Tim Moder : part five

What are you working on?

This should be the easiest question to answer, but I keep changing my mind. I have a sizable stack of poetry notebooks. I dusted them off last January and started sending out some poems.  I guess the idea was to have some published. I have had a few accepted this year as well as some positive feedback on some of the rejections. I have been thinking about publishing a chapbook. Or two. Or a chapbook and a full book. I have about 100 that I think are finished. Of the old stuff. Most of it goes back 20-30 years. I also have about 20 new ones that I’ve written this year. My dream publication is any place that publishes poetry, so I send some to the big-name places, but I also send some to small presses, and universities. I am having a great deal of fun at the present time.

Tim Moder : part four

When you require renewal is there a particular poem or book that you return to? Author?

If I truly require renewal, poetry alone will not do it for me. I have to be in nature somehow. Hiking or camping. Weeks of that will balance out whatever problems prevent me from writing.  But I will return to Eliot over and over. As well as other Imagist poets. Almost as a spiritual exercise. Spiritual as in I can get lost in the rhythm and the sound in the word choices, not in the nature of the poets. I also intend to spend a great deal of time this winter reading the poetry of Denise Levertov. I expect to have a similar experience. 

Tim Moder : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

I think I started writing poetry because I was in love with Shelley, Keats, and William Blake.  Later It became Ferlinghetti and Rexroth. More recently Mallarme, Neruda and Balmont. I’ve never written criticism, or studied poems critically, but I’m probably more attracted to poetry that doesn’t appear to follow rules. I’m sure they are following the rules. They make it sound so fluid and flawless. I recently heard a reading by a poet named Richard Berengarten, he was reading his long poem Goodbye Balkan Bell/Do vidjenja Danitse. I bought the book and it’s a great poem. He had two people shouting out place names as they related to the reading he was giving. A performance, but electric rather than expected. There are so many. 

Tim Moder : part two

What do you find the most difficult about writing poetry?

Understanding the rules regarding rhyme scheme, meter, etc. is very challenging for me. I went to one semester of college in 1990, so I have no formal training in writing.  I have read a lot of poetry, but I don’t know much about line breaks, phrasing or what kinds of poems there are. I’m not even aware of all the things about writing poetry that I don’t know. But I know they exist. I bought Jorie Graham’s Sea Change a while back and I remember thinking “You can do that?” The way the lines are formatted. I haven’t tried it, but I was blown away. I never learned about feet and meter, so I just wing it. 

Tim Moder : part one

Tim Moder is an Indigenous poet living in northern Wisconsin. He is a member of Lake Superior Writers. His poems have appeared in various publications, including Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, Penumbra Online and In Parentheses Literary Magazine. Find him on Twitter @ModerTim and Instagram @moder_poet_tim

How Does a poem Begin?

That’s really the question, isn’t it? The beginning could come from anywhere, an overheard comment, watching someone cross the street, a line in a song on the radio, organic natural life, what they call soft fascination. Something sparks a nerve, it gets your attention, it sounds different, or something you are more attracted to than usual. So you write it down. Sometimes just one or two words, or a sentence. On a napkin, a receipt, in a notebook. I’m in love with index cards. I use them for everything. So then when I get home I’ll add them to the notebook. THE notebook.  They go in there with all the rest and maybe get looked at again in a week or a month. Unless one comes all at once. But mostly the start is random.  Later comes all the hard work. Crafting it into a poem.  Initially it doesn’t appear to have very much to do with me at all. Then again sometimes I sit down to write a specific poem about something I’ve been thinking about.