Category Archives: Interviews with Poets

A Conversation with Ada Limon author of THE CARRYING, interview by Grant Clauser

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A Conversation with Ada Limon
author of THE CARRYING
published by Milkweed Editions
Interview by Grant Clauser 

Ada Limón is the author of several poetry books, including the National Book Award finalist Bright Dead Things, which was named one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of the Year by the New York Times. This year Limón released her fifth book, The Carrying, to wide acclaim, including being named a Best Book of Fall 2018 by Buzzfeed. Since the release of The Carrying, Limón has been traveling extensively for poetry events but was able to take some time out for Cleaver to discuss the new book and aspects of craft in her poetry. She lives in Lexington Kentucky. —Grant Clauser

Grant Clauser: All of your books, including the new one, include some mix of past events and present. Does a certain amount of time/space between events and the writing about the events affect your approach to it?

Ada Limón: Sometimes I write right in the white heat of the moment. Sometimes I need to do that just to work through what I’m trying to process. Other times I wait and need significant distance. Usually, the perspective changes with time. Writing about the present moment allows some freedom, however; there’s a familiarity with the moment that doesn’t need to be unearthed so the poem can come from a very authentic place without much need for research or personal mining of a certain event.

GC: When you wrote Bright Dead Things you worked for a media company (I think) in New York City. How did the change in environments from NYC to Kentucky affect the writing of your newer poems?

AL: I was actually already living in Kentucky by the time I wrote Bright Dead things, but I had just left New York. I was the Creative Services Director for Travel + Leisure Magazine. Moving to Kentucky gave me two much-needed things: time and space. My writing changed significantly because I was able to have long moments of silence and breath. I was also surrounded by wild things, green trees, grasses. The landscape gave me a new mode of writing.

Ada Limon

GC: In the new book, noticed recurring images of recovery, repair, rebuilding, remaking (such as in “Dandelion Insomnia”). Did that kind of theme-building happen spontaneously or does that come to the surface once you begin sorting poems into a manuscript?

AL: I think you’re right about those themes, and I do think they occur naturally. It’s usually because there is something big that I am going through. I am feeling some overwhelming need or question and the poems reflect it. Even when I’m unaware of what the I’m processing, the poems tell me. When the book starts to come together I look at what it is that I’ve been writing toward, and then I’ll start to give myself prompts so that I can go deeper into those themes—push myself further.

Naming is really important to me because I think when we name things we are more tender to them, we care about them, we understand them better. But I am also very aware of the hubris of naming things.

GC: The Carrying opens with a poem in which Eve is naming animals and ends with you thinking to yourself about the name of a bird. In between, there are other instances of naming or coming to know things. Is naming a kind of understanding or a kind of possessing or does it mean something different in your work?

AL: Naming is really important to me because I think when we name things we are more tender to them, we care about them, we understand them better. But I am also very aware of the hubris of naming things. Who are we to reach out and name something without language? I think that’s why I see the Eve in the poem trying to get the animals to name her, she realizes that they may have more wisdom.

GC: In “The Last Drop” which comes almost at the end of the book, there’s a feeling of resolve–that even the struggles in life are good. Could you talk about that and how it fits in the scope of the book? (one of my favorite poems in the book, by the way)

AL: Thank you! I wanted to get to a place where I was accepting of the mess and whirl of my world. That poem is all true, and I was feeling overwhelmed by everything: the horrid disease of Alzheimer’s, the death of my husband’s ex-girlfriend, her cats we were adopting, all of it was so much. And a month before our wedding, so this prose poem was a way for me to accept and absorb all of that without being too overwhelmed by it, it gave me a place to put it and a way to talk about it. I’m glad you like that poem; it’s one of my favorites too.

GC: This book shows a wide variety of lines lengths and stanza choices. Some are dense and some use a lot of open space, but the single stanza poem and couplets seem to be used most frequently. What attracts you to those forms, and how do they work differently for you?

AL: You know, I am always guided by what the poem wants. The poems that want to be slower have shorter line breaks, and the poems that want to be faster have long lines, the fastest are prose poems. The couplets usually are quieter, and they tend to be dialogues of a sort. I love working with form. My first book has a crown of sonnets. I’m interested in how form can both constrain and free you at the same time. It allows for each poem to operate differently.

GC: In “The Leash” and other poems there’s a kind of snowball effect (more in the single stanza poems than others) where the poem gathers emotional weight as it rolls down the hill. I imagine the hardest part of that kind of poem is how to end it. What are the challenges you go through in that kind of composition?

It’s easy—or rather satisfying—to always make the endings big and really stick the landing, but you need to stay true to the poem and make sure you’re responding to what you’ve already written, not what you had in your mind.

AL: Ah yes, you are not wrong about that, it’s all about the ending with the poems that have a certain kind of momentum or guided unraveling. The biggest challenge I face with poems like “The Leash” or “Bust” or “Dead Boy” is trying to make sure that everything is working together and that any tangent you go on still brings you back to the core of the poem. And then, of course, the ending, it’s easy—or rather satisfying—to always make the endings big and really stick the landing, but you need to stay true to the poem and make sure you’re responding to what you’ve already written, not what you had in your mind. You have to listen to the poem at that point and follow the poem’s instincts and not force an ending that might feel inauthentic.

GC: The poem “Trying” travels an obstacle course of subjects and emotions to get to a kind of resolve. What’s the key to maintaining control in a poem that operates like that? Or is control not even a consideration?

AL: I think it’s less about control there and more about release. “Trying” is a very natural poem, so that it has to feel like it’s effortless—even though of course it’s not—and it has to move in a way that feels like the mind moving. So you have to let go a little, allow the poem just to be and not worry it away. Poems that take place in the world of the now and the world of the body can easily get won over by the mind, so it’s more about releasing them before the mind turns it all into an intellectual project.

Marie Howe once told me that a teacher had told her: don’t listen when they say your work is no good and don’t listen when they say it’s great.

GC: In “American Pharaoh” the line “racing against nothing but himself” seems prescient to other moments in the book—that you can be successful when you measure yourself against yourself, not the judges, not the other horses, not society. That seems like a good lesson for everyone, but could that be especially important for poets who are constantly measuring their success against others?

AL: Oh I think any time we can have a lesson about not measuring ourselves against others, it will be highly beneficial. For the most part, I think the poets I love and admire are always trying to out-do their last poem, they want to get better, to get deeper, smarter, realer at all times. But, of course, when awards get listed or prizes come out, it’s easy for any artist to feel that sting of failure or ache of envy, but none of that tends to serve us. None of that is why we write. We write to connect, we write to figure out the meaning of life, to feel better about our world, our being, we write to make sense of the mess, to question, to rail against something, we write to save ourselves (sometimes from ourselves). So in some ways, you’re very correct in drawing that parallel between poets and the horse, our only enemy is time itself.

When awards get listed or prizes come out, it’s easy for any artist to feel that sting of failure or ache of envy, but none of that tends to serve us. None of that is why we write.

GC: Can you tell us one of the best bits of writing advice you’ve received from a teacher, mentor or friend?

AL: Marie Howe once told me that a teacher had told her: don’t listen when they say your work is no good and don’t listen when they say it’s great. Which I think is very true once you’ve reached a certain amount of success. And it makes me keep my head down and do the work. Nikky Finney once told me, at a particularly tumultuous time of my life, “know the elders are there doing what they do and be at great peace.” I think of that often too. These help me a great deal because they are both about trust and surrender, and I know I need that. I need to surrender and I need to trust this work. This work that is such a privilege to get to do in the first place.

Poetry craft essays editor Grant Clauser is the author of four poetry books, Reckless Constellations, The Magician’s Handbook, Necessary Myths and The Trouble with Rivers.  Poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Cortland Review, Gargoyle, The Literary Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry and others. He works for a New York media company and teaches poetry at random places. Find him @uniambic.  Email craft essay queries to [email protected].

 

Ada Limon author photo credit: Lucas Marquardt

 

I DON’T WORRY ABOUT LOOKING BACK A Conversation with Poet and Editor Grant Clauser

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

I DON’T WORRY ABOUT LOOKING BACK
A Conversation with Poet and Editor Grant Clauser

Interview by Natalie Kawam

On Cleaver’s five year anniversary, we continue to celebrate with interviews featuring our senior editors. Grant Clauser is the Poetry Craft Essay Editor for Cleaver, and he also reads poetry submissions. His most recent books are The Magician’s Handbook, published by PS Books, and Reckless Constellations, winner of the Cider Press Review Book Prize. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Cortland Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Tar River Poetry, and others. He runs workshops at Rosemont College’s Writer’s Studio and can be found on Twitter via username @uniambic. He is also a home technology editor at Wirecutter.

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Natalie Kawam: When did you join Cleaver?

Grant Clauser: A little more than a year ago.

NK: How did you find out about it?  What do you like about it?

GC: I knew that Karen Rile previously published a few of my poems, and we were connected through the Philadelphia literary scene.  She was looking for someone to help write and recruit writers for craft essays, and reading poetry submissions.  I like doing those things. So, I volunteered.

NK: Why do you like Cleaver?  What sets it apart from other publications for you?

GC: Cleaver is unique in that it is one of the more dynamic publications around now.  It tries new things.  Most of your online or lit pubs break themselves into poetry, fiction, maybe non-fiction.  Cleaver has a little bit of everything for the creative person, not just writers, because there’s also audio plays and art features and things like that. Cleaver never stops trying to do something new.  There’s the Life As Activism section, there’s the blog with interviews, there’s the craft essays.  And then, the core literature sectioNK: poetry, flash fiction, short stories.  In fact, right now there’s a graphic narrative feature on the website.  Then of course the Ask June advice column, which is one of my favorite parts.  So there’s a little bit of everything, and you just don’t find that in any other publication.

NK: What sparked your interest in writing poetry?

GC: I just enjoy how dynamic language can be.  My interest in poetry actually started in seventh grade when I memorized Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven.”  I just loved the music of it so much, and the imagery that it evoked in my mind.  It’s amazing that it can sound and create an experience within you rather than just be words on the page.  Shortly after that, I got into reading Poe for those two elements, sound and images, and it sort of went off into mania from there.

NK: You have two new books, is that correct?  How is that going?

GC: It’s great!  It’s a bit of luck that two of them happened very closely to each other.  The most recent one, Reckless Constellations, just went on sale this past January.  The one before that in October, The Magician’s Handbook.  So now I have a lot of readings and events planned for the year, to go out and try to get people to like them.

NK: Well, congratulations!  It always seems to happen that way.  It always comes at once, and then it works out until you go through that period where you can’t write anything!

GC: I’m actually not writing nearly as much now as I had been a year ago, and maybe that’s because I need a rest period.

NK: Who or what are you reading?

GC: I subscribe to a ton of print publications as well as online journals. At the moment, I’m reading the publication that showed up in the mail just yesterday, which was the Southern Review. Also, a book that I bought, which arrived in my mailbox about two days ago, from Devin Kelly called In this Quiet Church of the Night, I say Amen.  Kelly’s a person I ran into on Twitter.  I started reading some of his stuff online. So I ordered his book and I’m blown away by it.  I need to tell everyone I can to get this book. It’s fantastic.

NK: That’s great.  It’s one of the best feelings.  You feel like you’re being acknowledged through your own pursuit of finding things to read, and it almost feels as good as writing itself.

GC: Yeah. I buy about two books a week, and I subscribe to a lot. So I always have a pile of things to read.

NK: What are your go-to journals or literary magazines?

GC: What I end up doing a lot is following a number of poets and writers on Twitter. When they post poems they love, I click through.  So, I can’t say I have a lot of favoritism because I go through and read so much.

NK: I think that speaks to how people find poetry today, in this age.  It’s not just going through print journals or books, as they come out. It’s all over the internet.

GC: And there are a couple of writers who have been strong in promoting other poets, too.  Like Kaveh Akbar.  Any poem he falls in love with, he tries to makes sure everybody else reads it [on Twitter].  I’ve come across a lot of writers that I’ve heard of that way, from other peoples’ suggestions, which tells me there are less gatekeepers in the literary world now than there were twenty years ago.

NK: I think that’s one of the best things about Cleaver being online.  I know I have a number of peers that are also writers and, if I like their work, I know their influences are probably resources I’m going to love as well.  It’s an incredible network.

GC: Yes, absolutely.  Online pubs and social media have changed the poetry landscape in a lot of ways.

NK: What does your start-to-finish process look like for a piece? I know that it can vary and look very different for each piece, but which process is memorable for you?

GC: Oftentimes, my process starts with reading. I get ideas, or the feeling to write something, when I’m sitting down in the evening, going through a pile of books.  It usually starts with a word combo or an image that I like, and I try to build something around that. I think my poems are short. I don’t usually go over a page, that’s very rare. I’ll typically finish a draft within 30 minutes and then stare at it for a while, read it out loud to see how it sounds, play with it for a couple of hours, or the next day, and keep going back. That going back process is about looking for speed bumps, things I stumble over and want to correct.  Occasionally a poem comes out fully formed, but that’s rare.

NK: Do you feel like sometimes your earlier versions are better than your more revised versions?

GC: I hope not, because I don’t keep drafts! I don’t worry about looking back.

NK: How do you think American writing has changed or evolved in the past five years, specifically in response to the election?  

GC: What it’s done is—well, I don’t know that it’s changed writing as much as it’s changed writers. The election and politics, in general, have emotionally charged everyone, not just writers. There’s a lot more energy to express your thoughts and how you feel about the world. The result has been a lot more socially and politically charged poetry, because it is top of the mind for everyone, especially writers who are socially engaged in the world. Activism, or thinking politically about what’s going on in our country now, is so relevant that it’s going to express itself in their writing. Ten years ago, you wouldn’t wake up to think, “My god, what has our lunatic president done today?” Now, you do. That informs everything a person does, even more so if you’re an artist.

NK: What is your stance on writers having a social responsibility to affect societal change?

GC: I wouldn’t be the person to tell anyone what they should and shouldn’t be doing. Does poetry affect societal change? I would hope that a poem affects small changes in a person. Will it affect the way we feel about a social issue or political element? I don’t know. I can’t say whether it does or doesn’t; but the answer to that question shouldn’t affect whether you should do write poetry, especially if you feel you should do it.  If it’s a part of your experience, it’s going to be a part of your work.

NK: What do you hope to achieve in your future writing?

GC: I hope I’m able to still do it, and that people respond to the things I do in my work. And, that I don’t go broke doing it! I’m always going to be writing, and I’ve been lucky to have some recognition in that department. I feel lucky to have the opportunity to teach and share my enthusiasm about it. I want to continue all of the above.

NK: Lastly, why do you write what you write about? What is unavoidable for you?

GC: If it’s part of your experience, it’s going to be a part of your poetry. The two things I keep going back to is an outdoors style, and my family.  Both of those things are profound parts of what create my experience. In fact, my book, Magicians Hand Book was sort of a turn away from those two things [as subjects] because I think I was getting the reputation of being a nature poet. I thought, “I need to do something completely different.” The next book ended going back a lot to my own experiences.  

Social Media Maven Natalie Kawam is an undergraduate poet at Bryn Mawr College.  In May, 2016, she received the Academy of American Poets Prize at Bryn Mawr, and was published in September 2016 through the Academy.  See her poetry here.  Natalie is also a poetry staff reader for Glass Kite Anthology.

Brian Burmeister Interviews Heather Derr-Smith

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A Conversation with Heather Derr-Smith, author of Thrust, from Persea Books (2017)

Interview by Brian Burmeister 

Heather Derr-Smith is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and author of four collections of poetry. Her newest book, Thrust, was the winner of the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize. Thrust has been praised by many fellow poets, including Kaveh Akbar, who called the book, “An important, ambitious new collection.”

Derr-Smith is also an activist and advocate who has volunteered with several nonprofit organizations, including Everytown for Gun Safety. She recently founded Čuvaj se, which focuses on supporting writers in war-torn regions.

In this interview, Brian Burmeister asks Heather Derr-Smith about her poetry, the role of poets in the world, and her advice for fellow writers.

Brian Burmeister : Your new poetry collection, Thrust, explores a lot of powerful themes—love, desire, violence, and the search for personal identity. What do you hope your readers will think and feel as a result of these poems?

Heather Derr-Smith: I would like people to feel their own strength and resilience. I hope that people can tap into the possibility of facing suffering and pain honestly, not pushing it away or denying its existence or impact or effect. But also, that each and every one of us is strong and gifted with a right to fight back and say NO to malevolence, wherever it comes from. This is a delicate message I’m trying so hard to communicate. The hurt is real, the pain is real, suffering is right here all around us and don’t turn away from it. Your trauma is important and real. So is your power. You may not win or overcome, but just in standing firm you have done an incredibly powerful thing. I think I want them to feel that power of resistance.

BB: What was the writing process like for you as you wrote Thrust?

HDS:  I have a strange process, or at least, I’ve learned that it is strange when I compare myself to what other writers say they do. I do not write every day. I tend to cycle through seasons of listening, being present to the world, watching, reading, just absorbing things quietly. I’ve learned to trust that my mind is doing the work it needs for when it is time to write.

Then I start to take notes in a notebook. I usually read the dictionary and find words I like and I make sentences out of those words or images or lines for poems. I also find words in other books I’m reading or phrases I overhear in real life or in movies. I collect all these sentences, words, and lines in a notebook. Usually, it comes to be that I see patterns emerging of things I am interested in—like for Thrust I was reading a lot of books and essays on boxing, so I was taking notes on boxing terms. I started boxing myself and binge-watching old, old clips of fights. I took notes on all these things, images, descriptions etc. I was also reading all about Nabokov’s butterflies so I took a lot of notes on that. At some point I see common themes emerging and patterns and connections being made between such disparate parts as Boxing and Butterflies, which leads to this wonder of poetry and metaphor.

In my personal life I was wrestling with questions about my own past and my own trauma from both childhood and as a survivor of rape. I was in therapy and I finally got brave enough to return to my hometown, Fredericksburg, Virginia, where I grew up and hadn’t spent much time in for a number of years. I had been estranged from my family to protect myself emotionally and psychologically, but I felt like I had gotten to a point where I was strong enough to re-engage and make some discoveries on my own terms. So I visited all my old haunts, the old homeplace, my old friends, and places where I had lived as a teenage runaway. I was able to make some peace in those places and place often plays a huge role in my poems. So I started taking notes on what that all felt like and also the flora and fauna of those places. When I was a kid I wouldn’t have cared to name such things, which is perfectly fine for a child to be free from the need, just so immersed in the moment, but in writing I do care very much about naming. I love how it roots the self in the world in this way that I missed growing up, having such a fractured sense of identity from years of trauma.

So when I get to that place I feel a surge of energy and I plunge in and start writing a whole book all at once. I don’t work on poems so much as poetry. I start to see where there are poems in all the notes and I divide them up into manageable chunks and move lines and images around fitting them into pages where I see—oh, here is a poem forming about loss and this word fits and that image fits and let me tie it all together and strengthen that theme or add this contradiction or surprise. Pretty soon I have about fifty pages and the poems emerge stronger and stronger. I often think of it like I’m on a Ouija board and spirits are getting pulled out of the page/board into this world to speak.

BB: You’ve made multiple trips to Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), and your first book of poetry, Each End of the World, reflects upon life there during and after the Bosnian War. Recently, you created the literary and human rights organization, Čuvaj se, dedicated to the support of writers and scholars in communities affected by war. What led you to the creation of this organization? And what are your hopes or goals for the work done by this organization?

HDS: Yes! I am so excited to start this nonprofit and see where it leads. BiH has become like a second home to me, and I do think eventually I will live there a good part of the year. I made a commitment during the war to show up and be present with the people who were resisting authoritarianism and nationalism and I want that to be a lifelong commitment to that particular place. But as we know full well, these forces are on the march all over the world and never seem to really abate for long. This nonprofit is just a small gesture I can make that I hope will lead to something useful. I would like all of my income—which is very slight at this point but could become more significant as I teach more and become more established—any money from my books to go toward others. I have a lot of privilege as a white American woman. I’ve benefitted enormously from my access to resources like therapy to help me overcome PTSD, like networks of support to keep me out of poverty, education, literary networks, so even with a history of abuse and violence and adverse childhood experiences, I have benefitted from my place in the world and in society. I want to give back and lift up others.

I will have to start small with this nonprofit, small projects that are easy to accomplish, because for one thing, I’ve never run a non-profit before. I’ve been doing these workshops for years all over the world with refugees from Iraq and Palestine in Syria, Syrian refugees in Europe, Burmese refugees in the United States, and of course with the Bosnian diaspora, a community so profoundly affected by a brutal war and genocide. I want to keep doing that. In November and December I will be doing poetry workshops in partnership with the US Embassy in Estonia, and in Eastern Ukraine with IDP’s (internally displaced people) from the war in Donetsk and in Czech Republic and Bosnia. All of these communities are struggling through a resurgence of nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism. I serve two populations mostly. The first is university age students, often from the LGBT community in these countries, often advanced writers themselves who are interested in connecting with the broader poetry community. And the second group is very different, usually survivors of trauma, usually older, not university educated, not poets, but often people who just love poetry and may be there to practice English skills and/or are processing trauma. So the former is more academic and the latter is more therapeutic. I’ve developed relationships over the years and would like very much to partner with organizations already working in their respective countries. For instance, I’ve been involved in workshops in Sarajevo with TPO Foundation, already doing fantastic work with women activists and in the schools with teachers. They are in the process of trying to put together a summer camp for kids that would include poetry workshops and I could apply to grants to help run those in partnership with them. I’m looking at small-scale projects like that and we’ll just see where it leads. I will have a booth and brochures at AWP 2018 so hopefully by then I will have a specific project in mind!

BB: What civic or societal responsibilities do you believe poets in the world today should possess?

HDS: Building community at home and abroad. Being authentic and generous in the world with one another, neighbors and strangers. I think the days of poets as elitists in ivory towers should be over. I think the idea of poets as above others and privileged and milking their privilege for fame or immortality should be dismantled. We are all flawed, of course; no one is perfect and we all are learning and growing—or should be, so I hope poets will be real about who they are and strive for that kind of authenticity. I hope MFA programs, which I love, become more and more places of community and less and less places of unhealthy competition and unhealthy, even abusive, power dynamics. I believe we can strengthen one another’s work far better through caring for one another and positive critique—as in we all have muscles to build in our work, sure—let’s encourage one another to write stronger and harder but there are so many better ways of doing that than tearing each other down. I hate “negative” reviews and think they are worthless for making poetry better. This doesn’t mean we just praise one another all the time and we don’t care about craft. Poetry is a craft and we work hard to get better, and yes, it’s okay to differentiate between work that is mature and work that is not—but let’s also leave room for work that is maturing and leave room for possibility for our fellow writers.

I still believe American poets are too insulated from the rest of the world. This is a problem for Americans in general but for poets as well. Many countries do not have access to the networks we have, and we are leaving people behind, silencing a lot of incredible work, just because they can’t access our American networks or communities of writers. I would like to see us do a better job of being trans-national. Often poets in Ukraine, Estonia, Bosnia, or many, many other countries, perhaps in Iraq, Syria, name anywhere in the world, and so many great poets are disconnected simply because they are ignored when they do try to reach out. There is still the frenzy of popularity and celebrity and coolness within the American lit community, where certain names become cool—and, of course, their work is deserving of praise, but word spreads and they tend to dominate. It’s funny, in Western Europe and in many countries with a rich literary tradition, elitism comes in the form of a certain male-dominated intellectualism. In America there is elitism in American Coolness. You see it all the way back in the Beats; it’s the NY School; it’s just so much a part of our culture. It’s like no matter how marginalized or anti-elitist a movement starts out, it can still become exclusionary, which I think we should constantly be working to undo.

BB: Many of Cleaver Magazine’s readers are aspiring poets. As a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, what is one piece of advice you were given during your time there that you would want to pass along to other writers?

HDS: The best things I took from the Writer’s Workshop came by example, not really advice.  There was lots of good advice that I would echo. I mean I learned from reading a lot of poetry. I learned from imitating. I learned from writing a lot. But what meant the most to me were teachers and peers who demonstrated a generosity and authentic humanity. I believe this is what makes the best work and work that will last. Mark Doty taught me to be generous to others and to have empathy. He was kind. We had workshops around tables of food at one another’s homes. Sharing meals like that creates community. The way he talked about other poets was with the tone of friendship or awe. He didn’t need to show off by tearing things apart. He asked a lot of questions, and that modeled for me a way of being. Marvin Bell was the same, always excited about something, always wanting to show us something neat. It was just a genuine love of art and literature and being alive, too. Charles Wright was a master craftsman. He worked us hard. But he had a sense of humor and a lack of pretense. Just be real, be imperfect, be uncool, be curious, and be open to one another.

Brian Burmeister teaches communication at Iowa State University. His writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He can be followed on Twitter: @bdburmeister.

Grant Clauser interviews poet JERICHO BROWN

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Everything Has to Come Through You
A Conversation with poet Jericho Brown
Author of PLEASE and THE NEW TESTAMENT

Interview by Grant Clauser

Jericho Brown, author of the prize-winning poetry collections Please and The New Testament, visited Bucks County Community College in September to give a reading. This interview was conducted at a picnic table outside the school’s auditorium building prior to the reading.

Brown, who teaches creative writing at Emory University, has received numerous awards for his poetry including the Whiting Writers Award and the American Book Award. He’s received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was recently named poetry editor of The Believer. His poems are widely published in journals such as The American Poetry Review, The Nation and The New Yorker.

Grant Clauser: One thing I feel in your poems is a constant sense of motion—how they shift and pivot, like they’re running an obstacle course to get to something. I see that in the poems “Football Season” and others. Is that movement effect a conscious technique aim for or a expression of how you work through the poem on the page?

Jericho Brown: I think it’s a good idea to always be interested in creating what you wish was there, so what I try to do as a poet is make the poems I wish I were reading. It’s a matter of creating a need for something the reader may not have known he or she had a need for. And I think that’s how I want to live my life. When I’m teaching a class I try to do it how I would have wanted it done if I were the student. I want my poems to be like snapshots or a series of snapshots no matter how long the poems are. I want it to feel full, as is the case in a dream, but I also want it to have a certain kind of series of leaps that make sense, like in dream. So that’s part of what those pivots are about.

Talking about them consciously isn’t something I would really be capable of doing because it’s something I think that you practice to the point that it becomes second nature. So for instance when you’re writing a really formal poem you know you’re good at it when you’re not counting numbers on your fingers. Iambic pentameter is not about how do I get to ten, it’s about knowing it second hand because you’ve been practicing. And because you know that, you’re able to make the sonnet without thinking “now I’m going to write a sonnet.” The poem is moving toward sonnet. I think that way about form, but I also think that way about certain things that I do in poems, like what you call pivot—I always think of hinge, something that allows me to leap into something else, it opens a door and suddenly you’re in another world. That you can have both of those worlds in a single poem has always fascinated me.

I’ve always been really interested in trying to write life, and in writing a poem that is an organism, that is as complicated and complex as people are. I want my poems to be like me. I feel I’m a person in the world who upon being seen gets pinned down, and I hate that because it’s not true. I’m not one thing. I’m many things, and I’m that thing that people think I am. And I can be several things in a matter of five minutes. I can pray and love the Lord and get in my car and hit traffic and start cussing.

GC: How much do you think about the reader when you’re writing, and if you do, at what point does the reader enter into your process or in what way?

JB: I don’t think about the reader, but I do think about myself outside of myself. When I’m writing a poem I think about myself when I was nineteen or I think about myself given a feeling I had after seeing a piece of art or after having read a poem I love. How do I satisfy that reader in that moment? How do I satisfy the person I was the first time I heard Juvenile’s Back That Thang Up cause I was a happy and excited person who thought something new and wonderful was happening? It’s sort of a weird thing that when people ask about the reader, I think they mean someone other than me, but I can read, so I can just use myself. If I can get to the point that I like my poems, then that’s good.

I also think it’s important to have friends. Poets are clannish beings and I haven’t gotten to that point where I’m so solitary that don’t show poems to people. I want to see my friends’ poems and tell them that they’re bad, and for my friends to see my poems and tell me that they’re bad, or see my friends’ poems and say, “hey, I think this would be a better word here,” and I want them to do the same thing for me. In that way there’s a reader because there’s someone who can tell me when something is or is not working, but I don’t anticipate my friends when I’m writing. Mostly when I’m writing I just need to get everything down. As long as there are words on the page, as long as there’s text to work with, I’ll always be able to ask the poems questions that help me revise the poem. I just have to hold onto it long enough for it to answer those questions. Sometimes it can be a literal mess of words that don’t make any sense, but you can still say, “who is your speaker?” or “what is your occasion?” and sometimes that mess or words will begin to tell you, to translate itself.

GC: As a teacher of poetry-writing, what are the most important ideas you want to get across to your students, and what are the hardest ones for them to learn?

JB: I think with beginning poets there’s always a bit of wanting to write the feeling rather than the image or the experience or even just the music that would get us to that feeling. Ultimately what I teach is strategy. More than teach them to write, I think I teach them to read without reading for explication or interpretation. To read in a way that leads them to wonder why they’re turned on by something. The reason you’re turned on by something is not what it means, and we know this because everyone has a tree, and we’ll sit there and love that tree, but we don’t explicate a tree. We say, “oh, there’s a tree, it’s beautiful.” And then we might say the reason the tree is beautiful is because as I’m looking at it from this vantage point it is an interesting color against the blue sky that makes the green look different. And it’s not so much that the tree is beautiful, it’s that the blue sky is beautiful.

GC: One of the things that’s both necessary in poems yet impossible to teach is passion or intensity. Your poems have that. So my question is how does one cultivate that, how do you make sure it’s there and available to the reader?

JB: Passion comes from subject matter, which is something we shouldn’t think about when we’re writing. The important thing about writing is that you ask yourself poetics questions. How do I end in an abstraction? How does one make use of a contraction? Is it possible for me to have a direct address? Asking those kinds of questions leads to poems. What those poems are about should be second hand, should be what comes out of your language in trying to answer those poetics questions. And you’ll find out what you’re interested in through trying to answer those questions. As a poet who’s sitting around trying to write about injustice or love, if you start that way, saying I’m going to write about hatred or I’m going to write about God, then you are also going to write a bad poem. Whereas if you try to answer questions with poetics you will find yourself writing about God in order to answer these poetics questions and you will realize, oh, I really care about God.

The thing I notice in my students’ work is that at first in the intro class in their first poems they all have either birds and or trees, and they really don’t give a shit about birds, because they’re always just birds. They really haven’t ever noticed a bird in their lives, but they have this idea that they’re writing a poem so they need a bird. Instead of believing in the things that obsess them, and letting those things come out in the poem as opposed to writing about them in the poem. Then you’ll have that intensity and passion you’re talking about, because it hasn’t been prepped. You’re not trying to organize it. It is making it’s own way into the writing.

GC: In another interview you mention shame, as in poets feeling ashamed to be poets, to let people know that’s what they are? Whereas football players aren’t ashamed of being football players. Can you explain that? What motivates it?

JB: Poets are really subversive people and they’ve got a problem with everything, and that’s what I like about them. I like that when you show a poet something they immediately say, “well, that’s not what that is, I’m skeptical.” I’m the guy, who when I watch Game of Thrones, the entire time I’m wondering at which point they have body doubles. That’s why I watch it, so I can catch the body doubles. I think that poets are naturally that way, and I think that’s a good thing, but I think sometimes we’re that way about one another and ourselves in a way that is not useful to us in the long run.

We do have some things we love. We love poetry, and we’re not helpful to it when we are ashamed of it. Nobody wants to tell anybody they’re a poet. I say let’s make people afraid of you. Let’s let people go through whatever they go through when you tell them you’re a poet. Given the cultural impact that we make over time, we have to begin to be proud of the work that we do. The poet is always there. Even when we’re dead we’re always there. And we have to begin to herald and shout that out. The thing that we actually do is complain that nobody’s reading poetry. But who would? They’re ashamed of themselves. You know what I mean? You can’t have both.

GC: Related to that—we have a section on Cleaver called Life in Activism to encourage artists to express themselves politically. What do you think of the role of the poet as a voice in the world, as an activist?

JB: Right now, considering that we’re in the middle of a political crisis, I wish people would just understand. First of all, stop saying you’re surprised, whoever you are. Stop saying that because it’s insulting. It makes people like Gwendolyn Brooks and Allen Ginsberg and (for heaven’s sake, “the world is too much with us”) it makes Wordsworth and all turn over in their graves. If you’re a reading poet, or a cultural thinker or intellectual of any kind and you’re surprised about a fucking election than that means that you weren’t listening and that also means that you sat around calling black people liars, because every black poet that I’ve ever known has been telling you. Gwendolyn Brooks, in an interview, literally said Donald Trump will be president if we go the way we’re going, so when you say you’re surprised, you’re really insulting a bunch of people. So everybody who’s saying that needs to stop saying that—or be embarrassed about feeling that way.

Instead, it would be a good idea to assume that we are now living in the apocalypse, and so if you don’t want to live in the apocalypse you need to act as crazy as a person would act in order to get out of the apocalypse…because what you were doing before clearly did not work. So this idea of whether the poet is a political being, when everything about the history of poets tell us that it’s all the poet ever was, is just some American bullshit. And I don’t know why Americans need bullshit, but they clearly need it the way they need mayonnaise, and it’s shit. It’s going to get in your arteries and kill you. It’s going to get crazy people elected. So that’s sort of number one.

At the same time I do not think that the poet can think about any of those things while he or she is writing poems. When I’m writing poems I need to allow my obsessions to come through without pushing them. The question though, is, have I really opened my mind, to everything that could possibly obsess me. So my issue is never reading a poem and feeling that the poem isn’t political enough. But reading a poet over a period of sixty years and all they can write about for that sixty years is that same damn dog that they’ve been writing about since their first book. That seems strange to me. It seems odd to me that every one of us at this point has literally seen an unarmed black man murdered by a police officer for no reason. Whether we saw it on Twitter, Facebook, television, we’ve literally seen it happen. So it seems to me that if you’ve seen a human being shot by another human being for no reason, that you have an experience, because you’re a human being. You have an empathetic and sympathetic experience. You’re world is rocked. You see this thing, you lose you’re mind. I’m not saying anyone has to write anything, but I think it’s reasonable to question why they only see one side of life. I think it’s important for poets to begin to question whether or not they are living fully.

Whether or not they are experiencing all of life about them. It may not be that it is your responsibility as a poet to write as an activist or to write politically, but it is your responsibility as a poet to live fully. You are a repository. Everything has to come through you. And so I need to see what happens when we have so-called political moments come through the poets. And I think we need that. I think it’s important. So I’m not saying we need all poets to start writing about feminism or race or the fact that we’re absolutely dastardly to Muslim people in this country. That would be a waste of time. But I do think it’s important for poets to observe what they’re observing. Pay attention to what’s around you, and stop pretending it’s not there, instead of writing about that same damn flower.

How is it possible that other things have not found their way into your poems? And I know the answer. It’s possible because you refuse to see anything other than your garden, and you’ve built a life that allows you to not see anything but your garden. You have to build that life at this point. We’re more connected now than ever before. People are willfully not knowing. If you’re a poet, that seems to me odd, considering what we know about negative capability, what we know about tradition and individual talent.

GC: What are you working on now? Will the next book have anything in common with the last one, or will it take a different path?

JB: Today, I am at work on A Little Evil, a third collection of poetry written in the voices of personae and in the mode of meditations on literature, visual art, and film. I am asking myself new questions about how to allow poetry and other forms of art I love to influence my writing. In these poems, speakers address characters like Rufus from James Baldwin’s novel Another Country and High John from Daniel Minter’s painting High John the Conqueror. According to the poet Wanda Coleman, “Art feeds art,” and this manuscript is my way of proving that dictum. Some of the poems question our national obsession with horror films and investigate our love for celebrities with lines like “…I’m alone in the dark. I’ve paid for myself/To see Sandra Bullock try and hate/A handsome man…” Critics have said that this theatrical darkness is a kind of consciousness in which we allow an actor to perform an aspect of ourselves, so that watching the film is both private and public at once.

Because I am now more fully aware of my obsessions my subject matter, I want A Little Evil to question whether there is such a thing as “universal” and whether experiences that are not universal can be rendered as the so-called sublime. I am using personae to more fully understand whether or not the body is at different levels of risk when it is raced, gendered, or disabled.

Many of the poems in A Little Evil see the body as a repository for history. Its speakers turn toward other genres and forms because they want to believe that art can facilitate healing. In a few of the poems, the body attempts to split itself from its history, creating speakers who sound maniacal or surreal. A gravedigger sings love songs while burying the tortured and murdered in the poem “Shovel.” A football player guesses at the outcome of his very short career with, “That’s the dream, how we die” at the end of “Success Story.” Can the body wracked by history be reclaimed without suffering insanity? These poems are not so sure. If I had to sum the book’s poetics with a few of its lines, I might choose these from “Before Dawn”: “How long must I/Claim beauty where there is/Only truth.”

A Little Evil is a book about the malnourished and persecuted body. I explore how even that body learns to thrive despite the stories grafted upon it, experiences that mean to degrade and devalue it. What I have written leads me to a hypothesis: in several of these poems, speakers learn—through touch of their own and other bodies—to love themselves rather than wish for death.

Grant Clauser is the author of four poetry books, most recently The Magician’s Handbook (PS Books, 2017) and Reckless Constellations (Cider Press Review, 2018). His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Journal, The Literary Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Tar River Poetry and others. Follow him at @uniambic

 

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