The Poetry Spectrum
continued
the secular to the sacred because it’s busy, busy, busy, busy and then there’s this whole other thing that’s going to happen and it’s frightening. You don’t know if it’s going to be any good or not, but that’s not the issue; you just want to be doing it. AS: That’s what I found. I started writing when I was about seventeen years old, haphazardly. It’s still a mystery trying to uncover what it is or listen to the voices in your head. They happen all day long and some of them are very important. If you don’t get them out, they’re just gone. For me it’s never gotten any easier; you’re just more used to looking at it, like oh it’s you again and you just start writing. You just listen to the material, like oh this might be in quatrains. I sit down and write. I never know what’s going to happen; it’s a type of anxiety. It’s not for the faint of heart. What’s one thing you struggle with in your own writing? Maybe something you do that you’re aware of but you wish you didn’t do. AS: I don’t really know the answer to that, but I’ll give you an example. You know you write and write and you get something with some sort of substance. Then you look at it the next day and you’re like oh my god that’s terrible. I’ve become more self-conscious of the voice in the poem, like well that’s just somebody talking to me. It’s not really that interesting or whatever. When you get in the zone, everything you do is just fine, but it’s really hard to get there. It’s usually when the poem is close to being done, you read it and you’re like that’s terrible, no one would want to read that. MK: I think I need to try to be patient. Sometimes I’ll need to write six or seven poems about something that I’m trying to write about to get one that’s viable as a poem. So patience, and also, I’ve written some clunkers that I would put next to Art’s any day and win. I do this exercise in my classes where we bring in bad poetry then we cut them up and make collages. I have a wealth of material for this. There’s this one poem I wrote about Heather having a zit in the middle of her nose, and we went to the dermatologist. Why did I think that this could be a poem? There it was, and I remember it because the refrain is “Heather has a zit in the middle of her nose.” It belongs in the Stuffed Owl, which is the anthology of bad poetry.
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How have you both been influenced by one another? AS: I admire tremendously her fearlessness of material, what she takes on in poems. You really have to test yourself in some ways through writing to find out if you’re getting close to the quick. Plus, I’ve never mentioned this, but Marilyn, over the years since I’ve been here, has been incredibly productive, not only in her own poetry and other books, but in editing. I’ve lost count of her work to be honest with you. I’ve always admired that; details are very difficult for me, and to be able to do all of that in the midst of teaching and everything. MK: Thank you very much. With Art’s work, everything he does has integrity, very high standards. His poems have been paired down, transformed to music. His writing teaches me to not go long, and Art himself teaches me to not go long. One time we did a poetry reading together; it was in the stairwell of the university center, another really bad idea. I don’t remember where it came from. I was up there declaiming, and it was this long poem, some epic thing I’d written, and he looked at me. I don’t remember if he was just saying it with his eyes or whether he actually said to me I will not speak to you again for a very long time. He taught me in those situations that you don’t read your long poem and you need to learn to be compressed, be concise. AS: That’s hard. God knows we don’t have any audience then when you do have an audience, you think this is my most ambitious poem, I want to read it. MK: Yeah, No NO, Can you say no? We discuss this in our classes before we do readings: don’t read your epic now. I just picture myself at the top of that stairwell, and I picture the look on your face. How has your writing style evolved over the years? AS: After each book, I have found that there is a long fallow time in which I’m still writing but it sounds like stuff that would have been left over from that book, like it’s not good enough to go in that book. I’m always trying to change that voice some how, like where it is coming from or the contributing factors, i.e. opening the poem up more, bringing the world and history into it.
MK: I’ve gone to Squaw Valley a few times. I went the first time when I was fifty years old. Brenda Hillman had an impact on me there and has ever since. The experimental quality of her work really irritated the hell out of me to begin with. I was like what is this? why is this happening? I hate this. She was pushing about form. She didn’t care what the content was. In the workshops, Sharon Olds was all-confessional. It was wonderful; she gave us permission to say what we needed to say. Brenda Hillman didn’t care about any of that. The only thing she cared about was the form. She was looking for some kind of innovation. You know, what would that be and what would that be that felt necessary not just splashy. I write narrative lyrics and always have, but the narrative lyric now is bitten into at the edges by this other thing that is the question of how experimental, how edgy, how many poems can you have going on at once, that sort of thing. AS: We were just talking about that in class earlier today about how form, traditional and experimental, is one way a poet can surprise themselves. It makes you change the way you think, changes your brain waves. If you know you have to rhyme in two lines you start thinking ahead. You might have to say something in that language that you never thought of before. The whole point is to say something new about yourself that you haven’t realized. When do you feel you do your best writing? AS: Marilyn knows this. I can only work very late at night. I’ve got a menagerie of a house, which I love, don’t get me wrong. I’ve got three dogs, a parrot. My wife goes to bed early, sooner or later the dogs settle down. I’m alone in my house, like that William Carlos Williams poem when he’s doing the dance; that’s the only time where I feel like I’m free to say stuff. MK: I do my best writing in the morning. I’m a morning person. I go for a short run and then write. When I was working on these Darwin poems at the Virginia Center this summer, after I’d run and clean up, there was this path between the house and the studio. Walking down that path, poems would start to come to me. I read that Darwin had a thinking path. He would walk on the path and the ideas about the evolution of the species came to him on the thinking path. I’m not comparing myself to Darwin, but I was writing about Darwin and I was walking this
beautiful path and ideas would come to me. It was quite lovely. There’s a certain state of mind which everything seems to be poetry. It can be a mistake, that state of mind, because you think it’s all poetry then you look at it later and its not. When I said to people at the Virginia Center that everything’s poetry in this state of mind, one of the professors said, “What about this pimento sandwich?” Well, he’s right, point well taken, never mind. So I started a blog to write about the transition into the Virginia Center, it’s like a journal you know. I wrote that not everything can be a poem because of the pimento sandwich then suddenly people were writing in pimento cheese sandwich poems. Some of them were very good. So the only limitation is the poet’s brain, probably. What elements do you try to stress while you’re teaching students to write poetry? AS: Well, when I teach the lower division class, the three-hundred level, I try to teach about form and those things. Not that I want them to write those poems, but because I don’t know if they’ve heard it anywhere else. I talk about it to give background and history otherwise to them poetry was discovered fifty years ago instead of 2600 years ago. You just want to give them a sense of the enormous background. Then, of course, what you look for is that authentic moment in somebody’s poems. What I’ve been doing, I’m getting sophisticated now, every day on blackboard I make everybody write six lines. Just the student and I can see that material. They can be braver, riskier. They do the six lines for a week or two then boom this thing happens, and that’s how you find that material. That’s what I concentrate on: how do you find that authentic material that you didn’t know what was in there? When lines come to you while you’re doing dishes or driving, you have to capture those lines. If you don’t they’re gone because they’re coming from a part of your brain that doesn’t know language. You see an image or a phrase comes to you, you want to get that because it passes right on through. MK: I start out the three-hundred level class with books by Lucille Clifton and Arthur Smith. I’m trying to get rid of students’ preconceptions about poetry that aren’t any use to them in the writing and show them how to be spare and let the emotions and intellect lead, a lot of it has to do with the pairing down. They’ll
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