S. T. Brant : part five

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

I’m going to try to take this down a different road than just saying ‘writing is the most difficult part of writing’ because you can just scroll down your twitter timeline and see a million tweets a day affirming that. Instead, I’ll try to talk about what made it difficult for me. I used to be prolific in my youth. It’s a good thing I’m not anymore because I was also, generally, bad. But rattling off those easy things was probably good for me. Now, of course, the challenge is beginning: getting up the nerve to tackle the vision you have for what the idea should be and the prophetic certainty that your mortal coil will only be able to shuffle off a debased version of the ideal. See? The problem is that: nihilism precedes the opening, so the beginning never begins. If you have no hope that you can measure up to what Time demands, your despair will lead you to oblivion’s plate, and the insatiable emptiness will collect you as it does all. Then you counter yourself: if it collects all, better to be collected with a long trail behind you of artefacts rather than a deep inwardness of unsubstantiated ideas- and yet… Nothing reigns. This can become especially prominent once you shift from the private, youthful scribbles, or the private scribbles that predate the consciousness that you’re in the literary world into the conscious striving to set up a prominent place in the literary market- and you meet denial, rejection, muted or negative reactions when you only ever encountered praise in your little world. And digging out of the hole that is the comparing world of literature, submitting for publication, the measurements of publication, where the locations of the published pieces are ranked by prestige, all this then becomes part of your poetic psyche, and your writing is no longer about transcribing an ideal into a form but now about doing so in a way that pleases or defeats those who have hurt you, to join the crowd you’re outcast from. Maybe some people escape this or do better with it. But the real trial becomes: how are you able to get back to the place where writing poetry is about writing poetry and not about the game? The game presents a major obstacle, one which you, the writer, typically exaggerates to your own doom. Life builds walls enough: finding time to think and work in the midst of life. That’s the bulk of the difficulty there: the external hindrances that life thrusts upon us all- how do we overcome these sufficiently to work? Some can compartmentalize better than others: when they arrive home, they can cast aside the day’s drudgery; others take longer to decompress to get into the state they need to be in to let themselves feel what they need to feel to think. Finding your own groove is one of the difficulties. Sometimes your groove changes on you, and you need to reestablish how you overcome. Basically, life is determined to make writing poetry difficult. But sometimes it comes easy. Some poems flood out, and those are beautiful. Sometimes routine, by this I mean a work routine- maybe a job where the duties are fairly rote, or more physical and you feel you have your entire mental side to yourself- puts us in a position to work better. For me, it doesn’t. I’m a baby. I’m overwhelmed easily, and the slightest draught displaces me. I’ll cry that the world is set against me and wallow. Life is conspiring against my work. No one cares. Only me. In that reality, the only way out is through- a saying that may be cliché, but which helps me step on a plane and endure. Write or die. Obviously, I don’t want anyone to adopt that. I’ve adopted it because I hold myself to harsher and more merciless standards than I apply to others, but even hyperbolically, the point holds: work or don’t, but the suffering of not working will eventually outweigh the suffering of working. 

S. T. Brant : part four

Why is poetry important?

It isn’t, which is why it is. I’ll divide my answer to this in a pretty banal dichotomy: to those that consider literature Life and those that don’t. For the latter, if poetry has any importance at all, it’s minor- which could still be admitting to some importance, sure, but the qualities that make it important are different than what make it important to other people and maybe even what the writers thought would be the important chords they played. I think if poetry can be even the least important and serve as a distraction from life and a path inward, then it has already done enough- and in fact is likely more crucial than is outwardly acknowledged. Poetry sneaks up on you. Reading may never be their seminal recreation, it may be a chore, it may not be something they spend their whole day and night contemplating, and they may not spend all their time in bookstores, or consider visiting all the bookstores in the places they travel to vacation-worthy: in which case, poetry isn’t Important, but it can still be important. In those cases, poetry does have to be sneaky; it has little time to operate, and in that time it has to garden quickly: something in it needs to take root, it needs to leave something within that invites that person back, back within, where maybe they don’t spend much time, and invite them to investigate, to get to know that dark interior. But that time in solitude, when someone spends time with themselves in a part of themselves unfamiliar and learns to be alone, kicking open a new dimension to themselves- this poetry can do and is why it’s important. Letting someone get to know themselves better and become a richer character. For those that deem literature Life- what’s to say? The model of Important is Poetry. I don’t like the whole ‘what can poetry do? ‘how necessary is poetry?’ ‘is poetry dead?’ yada, yada, yada. It’s always Nothing/Everything; No/Yes; Yes/No. The words and I are often in strife, which is probably as it should be, because they don’t need me, and the contest is to prove them wrong and force some admission on their end that I made some inroads into what’s possible with language that even they didn’t anticipate, when all is said and done. But Poetry is important in that regard to me and me only because that’s the battle. Maybe if I say the right thing and get the idea right and the poem comes out as I have a vision of it, then maybe it can become important to someone for whom poetry isn’t generally important, or even maybe to someone for whom poetry is life. But I really only care about how important Poetry is to me and make no bones about convincing others. Even with my students, my goal isn’t to lecture them into assent, but to, sneakily, by the end, hopefully have demonstrated, whether through example or some blossom blasting through the dry season of the year, that there’s power in moving and being moved. I probably didn’t answer this question well. It’s hard. I’ve rambled and landed back at the beginning that it’s important to me. There’s a million anecdotes of it being meaningful in the world and being nothing in the world, and I think that’s how it should be. It’s the shadow-king. 

S. T. Brant : part three

How important is music to your poetry?

Right now, it’s the trope, par excellence. The mythology of this book centers on the ideas of ‘Harmony’ and ‘Melody’, and then musical metaphors abound. It makes sense since poetry is musical, but it’s also funny because music isn’t really that important to me in life, in that, I don’t actually spend a lot of time listening to music. Only when I’m driving. Even at the gym I’ll just listen to whatever is playing over the speakers but don’t listen to my own music. I prefer silence to music when I’m working or even just sitting around, and I can’t read with music playing at all. I just can’t seem to push it to the background; it’s always drifting too far forward. I’m probably pretty unsophisticated musically, even. A real plebian. Try as I might, classical music eludes me. It sounds beautiful, sure, but I can’t sustain listening for long periods. Same with jazz. I’m still trying to get into jazz because I like everything about jazz when I read about jazz, but I can never sit down and listen to jazz. Dylan, Springsteen, Costello, The Gaslight Anthem, those are my staples. The Clash. Artists like that. But even them, they’re for driving or when I’m doing something in my classroom, like decorating it or doing the end of the year chores that need to be signed off on. All that’s to say that music is more important to me as a trope than an actual source of joy in life. I guess like most things, I enjoy them idealistically above enjoying them sensually. 

S. T. Brant : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

I started out writing songs for a band I was in in middle school. Terrible songs. They’ve thankfully vanished. I know youthful writings are generally embarrassing, but… yikes. I was never a great musician, either. My friends that I was in the band with are actually still playing! I’ve lost touch with them, but they’ve stayed close and, I think, still play together. So that’s pretty cool. But I began writing songs, then when I left the band in high school and dropped all musical ambitions, I stopped writing anything. Then there’s a blank until I met this one girl. Her and I become close, and I start telling her about my band days and show her the current music of the guys I played with, which impresses her, which makes me jealous; so I mention that I wrote songs and show her some of the lyrics. She assigns me homework: write more. She gives me a deadline: a new song by next week. For years I always called poems ‘Deadlines’ because I would always say I can’t write poems, so I called them songs, then called them ‘deadlines’ (even though I was always late turning them into her). Now it’s become about trying to impress Time, but it all started out trying to impress a girl. 

S. T. Brant : part one

S. T. Brant is a Las Vegas high school teacher. His debut collection Melody in Exile will be out in 2022. His work has appeared in numerous journals including Honest Ulsterman, EcoTheo, Timber, and Rain Taxi. You can reach him on his website at ShaneBrant.com, Twitter: @terriblebinth, or Instagram: @shanelemagne. 

What are you working on?

Everything and nothing, it feels like. I’m trying to make a point to review more work, so I have a few poetry reviews on the docket. Otherwise, I have a poetry manuscript in the works. Life Between Transmigrations. That title will change but for now it helps me keep track of the idea. It’ll be the first note in a big song. Told through a series of dramatic monologues and narratives, an ‘epic’ in psychic fragments, traversing mythical, literary, historical personas, the same soul’s journey from the origin when he broke off from god to now, the day it All ends, and he confronts his exiled source. We’ll see what becomes of it. I have a few things written for it now. But it may wind up being multiple volumes because I also have a gnostic treatise of epistles written from one of Paul’s rivals going, St. Brant, which was supposed to be part of that manuscript but has seemed to take on a life of its own. These poetic works are supposed to complement the dramatic as well. Like O’Neill’s plan to write a huge cycle, I have a Vegas cycle: Meadow the Shadow of Golgotha. Also a title I’m not married to but helps keep me grounded to the concept. To turn Vegas into Dublin, that’s the plan, and be synonymous with Sin. Plays and poems: those are the projects, with the littlest bit of critical prose to help fight off the indolence. These ideas probably sound like unpublishable hodge-podge (most journals agree with you!), but hopefully not. If I get it right… that’s the thing… if I get it right, it’ll be Great.