Read the Poem Here!

Parker Webb: So, tell me a little bit about “The Registry,” just like a little overview. Anything you’d like to share about it?

Dustin Faulstick: Yeah, I like talking about this prose poem because it has a kind of story behind it. You know, sometimes ideas just spring from our minds, but more often, they don’t. In this case, there was this interesting thing that happened.

It started with my partner’s sister. She was going to a wedding and looking at the registry and saw that one of the options was a kitchen organizer. She was like, “What even is that? I don’t know what that is.” The funny thing is, unbeknownst to her, her partner decided to buy it for the couple. That’s what he got them—the kitchen organizer.

She found it hilarious because she didn’t even know what it was, and her partner had already ordered it online. I haven’t looked it up myself, so maybe kitchen organizers are incredibly useful and indispensable kitchen tools. But in my mind, it just sounds like one of those Little Tikes toy playsets for toddlers with fake eggs, a tiny spatula, and so on.

I thought it was an interesting little story. My partner did, too, and we started bouncing ideas back and forth about how something like this could escalate. Not for them—they’re happy; I think they’re totally fine—but we took the idea in a different, more dramatic direction.

It was fun to use this story as a starting point and to collaborate with my partner, whose sister is the person the story came from. We imagined a scenario with two people—one who wants this thing and one who doesn’t. That’s sort of how the prose poem was born.

Parker Webb: Another question I have is what got you personally into writing to begin with?

Dustin Faulstick: It’s probably helpful to know that I’m a literary historian. My PhD is in English, not creative writing, but I try to write one good poem every year. That’s a line from Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral”: I think I started saying that I try to write one good poem per year before I read Carver’s story, but, you know, we often don’t fully understand the ways things influence us.

So, as I said, I aim to write a good poem each year, and this was my poem from last year or maybe two years ago. Reading literature has definitely shaped my writing. My period of focus is early 20th century US literature, where we don’t usually see a lot of prose poems, but we do encounter some great language.

I really enjoy teaching and reading classic literature. One of the classes I teach is on 20th-century literature, covering the whole century and beyond, up to contemporary writers like Ada Limón and Marie Howe. I think my poem has a bit of a connection to their styles.

I also think that if you’re going to study something deeply, at some point, you almost have to try it yourself. Like art historians—most of them, I imagine, probably try painting at least once, right? They think, “I’m going to create something on canvas.” For me, that’s what writing poetry has been—an opportunity to try to do this thing that I like so much.

I don’t write nearly as much as many of my friends from graduate school, who have books and write every day. But I find it valuable to try to create something meaningful every once in a while. It doesn’t define my whole life, but it’s fulfilling to do something that feels important, even if it’s occasional.

Parker Webb: Tell me a little bit more about your professional life. You said you were a professor.

Dustin Faulstick: Yeah, I teach at the University of Kentucky in the Honors College, which is interesting because I don’t teach in the English department. The Honors College doesn’t have a lot of literature or creative writing students. Instead, it attracts highly motivated students who want to go to med school or be engineers or pursue graduate work, usually in fields other than literature.

Many of these students fulfill their general education requirements with honors classes. There’s an art and creativity requirement, for example, where they can earn both honors and general education credit. I often teach 20th-century U.S. literature to these non-literature students, and it’s really fun. The small classes make it even better.

One thing I enjoy is helping students see literature in a new way. Just the other day, we were reflecting on the semester. One student mentioned how she disliked AP Literature in high school because it felt like the only goal was to get the test questions right. She appreciated that in our class, there’s room for multiple right answers in literary analysis. It’s not unlimited, of course—your analysis has to be able to point to something in the text—but it’s not black and white, either. Unlike much of our social world, which often feels rigid and binary, literary analysis allows for nuance and multiplicity.

For example, I love teaching Sarah Green’s poem “Bruno Mars.” It’s not especially famous, but it’s a great piece. In the poem, a group of students is trying to figure out what Bruno Mars’ song “If I Were Your Man” is about. My students often engage in the same process, analyzing the song and discussing its meaning. I suggest to them that this process—thinking deeply about lyrics in pop songs—is something humans naturally enjoy. Even if they don’t see themselves as valuing literary analysis, their engagement with pop songs shows its importance. It might even be foundational to who we are and how our brains work.

Introducing students to 20th-century literature and literary analysis is incredibly rewarding. They don’t always think about literature in this way, and it’s exciting to help them discover something meaningful.

Parker Webb: Bringing it back to “The Registry,” I know something that I personally enjoy in a lot of my stories are a type of voice. When it comes to the works that I like to read, how would you describe voice in “The Registry” and maybe some of your other works?

Dustin Faulstick: I think the use of “they” and using phrases like “this one” and “that one” was quite intentional. It creates much of the voice in that poem and gives it a detached quality. To me, it feels like a story about someone else.

Of course, a lot of what’s in there comes from my own experience—things from my life that I’ve drawn on. But I was thinking about it as if it belonged to somebody else. It’s not who I am, and it’s not really about me or my partner. We’re very happy, too, by the way! But there’s something in the poem about the inevitability of it all.

That detachment comes through in how the events unfold: “They were doing this, and they were doing that. Then they decide to get rid of this and to get rid of that.” It feels like everything leads to this conclusion—“Yeah, that’s it. It’s over now.” There’s no way to stop it.

I think that sense of inevitability is something I’m interested in, particularly in the context of contemporary life. It feels pervasive. On a large scale, for example, there’s climate change—it seems inevitable that awful things are going to continue to happen, probably sooner rather than later.

On a smaller scale, I’ve noticed a shift in how students feel about the control they have over their lives. When I started teaching 15 years ago, students seemed to believe they could do anything. Now, many of them don’t feel they have much control at all. Maybe the pandemic contributed to that, but I think it’s a broader cultural shift.

Neither extreme is entirely true—we don’t have absolute control, but we’re not completely powerless. Still, this feeling of inevitability seems to permeate contemporary life, and I think the poem taps into that in some way.

Parker Webb: Can you tell me about your choice of form and why do you decide to make it more like a list or like paragraph form instead of a typical poem?

Dustin Faulstick: I love this question because it reminds me of one of my best friends and poetry friends, Patrick Swaney. He writes incredible prose poems, and I think I learned how to write them by reading his work. One of the things Patrick says—or maybe it’s something I say about his poems—is that there’s often an intentional lack of clarity in prose poems.

Of course, that can happen in lined poetry too, but with prose poems, there’s usually this sense of “fun confusion.” It’s not about making the poem overly complicated, but there’s a resistance to explaining everything. For instance, in my poem, you don’t know any of the characters’ names or which items belong to which person. I think that’s part of the fun—it creates this playful uncertainty.

My partner and I talk about this a lot: you have to trust your reader. You don’t need to spell everything out for them—they’ll figure it out. For example, they’ll understand that there are two people, and that one person likes down comforters and the other doesn’t. It’s about presenting some mystery while trusting the reader to piece things together. That’s something I think is true of most prose poems.

I might have tried this piece in lines at some point, but it didn’t feel right. I know it’s kind of a mystical answer, but Patrick has this idea that “the poem will tell you if it’s a prose poem.” It reveals itself as such during the writing process.

I had a great moment with one of my students this semester when he read Ada Limón’s “The Quiet Machine,” which is a prose poem. He was so excited when he realized he could write like that. He said, “You mean it can just be a paragraph? It doesn’t have to be in lines? I can just do it like that?” I told him, “Yes, you can,” and a really nice prose poem came out of it. 

Parker Webb: What are maybe some things that you may have thought the reader might not have caught on with your story? What are some nitty gritty details that you can think of?

Dustin Faulstick: I think I’ve touched on this already in terms of trusting the reader. It’s true that you don’t immediately know who’s who or who likes what in the poem, but I believe readers can put it together. Most people paying attention can figure it out; though, it is true, we’re not always great at paying attention these days. Still, it doesn’t require a hyper-intense level of focus—it’s not like reading Derrida.

There’s a little ambiguity in the poem, but it makes sense once you finish it. I like that balance. I don’t want the poem to be confusing to the point where it doesn’t make sense at all. In my 20^th-century literature classes, we often talk about a dividing line between modernism and postmodernism. Modernists seem to say, “You can figure it out—you just have to work for it.” Postmodernists, on the other hand, often embrace the idea that it might not make any sense, ever. Personally, I align more with the modernists. I want readers to be able to figure it out, and sometimes I’m disappointed when something feels unresolved, like in a Damien Rice song I once heard. It bothered me because I wasn’t sure he fully understood the meaning of the song himself.

To answer your question more directly—what’s something I hope readers get but might not get right away—it’s probably in the final line. Like I mentioned earlier, the poem carries a sense of inevitability, but I also want it to feel sad. I think it does feel sad. The poem shows all these things the characters have shared: they have plants, they’ve lived in different states, they have license plates together. You see that they’ve gone through so much, and if their relationship were to end—and it does end in the poem—it would be sad. Their lives would be diminished by that loss.

I imagine most readers understand that, but the final line also serves as an invitation. Yes, it leads to inevitable sadness, but perhaps it’s an opportunity for reflection. Maybe the reader can think, “That’s too bad,” but then stop and wonder, “What if I could change something in my own life to avoid that same ending?” The sadness is there, but it also offers a chance to reconsider and, maybe, to act differently.