Interview with poet Jennifer K. Sweeney

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 Jennifer K. Sweeney’s second poetry collection, How to Live on Bread and Music, received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of America Poets, the Perugia Press Prize, and was later nominated for the Poets’ Prize. Her first book, Salt Memory, won the Main Street Rag Poetry Award. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Award from Passages North, and two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg awards. Her poems have been translated into Turkish, included in Oxford and Benchmark textbooks, and published widely in literary journals including American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Pleaides, and Poetry Daily.

To learn more about Jennifer K. Sweeney — one of our favorite poets — included below is an interview from 1/10/11 conducted by Simon A. Thalmann featured at mlive.com.

MLive: How did you begin writing poetry and why did you stick with it?

Jennifer K. Sweeney: I began writing poetry as a child and wrote through high school. It was more for self-expression then, but I think I was practicing how to be present and innovative with language. As an adult, poetry is the most natural way for me to engage with the world, to continue to see it, to dwell both in clarity and curiosity. I stick with it because the privilege of experiencing life from the poet’s eye is the gift. To be in communion with the natural world, open to the possibility of other, is a kind of intelligence that writers are able to tap into. I envision thought fused with the five senses as a kind of “body-thought” or “body-sense,” a sixth sense of poetry. This writing from and into the intelligence of the body is an intuitive state that can be a gift to the writer.

ML: Who or what are the major influences on your work?

JKS: A wide range of poetry and literature, nature, the body, music, memory, meditation, art, field guides, dailiness, relationships with my city, my family.


ML: What is your process for writing poetry like? Do your write
 fast or slow? Are you more of a stream-of-consciousness writer or are 
you more methodical?

JKS: Both. My process can include the careful tending of ideas and experience and guiding them toward a poem through multiple drafts and new perspectives, but it is also often a quick rush of moving through time via the subconscious. Poems don’t happen in one way, and that’s the wonder and mystique of writing them. They arrive whole, in fragments, over a period of years, in five minutes, methodically, painfully, casually, recklessly. I don’t think I write one kind of poem and each arrives with its own timing and boom. In general, the work is more limber, has more possibilities when any external goal about the creative process is relaxed. I think it’s important to observe the mystery of the process, to be present for what may arise, to know everything I know in my waking consciousness and then to forget that I know it.

ML: What kinds of poetic structure do you find common in your
 poetry and why do you think you gravitate toward those particular
 forms? Is it a conscious or unconscious decision to use them when you
 use them?

JKS: I appreciate formal variety, so I’m not sure I could pinpoint a representative form or structure. I love a lucid unfolding narrative poem, a distilled lyric that takes me a year to fully understand, a compressed prose block, a hybrid of fragment and image. I think content guides the form, but those are often unconscious decisions that are intuited in the writing process.

ML: What kinds of themes or images do you gravitate toward in your 
poetry? Why? Do you use them consciously or do they appear
unconsciously?

JKS: For myself, each book or manuscript seems to have its own dialogue with themes and imagery. In my first book, Salt Memory, the sea serves as subject, metaphor, spirit guide, and there is a “yin” energy overall, many poems that address the female experience. In How to Live on Bread and Music, there is a sense of endurance underlying the work. I think that many poems in the book address time in some manner. There is the obsolescence of eras bygone (railroad, record album, glassblowing, Chinese ruins), music as an experience of time, the cyclical nature of the daily experience. Themes and imagery are more the work of the unconscious. This is the part of poetry where I step back and find larger connections, the part that is continually revealing something to me.

ML: What do you think is your best work and why?

JKS: My second book, How to Live on Bread and Music, is my most accomplished complete work. I was able to write those poems with a greater range of styles, and as a result the poems render their subject matter from different modes of consciousness. This flexibility of approach was something I admired in other writers and hoped to house in one collection.

ML: Which writers or books do you think people should be reading now?

JKS: I hope it’s not too pessimistic an answer to say that I think people should be reading period. Technology has changed so much so quickly that I think many of us are guilty of being preoccupied with our toys, our networks, the next do-it-all device. These are not bad things in small doses, but I worry about perspective, about how the art of attention will be affected.

Visit the author at jenniferksweeney.com.

Poetry X-rays, interview with Billy Collins

In this excerpt from a PBS radio interview, Billy Collins — U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003 — discusses his process of X-raying poems. (Read and listen to the entire interview at KPBS.org.)

INTERVIEWER: Where is the artistry in poetry? Is it the imagery, the cadence, the choice of subject?

COLLINS: Well, it’s sort of like doing six or seven things at a time. In prose, one just has to write sentences, one after the other. In poetry, you have to — you don’t have to write sentence, but I haven’t had a better way to express myself than the sentence, and lines at the same time. Because the line is the second unit or maybe the primary unit of poetry. So lines are delivered one at a time. So those are two things to think about. And even packaging the poem into stanzas is another consideration that is part of the craft of poetry.

INTERVIEWER: When you hold classes with students about poetry, you talk about X-raying a poem. I think we’re hearing a little bit of that right now. Can you explain a little bit more what that means?

COLLINS: Well, I think to X-ray a poem is really to find how it gets through itself. When I start a poem, I have an inkling of where the thing is going. I’m not completely in the dark, but I don’t know exactly where it’s going, and that curiosity is kind of what drives me to continue through the poem. And I think if we take a famous poem and we imagine that Keats has written four lines of it, but he doesn’t know what the fifth line is or any of the subsequent lines, then we have a sense that the art of poetry is really a matter of finding a path, an imaginative path which results in a conclusion or some kind of ending. So when I teach poetry, I try to not use the question what does this poem mean, so much as how does this poem continue, how does it commence and how does it keep going, and how does it stop?

Graphic: Poetry/Poem X-rays by Silver Birch Press

Sept. 25, 2013: William Faulkner’s 116th birthday

On September 25, 2013, we celebrated Shel Silverstein’s birthday — but neglected to mention that date was the 116th anniversary of the birth of Nobel Prize winning author William Faulkner. We will make up for that oversight with some Faulkner posts today.

In 1956, THE PARIS REVIEW, published a rare interview with William Faulkner, where the great author discusses his craft and the books he loves. Below is an excerpt from the interview conducted by Jean Stein.

INTERVIEWER: Do you read your contemporaries?

FAULKNER: No, the books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends: the Old Testament, Dickens, Conrad, Cervantes, Don Quixote—I read that every year, as some do the Bible. Flaubert, Balzac—he created an intact world of his own, a bloodstream running through twenty books—Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare. I read Melville occasionally and, of the poets,Marlowe, Campion, Jonson, Herrick, Donne, Keats, and Shelley. I still read Housman. I’ve read these books so often that I don’t always begin at page one and read on to the end. I just read one scene, or about one character, just as you’d meet and talk to a friend for a few minutes.

INTERVIEWER: And Freud?

FAULKNER: Everybody talked about Freud when I lived in New Orleans, but I have never read him. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either, and I’m sure Moby Dick didn’t.

INTERVIEWER: Do you ever read mystery stories?

FAULKNER: I read Simenon because he reminds me something of Chekhov.

INTERVIEWER: What about your favorite characters?

FAULKNER: My favorite characters are Sarah Gamp—a cruel, ruthless woman, a drunkard, opportunist, unreliable, most of her character was bad, but at least it was character; Mrs. Harris, Falstaff, Prince Hal, Don Quixote, and Sancho of course. Lady Macbeth I always admire. And Bottom, Ophelia, and Mercutio—both he and Mrs. Gamp coped with life, didn’t ask any favors, never whined. Huck Finn, of course, and Jim.

Read the PARIS REVIEW interview at this link.

E.L. Doctorow on the challenge of clear, concise writing

In a Paris Review interview conducted by George Plimpton, novelist E.L. Doctorow discusses some of his writing challenges — including trying to write an absence note for his grammar-school-aged daughter.

INTERVIEWER: You once told me that the most difficult thing for a writer to write was a simple household note to someone coming to collect the laundry, or instructions to a cook.

E. L. DOCTOROW: What I was thinking of was a note I had to write to the teacher when one of my children missed a day of school. It was my daughter, Caroline, who was then in the second or third grade. I was having my breakfast one morning when she appeared with her lunch box, her rain slicker, and everything, and she said, “I need an absence note for the teacher and the bus is coming in a few minutes.” She gave me a pad and a pencil; even as a child she was very thoughtful. So I wrote down the date and I started, Dear Mrs. So-and-so, my daughter Caroline . . . and then I thought, No, that’s not right, obviously it’s my daughter Caroline. I tore that sheet off, and started again. Yesterday, my child . . . No, that wasn’t right either. Too much like a deposition. This went on until I heard a horn blowing outside. The child was in a state of panic. There was a pile of crumpled pages on the floor, and my wife was saying, “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe this.” She took the pad and pencil and dashed something off. I had been trying to write the perfect absence note. It was a very illuminating experience. Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

Photo: Skobrik, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Haruki Murakami Translates F. Scott Fitzgerald

In 2006, Haruki Murakami – author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — accomplished a long-standing goal by translating The Great Gatsby into Japanese. Murakami has discussed his reverence for the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel many times over the years — and has written a compelling afterword to his translation. Read Murakami’s moving love letter to Fitzgerald’s masterwork at scribd.com.

Here are some excerpts from Murakami’s heartfelt homage to The Great Gatsby…

When someone asks, ‘Which three books have meant the most to you?’ I can answer without having to think: The Great Gatsby, Dostoevesky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. All three have been indispensable to me (both as a reader and as a writer); yet if I were forced to select only one, I would unhesitatingly choose Gatsby. Had it not been for Fitzgerald’s novel, I would not be writing the kind of literature I am today (indeed, it is possible that I would not be writing at all, although that is neither here nor there).

Whatever the case, you can sense the level of my infatuation with The Great Gatsby. It taught me so much and encouraged me so greatly in my own life. Through slender in size for a full-length work, it served as a standard and a fixed point, an axis around which I was able to organize the many coordinates that make up the world of the novel. I read Gatsby over and over, poking into every nook and cranny, until I had virtually memorized entire sections.

Remarks such as these are bound to perplex more than a few readers. ‘Look, Murakami,’ they’ll say, ‘I read the novel, and I don’t get it. Just why do you think it’s so great?’ My first impulse is to challenge them right back. ‘Hey, if The Great Gatsby isn’t great,’ I am tempted to say, inching closer, ‘then what the heck is?’…Gatsby is such a finely wrought novel – its scenes so fully realized, its evocations of sentiment so delicate, its language so layered – that, in the end, one has to study it line by line in English to appreciate its true value.”

Haruki Murakami Reads Ross Macdonald

In this excerpt from The Paris Review interview with Haruki Murakami — bestselling author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — the writer discusses the influence of hardboiled detective fiction on his work.

INTERVIEWER: … hard-boiled American detective fiction has clearly been a valuable resource. When were you exposed to the genre and who turned you on to it?

MURAKAMI: As a high-school student, I fell in love with crime novels. I was living in Kobe, which is a port city where many foreigners and sailors used to come and sell their paperbacks to the secondhand bookshops. I was poor, but I could buy paperbacks cheaply. I learned to read English from those books and that was so exciting.

INTERVIEWER: What was the first book you read in English?

MURAKAMI: The Name Is Archer, by Ross Macdonald. I learned a lot of things from those books. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. At the same time I also loved to read Tolstoyand Dostoevsky. Those books are also page-turners; they’re very long, but I couldn’t stop reading. So for me it’s the same thing, Dostoevsky and Raymond Chandler. Even now, my ideal for writing fiction is to put Dostoevsky and Chandler together in one book. That’s my goal.

INTERVIEWER: At what age did you first read Kafka?

MURAKAMI: When I was fifteen. I read The Castle; that was a great book. And The Trial.

INTERVIEWER: That’s interesting. Both those novels were left unfinished, which of course means that they never resolve; your novels too—particularly your more recent books, like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle—often seem to resist a resolution of the kind that the reader is perhaps expecting. Could that in any way be due to Kafka’s influence?

MURAKAMI: Not solely. You’ve read Raymond Chandler, of course. His books don’t really offer conclusions. He might say, He is the killer, but it doesn’t matter to me who did it. There was a very interesting episode when Howard Hawks made a picture of The Big Sleep. Hawks couldn’t understand who killed the chauffeur, so he called Chandler and asked, and Chandler answered, I don’t care! Same for me. Conclusion means nothing at all. I don’t care who the killer is in The Brothers Karamazov.

INTERVIEWER: And yet the desire to find out who killed the chauffeur is part of what makes The Big Sleep a page-turner.

MURAKAMI: I myself, as I’m writing, don’t know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I start to write a story, I don’t know the conclusion at all and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don’t know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there’s no purpose to writing the story.

Read the rest of The Paris Review interview here.

Photo: Haruki Murakami and cat friend.

Poetry X-Rays, Interview with Billy Collins

In this excerpt from a PBS radio interview, Billy Collins — U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003 — discusses his process of X-raying poems. (Read and listen to the entire interview at KPBS.org.)

INTERVIEWER: Where is the artistry in poetry? Is it the imagery, the cadence, the choice of subject?

COLLINS: Well, it’s sort of like doing six or seven things at a time. In prose, one just has to write sentences, one after the other. In poetry, you have to — you don’t have to write sentence, but I haven’t had a better way to express myself than the sentence, and lines at the same time. Because the line is the second unit or maybe the primary unit of poetry. So lines are delivered one at a time. So those are two things to think about. And even packaging the poem into stanzas is another consideration that is part of the craft of poetry.

INTERVIEWER: When you hold classes with students about poetry, you talk about X-raying a poem. I think we’re hearing a little bit of that right now. Can you explain a little bit more what that means?

COLLINS: Well, I think to X-ray a poem is really to find how it gets through itself. When I start a poem, I have an inkling of where the thing is going. I’m not completely in the dark, but I don’t know exactly where it’s going, and that curiosity is kind of what drives me to continue through the poem. And I think if we take a famous poem and we imagine that Keats has written four lines of it, but he doesn’t know what the fifth line is or any of the subsequent lines, then we have a sense that the art of poetry is really a matter of finding a path, an imaginative path which results in a conclusion or some kind of ending. So when I teach poetry, I try to not use the question what does this poem mean, so much as how does this poem continue, how does it commence and how does it keep going, and how does it stop?

Graphic: Poetry/Poem X-rays by Silver Birch Press

Aldous Huxley: The Paris Review Interview (Spring 1960)

In the Spring 1960 edition of The Paris Review, novelist/essayist/memoirist Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, discussed his writing process. Excerpts from the interview, conducted by Raymond Fraser and George Wickes, are included below. Read the entire interview at theparisreview.org.

INTERVIEWER: Would you tell us something first about the way you work?

ALDOUS HUXLEY: I work regularly. I always work in the mornings, and then again a little bit before dinner. I’m not one of those who work at night. I prefer to read at night. I usually work four or five hours a day. I keep at it as long as I can, until I feel myself going stale. Sometimes, when I bog down, I start reading—fiction or psychology or history, it doesn’t much matter what—not to borrow ideas or materials, but simply to get started again. Almost anything will do the trick.

INTERVIEWER: Do you do much rewriting?

HUXLEY: Generally, I write everything many times over. All my thoughts are second thoughts. And I correct each page a great deal, or rewrite it several times as I go along.

INTERVIEWER: Do you block out chapters or plan the overall structure when you start out on a novel?

HUXLEY: No, I work away a chapter at a time, finding my way as I go. I know very dimly when I start what’s going to happen. I just have a very general idea, and then the thing develops as I write. Sometimes—it’s happened to me more than once—I will write a great deal, then find it just doesn’t work, and have to throw the whole thing away. I like to have a chapter finished before I begin on the next one. But I’m never entirely certain what’s going to happen in the next chapter until I’ve worked it out. Things come to me in driblets, and when the driblets come I have to work hard to make them into something coherent.

INTERVIEWER: Is the process pleasant or painful? 

HUXLEY: Oh, it’s not painful, though it is hard work. Writing is a very absorbing occupation and sometimes exhausting. But I’ve always considered myself very lucky to be able to make a living at something I enjoy doing. So few people can.

INTERVIEWER: Do you ever use maps or charts or diagrams to guide you in your writing?

HUXLEY: No, I don’t use anything of that sort, though I do read up a good deal on my subject. Geography books can be a great help in keeping things straight. I had no trouble finding my way around the English part of Brave New World, but I had to do an enormous amount of reading up on New Mexico, because I’d never been there. I read all sorts of Smithsonian reports on the place and then did the best I could to imagine it…

INTERVIEWER: When you start out on a novel, what sort of a general idea do you have? How did you begin Brave New World, for example?

HUXLEY: Well, that started out as a parody of H. G. Wells’s Men Like Gods, but gradually it got out of hand and turned into something quite different from what I’d originally intended. As I became more and more interested in the subject, I wandered farther and farther from my original purpose.

Painting: Aldous Huxley by Brian Ashmore, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

T. C. Boyle on Writing: The Paris Review Interview (Summer 2000)

Novelist and short story writer T.C. Boyle (formerly known as T. Coraghessan Boyle) offered insights into his writing process in The Art of Fiction No. 161, featured in The Paris Review (Summer 2000), where he was interviewed by Elizabeth E. Adams. Excerpts from the interview are included below. (Read the entire interview at theparisreview.org)

INTERVIEWER: What is the difference in the composing of a short story and a novel? Is there a shifting of gears?

BOYLE: Yes, sure. But I do see everything I’m doing as a story, whether it’s five pages or five hundred. The essential difference is that with stories, or during a period of story writing, you’re never sure if you’re going to come up with the next one. Oh, you feel great on bringing a story to completion—what a rush!—but then, speaking of blocks, you go through a period of a week or so when you’ve become an utter failure, a bankrupt, a fraud. You’ll never work again. Of course, if you’re very, very lucky—and I have been lucky—the first stirrings of the next story come. With a novel, you’re locked-in, committed, and you sure do know what you’re going to be doing tomorrow morning.

INTERVIEWER: With a novel, do you see the thing as a whole when you start?

BOYLE: No, it’s an organic process. I have an idea and a first line—and that suggests the rest of it. I have little concept of what I’m going to say, or where it’s going. I have some idea of how long it’s going to be—but not what will happen or what the themes will be. That’s the intrigue of doing it—it’s a process of discovery. You get to discover what you’re going to say and what it’s going to mean.

INTERVIEWER: That’s interesting . . . the first line. Joe Heller [author of Catch-22] couldn’t write a word unless the first line popped into his mind, which unleashed a whole series of characters, scenes . . . Is that the way it works with you? What are some of the first lines?

BOYLE: Yes, I feel that too, but maybe not so thoroughly as Heller did. The first line isn’t unleashing much, but there’s certainly been a lot of thought and preparation for it, and certainly it suggests what’s to come—again, in the way of the first piece of a jigsaw puzzle. But you’re putting me on the spot with regard to first lines. World’s End starts like this: “On the day he lost his right foot, Walter Van Brunt had been haunted, however haphazardly, by ghosts of the past.” A Friend of the Earth begins: “I’m out feeding the hyena her kibble and chicken backs when the call comes through.” And, most famously, I suppose, the opening line of “Descent of Man”: “I was living with a woman who suddenly began to stink.” The first lines are provocative, I suppose, because they are meant not simply to provoke the reader but to provoke the writer—in this instance, me—to forge on.

INTERVIEWER: When you say that you have no idea where it is going to go, does that literally mean that you have no idea what is going to happen to the people about whom you’re writing?

BOYLE: You discover all this as you go along—of course, you may make leaps ahead, and discover where it’s going. Hemingway said that he never stopped a day’s work until he knew what was going to happen in tomorrow’s installment. I feel the same way. When I’m done for the day—dragged out, dumbed down, exhausted, beat, and depleted—I look over what I’ve done and make a mental leap into the immediate future of the work if I can. Sometimes, though, it’s just a mystery until you get there. In The Road to Wellville, for instance, I had no idea there would be a murder occurring at the end of that book—not that I mean to spoil it for you if you haven’t read it—but when I got there it seemed very logical (or maybe I mean “right”) that that was what was going to happen. I remember feeling great about that. I was up in the mountains at the time, trying to extract the juice from my brain. I remember walking around the lake, humping through the woods, exhilarated. I think I put off going to the bar till 4:05 that day. It was wonderful.

INTERVIEWER: So plot is more important than character. Would that be a safe thing to say?

BOYLE: The early stories were mainly idea stories that didn’t have much to do with character—I was much more interested in design then. I think I’ve learned to handle character through writing novels. My first novel, Water Music, was five hundred pages long and you just can’t go five hundred pages without inventing some characters. What I hope is that I’m now better able to integrate all the elements of a successful and original story without relying on one effect only.

Photo: T.C. Boyle photographed by Spencer Boyle.

Charles Bukowski Talks About Writing: Excerpts from NY Quarterly Interview

In a 1985 interview in the #27 issue of New York Quarterly, Charles Bukowski — who gave few interviews — offered some revealing insights into his writing process. Excerpts from the interview are included below. Read the entire interview at this link.

CHARLES BUKOWSKI’S RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS POSED BY NEW YORK QUARTERLY INTERVIEWER: 

I write right off the typer. I call it my “machinegun.” …The next day I retype the poem and automatically make a change or two…I seldom know what I’m going to write when I sit down….The writing’s easy, it’s the living that is sometimes difficult.

I don’t carry notebooks and I don’t consciously store ideas. I try not to think that I am a writer and I am pretty good at doing that. I don’t like writers, but then I don’t like insurance salesmen either.

I love solitude but I don’t need it to the exclusion of somebody I care for in order to get some words down. I figure if I can’t write under all circumstances, then I’m just not good enough to do it….I have written with children running about the room having at me with squirt guns….One thing does bother me, though: to overhear somebody’s loud tv, a comedy program with a laugh track.

[Writers I admire include] John Fante, Knut Hamsun, the Celine of Journey; Dostoesvsky, of course; Jeffers of the long poems only; Conrad Aiken, Catullus…not too many.

There’s too much bad poetry being written today…Bad poetry is caused by people who sit down and think, Now I am going to write a Poem…

[A poet starting out today] should realize that if he writes something and it bores him it’s going to bore many other people also. There is nothing wrong with a poetry that is entertaining and easy to understand. Genius could be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way. He should stay the hell out of writing classes and find out what’s happening around the corner. And bad luck for the young poet would be a rich father, an early marriage, an early success or the ability to do anything very well.

Illustration by Chris Adams (cordivopolis.com), ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (Chris Adams’ portrait of Charles Bukowski will appear in the upcoming Silver Birch Press Bukowski Anthology.)