Splash of Red – Interview

What are the greatest challenges and rewards to writing for you? I think the greatest challenge is not to let your ideas about what you want to write interfere with the process of writing. Of course, you sit down to write with images and ideas in mind, but writing takes place in the moment, and you have to let that moment inform your poem or story rather than forcing an abstract idea. When a character does something surprising or a poem goes in a completely surprising direction–for me that is the greatest reward. It’s magic.

Though you also write fiction, why do you choose poetry as your primary genre of choice?I think poetry chose me. I’ve been writing fiction as long as I’ve been writing poetry. In fact, my first published work was a story in my elementary school newspaper when I was in the third grade. And I read as much fiction as I do poetry. In college I had both poetry and fiction published in the Intro series. Going back to the first question, I think I was able to let go more easily in writing poetry and not try to impose my ideas on my poems.

In fiction, because it is more linear and more imbedded in the world, I really had a hard time letting my characters speak. For example, the first story in my book Lester Higata’s 20th Century, I knew the main character would die, but for years I wanted it to be the story of Lester and his son Paul. I wanted them to go out on Paul’s boat on an excursion to the northern islands in the Hawaiian archipelago and just disappear into the void. I really love Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and I wanted to do a rewrite of that for my last story. I can’t tell you how many times I tried to write that story, but Lester didn’t want to go there with me. Finally, I let go and realized it was about Lester and his father rather than Lester and his son, and I wrote a draft in a white heat over a couple of days. I’m hoping that the experience taught me something, but who knows?

Where do you see contemporary poetry heading in America as opposed to the international poetry community?

America is so lucky to have the dynamic duo of Whitman and Dickinson guiding our poetic schooner. I go to them for inspiration all the time. I don’t really know if you can talk about international poetry as opposed to American poetry. There are poets all over the world whose work I adore. One of the things I find myself thinking about is how any artist can be seduced by craft and forget about the center of any piece of art, which is an act of witness. We are telling our audience what it is to be a human being. My colleague Bob Butler talks about yearning for a place in the world and yearning for identity. I talk to my students about the central self, but I think we are talking about the same thing. When we read a great poem or a great story, we feel as if the writer or poet is speaking directly to us. There is a universal yearning for identity that transcends time and place.

When David and I were at the Aldeburgh Festival in England a few years ago, one thing that struck me is how formal English poetry still is. Some poets were trying for a looser idiom, but most were still using metrics and end rhymes, not that this is bad in itself, but I find that most of the time it gets in the way of the voice of the poet. In this country there are so many different schools. I think Language poetry has petered out except in graduate programs. So many students are enamored with “experimentation,” but as Tom Lux has said these experiments were done at the beginning of the 20th century. They were a dead end then, and they are a dead end now, because they are intellectual divorced from the emotional. However, I think you can use Language poetry techniques, but you still have to do the hard emotional work at the center of any work of art. The same goes for New Formalism, Surrealism, and all the other schools. It’s all a gloss on top of the real artistic center of a poem, as the Bible says, a voice crying out in the wilderness. If you don’t have that, then you have nothing.

Have you seen your writing evolve over time and if so, how and why? Where is it heading?

I began writing as a free verse poet, but I began to move to a more formal idiom, counting syllables, using rhymes, and using the abecedarian form. But I found that these formal techniques were a conduit to my unconscious mind. It didn’t work all the time, but most of the time the formal techniques took me to totally surprising places. In my last book, All-Night Lingo Tango, I felt as if I had finished with the formal techniques. Now I’m writing free verse again, but there is no poetry without form. I’m using lots of repetition, anaphora, internal rhymes. I used to teach an introductory poetry writing class, and I developed a class on performance poetry. Part of that involved Slam Poetry, which I didn’t have a high opinion of at the time. But I fell in love with Slam, and now I find many Slam influences in my work. These poems are really fun to read aloud.

If you could define one thing – one characteristic, trait, ability, anything – as most important to writing a good poem or story, what would it be?

As I said earlier, it’s that expression of what it is to be a human being in time, knowing that one day your time will run out and you will not exist. The great Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca called it duende or the shadow of death. He said that no great work of art can exist without that acknowledgment of death. I think this is especially true of comedy.

What are your favorite lines of poetry or fiction that you’ve written – something that really stands out to you and why?

I love lines that get a laugh, because I really feel as if I’m connecting with my audience. My poem “Ode to American English” has a line about Lazarus being raised from the dead, but I am parodying the new translations of the Bible, so I have Jesus say, “Dude, wake up.”

Your husband said that his scientific formula for writing is b + T = P. That equates to a small beginning plus a lot of time equals a big poem. But with writing, as with science, there is a lot of trial and error. What is your editing process like and what what is in your consciousness as you write a poem and then edit?

I used to revise a lot more than I do now, because I think I used to force my writing more. Now I really try to wait until a poem is ready to be written. It’s as if I tinker with them before hand. However, as I write this I’m thinking about a poem that I’ve been working on for a couple of years. I can’t get the ending right. I just can’t. I come back to it over and over hoping to discover the right ending. I was stuck in a lyrical ditch for the longest time. I don’t know what to do, but I hope I will soon.

What responsibilities do you feel the writer has to the reader and vice versa?

I want connection. I still believe in truth and beauty, too. But I think the most important thing is connection, one human being connecting with another. Some of my students say they want to make their readers work hard, but I think you have to delight your reader considerably to make them work hard. I’m reading Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children now. It’s not an easy read. The prose is dense and very demanding, but the narrator is so delightful–funny, poignant, horrid, hilarious, exasperating–that I am willing to go anywhere he takes me. The same is true of Eliot and Rimbaud.