1: Of all the possible varieties of writing, how did you wind up in poetry?
~Charles Harper Webb
I started out as a journalist, but not a very good one. I earned my BS and MS in Journalism from Northwestern University. I knew, in high school, that I wanted to be a writer, but I really had no idea that one could be a poet. My parents didn’t go to college and I was raised to be able to take care of myself. So when I was accepted as a journalism major, I assumed that was my path. As it turns out, I was a good writer but a mediocre reporter. I didn’t have the killer instinct, the nose for news. I was always more interested in the details that lingered at the fringes of stories, the stuff that is NOT news. So I started taking poetry workshops in New York while I was working at Newsweek, and it became pretty clear that poetry should be at the center of my life. So I went back to grad school at UCI, and prayed to like teaching. Which I did, so I went on to University of Houston, got my doctorate, wrote the poems that would become my first book. So here I am. Writing poems and teaching. Go figure.
2: Many of us are just starting out in the world of poetry. Would you mind sharing a story about a time when you doubted yourself as a writer?
All through graduate school; before that, I was working full-time and writing “on the side,” so it was one big doubt. During my MFA, I knew that I could write a certain kind of poem that was ubiquitous at that time, a sort of anecdotal narrative. It’s a good poem, and I still like reading it, but I knew there were more strategies out there, and that my poems had to become more ambitious. But I really had no idea how to get there, so that made me insecure. When in Houston, doing my doctorate, I was surrounded by strong writers. There were moments when it intimidated me, especially when in a room with Ed Hirsch or Richard Howard discussing my poems, but for the most part, I’ve let self-doubt motivate me. I think insecurity and guilt are great motivators. I will never have read enough. I feel lousy about that, and it will always drive me. Have you ever seen the movie, “Broadcast News”? Albert Brook’s character has this great line: Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive?” To me, insecurity and desperation in a poet aren’t bad things. They drive us. But don’t get me wrong: it feels good to get a few books out, too.
3: Hi Patty,
My 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?
~Danielle Mitchell
A series of good questions. You’re right, of course: I do write in a fairly wide variety of forms, from what might be called “strict” (a sonnet) to what might be called “loose” (a prose poem) – and everything in between, though, of course, they are all forms. As a child studying piano, I remember being slightly annoyed that my piano teacher was always harping on (sorry, Mrs. Petrakovitz) dynamics, expression marks. I wanted to ask her: “why can’t I just play a piece REGULAR?” Something held me back from asking this (idiotic) question. Although sometimes, I think my students, smart-to-a-fault, would like to ask me: can’t I just write the poem, regular, without thinking about form? The answer, of course is: no. Correction: in the generative stages, the earliest stages of a poem, yes, of course, you can just write out the poem and see where the lines break, see where or even if the stanzas break, etc. But once the fog clears and you really enter into the poem, and you really begin to engage with and interrogate the poem (which is how I see the revision process), form takes center stage. I think what that question really speaks to, in 2010, is the prevalence of free verse: students new to poetry can’t really imagine writing anything else, with the exception of performance-oriented poets, who generally approach poems writing in rhyming couplets, or more extensive rhyming than that. They need to learn how not to crutch on rhyme.
When I’m working on a poem, after I have the first draft, the basic language/idea/information down on the paper, then form becomes the next question. I look to the poem for cues. Most of my work is a musically dense free verse. Sometimes stanzas, sometimes a stichic (block of text without stanzas). Sometimes the stanzas contain the same number of lives, sometimes they don’t. I am always trying to break away from my own patterns and habits, so if I feel like I’ve been writing poems that are more “shapely,” as one of my mentors, Richard Howard, used to say, then I have a yen to write a looser stanza, a more erratic line length. If I feel that I haven’t been controlling the line quite as well, then I zero in on the line breaks and line lengths, perhaps moving them toward greater symmetry. I love mathematics, though I’m not terribly good at it anymore – I was, as a child – so there’s part of me that loves symmetry. I use that and play against it, depending. Also, being trained in classical piano for 10 years, I have a very strong sense of rhythm, which I think has served me well – for the most part – as a poet. Sometimes I have to push away from it, however. In any case, I’m always aware of it, and my students benefit and suffer (depending on who you ask) from my having them learn and practice metrics. It keeps the language from getting slack, prosy.
On the other hand, I’ve been listening to jazz since I was a teenager, so part of my idea, as a poet, is that the left hand maintains a strong rhythm while the right hand wanders, improvises. Many great jazz pieces are based on the premise of a backbone that allows the rest of the instruments freedom – though never as much freedom as it might sound like. There’s always control. This must be true for a poem, as well.
In terms of strict form, such as sonnets – I tend to be pretty strict with myself. For me, a 14-line poem is not a sonnet. Well, the fact is, it’s not a sonnet, and wishing can’t make it so. But it has leanings toward the sonnet, it’s a gesture in that direction, and so when I see one of my poems containing heightened compression of rhythm and some sort of argument, I might try to push it toward a sonnet. What I love about doing that is that trying to find strong rhymes – which should not be mistaken for any rhymes – invariably pushes the poem somewhere else, somewhere I probably would not have taken the poem. That’s a huge part of my revision process: getting the poem to the point where it’s telling me what to do, rather than be strong-armed by me. The best way to do that is by paying close attention to language: scrutinizing each word to make sure it measures up, deserves its place in the line. This should be true of each syllable: poems are about economy, not waste. I might decide, in a revision, to examine the verbs. Or to take the poem line by line, reading aloud, and seeing where the language gets lazy. Sometimes I start at the end of a poem and examine each line, because we’re often sort of tired, even as poets, by the end of our poems. The beginnings are these gorgeous, honed artifacts and the ends are slop. In my poems, the hardest part is the middle. I tend to be good at beginnings and ends – I used to be a journalist, and I think the notion of a “lead” and a “kicker” (the last couple lines of a story that leave you with something to think about) translates into my poetry. It’s those middles that I always have to work on. In general, I’d say, in the revision process, I think you have to make sure all of the language measures up to the best language in the poem. Find the two best lines, the lines you love reading aloud. Make everything else answer to them.
On the other hand, I’m also enjoying writing prose poems (am currently writing a crown of sonnets and a series of prose poems, going back and forth between the two). They are very difficult to revise, and I think that shows in a lot of prose poetry, much of which I find pretty damn tedious. On the other hand, what I love, I love: mostly French prose poets – Francis Ponge, Jean Follain. For me, revising prose poems means staring at each sentence, because the sentence – or fragment of the sentence – is your dominant unit. You’re not getting any mileage from a line-break, so those sentences need to be beautiful and intense. And varied.
Okay, I’ve blathered on for long enough.
4: You are a huge advocate of “breaking the page,” however also find a real significance in 14 lines given poetry’s long-time loyalty to the sonnet. Can you discuss the importance of both of these lengths to poetry?
I love economy in poetry: best words in best order, as Coleridge wrote. As for the page, however – it’s length is arbitrary, after all – if the psalmists wrote on lined-paper, how long with the great poems of the bible be? How long would “Paradise Lost” be? (Actually, I don’t know what Milton wrote on, but you get my point.) So I’m wary of not being able to write a longer poem, simply because I don’t think a piece of white paper should dictate the shape or magnitude of our thoughts. I think young poets should learn to stretch out, to juggle more balls in the air, to risk greater failure at taking on a bigger subject, or intertwining subjects that create a productive and unpredictable dialogue with one another, like a chemical reaction. I like Marvin Bell’s idea of writing past your first ending: why stop there? Stretch out. Try to be more ambitious. Take a good moment or image in the poem and “riff” on it. Perhaps it will take the poem in a different direction, and that’s okay – maybe even better than okay. The poem is not a fragile little flower: it can handle a lot. You may be holding your breath while writing a poem, but the poem isn’t. Be expansive. Let the poem generate more poem. Don’t be so damn nervous when writing the poem. Nothing’s going to happen to you. Put the poem down for a day, and pick it up the next day, determined to “begin” the poem where you left off. What you thought was the ending might be the ending of a section. You might be writing “Paradise Lost.”
And yet, there’s something so satisfying about those 14 lines that seem to encompass show much, that, when well-done, produce surprise for the writer and reader, to paraphrase Frost. I love the compression of sounds in a sonnet, the attention to detail (meter,rhyme) as well as the argument’s flow. It’s hard to argue with a good sonnet. They often provide great unpredictability than far more unwieldy and expansive free verse poems.
5: You have strong opinions on line breaks. Can you share some of that?
I’m in love with the line break, and am fond of reminding my students that it’s our big advantage over prose writers. I’m not a fan of lines broken syntactically, which is to say, where the reader would naturally pause, or breathe. I love enjambment. I love the hard-working line break that does double duty, that leaves the reader in one place (with white space) and acquires another meaning once you read past the line break. Of course, not every line in a poem is going to have some fabulous enjambment – you need relief from those, as well. And there are some poems that require a (deceptive) simplicity and lots of white space, that need to be slowed down, that need to allow the reader more time to breathe. I’ve known poets who I thought wrote remarkable images but didn’t know how to break a line, and so the image got buried, or fractured; narratives that speed or slow down too much so that the reader spends all her/his time with pacing rather than the story. Line breaks MATTER, and they are a huge opportunity for a poet to get more meaning, more of what matters, more subtly into a poem. I would talk about line breaks at cocktail parties, if sometime would invite me and let me.
6:What 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? ~Anonymous
There is nothing like witnessing a student who has just experienced the satisfying “click” of writing a poem that only he or she can write, one devoid of cliché, one that conveys intellectual and emotional development in the course of the poem, and the student isn’t even completely sure how he or she did, but it happened, and you were a part, even a small part, of that sense of discovery. Nothing like it. That’s what I enjoy most. But the truth is: I really like my students. They make me think, they make me laugh, they make my hair fall out. It’s all good.
I’ll try to make this sound like one piece of advice: get out of your own way, put in the time, get over yourself, do the work. And try your damnedest to listen to other people. Know that you are part of a community and as a poet, on a continuum with other poets. Don’t be a jerk. Be generous. Love the sound of language. Okay, I’m done. (I know that’s more than one piece of advice.) Sorry, I have one more: don’t always read poets you love. Challenge yourself to read outside of your aesthetic, to widen your aesthetic. Strong poets you DON’T love often have more to teach you.
7: Your most recent book is titled Hilarity. Does this put pressure on the collection to be funny? ~Alicia Adams
The truth is, Hilarity is not that funny. It was not intended to be all that funny, though I suppose it contains its share of my kind of humor, which tends toward a quiet irony (and an occasional yuk). The book started out being called “The Emergence of Hilarity,” a phrase that came from a baby-raising manual I was reading when my daughter was an infant. At the end of the chapter where it talks about your child’s first smile and laughter, the writer referred this phenomenon as “the emergence of hilarity.” I love the word, “hilarity.” It cracks me up, and in terms of content, makes me think less of stand-up and more of sheer joy, which is what children are capable of feeling, expressing and providing, uncensored. No one cracks me up like my kids. Of course, they have my sense of humor. Ah, well. But do I feel the pressure to be funny? No, not particularly. Of all things I’m insecure about, that’s not one. But I am wary of being too clever, and I warn my students against that, as well. Being a smart-ass in poetry generally doesn’t pay off. Rarely are we as clever as we might think. I was recently asked by a journal of humorous poetry for some poems, and as I went through my work, I found most of it to be somewhat dour. Fabulous, but dour. And occasionally, celebratory, because I do consider myself a celebratory poet: someone who is capable of recognizing the great gifts we have.
8: You received your BS and MS in Journalism from Northwestern, your MFA in Poetry from UCI, and your PhD in Literature and Poetry from the University of Houston. Do you see a regional difference in aesthetic?
Not really. The graduate programs at UCI and Houston gather poets from all over the country, so no particular region is being favored. Certain schools seem to have a dominant aesthetic – University of Iowa, for example. And California seems to maintain some of its “beat” roots, as well as a passion for performance poetry, and an avant garde tradition – I don’t remember who said, (paraphrasing), the only thing that never changes is the avant garde. Poets tend to move around a great deal; my mentors and friends have taught all over the country, and though I live in California now, I’m hard-pressed to call myself a “California poet.”
9: You are Co-Editor with Judith Taylor of Pool. This started out as a print journal but has recently converted to a zine. What brought about this decision and what role do you see technology playing in the poetry world? How will technology change the poetry world?
We decided to go on-line because the logistics of production and distribution were getting onerous, and Judith and I are a two-person operation. There are fewer and fewer independent bookstores to distribute journals, and it’s very difficult to get into the big-box bookstores. As well, it will be less expensive to produce an on-line journal, and as we read and researched, we felt that the poetry world was turning increasingly toward the web. We wrestled with our decision, but it became more clear as the on-line poetry world became more vibrant and diverse. We wanted to feel that the quality of on-line journals was high, and often, now, it is. We hope to part of that “high.”
10: I have heard a rumor about Patty exercises. Can you share a few to inspire our writers out there?
I’d like to coin a different term for the word “exercise,” because it carries with it connotations of pedantry and practice – as though there’s anything wrong with the term, “practice.” Each poem is a practice-run for the next. But I do love exercises: I assign them to my students and myself. Here’s a few:
- Read the Anthony Hecht poem “A Hill” and the Donald Justice poem, “20 questions.” You can find both on-line. “A Hill” contains one of those “poetic crossings” where the poet has a revelation, mid-poem. One space leads him into another space, literally and metaphorically. “20 Questions” is a poem of, well, 20 questions. Write a poem entirely of questions that contains a poetic crossing, from some sort of mystery or confusion to some sort of understanding, or revelation.
- I’m fond of that Jim Simmerman exercise, “20 Little Poetry Projects.” Even if all of the assignments don’t work for you, invariably, some of them will. You can find it on the web. He gets you to make leaps that you wouldn’t make, to use language you wouldn’t use, to be, ironically, programmatically idiosyncratic. But I don’t get how you get there, so long as you do.
- I love this OULIPO exercise (that I did not make up). Write a one-vowel poem. That is, 10 lines, 10 syllables per line (I added that so it wouldn’t be TOO hard) where you only use one vowel. Of course, each vowel has a lot of different sounds, but only use one vowel. And “y.” That’s the freebie. It sounds crazy, but I have students write amazing poems with these parameters. It really teaches you about the many sounds our language makes. We tend to be on English’s case because it’s not as pretty as Italian and doesn’t have the graphic beauty of Eastern languages. But it has sounds from all over the world and all over history, changes constantly, and is incredibly versatile.
- This is based on reading Robert Creeley, who I do not love (gasp): much of his work, according to Charles Altieri, is about “the problem of finding or creating an adequate language.” Write a poem in which language stutters, stops and starts, corrects itself and, in general, does not seem satisfied with its own attempt that communication.
- Read Wallace Stevens’ “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” (All over the web, and very anthology.) That’s it. No, I’m kidding: now write your own “13 ways” poem. Look at whatever “it” is from every possible angle, physically, historically, philosophically, emotionally. You don’t have to end at 13, but challenge yourself to exhaust whatever it is you are examining.
Stick & Stones (ii)
Back in the day, matter spread out in a nearly uniform sea
with subtle undulations.
Over time, gravity pulled matter into vast filaments
filament, filament, filament
and emptied the intervening voids.
Cosmic acceleration has changed all that: no clumping.
We go too fast!
I’ve had trouble with my cake mixes clumping.
For centuries, the process changed little.
pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake
The 16th century Spice Cake, the 18th century Nun’s Cake,
even the rich Pound Cake of our colonial days required
long hours of labor, which Puritans enjoyed – each suffering
just another correction on the sinuous path to the afterlife.
spare the rod
Balaam’s ass refused to continue along his path because
he saw an angel blocking his way, holding a sword.
He swerved three times – the last was really a crouch –
and nothing could tempt him to budge.
Ass and snake are the only talking animals in scripture.
The Garden abundant with what we now call “produce.”
blackberry, blackberry, blackberry
It does not say when God created stones.
nine days old
Jacob slept on one for a desert-pillow.
David readied five smooth for Goliath
who fell and the Theory of Improbability was born.
Was enough to make a man stare
This spawned the phrase, “What are the odds?”
This begat the track and the trifecta
which demands you pick three horses in order.
Praising his mistress’s disheveled appearance,
Robert Herrick wrote the poem, “Delight in Disorder.”
and a merry old soul was he
Disordered states outnumber ordered ones.
Order is a first-class luxury like certain fowl.
duck, duck
Bobby Fischer spends time in Japan playing random chess.
Back-row pieces are rearranged to eliminate what he calls
the “yawning predictability” of the game.
Fischer is a jerk.
Really, a jerk.
had a wife and couldn’t keep her
Newton thought gravity always attractive but now
we’ve found that some is repulsive, though I don’t like to judge.
I do like to listen to my son sing, as infants have perfect pitch.
spoil the child
Soon, I tell him, you will get your own stick and you can poke
the devil in the eye.
three blind mice, three blind mice
The earliest printed books are called incunabula, from the Latin
for “swaddling clothes.”
This is where the colophon comes from.
I have an affection for symbols because they take up so much
less room than the phenomenal world.
little lamb, little lamb, little lamb
Still, I would rather not fall from a great height.
let down your hair
It can be hard to put me together.
Previously Published in Slope, Summer, 2008.
Wow, there's so much great advice in this interview. I feel inspired. Thanks Patty and Jessica!
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