Aaron Belz : coda

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Yes, I would say it’s changed completely. I started out reading T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens and listening to a lot of 80s new wave music like the Smiths and R.E.M.—watching movies—a typical Gen X’er with a strong Modernist/Romantic inflection. I felt so inspired by the beauty of what I saw that I thought great art should be beautiful and inspiring. To me, Eliot’s Four Quartets was just about the apex of beauty. Since then, I’ve been dragged through a pretty depressing life, experienced a lot of hurt, hurt other people, and seen about 1,000 poetry readings. I just want to turn it all off sometimes. Now I believe good poetry is something new that wakes you up, not something intoxicating that makes you moony. 

Aaron Belz : part five

How does a poem begin?

I work incessantly on words, wordplay, invented words, word combinations and inflections that delight me. Most of them don’t become poems. They’re too dumb, and I’m just a tinkerer. But sometimes a word combination sparks a new unfolding thought which leads to a new way of seeing something I’d maybe taken for granted. When then happens, I begin to craft more carefully. Even then, most of the time I arrive at something unworkable. Poems are rare! Sometimes I arrive at nothing more than the first two lines. For me, that happens relatively often.

Aaron Belz : part four

Why is poetry important? 

Poetry is increasingly important, because, with the proliferation of general opinion and subreddits and comment threads, we increasingly take language and its possible meanings for granted. Poetry has the ability to hold words up to the light and see what colors refract through them—what memories and connotations, anxieties and images. Poetry stops words cold, and reading good poetry can make you feel as though the whole world is stopping. It’s like the old Sinatra song: “The music stopped, / but we were still dancing.”

Aaron Belz : part three

How important is music to your poetry?

Music and poetry are inextricable, because each word sounds a certain way. Even printed poetry conveys music as we read it aloud in our heads. In my poetry, I use a lot of echoic language, puns, problematic phrases (that don’t quite make sense), and I do intentionally reread to see where music can be added without compromising a poem’s sense. In the past five or six years I’ve found myself more intentionally end-rhyming. Feels like I’m writing children’s books sometimes. On the natural relationship between words and music, I recommend Kenneth Koch’s Making Your Own Days. 

Aaron Belz : part two

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Close-reading Emily Dickinson in grad school changed my sense of what language can do. She opens doors in the soul many artists try to open but don’t. Of the soul Dickinson writes, “I've known her — from an ample nation — / Choose One — / Then — close the Valves of her attention — / Like Stone —” The poem ends on an emdash. Certain Words are capitalized. There’s a slant rhyme between “one” and “stone.” But mostly there’s this word: valves. It slows the quatrain to what feels like a decommissioned dam. In 18 words, Dickinson creates a world. 

Aaron Belz : part one

Aaron Belz has published four book-length collections of poetry, most recently Soft Launch, which D.A. Powell described as “a delicious set of inside jokes.” He posts new poems at http://belz.blog and daily observations at http://twitter.com/belzpoems. He lives with his wife and dog in St. Louis, Missouri. Visit http://belz.net for more information about Aaron and his work.

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

What I find most difficult is that I want too much validation for my work. Even after an evening of reading or performing at a festival or something, after which people talk excitedly to me, and I feel sated with good response—even then, it’s not enough. I go to bed feeling hollow. This becomes a practical difficulty for my poetry if I’m writing to be validated instead of writing to create something new, a new way of speaking or thinking that hasn’t happened before. That space is very different from the public space. It’s frustrating, and I feel vulnerable there.