Aesthetically Speaking
My fellow poet and girl crush, Danielle Shutt, had a poem called “Narcotic Winter” in the September 2011 issue of Pank. It was accompanied by an interview conducted by J. Bradley. I’d heard the poem before during our monthly graduate reading, Voice Over, and I was excited to see what Danielle had to say about it. I wasn’t disappointed. As usual, Danielle was eloquent and witty, insightful and self-deprecating when speaking about her impulses as a writer. And it made me wonder how I would’ve answered questions about my own poetry.
For the next few months, I hounded my fellow poets. At parties, I got drunk and asked each one to “Describe to me your writing aesthetic.” I wanted to know what contemporary writers they would compare their work to. I wanted to know about their opinions on rhetorical questions in poems and how they viewed titles that had no seeming relation to their poems. I wanted to know about dashes. I wanted all these answers because I couldn’t answer them for myself.
Some writers don’t like to be asked what they write about but I don’t have a problem with that question. I write about sex and men, intimacy and my body – all together and separately but how I write about them is still a mystery to me. I think I could give a better response on how fellow poets (and barkers) Cathie and Kristina write than how I, myself, write.
When I was researching for a paper for my professor, JJ, on Major Jackson, I found an audio interview Jackson gave in which he talked about his latest book, Holding Company. He spoke about his intentionality of driving the poems forward with images instead of a narrative arc, which blew the cover off how I’d been reading (or misreading) the poems. When I looked at the poems again, this time knowing each was scaffolded by imagery, I was dumbfounded by how much easier the poems became to understand.
How do we, as writers, choose our delivery? How would you describe your writing? *puts the mic in your face* I need to know.
So you know how Wallace Stevens told Robert Frost that his problem is that writes about things? And then Frost rebuttal with, “Your problem is that you write about bric-a-brac.” I like to think I write about bric-a-brac too. At the moment, that may be the best answer I’ve got about describing my writing.
You said about! I want to know HOW you write about bric-a-brac. Tell me, please.
Part of me thinks it’s bad luck to talk about my writing, like I don’t even have the authority to comment on my own poetry. But it’s always about a thing, an image. And at the root of that image is an experience. And that experience is never about the thing. It’s always a confession, even if it isn’t MY confession. I don’t know. I never know if it’s a poem or what I think poetry should sound like. The other part of me just really wants a bowl of macaroni.
You’ve done two things here and only one of them is what I want, well besides the macaroni. You use an image to talk about an experience, which is then a catalyst for a confession. Hell Yes!
Good question. I would say when I write I lay everything out and then in subsequent drafts I slowly but surely cut out the “woe is me” crap and then look for metaphors. That’s the hardest part, because I’m usualy way too ambiguous about my attempted metaphorical comparisons and it gets me into all sorts of trouble.
Why is the “woe is me” crap, crap?