Len Gasparini : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

Extremely important. A musical note is akin to a stressed or an unstressed word or syllable. It all comes down to rhythm and meter. Everything is rhythm. The life of the cosmos resides in rhythm. I’ve written poems about classical music, rock-and-roll, jazz, and the blues. Most poets nowadays wouldn’t know a dactyl from a doorbell.  If you don’t dance, you don’t know what happens. 

Len Gasparini : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Several poets: Rilke, T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, John Berryman. One of the most important lessons I learned from each of them was “discontinuous composition”; in other words, the absence of linear transition, or placing separate, often disparate units of meaning one after the other in an elliptical way. Continuity is an illusion.

Len Gasparini : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

The organic fact that you can’t force a poem to happen. You have to be receptive to an unbidden mood, a rhythm, an image, a phrase; it’s something like being in a blessèd trance. Sometimes a stimulant can bring it on. That’s the way it works for me.

Len Gasparini : part two

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

I’m inclined to agree with Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz who said quite succinctly that “one clear stanza of poetry can take more weight than a whole wagon of elaborate prose.” I don’t think an explication is required.

Len Gasparini : part one

For over a half-century Len Gasparini has been one of the most original voices in Canadian poetry; a life experiencer “who emerged from the counter-culture of Jack Kerouac and the Beats,” as one critic said. Gasparini is the author of two-dozen books, including his Collected Poems, five short-story collections, two children’s books, numerous essays, and a one-act play that drew rave reviews in Montreal. His work has been translated into French and Italian, and anthologized here and in the U.S. Götterdämmerung, his latest book, is an eco-poetic tour de force that reads like a prescient postscript to T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. 

Photo Credit: Lisa Pike

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I’ve always had a rhythmic instinct for poetic endings; perhaps it was stimulated by my reading of O. Henry’s short stories when I was a teenager. Interestingly, in the Fall 2017 issue of subTerrain, critic Brian Palmu in his review of my chapbook Death and the Maiden, noted that I was “a master of endings”; and he quoted Robert Frost: “Any fool can get into a poem, but it takes a poet to get out of one.”