Sunday, April 5, 2009
Team 3 Questions For Brian Clements
MC: I'm the (self-proclaimed) world's biggest Kurt Vonnegut fan and he is a constant inspiration for my work. In fact I find most of my writing, poetic and not, is influenced by my reading. I was wondering who you read and how they affect your writing. Furthermore my poems tend to be fairly allusive. How important do you find allusions to be in poetry and how much concern do you have about the accessability of your poetry?
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KG: Like Pam was, I am also curious about writer's block, and I would like to ask you a follow question in regards to it. Is there certain material, whether it be prose or poetry, that you suggest your students take a look at if they are suffering from writer's block? Also, you said in your response to Pam that you write poetry because you like to see what you can do with words, lines, and sentences. I also feel this way; I love writing poetry because I find the adventure of finding the perfect words exciting. However, I find that when I sit down to write, I am always compelled to write around the same 2 or 3 themes; and when I attempt to break away from them, I am at a loss. Do you think it is dangerous for a poet to circle around the same themes in his or her writing or do you find it actually makes for better writing? Do you have a "go-to" theme so to speak?
ReplyDeleteKS: Because I believe I favor the performance side of writing, one of the most productive, creative stages of my writing life was while I was stationed overseas and wrote letters back to my dear old Mum, my friends, and the love I left behind. Other stages corresponded with different situations and events and also what I was reading or watching. Can you describe the your personal evolution as a writer, what has influenced that evolution, and how you have witnessed yourself grow more sophisticated as a writer?
ReplyDeleteHi Mike,
ReplyDeleteA couple of questions there. First, I read a lot of poetry as editor of Sentence and just as a matter of pleasure and professional currency. But I would say that my reading of newspapers, magazines, and non-literary books (especially on cosmology and experimental particle physics) influence me as much as my reading in poetry does. As I've said, poetry is a way of conversing with the world for me; that's the way I think of it. Actual objects don't talk much, and I don't have Francis Ponge's talent for speaking for objects, so the easiest thing to respond to or converse with is other texts. As for whether or not I'm concerned about accessibility--not at all. No matter what you write, there will always be some peole who like it and some who don't. The best policy, then, is to be true to your own interests, to write from your own idiosyncrasies and obsessions, and let the chips fall where they may in terms of audience. That said, in choosing to follow your own obsessions and interests in your writing, you are self-selecting your audience. The best ways to learn who is interested in what interests you are by reading books, journals, blogs, and listservs; by attending literary events; by taking classes like the one you're in; and by attending conferences like AWP. If you know your own interests and you know who else is interested, then why worry about audience?
Dear Kayla,
ReplyDeleteI hear you, and I know exactly what you mean. Here is where I find value in writing processes that help get you outside yourself. It's not a go-to theme, but a go-to process. I suggest doing this; give yourself an assignment that interests you, but is unlike those patterns you're falling into. For example, find a poem of between 10 and 15 lines that you like or that intrigues you and write a poem that uses the same line length, same pattern of sentence construction. Maybe even choose a topic--say, the economic collapse; or, maybe, your roommate's hair. The topic doesn't matter, because what you come up with is liable to change, evolve, in process. The important thing is to free your mind from having to come up with EVERYTHING. You know what the poems' going to look like on the page--it'll look like the other one you chose; so now you're imagination is free to wander. Or here's another. Write a list poem in which every line begins with a repeated phrase (called an "anaphron"). Denise Duhamel's great book _Mille et un sentiments_ does this with the phrase "I feel..." and Joe Brainard's book "I Remember" does it with, you guessed it, "I rememember..." Pick another phrase and let the imagination fly. Hope this helps!
Hi Kyle,
ReplyDeleteThat's a complicated question, or, rather, the answer is complicated. Let me just say that everyone's evolution is different and is tied to their own personality. Personally, I didn't have any idea what the hell I was doing when I first decided I wanted to write poetry. I think initially writing poetry was a creative substitute for a lot of role-playing gaming and sci-fi/fantasy reading that I did when I was a teenager. Then I went to college and there was a void; I took a poetry writing class and the prof showed us "Digging" by Seamus Heaney, which was the first poem that made me feel, in E. Dickinson's words, "as though the top of my head had been removed." It was a revelation, and I was hooked. Then came a long, painful process of trying to overcome the fact that until Heaney's poem I'd essentially never read a poem written more recently than Frost, which is the handicap that is imposed on 99% of our students. If you had a high school teacher who gave you contemporary poetry, you are very, very unusual. So I basically spent three years reading everything I could get my hands on and trying many experiments in form, style before I began to get a sense of what really interested me--NOT the confessional, solipsistic, navel-gazing mode. Robert Bly's "Leaping Poetry" was very important for me, as were Rilke, Jack Gilbert, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Charles Olson's "Projectivism" essay, _The Poetics of the Postmodern American Poetry_, some reading of literary theory, some investigation into Abstract Expressionism, film history, and Charles Wright. In grad school I began to further develop some avenues of investigation in my own writing that interested me, but I don't think I really began to understand everything that I've been saying in this interview until well after I had finished my PhD. After I finished my PhD, then I was ready for an education. God, talking about solipsistic navel-gazing...! I certainly don't consider myself a "sophisticated writer." Just someone following his interests and trying to do it responsibly.
LH: I would like to know if there was any one specific poet or artist of any kind that has greatly influenced you to become a poet and writer. I would also like to know if you find working alone or in crowded areas more productive. Does the solitude help you concentrate on your work? Or do populated surroundings help influence you in your writing?
ReplyDeleteI'm so sorry for the late post Mr. Clements, MH: I thought I posted earlier today but I something must have gone wrong because I don't see my question on here. I was just wondering if there are any other art forms that inspire your work besides writing, such as film, music, paintings, etc. Is there a specific piece of work in any of these areas that you have written about or has inspired you to write a specific poem?
ReplyDeleteLindsay, there are many poets who have influenced me--let me give you just a small part of that list:
ReplyDeleteSeamus Heaney, Jack Myers, Jack Gilbert, Frank O'Hara, Anne Carson, John Ashbery, Charles Wright, Robert Bly, James Wright, AR Ammons, Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, Emily Dicksinson, Wallace Stevens, Alice Fulton, ee cummings, HD, William Carlos Williams, the more accessible Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Denise Duhamel, Vasko Popa, Miroslav Holub, Russell Edson, Kenneth Koch, Pablo Neruda, Francis Ponge, and the list just goes on and on and on. Really, every poet I read influences me somehow, whether positively or negatively.
I find it difficult to work on poems in public and frankly find it baffling that anyone can do it. I actually thought about writing an article on this recently--how Starbucks, somehow, seems to have become in our culture a place where a poet might be expected to be found working. Just baffling to me. Are you one of those people who likes to work in public?
Hi Mackenzie,
ReplyDeleteYes, works in all of those art forms are fertile grounds for me, as well as works in many other forms, including television. I think I may have written an ekphrastic poem or two along the way, but I more typically try to work within the field that a certain painting, score, sculpture, etc. works in rather than write "about" it. I like to think of it as having a dialogue with the piece rather than making a statement about it.