What do you want to
accomplish by writing?
Um, absolutely
nothing, nothing that is terribly quantifiable.
I find that when I’m trying to describe something it comes out terrible,
as a bunch of abstractions, which I suspect is true for most creative
writers. But, if you have time to tinker…to
get jiggy with it…something comes out.
The rest of the world doesn’t express itself at all…or does it poorly,
except for the rare individuals who can make their brains cogent.
How does your material
deal with being a middle-aged white man?
It doesn’t very well. I think it was maybe Lorca who said that the “infinite
things that people write about are Dreams and Childhood.” There are certainly stories of adulthood, no
doubt, but so often they’re being ruined, just ruined in this book. Most of it deals with what he remembers from
being a kid; part of it is just meditating on objects around his house and
where they came from. So I think being a
middle aged white guy, I tend to write about the middle class suburban
landscape of my youth, and It was quiet and safe and didn’t have most of the
problems with rest of the world was dealing with. And somehow that quiet safety while we know
things are happening out there in the world, those are the things we make poems
about.
It’s easier to write
poetry when you’re not being shot at.
Yeah I mean, [if] you
don’t have a death squad threatening to crush your nuts, you’re going to have
time to reflect, to form and find imagery.
I asked the question sarcastically, but especially since the Multicultural Conference is coming to campus, it seems to be a theme.
It’s difficult to ask
questions about race and gender.
It’s hard to mask
them.
What do you say? I had
a happy childhood, mom and dad were nice, two kids, no gangs…no real
criminals. How do I write, how does
anybody write poems that somebody of a different world will respond to? I think that’s the trick…but we managed to do
it, absolutely…I believe if I’m reading his (Eduardo Corral) poetry correctly,
it’s revelatory, and he’s clearly Hispanic.
I think that stuff is beautiful, awesome stuff. It’s damn good stuff! He has completely and totally different
experiences from mine. If you look at his poems, at least what I’ve read, they’re
almost all memory poems. There are a lot
I haven’t read yet, but if you look, so much he’s talking about [are] moments
from life. Memories from childhood [like]
the one about his father1. I’m
assuming he’s crossing America. He find
the lizard, he eats it because he’s so ravenous, and it becomes a pure phallic
symbol for the speakers own sexuality.
That’s a childhood memory, that’s a memory of a moment that becomes a
major change in his life. A major event,
his first encounter with sexuality…a sexual epiphany more or less, and that
childhood memory is what poetry is made out of.
What is it about
Poetry that makes it [poetry]?
All writing is
wonderful in its own regard, but honestly I think poetry more than any other
writing, just like music, gets down to the mystery of consciousness. It’s the way of expressing, what would be
otherwise inexpressible. You could say “my
father crossing the desert, and I understood his hunger, his wanting for life
and great desire to be alive, and I equate that to my own desire in this
culture to come to terms with my own sexuality.” You could say that, but that’s a flat statement
no matter how much you mean it. But you put it into a nicely wrought poem where
language and the imagery force the reader into some sort of emotional union
with the poet; you have a whole different experience. That’s the beauty of poetry that I don’t
think other kinds of writing can’t do.
And there are things it cannot do as well…the long narrative where you
know the character as if you lived with the character for a while. But I think that poetry is the negative capability. The ability for language to be more open
ended, or to not have to have purely annotative meaning and most language in
poetry is almost entirely connotative. That’s
the power it has.
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