I
have written here before that the way I came to truly appreciate
poetry was one poet at a time. There was never a moment or period of time when
I can say I began to love poetry, but
there are many precise moments when I can say I fell in love with particular
poets – and their poems. Grace Bauer's poetry found me about three years ago
when I embarked on a joint blog
project with the journal Prairie Schooner, where she's a senior reader.
While
prose writers and poets often think of what separates us, in Grace's poems, I
find so much kinship between memoir and
imagery, story and metaphor, the lyrical and narrative. I'm so pleased to
feature this interview with her today, in which I ask about her newest poetry
collection, Nowhere
All At Once (Stephen F. Austin State
University Press), her writing and submitting
process, how she groups poems, and more.
Lisa: I believe this is your fourth full-length
poetry book, right on the heels of your fourth chapbook (Café
Culture). How and when do you realize that the poems you are working on at any given time are destined for one or
the other?
Grace: Putting together a collection is always a
long process for me. First, of course, is the writing and revising of each
individual poem. How they then come -- or are put -- together varies.
Two
of my books (The Women At The Well and Beholding Eye) are what I call, for lack of a better term, “concept books,” composed
of a series of interconnected poems. The
Women At The Well is all monologues spoken in the voices of women from the
Bible. (I’m happy to say it has just recently been presented as a play in New
Hampshire). Beholding Eye is all
ekphrastic poems (poems based on visual art, in various ways).
Retreats & Recognitions and now, Nowhere All
At Once are more eclectic collections of poems written in a voice (or
voices) that one might see as some version of my own, and based in personal
experience or observation. The eclectic collections are always more of a
challenge. I’ll generally have a pile of poems that I spread out all over the
floor and, quite literally, walk around in, looking for connections and links
and echoes – recurring themes, motifs and/or formal similarities.
My
goal is to weave the poems together in a way that makes the whole add up to
more than the sum of its parts. I obsess a lot about ordering the poems, even
though I know full well that many readers will hunt and peck their way through
the book instead of reading it from cover to cover. It’s something I feel
compelled to do for myself. Since I tend to be working on many things at once,
there are always poems that seem finished but don’t quite fit into the
manuscript at hand for one reason or another. I consider those poems possible
“seeds” for the next collection.
Q. Along the way (to a chapbook or collection),
how do you decide which poems to submit to individual journals? How much time
and energy do you give to that submission/journal publication process?
A.
I send stuff out to journals fairly consistently – or at least I try to. Sometimes the demands of my day job get in
the way of those good intentions. It’s always a struggle to find – or make –
the time to do the creative work and/or the “practical” work (I’m not sure you
can really call submitting to literary journals “practical”) you have to do to
get your writing out in the world.
For
me, both writing and submitting often go in spurts, but I try to practice what
I preach to my students and do at least a little something directly related to
my writing most days of the week.
On
the days I don’t teach, I “show up for work” in my study first thing in the
morning and put in as many hours as I can – either writing or revising or
submitting or corresponding. By the time I’m putting a book together, most of
the individual poems have been submitted to journals and, with any luck, many
of them have been published.
Q: You teach in English, Creative Writing, and
Women's Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and work with Prairie Schooner, and its annual PS
Book Prize. How does all of that reading and
thoughtful consideration of others' writing affect you – as a writer and a
teacher?
A:
My reading for the journal has been intermittent the past few years because
I’ve been working with so many undergraduate and graduate students (that also
means a lot of reading), but I have served as a Senior Reader for the Prairie Schooner book prize since its
inception.
Each
year I read a short list of manuscripts that have already successfully made it
through a previous round of screeners. I made a vow to myself early on that I
would read each manuscript in its entirety – cover to cover -- and I have stuck
to that. I’m hoping that rustles up some good karma in the poetry universe for
my own manuscripts. Most, if not all, of the manuscripts I read are of
publishable quality – or getting close to that point, so the reading is both
inspiring and humbling. I’m looking for the two or three that distinguish
themselves in some way; these I send on to the next level of judges.
All
this reading reminds me that I have to work very very hard – on individual
poems and a manuscript as a whole – to try to make it stand out in the crowd.
And I pass that idea on to my students.
Q. One of the endorsements (dare I say
"blurbs"?) for your new book is from Naomi Shihab Nye, and says in
part that your poems display "…a compact flow of narrative…" When you are writing and/or revising, how
much are you aware of a need, or perhaps I should say, a desire for the force
of narrative in a poem?
A.
I don’t necessarily begin a poem with a desire or need for narrative – or
anything else. A poem, for me, usually begins with a phrase or an image that
just sort of arrives, or presents itself, to my consciousness and/or my ear. My
job is to take that originating inkling and see where it takes me. I recognize,
of course, that I have a tendency toward narrative. Why? I don’t know exactly.
I know I’m drawn to the musical possibilities of common speech, the cadences of
voices. I like thinking about how poems can work on the page and orally/aurally.
Q.
I'm a huge fan of writing prompts. In
a blog post at Ploughshares, you noted that a
classroom prompt provided by a student, led you to write "Crime Scene,"
which appears in your new book, and I was struck by this: "I
was writing fast, never knowing what I was going to scribble down next. Any of
the first three lines could have been an opening." Many writers fear that sense of not knowing
where something is going, or are wary of trusting that a writing prompt exercise,
with no expectations, can lead to good work. Can you comment?
A.
As I suggest in the previous answer, I never know where a poem is going to end
up when I begin. If I already know the ending, I don’t see the point of writing
it. It’s the old “no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader”
thing. I’ll write with my students in class when possible – which it isn’t
always, for a variety of pedagogical reasons. Prompts don’t often lead to
full-blown poems, as this one did, but sometimes lead to at least a good line
or two.
Café Culture, for instance, grew out of – not a prompt, per se, but an
assignment of sorts, which was to go to a coffee shop or café or diner or
whatever and eavesdrop and/or spy on people till something caught my attention
and then I’d just start scribbling. Most of what I came up with was junk, but
eventually I had this small group of poems that I thought might make a fun
chapbook. I sent it to Dan Nowak at Imaginary Friend Press, and he agreed. So again, prompts, assignments, schedules.
Anything that gets and keeps you writing is a good thing.
Q. In a post
over at Hayden's Ferry Review's blog, you wrote,
"One thought leads to another; one
word to the next. Wave-like and wandering. Wondering. Sometimes sound for the
sheer pleasure of it. And so, sometimes, poems are made." I wonder how many of your poems begin this way
– wondering, wandering around on the page for pleasure, and how many others
begin another way – maybe with a kind of insistence or need, perhaps even the
opposite of pleasure, a way to work something out?
A. Well there’s pleasure.
And there’s torture. And, maybe tortuous pleasure and vice versa. A need to “work
something out” may be the impetus for a poem, but even then, there’s a kind of
pleasure – or satisfaction – that comes from working with the language – sound,
rhythm, the aha of finding a word or
image that seems right, that captures an impression or perception or feeling or
whatever and also works musically and/or suggests layers of meaning. I believe
you can write a poem about pretty much anything, but the so-called “subject
matter” of the poem is only part of it. As a reader, I go to poems not just for
what they may be “about,” but for how they go about being a poem.
Q. You mentioned to me that Nowhere All At Once is an
"eclectic collection which revolves around
recurring themes, motifs, obsessions and plays around a lot with perception --
how we look at the world around us, at ourselves and each other. How PREconceptions affect what and
how we see". This truly describes
what I found reading it! I'm curious,
was this apparent to you as you were writing the individual poems, or does this
reveal itself as you assemble them into the collection?
A.
Definitely the latter with this book. The poems in Nowhere All At Once were written over a span of time – some older
poems that didn’t make it into Retreats
& Recognitions and some much more recent work. It goes back to your
first question about how I assemble a book – many of these connections and
recurrences were discovered as I walked around those poems spread out on the
floor. Once I had a rough version of the manuscript, several friends – Hilda
Raz, Jane Varley, Liz Ahl – looked at it and gave me their invaluable
suggestions on individual poems and on the overall arrangement.
That’s
something I’d recommend to anyone at that point in the process – to get a set
of fresh eyes looking at the work.
Q.
I begin my nonfiction classes by reading a poem, to transition from everyone's
busy day to the world of words, language, story. One miserable New Jersey winter
day, we read "Slacker's Prayer," which to me celebrated the upside of
bad weather and cancelled plans. Everyone in the room – all ages, backgrounds,
lives –instantly nodded. And, we especially
loved the final lines: "..Curse
only/the fact that such days are too rare/and pass too quickly. Then praise the
work/you will rise tomorrow to do. And know/that giving praise (for nothing) is
work too." Perhaps this is a naïve
question, but can you remember how this poem came about, and whether or not its
traces back to a particular day, storm, feeling?
A.
As you know, there are several “prayer poems” in Nowhere All At Once. I couldn’t give you an exact date or anything,
but I recall the general feeling of the day this poem began. I have
fibromyalgia and am very seasonally affected. I hate winter and if I never saw
snow again in my life I’d be perfectly happy, so usually a blizzard would fill
me with fear and loathing.
This,
as you might imagine, is not exactly convenient for someone living in Nebraska!
So I often try talking myself into appreciating the world as it is in winter.
Usually I fail. But this one day I was at home and just found myself praising
things as they were – mostly because I didn’t have to go out in it. Next day,
out came the shovel and I was bitching about it all per usual.
Q. You've said the book is made up of "several
little' mini-series' -- the prayer
poems, the 'against' poems, poems about female characters" and while I understood that while working my way through
the book the first time, it also seemed to me that there were so many
connections between these – prayer poems that had an 'against' vibe, poems
about women that felt like prayers, etc.
When assembling a series or sections, do some poems seems to straddle
lines? How do you finally decide where to place them?
A. I’m happy to hear that all those connections came across for
you as a reader. Many of those connections evolved on their own; a few were
deliberate. For instance, I had the “against” poems and several of the prayer
poems, so I very deliberately set out to bring those together in the poem
“Against Prayer.” I could, of course, have clumped each “mini-series” together,
but I thought it might make for a richer reading experience (at least for that
ideal reader who reads cover to cover) if I intermingled the poems instead. I
was going for a weaving more than a patchwork quilt kind of effect. I like what Daisy Fried says in her
blurb/comment about the poems looking inward and outward and being “praise and
agitation.” The way I see it, the world warrants a bit of both.
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