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1. When did you start writing poetry?
The earliest I can remember attempting to write some feelings into the form of a poem was when I was in 6th grade. I’m sure we were probably studying that subject and it influenced me. When I was very young, my mother read to me from Mother Goose and other children’s books of poems. There was one about a calico cat and gingham dog and one about a a land of candy that are still vaguely rolling around in my head. By the time I was in high school, I was getting a little more serious about writing poetry but there was so much more going on….it was the 70’s, what more can I say? After high school is when I really began what I thought would be My Book of Poetry. I worked on it continuously, even typed up and mounted everything in a bound journal book with those old-time photo mounts. I probably had over 15 years worth of collection in that journal, always thinking I would have it published. Only what I thought was ‘my best’ went into that book. I lost it while traveling a couple of years ago. I have this crazy dream in my head that someone found it and some day, that person’s family will be going through their things and ‘discover my writing’ and the rest will be history! Ha!
2. What other writing do you do regularly?
Well, I have attempted a few short stories and a novel over the last few years. The one that I got to where I thought I was about half way through was about a woman that had amnesia and was homeless, it was about identity. But, I didn’t back up and my old computer crashed and it’s frozen in there. I have the computer still, hoping to somehow have it liberated. It haunts me, I can’t bear to start it again. Then, I tried my hand at another one but it turned into a long, short story. It was a little futuristic, a love-triangle that involved a man, his wife and a lifelike android. Didn’t back up, computer crashed with story frozen inside. I also have that computer, hoping for liberation. You would think that I would learn to back up, which I have done in a work environment. I guess I’m technically lazy, no really, I’m lazy to use technology. That’s sad.
I submitted a short story to Glimmer Train that was about a mom writer and how her real world and her writing world sort of collided with her in the middle. I didn’t get accepted, but I really enjoyed writing the story.
And, (please don’t judge me) I have written a true-life account of an encounter with an unidentified flying vehicle that my children and I had experienced.
I have played around here at AW and have shyly visited various sites like the memoir thread where I was picked one time for the ‘winning’ memoir. I like to visit the philosophy area and I’m sure they don’t like me running in and out and being silly but I love to lurk around in there and occasionally attempt to articulate my feelings….they are way over my head in that thread. I hope no one ever thinks of me as someone who just likes to pop in and spout off and run away. It’s just that it’s very scary to attempt to voice your thoughts when you know everyone in there is so educated and intelligent and I’m such a bear with a little brain.
On mine and my husband’s website, I started my first serious blog that I’ve been ‘consistently attending’. It is a few paragraphs related to food. I’ve started my own website that has to do with early child development that is at brainplay.weebly.com.
I had a poem accepted into the Bluerock Collection, one in Hollister Brown and several in the AbsoluteWrite Poetry Collection.
3. Do you think of yourself primarily as a poet?
I do think of myself primarily as a poet mostly because I’ve yet to do anything else, really. I do play with my photography, which I think of as visual poetry. For me, the arts are separated by thin walls and often bleed into each other. I suppressed my artistic self for most of my life and it’s only in my ‘maturity’ that I’ve begun to give myself license to come out and make a fool of myself trying to be artistic. I actually feel a hurt, a want, a need to express myself as an artist and I do feel a bit crippled in that aspect of myself. I think I need therapy, like lots of crayolas and reams of paper. I wish I could be a poet but I do consider myself a ‘wanna be’.
4. Why do you write poetry?
It’s fun to write poetry. My brain loves words. It’s fun to pronounce them, use them, study them and play with them. I’m not really interested in word puzzles, because I want the words to interact together so that they get larger than just the words themselves. (Hope that makes some sort of sense.) I like the presentation that words make, when they have an affect outside of themselves. So far, poetry is the only medium I have to express those artistic needs, as I mentioned earlier. (My photography is limited by my access to some good equipment but I’m happy with what I’ve learned with what I’ve got.)
I’m a concept person and words are tools to dig out particular concepts when constructing a poem.
5. How does writing poetry relate with your other writing?
I use to think I was really in bad shape because the only thing that I was “writing” was what came out of me playing the various one word games here on the forums, like the rhyme game and some others. But, the more I play those games the more I saw that they were helping me to make fast word associations which I think is helpful when writing. Those games are a good way to build up your vocabulary-association repertory. Also, when you are writing poetry, you really have to work with such a limited amount of words and that’s challenging. I’ve learned that when writing prose, so much gets stuffed into what a person wants to say that it’s half the job just to get all the excess and unnecessary out. Writing in the Haiku thread is like a discipline for me because it is so exact as to what you can use to present your ‘word-picture’. The story lines have to be very succinct. When I do attempt to write prose, sometimes I feel I’m ‘waxing poetic’.
6. Beyond Absolute Write, what is your publication/performance history?
Not much. I have had some stuff in college that went into something or other….a little thing here and there on different ezines, and that’s about it. Sad, sad, sad. You know the old saying….if you don’t submit, that’s it. Well, maybe I just made that up.
7. How often do you write poems?
I write poems almost everyday, in my head. Something will fire off a synaptic impulse and I’ll work on it a little and it probably gets scribbled on a piece of paper and I find them stuck into books, lying in piles of other papers, mixed in with important stuff like BILLS and just about everywhere in the house and the vehicles. But, those usually don’t get any further than those pieces of paper, even though I’m really excited about them when I’m writing them. Sometimes, I write them when I’m driving and that is really dangerous; not highly recommended, almost as bad as texting in the wrong place at the wrong time.
My ‘grounding’ is AW forums. If I didn’t have you guys, I would probably be a basket case. But, I have to be honest and admit that I do frequent another poetry writing group on the internet but consider AW my mothership. You all are much more personable and family-like. You all have nurtured me and guided me and provoked me and kept me generally fired up about writing poetry and I so thank you all (especially MacAllister) for ya’lls existence.
8. What goals, if any, do you have for your poetry?
You know, everyone who writes would love to make some money doing it, but I really think that regardless if that money ever comes, or not, an artist, whether a poet or a painter or a dancer or a musician, is going to express his/herself through the medium that seems most suited to that individual, that’s just how an artist (good or bad) rolls.
I have said so many times that I want to get a chapbook together and I have been so distracted taking care of elderly parents/children and helping my husband, I’ve not done that yet. Hopefully, I can change that this year.
I also have said that I would like to attempt , at least once, a poem in every form, whether or not they are good poems. I think it would be a great challenge and at one time, we were very active here at AW poetry forums with threads that challenged us to try various forms. I think I would like to try and revive some of that while Poet Laureate. I did try several different forms and really learned a lot from the members who shared their expertise with those forms.
9. Do you set out to write a poem, does it compel you to write it, or something else?
I probably will hurt some feelings and I apologize, in advance, but I don’t believe in the whole muse thing. (Please don’t anyone throw things at me or curse me or anything.) I do believe that there are sufficient ‘triggers’ both inside of us and in the world we experience to inspire poetry. It’s a matter of wanting to use poetry to say something about those things that trigger us. To be honest, where I really have applied myself is when I’m given a specific challenge either by my own self or by a challenge in a group or in a competition, then “it’s on”. I’m more motivated to do research, to flesh out my concepts and to work on my symbolism. I usually do write spontaneously but I really go after a poem when I “see a specific target”. Not long ago, for example, I read a news article about how the native peoples of Easter Island were being driven from their homes by developers and corporate crooks who want to financially exploit the Island and disenfranchise the peoples’ who legitimately have a right to the Island. There was fighting and bloodshed, the people being evacuated from peaceful protest with violence perpetrated by the government and the corporations. I challenged myself to translate that news story into a poem. I think someone called it a historical poem and I had never heard that term before. Who knows, maybe someone who would have never been inclined to read the news story about the event might, instead, be drawn to read a poem about it and be compelled to learn what was behind the poem?
10. What formal, semantic, or thematic traits do you prefer to use in your poems?
Yikes! I don’t know if I’m smart enough to answer this question! I know that I am primarily a free-style poet but, as I said, I would like to attempt to write all the forms, just as an exercise and, here at AW, I have had the opportunity to try my hand at several, enjoying each challenge. I like to use symbolism when I can pull it off . I like alliteration and whatever else I can muster from those poetry classes of my youth.
One thing that I’ve been attempting, probably not well, is to write poems that solicit the reader to interact with the poem. I like poems that bring in smells, sounds and textures. My favorite are poems that provoke people to think out of their own experiences and ask them to look at things from multiple perspectives. A big one for me is the idea of erasing timelines and letting the past, present and future sort of collide together. I do believe that is how people really think because, we have thoughts coming at us continuously from those timeframes and it’s linear reasoning that sorts it all out and turns our thoughts into some sort of consecutive line of experiences.
I am not educated to be able to get into the technical aspects of writing or poetry. I think I write, for good or bad, more intuitively, hoping that I’m not making a muck of things.
11. Which usually comes first: Topic/idea, form, words? Other?
It’s funny. Sometimes, when I write, it will be based on just one word. Either the sound of the word or the look of the word or the associations I have with that word will get me going. Sometimes, it will be some event, internal or external, that will do the trick. Again, I like the challenge of translating life into poetry, so, it could be anything that I feel inspired/challenged to convert into as few, and hopefully poetic, words, as possible.
12. Do you revise? Right away, later on? How do you decide when you've finished
with a poem?
Yes, I revise. I revise when I revise. It’s not my favorite subject. I think a poem can always be tampered with because they’re not sacred and life is not static. I don’t know if I’m ever finished with a poem but I also can go years without touching a particular poem and then decide something needs to be added or taken away.
13. How did you come to be interested in poetry?
I don’t know. I’m sure I was initially exposed to poetry through the books my mother read to me when I was a child. She reads about a book a day, so she made reading a big part of my childhood. I think the projects we had during elementary school were what really got me to actually writing poetry.
14. What particular poem or poet first attracted you to poetry?
Mother Goose and Edgar Allen Poe are my biggest memories from childhood but I know there were so many more that I was exposed to through my education as a child. I do remember studying minimalism around the 6th grade. I know there were so many more but my memory is not so good.
15. What poems, poets, movements or eras have influenced you as a poet: which do you particularly enjoy, admire, or aspire toward?
Here is where I get embarrassed. Again, I’m sure I’ve been exposed to so many of the classics and the modernist. My memory is so fragmented. I can think of Hiawatha. Plath. Poe. The Illiad and the Odyssey. Spanish poets. Kirdish poets. Japanese poets. There is so much that I’ve read or read about and sadly, for whatever reason, nothing really stands out. I’m not proud to say it, I just believe it’s all been absorbed and is just part of the mush that is inside my gourd. I read a lot but I’m horrific to tell you who I read, but I am happy to discuss what I read about. I think I have a terrible brain disease and I’m sure there a lot of ‘literature people’ out there that think I’m sacrilegious because I have this defect. I do remember I liked to play a lot with minimalism and made lots of interesting pictures out of my poems typing them out visually on a manual typewriter. Those were in the set of lost poems I was hoping to have published. Now, I prefer to paint my pictures with the words themselves.
I truly enjoy reading anything, more so, to see if I can find something within the poem that specifically speaks to me personally. I might not like a whole poem, but find a word or a phrase that intrigues me. I consider each poem I read to be an experience with the potential for discovery.
I know I am not attracted to poems that dwell heavily on morbidity, sexual perversion or words that are only used for supposed shock value. I really think it’s getting to the point, in our culture, that no word really has any shock value left.
16. What single poem of yours would you recommend to someone who had never read your work?
Yikes, another hard question. You know, I have a weirdo poem that really gets to me but probably doesn’t do much for anyone else. It’s in our thread called Calling Card Poems, I think. I wrote it as a ‘translation’ of how I was experiencing the whole Terry Shievo incident that happened at the same time the previous Pope died. I took those two events and played them side-by-side, in my head, and came up with the poem The Indictment: Shievo in Two Parts. That poem did a lot for me to express how felt in regards to such a tough issue with so many complexities. I’m not saying it’s a poem worth reading, it just says a lot about me and how I use poetry to ‘make sense’ out of the world around me and how I experience that world.
My recent poem Binding Love is an example of me ‘targeting’ or being challenged to write within certain parameters and to accomplish a specific purpose.
17. What are your thoughts on poetry today: its function, future, direction, relevance?
Well, I personally believe our world is going to get smaller and smaller, for a variety of reasons. I believe technology is going to turn out to be a true bane for culture. Really, I think for humanity, in general. I know a lot of people would argue that thought; to each his own. I’ve seen articles where computers and robotics are moving in on human turf and artistic expression is not exempt. Crazy talk, I know. Sorry, I read weird stuff. I’ve seen articles where it’s almost impossible to tell if an artistic work has been done by a human or not. In the Age of Spritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil, soon it will become more and more difficult to separate our lives in every aspect from the influence and infringement of machines (computers and robotics). Here is the link that gives some information if anyone is interested : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Spiritual_Machines.
I do also believe that it will not be guns that saves humanity from destruction but a raised consciousness that understands that we, in fact, came into existence through The Spoken Word and that music created us. Our spirituality is born of creativity and it is essential to our wellbeing to discover our center of creativity and it’s purpose, whatever that might be. I know that when I went on my spiritual quest to find my creative center, I discovered that place within me that was created for the indwelling of Jesus Christ. As a Christian, I found the fulfillment of my creative center. I believe that is often expressed in my writing.
I do believe that the supreme age of deceit, fraud and counterfeit is rushing upon humanity and that our best defense against it is a resolute spirit to be true to the song/poem that is in every created being’s heart. Poetry is part of the warp and woof of our very being.
18. What, in your view, makes a written/spoken work a poem?
I’ve never performed a spontaneous, spoken word poem, that would be an ecstatic experience! I have read poetry aloud, like in a class and it is such a wonderful experience to read poetry aloud. I encourage everyone to do so, even to yourself. It’s amazing to play with the reading of a poem because, as you do so, you often discover subtleties that escaped your previous readings. Also, you can work out the nuanced meanings by experimenting with your voice and reading the poem in your own dramatic interpretation. (Can you tell I don’t get out much?) It’s fun to read aloud, even for adults! I think “what works” has it’s own criteria that can sometimes take away from a freedom to write and read poetry. If “what works” means a well executed poem that has merit and shows skill, that’s all good and great and is what the ultimate goal should be for the professional poet. But, I do believe that poetry, regardless of quality, works on so many levels, even “bad” poetry, because it is a working-out-process and for some of us, we like to be caught up in the process, on any level, as much as enjoying the well executed poem.
If a well executed poem meets all the given criteria of its form, then it works. If it brings its audience into a vicarious experience, then it works very well, in my opinion.
19. What do you like about your own poetry?
I think what I like about my own poetry is that it is a medium that I can creatively express myself and that it is an ongoing learning process that I experience some feeling of accomplishment and still feel challenged to continue learning and producing.
I also enjoy digging into poems. For me, analyzing a poem, not just critiquing it for the sake of telling someone how they could write it better or to correct their mechanics, but to go after the real meaning that is buried within the poem, which I believe is a window into the poet, is often more intriguing than the poem itself.
There have been a few times where I posted a poem and if someone offered a critique or some feedback of some sort, I took the liberty to deconstruct my own poem. I sometimes have more fun doing that than actually writing it. It’s like the old technique they taught us to check our division/multiplication. When I take my poem apart and expose what I was attempting to do, I often, for the first time, really ‘see’ my poem. (I don’t know if that makes sense to anyone besides me.)
20. What would you say to someone who wants to learn to write poetry well?
I would say be open to advice from other people who write poetry, especially by not being argumentative or defensive. On the other hand, I would say to be prepared to give a good account of what is that you are doing and what you want to do. I think the more we can have healthy dialogues that affirm and yet challenge one another, the more we all benefit as a poetic community.
If you find that you are affected by fear, doubt, confusion, face off with it. Explore. Discover. Experiment.
Accept that people are just people. We’re all in this boat together and the more positive energy that we can create, the better we are for doing it. Accept differences and resist being homogenized.
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The earliest I can remember attempting to write some feelings into the form of a poem was when I was in 6th grade. I’m sure we were probably studying that subject and it influenced me. When I was very young, my mother read to me from Mother Goose and other children’s books of poems. There was one about a calico cat and gingham dog and one about a a land of candy that are still vaguely rolling around in my head. By the time I was in high school, I was getting a little more serious about writing poetry but there was so much more going on….it was the 70’s, what more can I say? After high school is when I really began what I thought would be My Book of Poetry. I worked on it continuously, even typed up and mounted everything in a bound journal book with those old-time photo mounts. I probably had over 15 years worth of collection in that journal, always thinking I would have it published. Only what I thought was ‘my best’ went into that book. I lost it while traveling a couple of years ago. I have this crazy dream in my head that someone found it and some day, that person’s family will be going through their things and ‘discover my writing’ and the rest will be history! Ha!
2. What other writing do you do regularly?
Well, I have attempted a few short stories and a novel over the last few years. The one that I got to where I thought I was about half way through was about a woman that had amnesia and was homeless, it was about identity. But, I didn’t back up and my old computer crashed and it’s frozen in there. I have the computer still, hoping to somehow have it liberated. It haunts me, I can’t bear to start it again. Then, I tried my hand at another one but it turned into a long, short story. It was a little futuristic, a love-triangle that involved a man, his wife and a lifelike android. Didn’t back up, computer crashed with story frozen inside. I also have that computer, hoping for liberation. You would think that I would learn to back up, which I have done in a work environment. I guess I’m technically lazy, no really, I’m lazy to use technology. That’s sad.
I submitted a short story to Glimmer Train that was about a mom writer and how her real world and her writing world sort of collided with her in the middle. I didn’t get accepted, but I really enjoyed writing the story.
And, (please don’t judge me) I have written a true-life account of an encounter with an unidentified flying vehicle that my children and I had experienced.
I have played around here at AW and have shyly visited various sites like the memoir thread where I was picked one time for the ‘winning’ memoir. I like to visit the philosophy area and I’m sure they don’t like me running in and out and being silly but I love to lurk around in there and occasionally attempt to articulate my feelings….they are way over my head in that thread. I hope no one ever thinks of me as someone who just likes to pop in and spout off and run away. It’s just that it’s very scary to attempt to voice your thoughts when you know everyone in there is so educated and intelligent and I’m such a bear with a little brain.
On mine and my husband’s website, I started my first serious blog that I’ve been ‘consistently attending’. It is a few paragraphs related to food. I’ve started my own website that has to do with early child development that is at brainplay.weebly.com.
I had a poem accepted into the Bluerock Collection, one in Hollister Brown and several in the AbsoluteWrite Poetry Collection.
3. Do you think of yourself primarily as a poet?
I do think of myself primarily as a poet mostly because I’ve yet to do anything else, really. I do play with my photography, which I think of as visual poetry. For me, the arts are separated by thin walls and often bleed into each other. I suppressed my artistic self for most of my life and it’s only in my ‘maturity’ that I’ve begun to give myself license to come out and make a fool of myself trying to be artistic. I actually feel a hurt, a want, a need to express myself as an artist and I do feel a bit crippled in that aspect of myself. I think I need therapy, like lots of crayolas and reams of paper. I wish I could be a poet but I do consider myself a ‘wanna be’.
4. Why do you write poetry?
It’s fun to write poetry. My brain loves words. It’s fun to pronounce them, use them, study them and play with them. I’m not really interested in word puzzles, because I want the words to interact together so that they get larger than just the words themselves. (Hope that makes some sort of sense.) I like the presentation that words make, when they have an affect outside of themselves. So far, poetry is the only medium I have to express those artistic needs, as I mentioned earlier. (My photography is limited by my access to some good equipment but I’m happy with what I’ve learned with what I’ve got.)
I’m a concept person and words are tools to dig out particular concepts when constructing a poem.
5. How does writing poetry relate with your other writing?
I use to think I was really in bad shape because the only thing that I was “writing” was what came out of me playing the various one word games here on the forums, like the rhyme game and some others. But, the more I play those games the more I saw that they were helping me to make fast word associations which I think is helpful when writing. Those games are a good way to build up your vocabulary-association repertory. Also, when you are writing poetry, you really have to work with such a limited amount of words and that’s challenging. I’ve learned that when writing prose, so much gets stuffed into what a person wants to say that it’s half the job just to get all the excess and unnecessary out. Writing in the Haiku thread is like a discipline for me because it is so exact as to what you can use to present your ‘word-picture’. The story lines have to be very succinct. When I do attempt to write prose, sometimes I feel I’m ‘waxing poetic’.
6. Beyond Absolute Write, what is your publication/performance history?
Not much. I have had some stuff in college that went into something or other….a little thing here and there on different ezines, and that’s about it. Sad, sad, sad. You know the old saying….if you don’t submit, that’s it. Well, maybe I just made that up.
7. How often do you write poems?
I write poems almost everyday, in my head. Something will fire off a synaptic impulse and I’ll work on it a little and it probably gets scribbled on a piece of paper and I find them stuck into books, lying in piles of other papers, mixed in with important stuff like BILLS and just about everywhere in the house and the vehicles. But, those usually don’t get any further than those pieces of paper, even though I’m really excited about them when I’m writing them. Sometimes, I write them when I’m driving and that is really dangerous; not highly recommended, almost as bad as texting in the wrong place at the wrong time.
My ‘grounding’ is AW forums. If I didn’t have you guys, I would probably be a basket case. But, I have to be honest and admit that I do frequent another poetry writing group on the internet but consider AW my mothership. You all are much more personable and family-like. You all have nurtured me and guided me and provoked me and kept me generally fired up about writing poetry and I so thank you all (especially MacAllister) for ya’lls existence.
8. What goals, if any, do you have for your poetry?
You know, everyone who writes would love to make some money doing it, but I really think that regardless if that money ever comes, or not, an artist, whether a poet or a painter or a dancer or a musician, is going to express his/herself through the medium that seems most suited to that individual, that’s just how an artist (good or bad) rolls.
I have said so many times that I want to get a chapbook together and I have been so distracted taking care of elderly parents/children and helping my husband, I’ve not done that yet. Hopefully, I can change that this year.
I also have said that I would like to attempt , at least once, a poem in every form, whether or not they are good poems. I think it would be a great challenge and at one time, we were very active here at AW poetry forums with threads that challenged us to try various forms. I think I would like to try and revive some of that while Poet Laureate. I did try several different forms and really learned a lot from the members who shared their expertise with those forms.
9. Do you set out to write a poem, does it compel you to write it, or something else?
I probably will hurt some feelings and I apologize, in advance, but I don’t believe in the whole muse thing. (Please don’t anyone throw things at me or curse me or anything.) I do believe that there are sufficient ‘triggers’ both inside of us and in the world we experience to inspire poetry. It’s a matter of wanting to use poetry to say something about those things that trigger us. To be honest, where I really have applied myself is when I’m given a specific challenge either by my own self or by a challenge in a group or in a competition, then “it’s on”. I’m more motivated to do research, to flesh out my concepts and to work on my symbolism. I usually do write spontaneously but I really go after a poem when I “see a specific target”. Not long ago, for example, I read a news article about how the native peoples of Easter Island were being driven from their homes by developers and corporate crooks who want to financially exploit the Island and disenfranchise the peoples’ who legitimately have a right to the Island. There was fighting and bloodshed, the people being evacuated from peaceful protest with violence perpetrated by the government and the corporations. I challenged myself to translate that news story into a poem. I think someone called it a historical poem and I had never heard that term before. Who knows, maybe someone who would have never been inclined to read the news story about the event might, instead, be drawn to read a poem about it and be compelled to learn what was behind the poem?
10. What formal, semantic, or thematic traits do you prefer to use in your poems?
Yikes! I don’t know if I’m smart enough to answer this question! I know that I am primarily a free-style poet but, as I said, I would like to attempt to write all the forms, just as an exercise and, here at AW, I have had the opportunity to try my hand at several, enjoying each challenge. I like to use symbolism when I can pull it off . I like alliteration and whatever else I can muster from those poetry classes of my youth.
One thing that I’ve been attempting, probably not well, is to write poems that solicit the reader to interact with the poem. I like poems that bring in smells, sounds and textures. My favorite are poems that provoke people to think out of their own experiences and ask them to look at things from multiple perspectives. A big one for me is the idea of erasing timelines and letting the past, present and future sort of collide together. I do believe that is how people really think because, we have thoughts coming at us continuously from those timeframes and it’s linear reasoning that sorts it all out and turns our thoughts into some sort of consecutive line of experiences.
I am not educated to be able to get into the technical aspects of writing or poetry. I think I write, for good or bad, more intuitively, hoping that I’m not making a muck of things.
11. Which usually comes first: Topic/idea, form, words? Other?
It’s funny. Sometimes, when I write, it will be based on just one word. Either the sound of the word or the look of the word or the associations I have with that word will get me going. Sometimes, it will be some event, internal or external, that will do the trick. Again, I like the challenge of translating life into poetry, so, it could be anything that I feel inspired/challenged to convert into as few, and hopefully poetic, words, as possible.
12. Do you revise? Right away, later on? How do you decide when you've finished
with a poem?
Yes, I revise. I revise when I revise. It’s not my favorite subject. I think a poem can always be tampered with because they’re not sacred and life is not static. I don’t know if I’m ever finished with a poem but I also can go years without touching a particular poem and then decide something needs to be added or taken away.
13. How did you come to be interested in poetry?
I don’t know. I’m sure I was initially exposed to poetry through the books my mother read to me when I was a child. She reads about a book a day, so she made reading a big part of my childhood. I think the projects we had during elementary school were what really got me to actually writing poetry.
14. What particular poem or poet first attracted you to poetry?
Mother Goose and Edgar Allen Poe are my biggest memories from childhood but I know there were so many more that I was exposed to through my education as a child. I do remember studying minimalism around the 6th grade. I know there were so many more but my memory is not so good.
15. What poems, poets, movements or eras have influenced you as a poet: which do you particularly enjoy, admire, or aspire toward?
Here is where I get embarrassed. Again, I’m sure I’ve been exposed to so many of the classics and the modernist. My memory is so fragmented. I can think of Hiawatha. Plath. Poe. The Illiad and the Odyssey. Spanish poets. Kirdish poets. Japanese poets. There is so much that I’ve read or read about and sadly, for whatever reason, nothing really stands out. I’m not proud to say it, I just believe it’s all been absorbed and is just part of the mush that is inside my gourd. I read a lot but I’m horrific to tell you who I read, but I am happy to discuss what I read about. I think I have a terrible brain disease and I’m sure there a lot of ‘literature people’ out there that think I’m sacrilegious because I have this defect. I do remember I liked to play a lot with minimalism and made lots of interesting pictures out of my poems typing them out visually on a manual typewriter. Those were in the set of lost poems I was hoping to have published. Now, I prefer to paint my pictures with the words themselves.
I truly enjoy reading anything, more so, to see if I can find something within the poem that specifically speaks to me personally. I might not like a whole poem, but find a word or a phrase that intrigues me. I consider each poem I read to be an experience with the potential for discovery.
I know I am not attracted to poems that dwell heavily on morbidity, sexual perversion or words that are only used for supposed shock value. I really think it’s getting to the point, in our culture, that no word really has any shock value left.
16. What single poem of yours would you recommend to someone who had never read your work?
Yikes, another hard question. You know, I have a weirdo poem that really gets to me but probably doesn’t do much for anyone else. It’s in our thread called Calling Card Poems, I think. I wrote it as a ‘translation’ of how I was experiencing the whole Terry Shievo incident that happened at the same time the previous Pope died. I took those two events and played them side-by-side, in my head, and came up with the poem The Indictment: Shievo in Two Parts. That poem did a lot for me to express how felt in regards to such a tough issue with so many complexities. I’m not saying it’s a poem worth reading, it just says a lot about me and how I use poetry to ‘make sense’ out of the world around me and how I experience that world.
My recent poem Binding Love is an example of me ‘targeting’ or being challenged to write within certain parameters and to accomplish a specific purpose.
17. What are your thoughts on poetry today: its function, future, direction, relevance?
Well, I personally believe our world is going to get smaller and smaller, for a variety of reasons. I believe technology is going to turn out to be a true bane for culture. Really, I think for humanity, in general. I know a lot of people would argue that thought; to each his own. I’ve seen articles where computers and robotics are moving in on human turf and artistic expression is not exempt. Crazy talk, I know. Sorry, I read weird stuff. I’ve seen articles where it’s almost impossible to tell if an artistic work has been done by a human or not. In the Age of Spritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil, soon it will become more and more difficult to separate our lives in every aspect from the influence and infringement of machines (computers and robotics). Here is the link that gives some information if anyone is interested : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Spiritual_Machines.
I do also believe that it will not be guns that saves humanity from destruction but a raised consciousness that understands that we, in fact, came into existence through The Spoken Word and that music created us. Our spirituality is born of creativity and it is essential to our wellbeing to discover our center of creativity and it’s purpose, whatever that might be. I know that when I went on my spiritual quest to find my creative center, I discovered that place within me that was created for the indwelling of Jesus Christ. As a Christian, I found the fulfillment of my creative center. I believe that is often expressed in my writing.
I do believe that the supreme age of deceit, fraud and counterfeit is rushing upon humanity and that our best defense against it is a resolute spirit to be true to the song/poem that is in every created being’s heart. Poetry is part of the warp and woof of our very being.
18. What, in your view, makes a written/spoken work a poem?
I’ve never performed a spontaneous, spoken word poem, that would be an ecstatic experience! I have read poetry aloud, like in a class and it is such a wonderful experience to read poetry aloud. I encourage everyone to do so, even to yourself. It’s amazing to play with the reading of a poem because, as you do so, you often discover subtleties that escaped your previous readings. Also, you can work out the nuanced meanings by experimenting with your voice and reading the poem in your own dramatic interpretation. (Can you tell I don’t get out much?) It’s fun to read aloud, even for adults! I think “what works” has it’s own criteria that can sometimes take away from a freedom to write and read poetry. If “what works” means a well executed poem that has merit and shows skill, that’s all good and great and is what the ultimate goal should be for the professional poet. But, I do believe that poetry, regardless of quality, works on so many levels, even “bad” poetry, because it is a working-out-process and for some of us, we like to be caught up in the process, on any level, as much as enjoying the well executed poem.
If a well executed poem meets all the given criteria of its form, then it works. If it brings its audience into a vicarious experience, then it works very well, in my opinion.
19. What do you like about your own poetry?
I think what I like about my own poetry is that it is a medium that I can creatively express myself and that it is an ongoing learning process that I experience some feeling of accomplishment and still feel challenged to continue learning and producing.
I also enjoy digging into poems. For me, analyzing a poem, not just critiquing it for the sake of telling someone how they could write it better or to correct their mechanics, but to go after the real meaning that is buried within the poem, which I believe is a window into the poet, is often more intriguing than the poem itself.
There have been a few times where I posted a poem and if someone offered a critique or some feedback of some sort, I took the liberty to deconstruct my own poem. I sometimes have more fun doing that than actually writing it. It’s like the old technique they taught us to check our division/multiplication. When I take my poem apart and expose what I was attempting to do, I often, for the first time, really ‘see’ my poem. (I don’t know if that makes sense to anyone besides me.)
20. What would you say to someone who wants to learn to write poetry well?
I would say be open to advice from other people who write poetry, especially by not being argumentative or defensive. On the other hand, I would say to be prepared to give a good account of what is that you are doing and what you want to do. I think the more we can have healthy dialogues that affirm and yet challenge one another, the more we all benefit as a poetic community.
If you find that you are affected by fear, doubt, confusion, face off with it. Explore. Discover. Experiment.
Accept that people are just people. We’re all in this boat together and the more positive energy that we can create, the better we are for doing it. Accept differences and resist being homogenized.
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