John Cal Freeman is the type of poet whose precision is surgical, but whose scope is more like NASA’s Terra satellite. Capable of capturing the finite details of a moment in relation to the broader societal context, Freeman’s newest book, The Weather of Our Names, seamlessly weaves hyper-specific environments with deep understanding of memory, place, and self. Zig-zagging across the great mitt, we are continuously grounded in sobering depictions of impermanence imprinted through the lens of an astute mind, seemingly impervious to the petulant Michigan weather. “Nobody lives up to their memoirs; no story can remain accurate once it’s set down,” he says in one poem. Even though memory remains an ephemeral measurement of time, even though places may or may not outlast us, even though we are constantly changing, for now, these poems will endure.
From football games to family to tongue-in-cheek jabs at late-stage capitalism, Cal is distinctly a Michigan poet with clarity and an unbreakable sense of reverence, a proverbial finger in the wind, a unique sensitivity to decipher barometric pressure and define the profoundly Midwest American experience. I had the joy and honor of speaking with him about his multi-faceted approach to writing.
Reynaldo Hinojosa
One thread I keep seeing appear throughout this collection is memory, more specifically the memory of place. Can you talk about your sense of self in relation to the physical spaces you’ve grown up with and their gradual transformation: how has their change marked your change, not only as a poet but as a person?
Cal Freeman
The neighborhood where I grew up on the west side of Detroit, Warrendale, looms large in my memory and identity. Before Lansing lifted the residency requirements for Detroit city workers, Warrendale was where many of the cops, firemen, water department workers etc. lived. We also had a strong UAW presence in that part of town, which shaped my sense of the importance of organized labor at a young age. My dad was a professor at University of Detroit Mercy and my mom was a nurse, so I don’t come from a working class background, but we lived in a very working class place. This fact shows up in my poems. I often dream of that Dutch colonial on Vaughan Street. The house isn’t standing anymore, and that block has emptied out a bit, green spaces where houses once stood, beautiful in a different way. I think in this book I write about Warrendale less than I have in the past.
Most of my adult life has been in Dearborn, a city with a terribly racist past (Henry Ford is from here and Orville Hubbard was mayor for a long time). But I like the fact that contemporary Dearborn has become a diverse city that has begun to reckon with its past in a serious way. I’m also fascinated with the geology and geography of the area. We’ve got two rivers, the Rouge and the Ecorse (well, the Ecorse is in Dearborn Heights and seems more like a creek where it passes my neighborhood, but close enough) and my neighborhood is a sand ridge comprising the vestigial northern shore of Lake Erie. Before the Niagara River opened up 13,000 years ago, this Michigan/Outer Drive corridor was the northern shore of the lake. Walking these streets, you can sense what water and glaciation have done to the land and there’s all sorts of waterfowl that come back to the backyards here via some epigenetic map of the former waterways they carry inside them. If you walk past the soccer field behind OL Smith School at a certain hour of the night, killdeers will shriek at you.
Reynaldo Hinojosa
As mentioned above, there is a powerful sense of place that seems to encapsulate not only environment but our sense of identity. Can you talk a little bit about being born and raised in Michigan, the state of the state as it were, and what sets Michigan apart from other states?
Cal Freeman
Water has been important to my writing and my consciousness as a result of being from Michigan. Ever since I learned the HOMES acronym as a kindergartener, the Great Lakes have mystified and fascinated me. I love walking down to the Ecorse Creek and picturing how it flows east toward the Trenton Channel of the Detroit River, which flows into Lake Erie’s Gibraltar Bay whose water eventually makes it into the Saint Lawrence Seaway. When I was a kid, I’d go with my parents to the Gaelic League in Corktown to hear Larry Larson play his 12-string guitar and sing. One of the songs he did brilliantly was “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” and I love the description of the way the lakes flow into each other in this song. Having 22% of the world’s surface freshwater bordering our state should remind us all of the importance of environmental stewardship. I hope this sense that our rich natural resources should be cared for and protected from corporate exploitation shows up in my poems. I think of the mitten shape of the state, the peninsulas within peninsulas as mirroring the poetic self in a way; the sacred interiors we set out to reveal and protect when we write.
Reynaldo Hinojosa
For those uninitiated with Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs, there was a craze surrounding the imminent value of these unique digital identifiers (Covid was a wild ride, y’all). One article from the Guardian in September, 2023 points to researchers who’ve claimed them completely worthless. Are you saying your NFT poems are scams? Talk us through your relationship with your NFT poems and the ephemerality of memory and place.
Cal Freeman
The reality of our civic moment is that anything the office of the presidency engages in is a scam of some sort. The dialectical part of this reality is that whatever poetry is able to reify, even at its most ironic, must have some authenticity about it. What initially interested me about NFTs was that they both did and didn’t exist, and that reminded me of what happens when we internalize poems. Poems get minted on the blockchain of our memories; they have inherent value but little value in this particular hyper-corporate epoch. Yet they can offer a necessary mockery of the kind of language that assigns everything a fiduciary value at the expense of our shared humanity.
I think of place, especially the urban spaces where I’ve lived, as palimpsestic. Places are ephemeral, which is why it’s important to record what we remember about how they used to be, as fraught as this kind of project can be with misremembering and self-mythologizing.
Reynaldo Hinojosa
Far from making dramatic cry of pain or alarm, yelping in these poems is a nod to the online review platform, which by its own admission can be a desperate cry in the wind. Call it tongue in cheek, call it an Ode, whatever it is, what do you consider different from a Yelp review and your poems?
Cal Freeman
Richard Tillinghast called my Yelp poems a nonce form, and I think this is right. Yelp reviews are meant to be evaluative. These poems don’t make it to that level. I think of these poems as mystifying and elliptical. They also came out of a place of wonder, post-Covid, about which of my favorite pre-pandemic places might remain. I’m a sucker for dive bars and modest restaurants with great food. I wanted to imagine what it would be like to return to real places after lockdown, but I also imagined fictive places that I wished existed. When the poem, “Yelping the Tegmine” was first published in Ligeia Magazine a poet friend wanted to check it out the Tegmine and said she couldn’t figure out where it was. I had to sheepishly explain that I’d made it up.
Reynaldo Hinojosa
Before we dive into the titular piece in the middle of this collection, I want to explore more of your relationship to nature. The essay, “The Weather of Our Names,” literally begins with a framing of the natural world. Can you talk a little about how place, nature, and memory exchange meaning for you? Specifically, how have these elements changed for you given the space made for nature in our modern world?
Cal Freeman
I’m always thinking about the ontological problems with the term “nature.” Nature seems like something that exists independently of human observation, so from a phenomenological point of view, maybe it doesn’t actually exist. Then, when I read the first part of this answer, I’m like, “Stop bullshitting. You know exactly what Rey means by ‘nature.’” Nature is a construct, I think, and nature writing can seem less like an evocation of the natural world and more of a utilization of a set of nouns. “Phragmites” and “goby” are two that I turn to in a tacit plea to take care of distinct but interrelated ecosystems. I realize the initial part of my answer might suggest that I dislike nature writing, but I don’t when it’s done well. I owe so much to the Traverse City writer Jerry Dennis. In books like The Living Great Lakes and The Windward Shore, Dennis offers a lexicon for discussing our state and the state of nature in our state. I owe an incalculable debt to his adventures and erudition.
A little over a decade ago I realized my street dead-ended at a park that borders the Ecorse Creek, and it became a daily ritual for me to walk down there. It’s a dirty low-gradient body of water, often full of litter of fast food items and shopping carts and lawn mowers that have been chucked there. The temperament of it changes depending on that week’s amount of rainfall, and the surrounding riverain is thick with willows, poplars, eastern cottonwoods, and climbing grapevine. As I mentioned earlier, this body of water extends eastward until it hits the Detroit River; along the way it passes my grandparents’ subdivision that’s described in the title piece. This realization and practice of walking down there every day to look at the water changed my relationship to my neighborhood and this corridor of Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, Allen Park.
Reynaldo Hinojosa
Something weathered implies use, time, and enduring the elements. I find this section to encapsulate everything we’ve talked about so far, and it’s fitting you placed it in the heart of this collection. I’d like to examine family, specifically legacy: “…memory affords you the luxury of forgetting, or at least remembering selectively what was good about us.” You carry a very sobering depiction of family in this essay, can you talk about how family, place, and memory guide your writing and keen observations?
Cal Freeman
My mother’s family, the O’Neills, are a complex but exciting bunch of storytellers. My mom has that Irish cultural bent toward recitation and I still hear poetry in her voice when I read it. When we were kids in Warrendale, she’d sit up late on our big green front porch reciting Eugene Field, Edgar Allen Poe, and Alfred Noyes poems from memory. My mother has also suffered from mental illness much of her adult life, and it sometimes gets hard for me to parse that imaginative poetic energy of hers from the delamination from shared reality that has periodically afflicted her. I’m also writing about family members who are gone, the absent/present dead, and making sure I remember them. My maternal grandmother’s family was a big part of the labor movement in Dearborn. My grandmother’s first cousin, Jim Sullivan, was a leader of the ’41 strike at Ford Rouge and served as one of Walter Reuther’s bodyguards during the late-30’s. I wanted to honor that legacy by repeating some of the lore of my mother’s family, especially in this book. My maternal grandfather, William O’Neill, figures in the essay you mention too. He was a criminal defense attorney who did a bunch of pro bono work on civil rights cases and protested the Vietnam War by wearing a black moratorium armband to court during that period. I inherited my left wing politics from the O’Neill side, I think.
Reynaldo Hinojosa
“I’m incapable of loving what I inherited but haven’t earned.” Again, we’re here with place, and if you think about it, our traits, genetic or nurtured, act as a sort of anchor to bring us back (like memory), what are some things you’ve inherited but haven’t earned?
Cal Freeman
A legacy of resistance and activism. I should be doing more, especially in this moment.
My late father’s desk copies of Milton, Hart Crane, and Shakespeare. I’m not a scholar, where he was, and I wish I was more like him, which is to say a more serious, systematic reader.
The barroom banter of dives in west Detroit and third-shift spots downriver where I’ve been enriched through wasting time.
These family stories that are and are not mine to tell.
POETRY
The Weather of Our Names
By Cal Freeman
Cornerstone Press
Published September 16, 2025
