Posted October 31, 2006 On Elegant Thorn Review, William Everson, Beat poetry, &tc. Let me say again how thrilled I am to have you aboard. I'm curious about what went in to deciding to start Elegant Thorn Review in the first place? Thanks Matthew, I'm excited to join the team. Elegant Thorn Review was first conceived in my living room in Seattle back in 1994, with my then-partner Celeste. We had envisioned a twice-yearly print magazine. We broke up before getting it off the ground. But earlier this year, after not writing poetry for more than five years, I began to write again. As a way to get involved in the poetry world, I thought that applying the idea of a poetry and photography magazine to the blog format would expose me to working poets, help me stay motivated with my own writing, and give some exposure to other poets. I've always enjoyed doing the editor thing, so it seemed like a good idea on a lot of levels. Tell me about how you caught the poetry bug, when and how it happened? When I was in high school, I hated poetry. The teachers made it so boring that I thought poetry was worse than torture. At the same time, I secretly wrote poetry that was very bad, but it was an emotional outlet at a time when I needed it. When I was a freshman in college, I had a wonderful teacher (who is still my friend today) who made us read Robinson Jeffers' Selected Poems for a class in writing term papers. Jeffers was unconventional, to say the least. He wrote violent narrative poems that were more like short stories. Even his lyrics were challenging. Jeffers totally changed my conception of poetry. After that I was hooked. I realized that poetry could be exciting and could open my mind to ideas. I threw out all of the stuff I had written before then and decided I wanted to be a poet. Have you seen your tastes in poetry change over the years? Yes, to some degree. When I was exposed to Jeffers, I also began reading the Collected Poems of e. e. cummings and William Carlos Williams. Those three very different poets influenced my taste in poetry a lot. From there my interest went to the Beats, and some more contemporary poets. Living in Seattle, I worked for a while at Open Books, the only store in the city that specialized in poetry. I read everything and fell in love with some of the language poets, such as Leslie Scalapino, Ron Silliman, and other post-modernists like Ann Lauterbach and Jorie Graham. What appealed to me the most in these authors was their playfulness with language. Since then, I have gone through periods of fascination with Asian poets, especially the early Buddhist monk-poets and Zen haiku masters, Sufi poets, and various American contemporary poets. The common thread, though, is always good imagery that shows me a different version of the world, crisp language that isn't predictable, and some underlying sense of meaning — even if it is only a search for meaning. Tell me a little bit about your relationship with the poetry of William Everson. You did your Master's Thesis on his work, and met him? I discovered Everson through Jeffers. Everson was one of the best Jeffers scholars, having written two seminal books on Jeffers as a religious poet. Bill Hotchkiss, the teacher who introduced me to Jeffers, was friends with Everson. He encouraged me to read Everson's poetry, which I did. At first, I rejected the Catholic poetry (written as Brother Antoninus), and read only the early poetry (very modernist) and the later poetry, written after leaving the Dominicans. When it came time to do my Master's Thesis, I wanted to combine my interest in poetry, comparative religion (especially shamanism), and psychology. I ended up having to do my thesis in the humanities department rather than the English department. One of my thesis advisors had studied with Mircea Eliade, who wrote the most widely cited books on shamanism. So my thesis was focused on the poet's role as shaman, with Everson serving as the exemplar, and Jungian psychology used as the foundation that connected the two fields. I met Everson (through Hotchkiss) the first time just before beginning the thesis work, but right after having published an article that Everson liked very much — a kind of introduction to my thesis topic. He knew that I also wrote poetry, so when we were left alone, the first thing he did (and you have to picture an 84-year-old man who was 6' 6" but now crippled by Parkinson's Disease, wearing a buckskin vest, and a very long white beard) was reach over and put his hand on my knee, look me in the eye, and ask me, "How is your love life." He went on to explain that this would be the key to my life as a poet (turns out he was right). We chatted a little bit about poets we liked and drank whiskey. It was great. I met him the second and last time just after my thesis was finished. I had sent him a copy. He really liked it and wanted me to turn it into a full-length book. He felt that I really got what he was trying to do with his poetry. Unfortunately, I never followed through on the book. I did write the Afterward to the second volume of the Collected Poems (The Veritable Years) and a few smaller essays. What about the Beat poetry do you think will endure the ages? Good question. Some of the Beat poets will endure, I think. Everson was a Beat by association — and a Time magazine cover calling him the Beat Friar. Everson will endure as long as Catholicism does, where he is still somewhat widely read. Ginsburg will endure much in the way Rimbaud and Baudelaire have. Gary Snyder will certainly endure, though in a hundred years he may be better known as an environmentalist and a Zen monk than as a poet. With the others, it's hard to sat — the ages are fickle, so some may come and go from time to time in their popularity. What the Beats did, at their best, was get poetry dirty. They brought poetry out of the academic world and dragged it kicking and screaming through the streets. This is what the French symbolists had done at the end of the 19th century. This is what has to be done periodically to keep poetry vital, to prevent it from in-breeding itself into obscurity. We're about due for another version of this, which may turn out to be slam poetry. What is your impression of the current U.S. poet laureate? I've never been much of a Donald Hall fan, but mostly because I haven't yet gotten around to reading him. I do like that he is plain-spoken, using a kind of informal New England diction. The problem with the poet laureate thing is that they don't get to serve long enough to do anything. One or two years is nothing. Give them ten years to make a mark, and then be sure to choose wisely who gets the job rather than having it be some kind of "lifetime achievement award." That said, Robert Pinsky did more to further the life of poetry in this country through the favorite poem project than most poets laureate. Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry syndicated column is also pretty cool. How well do you think poetry is surviving the age of the computer? I think it is prospering in some ways, suffering in others, as a result of the computer age. With the internet, poetry is only a few clicks away. If you want to understand the poetry you are reading, especially for students, there are a lot of places to find critical work. Further, a lot of poetry that was only available in libraries or bookstores is free on the web. That can only help. Some authors don't like having a poem or two posted on the web, but that's like turning down free advertisement. If I see a poem or two by a poet new to me, and I like the poetry, I'll seek out and buy the book. As far as writing is concerned, I think the computer is killing the quality of some poetry. It's so easy to write a poem and post it. I'm guilty of this as much as anyone. But good poetry goes through revision, and there is nothing better than living with the words as you write them by hand. I still write everything by hand in a notebook. As always, poetry will survive -- it will just change over time. It evolves as we evolve, because at its core, our poetry is a reflection of who we are as human beings. What do you make the of the now 20 year old Slam Poetry movement? I love slam poetry. Can't do it to save my life, but I like it a lot. I was skeptical at first, when slams were gaining major attention in the early to middle 1990's. But then I went to a few, at an old place called the OK Hotel in Seattle. It closed after the 2002 earthquake. But they had weekly slams and some of those people were awesome poets and amazing performers. What clinched it for me was seeing Sherman Alexie do his slam routine. Now here was a major US poet, young and recently awarded a major grant that allowed him to do anything he wanted, and he was doing slams. And he was GOOD. Really, I think slams are the combination of the Beat ethos of bringing poetry into the streets and the Hip Hop ethos of performance as prestige. What you end up with is good poetry being performed -- an interactive experience — and the book is an afterthought. In some ways, this takes poetry back to its bardic roots. That's a good thing. Can you point us towards a couple three of your poems, so the readers can get to know your work? Sure. Here are some links: ~ Autumn Morning ~ The Magician ~ extreme unction ~ Prying Beneath the Mask —William Harryman is the curator of Elegant Thorn Review. Matthew Dallman is the composer and producer of the full-length album, I Am Sound. NOT YET A SUBSCRIBER TO POLYSEMY? Make the choice to become one today — click here for POLYSEMY Print, or here for POLYSEMY Digital. ©2006 Polysemy. All rights reserved. |
