I think my favourite poem is the youtube video “Lasquite’s Saint Bernards 2011” and everyone should experience it!
Showing posts with label Brad Casey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brad Casey. Show all posts
Monday, 25 March 2019
Monday, 18 March 2019
Brad Casey : part five
How important is music to your poetry?
Very! I listen to a lot of instrumental music while I’m writing like the Dirty Three and Phillip Glass and Joana Brouk and Gail Laughton. Lorca has a lecture on the duende, something that is wordless, not a concept but maybe something resembling a feeling like a core of happiness within a vaster experience of sadness. Listening to Nick Cave or PJ Harvey or the song Dido’s Lament, those things often reach toward duende. I move for music that approaches that when I write. It’s a mood I’m enamoured with. Duende is central to my practice for sure.
Very! I listen to a lot of instrumental music while I’m writing like the Dirty Three and Phillip Glass and Joana Brouk and Gail Laughton. Lorca has a lecture on the duende, something that is wordless, not a concept but maybe something resembling a feeling like a core of happiness within a vaster experience of sadness. Listening to Nick Cave or PJ Harvey or the song Dido’s Lament, those things often reach toward duende. I move for music that approaches that when I write. It’s a mood I’m enamoured with. Duende is central to my practice for sure.
Monday, 11 March 2019
Brad Casey : part four
When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
I always go back to Federico Garcia Lorca. I have his collected works. I often open to wherever, whatever page and start reading. His work clears my mind. I read about a meditation technique from Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist monk who studied under Chögyam Trungpa and is deeply involved with a monastery in Cape Breton called Gampo Abbey. She says that when your mind is wandering you can clear it by thinking the word “thoughts.” Say it in your mind. Thoughts. It can clear your mind, help you breathe slower. That’s what reading Garcia Lorca is like for me. It’s like a big, empty, quiet field.
I always go back to Federico Garcia Lorca. I have his collected works. I often open to wherever, whatever page and start reading. His work clears my mind. I read about a meditation technique from Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist monk who studied under Chögyam Trungpa and is deeply involved with a monastery in Cape Breton called Gampo Abbey. She says that when your mind is wandering you can clear it by thinking the word “thoughts.” Say it in your mind. Thoughts. It can clear your mind, help you breathe slower. That’s what reading Garcia Lorca is like for me. It’s like a big, empty, quiet field.
Monday, 4 March 2019
Brad Casey : part three
What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
Very early it was the Beat writers. To write freely, that appealed to me. YB Yeat’s poem When You are Old. John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Romantics. I went to see John Keat’s death mask in Rome, the room he died in. That was an arresting experience. So a lot of male writers in my early years because I studied poetry in university and university classes tend to sway male. But also I loved Sylvia Plath too. As I’ve gotten older and been exploring it’s been Anne Carson, Eileen Myles, Ariana Reines, Ashley Obscura. A lot of women. And Bill Bissett too, Bill is one of the best poets of the last 100 years, in my opinion.
Very early it was the Beat writers. To write freely, that appealed to me. YB Yeat’s poem When You are Old. John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Romantics. I went to see John Keat’s death mask in Rome, the room he died in. That was an arresting experience. So a lot of male writers in my early years because I studied poetry in university and university classes tend to sway male. But also I loved Sylvia Plath too. As I’ve gotten older and been exploring it’s been Anne Carson, Eileen Myles, Ariana Reines, Ashley Obscura. A lot of women. And Bill Bissett too, Bill is one of the best poets of the last 100 years, in my opinion.
Monday, 25 February 2019
Brad Casey : part two
Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
I used to be very against readings. I never wanted to take part. I’ve been very lucky in the last few years to find a community of writers, all fairly disparate, who appreciate taking big risks and cherishing experience and who channel that energy into their performances. A lot of those people do readings and they make it something interesting, performative, compelling to an audience. They turned me on to readings. There’s an art to reading, I think, and it’s important, for me, to take into consideration. Even just to look up now and then while you’re reading, to speak from a self-assured place, to keep an audience engaged. It’s fine if you want to eyes down read and get out, it’s just not for me. So I’ve warmed up to readings, I like doing them now and am still exploring my own voice in that realm. Maybe I am a boring reader, I don’t know. I’m trying to connect with an audience in different ways, to be more performative. It’s an exploration. I still, often, don’t bring non-writer friends to “reading” readings, though. I think if you’re not invested in the art form it can be a weird experience.
I used to be very against readings. I never wanted to take part. I’ve been very lucky in the last few years to find a community of writers, all fairly disparate, who appreciate taking big risks and cherishing experience and who channel that energy into their performances. A lot of those people do readings and they make it something interesting, performative, compelling to an audience. They turned me on to readings. There’s an art to reading, I think, and it’s important, for me, to take into consideration. Even just to look up now and then while you’re reading, to speak from a self-assured place, to keep an audience engaged. It’s fine if you want to eyes down read and get out, it’s just not for me. So I’ve warmed up to readings, I like doing them now and am still exploring my own voice in that realm. Maybe I am a boring reader, I don’t know. I’m trying to connect with an audience in different ways, to be more performative. It’s an exploration. I still, often, don’t bring non-writer friends to “reading” readings, though. I think if you’re not invested in the art form it can be a weird experience.
Monday, 18 February 2019
Brad Casey : part one
How did you first engage with poetry?
When I was about 5 years old I wanted to be a painter. There was this underground tunnel that connected my elementary school to the middle school next door where my mother worked and no one was allowed to go through the tunnel except me, in winter, as my mother would drive me home after school. There was an art room in the tunnel with frames and canvas and paints and I was so small and the tunnel seemed so large and dark and this art room smell of paint and oil and wood and musty humid tunnel was only mine and it felt special. We got to use the art room one day for class and I was so excited, I made what I know now to be an abstract but then was just an excitement of painting and no skill. I was so proud of it. My teacher saw my painting and said no, that’s not what you were supposed to do, you should have done it like this and she showed me another student’s painting which was like a ship the way a kid would draw a ship. Half circle, a line up the middle, a triangle sail.
I was devastated. I was a sensitive kid and the teacher didn’t know that would affect me so much. It wasn’t her fault but I never painted again after that. I covered up that desire with a sheet.
The next year I had a teacher named Mrs. Dawson. She had this recipe box, like a little rectangular box filled with little rectangular pieces of paper and on each piece of paper was a writing prompt. Stuff like, “You’re in a hot air balloon and you can’t make it land, where does it go? What do you see?” or “You’re on a beach and you find a glass bottle with a letter in it from far away, what does the letter say?” Stuff like that. I was a bright kid and eager to learn and I’d finish my work early and she had me write stories from those prompts to keep me busy and sometimes she’d have me read those stories in front of the class. She was very encouraging. I was a quiet kid and shy and that experience helped me find a voice through writing, an outlet for that special feeling I used to have aimed toward painting.
Then I had a hard time as a teenager. I was bullied and made fun of a lot. No matter what I did I was judged. Harshly. I started writing poems and journals because I wasn’t judged there. I could write whatever I wanted and the page never judged me. I used to write letters to an imaginary woman named Sophia, I told her all my secrets. I’ve never told anyone about that. And I still remember the first poem I wrote: it was an acrostic of the name of the girl in my class that I liked. I always had a crush on every girl, as I’ve gotten more comfortable with myself as an adult that’s become a crush on every person. I want to write an acrostic for every person.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)