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Poetic Profile

Joe Ahearn

Poet's Note:

Ray, I’d like to say at the outset that I am much more concerned about the continuing Federal persecution of my friend Steve Kurtz than I am about anything having to do with my own work. Perhaps you could list the CAE Defense Fund URL (http://caedefensefund.org/), so that interested readers could get educated on this dreadful situation? 

Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?

I grew up in the desolate parallel universe of West Texas, and, nope, poetry didn’t glitter in the dust out there. I wrote about this in an essay called “How I Got My Education” (published in Sulphur River Literary Review, Volume 14.1, Spring 1998), so I’ll just quote from that essay here:

 I grew up in West Texas, which really is like growing up on another planet. It’s flat out there, and dusty, and if the wind is from the south, the smell of the stockyards, which might hang in the air for days, is enough to wake you from sleep. One day nothing less than pure wind blew my old ‘66 Mercury convertible, which must have weighed two tons, completely across a freeway and into a ditch. When I got out of the car, walking into the wind-blown sand was like being lashed with a whip. Within seconds, I had sand even between my rear molars. And there was no one around for miles. I walked for a long time. That’s West Texas.  

It goes without saying that I never met a single writer of any kind while I was growing up. I’m not sure I even met anyone who had gone to college except my maiden aunt who went to West Texas State University in Canyon, Texas. Even my own mother, who eventually practiced law, didn’t complete her first college degree until I was twelve. And she didn’t go to law school until I myself went off to college. How I ever got the idea of writing is a complete mystery to me.

 But I did. I clearly remember asking my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Henry, how to spell the word “diary.” She asked why I wanted to know. I said I needed to know because I was going to be a writer. How does this happen? How does an eight-year old boy, whose entire world has been farmers / butchers / fry-cooks / plumbers decide to write, of all things? I don’t know. But I did. And I wrote. Planned works I was going to write when I grew up. And that work was as real to me, and as constant, as Batman on TV or Merle Haggard on the radio.

But of course, I had no idea how to accomplish it. No one I knew read literature. I’m not sure I even knew what literature was. But I wrote and read a lot and just started in on the project, right there in the wind-raked playground of Southlawn Elementary School, thought hard about being a writer.

Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?

My first sense of any kind of personal expression, as I mentioned, came as I listened to the radio as a small boy in Dust Bowl territory. It seemed to me that some of the country songs I heard, especially those of Hank Williams, said something about my life that I never heard anywhere else. Later, as an adolescent, I was extremely taken with what we now call “roots music,” and I spent a lot of time listening to old country blues records, Woodie Guthrie and Cisco Houston and Bob Dylan, Kansas City jump blues, that kind of thing. I actually was more interested in writing songs and being in a country or blues band than I was in writing poetry. I had no opinion on poetry. It didn’t exist for me, as it doesn’t exist for many people in this country now. I learned how to play drums and spent a lot of time learning to bend notes on a blues harp, but eventually I had to face the fact that I had no real musical talent. So I wrote journalism, then plays, then fiction, and finally poetry.  

By accident, I ran across some books by Ezra Pound when I was 17 or 18 and that was the first start of any kind of literary education for me. Pound showed me the way out and I took it. Hemingway was also tremendous early influence as a model of literary discipline. Joyce was, almost literally, a revelation to me. In my college years—the late 70s—I loved punk music and the jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, and others, and I read, as Dylan Thomas said, with my eyes hanging out. Roethke and particularly Lowell were big influences then. 

In terms of my adult work, my biggest single influence has been the work of Brenda Hillman. I think she’s an incarnated poetry goddess. Brian Clements’s work and example has been of utmost importance to me in the last ten years. Likewise, the important work of Nathalie LaMont. Robert Hass has been very important to me, too, not least as an example of a brilliant male poet who isn’t destroying himself. The classical Chinese poets, Dickinson, Whitman, Cesar Vallejo, Keats, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rene Char, Stevens, Auden, Lyn Hejinian, and especially the impeccable later work of William Dickey remain very important sources for me.

Over the last several years, I have been making wood sculpture, and the rigor of trying to see what’s there and to work with planes and curves in an interesting way has been very useful. Like most writers, I am also intrigued by paintings, and I am currently very taken with the work of Helen Frankenthaler.

When did you 'become' a poet, when did poetry become part of your everyday life? 

In What is Literature?, Sartre mentions that a writer is someone who writes, someone engaged in writing. In that sense, one never becomes a writer or a poet. One struggles to stay in the writing process, with more or less success.

Where were you educated? Was this important?

My formal education has been at state universities in Texas, where I studied technical economics, math, and philosophy, mainly. I placed out of almost all my college English classes, so I have fewer college English credits than any writer I know. The only English classes I took in college or graduate school were writing classes. I think trying to get a good understanding of institutional economics, modern philosophy, and mathematics is a good start for a poet. Especially considering we really have no idea how poets should be educated. Obviously, it’s important to read and write, but I think young writers should get the broadest education possible, and spend a lot of time away from anyone, especially English teachers, who may try to tell you what to read, or how to think about what you read. Auden mentions that modern literature is what you get on your own, outside of class. I think he’s right. In my case, anyway, he is. The real education, it seems to me, is what you get when you try your best to read as deeply as you can. I mean reading down through the work into the ground until you’re oozing through the texts like groundwater.

 

Your writing has been influenced by so much, Buddhism, Pound, the South, technology.  What are your main influences now?

Well, I’ve always just thought of myself as a song-and-dance man.

You are a pensive and volatile writer at the same time how do you balance all of this in your work? 

Beats me.

What is your favorite food?

Tom Kha Gai. And ice cream. But not on the same day.

 

Sports Team 

The often-defeated but never quite-out-of-it American working class.

Vacation Spot?

The western coastal range running up from San Jose to the mighty Columbia River in central Oregon.

 

Curse Word?

Shrub.

How do you form a poem?

I listen. And I work. As Rodin put it, “What inspires me? Work inspires me.”

 

Do you use collage, found language?

No, I’m not interested in collage, as either a technique or a process.

Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?

I’m not sure those terms, at least as I understand them, apply to my writing process. I’d call my writing process Situationist, dialectical, Zennist, and obscure.

Where do you write? Is Ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?

I write anywhere I can get some quiet. I like to write my early drafts with a pen or pencil. And I find it nearly impossible to revise without smoking and drinking tea. Otherwise, I don’t have any compositional fetishes. I really like to write outdoors whenever I can. Early mornings are best.
 

In the balance between found language and created language where does your work fall? Do you use many sources? 

Well, none of us create language, I don’t think. And none of us “find” it, either. It occurs, and we pay attention.

Your work is very controlled how do you continue to control the evident energy in your work? 

My sense of the project is that we owe our often beset, tired, and overworked reader the very best we can do. For me, this means revising seriously and rather ruthlessly and for a long time. The last thing the world needs is another bad poem. So I think the obligation is to work hard in a sort of secluded way until you’re pretty sure you have something. It seems to me that you shouldn’t worry too much about showing someone a poem until it’s at least a genuinely interesting effort. Of course we all make mistakes about how interesting our work is, but I find, in general, the more narrowly ambitious the writer, the less interesting the work. Instead of aiming to get in some literary mag, or have someone praise a poem you spent two hours on, aim to write a thousand-page poem, or at least to write a better poem than, say, Thomas Wyatt or Lyn Hejinian or Sappho. And read Artaud early and often.

Commerical blurb: 

For the sake of my endlessly generous publisher, Mike Robbins, I should mention that my latest book, Five Fictions, is available at the following address for $13.50, postpaid.

Sulphur River Review Press

P.O. Box 19228

Austin TX 78760