John Foy and Joshua Mehigan: In the Wheelhouse
The following is an edited version of the text of my introduction to a reading by John Foy and Joshua Mehigan as part of the Morningside Poetry Series at Suite Bar in New York City on March 9, 2025.
While we were planning this reading, I asked John Foy if he could think of a good theme for it. John said he liked the word “wheelhouse,” and so the headline for our Facebook post read “John Foy & Joshua Mehigan: In the Wheelhouse.”
I then asked John what he had in mind by that tagline. In response, he provided me with a bunch of definitions—each of which, I now see, is perfectly applicable to the work of these two poets.
First, wrote John, “a wheelhouse, in its basic sense, is a pilothouse on a boat: a deckhouse for a ship's helmsman containing the steering wheel, compass, and navigating equipment.”
Well, that fits well. The books of both poets are wheelhouses equipped to contain the great range of their talents. And they’re both sharp-eyed navigators of the dark seas of our time.
Second: A wheelhouse is “a place or center of control or leadership.” Both John and Josh, having achieved technical mastery, are exemplars and excellent explainers of our art. I can also attest that Josh is a superb teacher of meter, form, and the history of English verse.
Last of all is a meaning that comes from baseball: “the section of the strike zone where it is easiest for the batter to hit the ball well.” I defy the readers of these two poets to cite very many times where, like Casey at the bat, they have ignominiously struck out.
John Foy
Although John carries his considerable gifts lightly, and often quite humorously, he’s quite a heavy hitter poetically. Today he’ll read mostly from his new book, At Play.
That title provides a clue to one side of John’s talents. Throughout his work, he’s been a student of what the Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga termed homo ludens, or man at play.
JOHN FOY
Thus, the subjects in John’s new book include such playful subjects as Curly of The Three Stooges, the horror film The Thing That Couldn’t Die, and male priapism. He is that rare thing, a poet who can be sidesplittingly funny.
Deeper down, however, his work displays the courage to stare down the darkness that surrounds us, in Robert Creeley’s phrase.
Most of the time his poems feature a satiric edge, as, for example, when he impersonates a corporate voice message or when he casts a gimlet eye on the phony uses of an overused phrase like “reaching out.”
One poem in the new book takes off from a line of Keith Richards’s, one of this poet’s comic heroes: “It’s great to be here. It’s great to be anywhere.” But then, the poem descends lyrically into the darkness of longing for a lost childhood love: “When I left you that summer, your blond hair/I gave up hope of here, of anywhere.”
This funny poet ends on a note of something like existential despair: “But I, John Foy, have nothing left to say/you are not here or there or anywhere.”
Joshua Mehigan
Eleven years ago, Farar Straus & Giroux published Accepting the Disaster, Joshua Mehigan’s second book of poetry. Hearing Josh read the book’s two lengthy masterpieces, “The Orange Bottle,” a harrowing narrative of madness written in jauntily rhymed trimeter quatrains, and the chillingly dystopian title poem, many of us sensed that a major book of poems was on its way. Since its arrival, some of us have considered it one of the most important books of poetry in recent years. I feel even more so today. It’s almost as if its true time has arrived, so greatly does it catch our current zeitgeist.
JOSHUA MEHIGAN
Reading it now, I see that one of Josh’s considerable array of gifts is that he is a great anticipatory poet. By that, I mean that at the end of a Mehigan poem, you are left in suspense. In “here,” the sonnet opening Accepting the Disaster, we encounter an apparently changeless scene, a town in which you will find ‘no big surprises.” The seasonal monotony is brightly relentless: “white snow, green buds, green lawn, red leaves, white snow.” And then a mysterious sense that something has changed insinuates itself. “is it the people? Houses? Fields? The weather?”
The answer comes in the quietly devastating final line: “nothing ever changes, till it does.” That sense of anticipation reminds me of a Twilight Zone episode that gives me chills just to think of its title, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” A preternatural intuition of what may be coming next endows the long poem “Accepting the Disaster” with a prophetic power.
While it’s true that climate change provided the poem with the anxiety of a slow-moving calamity spreading into the future, these lines uncannily anticipated the pandemic:
The NGOs and global censuses
Found that in wars and fatal illnesses
Half the world ranked above world averages,
Millions succumbed to downlevel viruses
The end rhymes of pluralized nouns—censuses, illnesses, averages, viruses—drive the poem and attest to the technical ingenuity of this poet. More to the point, the poem lands us in medias res of our current global political disaster, and advises us to accept it.