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Published by Associate Editor on November 15, 2014. This item is listed in Interview, Issue 24, Issue 24 Poetry, Poetry

Interview with Featured Poet Roald Hoffmann

Introduction of our Featured Poet

Roald Hoffman

Roald Hoffman

As always, it is with great pleasure to introduce our featured poets. But there is additional honor this time to introduce a fellow theoretical chemist who also shares a passion for poetry. I first learned of Roald Hoffmann when I was an undergraduate at Loyola College (Baltimore, MD) and even more so as a graduate student at Georgetown University (Washington, DC) in the mid seventies. I was fascinated with his application of quantum chemistry to understand chemical reactions. Apparently, so was the rest of the scientific world. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1981). I never thought our paths would cross, but I had recently learned that Roald and I share pages in Thirty Three, the anniversary issue of Negative Capability Press (edited by the Alabama State Poet Laureate Emeritus, Sue Brannon Walker), so I invited him to grace our pages at Silver Blade. Contrary to popular belief, we scientists have creative minds and desires. I learned from reading his biography and interviews that Roald Hoffmann was so enamored with the arts that he almost majored in art history. Such passions cannot be be contained nor thwarted by a pursuit of science. In fact, I submit that science would enable inevitable discovery of one’s creativity.

Cited from his website (http://www.roaldhoffmann.com/), here is a short biography:

Roald Hoffmann was born in 1937 in Zloczow, Poland. Having survived the war, he came to the U. S. in 1949, and studied chemistry at Columbia and Harvard Universities (Ph.D. 1962). Since 1965 he is at Cornell University, now as the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters Emeritus. He has received many of the honors of his profession, including the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with Kenichi Fukui).

“Applied theoretical chemistry” is the way Roald Hoffmann likes to characterize the particular blend of computations stimulated by experiment and the construction of generalized models, of frameworks for understanding, that is his contribution to chemistry. The pedagogical perspective is very strong in his work.

Notable at the same time is his reaching out to the general public; he participated, for example, in the production of a television course in introductory chemistry titled “The World of Chemistry,” shown widely since 1990. And, as a writer, Hoffmann has carved out a land between science, poetry, and philosophy, through many essays and three books, “Chemistry Imagined” with artist Vivian Torrence, “The Same and Not the Same and Old Wine” (translated into six languages), “New Flasks: Reflections on Science and Jewish Tradition,” with Shira Leibowitz Schmidt.

Hoffmann is also an accomplished poet and playwright. He began writing poetry in the mid-1970s, eventually publishing the first of a number of collections, “The Metamict State,” in 1987, followed three years later by “Gaps and Verges,” then “Memory Effects” (1999), “Soliton” (2002). A bilingual selection of his poems has appeared in Spanish. He has also co-written a play with fellow chemist Carl Djerassi, entitled “Oxygen,” which has been performed worldwide, translated into ten languages. A second play by Roald Hoffmann, “Should’ve,” has had several workshop productions since 2006; a new play, “We Have Something That Belongs to You,” had its first workshop production in 2009.

Unadvertised, a monthly cabaret Roald runs at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Vilage, “Entertaining Science,” has become the hot cheap ticket in NYC.

 

Interview of Professor Roald Hoffmann

Roald Hoffmann (RH)

John C. Mannone (JCM)

JCM: I often hear that science and engineering majors are not interested in liberal arts, so how did your interest in poetry develop? And how do you balance a career in chemistry and poetry? Perhaps you can include your writing process.

RH: Like so many things in this world, it began in college. Columbia has a core curriculum, and after I took that (with some poetry in it), I took a poetry course with a great teacher, Mark Van Doren. He could not teach the writing of poetry, but he taught us to read a poem. I still remember the breakthrough point to this wonderful world – it was Wallace Stevens “Sunday Morning”.

 

JCM: I have seen the stereotyping the scientist-poet: their poems are often funny, limericks, silly rhyme, cute, clever, entertaining, but often fall short of literary expectations. Obviously, this doesn’t apply to all of us; your poetry is certainly a serious work. What advice would you give your colleagues, science students, and scientific friends who might be encouraged to read and/or write poetry?

RH: First of all, put pen to paper, as they used to say. Sit down at the keyboard, start writing. Second rework it – I know of no poet who doesn’t need some drafts. Third, find a group of people to read poems together, criticize them.

 

JCM: In left-brain dominated disciplines, like the sciences, what do you do to energize the right-brain—the creative center of the mind?

RH: Nothing works better for me than to go out into nature, a long walk along a trail, around a pond.

 

JCM: Chemists and physicists have a plethora of new metaphors to tap into when we create poetry. And when it comes to revision, our discipline might enable the logical apparatus to kick in and assist in the evaluation of the different crafting elements of our poems, often simultaneously. Let’s consider a related question. In what ways could poetry help us be better scientists, better teachers? If you have any specific examples of this synergism from your experience, that would be great.

RH: I think poetry teaches us how to communicate emotion in words. Just a few words that establish an emotional tie between the author/lecturer and the reader/student are enough. If the reader knows that you are speaking to them, and that you care they listen/learn/experience you have their attention.

Poetry also taught me that a turn of word, an interesting way to say something, can have a tremendous effect. I used “Solid Memory” in the title of a scientific paper, for how extended structures have features similar to their component building blocks, and that worked very well.

 

JCM: Sometimes we see a quote from Dirac, a physicist I admire, taken out of context. But when we know the story, we might understand why Dirac might make a condemning statement about science and poetry. He was talking about Oppenheimer’s (apparently unaccessable) poetry (commenting to him about the poetry J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote):

I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry you are bound to say … something that everyone knows already in words that nobody can understand.

—Paul A. M. Dirac (Quoted in Steven George Krantz, Mathematical Apocrypha Redux: More Stories and Anecdotes of Mathematicians (2005), 169)

RH: Well, Dr. Dirac was a wonderful scientist, but he never tried to read a poem. Or no one took him by the hand through a poem the way Mark Van Doren took me. And his statement can be reversed – look at the unscalable walls of jargon surrounding much of science.

JCM: (cont.) And After I read one randomly selected Openheimer piece, I must concur with Dirac. (http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/coll/pauling/bond/notes/safe3.018.193-sea-01-large.html) Can you comment on the importance of accessibility in poetry?

RH: Well, John, you are sentenced to find other Oppenheimer poems. There are only around five. Here is one:

Crossing

It was evening when we came to the river
with a low moon over the desert
that we had lost in the mountains, forgotten,
what with the cold and the sweating
and the ranges barring the sky.
And when we found it again,
in the dry hills down by the river,
half withered, we had
the hot winds against us.

There were two palms by the landing;
the yuccas were flowering; there was
a light on the far shore, and tamarisks.
We waited a long time in silence.
Then we heard the oars creaking
and afterwards, I remember,
the boatman called to us.
We did not look back at the mountains.

—J. Robert Oppenheimer

Do you see that as obscure? He was, in his time, a brilliant kid, influenced by Ezra Pound, TS Eliot. Look for the poem that he marked, as he sent it to his high school teacher, as “my first love poem.”

 

JCM: My gut feeling is that poetry might bridge physics (and chemistry) and metaphysics. I can’t help but think of things that transcend equations describing the beauty of nature when I see an electron microscope’s image of a layer of atoms, or, in a telescope, see a cluster of galaxies enshrouded in what might be dark matter. What do you think about this, about the questions science raise that cannot possibly be answered by science? Poetry might indeed be the language to “express the inexpressible.”

RH: Yes, it could be that way. As science fiction does. Though to be honest, poetry has not led me to any specific new idea I can point to in my science.

 

JCM: I have often heard to keep away from scientific language in poetry. The usual indictment is that scientific terms are sterile, and that Latinate words are not poetic. What say you?

There are problems, with people not allowing us/themselves to float on the sound of the words when meaning escapes us, at least for a while. I think Archie Ammons was a master of using complex words, even scientific ones, in poems. I would recommend a reading of his Hymn; here’s a piece of it:

“And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth
inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes
trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest
coelenterates
and praying for a nerve cell
with all the soul of my chemical reactions
and going right on down where the eye sees only traces”

JCM: One of the fascinations with chemistry I’ve had is the luxuriant sensory stimuli in the laboratory—the exotic glassware, complex smells, an infinity of colors. Have any of these types of things stimulated poems for you?

RH: Occasionally, but not often enough. I’m more likely to be inspired by some chemical words, as words, or as ideas.

 

JCM: What about chirality*? It’s inescapable in any science fiction poem or story that promotes some kind of genesis not to address it. Poetic license can only buy so much. And while we’re on the topic of life, what about life forms based on some other element than carbon? I know some have suggested silicon, nitrogen and phosphorous based life, but these elements don’t have the chemical diversity of carbon. There are no yet-to-be-discovered elements (except from the islands of stability, which would not likely offer a stable model for life).

* For the benefit of our readers, chirality is a word chemists use to discuss identical molecules configured differently, in particular, their mirror images. Just like your left hand is a mirror image of your right, they are quite different (try to comfortably put your left hand in a right-handed glove). The building blocks of life (amino acids) in humans are left-handed. If I understand it correctly, we could not have evolved from some primordial soup containing a mixture of left- and right-handed molecules.

RH: Oh yes, chirality, handedness has intrigued me. Here is one section of a long poem entitled “Specula”

Tetrahedra, screws, bolts on car
wheels always tightened the wrong
way; in silver mirrors, in molecules
growing on handed clay surfaces, or
seeded, panspermia, into cauldron
atmospheres, chains growing, left
clasping left, sculpting double
helices, to be nicked in mutations,
building, building, to Alice’s
passage, in cyclones and anti-,
born from nonconservation of parity,
the four-pronged, chiral universe
marches to an asymmetric tune: left,
right, left, left…Remember, o
explorers, to bring along a hand
when you rocket to the far stars.

 

JCM: I am fascinated by your poems (“Voliton,” “Crossing the Mekong,” and “A Different Kind of Motion”). Can you give us back story to them?

RH: “Volition” was an attempt to write a poem like a collage by Vivian Torrence, an artist with whom I collaborated on a book “Chemistry Imagined.” Take a look on her website, http://www.viviantorrence.com/ for her work. “Crossing the Mekong” came out of reading in one place on the Hmong people, and elsewhere about the evolving cultural practices of apes. “A Different Kind of Motion” was a tribute to a Dutch choreographer, Katelijne Vanduffel, the way she brought up emotions in her dancers. I tried a word dance for her.

 

JCM: I was moved by the end of the poem by Charles Tomlinson (“Farewell to Van Gogh”) quoted in your Banquet Speech when you were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1981). (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1981/hoffmann-speech.html#not) Do you still use poetry in your speeches, lectures and in your introductory chemistry classes?

RH: I do, in just the settings you mention. Sadly, in straight science settings, that is the only place one can use a poem. Not in my papers, the gatekeepers won’t let it by.

 

JCM: The scientific language of some of the great scientists of the Renaissance was poetic. I visualize Newton’s Principia, Bailey’s description of a solar eclipse, and many others. Perhaps this is a rhetorical question, but why not write scientific papers today with a creative non fiction flare (at least a little)? If nothing else, the metaphors could help someone new to the field understand better.

RH: I think nothing in the structure of science would be damaged if we did allow metaphorical language, narrative, a personal involvement. But it is not a battle that I will win…

 

JCM: Who are some of your favorite poets? Besides yourself, I found several chemists who also are/were poets & writers: Isaac Asimov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov), Carl Djerassi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Djerassi), Primo Levi (http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/primo-levi-181.php) Are there other scientist-poets you admire and/or those that should be on this list?

RH: You have named some great ones. One of Israel’s leading poets of the past century was an inorganic chemist, Avner Treinin. Unfortunately not much of his poetry is translated into English. More accessible to people is the work of Czech immunologist Miroslav Holub. And David Jou, a first class physicist in Barcelona, is a leading Catalan poet.

 

JCM: Are there any literary projects you’d like to tell us about?

RH: Well, I’m desultorily working on a book on narrative in science, called “Not Just So: The Importance of Storytelling in Science.”

 

JCM: How can we find your work? Website?

RH: I think two of my four English poetry books are still in press: “Soliton” and “Gaps and Verges.” Leads to many published poems, and other nonfiction books, and essays are on website roaldhoffmann.com.

 

 

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Published by Associate Editor on August 19, 2014. This item is listed in Interview, Issue 23 Poetry

Interview of our Featured Poet Sue B. Walker by John C. Mannone

Sue B. Walker

Sue B. Walker

Introduction:

Sue Walker is the Stokes Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, Alabama and the Poet Laureate of Alabama from 2003-1012. She is the publisher of Negative Capability Press and the journal’s editor.

~~~

Sue Brannan Walker is known nationally and internationally for her poetry, as well as for her critical articles on poets and writers such as James Dickey, Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, Carson McCullers. As Editor and Publisher of Negative Capability, she has published numerous Alabama poets and writers, providing them a greater audience and some of them their first opportunity to be published. She has continued this work since 1981—a distinguished effort recognized by Writer’s Digest when it ranked Negative Capability Third in the Nation in Poetry in the early 1990s out of approximately 2700 markets.

Her poetry, prose works, and community service have deservedly garnered numerous awards, grants, and fellowships. She has published 9 books of poetry and a critical book on James Dickey: The Ecological Poetics of James Dickey.. One of the poetry collections, Blood Will Bear Your Name, won Book of the Year from Alabama State Poetry Society and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

As the Stokes Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing, she was formerly Chair of the University of South Alabama English Department. Dr. Walker’s works also include a a biography of Jefferson Davis in sonnets; and work on Flannery O’Connor and Kate Chopin. She has just finished a hybrid book that is prose poetry/memoir/history/cultural study/abecedarian about a crone. (See discussion below.)

~~~

Interview:

Thank you Susan for taking the time to do this interview. When your name first appeared in our magazine’s queue, I sensed a familiarity I couldn’t quite pin down…until I read your bio. It was last year while attending a Southern Christian Writers’ Conference (June 2013) in Tuscaloosa that your name camer up—you had been a featured speaker there in the recent past.

We have been fortunate to have had many excellent and notable poets grace the pages of Silver Blade, but this is the first time we’ve had a state poet laureate! Thank you for honoring us.

1. John C. Mannone (JCM): I feel compelled to begin with how your interest in speculative poetry developed. Include your influences

1. Sue Brannon Walker (SBW): Perhaps I became interested in speculative poetry in a former life – when I was Isis or maybe Greta Garbo. I’ve always been good at acting-up, acting-out, abreacting, co-enacting, re-enacting. I like S.T. Joshi’s Emperors of Dreams: Some Notes on Weird Poetry.

 

2. JCM: I’m not in favor of such distinctions, but many writerly folks make them all the time—please say anything you’d like about genre (in particular, speculative) vs. literary poetry.

2. SBW: I resist categorization and affirm hybridity. I like the way that traditional genres can be integrated in varying ways: fiction as lyrical; poetry as lyric essay, and creative nonfiction as literary criticism; ekphrastic poetry, concrete poetry, a merging of forms–prose abecedarians, prose sestinas and the like. The creative cosmos is expanding.

 

3. JCM: What can you share about your writing process? And for those who get stuck, what advice can you give them?

3. SBW: I think that “getting stuck” might be associated with fear of failure or fear of rejection, even more than with lethargy or busyness. Nobody likes to be rejected, so after two, three, or more rejections, there might be a tendency to fold up the tent and quit trying, Yevgeny Yevtushenko said that to “believe in yourself is indispensible.” Unfortunately we’re schooled in failure—those red marks teachers put on student papers that highlight mistakes. I think teachers are sometimes too quick to designate “wrong” and may be remiss in pointing out how something might be improved, which is a different slant on learning and teaching. Of course, we need to learn how to use MLA documentation and perhaps the Chicago Manual of Style if we’re in college or getting a Masters, but maybe the desire to learn should be connected with goals and ambitions—a road to success in which the things that might improve a paper (a road sign that says turn right) will get you where you’re going a lot sooner. I read where William Stafford did not give his students grades. In writing, I think the focus should be on revision.

I revise and revise and revise 10, 20 or more times. I go back to a poem or a story or a manuscript after a couple of weeks or a month. I’ll see it, then, in a different light; I’ll see things I missed when writing the first draft or the 2nd or the 3rd . I am, however, impatient; I want to get on with something new. And I’m still learning after many years that patience is, indeed, a virtue—at least when it comes to writing and publishing.

I also have a few trusted friends who are also writers, and I value their suggestions when I’m editing and revising.

 

4. JCM: Backstories to poems are often as fascinating as the poems themselves. Would you comment on them for the poems appearing in this issue?

4. SBW: Back stories are, indeed, interesting. Let me begin with “Nature, Like Mother, Is An Improper Name (Shilly Shallying Sin) (A Prose Sestina). I have just completed a book manuscript, tentatively titled Sobriquets in which an older woman (a crone), who was given away at birth, decides to give herself a new identity and a name she chooses herself. She goes through the lexicon and tries on personas: Abigail Adams, Belle Boyd, Coco Chanel and so on, from A to Z. This manuscript/book is a prose poem, abecedarian, cultural study, and memoir that intertwines my own life with that of representative women, including Lois Lane and Olive Oyl.

[Fascinated by the notion of a prose sestina, I deconstructed your piece to better understand its mechanics. In this beautifully rhythmic prose sestina, the repeated words (1 house, 2 road, 3 wood, 4 walk, 5 pines, 6 flowers) are not used at the end of sentences or sentence fragments as they would be used at the ends of lines, rather, it is their sequences that are preserved throughout the prose piece. Think about the word sequences as groupings instead of stanzas:

123456

615243

364125

532614

451326

246531

123456

In this one-paragraph prose poem, we can look at the text and see the proper sequences of the words. But note that there is the use of homonyms (wood/would; road/rode) and extra repetitions of words, as well as variations of some words: house/housing; walk/walked, flowers/flowering, etc. JCM]

 

5. JCM: The first one in the sequence is a fascinating found poem, “What Is Found There.” I think writing a found poem is a wonderful way to create, but is misunderstood by many poets.*

5. SBW: I like playing about with form , so “What Is Found There” (Title borrowed from Adrienne Rich) is an ekphrastic prose-poem cento. A cento, by definition, is a poem that is made of borrowed lines from other poets or other sources. It is a patchwork or collage poem, I decided to pull an odd assortment of books off my shelf and see if I could make something of various lines in these randomly selected books—an idea that I got from Barbara Henning. I think that finding a voice in the writing of a cento has to do with the author’s selection process, both in terms of the message conveyed and the manner of conveying it. Some cento poems are written in lines, but others, as in the case here, the cento is written as a prose poem. John Ashbury has a poem entitled “The Dong With The Luminous Nose” http://www.english.txstate.edu/cohen_p/poetry/Ashbery.html. Edward Lear also has a poem by that title, but it’s not a cento. Theresa Malphirus Welford edited a collection of collage poems entitled The Cento, published in 2011. This is a great little anthology of cento poetry.

[*Some poets express a fear of not finding their own voice in someone else’s words, while others worry about copywright. Clearly, you have shown your own voice. And the footnote references should allay any fears one might have about copyright, especially since new work is being created. JCM]

 

6. JCM: David and Bathsheba make excellent poetic subjects, if for no other reason, the steamy affair between them. I can here the song, “Hallelujah” play in my head (as sung by Rufus Wainwright) as I read your poem. You sent me an image of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s late 19th century painting, “Bathsheba,” which inspired your poem, as well as the music. But you mentioned something else triggered your poem “Bathsheba Bathing On The Roof” and that it started as a prose sonnet.

6 SBW: “Bathsheba Bathing On The Roof” started as a sonnet; I wrote it in 14 sentences. Later when I was working on my memoir, I thought about Bathsheba as one of the persona figures for the abecedarian book, and I rewrote the poem as lyric essay. Then I decided that I wanted double alphabetical names or characters if possible, so I chose Belle Boyd, who was a Confederate spy, instead of Bathsheba for the book. The story of David and Bathsheba is a fascinating one—and as I was writing, I listened to Leonard Cohen singing “Hallelujah.” I could listen to him sing me to sleep every night.

 

7. JCM: The linguistic gymnastics of the poetic prose piece, “Committee By Fiat?,” is intruiging, especially with politics and religion. How did this one evolve?

7. SBW: “Committee by Fiat” has a bit of a back story. It grew out of a contentious faculty meeting.” The quote by Richard Dawkins came from The God Delusion. Sometimes faculty members tend to think of themselves as “mini deities”–-and I enjoyed writing a slice of academe as jest. I keep a poet’s notebook of bits and pieces/fragments, so notes taken in a faculty meeting resulted in a poem. I am fascinated by poets’ notebooks. See Anna Kamienska’s “Industrious Amazement: A Notebook” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/241270

Other favorite literary notebooks are A Poet’s Notebook by Edith Sitwell and It Depends: A Poet’s Notebook by Eugenio Montale.

 

8. JCM: Negative Capability is such an interesting name for your press and publication. Tell us more on how you chose this name and what your press and publication are looking for. And do they consider speculative poetry pieces, as well as collections?

8. SBW: Thank you for the opportunity of mentioning Negative Capability Press (negativecapabiltypress.org). Also, we’re on facebook—Negative Capability Press Facebook. The title of the journal came from a letter that John Keats wrote to his brothers George and Tom Keats in which he said: “at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” I tend to reach “irritably after fact and reason” so Keats’ statement spoke to me—and I chose it for the title of the journal. The journal was dormant for awhile, but we’re publishing a 33rd year anniversary issue that should be out in late August. We also publish seven or eight books a year. We’re proud of our books and have just published Lissa Kiernan’s Two Faint Lines in the Violet. We will soon be releasing a book by Maurine Alsop entitled Later, Knives & Trees, a book by Philip Kolin entitled Departures,  and a book by Barry Marks entitled Dividing By Zero. Other books in the works are by John Davis, Jennifer Grant, Bonnie Hoffman, Faith Kellerer, Betty Spence and a novel by Joe Berry. This year we have published books by Michael Bassett, John Brugaletta, Melissa Dickson, Rob Gray, Jim Murphy and Mary Murphy (no kin), Patricia Harkins-Pierre, Clela Reed, and Charles and Mary Rodning. And yes, we publish speculative poetry. As soon as our current Anthology is out, we’ll be starting another Negative Capability issue.

 

9. JCM: As president of the Alabama Writers’ Conclave, tell us more about it. Does it have a speculative writing component or anything else that will improve the craft of poetry?

9. SBW:The Alabama Writers Conclave met this July 2014 on the University of South Alabama campus in Fairhope, Alabama—a stone’s throw from Mobile Bay and the place where Kate Chopin’s novel, The Awakening, was filmed. The conference features two days of workshops, all of which focus on some aspect of craft in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and drama. I believe that AWC is the 2nd oldest continuing writers group in American. We had over 100 participants in Fairhope this past July.

 

10. JCM: Tell us about your successful writing projects; entice our readers so that we’d want to rush out and purchase them. Where do we find them?

10. SBW: My latest published book is The Ecological Poetics of James Dickey, published in 2012. There’s a new review of this book in the James Dickey Newsletter on-line. http://www.jamesdickey.org/

Two articles about Flannery O’Connor and lupus have just been reprinted in Short Story Criticism, vol 195. I wear my heavy-duty prof boots on my left foot— good for slogging through sloughs of water and my pinkpurpleyellowgreen shiek-shoes for poetry.

Check out my work at Connotation Press — http://www.connotationpress.com/poetry/513-sue-brannan-walker-poetry.

See my chapbook from The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature: http://www.deadmule.com/poetry/sue-brannan-walker-how-stubborned-words-mule-how-they-balk-take-their-own-measure-a-chapbook-of-prose-poems/

See also my fun with math at: http://talkingwriting.com/sue-brannan-walker-math-poetry

Please check out our Book Competition ($2000.00 Award) at negativecapabilitypress.org. We will consider additional book manuscripts for publication.

 

11. JCM: Tell us about your new writing projects.

11. SBW:I hope to wrap up Sobriquets in September; like the sound of “Sobriquets in September.” I also want to go back and pick up a verse novel on the Yellow Fever epidemic in Mobile, Mississippi, New Orleans, etc. that occurred in 1878. When I started the project a few years back, I was trying to write a novel about a young quadroon purchased at a Quadroon Ball during the time when the plaçage system was part of New Orleans culture—the time when mariage de la main gauche was prevalent. I wrote about 150 pages as a novel and then decided to write the piece as a verse novel. I want to go back and finish this story in a different form.

I’m toying with the notion of doing some really hybrid work—something to do with “The Body: In Part.” It will incorporate parts of the body, such as the “scalp”–going back to Herodotus, a time when “Scythian soldiers scraped the scalp clean of flesh and softened it by rubbing it between their hands and using it as a napkin. The Scyth, proud of these scalps, would hang them from his bridle rein; the greater the number of such “napkins” that a man could show, the more highly he was esteemed. Some men made cloaks by sewing a number of scalps together. There’s an interesting ekphrastic representation of “scalping” in the film “Navajo Joe” staring Burt Reynolds. Cormac McCarthy also mentioned “scalping” in Blood Meridian. So, I shall go “head-to-toe”—and by-the-way, did you know that long second toes had been considered as indicators of criminals? Maybe I’ll proceed from bottom to top—and start making lists—write the body from bottom to top. I think lists are great for thinking about what projects might entail.

I also want to do some innovative things with Negative Capability Press and am open to ideas and suggestions.

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Published by Karl Rademacher on July 9, 2014. This item is listed in Interview, Issue 20, Issue 20 Poetry, Main Features

Interview with Bruce Boston

by John C. Mannone

Bruce-Boston-1980_350

Bruce Boston

Bruce Boston is the author of fifty books and chapbooks, including the novels The Guardener’s Tale and Stained Glass Rain. His writing has appeared in countless publications, most visibly in Asimov’s SF Magazine, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Realms of Fantasy, The Pedestal Magazine, Science Fiction Age, Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Nebula Awards Showcase. One of the leading genre poets for more than a quarter century, Boston has received the Bram Stoker Award for Poetry Collection, the Asimov’s Readers Award for Poetry, the Rhysling Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and the Grandmaster Award of the SFPA. His fiction has received a Pushcart Prize, twice been a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award (novel, short story), and a finalist for the Micro Award (flash fiction).

John: To say you are a prolific writer, as well as being highly accomplished, is an understatement.  Click here for a bibliographic summary..

Having read other fine interviews with you, such as John Amen’s in The Pedestal (issue 11, 2002) and Van der Hooft’s in Strange Horizons (June 2007), where you address what speculative poetry is, would you please summarize your thoughts about what it is for our readers who might ask if a speculative poem is just a science fiction or fantasy poem, especially since you helped define the genre?

Bruce: If you are talking absolute categories, the defining characteristic that sets speculative poetry apart from mainstream poetry is that it speculates. Mainstream poetry concerns itself with the everyday world that we inhabit and perceive: personal relationships, observations of people and the city and of nature, social and sometimes political situations, etc.  When you encounter an “I” voice in mainstream poetry, it is most often the author of the poem speaking directly to the reader about something in the real world. In contrast, speculative poetry deals more with the imagination: the world as it might be, the nature of reality, why we are here, what the future may hold, the existence of the supernatural, etc. It fashions scenarios of the possible rather than the actual. When you encounter an “I” voice in speculative poetry, it is most often a fictional character speaking, not the poet. Since the real world exists not in terms of absolute categories but of gradations from one category to another, it is not always completely clear whether a poem is speculative or not.

 

John: I understand that your first passion was fiction. How did you become interested in speculative poetry? And as you write fiction today, what has poetry brought to the table besides the effective use of metaphor and other poetic devices in your fiction.

Bruce: In 1971 I joined a group in Berkeley, California: The Berkeley Poets Cooperative.  I already had an interest in poetry from reading poets such as Pound, Eliot, Ginsberg, Poe, and a score of others. And I’d already written some poetry that had been published in Occident, the University of California, Berkeley, literary magazine.  Each week the group held an open workshop, so I began writing poems more regularly to contribute to it. My poems were often distinctively different from other in the group. I was writing speculative poetry, though I didn’t yet have at name for it. It was not until the late seventies that I connected with Robert Frazier and his magazine The Anthology of Speculative Poetry, and through Bob the Science Fiction Poetry Association, that I discovered fellow writers who were mining the same imaginative vein that I was in poetry.

Poetry and fiction both employ the medium of language. Anything that enhances one’s language skills is going to enhance both, and seriously practicing the craft of poetry certainly enhances one’s language skills: brevity, the perfect word for the line (or sentence), symbolism, assonance and dissonance, rhythm, flow, etc.  I generally read poems aloud at some point while composing them, and for certain passages in fiction, I do the same thing.

 

John: If there is such a thing as a typical writing day, please share your process with us. If the process is unique each time you write, then could you share the triggers of inspiration?

Bruce: There is no typical writing day unless I am working on something long: a novel, a long story, or a very long poem.  Then I write first thing in the morning and try to put in four or five hours at it, sometimes returning to it for another hour or two later in the day.  If I am writing shorter poems or flash fictions there is no schedule. I write when the spirit moves me, sometimes not writing for weeks at a time. A thirty-line poem may percolate for days or even months, changing a little and becoming more polished each time I return to it, until I feel it is complete and ready to submit for publication.

 

John: In a recent and fascinating article posted in The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/05/daily-rituals-creative-minds-mason-currey), Oliver Burkeman reviews the book “Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration And Get To Work” by Mason Currey. We learn six lessons from history’s most creative minds; one of them is the practice of “strategic substance abuse.” I think many of us are familiar with Edgar Allen Poe and his indulgence to alcohol, or Calvin Coleridge, and his to cocaine, when they created some of the finest speculative fiction or poetry in history. And though hardly abusive, I do enjoy a glass or two of dry red wine when I create poetry (or write interviews. LOL). So tell us if your experiences support Currey’s thesis.

Bruce: Very much so, though I think I’d refer to it as “use” rather than “abuse.”  I’ve consumed a large quantity and variety of mind-altering substances in my life. When the mind is in an altered state one’s imagination can be stimulated and you are more likely to travel mental byways that lead to ideas and perceptions you would have never experienced otherwise. Thus the ingestion of certain substances can contribute to one’s creativity and imagination, just as your glass or two of wine does for you. However, I believe abuse of such substances is detrimental to both creativity and one’s health. And I don’t write final drafts of either poems or stories in a mind-altered state. That’s where the craft of writing comes in.

 

John: You close your recent collection, Dark Roads, with “Thirteen Ways of Looking at and through Hashish.”  Its clever final lines might elucidate what we’ve talked about in the previous question.

“Tendrils of illumination
Cling to my thoughts,
Trailing in my wake,
Puzzling to those
Whose paths I cross,
Those ever immersed
In the dull endurance
Of their daily tasks,
Without illusions,
Without perception
Of what lies beyond
The stolid borders
Of the everyday,
Insensate and
Unable to travel
In the domains
Of space and time
And consciousness.”

Bruce: Actually, I think the whole twenty-page poem does. But please note that the poem as a whole portrays not only the positive but the negative aspects of mind-altering chemicals.

 

John: This, of course, is a good segue into your latest collection. I’ve had the pleasure of reading Dark Roads: Selected Long Poems/1971-2012 (Dark Renaissance Press 2013). Thirty one poems span over the 156 pages. Share with us what you’d like your potential readers to know about this fine collection. (And of course, tell us how we can purchase it.)

Bruce: Dark Regions Press published a retrospective collection of my work in 1995 – Sensuous Debris: Selected Poems 1970-1995.  Since nearly twenty years had transpired since that book, and more than forty since I began writing speculative poetry, I thought it was time for another retrospective collection covering my entire career as a speculative poet. However, when I began to assemble it I realized that if I included all my own favorites poems along with those readers had single out, I would be looking at a three-hundred-page collection, which seems to me excessive for a book of poetry.  Therefore, I first decided to limit the book to long poems, all those fifty lines or over.  And next, since I’ve been working more in the horror field than science fiction for the last dozen or so years, I decided to limit it to dark poems.

You can purchase the regular trade paper edition of Dark Roads at Amazon, the signed limited trade paper at Dark Renaissance Books and Dark Regions Press, and the signed, limited hardcover edition at Bad Moon Books, Camelot Books, and Ziesing Books.

 

John: The illustrations by M. Wayne Miller in Dark Roads are remarkable. Your wife, Marge Simon, is also a notable poet and artist, whose artwork is fascinating, too, and she is quite skilled at ekphrasis—one art form complementing another (a fair way of defining it).

So, in general, how do you collaborate with Marge, and what advice can you give other writers collaborating with their counterparts?

Bruce: Joe Morey at Dark Renaissance Books selected Wayne Miller to illustrate Dark Roads, and I couldn’t have been more pleased, particularly once I saw the work he produced for the book.

Marge and I have collaborated in several different ways and forms.  Marge has illustrated several of my collections, which is a kind of collaboration since her art was in response to specific poems. We have also collaborated on cartoons, Marge’s art along with ideas that I came up with or we did together.  However, most of our collaborations have been with poetry and flash fiction. This generally happens when Marge is stalled on a piece and I contribute some ideas and lines that get it moving again. Then we pass it back and forth until it feels finished and we are both satisfied with it.

As far as advice for couples or any writers collaborating: 1) If your styles of writing are too disparate, don’t try it; 2) Have a clear idea of what you are trying to accomplish with a particular poem or story, and make sure you agree on it. 3) Never collaborate unless you are both enthusiastic about it.

 

John: We are delighted to reprint or publish for the first time some of your poems in this issue: “Living in a World Of Giants,” “For Spacers Snarled in the Hair of Comets” (Asimov’s SF Magazine, April 1984 and 1985 Rhysling Award winner), “Visions of the Blue Clone” (Shades Fantastic, 2006), and “The City and the Stars” (The Pedestal Magazine, 2002). Would you care to give the genesis of each of these poems and/or any interesting anecdote concerning them?

Bruce: Not sure about the genesis of each poem, but I can say something about each:

 

“Living in a World of Giants” –  Modern science, despite it’s many wonderful practical achievements that have given us a living standard superior to kings of a hundred years ago, remains totally impotent regarding one important aspect of our daily lives.

“For Spacers Snarled in the Hair of Comets” – This one was written thirty years ago, and I don’t remember what prompted it.  It’s a mix of science fiction imagery and surreal imagery.  The “spacers” of the title can be interpreted literally as far future space travelers, or metaphorically as anyone who has lost their way and is struggling with life’s complications.

Visions-of-the-Blue-Clone_50“Visions of the Blue Clone” – This is an ekphrastic poem based on my own art. In some early version of Windows there was a free graphics program included called Picture It.  I started playing around with it as a recreation, taking photographs and other images and manipulating and changing them.  By taking an old photo of Marge, I created the image below.  This consequently inspired the poem, which portrays the aspects of a developing relationship using a biblical metaphor.

“The City and the Stars” –  The title of the poem is taken from an early Arthur C. Clarke novel where the last surviving humans live in a huge enclosed arcology on a barren Earth.  They have forgotten about the stars completely and lost their aspirations to reach them. I took the same idea and compared it to humans living in a contemporary city. This is one of the poems that stands on the borderline between speculative and mainstream, and it first appeared in a literary magazine, not a speculative publication.

 

John: What projects do you have on the near and far horizons?

Bruce:  For the first time in many years, I’m project-less at the moment.  I could put together a retrospective collection of my shorter poems, or an entirely new collection of previously uncollected poems.  But the book market is so glutted these days by indie and small press books, and ebooks, often offered for free, that it seems like a fruitless endeavor.  Though I will be continuing to submit new poetry and fiction to magazines and anthologies.

 

John: Thank you

Bruce: Thanks for having me.  I hope your readers enjoy the poems.

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