Ok, Brian, (a.k.a., Dr. Clements),
I have a question for you, too, although I feel like we've probably talked a bit about this in the years we've known each other: I'm curious as to what about our home state of Arkansas and the inherent culture of the place do you think most influenced you--even if that influence had to do with your turning away from it, or the "rebellion" that you speak of in an earlier answer?
Maybe this is something that we should explore in our writing?
LG
Lea, everyone,
ReplyDeleteFirst, thanks again for inviting me to Marist and for coming to the reading and having such a good group of questions afterwards. I truly enjoyed it.
I'm sure that there are two things about Arkansas that most influenced me: 1)an appreciation of nature, and 2) a distaste for religious hypocrites and racists. Arkansas certainly isn't unique in its posession of any of those things, but happened to be where I experienced them. And I'm sure my interest in writing about nature/science/physics/biology/cosmology in my poems comes directly from near-mystical experiences in the Ozarks. My rejection of the negative items I mentioned above I think carried over into a rejection of the idea of writing about them, but I think I'm coming around to that now.
Other things I love about Arkansas--the way people talk, not only their accents but the things they say (for example, do people use the word "boonies" up here?); the heat and even the humidity; rice fields and bayous, even with the mosquitoes; the Ozarks themselves, which are one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world (and thus worn down to much smaller size than, say, the Rockies or Appalachians) and used to be completely under water (you can find fossils of sea creatures while hiking in the mountains); but I better stop writing all of this and save it for our book!