HERE, WHERE I AM

Democrat or Republican, · Alehouse

Prior to my arriving at Lincoln Memorial University for the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival this weekend, Sara West, a student and promising young poet, asked me a series of questions for an interview to be published in LMU's The Emancipator.   Here are some excerpts.

 1. Where does the inspiration for your poetry come from? 

 What we call inspiration can come from just about anywhere; the  important thing for a writer, or anybody, for that matter, is to try to  stay attentive to what is happening both outside and within. Having said  that, however, I can't deny that certain images, memories, lines from  books I've read, slants of light, call to me in ways I can't ignore. I  grew up surrounded by a legion of live oaks, hogs, cows, and  cornfields, not to mention many cousins and other members of a large  extended family. The landscape of that farm is probably the bedrock of  my imagination, or certainly a huge part of it. The smells of it, the  sounds, the stories rising up out of it, not to mention the growing  sense as I grew older that it all was vanishing, that I would never be  able to go back to the way it--and I--had been. At the same time I was  in love with the mountains that we visited in the summer, the N.Ga.  Blue Ridge where my father's family lived. 

My grandmother had wanted  to return to her home place before she died but never did. I knew I  wanted to live in the mountains after graduate school, which I guess is  a good example of that inner tug at one's attention I mentioned above.  I've lived here in WNC since '68, and this Appalachian landscape has  become as important to my imagination as that long ago S. Georgia one.  The two seem to be partners in my imagination.

 2. What part of the writing process do you most enjoy and why? (i.e.,  first drafting, revision, editing, poetry readings?)  

How can one resist that first excitement of a rough draft, the fire of  that first appearance of words that seem to be moving ahead of you,  drawing you toward ....what? And who cares? The important thing is to  follow as long as the verbal energy keeps uncoiling. I must say,  though, that I enjoy the fruitful revision that comes later as a poem  becomes more and more apparent in its shape and cadence. I do not  enjoy staring at a poem in despair and calling that revision. Then  it's time to get up and get out of the house, take a walk, listen to  loud music, or do something with the hands, maybe knead bread, dig in  the garden. Anything to let the poem lie in the darkness and do what  it will with your imagination. Good revision brings the initial  excitement of the draft back each time one returns to work on the poem.   I don't enjoy editing. Write with fire, edit with ice, as a friend  once said. One must be cold-hearted in the editing process, and  frankly I don't like putting on ice-glasses to read my own work. It  scares me. What if what I thought was brilliant turns out to be full  of holes? Poetry readings can produce a real high, if they go well,  if I feel a connection with the audience. And it's my job as a reader  to make that connection, to sense where the audience is and bring my  work to that place. I enjoy reading poetry aloud, whether mine or  someone else's. Actually, I prefer reading someone else's.  Readings, if done well, do so much to re-vitalize that connection with  language, and I've had people come up after a reading to say, "I didn't  think I liked poetry but I really could see what was happening in..."  and what follows is some connection made with that listener's own  experience.    

3. When and how did you realize you wanted to delve into poetry?  

I began with writing fiction, no doubt because the women models before  me were women--Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, for example. Of course  there was Emily Dickinson but I just couldn't feel much connection with  her, being a New Englander, so terse, so, well, tight-lipped. I  didn't know of any Southern women poets as I headed out. My first  stories were derivative and to be honest, I really didn't enjoy writing  them. I just thought I was supposed to be writing them. Fortunately I  had a professor my senior year in college who introduced me to some  poets who made me want to write poetry, including some John Crowe  Ransom and Robert Penn Warren; he urged me to begin to draw on my own  experience, my own landscape and memories, and that opened the way into  poetry for me. 

4. Do you use poetry more as a medium for personal expression or a way  to address deeper issues?    Poems begin for most of us as personal expression, because one must  begin where one is, after all, but from that beginning the poem moves  by the sheer nature of poetry itself into the deeper issues. The  currents beneath the shimmering "personal" surface lead the imagination  downward to the riverbed where the treasures lie--the music and imagery  of our inner lives that never stops unfolding, no matter what is going  on above the surface. I have difficulty splitting hairs here, because  the personal leads to those deeper currents, if we are attentive and  heed what is going on around us. There's no way I can avoid the depths  if I let the flow of the poem carry me, no matter what triggered it. 

HERE, WHERE I AM

Southern Fictions: Coda

CONTINUING TO EXCAVATE OUR SOUTHERN PAST

OLD LETTERS FOR THE NEW YEAR

WORDS SHINING IN THE NIGHT

WOMEN'S SPACES--WOMEN'S PLACES

Campbell Clan reunion

MOUNTAIN WOMAN: COMPOST

CHAIRS

Freeze Warning

WILLIE JAMES KING

Blog This Rock: Poem of the Week: Penelope Scambly Schott

EL DIA DE LOS MUERTOS

MOUNTAIN WOMAN: ALL HALLOWS

HANDWRITTEN

MOUNTAIN WOMAN: MY FIRST MEMORY

POET'S FEATURE: unsettled by Jodi Barnes

The Last Morning Glory

MOUNTAIN WOMAN: PEPPER POT SOUP

DRIVING INTO THE CITY

MOUNTAIN WOMAN: ROOTED

MOUNTAIN WOMAN: BLACK LUNG, by R. T. Smith

Goodbye Ducks!

LITTLE KING

MOUNTAIN WOMAN: GUEST BLOGGER: BARBARA BATES SMITH

MAGICAL CREATURES

Guest Poet: Anora McGaha

Kitchen Keeper's Emerald

MOUNTAIN WOMAN: Guest Blogger: Julie Brooks Barbour

LONG BLACK VEIL

MOUNTAIN WOMAN: REMEMBRANCES OF ANNIE LEE, continued.

BASIL

MOUNTAIN WOMAN: Guest Blogger: ELIJAH MORGAN

MOUNTAIN WOMAN: OUR OWN WILD LIVES

Mountain Woman: MOON-ROUSED

The Goddesses: Athena

Sandhill: Exit, Laughing

A Poem Poster for 4th of July, 2011

ROSES AT MISSION SANTA CLARA: Marie Ponsot

A Chorus of Clouds: Nelly Sachs

DEEP WATER: Interview excerpts

SAN FRANCISCO: Where to Begin?

Brown Heart Beating

Listening to Home: The Poetry of Lisa Parker

WORDLESS

WRITING ON THE RAZOR'S EDGE: RICHARD KRAWIEC

MAGPIE TALES: MELISMA

MAKING SOME CHANGES

POET OF THE WEEK: ANDREA SELCH