When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
Here is where I return to Ondaatje. His novel Coming Through Slaughter was given to me while I was busy feeling inadequate in graduate school. I wasn’t reading much at all during that time so I was slow to start the book. But then I opened it and saw those three sonographs of dolphin sounds and my reading and writing life was completely changed. There are paragraphs and sentences and phrases in that book I can return to in any mood and become instantly recharged. Ondaatje is in a tower all his own.
And recharge is what I want to do when I get inside my own head or let somebody else work their way in. Anything that distracts from my writing. The writing is what matters; it matters more than publishing, more than praise, more than awards, it even matters more than respect. If you write, don’t let anything come before it other than family. It’s the only way to make sure you express what’s in your heart. And expressing what’s in your heart is the only reason to do anything, ever.
Showing posts with label Sheldon Lee Compton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sheldon Lee Compton. Show all posts
Friday, 3 April 2020
Friday, 27 March 2020
Sheldon Lee Compton : part four
What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
Honestly two come immediately to mind. In the order I discovered them I would say without hesitation Michael Robbins and Russell Edson. Prior to these two, Michael Ondaatje made a long-lasting impression on me, but that came through his masterpiece Coming Through Slaughter and not his poetry.
Michael Robbins had to have known when he finished writing his collection Alien vs. Predator that he had brought about a formidable shift of the poetic sensibility. Here’s a guy with a PhD. in poetry who is writing poems that every single person I’ve ever shown loves. Every single one. Memorable lines that unabashedly rhyme and take on other hyper-traditional structures and forms but have a kind of serious playfulness that is beyond what any other poet, novelist, essayist, short story writer, or playwright out there is doing. I’ll buy and read anything he writes forever.
But for total fearlessness, Russell Edson can’t be matched. Often called the godfather of prose poetry, the amazing thing is that he could have cared less about that. He didn’t care what was expected. Among many other blindingly imaginative poems, he wrote about a woman fighting a tree, a family having apes for dinner, farmers falling in love with hats. And in the midst of such faith in his own voice, there was his sense of adventure and risk. He is quoted as saying, “I sit down to write with a blank page and a blank mind. Wherever the organ of reality (the brain) wants to go I follow with the blue-pencil of consciousness.”
Honestly two come immediately to mind. In the order I discovered them I would say without hesitation Michael Robbins and Russell Edson. Prior to these two, Michael Ondaatje made a long-lasting impression on me, but that came through his masterpiece Coming Through Slaughter and not his poetry.
Michael Robbins had to have known when he finished writing his collection Alien vs. Predator that he had brought about a formidable shift of the poetic sensibility. Here’s a guy with a PhD. in poetry who is writing poems that every single person I’ve ever shown loves. Every single one. Memorable lines that unabashedly rhyme and take on other hyper-traditional structures and forms but have a kind of serious playfulness that is beyond what any other poet, novelist, essayist, short story writer, or playwright out there is doing. I’ll buy and read anything he writes forever.
But for total fearlessness, Russell Edson can’t be matched. Often called the godfather of prose poetry, the amazing thing is that he could have cared less about that. He didn’t care what was expected. Among many other blindingly imaginative poems, he wrote about a woman fighting a tree, a family having apes for dinner, farmers falling in love with hats. And in the midst of such faith in his own voice, there was his sense of adventure and risk. He is quoted as saying, “I sit down to write with a blank page and a blank mind. Wherever the organ of reality (the brain) wants to go I follow with the blue-pencil of consciousness.”
Friday, 20 March 2020
Sheldon Lee Compton : part three
Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
Oh yes absolutely. In particular in regard to prose poetry. I once thought prose poetry was a high-brow way of describing a paragraph of straight prose. But the more I read, the more I saw how lyrical the form can be while maintaining a solid foundation rather than mucking around with obscurity for obscurity’s sake. I think mostly of Lydia Davis’s work when considering this approach. Her “stories” could as well be “poems” if insight and authenticity count for anything, and both certainly should. Standing in direct opposition to this more relatable kind of poetry would be poems written by the likes of Wallace Stevens. I’m aware I’m on cusp of utter blasphemy saying so, but I can’t stand Stevens’s work. And it’s likely for the same reason Harold Bloom worshipped it; Stevens seemed to go out of his way to write poetry for some elite idea of other poet-readers, poets who, themselves, wrote poems for the others in turn, hoping to create their own kind of secret, exclusive language built to stroke one another’s bruised sense of self. Or there’s always the chance these poets were just more educated and more talented than me and I’m missing something. Who knows really?
Oh yes absolutely. In particular in regard to prose poetry. I once thought prose poetry was a high-brow way of describing a paragraph of straight prose. But the more I read, the more I saw how lyrical the form can be while maintaining a solid foundation rather than mucking around with obscurity for obscurity’s sake. I think mostly of Lydia Davis’s work when considering this approach. Her “stories” could as well be “poems” if insight and authenticity count for anything, and both certainly should. Standing in direct opposition to this more relatable kind of poetry would be poems written by the likes of Wallace Stevens. I’m aware I’m on cusp of utter blasphemy saying so, but I can’t stand Stevens’s work. And it’s likely for the same reason Harold Bloom worshipped it; Stevens seemed to go out of his way to write poetry for some elite idea of other poet-readers, poets who, themselves, wrote poems for the others in turn, hoping to create their own kind of secret, exclusive language built to stroke one another’s bruised sense of self. Or there’s always the chance these poets were just more educated and more talented than me and I’m missing something. Who knows really?
Friday, 13 March 2020
Sheldon Lee Compton : part two
How did you first engage with poetry?
My first exposure to poetry, beyond the mush they serve up in high school, was with my uncle Gayle’s poems. He’s a well-known Appalachian poet and started letting me read his work when I was very young, around eleven or so. He treated me like a peer even then, and had already won numerous awards for his work, including an unprecedented three consecutive Plattner awards, a high water mark for Appalachian writers throughout the state. I read and reread his poems back then and can still remember images from them, such as the moon hanging yellow in the sky and one in which he cuts himself shaving while turning thirty. Even today one of my favorite pieces of literature ever is a poem of his called “Nine Cedars” that has as its subject his grandfather and my great-grandfather Augustus Payne Hobson.
My first exposure to poetry, beyond the mush they serve up in high school, was with my uncle Gayle’s poems. He’s a well-known Appalachian poet and started letting me read his work when I was very young, around eleven or so. He treated me like a peer even then, and had already won numerous awards for his work, including an unprecedented three consecutive Plattner awards, a high water mark for Appalachian writers throughout the state. I read and reread his poems back then and can still remember images from them, such as the moon hanging yellow in the sky and one in which he cuts himself shaving while turning thirty. Even today one of my favorite pieces of literature ever is a poem of his called “Nine Cedars” that has as its subject his grandfather and my great-grandfather Augustus Payne Hobson.
Friday, 6 March 2020
Sheldon Lee Compton : part one
What are you working on?
Over the past year or so I’ve worked on prose poetry and what I’ve come to refer to as footnote poems. I stayed away from it for several months at one point. About a year ago a writer who I won’t name did a hate piece on me and two other writers I also won’t name. Among the vitriol thrown at me was that I should never try writing “modernist stanzas” again or Jean Toomer’s coffin would “bench press” me. The piece was actually really funny, but it hurt me and caused me to take a long look at whether or not I should be writing poetry at all. I hate how I let it get to me, and I’ve only recently regained some confidence. That’s more than you probably hoped to learn with this question, but I do think I’ll have a manuscript of prose poetry ready for publication soon. Maybe one for the footnote poems at some point.
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