T.P. "What do you think is the most important
element of a successful poem? Why?"
C.M. "It's no doubt structure. That's what
separates poetry and prose. This is not
to say that the structure must be definable in a traditional sense, but there
has to be an order and a reason that comes together in terms of line. This doesn't mean that I don't enjoy reading
(and possibly writing) poetry that is little more than broken prose. However,
as a writer negotiates those things technical that can turn him into a poet,
nothing is more important than structure."
T.P. "Would you dare to define the phrase
"poetic line?"
C.M. "I'd certainly "dare" to do it, but I
don't know that I can and like many things involved with poetry as such, it
would be a bit subjective. There's something to be said about the so-called
Whitman/Dickinson method in which each line is almost a poem within a
poem. Of course, their work tends to be
relatively straightforward, at least in my mind. "Poetic line" would be much more
difficult to put one's finger on in terms of "language" poetry where
the words and arrangements of such are at times much more important than the
message conveyed.
I use the phrase "I know it when I see it"
often and that's pretty much my assessment of line.
It's like you can feel that the poet knows what he or she
is doing. The first time I read Louise Gluck, I was flabbergasted.
Of course, I read "The Seven Ages," which is one of her later
efforts and in doing further research on her work I
was able to see a development of sorts that, as is the case with many if not
most poets, grew over time. Her command
of line was unbelievable. It worked
every time and in every instance in that book.
I don't know that I'd hold it up as a
standard. In fact, I can't
think of any poet's work that I'd consider to be such. However, it was obvious to the point of being
blatant that she truly knew what she was about in terms of craft."
T.P. "To what extent is your writing influenced by
what you read? Does it bother you when
you read work that at least appears to be more derivative than original?"
C.M. "Let's face it.
We are the sum total of both our influences and experiences. In some manner one
might say that all work is derivative. Poetry that is obviously derivative always appears to me to
represent a very limited reading background on the part of the composer. However, one can be associated with one of
the various "schools" of poetry and maintain his or her
uniqueness. At this moment, I'm thinking of Bill Slaughter, poet and editor of the very
fine online publication Mudlark. When I first read his work, I referred to it
as the next link in the Williams/Creeley chain and I
believe it was/is a link in said chain, but I'd never
call it derivative.
You, yourself, referred to the great
In my own early days, more than 30 years ago in fact,
I was probably trying to be another Lawrence Ferlinghetti. That phase didn’t
last long, but I "did" go through it.
I would say that my own writing is very much
influenced by what I read as well as the music I listen to, the
television shows I watch, what happens at the office, or at dinner or a
ballgame. Again, it's
that sum total lurking. I don't feel creative unless there are several things running
through my head. I've
referred to it as "the swirling milieu." I wouldn't call it a muse as such, but it's
what drives whatever language occasionally comes into my inner view."
T.P. "I know that music is a big part of your
life. How much consideration do you give
to sound when you are writing?"
C.M. "That may be the most difficult question
yet. I only think about the actual sound
of words themselves when doing my own rudimentary concept of language
poetry. On the other hand, I've been very aware of the sounds of lines in several
pieces such as some of the Ra Postcards, which as you know came totally from
Sun Ra and his music. Sound and its
possibilities drive me somewhat in terms of my creativity. It's a bit like
listening to a song and thinking of how you could change it as in what
instruments you might add or remove or what breaks you might lengthen. I think that's the
way the creative process works in many artists.
A consideration of possibilities sort of fuels
the fire as it were. I know that
"what if" is a big part of my poetic stimulation. And, I know this
trait in me was created by my lifelong passion for music.
Also, in conjunction with my
semi-dodging of this question. I know there are some very lyrically poignant
songs in which the words will not stand up by themselves. The sound somehow adds to the poignancy. Also, you and I have
discussed the fact that many very good to great poems don't make it at
readings. Sound just seems to hover
around the craft of poetry on many levels."
T.P. "Why do you write?"
C.M. "I probably do it now as a kind of search if
you will. Particularly in terms of
poetry, I'm looking for something I haven't
found. I'm a
writer only in the very broadest sense of the term. I refer to myself as a student of writing and
believe that to be accurate. I'm very much into the actual craft of writing prose/fiction
and fully realize that everything I've published has flaws. With fiction, I'm
searching for the perfectly presented story within myself.
In terms of poetry, and I've
said/written it on numerous occasions, I'd like to find that thin line between
something almost ultra-experimental and verbal vomit. Various recent personal and professional
distractions have altered my thought process somewhat, but I've
been able to keep my hand in things with various narrative-type productions
such as Waffle House Blues and the Billy Putrid stuff. I don't know that
I'll live long enough to find what I'm looking for and it seems that I've been
in several different directions poetically.
None of which seem to quite hit the mark.
The idea of writing first occurred to me as a
pre-teen. I used to sit for hours
reading old Outdoor Life and Field and Stream magazines that my father had
saved since the late 50's. I thought,
"What a life this would be. To hunt
and fish and tell stories and get paid for it."
I first encountered the work of Robert Ruark during this period.
People can and will believe what they wish, but aside from Thomas Wolfe,
Ruark is NC's best writer, certain contemporary
writers notwithstanding. In conjunction
with this, the only writing I did between 1974 and 1998 was a newspaper column
about hunting and fishing. That lasted
for a couple of years prior to my return to college to take some
post-baccalaureate courses.
As for poetry, it's
something I got into early in my college career. Since I was not at a major university or a school
with an acknowledged writing program as such, the campus literary scene was
sparse. Just as with
young writers today, love poetry and somebody's idea
of emotional profundity were rampant.
What separated me from most of these people was the fact that I was a
reader. Instead of sitting around
showing my rudimentary pieces to these people who weren't
really my peers, I utilized both the campus library and my meager funds in an
attempt to devour whatever poetry was available. While I sort of
started with Brautigan and Ferlinghetti,
I quickly discovered W.C. Williams, Wallace Stevens, Pound, Ginsberg, Creeley and on and on.
We were talking about derivation and influence
earlier. With the creation of the
Internet, we've seen the advent of poetry boards and
forums. Lots of
young people in these venues and some with talent. However, from a strictly educational
standpoint, they are limited and the reason for said limitation is a lack of
reading. And,
that's what I mean when I say educational standpoint. You can't just go to
work that's familiar, accessible, and comfortable. You have to work to consume it all. Sure, there is likely one writer/poet
somewhere who we read and who influences us to
write. However, it's that sum total
thing again. You need to know
Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Wallace Stevens,
Dylan Thomas, Pound.
Regardless of the style that you, yourself, wind up with, you won't make
it as a poet simply by doing required reading in classes and going through four
Bukowski books.
And, as you know, I’m not putting Buk down by any stretch of the imagination. He's likely as
prominent in my own work as anyone.
I recall several years ago a visit from a local
guitarist who was quite talented in a rock/punk rock vein. For whatever reason, his parents had sent him
to me for advice. I asked him if he
considered himself a musician or a performer.
He said he hadn't thought about it. I said, "O.K. I'm
going to give you a record to listen to.
Give it a whirl and come back and tell me what you think about the
guitarist." I gave him a Buck Owens
album from the time that Buck was hooked up with Don
Rich who, personal tastes aside, was a fantastic guitarist. The kid came back the next day and said he'd listened to the record, particularly certain songs, for
hours and was blown away. I told him
then that he was a musician. As you,
yourself are quite aware, musicians have the broadest tastes imaginable. Sort of like Charlie Parker going to some bar
in
What I'm getting to here is
the fact that you have to get outside yourself, your sort of self-imposed
safety net, if you will, in order to improve.
To surround yourself, whether on a poetry forum or in person, with
writers who are basically at the same talent level as you tends to inhibit
improvement. It's
almost like playing a sport such as tennis.
If the only people you ever play are those who
you beat the crap out of, you'll never get any better. Making art is about challenges, about
challenging yourself and how you respond to said challenge. It's not about
reading the same six "hobbyists" three times a day in hopes that they
will read your own stuff and respond with a perfunctory compliment. These people who are seemingly hooked on the
community aspect of web forums would be amazed by what would take place if
they'd spend the same amount of time reading legitimate work that they spend
reading SohoBabe's stuff.
I've gone off track a bit here and begun to preach.
Sorry."
T.P. "That was a pretty open-ended question. However, your mention of Hank Williams seems
appropriate in a discussion of poetry.
Many times I have thought that he may have been
the best American poet of the 20th Century.
Do you think anyone else has achieved Williams' level of direct, pure
communication?"
C.M. "Probably, but you have to take into consideration
the advantage of being in the music medium.
I would call Buk's writing "direct and
pure communication" as well as Jim Chandler's. I think you can find many noted poets who
write what I would call naturally, but they don't have
the advantage of radio, etc. As I've said before, poetry is a self-supporting art form in
that anyone who buys it or reads very much of it, writes it at some level.
Another thing is that like many writers who tend to
be prolific, if you go entirely through the canon of Hank Williams, you'll find
many gems, but you'll find a great deal of redundancy.
Both lyrically and musically. How many
times have you or I said, that when a certain artist (regardless of medium) was
"on" that he/she was as good as there was? I think this is particularly true of
poets. In Hank's case, considering his
relatively short life and his being banned for a period from the Opry, etc. He never
had the opportunity for either his work or himself to get old. Didn't have to
experience the artistic decline that happens to virtually all artists at some
point. Nor the decline
in popularity.
Hank Williams, again, is comparable in many ways to Bukowski, albeit on a kind of different level. I think they are both "pure" in
terms of your question and I think they both reached a broader or different
audience with their work than the status quo in their mediums. The main difference between them is that
Williams seems totally honest and tends to find a
point of emotional relevancy within the everyday guy. Buk, on the other
hand, while direct and honest to a fault, is fueled by
cynicism. And,
when you think about it, that tends to appeal to young people.
You and I are, or have been, fueled and inspired
somewhat by the Beats. For the sake of argument,
let’s suggest that Ginsberg was the first
"recognized" Beat Poet. I wouldn't call his work "direct and pure
communication." However, in terms
of a previous question, you can "hear" a lot of his work as you read
it. "Howl" and "Kaddish" being examples that come
to mind. When I think of Beat in a
literary sense, I think of Ginsberg, Corso, etals. along
with the obvious fiction choices. However, when I think of Beat in a "Beat" sense, I think
of, say, Jack Micheline and Ray Bremser. I think Buk falls
somewhere in between and is a legitimate heir to both
lineages.
This comparison here reminds me of a poem I once
wrote about Williams and Buk titled "the two
hanks." You might have read it.
I "will" say this
before I leave the subject. I think Hank
Williams was a genius and a "pure" genius. I think the songs he made just sort of came
out. I think that Buk's
genius was of a different sort. I think
it lay in his ability to put both his observations of the world as well as
those of himself into perspective. Of
course, like Hemingway before him, if Buk were to
start writing today, the political correcticos would try to beat the crap out of him. Of course, I personally would posture that
political correctness may have a place in the artist, but it has no place in
the art."
T.P. "Do you think it's possible to be a literary
"outsider" now and succeed as Bukowski
did?"
C.M. "I think perhaps a more appropriate question
would be, "Is it possible to be a literary "outsider?" While I might take your question to mean
"outside the academic press," I'm not at all
sure that such a position has the significance it might have had, say, twenty
years ago. I'd
have to do some research in terms of accurate definitions, but I would opine
that in the 50's and 60's that the "small" press was much more
underground than what it is today. I
would, also, suggest that there are many, many what I
would call "academic" poets who are very visible in that realm.
I don't think it's
impossible for a writer of visible and prominent note to stumble upon the work
of someone obscure, champion him/her, and bring him/her to the forefront in
some manner of the poetry world.
However, I suspect that it would much more likely be a matter of self-promotion
on some level. You and I will agree, I'm sure, that there are tons of musicians all over who are
as talented, if not more so, than those who are very visible, popular, and even
respected. The same is true of
poets. This is not to say that many
noted poets in this country and others are not brilliant. What it says is that there are talents out
there who tend to shy away from people as opposed to pushing themselves and
their work until it gets in front of the right person or persons.
Recently a young poet whose name I won't
mention, but with whom you and I are both acquainted, asked me what he could do
to get more known. I told him to go to
college. I'm
not sure he understood my reason for saying that. I think he misinterpreted my comment to mean
that a writing course would help him. It
wasn't that at all.
It was because he would put himself (and his talent) into a potential
network position that, as a small press poet, he currently doesn't
have. He used the term "more
known," but what he was really thinking was money. As you know, tangible success in the world of
poetry comes from doing readings, etc.
Look at what Angelou, Creeley, and Baraka get paid for a reading or
for appearing on a panel. Also, much smaller names get honorariums frequently. I know people who push themselves to the nth
degree and I don't think there's anything wrong with
it if that's what they want.
Again in terms of literary outsiders, I'm almost sure
that Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti were in the Norton
Anthology in the early 70's and while both were very literate (Ferlinghetti has a PhD, I believe), their work,
particularly their early work, was anything but academic. Of course, both were marketers as well. I doubt that any poet in the 20th Century did
more to push himself and his friends than Ginsberg. Also, with his City
Lights Books, Ferlinghetti had a pretty nice
outlet. Though it was
published by New Directions, I think, in the 70's Ferlinghetti's
book, A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND, was the largest selling book of poetry
ever. Or, so I
was told.
With the advent of the internet and ezines, the small press has become anything but small. I am aware of at least a couple of instances
involving faculty editors of college literary magazines having a problem
convincing fellow faculty members to change from print to online and I suspect
that kind of "stuffiness" is much more prominent than that. However, despite the fact that there are lots of online publications that surface for a few issues
and die, there are quite a number of very legitimate ones. I would also suspect that these 'zines are much more widely read than the average campus
perfect bound efforts that wind up languishing in libraries drawing dust. And, this is not
meant in any way to suggest that the work in either venue is superior.
I can think of several writers at this moment who
would have been "outsiders" 20 or 30 years ago. However, I don't see
them as such now. In fact, the only
people I consider to be outsiders are those who simply
can't write poetry. Those people who
submit or post pieces laden with spelling and grammatical errors or who have
little or no sense of line. Those who
simply proffer some rudimentary concept of profundity and who place being published or being recognized as some kind of "be
all, end all" and who don't try to grow and improve. They are the outsiders and there is little,
if any, hope for them."
T.P. "Yesterday, the book editor in the Charlotte
Observer wrote a column about the decline of reading in
I would agree with this point if what we are talking
about is school-aged children or what I would call
casual readers. However, other than
playing various games, if people are on the internet, they are reading. I don't subscribe to
any newspapers now because I can read them online. I don’t need to go
to the library to do research because I have the world's greatest research tool
at my fingertips. When I first gained
internet access in the late 90's, I probably did more reading than I had done
in years. Don't
even mention the access to ordering books, which would never have been
available in the Provinces in a million years.
In working with young poets, I often find that their
reading has been very limited. The
beauty of the internet is that when you mention a name with which they are unfamiliar,
you can send them a link to his/her work.
These people may have limited funds and/or access to much of American
Poetry, particularly the more contemporary or seemingly obscure work. Quite frankly, I don’t know about reading
"books" or checking them out of the library, but I'd be surprised to
find out that poetry wasn't being read more today than ever before. Of course, in this answer I may have
committed the unpardonable sin of using my personal experience as being
universal. Yet, I think what I've said
is very logical."
T.P. "I've often disagreed with other writers over
the part that poetry and literature ought to play in politics. What role, if any, do you think the arts
should take in terms of social and political concerns?"
Good question. Bill
Slaughter wrote me that it was impossible to write a poem that was not a
political expression. I think that's true when considering politics in its purest
sense. However, when
it comes to opinions about war, etc. I don't
care what any writer in this country thinks about it one way or the other. I don’t need artists
to help me mold my social conscience. I
see a vast amount of work related to politics as being as ridiculous as the
so-called poetry "challenges" on various message boards. If you need a challenge to write a poem,
maybe you ought to find another medium of expression.
My own research as well as my personal experience,
which you know to be comparatively vast in terms of politics, tells me that the
actual facts revolving around most controversial
situations tend to be taken out of context by both sides in political
arguments. If I tell the truth, and I do
so brutally in this instance, I wouldn't care what any
writer/poet thought about a political issue any more than I would Barry Bonds
or some movie star. Notoriety is gained
in many ways, but it seldom makes one an expert on everything.
Now, I "will"
acknowledge that some people are passionate in their beliefs to the extent that
politics may be what motivates them to create.
However, and again I'm talking about politics
in terms of government, etc., I probably won't be very interested in their
art. It's not
what drives or motivates me and while I'm certainly interested in ultimate
morality, i.e. what is truly right and wrong, I've not been privy to the work
of many artists who could enlighten me in said regard. The bottom line is that I don't
like overtly political art regardless of whether I agree with the point
attempting to be made. An example, I
felt Steve Earle had lost something when he started posturing about landmines
and the death penalty. Though I continue
to have a tremendous amount of respect for his work, he's
no one to tell me or anyone else how to vote or what to believe in. I'll leave the question with that."
T.P. "One last cheesy question: who do you think is
the most memorable fictional character from the American century?"
C.M. "Rufus T. Firefly"
T.P. "Good answer.
All things should end with Groucho."
Peeler’s site is here