This is very exciting to have such an amazing woman and poet as Formaldehyde's first interview. Patty and I look forward to your questions and I will keep you all posted as to when the interview will be posted.
Patty Seyburn received her BS and MS in Journalism from Northwestern University and her MFA in Poetry from UCI and her PhD in Poetry and Literature from the University of Houston. She has three books of poetry, Mechanical Cluster, Diasporadic, and her most recent, Hilarity. Her poetry has been featured in The Paris Review, Crazyhorse, Cimmarron, Seneca Review,Poetry and Prose, and many, many others!!!! She is the Co-editor of Pool: A Journal of Poetry and has taught at USC, University of Houston, UCI, and others. She currently teaches at California State University, Long Beach.
Here are a few links to her poetry and book reviews. We hope to post her work directly on the blog with her interview.
~ http://thediagram.com/9_6/seyburn.html
~ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238288
~ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=238606
~ http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20650
~ http://thediagram.com/7_4/seyburn.html
~ http://www.lafovea.org/La_Fovea/patty_seyburn.html
Use the link below to see the review of Patty's new book Hilarity in the New York Times
~ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/books/review/McHenry-t.html
You can also find articles on poetry written by Patty at www.poetryfoundation.org
~ http://foggedclarity.com/2010/01/the-poetry-of-patty-seyburn/
Hi Patty,
ReplyDeleteMy question has to do with form. I was reading a Stephen Dobyns interview recently where he said, "Through revision, through argument, you make everything within the poem seem necessary, even the shape. The shape of the poem bears metaphoric relation to the content. They're completely intertwined."
While reading the poems that Jessica cited in your introduction I immediately noticed the different shapes that your poems take; "Davenport" is a prose poem, "Location, Location" is in couplets, "On Cooking a Symbol at 400 Degrees" is a sonnet, and "What I Disliked About the Pleistocene Era" is in quatrains.
I'd like to know how your poems take shape, and how much importance you believe lies in the form? Do you believe as Dobyns says that the shape of a poem has a metaphoric relation to the content? I think that we all understand that they are "intertwined" because shape and content are not arbitrary elements of a poem, but does the shape affect the metaphor?
Also, if your answer doesn't somehow lead you there, could you talk a bit about revision? How do you view revision? What kind of revision techniques do you employ on a regular basis?
Thanks Patty! (Nice “meeting” you!)
Danielle Mitchell
Questions for Patty:
ReplyDeleteWhat do you enjoy most about teaching students poetry? If you could give your creative writing students only one piece of advice, what would this advice be?
Of all the possible varieties of writing, how did you wind up in poetry?
ReplyDeleteCharles Harper Webb