ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com

Poetic Profile

Joyelle McSweeney

General Questions 

1)   

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

I was born in Boston, lived in Scituate, MA, moved down to Northern Jersey, on to Austin, and finally back up to suburban Philadelphia where I did the bulk of my growing up.  I think the contrast of all these places cued me in to the variety of this world at a pretty early age.  Possibly something of the magpie-aesthetic of my first book is drawn from all this roving around.  And I also must confess that I LOVED being the new kid--loved the thrill of the new, and also loved playing the role of the Stranger from Wherever I’d Just Left.  If you had been in my fifth grade class in Pennsylvania and heard my put-on Texas twang, you would NOT have assumed I was born in Boston to Irish Catholic stock. 

 

As for writing, I had the great luck to be born to parents who valued reading as a number one virtue and modeled it, too.  They believed in public schools and the public library and I think I always associated reading with access, with activity.  I’d got my hands on some pretty aged poetry anthologies  (the kind with ‘Best Loved’ in the title) which put me on to the glories of ridiculous old-fashioned poetry devices such as apostrophe, epithet, and the liberal usage of ‘O!’ which have certainly stayed with me to this day…  ‘Light-winged smoke! Icarian bird,’ starts this one Thoreau poem, though it took me a bunch of years to figure out what ‘Icarian’ was supposed to mean. I think I gleaned a sense of poetry as enthusiasm there, and from Poe, of course. I never thought of poetry as a quiet or decorative art.

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

The one place detailed literary analysis was taught and used at my high school was in the Latin classroom, and I took Latin for six years.  The names of the literary devices I mentioned above I learned in Latin class, as well as the sense of pacing and sauciness Virgil and Catullus respectively employ.  I think they teach you how to torque syntax across a line, and also how roomy and intricately chambered a sentence and a stanza can be. Reading Joyce in graduate school helped me figure out the way a word can function like a log in the old Frogger video game, flowing one way with the syntax but also allowing you to move radically in all different directions across the screen.  More recently, the poetry of Aime Cesaire, Kamau Brathwaite, Lisa Robertson, Altazor, the plays of Suzan Lori-Parks, and also Simon Armitage’s verse play ‘Cloudcuckooland’ have been hot flames.

3. When did you 'become' a poet? When did poetry become part of your everyday life?
 

There was a moment in the second year of my MFA when I realized just how labor-intensive poetry was going to be, how I was going to have to wake up to it every morning and wrestle with it all the time; I think that’s the first time I truly ‘tried on’ the profession of poet.  Since then I hope I’ve gotten a little less melodramatic in my approach, but it’s still a lot of work, right?


4. Where were you educated? Was this important?
 

Well, I’ve already mentioned my good experiences in high school.  My higher education was extremely old school (Harvard and Oxford) before I landed through the luck of the Irish at Iowa.  The good thing about Harvard and Oxford is that I got a big heaping dose of the canon and I have to say I love the canon in all its goofiness, splendor, and goofy splendor.  And of course Iowa hit me like an Acme safe after that.   To write poetry after all that reading just split me open!  And writing made me a better reader.

5. How is Alabama? Does being in a college town have special challenges?
 

Our program in Alabama is busy, big, and ultra-stimulating.  Our students come from all over, and they are not only talented, but they’re the kind of people who are up for an adventure, or they wouldn’t be uprooting from Chicago, or LA, or wherever they’re living, to try life in this surreal town. As for the program, we put a high premium on experimentation among and within genres, to the extent that the student is interested.  For example, last semester I led a seminar on political poetry, and next I’m teaching a triple genre class on poets’ and novelists’ plays.  There’s great aesthetic diversity on our faculty and it makes our MFA a really bracing and exciting place to try learn about yourself as an artist. I think both faculty members and students would say that.

I would wager that the town of Tuscaloosa does not bear many similarities to the type of college town you are thinking of in posing your question. It does not, for example, have a bookstore, besides the ones that sell t-shirts, textbooks or Bibles; on the other hand, you can take the sleeper car on the Crescent Line from here to New Orleans, and if that’s not sublime in 2005 I don’t know what is.  Jesus, football, and the driving of S.U.V.’s do dominate the visible mainstream culture, but then there’s a whole simultaneous culture involving blues and soul music, folk art and cuisine. If you add to all that the extremity of Alabama’s history, it makes for a rollicking, eye-popping, consistently amazing place to wake up to every morning.

6. Your recently launched a bookpress; how do you separate Joyelle the editor from Joyelle the poet?
 

We started Action Books for the reason probably a lot of people have started presses: there is so much exhilarating poetry out there that is just not finding its way into books.  Action Books is dedicated to the kind of poetry which people are drawn to but also scared by, the kind of poetry that in workshop is labeled as going ‘too far.’   But what could that possibly be?  How could poetry go ‘too far’?  We want poetry that goes too far! And we want global poetry in translation, too, all you translators out there. Check us out at www.actionbooks.org.

Although the press puts a crunch on writing time, feeling like I’m really sinking my hands into poetry and working to get poetry out there which is going to amaze people and freshen up the debate really stimulates me; that energy, in turn, gets poured back into my own poetry.  Recently Johannes and I got to catch the last day of the Basquiat show in Brooklyn and I came out of there thinking, you know, to hell with half-assed poetry, from me or from anybody else.  And then I went back to my brother-in-law’s apartment and copyedited for six hours.

7) What is your favorite food?
 

Avocados.


8) Sports team or Activity?
 

The Red Sox, those bums. 

9) Vacation spot.
 

What? I guess Johannes and I have been dreaming of visiting Mobile, Alabama for some time now.  It’s supposed to be very beautiful--white beaches, shellfish, sharks.  It’s also known as the Redneck Riviera, I hope you are interested and not offended to learn. The fact that we haven’t been able to drive the three hours and do so gives you some idea of the time commitment of this press.

10) Curse word.
 

The F-word serves me nicely, thanks.  It’s very flexible, effective in rhetorical questions, unrivalled as a verb, forms sturdy, offensive compounds with even the most innocuous nouns.  I’m embarrassed to admit that poetry and the swear-kit of a sailor have been simultaneous acquisitions for me.  Whoops.


 

Craft Questions



1) How do you form a poem? Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?
 

That’s changed for me over the years.  My first book is highly collage, and thus synthetic, while my second is full of really weird-shaped, cumbersome poems that leapt from my brain pretty much fully formed.  These latter were written in the very short amts. of time I didn’t have to work or commute while I was working three part-time jobs in Chicago.  Now I’m writing some prose pieces that I’m very comfortable returning to again and again.  But is the revision process synthetic or organic? Discuss!
 

2. Where do you write? Is ambience important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?
 

I like to be in a room alone. But that’s it, in terms of atmosphere.  I can write in bed, at my desk, on the porch, wherever.  When I was a student everything had to be just so—same time of day, same place, same ritual.  Now I’ll take writing time where I can get it!


3. In the balance between found language and created language where does you work fall?

A great deal of The Red Bird works with found material, but even when I’m not writing with overtly found materials, I think my brain works on language the same way—selecting, assembling, sounding out complexes and runs.  I think the brain, or my brain, approaches almost all language as ‘found’.  Even neologism, though that sounds paradoxical. Like the term ‘Commandrine’. I made up that term for a female commander, but I made it up from parts of words I found lying around…


4. Now that you are a teacher and professor has the way you formed poems changed?
 

No. But getting paid to read a lot of material definitely keeps my brain buzzing, and a buzzing brain maketh a more productive writing experience.  And reading to keep up with my students, yes, that’s been great!