Clif Mason is an English professor and a poet with four collections published. I reviewed his remarkable debut full-length collection, Knocking the Stars Senseless, here and here (part II of the review). Since then, we've been emailing back and forth the following extensive interview on the art, craft life and development of the poet.This interview is (or will be) in four parts:
Laura Madeline Wiseman pointed out the walking motif in your poems, mentioning William Wordsworth (not to mention Wallace Stevens). Does this commonly inspire poems or something else? What are some ways you breathe to life new
poems? What do you do when feeling less inspired?
Yes, walking—both in the daytime and at night—is the catalyst
of many of my poems, perhaps most notably in “The Sea Anemone Must Wed
Lightning,” “The Reprieve,” “Culmination,” and “Fantasias of the Falling Snow.”
As far as literary influences go, Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” and Whitman’s
self-depiction as a poet “afoot with vision” in the world have been important,
as well as the examples of Wordsworth and Keats. Walking is, for me, a form of
meditation, sometimes to the point of complete trance-like immersion in the
world around me. I find the rhythm and pace of walking almost perfectly suited to
the creative states of being from which words arise as if from nowhere and begin
to coalesce into poems. The other main way I find the inspiration to write is
to leap almost anywhere into the work of some of the writers I’ve listed above.
Within a poem or two I put the book away, pick up my notebook and a pen and
begin to compose. When I’m feeling less inspired, I don’t write. As Keats said
in one of his letters, “if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a
tree it had better not come at all.” Or I use revision of a poem or poems as a portal
into new composition.
You draw equally on surrealism and
reality. When did you begin work that in to your work and what do you feel
surrealism brings to the table?
I read some surrealists early on, in the 70s—James Wright,
Robert Bly, and W. S. Merwin, and a few others, but it was my first in-depth
readings of Lorca, Neruda, Merwin, Rimbaud, Trakl, and Merwin in the late 90s
and early 2000s that propelled my poetry in a new direction. I had read them
cursorily before, but now the full emotive force and electric charge of their
image-making came home to me. I read Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads, The
Tamarit Divan, and Poet in New York; Neruda’s Residency on Earth,
Canto General, and Odes; Merwin’s The Lice , The
Carrier of Ladders, and Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment;
Rimbaud’s Complete Poems and Trakl’s Selected Poems obsessively,
again and again. I felt deeply emotionally at home in these poets’ imaginary
worlds, in a way I rarely felt at home in the so-called real world. Their poems
lived in the pulse in my wrist, as well as in the impulse in my brain.
Surrealism, at least as practiced by these five writers, profoundly
de-familiarizes language and helps us gain a new vision of what reality might
be and a new alphabet by which to record it.
When did you first feel confident about what you wrote? What remained to be learned?
I don’t mean to sound immodest, but I felt confident about
my writing almost as soon as I began to write seriously—about age twenty. I had
as many clunker lines as lines that pitched steeply up and took flight, but when
the words flew, I knew it and I knew I could become a poet. What I had to learn
was the discipline of craft. I tended to write long, mixing in prosaic lines
with original ones, and I had to learn to cut—ruthlessly, mercilessly—the bad
ones. And I could be a vexingly slow learner. I also had to learn not to write
about something just because I thought I should. I wrote a number of bad poems
in that way. For me, at least, ideas shouldn’t be the origin point of poems.
This is not to say that poems shouldn’t have ideas, but simply that the ideas
should arise organically from the images and sonic intensity of the lines. I
had to learn to eschew the didactic and let the first words of a poem magically
appear in my head and then to nurture and develop—organically,
associatively—the poem, to grow it from those first verbal seeds. Assonance,
consonance, and alliteration came naturally to me—an early instance was “Frog
croak, cricket chatter, / wind keening in the corn blades,” from “Night
Wounds”—and I had to learn how to play with them to increase the verbal force
within lines and stanzas, and how also not to allow a surfeit of such sound
effects to drown my poems. I often pushed the music of a poem to (and sometimes
beyond) the breaking point. I had, in revising, to try to repair the lines
through careful pruning. Finally, I had to learn how to allow myself to
reimagine poems and open myself to radical reinventions of them, often by challenging
and changing their form drastically, and also by “trainwrecking” two or more
poems or poem fragments together. I had to learn to recognize when poems had a common
imaginative origin. I was excited by the new possibilities this practice opened
up for my poems.
If you felt confident at twenty,
what took so long to publish your first book? What were the impediments?
I would never think of them as “impediments,”
as they were all-important to my sense of who I was and who I might be as a
human being, but I would mention three things that kept me from developing as
quickly as I otherwise might have as a writer: working on my Master’s and Ph.D.
degrees in English, and teaching and trying to support a family. During my
graduate studies, I became a bit of a researching, criticism writing machine,
though this metaphor hardly does justice to the work. I found the writing of
criticism both challenging and enormously stimulating, and I became so immersed
in it over time that I almost forgot what it was like to write poetry. Several
years into my teaching career, I tried my hand again at poetry, fitfully at
first. After several years, I gave up writing criticism to focus completely on
poetry. I became obsessive about it. Every day I was reminded how little I
really knew about poetry and especially about writing poems worth reading. I
set out to re-educate myself, and that project is still in motion. I usually
have a dozen or so books of poems that I’m reading at any one time, and I float
back and forth between them, as mood and whim and felt or perceived need
dictate. I began sending poems out to magazines and reaped bushels of
rejections, and a few acceptances, enough to encourage me to keep trying. I was
the faculty sponsor for a little creative writing magazine at the University,
and somehow Fredrick Zydek, a poet from Omaha, discovered us and submitted a
sheaf of poems. We had never published anyone from outside the University
before, but the students liked his poems, so we did. I began corresponding with
Fred and sharing poems with him. He sent me relatively few poems as he was
going through a protracted period of writer’s block, following the death of his
mother. As it turned out, Fred was the Editor in Chief at Lone Willow Press,
and he invited me to submit a chapbook manuscript. I sent him From the Dead
Before, and he published it.
No comments:
Post a Comment