Regan Good : part five

What are you working on?

I am currently working on fourth and fifth poetry manuscripts simply by putting poems into two sliding and approximate piles.  There could be a sixth book between those two piles that I’m too dumb to see. I’m really not good at the “get your book in order” analytical work.  My heart hurts when I see workshops and the like offered on “How to order your manuscript.”  There is so much commerce around poetry right now, so much junk, I am deeply suspicious—really, I’m a big drag about it.  For God’s sake, just write your poems!  I think Dana Levin Tweeted something the other day like, “Can’t I just call my book, ‘What I Wrote from 2014 Until Today?’” A poem comes when it comes, you can’t make the writing of poems directed and expect good poems; you can not set out to make a product.  It’s all gotten very A+ student out there and A+ students are incredibly tedious and predictable, even those claiming experimentation.  I like some human smell left in a poem—problems, oddities, wildness, even a typo at this point is welcome.  At fifty-three, I am really only now starting to write well.  Or maybe I’m deluded.  I don’t know, life is a dream. 

Regan Good : part four

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I can reread it and not feel as Lowell said “paralyzed by fact”…the poem doesn’t feel lurid, garish or grouped.  Words aren’t laid or pasted down, instead the pressurized words form a matrix, a world, and you need to interact with it and be in that mess of potentiality.  If I think I’m beginning to think too much, I stop writing and walk away.  So years may go by before anything is finished.  But when I close them down, I still want the feeling of “no conclusion.”  I was editing someone’s poem the other day and she asked, “Are you as hard on your own poems?”  Oh my God, yes.  Worse.  I have a Supreme Court Justice of Poetry in my head, always, always.  

Regan Good : part three

How important is music to your work:

You mean rhythm and sound combined?  Without music, it is not poetry.  It just isn’t.  It is something else that could be interesting for other reasons, but music is elemental to poetry.  Music is the engine; thought is not the engine.  No music?  You have prose maybe artfully arranged.  To me it is Death.  That is the truth.  Poetic music was first the sound of clapping or feet stamping around a fire, maybe with some chanting or groans added in.  Rhythmic utterance, incantation, dream, intuition, song, prayer.  Music is the most elemental part of the art and I refuse to abandon it.  There are some interesting flat sounding poems out there that do work, so what do I know?  Still, how else does one really reach another place?  You need transport.  It is true that you have to be sure you don’t lie with your music.  Be careful that it doesn’t lull you into saying a half-truth or something sentimental or fuzzy.  I was preoccupied with that at Iowa, how to ensure I didn’t lie.  I was obsessed—and I still am; I wanted my poems to be pure.  In graduate school, I dropped all my dumb, half-understood college girl tools and began to work without any nets at all.  It was a mess but necessary.  (I was reminded yesterday that in high school I had wanted to be a hybrid of Thomas Wyatt and Joni Mitchell!) I’m finally seeing how that ugly period led to the poems I am writing now, the poems I wanted to write 25 years ago.  Things take a long time to settle in art, one’s own art, if you are really putting pressure on your work.  So, please, everyone remember that art is not a race, though our culture makes it seem so.  

Regan Good : part two

How does a poem begin:  

As Madame Moore said, “Ecstasy affords the occasion and expediency determines the form.”  I know when something is happening, time gets sticky and I feel both small and large at once.  A dead rose on a bush can offer entry.  It’s a textural thing.  The small thing leads to the big space that I understand as freedom; I let my mind sort of fan out until I feel like there’s a hinge or a hatch, a feeling of another world behind whatever image or bit of music afforded the poem.  This is not symbol making.  Despite the feeling of space and freedom, I do impose a lot of strictures on myself.  Poetry is a special kind of thinking, poetry is thinking that is bound to feeling, not tiny personal feelings, but to the larger archetypal feelings of human kind—love, confusion, anger, grief, horror of death, joy—whatever river the poet is in.  I’m fascinated by prehistoric Man and I try to imagine what their connection to the world was like which is impossible to know; they are our first poets.  The work they did—making sense of the world through stars, rocks, vegetation, animals, water and forging rituals and ceremonies—that is the poet’s work writ large.  I am very careful to keep myself in the Cloud of Unknowing for as long as possible when writing, every line needs to flow from the feeling of wanting to know but not knowing.  As Frost wrote, “way leads on to way.”  I keep poems “open” for years because I love the feeling of potential, or re-entering the mess of words and being in that place of suspended time.  I am always asking myself, is this room big enough?  Can I see all the corners?  If I can see the corners then I need to open a window or find a tunnel out of there, or I need to build another floor.  I wait for a feeling of overlays.  I believe that poetry is “the best words in the best order,” but I also absolutely don’t believe in perfection of any kind whatsoever, at least in regard to anything produced by Man.  I love imperfections, ruin and all examples of Wabi-Sabi in the world.  

Regan Good : part one

Regan Good attended the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and currently teaches writing at the Pratt School of Architecture and Barnard College.  She published her first book, THE ATLANTIC HOUSE, in 2011, and her second, THE NEEDLE, this year.  She lives in Brooklyn.  

Photo credit: Mia Isabella Photography

Poets I learned from:

Dead: All of the dead poets teach us/me, and I am always thinking of them (especially the American poets Dickinson, Frost, Bishop, Stevens, Berryman, Crane, Lowell, Eliot, Moore, Roethke, Whitman, Ashbery).  Yeats was foundational to me, I can’t imagine poetry without him, my middle name is Maud after Maud Gonne because Yeats was my mother’s favorite poet.  Another important influence (though why would any one care?) was Milosz and the book The Bells of Winter.  I also read Anna Akhmatova and Wislawa Szymborska at an important point as well. Rilke, too. Recently Aime Cesaire’s poems have become portals, and also St. Jean Perse’s Chronique taught me something I can’t articulate but I felt it the second I read his work—it’s huge. 

Living: I learned a tremendous amount from Jorie Graham at Iowa; her third book, The End of Beauty was very important to me.  I was saved from a path of perdition in the early 90s by Donald Revell’s work; his book New Dark Ages was a real rock in a ironic ocean.  I did not believe in the ironic style that marked the 90s (but for one or two exceptions), and I was happy to turn away from it.  Jane Mead’s beautiful work was important for that reason, a sane alternative.  Then the work of poet peers who one has known for decades informs one in imperceptible ways.  I recently gave a reading with Geoffrey Nutter and Matt Rohrer and we felt we were in a dream, listening to each other and thinking backward to who we were in 1993 in Iowa City.  A lifetime later and we are still hard at it.