Tyler Truman Julian : part one

Tyler Truman Julian is originally from Wyoming, though he currently resides in Mesilla, NM, with his wife. He is an MFA Candidate in New Mexico State University's fiction program and is an Assistant Poetry Editor for Puerto Del Sol. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Burnt Pine Magazine, Oasis, Wyoming Magazine, and Cigar City Poetry Journal, and his full-length poetry debut, Wyoming: The Next Question to Ask (to Answer), is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

Photo credit: Kelli Campbell.

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

For me, I turned to poetry out of necessity. I knew I wanted to write and felt like I had stories to tell but felt pressed for time (when I first started writing seriously, I was working on my family’s sheep ranch and going to school), and poet Sarah Suzor suggested I try writing poetry to capture quickly and dramatically the things I saw or did day to day. As a result, I began jotting down images I saw or short vignettes in the “Notes” section of my phone while out with the sheep or on horseback or in a tractor cutting hay and come back to them later. Most of the poems in my book, Wyoming: The Next Question to Ask (to Answer), grew this way. And, to me, that is the power of poetry. It is so distilled, so immediate, so timeless. Someone once said, if a story is a cruise ship, then a poem is the boiler room. I stand by that. Poetry allows for a powerful, immediate catharsis that can then stay with a reader for a long time. As a poet and fiction writer, I am always courting longer work, but there seems to be something in poetry that is so personal and relatable because you are able to get to the crux of the matter in just a few lines, continue on with your day, and return again and again and again in the future. There’s a freedom in this to engage with emotions that may not fare so well in a longer work that people are nonetheless looking for, and I like that. I like being able to write about riding a horse under powerlines and reflect on the anachronism of that moment, the static electricity, the way your horse dances uncomfortably, I can see that as part of a longer piece, sure, but in the immediacy, the brevity of a poem each one of those images takes on profound and lasting meaning.