by Dana Guthrie Martin
I had the pleasure of meeting Anita Boyle and Jim Bertolino last year when they were reading individually and collaboratively written work as part of a poetry series in the Seattle area. I was taken by the writing that Anita and Jim have been doing together over the years and asked if I could talk with them about their collaborative work. They graciously granted me an interview. I hope you enjoy their thoughts about collaboration.
Dana Guthrie Martin: You all say that you started writing together because you were hanging out in bars and it’s hard to hear one another but very easy to write collaboratively by passing a piece of paper back and forth and writing line by line. What gave you all the idea to try this form of collaboration in the first place?
Anita Boyle: Writing poetry collaboratively started as a form of conversation. When you don’t know someone very well, and you’re really trying to talk to them, but you can’t hear a darn tootin’ thing they’re saying, and you happen to be a writer, you pull out your journal. A rational response. You write something in it, and pass it to the person you’re attempting to talk to. Maybe this is something we learned in elementary school when kids first start passing those forbidden notes back and forth. If you’re in a noisy bar, and you happen to be a writer AND a poet, when pen goes to paper there’s not much of a transition from conversation to poetry. So the idea was spontaneous.
Jim and I began writing collaborative poetry shortly after we met, since when we were dating, we often ended up in noisy places: bars, taverns, pubs. We went other places, too, and sometimes wrote collaboratively there: at a coffee shop, or in a park, or beside the Noon Road pond. These were usually quiet places, so once we began to write in the noise, it easy to write in the quiet. And we’ve kept it up because it’s fun to write this way.
Jim Bertolino: While it’s true that Anita and I began writing collaboratively as a way to communicate effectively in noisy bars, for me there were other aspects of the process that kept me interested, generated satisfaction. I am a poet who loves responding to what appears to happen randomly, and when your collaborative partner shares a passage, it can be like an unexpected gift handed to you by a smiling stranger. It calls for your best creative efforts to either create a verbal landscape that might be implied by what you’ve received, or willfully alter the direction of the burgeoning poem to shape a surprise or insist on contrast. Like the curse of tragic nostrils! Participating in a collaborative poem is an acceptable opportunity to release your rational mind from the responsibility of making something meaningful. A chance to get down and roll in language like a white mare in mud.
DGM: Jim, you say that collaboration allows you to willfully alter the direction of the burgeoning poem. Has that ever been a problem for you and Anita when you work together? Have you ever pulled each other too far, so far the poem lost its sense of where to go and how to recover from all the tugging?
JB: Part of the great fun of poetry collaboration is in trying to compose a passage that is imaginative or clever enough to seduce your partner into embracing a new direction. This is an especially useful strategy when you think the territory that the poem has moved into over several exchanges has been explored enough, or when some part of what your collaborator has just written switches the light on in another room, or in another part of town, or even in some other universe. And as for the poem losing its sense of where to go, one of the characteristics of lively collaboration is that you, or your partner, can always tug the poem back to its best direction.
DGM: And, Jim, you also talk about collaboration providing a means to “release your rational mind from the responsibility of making something meaningful.” How can that responsibility hamper a poet’s individual writing, and why is this freedom from responsibility so important?
JB: The reservoir of language and imagery every poet carries is fabulous, and while that source is always there to enrich and embolden what will embody meaning for the reader or listener, diving into that reservoir without a plan can not only be a pleasure, but may take us on currents of language and image to places we would have never visited otherwise. Both in my collaborative writing and in my intentional poems I have come to depend on eruptions that offer unexpected beauty: in deep connections created by the juxtaposition of certain words and phrases, and in images that can simultaneously seem both random and precise. I’m committed to sharing the experience of what I didn’t know was there.
DGM: Anita, so my question for you is: Shouldn’t there be a dating service that pairs people and sees if they are compatible based on their ability to write poetry together? Don’t you think poets would come to a workshop like that if you and Jim taught it? You could call it something like, “Write Together, Love Together.” Too cheesy? How about “Eat, Date, Poem”?
AB: From what I understand about dating services, Yes! Writing poetry together is a good way to interact even with an unfamiliar date, and can introduce a person to another in a unique way. Passing a journal between two poets offers each specific details about the other: handwriting style, type of humor, even political and social perspectives. Most poets have a few words they can’t stay away from (their personal lexicon). Mixing those words up with another’s adds a dimension to conversation that isn’t explored nearly enough. Especially now, with the huge number of communication methods available, it seems to me that collaborative communication will continue to become a norm in the arts, in the workplace and in simple conversation. There’s a lot of give and take in collaborating, and that’s not such a bad thing. For now, collaborative poetry is an opportunity for a extraordinary personal experience in a semi-intimate environment.
Titles are hard to come up with. As far as a title for a workshop like this? Your titles are fine, but how about: “Poetry as Duet” or “How Do You Do? My Name is Not Sue: The Poetry Date Experience”?
DGM: Anita, you also talk about the transition from conversation to poetry being a small one. Doesn’t this fly in the face of those who proselytize about how arduous and lonely poetry work is and by definition has to be? What a drudgery it is? How different poetry is (and should be) from “normal” conversation?
AB: I believe that writing poetry can be arduous and lonely, which often guides the inspiration for a poem and creates a tension in it that makes for great work. But if a poet thinks writing is a drudgery, they should perhaps call themselves a hobbyist and find a new one. Gardening, for example. Life is too short for unnecessary drudgeries, isn’t it?
Writing your own poetry is a similar to writing collaboratively, but is an entirely other experience. Collaborative poetry usually starts out quick and fast by comparison. Two people can write two to five poems in a matter of hours, which doesn’t happen for most poets on their own. (Revising collaborative poems seems to take about the same amount of time as revising one’s own poems. I believe in a revisionary god. That’s where the thing gets the spark.)
With your own poetry, it’s an inner struggle to find the right musical cadence, to construct a rhythm, find the perfect near rhyme, etc. You can tear your hair out for just one word, that one particular, yet elusive word. But in writing together, it’s a poem by committee. Committees are what they are. They can work as well as a rusty fat-tired bike, or as smooth as a professional quality road bike, but all committees depend on the input given from everyone. This is a relief, too, because some of the responsibility of coming up with something fantastic is alleviated, though committees sometimes add other elements of stress. When collaborating, while one poet is working on the poem at hand, the other can be thinking about where to take the poem next, or observing the one currently writing, or they can even be writing a grocery list. And if something from the grocery list makes it into the poem, so much the better.
There hasn’t been any pressure to be the greatest-poet-that-ever-lived when I write with Jim. Sometimes, I’ll finish my lines, set them down in front of him and say, “You can cross that out if you want. It’s terrible.” He never has. Well, maybe a word here or there, but that happens rarely. He makes things work. And when it’s my turn to add onto the poem again, sometime I think, “Oh brother. Where are we going with this?” But we keep going. At the end we read the poem out loud (very loudly sometimes, depending on where we are), and are almost always surprised by what came together. I can’t think of any that we actually ignore as poems or potential poems. When we go back through our journals, we type them up, revise, combine, shuffle, and make them work somehow. I find collaborating with Jim has been a relaxing, enjoyable, and sometimes a hilarious experience, and it’s shaped our relationship in very good ways.
If you like writing poetry, I don’t see any drudgery in that. Hard work, maybe. But it’s just a ton of fun, whether it’s collaborative or one’s own.
 Dana Guthrie Martin is the founder of Read Write Poem. In 2010, she is taking a break from completing poems so she can study their component parts, while at the same time learning a new musical instrument, most likely the oboe.
by Dana Guthrie Martin
In September, Beth Adams and Dave Bonta, co-editors of the literary magazine Qarrtsiluni, announced the winner of their first chapbook competition. Pamela Johnson Parker’s collection, A Walk Through the Memory Palace, was chosen by contest judge Dinty Moore.
I had a number of questions for Beth and Dave about their entry into chapbook publishing. I figured others might find their answers intriguing, so I decided to organize my questions and conduct an interview with Beth and Dave by email then share their responses here.
The interview appears below. And for those who want to know more about the winning collection, check out this post at Qarrtsiluni.
Dana Guthrie Martin: What made you all decide to leap into publishing, and why at this time when so many publishers, especially small ones, seem to be having such a difficult time staying afloat?
Beth Adams: Well, Dana, if staying afloat were essential, we wouldn’t have leapt! Small publishing today is about as financially risky as it gets. However, if making your living from it is taken out of the equation, there are opportunities now for producing and sharing work — as artists and arts organizations — that have never been there before.
Starting a small press was really just an extension of stuff I’ve done since I was a kid, when I was always “publishing” little projects that I illustrated and wrote by myself or with friends. I’ve spent 30 years in graphic design and marketing, with my husband, producing all kinds of publications for other people, including books. So when an independent book project came up a few years ago that needed an ISBN and a design and a publisher, I just jumped in. (It’s a little easier to do that in Canada, I think, than in the U.S.)
But I’d also just been through the process of writing a nonfiction book and having it published by a small but respectable press — Soft Skull, in Brooklyn, run by Richard Nash, who’s well-known in independent publishing circles. That process and relationship really opened my eyes to the current economic reality, both for authors and publishers: You walk into a warehouse and see the boxes of unsold traditionally printed books, but there’s no money for advertising. Or a book gets impressive pre-publication bookstore orders but then a lot of those books are returned and the money must be refunded. Authors are paid advances “against returns.” So it’s very rough, especially for small- or niche-market books. Because of being a designer, there was no particular mystique for me any more about the nuts and bolts of producing a book, but my naivete about the marketing and sales side of publishing definitely didn’t last long either, once I saw it firsthand. And then there was the economic downturn. As my dad says, you’d have to have rocks in your head to go into publishing for the money.
So I’ve become convinced that publishing short-run books the traditional way is essentially over, but equally convinced that it’s vitally important to find ways to continue to get good work out into the world.
Three things seem evident: 1. Distribution and marketing and a lot of publishing are going to happen via the web; 2. The future of indie book publishing (of paper editions) lies in print-on-demand; and 3. The former competitive model has to give way to innovative collaborative efforts, where artists and writers and publishers help each other rather than competing for a shrinking number of book contracts, awards and recognition. Dave and I are both motivated by that third reality — wanting to find new ways to encourage writers, get their work out there, and preserve some of it for posterity in print — because we continue to believe that people want to hold books in their hands.
Dave Bonta: Hmm. Hard to improve on that answer! Like Beth, I’ve been publishing things for a long time, starting with a mimeographed magazine my brothers and I produced as kids. It was a nature magazine, but I always wrote a poem for the back page. We had 35 subscribers! Then as a young adult, I produced a series of poetry chapbooks, Kinko’s jobs, though one had a sewn binding and a cover designed by a local artist friend. I put prices on them, but I let the bookstores keep the money. Poetry was never about money for me. It’s like water. It’s supposed to be free.
When blogging started to get popular in 2003, I held off trying it for a while because I had heard it was only for expressing off-the-cuff opinions, reactions to current events. It finally occurred to me that it didn’t matter how other people were using the medium; I could use it to self-publish poetry and essays. And then of course I found other people who were doing the same thing. Beth was the first. I found her blog, The Cassandra Pages, through one of those blog directories that used to be so popular — Blogarama, I think, under “religion and philosophy.” And then I met other like-minded bloggers through her comment threads. Six years later, Beth and I are still working to encourage a culture of literary blogging. That was our original goal in launching Qarrtsiluni back in 2005.
But books also remain important fetish objects for both of us, and I believe for virtually all of the literary bloggers in our acquaintance. And it may sound odd for someone who believes so strongly in online publishing to say this, but I still find the printed page more conducive to deep reading, reading that goes below the surface of the words. Without audio or video accompaniment, poetry online is distressingly easy to skim. And then there’s the question of permanence. While we plan to keep Qarrtsiluni online indefinitely, we’re both pretty pessimistic about the long-term viability of our fossil fuel-based, consumerist civilization. Books are not just handy companions when sitting on the pot; they are also durable artifacts. A well-made book can last a long, long time. So when I started hearing about lulu.com and other print-on-demand services, immediately I wanted to give it a try. Fortunately, Beth has mad designer skillz and a head for business — which in our case means breaking even.
DGM: You’ve both talked about being very concerned about the process for your contest. I know you put a lot of careful consideration into it. Can you describe the process you used and what other contest models shaped yours?
BA: Well, for starters, Dave and I are both in love with poetry, and deeply ambivalent about contests. While we’re all for raising up work of merit, neither one of us likes the idea of “winners” and “losers,” and we’re well aware how subjective judgment is in the literary world; we both want Qarrtsiluni to remain independent of the whole tide of “poetry pedigrees” and have worked hard to maintain that stance and not contribute to a sense of poets being “in” or “out.”
Ultimately, we’d like to publish several chapbooks a year and have them simply be the best ones we receive. But to be honest, we’re new to this, and trying to be responsible — and we can’t afford to publish chapbooks without the reading fees generated by a contest. We wanted to keep those fees as low as possible, and be able to pay an independent judge as well as being generous with copies of the chapbook for the author, all the contributors and reviewers. So we figured out a way to do an initial trial run that we hoped would break even (and it looks like it will, though we definitely need some more sales — hint, hint!) and be good for the poets and good for Qarrtsiluni.
We felt it was crucial to run a fair and strictly anonymous contest, and have the winning book be of the highest quality, both in its online and print forms. We also wanted to recognize as many of the top manuscripts as we could, which is why we chose and published a poem from each of the 10 shortlisted chapbooks, with audio and an author bio. The work was stunningly good, I thought — I was often moved to tears while choosing these poems at the end.
Running a contest is complicated and we learned a lot: The more manuscripts you receive, the more exciting the contest becomes, but it also becomes more work. We were sure we wanted each chapbook to be read by at least two people, and to stay completely out of it ourselves, because we “know” many of these poets. The feedback we received from the judges was that 10 manuscripts was about the maximum they could handle; Dinty asked for a shortlist of not more than that as well, for good reason, I think. So you quickly find you need to call on quite a few people, all of whom need to be qualified and as objective as possible. We felt very lucky to have a group of past guest editors who were willing to help out.
DB: What models did we look at? None, I’m afraid. As our pattern has been with the magazine itself, we just kind of figured out what made logical sense and did that. Designing a blind submissions process wasn’t too difficult. The main thing was to choose screeners and a final judge who best resembled our ideal profile of a Qarrtsiluni reader. Dinty Moore was a friend who had recently said some kind things about Qarrtsiluni, so I figured he might agree to the gig, but more importantly, though he has taught poetry in college literature classes and certainly reads it for pleasure, he’s a nonfiction author and editor, not a poet. We really struggle against the prevailing assumption that the primary audience for poetry is other poets. Many poets are in fact too self-involved to make very good readers, to be honest.
For our screeners, we asked a number of past editors of Qarrtsiluni, people whose taste and judgment was a known quantity. Some are primarily poets, a couple are primarily fiction writers, one’s working on her rabbinical degree, one teaches high school English — a diverse lot. We paired them up pretty much at random, gave each pair a bunch of manuscripts, and Beth kept track of everything in a complex, color-coordinated Google spreadsheet that made my head hurt. I do a lot of the day-to-day Qarrtsiluni stuff, so the contest was Beth’s baby (as is our print division in general). I am grateful to her and to the screeners for all their hard work on this. All I had to do was the fun stuff at the end: set up the posts, solicit and process the audio, and design a new website.
BA: Actually, I did look at a bunch of other chapbook contest descriptions, mostly trying to see the range of manuscript lengths, reading fees, awards. I still have the Keystone and Flume Press guidelines in my file; there’s a comprehensive list here which we ought to get on for next year, Dave!
DB: You did? I’ll be damned! Well, like I said, the contest was your baby. Good thing Dana offered to interview us so I could find out what exactly we did.
BA: Right! Especially since so many contributors seem to assume we’re an item and know everything about each other! (Dave and I have met in person — what? — three or four times? But we’re very close friends.)
DGM: Dave, you mentioned doing the “fun” stuff — setting up the posts, soliciting and processing the audio, and designing a new website. Can you both speak to that element of creating the chapbook? Many chapbook publishers don’t even provide their collections online, or if they do they make them available only after the print run runs dry, and often they simply make a PDF of the chapbook and that’s it. Not only did you create a fine print edition, but also I am struck by how you are using technology in every way possible to provide the best online experience of the chapbook to as many people as possible.
BA: This one’s definitely for you, Dave.
DB: Well, making an online version was something I felt pretty strongly about, because of our mission to make work as widely available as possible. If we’d been making a more typical, limited-run printed chapbook rather than an unlimited, print-on-demand edition, we might well have decided it would be counterproductive to release the content online until the print run was at least half-gone. But even in that case, I would’ve insisted on making a true online book, not a PDF or other electronic file that isn’t searchable and may not even be viewable on some machines. A PDF is designed in part to be printed out, so it would more directly compete with the print edition. Issuu.com is pretty nifty as a PDF reader, but you still can’t hotlink to any content within an Issuu document, and it’s completely proprietary — you have to accept their branding and their terms. (I will give them credit for supporting audio files, though — one per document, I believe.)
The best model I’d seen for what I wanted to do was the 2River Chapbooks Series. I had also experimented with using WordPress to present two online collections of my own work. But one thing I felt that was missing from all three of these was a sidebar table of contents on each poem page, which I feel is important because I want the online reader to be able to skip around and read the poems in whatever order she chooses, just as a reader of the print edition can do. With my two online books, I had tried to fill this need with a “random poem” link in the top navigation bar, but those were both full-length collections. With a chapbook-length collection, a Random button doesn’t make as much sense — but on the other hand, the table of contents was now short enough to be viewed without much if any scrolling. So the challenge became, how to include a sidebar without making it look too bloggy.
The ability to include audio is one of the great advantages of the online medium as far as I’m concerned, and I’m surprised more publishers don’t do it. I decided to make the audio available in two versions: as a continuous reading of the entire chapbook for the podcast, and broken up into the constituent poems to put into Flash audio players on each page of the online version, for people who prefer to read along as they listen, or who don’t want to try and take in the whole thing at once. Though the website is independently hosted, we uploaded the audio files to the main Qarrtsiluni site, which is hosted at wordpress.com, to take advantage of the much faster, virtually Digg-proof streaming there. And we were very lucky that Pamela was able to convince an audio engineer friend to record the reading for us; we ended up with a more high-fidelity product than we would’ve gotten with some of the dodgier methods that we recommend to authors for our daily podcast. You don’t want to listen to someone reading over the telephone for a whole half-hour.
DGM: What has the response to the first collection been like so far?
BA: Very positive. We’ve sent out free chapbooks to all the contributors to the contest, and to the winner and artist and judges, of course, and sold some copies outright. I think people have been surprised at the quality of the chapbook itself — the artwork and excellent printing and binding — and we’ve only heard positive comments on Pamela’s poetry. We’d welcome additional feedback, and of course we’d love to have more people purchase copies. I think chapbooks are often more interesting than books, because they’re so focused, and they have such a long history and breadth of content and design — and they’re inexpensive — they’re a good thing to collect.
DB: Last week, the news blog connected with the online version of the chapbook finally received its first spam comment. I felt like a parent whose kid just got her first skinned knee falling off a bike.
DGM: Why chapbooks as opposed to full-length collections?
BA: Two reasons, for me. First, because the selection, editing and design process take a huge amount of time, which would be even more for a full-length book, and we’re still volunteers who have the online magazine as our priority. Second, there’s very little money to be made in publishing poetry; we need to make sure we do projects that can at least break even, and do them on a new web-based model. We need more experience with the market before publishing full-length books, but it’s not out of the question for the future.
DB: What is the ideal length for a collection of poetry? If it’s a multi-author anthology, maybe 300 pages. But for a single-author or collaboratively authored work, anything over 80 pages can seem too long, unless it’s a “new and selected.” Or maybe I’ve just been conditioned by years of exposure to poetry books from the American lyric-poetry mainstream. But look at one of those standard, single-author, 60- to 80-page collections, and what do you see? Almost invariably, it consists of three or four chapbook-length sections, often individually titled. I would argue that modern lyric poetry has a natural tendency to coalesce into groups of seven to 20 poems. I’m not sure exactly why this is, and whether it’s the result of writers’ or readers’ needs — maybe a bit of both.
Like Beth, I hope we eventually gain enough experience and confidence to be able to publish some longer books, too, but I want to emphasize that I share the view of a growing number of poets and poetry presses that the chapbook is more than just a stepping stone on the way to a “real” book. It can be a beautiful and satisfying thing all on its own. It’s like sex: One can’t have 3-hour-long tantric marathons every time. The kitchen-table quickie can be just as special.
DGM: Eew. [pauses] Is there anything you will do differently for the next contest?
BA: Gee, Dave, I hardly know how to follow up on that last comment! Um, how about illustrated chapbooks?
Seriously, though, we might reject manuscripts that aren’t properly prepared, because that created extra work. [see next question]
DB: We won’t depend on Canadian mail for anything urgent. (Sorry, Canadians! Your banking and health care systems still kick America’s ass, though.) And I think we’ll be a bit more aggressive about lining up reviewers.
DGM: Having sifted through so many entries, do you have any advice for those entering contests? Dos? Don’ts?
BA: Please make sure you read the guidelines and follow the contest rules! As for the manuscripts themselves — remember that we weren’t the judges. But if I had been, I would have looked for chapbooks that had an integrity and vision behind them, some reason for these poems being collected together, and a flow to the sequencing of the poems. Not all the chapbooks had this, but the best ones did. It helps the readers greatly if the manuscripts are carefully presented, too. Some poets don’t seem to have a basic command of word-processing programs and don’t know how to collect their work together, but this is a skill that every poet needs now, so it’s worth taking the time to learn how to prepare a digital manuscript with page breaks, page numbers, a table of contents, and headers and footers. The type can be Courier, I’m not talking about the manuscript having to be “designed” already; it’s a question of organization, just like a resume is expected to be well-organized and presented. And of course, we appreciated early entries, but it’s understandable that people submit at the last minute. Mostly, I’d just encourage people to give it a shot! We tried hard to run a good contest, and because it’s relatively new, there weren’t hundreds of entries, so poets had a good chance to make the shortlist.
DB: Enter early and often. Don’t enter contests that don’t give you a copy of the winning book in return for your entry fee. Read the fine print. And if you shop your manuscript around for a while and nobody bites, don’t rule out self-publishing — print-on-demand services such as CreateSpace and Lulu now make this exceedingly easy, not to mention free, except for the cost of labor. Just be sure to hire or arm-twist someone you trust to edit and critique it for you, don’t stint on the design, get an ISBN number, and be sure to make a generous sample of the contents available online so people can decide if they want to buy it. As Jello Biafra says: “Don’t complain about the media, become the media.” That goes for poetry publishing, too!
Dana Guthrie Martin is the founder of Read Write Poem. She writes things and stuff. Most of the time, her things and stuff happen to be poetry, or at least they call themselves poetry. She has a robot named Feldman. He’s writing a book of poems.
by Deb Scott
This week we feature an interview I orchestrated with Dana of My Gorgeous Somewhere and Blythe of Pro Tempore. Read Write Poem readers know them both as participants and brought-to-you-by-ers. Dana created Read Write Poem last fall, and as this discussion reveals, both the interview and Read Write Poem were an entirely collaborative process from the beginning.
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Deb Scott: Dana, you’ve been interested in poetry collaboration for a quite a while. The very first RWP prompt was about American Sentences and it included ways to collaborate. Many, if not most, of the following 36 prompts included tips on how to collaborate with other poets, and RWP shared your Read Write Interview with Matthew Rohrer, a poet well-known for his collaborative work with Joshua Beckman. Just a couple of weeks ago you wrote a poem with Brent Goodman, which you shared as part of your Read Write Interview with him.
So what is this obsession with collaborative poetry? Where’d it start and what draws you to it still?
Dana Guthrie Martin: Poetry collaboration is nothing new. As I wrote in an article for Poets Who Blog, collaboration was intrinsic to oral traditions. It was part of Japanese court life as early as the 12th century. It was part of the early 1900s French Surrealist movement. A group of Japanese poets called the Vou Club wrote together in the 1930s. The list goes on and on. Coleridge and Wordsworth. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Beat writers. Some feminist poets, who have used collaboration as a way to access a collective female voice. (This is all detailed in Saints of Hysteria: a half century of collaborative American poetry, a book everyone who’s at all interested in collaborative poetry should check out.)
As an English literature student, I was aware of how many poets and writers worked together. I’ve also been around enough contemporary poets and writers to know that many like to send collaborative poetry postcards back and forth and play other collaborative writing games.
But I didn’t really give it much thought, or at least consider it as more than wordplay, until I attended a workshop and reading given here in Seattle by Matthew Rohrer and Joshua Beckman a couple of years ago. I went to high school with Rohrer, and he managed to flee the state of Oklahoma unscathed, so I figured he must be a smart guy who knows what he’s talking about. So when he and Joshua explained how deeply and fundamentally collaborating with each other had affected not only their individual poetry, but also their views about poetry and how poetry should be approached, I figured I should listen to him.
That’s when I got serious about collaborating. I am still drawn to it because of Blythe. She consistently amazes me. We work really well together, and I think we do good collaborative work. It’s lovely to have that kind of coordination: to feel as though the two of us are one mind and one body making these poems. But at the same time, the right arm or right hemisphere of the brain might do something, and the other half says, “Wow. That’s entirely not what I expected you to do. But it’s interesting!”
DS: I always assumed RWP was created to fill the void when Poetry Thursday pulled up its stakes. Is this true?
DGM: RWP was actually an outcropping of the collaborative work Blythe and I were doing. We had many, many hours of discussions about starting a collaborative project. I owned the domain name Read Write Poem and had it in mind for some kind of project, but I didn’t want to create a Poetry Thursday clone.
I didn’t know what I wanted my next group poetry project to be. Then, Blythe and I started collaborating together, since collaboration was near and dear to me, and it just clicked for both of us. We fell in love with the process, specifically with working together. One day, and I might actually have the IM conversation, one of us was like: “Wouldn’t it be great to have a site like Poetry Thursday but with an emphasis on collaboration?” And the other one was like, “Yes, wouldn’t it be fabulous to bring this way of working to a larger group, so they could experience the kind of pleasure we’ve found working collaboratively?”
I could be paraphrasing, but that’s the gist of it. So Blythe didn’t just participate from the beginning. She is half, if not more, of the reason RWP was started. Even though I technically founded the site and pulled in a lot of elements I’d developed on Poetry Thursday, Blythe absolutely was the inspiration for it. Her energy and enthusiasm, her ability to work intelligently and emotionally with me on collaborative pieces, our reciprocity, that is why RWP came to be and came to be with a collaborative emphasis.
In fact, the Read Write Poem project was actually all built and ready to go but hidden for a couple of months before Blythe and I decided to officially take the plunge and move ahead with it. That’s when we brought Carolee, Jill and Tom in, reaching out to them to share: 1. what we had learned about collaborating and 2. the conceptualization and design work Blythe a I had done on the project. We then brought in Christine, January, Jessica, and Juliet, once we’d hashed a lot of details out within the core team. And then others came along. And of course I should point out that you saved the project when I had to bow out for a while, and you’ve been running it since January.
Blythe: It is true that we spent a lot of time talking about a collaborative project and brainstorming about what that could look like. I fell for collaborative poetry as soon as Dana introduced me to it, but I still feel a bit like a novice when it comes to matters in the poetry world, and Dana has the talents of a visionary that I do not.
For example, the first time we wrote together, we wrote a piece about a plane crash, and we decided at the end of the night to each write a section for another plane crash poem, because we both felt there was a lot of potential material there. Well, I came back with a big, clunky, five-stanza poem, and was like, “Dude, I loused it all up, I’ve got too much poem, it’s never going to work.” And Dana just said, “Oh, well we’ll do a chapbook.” And I said, “Um, what’s a chapbook?” So she sent me a link to a site explaining what chapbooks are, and by the time I had finished reading it she had done a rough layout of the first few pages of our potential chapbook.
I don’t share this story to shirk off any ownership of the site, but rather to explain why I see it as such a gift that we’ve gotten to work together on several projects. She’s absolutely spot-on when she says we spent hours talking about collaborative poetry and thinking of different ways we could practice it together and share it with others, until one day one of us finally said, “We need something similar to Poetry Thursday, but with collaboration.” And then we got to it.
DGM: You crack me up, Blythe. “Dude, I loused it all up” has me rolling. Can we work that into a poem?
DS: Dana, some of the RWP community may not know you recently got hitched to Blythe in a Facebook marriage. Is this part of your collaborating process or is it just some whimsical diversion?
DGM: Not whimsical at all. We are married now. Our last name is Funnelcake. We are the Funnelcakes. We are a bona fide copula.
I can only speak for myself (because I like to let my wife speak for herself), but I think everything we (and by we I mean all of us) do, from waking to sleeping — and actually even while sleeping — is part of the process of being a writer. So, whimsical? Perhaps. Part of our writing? Absolutely. As are showering, walking down the street, lying in the grass on a sunny day, getting into a fight with a lover, feeling (an sometimes being) alone, harboring anger toward the President, wanting to help others, not always knowing how to help.
And Facebook marriages, for sure. Yes, it’s all writing. It’s all a way of collaborating with and being engaged with the outside world.
And after all, isn’t all poetry a whimsical diversion?
B: Just for the record, I am in agreement. We are married. Our marriage came out of our writing, and it has added to it. It’s a good thing. (Whimsical? A diversion? Maybe. But definitely a good thing.)
DS: Blythe, was it easier to say “yes” to Dana when she said it would be a one-month marriage than when she switched it up and claimed forever-Facebook love?
B: I didn’t consider the time frame much when I answered her proposal with a resounding “yes,” so it wasn’t a huge deal to jump to a forever-Facebook marriage with Dana. I did decide to make my profile only visible to friends, because I’ve had potential employers I’m interviewing with scope out my Facebook page, and the marriage thing makes it easier to find my personal blog, which I’ve tried to keep off the beaten path a bit.
And I spent a moment worrying that her other Facebook fiancés would be upset, but we’re hoping they’ll marry off to each other. And I was relieved, because I didn’t have any other Facebook brides lined up, and I had been worried I’d be a bit lonely when our nuptial ties were severed.
DS: So how did you meet Dana?
As of mid-2006, I had written exactly 1.5 poems in my adult life, but I wanted to write more. I had read the work a handful of poets extensively, and I had a small inkling, deep in my gut, that I had some poems to share with the world, too. So one day I took the bold step of googling “I want to write poems but I don’t know what I’m doing” (or something along those lines), and I immediately ran across Poetry Thursday, the poetry site that Dana was co-hosting at the time. And thus, I found her blog, and I was immediately hooked.
DS: Do you segregate your poetry ideas? By that I mean do you set aside one idea to work with Dana, or others, and save another that you want to try out on your own?
B: I don’t purposefully compartmentalize poetry subjects, themes or exercises, but some of that happens naturally. I write more confessional poetry and more poetry influenced by people I know/events in my life on my own than I do with the rest of the collaborative, obviously. And as far as subjects that aren’t autobiographical in nature, I tend to look around to see if there’s anyone who wants to poem with me before I delve into them on my own. Poetry is simply better when made together.
DS: It’s hard to quantify poetry-writing, but how much of you two’s current work is collaborative? How has it changed how you work?
DGM: I don’t know. I hadn’t been writing much at all between January and June, since I was dealing with thyroid problems and other health issues I had (and to some degree still have) as a result of the thyroid problems.
But before that, I’d say I was writing collaboratively about 1/4 of the time. Now, with the formation of The Poetry Collaborative, more than half my poetry-writing is collaborative, or at least based on prompts from the collaborative. That percentage might change dramatically over the coming months and years. I think the percentage will go up and down, depending on other circumstances in my life and in my writing.
And how has is changed my writing? It’s made it better, more lustrous.
B: As a very rough approximation, I’d say that about 1/3 of the writing I’ve done over the last nine months has been a collaboration of sorts.
Collaborating has changed how I approach poetry, even when I’m writing alone. Reading about how someone else tackles a poem is one thing, but going along with them, sharing their practice, that’s another. Poems look a little different now. They have more angles of approach. I’ve learned new ways to put words and lines together and have gained a lot of confidence about what you “can” do with a poem. Plus, collaborating has stoked my fires for poetry in general.
DS: Blythe, what was your wedding present to Dana?
B: Just me. Is that lame or what? And I got a collaborative poetry website and a new wife. I am clearly the slacker in this relationship.
DS: Dana, this site Blythe refers to, The Poetry Collaborative, quickly became a group site, administered by you and Blythe, once you invited the “wedding party” to first witness your collaborative poetry, then participate themselves. Why such a public setting? What it is about collaborative poetry you want visitors to witness?
DGM: It. I want them to witness it. In action. All of it.
DS: “All of it”?
DGM: I mean all of it. The whole gnarly, brilliant, iterative, process-oriented mess that is the heart of any collaborative artistic endeavor. I also want people to see that collaborative writing can be tough, wry, honed, gorgeous, life-affirming, life-altering, sinuous, brave, wrenching and achingly funny.
We’ve assembled a group of women whose individual writing possesses all these qualities, and in writing together we are creating a kind of collective voice and entity: this smart, sexy, witty, fearless and haunting presence who has all of our words coursing through her veins, but who at the same time is a kind of apparition. We know her, we recognize her but she is not us. She is a mystery. She is foreign. She is other. We are at once drawn to and a little afraid of her.
Being with her is like looking in a mirror and seeing someone who resembles us yet is not us. The journey with this collaboration, I think, is to learn more about who she is through a continual dialogue with her, through being brave enough to — over and over again — move into her space, her body. To inhabit her and wear her around like a living garment. To confront the “other” that is her and in so doing learn more about our own writing and in turn about ourselves. Our mission is to move from experiencing her as “object” to experiencing her as “subject.” To make her whole and to embrace her entirely.
DS: I think many people, myself included, always assumed the work of poetry was done in a very alone, isolated and private space. Based on one of RWP’s (very scientific polls) it seems that most poets are introverts. This collaboration idea turns that assumption on its head. On its head and then some. You both say you are introverts. (And I have to say watching you work together and reading your writing — as individuals and the Funnelcakes — doesn’t support that theory!)
B and DGM in unison: We are. Trust us.
DS: So why does collaboration work? Could *anyone* collaborate?
B and DGM (answering collaboratively): We don’t have monkeys in our basement, which keeps making Dana cry. But Blythe won’t fondle her minute men without a turkey baster.
So obviously we can’t give monkeys or turkey basters to our invisible pizza delivery team, unless of course they masquerade as Robert Downy Jr. look-alikes or prescription drugs. (Same difference, really.)
What we mean is: Collaborative poetry cantilevers hot air balloons above The Kon-Tiki Room.
And we only know this much: Collaborative poetry never turns on without robots singing show tunes. That’s the quixotic nature of collaborative poetry. But other than its imaginary quests, collaborative poetry is itself and also us. It is both a separate hedgerow and an internal labyrinth.
Collaborative poetry answers to every call, like a well-trained OnStar employee. Don’t you wish your poetry could be as obedient as ours? Look at Blythe put gummy bears all over Dana’s Pizzeria Combos. Our verses flow off course, flapping and flailing, of course. Have no fear.
The Poetry Collaborative is the Funnelcakes’ baby, although they have invited a group of women to experience the collaborative process with them. Since it is an experiment, it is small and will probably stay that way, not to be a clique but to focus the collaboration process they hold dear. They encourage everyone to check out the blog from time to time to see collaborative poetry prompts, read poems written using collaborative processes and watch new collaborative pieces unfold on the site. This interview exposes RWP readers to ways collaboration can occur and invites them to explore their own ideas, perhaps to even start their own collaboration sites. Blythe and Dana are happy to answer any questions about how to go about it.
by Dana Guthrie Martin
Recently, I summoned Brent Goodman to his computer to grill him via email about his debut collection, The Brother Swimming Beneath Me, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. The book was more than a decade in the making, yet this masterful collection manages to reflect who Brent is now as a poet. His poems are seductive, unsettling, hilarious, brutal and tender. And always, always unexpected. They stab. The breathe. They threaten to ignite in one’s hands.
I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to get inside Brent’s head a bit, to noodle around in that creative brain and glean something about how it works.
Note: This piece is really more of a conversation than a formal interview, as evidence by all the rambling I do throughout.
* * *
Dana Guthrie Martin: You’ve been working on this collection for years, but you’ve commented that you changed it dramatically in 2007 and that most of the poems in the current collection were in fact written in 2007. How did you get to the point of doing such major revisions? I am sure you had a vision for the collection early on, so what led to such a fundamental shift in the architecture of the entire collection and many of the poems contained therein?
Brent Goodman: In late 2007 I realized that my “first book” couldn’t be anything but who I am right now. It was no longer my creative thesis from ’95 or my adventures in Madison thereafter, no matter how long I schlepped those good-looking children around.
Ultimately I gave up trying to get published and stopped writing poetry all together between 2001 and 2006. When I finally started writing again in 2007, I also decided to dust off The Brother Swimming Beneath Me, thinking I was shopping around my belated first book while writing the second. And by shopping around I mean, like, 40-odd submissions to contests/open reading periods in 2007. I made a spreadsheet with every first book call for submissions I could find and sent it to nearly every damn one. The old manuscript had some legs, coming in 3rd or 4th or 15th in a few races.
By fall 2007, I had written enough new work to seriously question why I still wanted to debut a decade-old manuscript. I think the tipping point came when a majority of the new manuscript fell into place. I felt I had nearly finished a second book without publishing the first. But then I looked back at the The Brother Swimming Beneath Me manuscript I was circulating and discovered I could effectively take the three core elegies from the old manuscript and place them in the new one (a “heart transplant,” which I blogged about here).
It was both terrifying and liberating to abandon a decade of writing for fresh work. But I realized this was my first book. So I began withdrawing the old manuscript from any remaining consideration at various publishers and contests, including Black Lawrence Press. An editor at Black Lawrence Press replied that she was interested enough in the old version (it was currently a finalist) to look at the new one mid-contest. Then in February, I received an email offering me a book contract as one of four published finalists for the 2007 St. Lawrence Book Award.
DGM: You have such vision (and such balls!) for withdrawing your manuscript because you felt another was a stronger and more appropriate representation of you and your current work. So many poets, given the pressure to publish and the fear that each book might be their last, would have slogged ahead with those two manuscripts, one in their left hand, the other in their right, hoping to get both published even if it meant each was not quite the “right” single manuscript.
What I am saying is: What the hell possessed you, man? How’d you decide to take the path you took and pull a manuscript from Black Lawrence Press even though it was a finalist? You banked on yourself and your money the way thieves bank on their ability to pull off a heist without any hitches. You are amazing.
So anyway, yeah. What drove you to take that path, and did you get any advice from other poets to do so, or to NOT do so?
BG: Thank you, Dana. I should say I didn’t discover the manuscript was in the short pile for the St. Lawrence Book Award until I tried to withdraw it from the contest — nothing had been formally announced yet — but yeah, I did have to wear boxers that whole week!
The decision was surprisingly easy, no advice needed other than my gut. When the new manuscript suddenly came together I sensed I had more than a collection. I had a book. And I didn’t know what that felt like until it happened. But I did know I had a manuscript floating around out there that I no longer wanted to publish, even if I could. So I started pulling in the nets.
Not to say I would have made the same decision in my 20s, fresh out of grad school with my thesis in one hand and my degree in the other. Thinking it was a race to publish, I would have made choices that race-runners make.
A decade on, I live blissfully outside any pressure to publish. Patience cultivates perspective. And the perspective the writing hiatus afforded me was invaluable. When I came back to poetry and started reading what great work is being published (especially online), my eyesight changed. This forced me to see the old manuscript for what it was — an attachment to who I wanted to be in my 20s — versus the new manuscript, which speaks to who I might be moving forward. Of course, my brother is still at the heart of the book, but in a light now refracted more through joy than grief.
DGM: Precisely. You do have a book, and it reads as a book. So many collections don’t do that. They are poems cobbled together and bound only by, well, their binding. Yours has not only a spine, but a heart, kidneys, bowels, more than 40 different sphincters. (Did you know there are that many sphincters in the human body?) Most importantly, it has bones.
But I realize that I am singing your praises when I should be asking my third question, so to that end: Do you really not feel like your six-year hiatus from writing was time you frittered away? No regrets, for real? (I ask as someone who took a nearly seven-year hiatus from writing poetry, oddly enough one that corresponded with your hiatus. Maybe the planets were misaligned for poetry-writing or something.)
And, here’s another question: What made you come back to poetry when you did in 2006?
BG: 40-Odd Sphincters was actually a working title I was toying with — how’d you guess!? My favorite forgotten sphincter is a toss-up between the sphincter pupillae and the sphincter of Oddi.
Really, I don’t carry any regrets at all for not writing during that period and I hope you don’t either. For me it was a very treacherous few years which I’m grateful to have survived relatively unscathed, but that were absolutely vital to who I’ve become. Never regret transformation.
What brought me back to writing was reconnecting with a poetry community, something I had abandoned when I moved away from Madison in 2001 and hadn’t found since. This started with launching a blog, which put me back in touch with old friends while exposing me to many exciting new writers I hadn’t heard of. The other very important community I found online was your Poetry Thursday site, which got me writing on a weekly basis again. At least two poems from the manuscript, “Doors and Windows for a Room” and “Wisconsin Triptych,” started as Poetry Thursday prompts.
DGM: Oh, your mention of Poetry Thursday helping with your writing gives me goosebumps. See? There, on my arms.
40-Odd Sphincters would be a GREAT book name. If you *do* name a book 40-Odd Sphincters, you have to credit me for inspiring you.
But on to my next question: What poet-bloggers did you find when you started your blog? I am sure people reading this piece would be interested in knowing whose blogs you read, and love, and why.
(And yes, transformation: always a good thing. Our sphincters appreciate it. They get tired of being inside the same old person all the time. It’s good to change things up and keep the sphincters guessing about who we’ll be tomorrow. And the day after that.)
BG: The first po-bloggers I found were fellow Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award winners Ron Mohring (who I had corresponded with in the late ’90s but lost touch with), and Charles Jensen, who wrote me shortly after discovering my blog. I invite everyone to click through my Next Destinations blogroll to find some great writing. I regularly stop by Paul Guest’s blog, where he posts both amazing first drafts and updates on his shooting-star rise to rock-star literary status. I also enjoy Emperor of Ice Cream Cakes for surreal fun, Radish King, Peter Davis (author of Hitler’s Moustache), and Steven Schroeder, just to name a few. And, of course, I’m one of your original secret Internet stalkers.
DGM: If you are one of my original secret internet stalkers, then you know more about me that I might like for you to know. It also means I have the right to snail mail you pictures of my ass, right? (Because if that’s not the case, Step. Away. From. Your. Mailbox.)
So what poets do you read? Who do you love? Why do you love them? (In addition to the poet-bloggers, who we’ve already covered.) Along the same lines, what poets inspired you to write, and why?
And (and this question is very important): If you could poet-stalk one poet, who would it be, and why? (I would poet-stalk Richard Siken, and actually have, twice. I would say that I have poet-stalked you, too, but I don’t think it counts as stalking if the stalkee likes it.)
BG: Well that must have been you then knocking knees with me crouching together in the hedgerow outside Siken’s master bath. Have you checked out his watercolors? They’re amazing. He’d never admit it, but I posed for this one. I’m the guy in front. I was going for a Men in Black meets Annie meets “unapologetic porn stache” sense of place. Seriously, his debut, Crush, is the real deal. We’ll all learn every time we lift it. Find a slim home for it in above your fireplace, I promise you.
DGM: Dude, say no more. I take Crush to bed with me.
BG: I’d have to say my first crush was Ginsberg. A queer Jew with a mother in the insane asylum? I can relate to two outta three, though one I’ll keep a fantasy, TYVM. More important than the fact that he liked taking nude photos of himself, he teaches us to strike contrasting strokes of color against a blank canvas like Cézanne, spark a clash, green against red, hydrogen jukebox reaching our chest before our minds. The mind is jealous and impulsive. We have to dig. A list is always a good starting place.
The Beats led me through Gary Snyder to the sources of Zen. Of course Basho, Issa and Lao Tzu. I think, no matter how contemporary, Web-savy or emo, every writer needs to ultimately discover her source. I think for me that’s also Rumi and Rilke. These are the voices where I cannot find any obscurity. Every word seems to make sense. Who does that for you?
I admit to a big Ted Kooser phase. Let’s say he taught me tennis by the net. He’s important; don’t be a hater — sometimes poetry has to be more accessible than a public toilet.
I’ve taken an oath never to stalk another poet. My last victim was Gerald Stern, upon whom I imposed an ill-prepared kishke trapped in a friend’s rented reception La-Z-Boy after a reading at Purdue. O Lucky Life! / O lucky lucky life. Lucky life was not a quote from that evening.
Most recently, I continue to read Patrick Lawler, who teaches me to have confidence in short sentences with vision over a four-book series.
The rest of my “who am I reading” list is too long to truncate. There’s so much good work going on out there, you just need to find it. Read everything. Discover it.
DGM: Um … Ted Kooser???? Come on, dood. (Psst, I like Billy Collins. *hangs head in shame*)
Hello … Brent? You still there? Hello?
And that concludes the conversation between Brent and me. But we’re not quite done with you yet. There’s still a collaborative poem we wrote, which must be shared, so don’t run off like Brent did.
I Bet You Like Being Told What To Do
by Brent Goodman and Dana Guthrie Martin
she gambles behind your ear, but you
aren’t dissuaded by her words, which fall
in ringlets of desperate femininity
around the stuttering bedposts.
Now you can’t not remember witnessing
through a neighbor couple’s well-lit window
something resembling disheveled frivolity
but too sickly sweet to have been anything
other than unbecoming levity. Should we
let this mingled taste rise or refrain?
This skin is not my own. But yours
is slick as waxed paper. How do we
sense the spark between wonder & witchcraft?
How many fingers must interlace before
we’re able to seal something closed, or open?
by Dana Guthrie Martin
For this installment of the Read Write Poem Poet Interview, I interviewed Dorianne Laux via e-mail. I had the pleasure of meeting Laux the summer of 2006 when she was teaching at The Tomales Bay Workshops Writers’ Conference.
 A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Laux’s fourth book of poems, Facts About the Moon (W.W. Norton), is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award, chosen by Ai. It was also short-listed for the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the most outstanding book of poems published in the United States and chosen by the Kansas City Star as a noteworthy book of 2005.
Laux is also author of three collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Awake (1990) introduced by Philip Levine, recently reprinted by Eastern Washington University Press, What We Carry (1994) and Smoke (2000). Superman: The Chapbook was released by Red Dragonfly Press in January 2008.
Co-author of The Poet’s Companion, she’s the recipient of two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Best American Erotic Poems Prize, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has appeared in the Best of the American Poetry Review, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Best of the Net, and she’s a frequent contributor to magazines as various as the New York Quarterly, Orion, Ms. Magazine and online journals.
Laux has waited tables and written poems in San Diego, Los Angeles, Berkeley and Petaluma, Calif., and as far north as Juneau, Alaska. For the last 13 years, she has taught at the University of Oregon in Eugene and since 2004, as core faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program. Her summers are spent teaching poetry workshops in the beauty of Esalen in Big Sur, Tomales Bay, Aspen, Spoleto, Italy and Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. In fall of 2008, she and her husband, poet Joseph Millar, will move to Raleigh, where she will join the faculty at North Carolina State University as a Poet-in-Residence.
* * *
Dana Guthrie Martin: You have called yourself, in part, a poet of personal witness. Can you explain what that means?
Dorianne Laux: There seems to be a general discomfort right now with the personal, the private, the confessional and the narrative. Of course, poets have been writing poems of personal disclosure since the beginning of poetry. And since the beginning, people have suffered through great historic upheavals, war, geologic disasters, famine, and enjoyed great times of renaissance, scientific discovery, political change, explosions of art, culture, philosophy.
We know some of what happened. We keep records, diaries, logs, news reports, pictographs, paintings, photographs. But it’s poetry that informs us of what we felt while those times and events rained down, and it’s poetry that recalls us to our selves. It’s our emotions that are in danger of being left out, and it is poetry that accounts for, is responsible to, the human element.
I’ve been re-reading a favorite book of poetry with a student in the Pacific MFA Program. The book is called The Moon Reflected Fire, by Doug Anderson. He was a medic during the Vietnam war and the first section of the book recalls that experience in vivid narrative poems that introduce us to the narrator as well as to the men and women he worked with and for and the Vietnamese people we were making war against. The next section is filled with short, lyric persona poems about Goya struggling to create art during the Inquisition. The third section contains poems in the voices of minor characters from the Odyssey and the Iliad, the voices we didn’t hear in the first telling. The final section returns to the narrative, poems about recovery, from the war, alcohol and drugs, damaged relationships, those broken by the war.
The poems are gripping, wrenching. One of the most arresting and heartbreaking lines is when Doug Anderson, the soldier, the medic, asks a wounded soldier slipping in and out of consciousness: Hey, what’s your mother’s maiden name? He’s trying to keep the man tied to the world though memory.
That seems to me what poems do. They call out to us, not by just any name, but by our particular name, and keep us tied to the world by accessing our memories. Poems keep us conscious of the importance of our individual lives. There are many ways to do this, and combinations of ways to do this, but personal witness of a singular life, seen clearly and with the concomitant well-chosen particulars, is one of the most powerful ways to do this.
When we write a poem of personal witness, a poem about an ordinary day, an ordinary life, seen through the lens of what Whitman called “the amplitude of time,” we’re struggling to find the importance of the individual who is stranded in the swirling universe, a figure standing up against the backdrop of eternity. I think of the fisherman’s prayer: Dear Lord, be good to me / the sea is so wide / and my boat is so small.
DGM: You realized you were meant to write poetry after hearing a poem by Pablo Neruda. Some poets have that feeling when they first start writing but aren’t able to sustain it, at least not all the time. Have you been able to sustain that sense of being meant to write ever since you started writing, or have you ever had times when you felt poetry left you?
DL: I don’t think we ever get back the energy of our youth, the idealism and innocence of that time. But with that loss come certain gains: experience, patience, a sense of wholeness. Once we’ve begun the journey of a reading and writing life, we begin to see certain familiar themes, ideas, language, returning again and again, in our own work and the work of others, and we can sometimes tire of it.
But there is nothing like finding a new love at an old age. Poetry will go underground for a time, but will also pop up when I least expect it, fresh and new again, and more importantly, when I seem to most need it. Poetry saved me early on, and it continues to save me, just at longer intervals.
I also look around at the poets of the generation before mine, now in their 70s, 80s, 90s — Stanley Kunitz just died at 102 and was writing the best poems of his life. Adrienne Rich and Philip Levine, Jack Gilbert, Ruth Stone. All poets who still have something mighty to say and are saying it with power. These poets inspire me and help me to see again, to feel a life sometimes buried by habituation and stagnation.
And younger poets coming up all the time who give us all a fresh way of looking at the world. I’m moving soon to North Carolina after living on the West Coast most my life. It’s a big move for a 56-year-old woman, and I welcome the adventure of it. I know it will shake me out of certain mental ruts, enliven my art.
I also have a stint this summer at VCCA. I haven’t been to a writer’s retreat in a few years now and just knowing I’m going there has motivated me. Looking forward to a time when I can be quiet and alone with my inner life. I think many times when we think we’ve lost poetry, it is a matter of lack of solitude, lack of support. Poetry is always there, waiting to be unearthed. To be necessary again.
DGM: I’ve spoken to people who think we have too many poets and aspiring poets in this country, and not enough ways to sustain those poets — or enough readers to read their work. Others have a different view, seeing this as one of the most vibrant times for American poetry. What are your feelings about the state of poetry today and its future?
DL: I think a bit of both visions are true. Everyone seems to want to be a poet, though I think this has been the case for a good long time. At some point in a life something happens that is just so incomprehensible and emotionally powerful that it seems the only way to process it is through poetry.
If you went out on the street and asked people if they had ever written a poem, I think most would say yes, at least one. If you asked if they had ever painted a portrait or composed a musical score or sculpted a bust or thrown a pot you’d get fewer yeses. Poetry is the art of the people. Anyone can write a poem. And that’s a two-edged sword.
On the other hand, there can never be enough poetry. It would be like asking a drunk if he’s had enough wine. What’s too much? And how will we find the next Whitman or Dickinson, the next Neruda or Akmatova? One could be living right now, hidden away in an ordinary house on an ordinary street in the middle of America. A young Etheridge Knight in Corinth, Miss., or a Gwendolyn Brooks in Topeka, Kan. That’s the kind of democracy that makes way for genius.
It also makes way for mediocrity, but you take the good with the bad. So yes, this is a vibrant time for poetry simply because so many people are interested in reading and writing it. And no, we don’t have enough support for all these people, but there is also more support for poetry now than there has ever been in the past.
The expectation here is a bit skewed as well. Most of us don’t enter this practice with material gains in mind. The university system has helped to create this expectation of fortune and career, as though poems were a commodity. A good book to read to disabuse oneself of this mindset is Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, which has just been reissued on Vintage Books. When it first came out in 1983, the subtitle of the book was Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. That’s been changed to Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.
Lewis Hyde* uses anthropology, economics, psychology, art and fairy tales to examine the role gifts have played and continue to play in our emotional and spiritual life, and describes how poetry is the one art that resists commodification and holds tribes of people together.
DGM: You’ve talked about being drawn to, and about writing, poetry with some blood in it. Can you describe what that means, both in terms of your own work and the work you are most drawn to?
DL: Yes, blood. In other words, poems that possess a heart beat, the blood pumping, flowing through the veins. Poems with energy and drive, force and counterforce. Poems speaking with directness in the telling, where the reader can feel the human need from which the poem emerged. Hot-blooded poems. Which doesn’t preclude quietude. But a weighted silence, in which you can hear someone breathing. Poems with tension, velocity and vigor.
We get born from salt water into blood, we suffer injustices and loss. Sometimes unfathomable injustice, unbearable loss. And we die. Sometimes quickly, quietly, sometimes slowly, painfully. Always alone. I want a poetry that acknowledges this. I want to be broken into, like a house. I want to have everything stolen from me but my life and I want to wake up grateful for being spared.
I want poetry that tells the truth with compassion. I see so many poems of which anyone could say: There is absolutely nothing wrong with this poem. Or this poem is interesting. Or this poem is so smart. What does that mean? Smart? Was Neruda a smart poet? Or this is so well-crafted. I’m looking for poems that leave me speechless. Breathless. Slayed. My spell check says there’s no such word as slayed. And this is what I mean. I’m less interested in the right way than the only way.
When I read a Sharon Olds poem I think, this is the only way she could have written this. She’s our D.H. Lawrence. When I read a Philip Levine poem I think, this is a poem that has some sweat on it, some muscle and bone in it. Lucille Clifton, daring to tell us what we don’t want to hear, with power and anger. Yes. These are my heroes, not because they have mad line-breaking skills, but because over and over they are trying to say something important about what it is to be human.
Gerald Stern. Talk about energy, force, drive. He’s our Whitman. He cannot be contained! You can’t coolly appreciate Stern. C.K. Williams, his forward momentum, his brooding vision. Adrienne Rich at her fiercest and most direct, Ruth Stone beating out the singular loss of her husband over and over again, struggling, at 93, to get to the heart of it.
Galway Kinnell’s rawness, riskiness and originality in a poem like “The Bear.” Jack Gilbert, a poet of great compression, bearing the weight of his loneliness, his bleakly romantic vision. Stanley Kunitz, the pressure of that early cruelty, injustice and grief forging a poetry of compassion and tenderness. When you read these poets you don’t say, Gee, isn’t this a great line break, you say, Jesus!
And craft is important to all these poets, but it’s not why they sat down to write or why I have to sit down to read them. Craft is important, a skill to be learned, but it’s not the beginning and end of the story. I want the muddled middle to be filled with the gristle of living. Sexton and Plath. Yes. And I expect no less from myself. That doesn’t mean I don’t write poems that fall far short of my own expectations. Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t. I want blood.
*You can find Lewis Hyde’s The Gift at www.lewishyde.com/pub/gift.html.
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read write poem news- read write poem napowrimo anthology
June 20, 2010 | 1:36 pmThe Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Anthology is still in production. Selection, placement, layout and copyediting are taking longer than anticipated. Thank you for your patience. I hope to have the piece completed in July. For those who have emailed asking if they can be included, the May 7 deadline for submission of work stands. Those who met that deadline will be included. Please check the post on this site listing who I received submissions from by that date. If you submitted your work by the May 7 deadline in accordance with our guidelines and your name is not listed, send an email to info (at) readwritepoem (dot) org.
- read write poem napowrimo anthology
May 5, 2010 | 3:09 pmRemember that Friday* is the deadline for submitting work to the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Anthology. Check out the guidelines for submission in the main column (to the left). On May 8, we’ll post a news item listing everyone we’ve received work from. If you submitted work and your name is not on that list, please let us know. Thanks!
*I initially said “tomorrow,” but I meant to say “Friday.”
- napowrimo congratulations, and a reminder
April 24, 2010 | 12:05 pmIt’s the final week of the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge! Just 7 days left. With that, a reminder that Read Write Poem will culminate with the anthology featuring work from those who complete the challenge. A post with details for submitting to the anthology will be published May 1. Be sure you remove any information from the site that you want preserved — such as group content and personal messages. Those elements of the site will be removed May 1 as well. The main site will remain up as an archive.
- ‘underlife’ tour at january gill o’neil’s blog
April 20, 2010 | 8:11 pmJanuary Gill O’Neil’s virtual book tour has moved to her site and is underway now. Check out the lineup at Poet Mom.
 Archive for read write poem news »
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thank you and farewell As of May 1, 2010, Read Write Poem is no longer active.
In late May, an anthology featuring work from those who completed the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge will be published here and on issuu.com.
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