Coda: At a reading once, a reader asked me the following question: “We’re always told how poetry will help our fiction writing, but how do you think fiction writing improves your poetry?” I’ve thought about this question a lot in the years since. Honestly, I think it helps in so many ways, but perhaps the top three are these: 1) fiction reminds me that I get to make up things and that my allegiance is not to facts but to larger truths, 2) writing character reminds me that voice and personality come from language and cadence and that these things are infinitely malleable, and 3) working with plot and tension asks me to remember the reader, reminding me that the work isn’t about me but rather is about their reading experience. That is, if I expect anyone to be interested, then I had better make things interesting and make interesting things.
Showing posts with label Siân Griffiths. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Siân Griffiths. Show all posts
Thursday, 11 April 2019
Thursday, 4 April 2019
Siân Griffiths : part five
How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?
When I first began writing poetry, I write for my university workshops, but as time went on, many of my workshop friends stopped writing or moved cities. It felt really isolating at first, but I realized that I needed to be more reliant on myself, which ended up being a good thing. I remember workshopping poems that my friends weren’t really into, and it made me doubt the work unfairly—but some of those poems found really great homes. I’m a multi-genre writer, and oddly, I will always try to find a fellow novelist to trade manuscripts when I’m ready for feedback on one of those, but with poetry, it’s usually just me and the poem. For instance, I have a poem coming out in Epoch and the only people who have read it are the journal editors who accepted it for publication. I’m really excited for it to get out into the world. I have no idea what anyone will think, which is wild.
When I first began writing poetry, I write for my university workshops, but as time went on, many of my workshop friends stopped writing or moved cities. It felt really isolating at first, but I realized that I needed to be more reliant on myself, which ended up being a good thing. I remember workshopping poems that my friends weren’t really into, and it made me doubt the work unfairly—but some of those poems found really great homes. I’m a multi-genre writer, and oddly, I will always try to find a fellow novelist to trade manuscripts when I’m ready for feedback on one of those, but with poetry, it’s usually just me and the poem. For instance, I have a poem coming out in Epoch and the only people who have read it are the journal editors who accepted it for publication. I’m really excited for it to get out into the world. I have no idea what anyone will think, which is wild.
Thursday, 28 March 2019
Siân Griffiths : part four
What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
No one is more important to me than Sylvia Plath. Her poetry broke everything I thought I knew about poetry, so many of which I learned in high school from Victorian poets. She showed me how a simple word could be elevated through cadence and contrast. Lines like “You do not do, you do not do/ Any more, black shoe” are so deceptively easy but also musical, but then she takes those long oos of do and shoe and shutting them down with “in which I have lived like a foot”—did the word foot ever feel so cramped, so final? And she opens it up again with “barely daring to breath or achoo,” which is delightfully comical. And she does this kind of thing over and over. I could read her all day.
Before her, I was really in love with Robert Browning, and I still love the way a poem like “Porphyria’s Lover” is part horror film, part confession. I remember reading that poem the first time as a high school sophomore and thinking, Whoa! Poetry isn’t supposed to be this violent, is it? But it is, and it’s beautiful. Understanding how Browning’s confessional dramatic monologues were fictions helped me understand Plath’s work as a constructed fiction as well, which I think is really important to unpacking her work and getting past the autobiographical way writers like Robert Lowell and Ted Hughes framed her poetry in general and Ariel in particular.
No one is more important to me than Sylvia Plath. Her poetry broke everything I thought I knew about poetry, so many of which I learned in high school from Victorian poets. She showed me how a simple word could be elevated through cadence and contrast. Lines like “You do not do, you do not do/ Any more, black shoe” are so deceptively easy but also musical, but then she takes those long oos of do and shoe and shutting them down with “in which I have lived like a foot”—did the word foot ever feel so cramped, so final? And she opens it up again with “barely daring to breath or achoo,” which is delightfully comical. And she does this kind of thing over and over. I could read her all day.
Before her, I was really in love with Robert Browning, and I still love the way a poem like “Porphyria’s Lover” is part horror film, part confession. I remember reading that poem the first time as a high school sophomore and thinking, Whoa! Poetry isn’t supposed to be this violent, is it? But it is, and it’s beautiful. Understanding how Browning’s confessional dramatic monologues were fictions helped me understand Plath’s work as a constructed fiction as well, which I think is really important to unpacking her work and getting past the autobiographical way writers like Robert Lowell and Ted Hughes framed her poetry in general and Ariel in particular.
Thursday, 21 March 2019
Siân Griffiths : part three
What poetry books have you been reading lately?
Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Dan Brady’s Strange Children, Maggie Smith’s Good Bones, Matthew Olzmann’s Mezzanines, Janine Joseph’s Driving Without a License, and Kirsten Kaschock’s Confessional Science-fiction: A Primer
(Actually, it’s been a couple of years since I first read the Vuong, but it’s so mind blowing and awesome that I can’t stop thinking about it and returning to it.)
Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Dan Brady’s Strange Children, Maggie Smith’s Good Bones, Matthew Olzmann’s Mezzanines, Janine Joseph’s Driving Without a License, and Kirsten Kaschock’s Confessional Science-fiction: A Primer
(Actually, it’s been a couple of years since I first read the Vuong, but it’s so mind blowing and awesome that I can’t stop thinking about it and returning to it.)
Thursday, 14 March 2019
Siân Griffiths : part two
What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
There’s not much about poetry that isn’t difficult, which honestly is part of what draws me to it. I grew up in Southern California, and I used to love watching skaters working on tricks. Skaters have reputations as being slackers, but I didn’t see that. Instead, I saw people who were always trying to do the next hardest thing because the next hard thing is the cool thing and who didn’t want to be cooler? I feel that same way about writing: if you do things you know you can pull off, it’s boring. Boring isn’t worth spending time on. You have to reach and do the things that are tricky to pull off because that’s where things get interesting.
I feel like I’m dodging a little though, so I’ll be more specific: as someone who spends a lot of her time writing prose, I will admit that I find line breaks baffling. I spend way more time that I would like to admit trying to figure out how any one poem should arrange itself on the page. I stare at the way published work break their lines, too, and try alternatives in my head, trying to figure out why the poet landed on the ones they chose.
There’s not much about poetry that isn’t difficult, which honestly is part of what draws me to it. I grew up in Southern California, and I used to love watching skaters working on tricks. Skaters have reputations as being slackers, but I didn’t see that. Instead, I saw people who were always trying to do the next hardest thing because the next hard thing is the cool thing and who didn’t want to be cooler? I feel that same way about writing: if you do things you know you can pull off, it’s boring. Boring isn’t worth spending time on. You have to reach and do the things that are tricky to pull off because that’s where things get interesting.
I feel like I’m dodging a little though, so I’ll be more specific: as someone who spends a lot of her time writing prose, I will admit that I find line breaks baffling. I spend way more time that I would like to admit trying to figure out how any one poem should arrange itself on the page. I stare at the way published work break their lines, too, and try alternatives in my head, trying to figure out why the poet landed on the ones they chose.
Thursday, 7 March 2019
Siân Griffiths : part one
Photo credit: Megan Griffiths
How did you first engage with poetry?
When I was a high school student, I thought of poetry as I had been taught to think of it: a form of self-expression. I wrote accordingly, producing dreadful, angsty, abstraction-filled cries from the heart. At the same time, I kept a notebook in which I would copy favorite poems and song lyrics, including anything from Robert Herrick to Sylvia Plath to Depeche Mode. I think I started to sense the gap between what they were doing and what I was doing. I began to realize that poems needed to be about more than the poet. As a reader, I started thinking about how poems made me care, which translated into my writing as I started reaching for ways for my words to do more work. I’m still reaching.
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