Tag, I'm it! I am grateful to Angie Macri for inviting me to participate in this blog tour, wherein writers are answering a few questions about their work and then tagging new people to participate next week.
I am thrilled to say that my first collection of poems, Hive, has won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and will be published in 2015 by the University of Wisconsin Press.
Thanks to that fantastic news, right now I am finalizing the manuscript for publication. I'm elbow deep in the poems, making sure every word is right where it needs to be.
When you're in the zone creatively, though, unexpected things can happen; I've written four or five new poems amidst all my editing of old ones. I'm also starting to think about what my next collection will look like, which makes cutting poems from Hive a lot less painful. I want Hive to be a lean, mean volume. Violence and God are two of its main themes, and a little goes a long way.
People like to put things in boxes and give them a name. As such, poetry is usually categorized as either narrative (telling a story) or lyrical (driven by emotion, with no discernible story).
What I write are temporal lyrics. This is a blend of narrative and lyrical. The poems may be anchored in a specific time or place; they may feature people whose relationship is easily understood, such as lovers or siblings. But the poems are really about the central question of "how did it feel" rather than "what happened next." That's what makes a temporal lyric.
For more on the temporal lyric, refer to the essay by Carl Dennis in the book Poet's Work, Poet's Play.
Another characteristic of my poems is that most of mine aren't hard to understand. Sometimes people don't like poetry because they don't get it, or there's lots of fancy language. I believe in being readable. If you can't be understood, what's the point?
I feel more like my obsessions have chosen me rather than the other way round. I doubt there will ever be a time when I'm not writing about love, or faith, or man's inhumanity to man. These topics are eternally varied and thus eternally interesting to me.
Now, if I interpret that question to mean "why do I write poetry instead of science fiction novels," then my answer is this: sci-fi is awesome and I definitely might write a novel someday. But I gravitate toward poetry because it's challenging to write. The same way Twitter can be both vexing and rewarding because of the 140-character limit, poetry is all about saying as much as possible with as few words as possible, and using white space as a tool. Poetry balances what is said with what isn't, and trusts the reader to see between the lines.
Poems are collaborative: they depend on both the writer and the reader to come alive. That's just cool.
It's never a smooth road, that's for sure. If I wanted to sound impressive, I suppose I would claim to rise every morning at 5:00 and sit at my desk until 12:00, working industriously. But it's rarely like that. I have a full time job, for one thing, and a life.
British comedian Stephen Fry described writing a book like this: if you want gold, first you have to climb down in a gritty mine, wield a chisel till you're exhausted, and for pity's sake WORK at it.
I write in enormous fits and starts. My poems come from everywhere—things I hear, things I see, things I read. They come from the world around me and they strike at any moment. More times than I can count, I've used Siri to dictate a few lines while I'm driving home in traffic. The important thing is to stay curious and be alert to anything that catches your attention.
Over the years I've learned not to fight my natural inclinations. When a line or an image materializes, I pause what I'm doing to jot it down. If I don't, I'm sure to forget it in a few minutes. Then when I have a couple solid hours to devote to writing (often on a weekend), I take all that ephemera and start crafting it into a poem.
The only real rule I follow is "write it while it's hot." Write hot, edit cold. And be willing to let anything go.
My tagged writers for next week are: