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.
