is in one of your poems, but how did you land on that for the title of the book?

Yes, to all of the above. The wild dog I was introduced to in the fields was pronounced ky-oat. But I also grew up watching Wile E. Coyote and understood that the word has several pronunciations. It's a loan word from Aztec through Spanish and into English. The slippery nature of the pronunciation seems appropriate for the slippery nature of the coyote. They live on the borders of human civilization, passing amongst us and then disappearing. They hunt with strategy. They talk. They're indefatigable survivalists. My dad says, when the last man dies, a coyote will dig up his grave and run off with his femur. In mythology, they have supernatural qualities, often meant to teach humans some lesson. The phrase happens a few times in the book, both as a father and son call out when they see a coyote, and also when a father and daughter hear coyotes calling. There's some supernatural communication that happens through them. As the book came together, the idea of language being a way to survive became clearer. I don't want to push it into outright symbol territory. A coyote is a coyote. If it's merely a symbol, then to hell with it.

Your book has a few different sections. Did you have those sections in mind and organize the poems around them, or did the sections emerge from the poems themselves?

I'm not a planner. Several years ago, before smart phones, I went to Rome with some friends. One of those friends was the planner. I'm glad he was on the trip. Before we left the hotel each morning, he memorized the route we would take, and then expertly showed us the sites. I, on the other hand, was usually about 100 yards behind, looking at rocks or gargoyle faces on a minor church. It became a joke about our personalities. However, when we discuss that trip now, I usually have much more vivid memories about the experience. All this to say, that's how I organized the book. I got where I needed to go, but I don't know how I got there. I do remember the gargoyle though.

This is your debut book of poetry. You've obviously been writing poetry for a while, but why is now when we are seeing this book? Was there a sense of urgency on your part or was the timing just right? Why this book, right now?

I've been writing and publishing in earnest since college. High school really. I had a brief stint as a poet for hire, writing romantic poems for tongue-tied dudes, like Cyrano de Bergerac. But ask my wife, I am not an urgent person. In many of my friend Jack's drawings, he'll include a turtle in the background. I've watched him work on a single painting for over a decade. That is my pace. Poetry is not a medium for the news. It doesn't exclude the news, but if you're aiming to make something that lasts, that preserves a communal memory beyond your life, then the poem needs to hold up against time. How can you possibly judge that unless some actual time passes? I'm 45 now. I hope I'm not 90 when the next book is finished, but I'm willing to reserve the possibility that it might take that long.

Wiseblood Books is still a younger press. What should people know about Wiseblood Books?

Wiseblood is eleven or twelve years old now. There was some interest in this manuscript from a few different presses, but Wiseblood won me over for a couple of reasons. First, they're willing to sing songs; not chase trends. Right about the time I signed my contract, they published The Woman without a Shadow, which was written first as a post-World War I opera libretto and then reimagined as a novella. Can you imagine that being pitched at a corporate meeting over a Zoom call? Some lowly acquisitions editor would be tossed out by security within 10 minutes. Not because the book isn't viable in the marketplace (anything is viable if it's interesting and well done), but because it didn't adhere to the model of low-risk derivatives. I mean, Wiseblood is publishing a trilogy of verse plays (in 2026!) by Jane Scharl, the first of which is a hilarious, medieval murder mystery. That's straight up courageous! The second thing they're doing is cultivating a reading audience that can and will read those kinds of stories. They publish a series of monographs which are wonderful little educations. My 22 year old self wishes these would have been around when I first set out to write.

I noticed in the bit of information about you that you have held a lot of different jobs at some point in your life. How did your various jobs help make you a better observer and/or writer?

Working in different kinds of jobs has placed me in proximity to a bunch of wild characters. Everyone should teach high school at some point because you are exposed to the widest cross section of your town, in adolescence. Construction is the same way. I guess that could be a good source of material, but largely, it's just good to know the people in your town. What makes a town economically tick? What culture makes a people stick? What's the gossip?

In your "Note for the Reader" you reference a lot of other writers. How important for a writer is a community of fellow writers (or readers or other creative people)?  

Of utmost importance. All the famous writers you know are the result of the foolhardy confidence of their friends. Being a writer does not compute for the average man-on-the-street. You have to find people who believe writing is a legitimate vocation, believe in what you're doing, and in whose work you believe. Finding all three of those things is difficult.

You're on the board at the Center for the Study of the American West. Can you tell me a little more about that Center? 

The Center for the Study of the American West is hosted by my alma mater, West Texas A&M. Its primary concern is the study and promotion of the history west of the 98th meridian, where the climate becomes decidedly drier and the population more sparse. That involves everything from natural history and ecosystem scholarship, to indigenous cultures that inhabited the plains, to cattle drives and petroleum exploration. We have an abundance of fascinating history, much of which has contributed to the broader American culture, but haven't had a lot of scholarship or voices telling those stories. The Center is mostly student scholarship focused (encouraging young local people to learn their own history is a primary mission), but also hosts several community outreach events throughout the year. 

You can order Call Out Coyote from Wiseblood books here.

Interview conducted by Elizabeth Stice