I am counting down the days until the book is published. April 1, here we come.
The other day I walked outside into the city, into my day and the sun was out. It was nice for NYC, for the winter we've had so far. I remember thinking: "Man, winter might finally break" and then, yesterday we got hit with a full day's worth of snow. Yep. And high temperatures this week won't even get near freezing. Thank goodness for crocheted scarves and hats and good coats. Thank goodness for hot drinks.
I have been on a hiatus as of late from most of my normal doings. Blame it on a boy. Blame it on the cold. Whatever. I finally stepped outside yesterday to see a friend, Myronn Hardy, read with Cathy Park Hong --who I saw read at Cornelia St. Cafe (where I hope to read, soon) back in 2007.... What a day to finally step out of a shell! Snow packed into my scarf, onto my coat. But alas, it was warm inside, and they had wine and cheese and crackers and fruits. It's the little things. Anyways. So the reading was this Cave Canem sponsored event called "Poets on Craft" where the poets do a short reading and the rest of the time is a moderated discussion and then Q&A. I felt like...the reading should have been a bit longer, the moderated part a bit shorter, and the rest of the time for audience engagement. Not like I was going to ask any questions. I know Myronn and his work. I know the answers he would like to give if not shy. Cathy's work is hard to hold onto in the ear, and I've not gotten her book(s)...so it was tough, really, to ask questions on her work, although she gave insightful answers during the discussion.
It made me think, though, about how I would answer some of the questions. Thinking about theory and poetry. Thinking about intersections of genre, genre-bending if you will, or what should come first the music/language or the meaning -- the famed chicken and egg quandry of the poetry world. And of course, the infamous I, and how the I factors into poetry...and what should the reader do in response to the I?
Now. Maybe it's because I read a lot of Sharon Olds when I first started out. Something about the poetry as confession helped me reach into a space for words to say everything I wanted to say. Then I turned to other conventions: musicality, form, line breaks, etc, to do the other work. With the exception of projects (say, Palestine, say the Ackland Art Museum works...) and maybe attempting to tell someone else's story, I find that poetry exists for me as an artistic expression. Read: the I is not collective. Now, I just wrote a review of a book where I felt that the I was....singular, that it belonged solely to the poet. And in that collection, I believed it, because the experiences were so...cyclical, so....circular. The experiences revolved around one or two incidences that connected a life-time of stories: a mother's death, a father trying to raise a daughter. I felt that the I belonged only to the poet, and we as readers could only read the collection as belonging to another voice. This is not to say that it is bad that the collection did that or to say that it was inaccessible, or that I couldn't enter into the work as an outsider. It was sort of just stating fact. I don't know where I'm going with all of this, except to say that I am almost sure that any "I" I write has some connection to me. The story the "I" is telling might not be mine. But the sentiments, or maybe, how I would deal with it -- because in truth, in writing from this "I" perspective, we as poets are imagining ourselves in that situation, no? -- so the actions given the situation are mine. And I'm all right with that.
The other question is on influences....how people expect you to just list and list and list poets for days, and your ability to list and name as many (famous) poets as possible shows that you're well-rounded and gives you credibility. Granted, I just said "maybe I read too much Sharon Olds" and that could be considered an influence, but she does not influence my current work, and didn't really influence my work when I started writing. I lived with a writer before I considered writing like I do now, so I spent days and nights reading and reading. I couldn't come up with a "standards" list. Instead, I'd argue that History is my biggest influence. That harkens back to my decision to major in History in Chapel Hill despite the fact that my career is largely literature and English-writing related. However, I believed that reading and re-reading the same British Literature models would do nothing for providing me something to write about. I did take the introductory-level survey to British Lit classes, and could have an intelligible conversation about major american authors and so on and so forth, but I think on a working, everyday level what matters is history, is current events, and if you can spin that into a poem, into a conversation, your ability to connect -- because isn't art about communication, about connecting? -- is that much higher.
