Grady Chambers : 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? 

Many poems I write are first seen and commented on by two great friends and poets--Adam Bright and Tim Craven. We were in the Syracuse MFA program together, and have been holding a near-weekly workshop between the three of us since the spring of 2013--about seven years. Our group was larger at the start, and those meetings used to take place in-person at various diners in Syracuse, but now it's just the three of us and most meetings take place via video chat online as Adam lives in Canada and Tim in Scotland. They're work and feedback and friendship has been invaluable to me, and many of my poems reflect their input or edits.

Grady Chambers : part four

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

Well, one thing is that many poems are brief enough to be memorized with a bit of work, and then can be carried with you in their entirety, inside your mind, to be called up and shared or recited or re-experienced whenever you choose.

Grady Chambers : part three

How did you first engage with poetry? 

Largely through the books on my parents' bookshelves. Both my parents are anti-war, anti-racism, pro-social justice activists who were born in the mid 1940s, and so their shelves were filled with a pretty great array of texts, among them a lot of Beat-era literature. My dad gave me Howl to read when I was probably 11 or 12, and I remember really liking it, at that age probably mostly because there were swear words and sex and so I felt cool reading it, but it's a poem I've come to absolutely love, and I try and read aloud to myself once a year or so. Also: I remember that in my freshman or sophomore year of high school, our teacher asked us to memorize a poem and recite it aloud to the class. I chose "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," and still have it memorized. Reciting it in my head for so many years, I feel like I have a relationship with it. It's a comfort. 

Grady Chambers : part two

What other poetry books have you been reading lately? 

The last handful of months I've been sort of intensively working on putting together a second book of poems, and as has happened before when absorbed in my own work, have found myself spending more time with fiction than with poetry lately. I'm reading War and Peace at the moment, and making my very, very slow way through the New Testament. I read the latter only during my commute to work, so I only get through a few pages each day. It's been wonderful to experience it like that. I didn't grow up attending synagogue or church, so the bible is something I've never studied in any kind of formal way, and I've never felt forced to accept any of its teachings. That's allowed me to approach the New Testament purely out of curiosity and with more of an attention to language and phrasing than anything else, and I've found much to marvel at and enjoy in those aspects.

Grady Chambers : part one

Grady Chambers is the author of North American Stadiums (Milkweed Editions), selected by Henri Cole as the winner of the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from the The Paris Review, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Grady was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing, and he lives in Philadelphia.

How important is music to your poetry? 

I'm reading "music" here to mean the music of the poem itself. Thought about that way, my attention to the music of my poems--the rhythm and sounds of the lines and words--is far less than it used to be. When I was in graduate school--six, seven years ago now--I was spending a lot of time with the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the incredible music of his poems led me to give a great deal of attention to the music of my own. When I would finish a draft of a piece, I would record myself reading it aloud. I would then play the recording back to myself. I felt l could tell where it needed work based on when I sensed it lost its rhythm / momentum.

Over time, I've done that less and less. I think at some point I sensed that my desire for the words and rhythm to sound a certain way got in the way of the poem expressing what I wanted it to. I still sometimes record myself reading new drafts and play them back to myself, but now I think I'm listening more for pacing than I am for the internal music or rhythm of a line.