"That exposed edge of the world": an interview with Adam Houle, author of Stray
The One Where the Girl Died in Woods Close to Home
It started when a filament popped
in the lone headlight
of the snow sled,
quietly, beneath the engine’s roar
and the grind of the single-track
trundle churning snow
as the girl left late
to make it home.
The blizzard, my mother
says, buried her
back-trail and without
a light she could not find
her trace. That filament,
the fine hair finely split,
brought on a deeper night,
and with it the wind conspired.
The wind banked great drifts.
It rearranged the known world’s face.
It started when a filament popped
in the lone headlight
of the snow sled,
quietly, beneath the engine’s roar
and the grind of the single-track
trundle churning snow
as the girl left late
to make it home.
The blizzard, my mother
says, buried her
back-trail and without
a light she could not find
her trace. That filament,
the fine hair finely split,
brought on a deeper night,
and with it the wind conspired.
The wind banked great drifts.
It rearranged the known world’s face.
Here's the interview:
FD: What do you think of the contemporary resistance to poetry? What advantages do poetry have over prose?
AH: What resistance there is is a particular type that seems steeped in distrust. Distrust that there’s a “hidden meaning” that the poem or poet or teacher will use as a weapon; distrust that poems don’t “do anything”; perhaps distrust because advocates for poems over-sell a piece or group of pieces and, when that piece doesn’t have the earth-shattering results promised, the hearer suspects either the poem or the self are defective in some way. Too often I think poems are presented as puzzle boxes painted black with a busted latch that’s latched from the inside anyway, and so what’s the point? But poems need time and space, and they are best met on their own terms. They’re not instrumental; rather they are worthwhile unto themselves as themselves. The act of reading carefully and with empathetic attention slows us down, it asks more of us, and I find a lot of pleasure in that process. Sitting down to read a poem need not be a hallowed event separate from the world. A poem can be a prismed look into that world, and I find my eyes are fresher when I’m also spending time reading and writing poems.
AH: What resistance there is is a particular type that seems steeped in distrust. Distrust that there’s a “hidden meaning” that the poem or poet or teacher will use as a weapon; distrust that poems don’t “do anything”; perhaps distrust because advocates for poems over-sell a piece or group of pieces and, when that piece doesn’t have the earth-shattering results promised, the hearer suspects either the poem or the self are defective in some way. Too often I think poems are presented as puzzle boxes painted black with a busted latch that’s latched from the inside anyway, and so what’s the point? But poems need time and space, and they are best met on their own terms. They’re not instrumental; rather they are worthwhile unto themselves as themselves. The act of reading carefully and with empathetic attention slows us down, it asks more of us, and I find a lot of pleasure in that process. Sitting down to read a poem need not be a hallowed event separate from the world. A poem can be a prismed look into that world, and I find my eyes are fresher when I’m also spending time reading and writing poems.
I think too that there’s a perception that poems are narcissistic little things written by narcissistic little souls, but that’s just absurd. I mean, if you go see a movie, and it’s a bad one, you don’t swear off all movies, right? You read a bad novel, and you think: that’s it. Prose is awful. That sounds really shortsighted. But it seems like we don’t have a problem doing that to poems. There is a lot of great work out there, and new pieces published all the time. There are magazines publishing excellent poems issue after issue, poems that could speak to all sorts of folks from all sorts of backgrounds and experiences. So, should you come across one that you don’t like, big deal. Move on. It’s such a rich field.
But I think that’s true of prose, too. The advantage that, say, a lyric poem has over a twenty-page short story is a temporal one. The physical act of reading down the page takes less time with a poem, which I think also works against the poem in that someone might, wrongly, assume it has less heft or significance or something like that. It’s just a little song, after all. But I think experiencing poems on their own ground should be a part of all our lives. Sometimes, I, with great sneakiness, start my classes a few minutes early and just read a poem I recently enjoyed. I say: Hey, listen to this cool thing I read. And then I read that cool thing. No commentary, no quiz, no paper assigned. Just a minute and a half or whatever to listen to a poem.
But I think that’s true of prose, too. The advantage that, say, a lyric poem has over a twenty-page short story is a temporal one. The physical act of reading down the page takes less time with a poem, which I think also works against the poem in that someone might, wrongly, assume it has less heft or significance or something like that. It’s just a little song, after all. But I think experiencing poems on their own ground should be a part of all our lives. Sometimes, I, with great sneakiness, start my classes a few minutes early and just read a poem I recently enjoyed. I say: Hey, listen to this cool thing I read. And then I read that cool thing. No commentary, no quiz, no paper assigned. Just a minute and a half or whatever to listen to a poem.
So that’s an advantage. I mean, I can’t take a few minutes before class to read Moby-Dick, right? Poems are companions to a thoughtful life, and I guess I get bummed when I hear someone say how awful poetry is. That said, I don’t need to get too bent out of shape. Poetry doesn’t need me to defend it. It’s crafty and wily, and it will be okay with or without me.
FD: How would you describe your aesthetics?
AH: I don’t know. That’s the short answer. The longer is this: I’m trying to get the words right in their right orders. I like speakers jolted to speak, to make structure of experience or psychological states, of both, to enlist artifice and authenticity. Poems are stylized, they’re crafted things that should seem essential, that they could not be otherwise. There’s pruning and distillation, a tautness in the language that, for me, is primarily important. And that starts with the line—and as the lines tumble down the page, I like when I’m engaged by vibrancy in voice, in image, in sound, in the singleness of the poetic moment being offered up, that builds on itself and organizes its own internal logic. Show me a possible world. Show me a possible self. I think poems memorialize through attention to how they operate. I like knottiness and texture, part luxury purse and part mucky rucksack that carry and convey something essential about the world in which they exist.
FD: Why do so many of your poems have such cold imagery?
AH: Stray isn’t really a warm book, is it? When I was organizing the poems, culling, structuring the book’s arc, looking for unnoticed recurrences, thematic echoes and the like, it became quite clear to me how much I identify with the sharpness of the winter world. It wasn’t intentional in the composition, revising, editing process. But I saw I had written a lot of poems, and it was time to get them into a larger shape, to curate and structure a manuscript. And there’s something evocative about a winter landscape. It’s brutal and unforgiving and elegant and austere. The sight lines are crisp, and in winter I truly feel like I’m on a planet, a living rock hurtling through space. So you have that exposed edge of the world sort of feeling, and then, if we increase the magnification, there are quiet dramas and sorrows and joys unfolding right there. I think much of Stray tries to come to find a shape for that.
In college, I lived in this little back apartment in Green Bay for a couple years. Half the place was heated on my dime; the other half by the landlord (illegal addition, electric heat, you get the drift). So, I blocked the warm half, killed the heat I had to pay for, and swept snow out of my kitchen most mornings from November through March. The cold must have seeped into my psyche.
FD: Why do you tend to favor formal poetry, such as the sonnet?
AH: Formal considerations help me speak to tradition; poems are shaped things—they have contours that I like to think make expressive and evocative sense. For me, the sonnet and its relatives in Stray offer a counterpoint to the thematic straying throughout the collection. It’s a formal return, then, and I hope offers echo, or a refrain of sorts, to the collection as a whole; there’s a rhetoric to the sonnet that makes sense to me. It’s nimble, it’s flexible, and it offers compression that, when it’s well wrought, lets the poem sing spontaneously within a frame. That’s the authenticity and artifice I mentioned earlier—it’s a worthwhile tension, a richness that I admire in so many poems I read.
FD: What do you make of the poetic tendency to write about animals?
AH: Wonder. That’s the first word that comes to mind. I’m in awe of life, and I think about the ways the world we make brushes against the world we find. For me, it’s attentiveness and openness to what’s missed in the day-to-day—the snippets of song and the suggested narratives of the animal world. I don’t think I’m doing the animals in my poems any great favors by writing about them. I’m just trying to pay homage to the world, to memorialize it in some small way. At the same time, I’m also aware that I’m responding to some necessary part of myself.
FD: Could you guide us through the writing process for, say, "The Least of Wonders," or is that a dumb intrusive question?
AH: That’s neither dumb nor intrusive. For each draft, for me at least, the process is dictated by the poem. I try to see clearly what a draft’s doing. Most drafts start with an image, a small bit of a line, a phrase that sort of sticks sideways in my mind. That ends up in the notebook, and as I follow the sound or the sense, I realize that it’s something that should get over to the computer. Perhaps it’s only a few stanzas, but I’ll type it, print it, and work on it more in pen. Changing the medium helps. Carrying the draft with both print and handwritten stanzas gives me some distance and clarity. “The Least of Wonders” first appeared in Jelly Bucket out of Eastern Kentucky University as a very different poem. The revisions that I hope made it a stronger poem happened in fits, with lots of other poems drafted in between. Those in between poems taught me things “The Least of Wonders” needed.
After grad school, the early morning hours of concentrated work became harder to find, so I’ve had to be more diligent in my conscientious working habits. Part of that is being okay with working in small spaces—a half hour here, jotting down nonsense rhymes for fun when I’m waiting for a meeting to start, that sort of thing. One thing it’s shown me, though, is how important poems are to me.
FD: Advice for young poets?
AH: Read widely and without prejudice. Write diligently. Don’t apologize for doing either. That’s advice to me, too. I feel very young.
FD: What motivates you to sit down and revise and develop your next collection on a pleasant spring day when you could be relaxing and enjoying yourself outside instead?
AH: I can do both, though. I find the hard work of trying to write poems well a true pleasure. My home office has a window, and I can look out there, see what the neighbor cats are getting into. I can take the notebook to the porch. I can take the dogs walking while hashing through some ideas, thinking about lines, or trying to think nothing at all and otherwise taking in the day on its own. For me, it’s not a beautiful spring day that gets in the way; it’s the other obligations. I take those obligations seriously, and it’s an honor to do so. But I also need emotional and psychological space to work, to say nothing of time. But the work gets done because it must. I’m happier and more effective when I have poems waiting.
FD: What do you think of promoting your work through readings, interviews, etc.? (I'm thinking of Don DeLillo, who I hear refuses to promote his work.)
AH: I think a lot about my intention when it comes to promotion. More important than promoting my work, I hope I’m promoting poems and community and attentiveness, maybe a line or stanza or whole poems sort of rattle around and glom on to the mind and heart of a hearer. That’s what happened to me, at least, in high school to a certain degree and certainly in college and grad school, when our reading series brought in writers who memorialized things that mattered to them, and their verve, energy, and generosity at the podium and in the classrooms changed me in small, important ways. I felt less alone, less lost in my head—here were folks who worked hard to share a flash of vision, a structuring moment that resonated, invisible strings vibrating across the auditorium or wherever. So there we all are, engaged, entertained, listening to language structured, I hope, to do something of consequence, to broaden us, deepen us, humor us, mark us in some small way. It seems really human to do that, to want that, and I support being human.
The same human urge is true for interviews. We’re curious. We like insight. We like knowing things about books that evoked something in us. That seems reasonable. But it’s also reasonable for an author to dislike the whole process. I read once that James Joyce was asked why Ulysses was so long. Joyce responds with something like if he could have paraphrased it he wouldn’t have had to write it. So, what’s DeLillo have to say about Underworld that he didn’t say in Underworld? Also, who wouldn’t prefer getting the work done to talking about how some work gets done? I feel that way, but I also think generosity matters. And we must eat. For many, I think it’s both pragmatic and idealistic to both give readings and provide interviews to promote the work at hand but also literature or art in general. Good readings and good interviews can do both: sincerely promote a single work as part of a larger thing happening in the world, a diverse and faceted and rebellious thing where people get words on pages.
FD: Why do you repeat words on a given line? Can you give an example?
AH: The best example of that repetition in Stray is probably “Earthworm Flooded Out in Rain.” So, there, the speaker’s sort of lamenting the crappiness of how an earthworm dies after a big rain washed it out. I always thought that sucked. You make it through the flood, but then you’re up on the sidewalk or whatever, and the sun bakes you because you can’t get back to the dirt. So, in that one, it’s a pooling of sonic energy. For me, the repetition of “dappled” in such a short space creates an insistence, a cycling or charging of sorts. It allows the speaker and the reader to spiral for a moment before moving on. It has the same effect in “Night Studies,” but with different expressive potential. It’s echoing the memorizing work the beloved does with her Latin studies. I see that sort of repetition, in a general sense, as internal rhyme. That the preceding consonant sounds would make the two appearances of “dappled” not actually be rhyme seems inaccurate. I mean, maybe it’s uninteresting as a rhyme, but I don’t think that’s true either. In any event, that sort of repetition adds a sonic insistence that I like—it’s a bit hypnotic, a bit hymn-like, or chant-like.
FD: What do you think of rhyme in contemporary poetry?
AH: Poems make patterns; they have a shape, a form, a feel. Rhyme can be lovely and memorable and fresh. I remember reading a review of a book that used rhyme as a dominant patterning throughout the collection. The reviewer said it’s like listening to a friend with a lot of neat things to say who just happened to speak in rhyme. I loved that description because it touches on both the artifice and authenticity of the poems. Rhyme creates expectations for the reader, and when those expectations are both met and messed with, the results can be so satisfying as a reader and as a writer. There’s a tension between the orderly movement and the vagaries of the piece itself, and that’s exciting. It offers a framework for the play of the lines, and the play of the piece as a whole. And when that’s handled well, I’m invested as a reader. I respond to both the unexpectedness, the jolt of the poem, and the fulfillment of the sonic contract the poem made.
That said, a poem using pure end-rhyme that does so with less-than-successful results calls far more attention to itself than, say, an unmemorable open form poem. That poorly-rhymed poem sort of blinks like a church out in the county that uses neon signs. Well, not like that. I’d like to see that. I think, though, that the sound for poems like that are probably the least of the concerns. Usually, the rhetoric of the poem, the emotional / intellectual movements are sort of weak. The expected rhymes can be symptomatic of expected responses or nebulous, generic responses to the situation at hand. We’re probably lacking concrete significant details, a directed speaker, etc…we’re lacking a lot of things likely because the poem grew too enamored with its own end rhyme. The Love/Dove, June/Moon sort of stuff. But the whole line matters—I mean, what if we go:
“Honey Boo-Boo weighs down the mind of Mama June/ who smokes out back and aims her cherry at the moon”—so now we have rhyming hexameter couplets about the tv stars using the dread June/Moon rhyme. We also have a little drama unfolding, and the strange gesture in the image of the Mama June lady pointing her cigarette at the moon while mulling over her daughter. Maybe it could work. What we’re really worried about with rhyme, though, is “I loved you with all my heart all June / and we kissed under the summer moon,” right? A little vague, a little expected. But I’d say that the unsuccessful end-rhyme is one of a few things that could be addressed.
FD: How often do you abandon poems?
AH: Every chance I get. I take ‘em to the swamps, tell them they’re better off without me, and fold them into paper boats and send them on their way. I sprinkle them with turtle food too, so they get eaten.
I’ve become pretty diligent about seeing poems through a few different drafts before I either full-on commit or put them into the abandonment file on my computer. I’ll filter through there from time to time to see what might strike me. But, for the most part, I abandon a poem when I lose interest. I don’t really see misshapen stanzas or a few lines going nowhere as a poem I abandon, though. That’s exercise or a start to something that will come around again. So, I think that when a poem or starts are going nowhere, I’m just recycling them, composting them. If the image, line, metaphor, or genesis are urgent enough or deeply rooted enough, they’ll come around again. Right now, there are some poems I refound from last year. They’re works in progress. So, they were abandoned, but when I went through some old draft work, I found them, read them, and didn’t cringe at some of the work there. I’ll revisit.
FD: Do you find some subjects (such as, say, multinational corporations) not conducive for poetry? Are you careful about the ideological implications of your work?
AH: I try to get the poem right. I try to be emotionally and intellectually honest. I try to be accurate and find fruitful juxtapositions of sounds and sense. It’s an ideology of attentiveness, and I think that matters. I respond to the world in specifics, though. I don’t think in terms of movements or ideologies. That’s not say there aren’t implications, because of course there are. I write from my own limited, tentative, and tenuous grasp on the world, and that’s bound to change over the course of my life. So I hope that my work rings honest, sincere, and well crafted with people. I hope the voice is compelling. I hope readers enjoy the poems, that something sticks with them, slows them down a bit. But I don’t sit down to write and say, okay! Let’s write one that a Marxist would really appreciate. Or I really want to burn the Tea Party folks with this.
Speaking of Marxists, I don’t think multinational corporations are inherently off limits to poems. They’re part of the world, after all, for better or worse. Do I feel moved to write about them? Not overtly, not consciously. Images have found their way into poems that conjure corporate-y things. But that’s in service to that particular poem and not part of a larger project. I think it’s less about subject and more about execution. Compel me. Move me. Show me the private history of one against the backdrop of a world in crisis. Teach me something about being on earth.
AH: I don’t know. That’s the short answer. The longer is this: I’m trying to get the words right in their right orders. I like speakers jolted to speak, to make structure of experience or psychological states, of both, to enlist artifice and authenticity. Poems are stylized, they’re crafted things that should seem essential, that they could not be otherwise. There’s pruning and distillation, a tautness in the language that, for me, is primarily important. And that starts with the line—and as the lines tumble down the page, I like when I’m engaged by vibrancy in voice, in image, in sound, in the singleness of the poetic moment being offered up, that builds on itself and organizes its own internal logic. Show me a possible world. Show me a possible self. I think poems memorialize through attention to how they operate. I like knottiness and texture, part luxury purse and part mucky rucksack that carry and convey something essential about the world in which they exist.
FD: Why do so many of your poems have such cold imagery?
AH: Stray isn’t really a warm book, is it? When I was organizing the poems, culling, structuring the book’s arc, looking for unnoticed recurrences, thematic echoes and the like, it became quite clear to me how much I identify with the sharpness of the winter world. It wasn’t intentional in the composition, revising, editing process. But I saw I had written a lot of poems, and it was time to get them into a larger shape, to curate and structure a manuscript. And there’s something evocative about a winter landscape. It’s brutal and unforgiving and elegant and austere. The sight lines are crisp, and in winter I truly feel like I’m on a planet, a living rock hurtling through space. So you have that exposed edge of the world sort of feeling, and then, if we increase the magnification, there are quiet dramas and sorrows and joys unfolding right there. I think much of Stray tries to come to find a shape for that.
In college, I lived in this little back apartment in Green Bay for a couple years. Half the place was heated on my dime; the other half by the landlord (illegal addition, electric heat, you get the drift). So, I blocked the warm half, killed the heat I had to pay for, and swept snow out of my kitchen most mornings from November through March. The cold must have seeped into my psyche.
FD: Why do you tend to favor formal poetry, such as the sonnet?
AH: Formal considerations help me speak to tradition; poems are shaped things—they have contours that I like to think make expressive and evocative sense. For me, the sonnet and its relatives in Stray offer a counterpoint to the thematic straying throughout the collection. It’s a formal return, then, and I hope offers echo, or a refrain of sorts, to the collection as a whole; there’s a rhetoric to the sonnet that makes sense to me. It’s nimble, it’s flexible, and it offers compression that, when it’s well wrought, lets the poem sing spontaneously within a frame. That’s the authenticity and artifice I mentioned earlier—it’s a worthwhile tension, a richness that I admire in so many poems I read.
FD: What do you make of the poetic tendency to write about animals?
AH: Wonder. That’s the first word that comes to mind. I’m in awe of life, and I think about the ways the world we make brushes against the world we find. For me, it’s attentiveness and openness to what’s missed in the day-to-day—the snippets of song and the suggested narratives of the animal world. I don’t think I’m doing the animals in my poems any great favors by writing about them. I’m just trying to pay homage to the world, to memorialize it in some small way. At the same time, I’m also aware that I’m responding to some necessary part of myself.
FD: Could you guide us through the writing process for, say, "The Least of Wonders," or is that a dumb intrusive question?
AH: That’s neither dumb nor intrusive. For each draft, for me at least, the process is dictated by the poem. I try to see clearly what a draft’s doing. Most drafts start with an image, a small bit of a line, a phrase that sort of sticks sideways in my mind. That ends up in the notebook, and as I follow the sound or the sense, I realize that it’s something that should get over to the computer. Perhaps it’s only a few stanzas, but I’ll type it, print it, and work on it more in pen. Changing the medium helps. Carrying the draft with both print and handwritten stanzas gives me some distance and clarity. “The Least of Wonders” first appeared in Jelly Bucket out of Eastern Kentucky University as a very different poem. The revisions that I hope made it a stronger poem happened in fits, with lots of other poems drafted in between. Those in between poems taught me things “The Least of Wonders” needed.
After grad school, the early morning hours of concentrated work became harder to find, so I’ve had to be more diligent in my conscientious working habits. Part of that is being okay with working in small spaces—a half hour here, jotting down nonsense rhymes for fun when I’m waiting for a meeting to start, that sort of thing. One thing it’s shown me, though, is how important poems are to me.
FD: Advice for young poets?
AH: Read widely and without prejudice. Write diligently. Don’t apologize for doing either. That’s advice to me, too. I feel very young.
FD: What motivates you to sit down and revise and develop your next collection on a pleasant spring day when you could be relaxing and enjoying yourself outside instead?
AH: I can do both, though. I find the hard work of trying to write poems well a true pleasure. My home office has a window, and I can look out there, see what the neighbor cats are getting into. I can take the notebook to the porch. I can take the dogs walking while hashing through some ideas, thinking about lines, or trying to think nothing at all and otherwise taking in the day on its own. For me, it’s not a beautiful spring day that gets in the way; it’s the other obligations. I take those obligations seriously, and it’s an honor to do so. But I also need emotional and psychological space to work, to say nothing of time. But the work gets done because it must. I’m happier and more effective when I have poems waiting.
FD: What do you think of promoting your work through readings, interviews, etc.? (I'm thinking of Don DeLillo, who I hear refuses to promote his work.)
AH: I think a lot about my intention when it comes to promotion. More important than promoting my work, I hope I’m promoting poems and community and attentiveness, maybe a line or stanza or whole poems sort of rattle around and glom on to the mind and heart of a hearer. That’s what happened to me, at least, in high school to a certain degree and certainly in college and grad school, when our reading series brought in writers who memorialized things that mattered to them, and their verve, energy, and generosity at the podium and in the classrooms changed me in small, important ways. I felt less alone, less lost in my head—here were folks who worked hard to share a flash of vision, a structuring moment that resonated, invisible strings vibrating across the auditorium or wherever. So there we all are, engaged, entertained, listening to language structured, I hope, to do something of consequence, to broaden us, deepen us, humor us, mark us in some small way. It seems really human to do that, to want that, and I support being human.
The same human urge is true for interviews. We’re curious. We like insight. We like knowing things about books that evoked something in us. That seems reasonable. But it’s also reasonable for an author to dislike the whole process. I read once that James Joyce was asked why Ulysses was so long. Joyce responds with something like if he could have paraphrased it he wouldn’t have had to write it. So, what’s DeLillo have to say about Underworld that he didn’t say in Underworld? Also, who wouldn’t prefer getting the work done to talking about how some work gets done? I feel that way, but I also think generosity matters. And we must eat. For many, I think it’s both pragmatic and idealistic to both give readings and provide interviews to promote the work at hand but also literature or art in general. Good readings and good interviews can do both: sincerely promote a single work as part of a larger thing happening in the world, a diverse and faceted and rebellious thing where people get words on pages.
FD: Why do you repeat words on a given line? Can you give an example?
AH: The best example of that repetition in Stray is probably “Earthworm Flooded Out in Rain.” So, there, the speaker’s sort of lamenting the crappiness of how an earthworm dies after a big rain washed it out. I always thought that sucked. You make it through the flood, but then you’re up on the sidewalk or whatever, and the sun bakes you because you can’t get back to the dirt. So, in that one, it’s a pooling of sonic energy. For me, the repetition of “dappled” in such a short space creates an insistence, a cycling or charging of sorts. It allows the speaker and the reader to spiral for a moment before moving on. It has the same effect in “Night Studies,” but with different expressive potential. It’s echoing the memorizing work the beloved does with her Latin studies. I see that sort of repetition, in a general sense, as internal rhyme. That the preceding consonant sounds would make the two appearances of “dappled” not actually be rhyme seems inaccurate. I mean, maybe it’s uninteresting as a rhyme, but I don’t think that’s true either. In any event, that sort of repetition adds a sonic insistence that I like—it’s a bit hypnotic, a bit hymn-like, or chant-like.
FD: What do you think of rhyme in contemporary poetry?
AH: Poems make patterns; they have a shape, a form, a feel. Rhyme can be lovely and memorable and fresh. I remember reading a review of a book that used rhyme as a dominant patterning throughout the collection. The reviewer said it’s like listening to a friend with a lot of neat things to say who just happened to speak in rhyme. I loved that description because it touches on both the artifice and authenticity of the poems. Rhyme creates expectations for the reader, and when those expectations are both met and messed with, the results can be so satisfying as a reader and as a writer. There’s a tension between the orderly movement and the vagaries of the piece itself, and that’s exciting. It offers a framework for the play of the lines, and the play of the piece as a whole. And when that’s handled well, I’m invested as a reader. I respond to both the unexpectedness, the jolt of the poem, and the fulfillment of the sonic contract the poem made.
That said, a poem using pure end-rhyme that does so with less-than-successful results calls far more attention to itself than, say, an unmemorable open form poem. That poorly-rhymed poem sort of blinks like a church out in the county that uses neon signs. Well, not like that. I’d like to see that. I think, though, that the sound for poems like that are probably the least of the concerns. Usually, the rhetoric of the poem, the emotional / intellectual movements are sort of weak. The expected rhymes can be symptomatic of expected responses or nebulous, generic responses to the situation at hand. We’re probably lacking concrete significant details, a directed speaker, etc…we’re lacking a lot of things likely because the poem grew too enamored with its own end rhyme. The Love/Dove, June/Moon sort of stuff. But the whole line matters—I mean, what if we go:
“Honey Boo-Boo weighs down the mind of Mama June/ who smokes out back and aims her cherry at the moon”—so now we have rhyming hexameter couplets about the tv stars using the dread June/Moon rhyme. We also have a little drama unfolding, and the strange gesture in the image of the Mama June lady pointing her cigarette at the moon while mulling over her daughter. Maybe it could work. What we’re really worried about with rhyme, though, is “I loved you with all my heart all June / and we kissed under the summer moon,” right? A little vague, a little expected. But I’d say that the unsuccessful end-rhyme is one of a few things that could be addressed.
FD: How often do you abandon poems?
AH: Every chance I get. I take ‘em to the swamps, tell them they’re better off without me, and fold them into paper boats and send them on their way. I sprinkle them with turtle food too, so they get eaten.
I’ve become pretty diligent about seeing poems through a few different drafts before I either full-on commit or put them into the abandonment file on my computer. I’ll filter through there from time to time to see what might strike me. But, for the most part, I abandon a poem when I lose interest. I don’t really see misshapen stanzas or a few lines going nowhere as a poem I abandon, though. That’s exercise or a start to something that will come around again. So, I think that when a poem or starts are going nowhere, I’m just recycling them, composting them. If the image, line, metaphor, or genesis are urgent enough or deeply rooted enough, they’ll come around again. Right now, there are some poems I refound from last year. They’re works in progress. So, they were abandoned, but when I went through some old draft work, I found them, read them, and didn’t cringe at some of the work there. I’ll revisit.
FD: Do you find some subjects (such as, say, multinational corporations) not conducive for poetry? Are you careful about the ideological implications of your work?
AH: I try to get the poem right. I try to be emotionally and intellectually honest. I try to be accurate and find fruitful juxtapositions of sounds and sense. It’s an ideology of attentiveness, and I think that matters. I respond to the world in specifics, though. I don’t think in terms of movements or ideologies. That’s not say there aren’t implications, because of course there are. I write from my own limited, tentative, and tenuous grasp on the world, and that’s bound to change over the course of my life. So I hope that my work rings honest, sincere, and well crafted with people. I hope the voice is compelling. I hope readers enjoy the poems, that something sticks with them, slows them down a bit. But I don’t sit down to write and say, okay! Let’s write one that a Marxist would really appreciate. Or I really want to burn the Tea Party folks with this.
Speaking of Marxists, I don’t think multinational corporations are inherently off limits to poems. They’re part of the world, after all, for better or worse. Do I feel moved to write about them? Not overtly, not consciously. Images have found their way into poems that conjure corporate-y things. But that’s in service to that particular poem and not part of a larger project. I think it’s less about subject and more about execution. Compel me. Move me. Show me the private history of one against the backdrop of a world in crisis. Teach me something about being on earth.
Comments