G. E. Schwartz : coda

My poetry takes on everydayness, searching out that quality of wonder which Is our true subject. I try to write, opening onto some larger mystery, one that we, no less than any other, are still trying to come to terms with.

G. E. Schwartz : part thirteen

How does a poem begin?

Waking from last night's dream (s), dialoging with its narratives and images.

G. E. Schwartz : part twelve

Why is poetry important?

Because it gives us the best possibility to present and explore our knowing and unknowing: that it can be a modest restatement of the notion that we are more than an organism in an environment, more than an integrated personality, more even than a mature and creative individual, as the phrase goes... as we are wayfarers and pilgrims.

G. E. Schwartz : part eleven

How important is music to your poetry? 

Listening to it, being moved by it, gives balance to poetry forging by example, its effectiveness in tone, mood and clarity.

G. E. Schwartz : part ten

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

There are three: Herman Melville's Pierre or, The Ambiguities, as it always reminds me how an authentic dramatic expression of profound anxieties and obsessions reveals us as a species on a path to discovery; Melville's Clarel, which, while mocking Christian allegory, addresses the deeply pastoral with virtuosity and purpose, and ALL of Margaret Avison's work, as she brings home for me at least that the elusive--and the elliptical--can stalk me with its river-deep slow whisperings.

G. E. Schwartz : part nine

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Alex Dimitrov's Together and By Ourselves, Anais Duplain's Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus, and Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic.

G. E. Schwartz : part eight

What poets changed the way you thought about your writing?

In rough chronological order: John Berryman, as his poetry showed me I could express the various voices and moods within; John Montague, as he reminded me we ALL live (in a micro and macro way) in various cultures, mostly dualistically, Joseph Brodsky, as he taught me to ALWAYS LIVE a strong defense for anything I make--that it might be made to be tried and tested, Ronald Johnson, who set a great example on the many  ways to address the vistas before me, and William Bronk, who taught me how to navigate World, as a land of dreams with its joy its beauty and often its cons.

G. E. Schwartz : part seven

What do you find the most difficult about poetry?

Building the emotional connection between the reader (or listener)and me--without that there's no compelling reason for a reader to care.

G. E. Schwartz : part six

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms cannot?

Poems at their best create solitudes where we can meet.

G. E. Schwartz : part five

How does you work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writer's group that you work ideas and poems with?

After many years ago when I workshopped and studied with the Irish American poet John Montague and soon after with Joseph Brodsky, I internalized, I believe, the patterns of serious critique, and ever since have written poems with, as the tact of my first collection (Only Others Are) implied, as visioning various individuals and groups, audiences, as it were, for placement of the works, both ghosts and those still corporeal.

G. E. Schwartz : part four

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

At near 61 now, I approach the page, especially in my "solo" work of poems themselves, as a kind of temenos, a sacred place, a space (almost a landscape) dedicated to worship or deemed divine. When at the outset, when I began writing steadily on in my teens, the last thing I wanted in my work was the imaginative power of numinosity, as then, under the heavy influence of John Berryman, it was all about creating poems as soliloquys, characters speaking their profane bits.

G. E. Schwartz : part three

How do you first know a poem is finished?

If it seems to hold its gestalt on the page and if when I read it slowly aloud, it feels it says what it has to say with no more or no less.

G. E. Schwartz : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

At about age three into four when my mother, who took me to various evening novenas and weekly and sometimes daily mass would begin to show me how to follow along the prayers on the page which in the missal were shaped like poems--they had line breaks and scansion. It was also most certainly my first introduction to reading, so both were indelibly braided within me.

G. E. Schwartz : part one

G. E. Schwartz, born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, 1958, lives in Upstate New York. He is the author of Only Others Are, World, Odd Fish, Thinking In Tongues and the upcoming Murmurations.

Photo credit: Caylin Schwartz

What are you working on?

I most always have three or even four projects on three or four burners at once. Right now: a long poem about the first Dutch exploration from Albany, New York (then Fort Orange), west to about the Mohawk River, Little Faust Goes to Hell, a multimedia work, which is being written to be produced and performed at an upcoming fringe festival, a novella about a small western New York rust-belt town in Trump's America, and a cycle of poems written as a calendar and inspired by the seasonal paintings of the painter Charles Burchfield.