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Poetic Profile

Brian Clements

Interview Questions for Brian Clements

Dear Ray,

Since I started responding to your questions, the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal has erupted. This is yet another emblem of the corrupt heart of this administration and its policies, yet another boulder on top of the huge rockpile of crimes our government is committing in our names. It makes the interview seem frivolous and insignificant at this point. I hope you’ll publish this note along with the interview, because I want to encourage all of your readers to do whatever they can to speak out against this violence, to speak out against unilateral actions like our invasion of Iraq, and to vote this corrupt administration out of office.

1) Where did you grow up?

Mostly in small towns in Arkansas and Mississippi, also Memphis; went to high school in the Metropolis of North Little Rock. When I say small, I mean population 3,000.

2) Was poetry and writing part of that mix?

No.

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

Too many too list. The motto of Jubilat and of my friend Brian Brennan is mine, too: Everything matters. I get the most out of music, films, poems that have that attitude. Thus my attraction to Whitman and O’Hara and Tom Waits and Wilco and Milan Kundera and Peter Greenaway and Paul Thomas Anderson and Joseph Cornell and Laurie Anderson… oops, there I go. At the moment, I’m into Alan Halsey’s work. I’ve recently been impressed by Chritian Bök’s Euonia, Brenda Hillman’s Cascadia, and The Cuckoo by Peter Streckfus. I’ve been pushing Cornelius Eady’s Brutal Imagination on people like magic vitamins for two years now. I’m delighted that Joe Ahearn’s first full-length book is out, and I’m looking forward to Jo McDougall’s new book. How’s that for variety?

4) When did you 'become' a poet? When did being a poet become part of your everyday life?

I guess, as you’ve suggested, you’re a poet when you’ve started writing poems and writing them or at least thinking about them becomes indistinguishable from the rest of your life. That probably happened to me at about age 20 at…

5) Where were you educated? Was this important?

…SMU, where I studied as an undergrad with Jack Myers. Jack, as hundreds of people all over the country will tell you, is one of the best teachers around. I think my first book, Essays Against Ruin, was a way of exorcising Jack’s introspective, personal voice and learning how to go get away from talking about myself (for which reason, I’m not quite sure about this interview…). Milt Kessler, at Binghamton, got me off the self-centered track and on to other things. He also got me addicted to Whitman and helped me to think of the poem as part of an ongoing dialogue. I never really had a “mentor”—more like enablers. Some non-academic poets in Dallas and my peers at Binghamton taught me what it means to be a poet in a city, state, country that hates poets. The Comp Lit dept at Binghamton was as important to me as the Creative Writing program, probably more important—see above re: everything matters.

6) You were not always an academic; how does this influence your work?

Au contraire, I was born in a committee meeting and learned to read by reviewing curriculum plans!

Actually, I’ve never been an academic. I don’t have whatever it is you’re supposed to have in order to get hired in a creative writing program or any other kind of university position—apparently a PhD, teaching experience, and publications are not it. Not that I’m bitter…

I teach on the side because the dialogue is important to me; I make a living elsewhere. Like many poets, I’ve found that there can be more supportive communities outside academia than in, and there are also learning communities outside academia that can be more genuinely engaged in learning than institutional education tends to be. The Writer’s Garret in Dallas, for a local example, is a gathering energy for poets and has both wonderful teachers and students coming together to read work to which they’re determined to grant their attention.

“Community” of course is no longer an issue of locality, thanks to web publications like yours, blogs, email discussions like the Buffalo Poetics list, and the current explosion in literary journals and small presses. The apparatus around Sentence has fast become an international conversation thanks to the fact that we communicate with poets, readers, and critics in Belgium, England, Mexico, Japan, Slovenia, Italy, Canada, Korea, France, Germany, Jordan, Israel, and Chile. Ongoing discussion among all of those communities is central to what I consider to be my project. We’re constantly shooting language past each other at the speed of light; some of it hits, some of it flies past off into space. I’m interested both in what our language is doing when we think we’re communicating and what language is doing when we’re not using it to communicate.

7) What is your favorite ...

Food?

Guinness and dark chocolate, separately or together. Good Texas-/Oklahoma-/Arkansas- style barbeque. Home-made fried chicken. An ice-cold Corona after working hard or playing hard outside. Really good sushi. Pho. Chicken Korma over rice. Homemade, hand-turned peach ice cream (made with my kids).
 

Sports Team?

Arkansas Razorbacks, with hopes for a return to excellence in basketball and baseball next year. Also, I’m a baseball fan living in Dallas, but can’t root for Tom Hicks’s Rangers—and will have a hard time getting up any enthusiasm for the game as long as there’s a sham commissioner. So I guess I’ll go with my favorite childhood team, the A’s (‘72-’74—Fingers, Blue, Jackson, Hunter, Tenace, Rudi, Bando).

Activity?

Filling out questionnaires.

Vacation Spot?

Canoeing in the Ozarks.

Curse Word?

How about my least favorite? No word exits my mouth with as much disgust and vitriol as “Bush.” Just thinking it makes me want to wash my brain out with soap.

8) Dallas is a small pond; do you think that a small city/poetry scene or a large scene is better for a poet?

I don’t think the size of the scene should matter to the poet. I don’t want to say that what comes after the poems is irrelevant, because I think poetry is useless unless it’s part of a dialogue, or multilogue rather. But poets have to filter out a certain amount of that noise (almost all) up front just to get the writing done. What a vibrant community can do for a poet, though, is help keep the energy level up; that doesn’t require a large community, just an engaged one.

And the Dallas (really, North Texas) poetry scene is not so much a small pond as a long series of dammed up pools on a dried-up creek beset by Hummers. But a few people are trying to channel in more water.

9) Sentence has become a very popular magazine, what are your goals for the magazine? What do you attribute the success of Sentence?

Well, I’m not sure what your standard is for “popular.” We only have 150 subscribers and have sold a little over 100 copies in addition to those. But the response from those who’ve seen it has been phenomenal—better than we dared hope. If it’s going to survive beyond its fifth issue, we’ll have to have that many new subscribers for every issue and/or some generous donors. We have no institutional support.

If Sentence has been successful thus far, it’s been due on one hand to the current popularity of prose poems and “poet’s prose” and on the other to the quality of the work in the first issue. I also have to say that there is a large backlog of readers who were very disappointed with the demise of Peter Johnson’s The Prose Poem: An International Journal, and many of those folks have graciously transferred their support our way. Peter, by the way, has plans (or hopes, at least) to bring back TPP in a limited fashion in the not-too-distant future.

Our goals for the journal are simply to keep it alive and to put as much information and good work in each issue as possible. We’ll have a feature section in each issue (French-language prose poets in #1, Spanish-language prose poets in #2, British prose poets in #3   guest-edited by Nikki Santilli, author of the first full-length study of the prose poem in English literature). Peter Johnson will guest-edit #4. There is FAR more excellent work out there than will possibly fit into one issue cycle of Sentence, Double Room, Quarter After Eight, Paragraph, and CUE combined. For the first two issues, Sentence turned away at least 40 excellent poems because there just wasn’t room. Add to that the good work out there we haven’t even seen…

 

Craft Questions

1) How do you form a poem?
 

In a variety of ways, like everyone else. Most frequently these days I start with an idea for a project that will carry me through a sequence of poems, which is how Burn Whatever Will Burn was done, for example (http://www.muse-apprentice-guild.com/summer_2003/1individual_authors/brian_clements/brian_clements.pdf). I’m working on a book now that is simply a collection of smaller projects, and I think I will stick with that strategy for several books. My entry into the prose poem was essentially such a project, though with a longer range.

An individual poem gets made however it seems necessary at the moment to make it. But I can say that all poetic effects are formal/musical or at least enforced by form and music (I like the way you posed the question—“how do you form a poem”), so whatever else is going on in the process of composition, I’m always paying close attention to sound, rhythm, music, and how they play off the semantics and structure.

The problem with this kind of interview is that it’s very difficult not to come off sounding like you think it’s significant every time you stroke a key. Each poem is just part of a larger process which each poet begins “hoping not to cease till death.”

2) Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?

Both.  As in Burn, I tend to use a lot of source material, but not usually as explicitly as there. Frequently, a gathered reservoir of language (pulled from websites, books, memory, television, American Heritage Dictionary, the air) serves as a starting point. I also use games and other operations as starting points. So, synthetic in that sense. But that language filters down through the individual sensibility, which is how I think all writing is done (unless it’s purely mechanical), regardless of how it’s characterized. What gets called creativity or originality or the organic or imagination is really just attentiveness to what’s going on (kinetically and potentially) in the American (for Americans) language, what’s going on when language passes among people, and what’s going on in the way the brain handles that material. That’s where the element of discovery comes in (if you care to call that “organic”), which, for me, is what makes the experience worthwhile. But I don’t believe in any kind of organic “rightness” in the Platonic sense that Levertov uses the word.

3) Where do you write?

At a computer if one is available.

4) Is Ambiance important?

I cannot possibly write without the accompaniment of a string quartet (live or recorded), a bottle of 1996 Dom Perignon, a steamed towel for refreshment of face and hands, a pair of soft leather slippers, a basset hound at my feet, two Fuente Double Chateaus, and the sound of various songbirds outside my window.

Other than that, all I need is a little quiet.

Later note: I meant quiet locally, but some global quiet would be a nice thing, too. But when have we ever had that? Since the beginning of this administration, my work has been “political” in a way that it never was before. So, in that sense, ambiance is determinative, at least partially.

5) Do you have rituals or habits when you write?

None other than those I also have when I’m not writing.

6) In the balance between found language and created language where does your work fall?

It’s all found. As far as I know, I’ve never created a single word in my life, other than while playing with my children or otherwise. Oh, I take that back. In my sequence Use Cases (excerpts and an audio file at Chris Murray’s Texfiles, http://www.texfiles.blogspot.com/2003_10_01_texfiles_archive.html --look for the October 20 entry), all of the titles are made-up words. I’m playing then, too.

If you mean found language vs. re-worked language, it’s all reworked in some fashion, aside from Burn Whatever Will Burn (in which some found material is presented whole-hog) and a piece called “Beginner’s Manual” (in APR, December 2002), which is 80-90% found language from one source. Almost all of my prose poems at least start with some kind of found or collected language.

7) Do you use many sources?

Anything that has words on it, in it, or coming out of it.

 

Global Questions

1) You have been called a southern writer and an experimental writer where do these two things meet for you?

Those terms can mean so many different things that they are useless unless extensively qualified. I’ve never thought of myself as a southern writer, though I do think of myself as a southerner. Is there a difference? I’ve never thought of myself as an experimental writer, but I do think of myself as an experiment. Is there a difference?

2) What major projects are you working on now?

Main project: a 2.5 year-old boy. Also a sequence of poems about objects and animals; I would locate the drive of the poems somewhere in the neighborhood between Ponge’s observations and Rilke’s meditations, with maybe a little parody of Aesop around the corner.  A couple of textbook/reference book projects. Sentence. We are delighted to publish Denise Duhamel’s book Mille et un sentiments in the fall.

3) What do you think about poetry in the provinces?

It’s my experience that poets in low-poetry-traffic areas of the country are much more hungry and thus much more open to what’s going on elsewhere than poets are in, say, New York or Boston or San Francisco, where communities of poets have been, ironically, far more provincial. But right now I think, especially among young poets, there’s a new sense of openness and fertility across the country and even internationally, so that the big centers are less privileged and you get a pub like Skanky Possum in Austin or Sentence in Dallas or the far-flung web publications featuring poets from around the world, which isn’t really new, but it’s much more common. Regionalism is dead, thanks largely to email, the web, and the drive of young poets to make it new. Let’s hope that carries over politically and helps us get rid of the smug American sense of superiority and its corollary attempts at domination.

RAY RESPONSES TO BRIAN's QUESTIONS  

Now I have a few questions for you:

For those of us not in Chicago, what’s going on there that we can’t get by looking at your calendar? Is the poetry community there fractured, homogenous, riotous, sedate? I was in Chicago recently—you have some great young poets there. Why do you think poetry in Chicago is so far beyond poetry in Dallas, for instance? Or is it? Is it because there are more fine colleges and universities there? Because it’s older? Because it’s just a better city for writers?

Answer:

Chicago has always been a funnel a place where the north, west, south, east. Europe and Asia come together in conflict but also Midwestern fusion Chicago's mix of people is unique, Poles, Italians, Mexicans, Jews, Every Eastern European under the sun this makes for a dynamic and strange mix. 

The website gets allot of traffic and it was created to highlight a certain type of poetry that did not have an online community in Chicago, for lack of a better word Avant Garde poetics. 

Chicago has a VERY strong Slam Scene and some of it is innovative but much of it is wrote and boring. The Ethno scene especially Mexican American scene is very interesting. You know Chicago has over 900,000 Mexicans and 1.2 Million Poles and they are intermarrying creating a poetry of something new Policans. This could only happen here.

The innovative scene is growing here and we are kind of in our 'moment' right now there is a real mix of people here working. I just finished another profile of Simone Muench for example, who is really a fusion poet, kind of a mix of Charles Wright and HD, but she is also from the south.  We poetically agree on little but she is a fine poet and this is making poetry dynamic here.

Chicago also has a true sense of place we are a city, even in our suburban sprawl areas, that was created by geography, not in spite of it, and it has been said that what Chicago really is is New York's biggest suburb and I think this may be true.  Chicago also has a real history, Chicago people are very proud of this. The normal person on the street knows that this building is famous, or we invented the elevator or the catalog or the Ferris wheel, people are proud and are not fixated on the new which is not true in the Sunbelt.

Dallas, was a very nurturing place but it is a new city, a place where you can make your own way but it is also a city without grit, without the kind of in your faceness that you get in Chicago. Dallas also is a city in the position that Chicago was in in 1900 in fact Sandberg's "Chicago" is more like Dallas now than Chicago.  As a writer Chicago offers more stimulation than Dallas but Dallas has better Barbecue. 

Does this Chicago-oriented web site get much traffic from outside Chicago? I like your practice of profiling poets from elsewhere. I’d like to see some profiles of poets from Chicago and elsewhere on something like the Writer’s Garret (Dallas) website. Can you do anything with orgs in other cities to create such a dialogue? Doesn’t can we have our ball back do something like that?

Ray Answer

I decided to do the Poetic Profile section of the site because of Inside the Actor's Studio on Bravo.  There were many questions I wanted to ask poets, and I wanted to share those with everyone. I also wanted to help poets whom I respect and admire to sell books and have successful readings. I think that often people don't know enough about poets to take a liking to them. 

Chicago does not have an organization the caliber of the Writer's Garret of Dallas.  what Thea Temple and Jack Myers do in terms of community building in wonderful and if Dallas wants to loan them to us here we would love to have them.  In terms of dialogue I am open and ready to dialogue with anyone, maybe I can get back to Dallas and we can road trip to Archer City to Booked Up?

Do we place too much emphasis on community among poets? Don’t a lot of poets hate each other (recent blog wars as most current embodiment of that phenomenon)? Why should poets engage in love-fests any more than football players or longshoremen? Michael Helsem, a Dallas poet, says there are no poetry communities, only poetry tribes.

Ray Answer

No! I think that while our artform is solitary we need to build community among poets (not writers) poets are the mystics of the literary world. I take this from my Catholic upbringing, Fiction writers are the Jesuits, erudite open but possessing a goal working to "make something successful" , Poets are the Trappists in their quiet listening for the Mystical and creating something new that in the end is transformative and earth moving. Poets need community to do this work. 

Why is it that poets of differing modes have so much trouble talking to each other? And again, why should we expect them to? Would Picasso and Rockwell have gotten along? Stravinsky and Sousa?

Answer

Because of course poets who don't agree with me are idiots! (Just Kidding)

 I actually think that strong argument would be good for poetry, let the Neo-Formalists and the Post-Language poets fight, yell argue and then see what happens. I would love it if someone heckled me at a reading and challenged me to be better.

What is missing in American culture that makes some of us crave closer communities?

We are a nation of refugees.  America is made up of those who were rejected, stolen or evicted and we all feel a sense of loss that is why we form so many groups and clubs.