What do you feel that poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
I turn to poetry to be led by a different logic than the kind that produces a lot of the algorithms that increasingly dictate our behavior. Poetic logic derives from what the body knows, what arrives through the senses and heart as well as the brain. At a formative period I encountered the poetics of silence and I will pledge allegiance to that flag forever, and more and more, as the noise continues to amplify in a seemingly deliberate attempt to drown out wisdom and kindness.
I am finding that over time, doing art is less about trying to get something and more about wanting to make and to participate. Letting the ego sit quietly on the shelf for longer periods is a huge relief and actually leads to much greater productivity and happiness. I am grateful to all the friends who help me constantly recommit to a poethical (to quote Retallack) path.
Thursday, 31 January 2019
Tina Mozelle Braziel : part one
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
Poetry gives direct access to someone else’s interior world, how their mind moves, how they grapple with being alive, and how they make meaning.
Wednesday, 30 January 2019
Elizabeth Ross : part three
How do you know when a poem is finished?
Mostly when enough time has passed that I can get into it objectively. I think finished-ness ideally happens after it’s been written, revised, left alone for awhile, and then read by someone else, ideally an editor or another writer, and I’ve had a chance to think about their comments and revise some more. And publication is a pretty good sign a poem is done, but not necessarily a guarantee.
There are other ways for a poem to be finished: sometimes a poem ends up being more of a process than a poem, or more of a thought exercise, and it kind of finishes itself — it was its own point. So, finished — and left on my hard drive (hopefully!).
Mostly when enough time has passed that I can get into it objectively. I think finished-ness ideally happens after it’s been written, revised, left alone for awhile, and then read by someone else, ideally an editor or another writer, and I’ve had a chance to think about their comments and revise some more. And publication is a pretty good sign a poem is done, but not necessarily a guarantee.
There are other ways for a poem to be finished: sometimes a poem ends up being more of a process than a poem, or more of a thought exercise, and it kind of finishes itself — it was its own point. So, finished — and left on my hard drive (hopefully!).
Tuesday, 29 January 2019
Vannessa Barnier : part four
When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
There are three writers who have had the most influence on me: Donald Barthelme, Gary Lutz, and Diane Williams. It’s a combination of DB’s stories and characters, GL’s use of unconventional suffixes and complimentary words, and DW’s obscuring of the every day that have the most influence on my style. My copies of Sixty Stories, I Looked Alive, and Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty are in tatters.
There are three writers who have had the most influence on me: Donald Barthelme, Gary Lutz, and Diane Williams. It’s a combination of DB’s stories and characters, GL’s use of unconventional suffixes and complimentary words, and DW’s obscuring of the every day that have the most influence on my style. My copies of Sixty Stories, I Looked Alive, and Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty are in tatters.
Lenea Grace : part five
How important is music to your poetry?
Music drives and influences almost all of my work. In the crown of sonnets I’ve been writing, I’m talking JD Souther, Linda Ronstadt. I’m talking 70s Texas music: Jerry Jeff Walker, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark. The poems aren’t about them – spoiler alert, they’re about me – but they loom large in my psyche.
Music drives and influences almost all of my work. In the crown of sonnets I’ve been writing, I’m talking JD Souther, Linda Ronstadt. I’m talking 70s Texas music: Jerry Jeff Walker, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark. The poems aren’t about them – spoiler alert, they’re about me – but they loom large in my psyche.
Monday, 28 January 2019
Tyler Truman Julian : part two
How do you know when a poem is finished?
When I was working on my forthcoming book, Wyoming, “finished” largely depended on if the new work was meaningfully adding to the work I had already drafted and was helping complete the “story” I was trying to tell. All the poems in that book are linked and build off one another, so the story of the collection felt equally as important as the poetics. In general though, I believe a poem is finished if it is emotionally, structurally, symbolically “true” to the moment in which it was written, and if I can still see that truth down the road. As a result, maybe strangely (naively?), I try not to look back at poems I have written once I have gone through many drafts and begin sending them out.
When I was working on my forthcoming book, Wyoming, “finished” largely depended on if the new work was meaningfully adding to the work I had already drafted and was helping complete the “story” I was trying to tell. All the poems in that book are linked and build off one another, so the story of the collection felt equally as important as the poetics. In general though, I believe a poem is finished if it is emotionally, structurally, symbolically “true” to the moment in which it was written, and if I can still see that truth down the road. As a result, maybe strangely (naively?), I try not to look back at poems I have written once I have gone through many drafts and begin sending them out.
Sunday, 27 January 2019
John Luna : part two
2. What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
Part of my interest in relating to poetry pertains to my own problems as a reader, and how a person should go about accessing ideas in writing. Poetry has often just seemed like the most efficient way to communicate a material sensibility in writing urgently, with a figural relationship to the structure of the writing (its syntax, its appearance on the page) that is direct and also directly reflexive. The problem of introducing characters is avoided, as is the problem of framing arguments, yet characters and arguments occur. We get close to the visual, to conventions of speech and even body language, as to conventions of rhetorical oratory like truism, epigram, etc., always with the ability to slip back into thought and the process of language’s just achieving coherence. Even the lyrical or the musical can fall back into silence or forward into traffic.
Part of my interest in relating to poetry pertains to my own problems as a reader, and how a person should go about accessing ideas in writing. Poetry has often just seemed like the most efficient way to communicate a material sensibility in writing urgently, with a figural relationship to the structure of the writing (its syntax, its appearance on the page) that is direct and also directly reflexive. The problem of introducing characters is avoided, as is the problem of framing arguments, yet characters and arguments occur. We get close to the visual, to conventions of speech and even body language, as to conventions of rhetorical oratory like truism, epigram, etc., always with the ability to slip back into thought and the process of language’s just achieving coherence. Even the lyrical or the musical can fall back into silence or forward into traffic.
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