Jan
08

Everyday Poets 3: Bryan Lewis

By | Poetry

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Clockwork

Nature sees what nature sees,

And nature does what nature does.

Minds believe in memories,

And sometimes hearts believe in love.

When hearts and minds do both agree,

Conceived are dreams converged as one.

But love of life and logic leaves

Our livelihood left out of luck.

Deceived are these who dream of things

Composed of money, grease, and blood;

Mechanical beings with cogs and springs,

Like clockwork do this planet run,

In tightened shifts devices click,

Send slowly start to smog the sun.

But smoke and fog made synthetically,

How many does this bother? None.

Machines you see, they do not breathe

The air they leave, beneath, for us.

They call this craft their politics,

And leave us here to pay in blood.

Being animals, we wonder,

How the humans lost their love.

When will man begin to see?

What nature sees how nature does?

*This poem’s final line is a powerful one. As humans, we think we’re smart enough to sit back and look at what we’ve done. Maybe we’re not, the poet suggests, through posing the question. Aside from that, the wording is tight. That concept could easily have sprawled on for an entire paragraph, but here the poet has concisely stated a grand idea in as few words as possible. Lines like this are what can separate poetry from all other genres of writing.

Ugly

This is how it started,

Sitting in an ugly tree

Eating ugly sandwiches,

And they were good as they can be,

When suddenly there came a breeze

And i was falling gracefully,

I hit my head on every branch,

Then the tree fell on me…

*I enjoyed this poem because it made me reflect on how a current emotional state can impact reality. On a good day, maybe that sandwich would have been nondescript or even artful. But this isn’t a good day. It’s one of those days where the cliche “when it rains, it pours” fits. Even the falling, although graceful, is still falling and even results in hitting the head on branches. But, alas, that still isn’t enough. The tree not only falls, but falls on the fallen. We’ve all had days, metaphorically speaking, like this.

Bryan Lewis is a 25-year-old computer science major from Richmond, Indiana. When he’s not studying for class, he writes, produces, and performs music (lyrical rap.) He also writes poetry and short stories in his free time, although he’s never made a significant effort to be published. Bryan has a deep love for the natural world, and enjoys the solitude and reflection it brings. Find him here on Facebook.

Aug
06

Cameron interviews Todd Davis

By | Interviews on Others, Poetry

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Todd Davis teaches creative writing, environmental studies and American literature at Penn State Altoona.  At times, he somehow teaches about greenhouse gases while conducting poetry workshops and teaches about enjambment while ascending mountain tops. Through Todd I saw a poet could be a disciplined athlete, a dedicated father and husband, and a devoted professor willing to do whatever it took to positively change the lives of students. He broke the many stereotypes I brought to poetry as a beginner studying the art form. Todd’s office was always open. I spent hours talking to him about literature, athletics and how to overcome struggles in life. A friendship developed. A role model and mentor he became. He was often what I needed when most I needed. I recently caught up with him for an interview about how he became a poet, about the direction of his most recent books, about how he balances the many angles to his life and about advice he would give to a budding poet in 2010.

CC: How did you get interested in poetry? Why did you feel poetry was worth pursuing?

TD: I certainly never thought I’d write poetry when I was growing up in Elkhart, Indiana, a factory town on the border of Michigan. My father was a veterinarian and my mother was an elementary school teacher and a lay minister in the United Methodist Church. I was crazy about comic books and fantasy and science fiction novels as a kid. If I thought I was going to be a writer, it was going to be in fiction. In high school I got hooked on Hemingway’s short stories and thought that would be the thing to write.

Yet, as I look back now, I see poetry was everywhere in my house. My father, who went to a one-room school house in Green County, Kentucky, had memorized a great deal of verse for his teachers: Shakespeare, Keats, Wordsworth, Longfellow, Whittier, Frost, and the like. He had the tendency to rattle off a poem when we were working together or hiking in the woods. My mom’s love of poetry came through religion. She would quote from the Psalms and the Gospels, weaving the language of the King James Bible with the vernacular of the South—she was born and raised outside Lexington, Virginia. It was quite a stew of sounds.

As for why I thought poetry was worth pursuing, I suppose I’ve been drawn to various wisdom traditions and the ways poetry tries to live within those traditions ever since I was given my first Bible in fourth grade. Here I’m thinking of Christianity, Transcendentalism, Judaism, and Zen Buddhism, the traditions I’ve lived closest with. But really, if I’m honest with myself, poetry ended up choosing me. By that I mean that when I was an undergraduate I stumbled across three writers that made me want to write poems, that made me think I might be able to make a poem out of the life I lived. (My life at that time was comprised of working with animals in my father’s practice, playing basketball, and wandering the woods of northern Indiana and lower Michigan.) These are the first three poems that ever truly hit me in the gut and made me sit up and take notice of what a poem can do: Galway Kinnell’s “The Bear” acknowledged the physical and mystical relationship we have with animals; James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” helped me see that there was something to be said about the sadness I’d felt with my teammates playing football in high school in our dying factory town; and Maxine Kumin’s “The Excrement Poem” celebrated the kind of work I did cleaning kennels on a daily basis.
CC: Speak a bit about how your third book of poems, The Least of These (Michigan State University Press, 2010), came together, what you hoped it would accomplish, and how it has been received so far.

TD: Hmmm…. I’m not sure I ever set out to accomplish much more in a book of poems than simply to be honest, to write poems that demonstrate my love for, or my awe for, or my sorrow for this world that carries us on her back. In other words, most of my poetry has a daily-ness to it. I’m one of those writers who tries to be at the desk at least five days a week for a few hours at a time. The act of dreaming my way into the poem, the actual process of making a poem, is life-giving, life-sustaining. I can’t imagine what my life would be like without it. But the poems aren’t separate from the other ways I live. I’m not sure there would be any poem-making if I didn’t have time to walk in the woods—I have 16,000 acres of gamelands above my house with no marked trails, only old logging roads and game paths—or to be with my family, or to savor the food that I prepare, or to feel my heart pounding when I go for a run.

My poems are comprised of the stories I stumble across each day. Or if narrative is not a driving mechanism in the poem, then the idea of framing some image that has arrested my attention, not all that different from still-life painting.

But if I was forced to describe what The Least of These focuses upon, it’s what we ignore—to our peril—in the world, both human and nonhuman. While Christ was talking about “the least of these” in human terms, I find myself drawn to “the least of these” in the streams and woods of my local bio-region, the worlds we often miss in our own busy, self-consumed patterns.

As for the reception of any book of poems, it’s folks like you that help spread the word. Most bookstores don’t carry much in the way of poetry. I’m very thankful when a book of my poems is reviewed, when it’s used in a class, when someone like Garrison Keillor reads one of my poems on The Writer’s Almanac or when Ted Kooser includes my work in his syndicated column, American Life in Poetry. All of that has happened with The Lease of These, and it was just released in January 2010. So I’m very grateful for this kind of reception, and I’m always looking to get on the road and do readings and connect with other people who love poetry.

The best part of writing a poem is the process, the actual act of creation. But if you are lucky enough to have your work published in a journal or book, then the best part is when a poem you’ve toiled over connects or resonates with a reader. As I mentioned earlier, Kinnell, Kumin, and Wright changed my life simply by working on a poem and sending it out into the world.

CC: You recently co-edited, with Erin Murphy, an anthology called Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets (State University of New York Press, 2010). Tell me about the creation of this book. Who are some of the poets involved with the project, and how would you describe what this book sets out to do?

TD: Erin and I are fascinated by the vast array of approaches our fellow poets take in making poems. Too often in our educational system students are given the idea that there is a single, solitary way to approach writing or reading a poem, or if not a single way, at least a very small number of “sanctioned” approaches. The truth is found in our differences in writing poems; it’s endless and imbued with the variegation of the human species. Out of this recognition, we worked together to create a book that we wanted to read and that we wanted our students to read. However, we also wanted to have a book that a general poetry reader could enjoy as well. The book is comprised of forty poems by a range of poets, including Natasha Trethewey, Robert Wrigley, Robin Becker, William Heyen, H.L. Hix, Jan Beatty, Fleda Brown, Jim Daniels, Kimiko Hahn, and Jack Ridl. It really is an eclectic mix. And the essays that the poets have written about how they make a poem are a true revelation.

CC: How do you balance being a professor, an author, and a fitness enthusiast, with being a husband, a father, and a religious man? What struggles have you had in this regard, and how have you found resolution?

TD: Our culture promotes specialization and embraces dichotomies of all sorts—flesh and spirit, private and public, religious and secular. I suppose one of the things I’ve been focused on for a long time is the idea of unity, of an organic, holistic way of living that brings together what some deem as separate worlds. I certainly will not tell you I’ve achieved it. I fail in many ways. But I do believe that the health of my body—the ways I treat it in terms of what I eat or how I exercise—is intimately connected to my spiritual life, and that my spiritual life is not an ego-driven search for meanings but rather is connected to the health of my family and the community I live in and worship with. And, perhaps to the chagrin of my students, when I step into the classroom, I don’t leave that personal self behind because I believe all of this is connected to, and affects in profound ways, my intellectual life. I know I’m very fortunate because I teach creative writing and literature, and such subjects allow for this more holistic approach. I want my students to see how their lives come into play as they study virtually anything. However, this doesn’t mean that I want the ego-driven, self-centered part of our lives to dominate the conversation. On the contrary, I hope that the recognition that who we are—every part of our lives—makes how we learn and what we learn possible, and in that recognition we look to others outside ourselves with this perspective. We are all part of a tapestry, strands of life stitched to one another. There’s no escaping these parts of our lives and their connections to others. (Yes, we can choose to ignore the tapestry, but that doesn’t make it go away!)

CC: What advice would you give to a budding poet in 2010?

TD: First, recognize that the making of art is its own reward, and, second, read, read, read. I tell the same thing to players when I work with them on their basketball game. There is always something to learn from the great players, to practice from their repertoire of amazing moves. Same is true with poetry: I may not love every poet’s work down to my very core, but I can almost always find a move they’re making that I can learn from. So get out there and support other poets. Buy books of poetry. Read books of poetry. Request that your local public library buy contemporary books of poetry. And read, read, read. Soon enough your own life—and I mean all of that life—will join with what you’ve been reading, what you’ve been studying, and the moves will become yours, and you’ll add your line to the book of poems that has been open as long as humans have been playing with sound and image, recording all the beauty and joy and sorrow this world is made up of.

Aug
05

Cameron’s interview with Dorianne Laux

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If poet Dorianne Laux had a jersey, I’d wear it. I was introduced to Dorianne Laux’s poetry in 2005 through her poem “Dust.” I was in that voracious young poet stage –

tearing through as many poetry books as possible in the hope that I could make up time since I came to poetry later than those around me. Poem after poem drifted in and out of my consciousness like breath, but something made “Dust” stick. It wasn’t until a few years later, when I was in grad school and trying to capture as many of life’s simple truths in my stenographer’s notebook, that I thought to myself: Sometimes I’m too damn tired to write stuff down. Can’t there just be beauty in the ephemeral? The final four lines of “Dust” came to me:

That’s how it is sometimes-
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it.

I was once a poet that pushed and pushed even when I was mentally overtrained. Despite my mixed martial arts fighting career, I hadn’t learned the lesson that the mind is like the body – it too needs rest. Before I’d reflected on Dorianne’s “Dust,” poetry could feel like an annoyance, like a hard work that sometimes I simply did not want to do. Post-reflection on “Dust,” poetry still could feel that way (it’s a job like any other) but I no longer felt alone. As a poet, especially as a young poet in the 21st century, feeling connected and understood made all the difference.

Maybe it was a combination of my fandom and Dorianne’s genuine coolness that helped me land this interview. Either way, I’m awfully grateful and hope you poets and non-poets alike enjoy it as much as I did. Here goes:

CC: Dorianne, most introductions of you list your poetry accolades (Fellowships from the Guggenheim and NEA, Pushcart Prize, Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award) along with a list of the jobs you’ve worked (a gas station manager, a maid, a donut holer and a sanatorium cook). Many poets tend to remain cooped-up in their minds and forget about the importance of accruing life experiences. How have yours shaped the writer you’ve become?

DL: Thank you, Cameron.  It’s a pleasure to meet you here.  And I want to ask you this same question.  Your life has taken so many twists and turns, how has that crafted you?  I would say my life experiences are my poetry, whether I’m writing about those actual, factual experiences or not.  I am the flesh boat of my experiences– we all are– my feelings, thoughts, desires and dreams are captured in my body’s pliant cells, fastened onto my DNA.  They’ve made me, for good or ill, the poet I am and the one I will be as I oar through the waters: the fish that fly over or flop in, the barnacles that attach themselves, the rust that accrues, the salt, the scum, the reflection of the moon, the stars, space junk, as we drift, all of it.  And the more that accrues, the more depth, weight, and breadth we can bring to the poems, which we then need to throw overboard so we don’t sink. How’s that for a wobbly metaphor?  I think what life experience has brought to my poems is compassion.  When you work hard to make a living, raise a child up into the world, fail at marriage and try again, teach and fail, travel and fall, become ill, well again, weak but grateful, you learn patience, forbearance.  When you have worked with people all day who have so little and struggle to make it stretch, who live outside the rarefied, you are humbled.  I feel deep gratitude for the life poetry has allowed me to live.  I know the life I could have lived without it.  Both on the physical plain, and the soul plain.  Poetry helps us endure.

CC: You’ve been a teacher of poetry for over twenty years, and you’re now a faculty member of North Carolina State University’s MFA Program. How as a teacher do you keep material fresh both for your students and for yourself? What have your students taught the teacher?

DL: I share my life experiences as a poet with my students.  My poetic difficulties, joys, struggles and discoveries.  If I read a new poem or essay or book I’m excited about, I bring it in.  I also have my backpack of the tried-and-true, and because it is new to them, it becomes fresh to me again as well.  One of the things I do with undergrads is the Broadside Project. On my Facebook page I post photos from this project at the end of each semester. The students always, always surprise me.

CC: Your husband, Joseph Millar, is not only a terrific poet, but also a poet with an interesting work background – he’s worked as a telephone installation foreman and a commercial fisherman. Tell us about the work dynamic between you two. Are you readers for each other’s work? What are the similarities and differences between you and your husband’s writing process?

DL: We are often the first reader for one another’s work, and we often also have the last word.  We trust each other.  We have our past working life in common, our recombined families, as well as our life as teachers, and we read much of the same literature and have similar esthetics, so there’s a simpatico there.  But we do disagree and that can be fruitful, even if it’s not so great in the moment.  We push and pull each other to go out on limbs, to attempt new things.  We have no embarrassment.  Joseph is much more disciplined than I am.  He’s up every morning meditating, then he writes, and he reads throughout the day.  He probably reads ten books to my two and writes twice as much as I do.  But, when I do hunker down I’m focused, determined and bring my all to it.  He writes line by line, very steadily and carefully.  I just pour it out and hope something happens that I can then go back to, maybe excavate a poem from.  Either way, we get it done.  He’s more lyrical I’d say, more contemplative.  I’m more active and narrative.

CC: Despite having five books of your own poems out on the market, your Facebook profile picture is of you holding W.S. Merwin’s “The Second Four Book of Poems.” Literary critic Louise Rosenblatt often spoke of the reading process as “transactional,” that is, that both the reader and the text continuously act and are acted upon by each other. When you sit down to read Merwin, what do you bring to his poems? What do his poems bring to you?

DL: His life seems similar to your life, to mine, to too many lives, coming from a violent home and searching, through poetry, for a way to find some peace for the self, to find something outside the self, “bowing to not knowing what.”  This life, as Merwin says, is a “strange garment” we will soon slough off and so, we listen to the wren.  I’ve taken cues from him for my own, very different style of poetry.  Merwin says “after three days of rain” and I write “After Twelve Days of Rain.”  I like his quietude.  I admire his ability to be simple without being simplistic.   As in his poem “My Friends”:

My friends without shields walk on the target

It is late the windows are breaking

 

My friends without shoes leave

What they love

Grief moves among them as a fire among

Its bells

My friends without clocks turn

On the dial they turn

They part…

This poem is so real, and yet surreal, and strange and heartbreaking, and ultimately unknowable except that it is what’s most known and felt.  Again: compassion. It’s difficult to talk about Merwin’s poems, as it’s hard to talk about a feeling or a smell.  It is what it is, but so much so that it overwhelms both sense and the senses.  I aspire to something about his work, that imbues his poems, though I’m not sure I could say what that is.  A purity, maybe, the kind of purity that comes from being beaten, like steel.

CC: Comment about the current trajectory of contemporary American poetry. In your opinion, what ways do you see it changing and/or evolving?

DL: I don’t know if we ever have enough distance to “see” our own trajectory.  We’re in the muddled middle of it.  Who knows what will last, what poems will take hold of the imaginations of the future.  I guess what I can see from my limited perspective is that since the Illiad was written down in 750 BCE, poetry of every kind has survived every war, every holocaust, every natural disaster, and every cruelty, repression, ignorance and every critic that was ever born, and is still alive and flourishing in the 21st century. The changes that have occurred in poetry have been minor when you look at it over the scale of human time.  It’s like a rose, maybe a hybrid with color and size differentials, but the same genus, plucked from the same original blowsy family we’ve come to know as rose, and it remains, as it will for all time, a single voice crying out from the wilderness saying “We were here.”

Dorianne Laux’s fifth collection, The Book of Men, (W.W. Norton, 2011) is now available.

Aug
05

Cameron interviews Eavan Boland

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For several consecutive mornings I’ve sat staring at the black blinking cursor on the blank Word document of my computer screen. Perhaps this staring was due to stress-induced writer’s block or perhaps I hoped the cursor’s rhythm would ignite an answer to my seemingly answerless question: How in the world do I write an introductory paragraph or two of Eavan Boland?

An Amazon.com search brings up 120 results for her or work about her. She is one of the rare poets who, during their lifetime, see books written about them – Eavan Boland’s Evolution As an Irish Woman Poet: An Outsider Within an Outsider’s Culture. When there is a discussion about the history of Irish literature, Eavan Boland is discussed. When there are panels about contemporary poetry (especially regarding women), Eavan Boland is discussed. When the thousands of poets each year who have dreams of receiving what is possibly poetry’s most respected fellowship – the Stegner – begin their research, they find “Eavan Boland, Director” at the top of Stanford University’s Creative Writing faculty list.

So, I suppose I found an answer: Raw Honesty, Hyperlinks and an Interview.

CC: Eavan, you have been Director of Stanford’s Creative Writing Program for twelve years now. What are some of the changes you’ve experienced within the program (both departmentally and aesthetically) since you first began in 2000?

EB: It’s hard to measure change. And I’m not quite sure where it resides. Something that never changes is the reward in seeing strong writers apply for the Stegner Fellowship. That’s the same for me and all the other writers in the program. I imagine it always will be. As for some other changes, I think the program has grown. Not so much in the graduate fellowship, as in the undergraduate cohort. That really has expanded.

CC: Many professors of poetry (and in general) tend to bounce around from university to university. Despite the ease these days of travel, what has kept you at Stanford University?

EB: It’s a unique place –for myself, it’s a really powerful mix of a great communal University and a writing program that is able to have autonomy and freedom within the University and yet benefit from its institutional shelter.  That’s a rare blend. In some ways it comes from the origins of the program. Wallace Stegner came west more than a half century ago and set out to find a program where young writers could find themselves.  His love for the west, his environmentalism and his belief in the writing life still permeate the program. It’s a unique community, and I’m glad to be associated with it.

CC: A part of poetic growth seems to be an awareness or recognition of the poet’s own poetic process. From there, the writer can choose to disregard the awareness and experience something new, or stay comfortable for awhile in their understanding. Can you give us a glimpse into any part of your poetic process? Do you snatch fragments from life and seek to extract their meaning through poetry? Do you need a cup of tea on your left hand side when you sit to write? Tell our readers a bit about how you do what you do.

EB: It’s changed over time. When I had small children I certainly needed that cup of tea. Or some figurative equivalent. Those were years when I was trying to excavate time from the domestic quarry. And that changed my writing habits. From being a student-poet who wrote a poem in a fairly continuous way, I became a much more fugitive writer. Every half year or so I acquired a big, plainspoken notebook –the kind that you could still get in Dublin stationery shops then. It was like a ledger, with lined paper and heavy binding. It stored all my lost days, my interrupted afternoons, my broken plans for a quiet writing session. I found that if I couldn’t write a poem, I could write a half-poem, or if not that maybe a few lines. On some days even a line or an image would do. And I put them all in that notebook. And strangely enough, although it began as a stopgap, an apology for a more peaceful writing process, it turned out to be something more. When I went back to my notes after a while, they were a surprisingly rich source. And I still work in fragments, even now. I can begin a poem, and write some of it, and start again with a different opening. And so on. And I still have a variant of those old notebooks with me at all times.

CC: I’ve come to see the study of poetry like the training for sport. The repetition of practice seems to create mind memory in the way sport practice creates muscle memory. Who are the authors (or what are the books) you return to (both personally and professorially) as a means of helping to train yourself and your students? What qualities do you feel these author or books offer?

EB: The poet who always stands beside me is Yeats. His discipline, intensity,

the lyric adventure of his best poems – I always go back to him, and I always recommend him to others. Women poets have been very important to me –Rich, Plath, Levertov. In the Stegner workshop I’m always more interested in what the poets there are reading. There is something fascinating and moving in the way young poets travel with the ghosts of their future beside them: that’s a time of life when a book is almost read to rags. But as for the qualities authors or books can offer, it always comes down to one thing: any good poem is an endless source of education for other poets.

CC: Lastly, thank you for taking time out for this interview, Eavan. You’re an inspiration to me and to many poets the world over. It was an honor and a highlight in my career to be able to ask you a few questions. Continued success!

EB: Thank you for your questions -

This interview was originally published at Examiner.com.

Aug
05

Cameron’s interview with Rick Moody

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Rick Moody is to writing as Scottie Pippen was to basketball – ultimate versatility. As such, Rick is broadly defined: a novelist, an essayist, a memoirist, a songwriter, and a professor of creative writing. He’s had major motion pictures based on his books (see The Ice Storm Trailer here). He’s been featured in the The New York Times, The Village Voice, The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic, and Harper’s. He’s won the Guggenheim Fellowship and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. The Washington Post once called him “…one of our [country’s] best writers.” Esquire describes Moody as, “that rare writer who can make the language do tricks and still suffuse his narrative with soul.” He is currently on the Editorial Advisory Board for Creative Nonfiction – the premier journal in the genre. Rick Moody’s sheer writing experience and his intellectual, probing thoughts on all aspects regarding the intersection of society and writing make him a tremendous asset to all writers in all genres – including poets.

CC: Rick, a big thanks for taking time out to answer a few questions. First on deck: In an interview last year for Big Think, you said, “Writers are more desperate now than at any time since I’ve been watching….” In particular, you said, “The crazy great ones… are really struggling to find people to publish them.” Can you elaborate on these thoughts? Is the trajectory still looking the same? Worse? How is this impacting the humanities (and creative writing in particular) within academia?

RM: You’ve caught me in a period in which I have again been doing a lot of thinking about the state of things as regards literature now, and I confess that I am deeply worried. Part of this worry, I suspect, is because I’m hanging on to old ideas about what literature is—namely that it is something contained in a book. Part of this worry adheres to the fact that I think the e-reader offers a truly inferior, an even indefensible reading experience, one that has as much to do with what I like about literature as Katy Perry has to do with Chopin, and that this is nonetheless the way of the future. This technological “advance,” along with the fact that people who make literature are finding themselves less and less likely to be compensated adequately for their work, and more and more hemmed in by a risk averse publishing industry, and more and more taken advantage of by these distributors of literature, this all means to me that the future is a dark place, a place of very obvious writing produced by people on mobile phones for other peoples on mobile phones. While literature happens on the margins, only for the love of it. Academe is not yet affected by all this, but academe lags the trends, I suspect. But it will be affected by it. And I say this as a person who is mainly optimistic and who tries to see the good in things where possible.

CC: Local newspapers are getting smaller and some are now extinct. I’ve walked into several grocery stores where pollsters were asking a simple question: Do you get your news from the newspaper, the television or the Internet? As one quite connected in the world of social media, what do you foresee as the future of news and reporting and…reading?

RM: I love newspapers, I love the habit of the newspapers (I read the papers every day), I love the muckraking of the business, and the cutthroat qualities of it. My grandfather was a newspaper publisher, of a rather important (at the time) American tabloid, and he instilled in my family a great love of the news, and an insistence on getting it from many sources. He was quite conservative (lamentably so!), but he read the New York Times, for example, every day, because he wanted to know what the other side thought. I take these ideas—wherein one newsgathers very broadly, wherein one listens to a lot of points of view—very seriously. I am discouraged by a social media that somehow obliterates the news business as formerly understood. I just don’t think that Huffington Post even rises to the level of USA Today, though I read it. HuffPo is part of a diet of news consumption, but it doesn’t replace the most robust and older iterations thereof. HuffPo is like a weight loss program consisting only of desserts.

CC: There’s often talk about how the study of poetry can have a positive impact on the novelist and essayist. Could you share your thoughts regarding this? Also, what hurdles might a poet face when making the transition from poetry to essays and novel-length projects?

RM: Poetry called to me first. Or at least most of my juvenilia (of the very ancient cave-painting vintage) was all poetical. At that point I was learning how to use metrical feet and writing in classical forms, and also stealing tetrameter and the like from various rock and roll songs of my acquaintance, and just writing new words to the existing meters and rhyme schemes. I wrote a lot of free verse too. I had a lot of ideas for stories, but I lacked some follow through in the story department. My first finished story, by which I mean my first rewritten story was in my sixteenth year. But I considered myself a poet then, and I read a lot of poetry (I read tons of the Romantic poets), and I still do read a fair amount of it. I think poetry stands as the most ambitious and elevated use of language, that’s what it’s for, and so there’s lots to learn from it, if you write in a more degraded and mongrel form, i.e., prose fiction. In fact, writers of fiction ignore poetry at their peril. That said, I think contemporary poetry has not argued well for its merit, for its importance, in part by being, on occasion, recondite to no great effect, and also by appealing to specialists. I like experimental poetry, to be sure, but I also like poetry that is plainspoken (William Carlos Williams is among my very favorite poets, for example), and accessible, emotionally speaking. I think poets of my generation, and the generation after me, have done a good job of restoring poetry to the people, to the regular users of the English language, instead of leaving it in the hands of academics. And that is to be admired.

As for prose works by poets: there are so many great ones! I love that poets embark on using fiction as though fiction has never existed before. This is exactly the way to go. Please take our form and bend it entirely out of shape! I beg of you! The Doctor Stories, by the aforementioned W. C. Williams; A Nest of Ninnies, by Ashberry and Schuyler; The Ideal Bakery, by Donald Hall; Angels, by Denis Johnson; Crystal River, by Charlie Smith; Record Palace, by Susan Wheeler. These are all very excellent works of fiction by people who seem to come to fiction writing as though it is in a different language from the one they normally employ on the job. I think these works make fiction a better and less homogenous place, and we are lucky to have them.

CC: Of course, there’s no specific formula for how a writer acquires the accolades and respect that you have throughout your career. However, in general, what are three qualities that our readers (a diverse, multi-genre bunch of writers) can keep in mind (or on Post-It notes) as they continue on their quest?

RM: I suspect, at this point in my journey, that accolades are cheap, inconstant, and not to be trusted, and that while one may hope for them, one should never write in anticipation of them, nor worry unduly about whether they come or not. The important part of the job is the daily practice. I think writing, to the extent possible, should be like meditation, like chopping wood and carrying water, or like savasana, the so-called corpse pose. I only feel good working. I never feel adequate during publication. In fact, I mostly want to crawl under a rock during publication. And by the time things are getting accorded “accolades,” I am off on the next thing and am no longer interested at all. If one is dependent on the results of composition, one is somewhat doomed to unhappiness, because eventually the day will come when there is nothing but bad news (I have had plenty of it myself, I promise you). But if you set in your sights just the patient improvement of whatever language is in front of you on paper, or onscreen, then whatever happens out there will bother you much less. This is my quest now. Not the results, but the practice of the craft.

CC: Lastly, the American media buzz-term is “political climate.” In what ways (economically, aesthetically and otherwise) do you see our current political climate influencing writers and writing?

RM: There’s so much to say about this! Yes, there is always a “political climate,” of course, because there is never a period outside of politics, or a place outside of politics, nor is there a prose, or a poetry, outside of politics, nor a song, a painting, a play, a sculpture, a pantomime. A useful starting point, I sometimes say when I am teaching, is to imagine that there is nothing produced from within the edifice called capitalism that is not an apology for capitalism, no matter how blissfully ignorant this production may affect to be. This is especially useful, I find, when talking about American naturalism, which imagines that limpid observations about hooking salmon (and ripping out some of the flesh in their mouths), somehow do not play into the hands, e.g., of the Koch Brothers, or the likes of Goldman Sachs. In fact, those upper level managers at Goldman are just the sorts of people who believe that a book about ripping flesh out of a salmon’s mouth is somehow “above politics.”

That said, the current “political climate” is unusually obstreperous. Not only in the United States, but in the world at large, at least that’s how I see it. And I imagine it has a lot to do with a worldwide struggle over the nature of reading. This may sound farfetched, but look at how fundamentalist Christianity in the United States reads the Bible—as though it is literally true, as though it were not cobbled together over centuries as part of internecine battles among fervent and disputatious factions. The same is true of the Torah, of the Qu’ran, of the Constitution of the United States, and, I would argue, the founding documents of just about every other religion or political institution. What is most dangerous to established power, in the end, is the free play of interpretation. What is most dangerous is reading as a liberal. What is most dangerous is empowered individual readers, who are willing to engage with a text however it suits them. The forces of evil, such as they are, are those who want to control textual scholarship, or who believe that there is some right way to interpret foundational documents, excluding all others. If this is the “political climate” in which I write, I count myself lucky, because I make my work for people who are passionate and discerning and totally liberated in the matter of reading. They are a good readership to have, and I hope to continue making work for them.

This article was originally published here: Profile Interview: Rick Moody – National Poetry | Examiner.com

Aug
05

Cameron interviews Floyd Skloot

By | Interviews on Others, Poetry

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In January 2010, Poets & Writers named Floyd Skloot one of fifty of the most inspiring authors in the world. He is the author of four creative nonfiction books (The Night Side, In the Shadow of Memory, The World of Light, The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer’s Life), seven books of poetry (Music Appreciation, The Fiddler’s Trance, The Evening Light, Approximately Paradise, The End of Dreams, Selected Poems: 1970-2005, The Snow’s Music) and four books of fiction (Pilgrim’s Harbor, Summer Blue, The Open Door, Patient 002). His wife is painter Beverly Hallberg and his daughter is Rebecca Skloot, award-winning author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

Floyd contracted a virus that targeted his brain in 1988, and it has impacted his neurological functioning, damaging his memory, balance, abstract reasoning powers and concentration. It’s also forced him to completely change his writing process. Nevertheless, for well over twenty years post-diagnosis, Floyd marches on and continues to carve out his name as one of our country’s best multi-genre creative writers.

He agreed to answer a few questions and I jumped at the opportunity.

CC: Floyd, many writers struggle throughout their career to discover their writing process. Prior to the diagnosis, you seemed to have found yours through the structure provided by the routine of regular writing habits, formal precision, clarity of direction. However, after the diagnosis you had to change things altogether – working at unpredictable times in much smaller chunks and in absolute silence. How do you feel this has changed your writing? Have there been unexpected benefits through working in this different style?

FS: Because I can only work in fragments, without relying on abstractions or pre-determined structures, without a strong sense of where I’m going, writing has become an act of discovery for me. I work slowly, gradually seeing where the fragments lead, and in a sense sharing the exploration with a reader.

CC: In 2012, Tupelo Press will publish your seventh book of poems: Close Reading. The book’s description says that it “begins with ten poems about painters, composers, and writers at critical moments in their personal and creative lives, moments when everything changes or comes into focus.” Can you provide our readers with a bit more insight into this fascinating topic? Also, what impact did your family have on the creation of this piece?

FS: Early in my writing about the way my life had suddenly changed, I understood that only writing about my experience would be a trap, limiting what I might learn or discover, a vanishing into the hole of self-absorption. Also, in my reading as I tried to learn about neurology, virology, cognitive science, I was led to many stories about artists whose lives and careers had been impacted by sudden change–not just illness, but all sorts of unpredictable challenges. Reading and writing about them made me feel less alone in my experience, and taught me so much about human adaptability, strength, courage.

My wife is a painter, musician, and fiber artist. We married in 1993 and as she worked I found that my reading about art was helping me understand what she was doing, just as seeing her work gave me a language with which to speak of art. Similarly, my daughter with her brave, fierce, compassionate dedication to the book she spent ten years writing, inspired my own dedication, and also provided insight into processes of creation.

CC: You’re a prolific book reviewer and a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Boston Globe, and the Harvard Review. Well-written book reviews can take tremendous amounts of time and creative energy. And journals rarely pay for them. As such, many writers (particularly those younger) rarely write them. What have book reviews – the close reading of and reflection on recent works by others – brought to your career?

FS: I’ve done reviews since the very beginning of my writing life more than forty years ago. I feel that it’s an essential part of my creative activity, helping me to clarify for myself what works and what doesn’t and why, leading me to serious consideration of writing unlike my own, keeping me fresh in my encounter with the possibilities of writing. It also forces me to be part of the conversation, to engage with the world of writing, and for someone who lives a fairly isolated life, that engagement is essential. And finally, it’s a kind of compact: if I want my published writing to be reviewed–and I certainly do–it’s right that I review others.

CC: Thanks for your time and wisdom, Floyd. It was an honor.

Floyd would love to join your class or reading group in a discussion of his work. Depending on where you’re located, it may not be possible for him to be present in person, but in that case there are other options.  Make an appointment and ask the author himself questions about his work. You can do this live via iChat, Skype, speakerphone or submit questions in advance by e-mail. Visit Floyd’s website to contact him.

This interview was originally published at Examiner.com.

Aug
05

Cameron’s interview with Alison Hawthorne Deming

By | Interviews on Others, Poetry

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She’s won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and held a Wallace Stegner fellowship at Stanford University. Her multi-genre writing awards, fellowships and residencies have already created the type of legacy that many writers dream of leaving behind. None of it, though, will tell you this:

(1) She gives as much or more time developing her students as writers and people in the world as she does to her own writing.

(2) Perhaps no other living woman writer has written about (and been involved in the writing of) our natural world as extensively, consistently and superbly.

Young or old and regardless of genre, writers seeking to write about – and/or study the writing about – our environment will eventually come to the work of Alison Hawthorne Deming. Along with her four books of poetry (Science and Other Poems, The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence, Genius Loci, Rope) are her three books of nonfiction (Temporary Homelands, The Edges of the Civilized World, Writing the Sacred into the Real). This introduction does not include her chapbooks, the many books she’s edited, the panels she’s organized or participated in or her countless hours of volunteer work for literary journals and environmental organizations.

Of all the professors I’ve had throughout my writing career, I’m honored to say that Alison is the professor with whom I’ve taken the most classes. Despite her busy schedule, she’s granted me an interview.

CC: Alison, when or how did you know that this path (the fusion of writing and environment) would be the one you would follow? Do you have any advice for writers (or people in general) about how to listen to and let their inner workings be their guide?

AHD: The funny thing is that I don’t remember actually making such a decision. Like most artists, I followed my intuition where it led me. I grew up in the woods in Connecticut in a family that prized the arts and the wilds.  These seemed the basis of what it meant to be a cultural animal.  My parents were writers and devotees of theater—acting and directing in community theater throughout my childhood.  I too loved the theater, but I preferred the deep privacy of the literary experience—the way we can enter a book in solitude, taste and savor it, carry some essence of it as a part of who we become.  Literature takes the measure of an individual life within the context of a particular historical time.  It is how we know what it felt like to live in whatever period the author was writing.  Calvino says it is an ear that can hear beyond hearing, and eye that can see beyond seeing.  Something like that. And one of things I feel most keenly about the time in which we’re living is the human toll on the richness and beauty of Earth’s biological legacy.  The diminishment of our fellow creatures—and the land, air, water that sustains us all–is a kind of madness which we have been pursuing with self-absorbed oblivion.  I think all creatures, not just the human ones, should have a chance to fulfill their evolutionary potential.  So for me the great stories are not only the ones about the difficulty of conducting oneself well in situations of conflict, crisis, moral complication in relationships with other people.  They are the stories of how we frame our existence within the larger context of life on Earth.  That means exploring an idea of ourselves not only as individuals and cultural beings, but as a species among other species, all part of the amazing expressiveness of this planet.  Those of us who write about the environment are trying to expand the moral imagination beyond the sphere of self-interest to include concerns for environmental justice and for those who come after us.  It’s interesting to write about this stuff, it stirs my passion, it makes me feel that art is useful.

My advice to other writers and artists is to cultivate a good working relationship with the unconscious, which is the human organism’s repository of cellular learning, and to frame personal story within a cultural context.  Read into your ignorance. Read, read, read.  Keep testing your values and assumptions against your own experience to see if they still hold up.  Don’t spend too much time licking your wounds.  We all suffer.  Educate your empathy so that it grows.

CC: We know, in many ways, that the environment (in the broadest sense of the word) continuously fascinates and sustains you. In regards to teaching, do you feel your students serve the same purpose? What is their impact on your career as a writer?

AHD: Students feed my work, there’s no question about that.  I admire those who respond to an artistic calling and I feel that it’s a radical act to do so.  The range of human story and experience that students have brought to my attention over the years astonishes me: from cage fighting to urban planning to archeo-astronomy to transgendered identity to becoming a conscientious objector as a Marine in Iraq to all the muddles and mysteries of family life.  That’s something I love about creative nonfiction: it has content.  I’m sure teaching has been one of the enterprises that has helped to educate my empathy. And I have tried to remain a good citizen to the art through my teaching. I have little patience for colleagues who whine about the burdens of their academic responsibilities.  Pick a job you’d rather have, I want to tell them.  Artists have an illusory idea that they may have the freedom not to have a job.  But having a job keeps us honest and accountable to others.

I also like the challenge of having to articulate an informed response to my students’ writing, of digging into a work-in-progress in collaboration with a student to see what it might become.  With graduate students, there is commitment and talent that makes the teaching relationship satisfying.  I don’t always feel that way about undergraduates, who often seem to think that they can become writers without becoming readers or without understanding the mechanism and cadence of sentences. Read, read, read.  Study sentences. Sing them.

CC: At times it seems like both the environment and the field of literary writing are under constant attack – programs, artists and places defunded or cut. Do you feel, as comes through in the writing of the Yaak Valley by Rick Bass, that you work from or are driven by the underdog role? What are your thoughts on the current nature of both fields?

AHD: I don’t feel that when I think in terms of Big Time, because I think both of these concerns are among the most enduring ones.  Sure, there is a lot of competition for people’s attention out there.  But in the big story, every culture has had its poetry, narrative, and art.  And every culture has worked to understand and sustain its relationship with the natural world.

In terms of the current imperatives that come with climate change, I feel a terrible urgency and fear that the noise of political argument is taking a lot of intelligence away from addressing the problems.  If we could develop a sane and moderate defense agenda and budget, we’d have the resources to lead the world in amelioration and adaptation to climate change threats.  Maybe it’s too late.  But there’s no future in thinking that way.  I want to leave something in the world that will say I tried to make a difference.

This article was originally published by Cameron on Examiner.com.

Aug
05

Cameron interviews Jeff Gundy

By | Interviews on Others, Poetry

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Jeff Gundy’s words have lived on in my head for years after I’ve read them. In moments of stress I return to them regardless of where I am, regardless of if I have his books with me. Here’s one example from his book “Spoken Among the Trees”:

and how can I worry about the gray in my beard

or soaring Chinese oil consumption or even
the misery and rubble my tax dollars are buying

when the cardinals are showing off
and the mallard sprints toward the far shore

My introduction to Jeff’s poetry came five years ago when he came to visit us young poets in Todd Davis’s poetry class at Penn State Altoona. It was the first time I had fallen in love with a book of poems then had the chance to meet with the poet. A few years later I wrote a review of his work in Rattle, and although we haven’t talked since he was gracious enough to grant me an interview.

CC: Jeff, you’ve been a faculty member at Bluffton University for quite some time. What has your experience been like there? How have you grown as a teacher? What is it about the environment that allows you to draw inspiration for your own work as a poet?

JG: Bluffton has been a great place to call home, even while I’ve always had a sense, as William Stafford put it in a poem, that I didn’t want to “just live here.”

I’m a farm boy, a Midwesterner, and while I complain plenty about the weather, the provincial quality of my home territory, and the work load, in my daily life there are a lot of good things about teaching at a small college in a small town. I can walk to work, and I have great colleagues and fine students. I get to teach a variety of courses, from writing workshops to literature classes to general ed courses that let me explore politics and the state of the world. I get to spend time with like-minded people and a steady stream of visitors from all over the place.

Teaching is endlessly absorbing, I find—even if it’s trying to figure out how to convince a class full of semi-motivated and under-prepared freshman comp students to put together something resembling a coherent essay.

There are tradeoffs everywhere, of course. When I’m teaching four courses and submerged in papers, meetings, advising, and all the rest, I yearn for the cushy loads of my friends at big research schools. When I’m facing a room full of business, rec management, and dietetics majors who could not care less that I’ve written a poem or two, I wish for a little circle of literary disciples hanging on my every word. But I think it’s healthy in a lot of ways not to be taken too seriously, much of the time anyway.

There’s a plain sort of beauty in the landscape I inhabit, and an incredible variety that comes with the seasons. Not much changes from day to day, and yet everything changes. It’s useful to a writer stay in one place long enough to know it well, and to get weary and bored with it, and then perhaps to come out the other side.

At the same time, this is hardly the whole world. My wife is from British Columbia, so we visit there regularly, and I look for other chances to travel as well—workshops, conferences, readings, and just general exploration. I’m really grateful for the great privileges of a steady academic job: summers off, conferences and workshops to attend, and enough income to do some wandering. We spent several months in Salzburg on a Fulbright in 2008, and loved and learned a great deal from that. With the web, books, journals and all the rest, it’s possible to be connected with people and great writing and ideas from all over the world.

CC: Although creative nonfiction is a hot topic in the literary writing community now, it’s a little known fact that you’ve been working in this genre for close to twenty years. As one there from the beginning of the boom (See Gundy’s creative nonfiction book from 1995 titled: A Community of Memory: My Days with George and Clara), what changes have you noticed? How has your study as a poet translated into your work as a creative nonfiction writer?

JG: When I started the project that became Community of Memory I had no real background in writing narrative beyond reading a lot and teaching some fiction-writing classes because no one else here knew anything about it. I got sucked into writing nonfiction prose because I wanted to tell these family stories about my Amish and Mennonite ancestors in an accessible way—though I wasn’t able to resist some postmodern maneuvers, including the frequent interruptions of my own voice into the story whenever I ran short of information or the narrative started to bog down.

I found, though, that all my practice writing poems and academic prose did enable me to write pretty good sentences and string them together. There was some relief in discovering that narrative prose required a certain relaxation of the intense pressure that’s on every word and line in a poem. Sometimes in prose you just have to write something like “He got up and walked over to the window,” without worrying about whether it’s stated absolutely perfectly or whether you might wring a few words out of every sentence.  If prose is to be readable, in fact, it’s better if it’s not always pitched at a high level of lyrical density.

From the start of this project I was aware of two quite different ways of writing nonfiction. The nonfiction bestsellers tend to involve spectacular confessions of one sort or another, as we all know—usually involving sex, drugs, crime, and other sorts of transgression. But there’s a lot of fine writing that’s driven by subtler concerns, and by the quality of the writing itself.  I understand the attraction of the first, but partly because my own life has been relatively non-lurid, I’m much more drawn both to reading and writing the second. As a writer of nonfiction I’ve had little choice but to pursue the second course, unless I want to join some famous examples and just start making stuff up. It’s sort of tempting, because the first sort of writing is clearly much easier to sell. But so far I’ve held out.

There are excellent writers with extreme life material, of course, and I read some of them with pleasure, but generally when I want something over the top I gravitate to space operas rather than gritty accounts of life on the mean streets. This is just personal.

In writing about my father’s side of the family, I found very few skeletons, and so Community of Memory is really a book about cherishing the rediscovery of their particular, human stories, interwoven as they are with their times, their places and their Mennonite faith. My second nonfiction book, Scattering Point: The World in a Mennonite Eye, has some similar concerns, but even wider-ranging explorations of history and place.

CC: What keeps you hungry? What keeps you opening windows? Poet Dorianne Laux is renowned for her poem “Dust” which ends on the lines:

That’s how it is sometimes–
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you’re just too tired to open it.

JG: Those are great lines, though I can’t say I’ve had that exact experience . . . more often, for me, what I fear is sinking into the wearying but comfortable round of daily life, with all its easy distractions, and not even noticing God at the window. Or, worse, opening the window and looking around eagerly but finding “only” the world.

What should we do with this singular life? How astonishing is it that we’re here at all? Shouldn’t we go about in a state of constant amazement, laughing and praising and demanding justice and mercy for all?

I grew up going to church regularly, am still part of the Mennonite church, and teach at a Mennonite college. For better or worse, Christian discourse has been in the air I’ve breathed all my life. But I’m most drawn to the eccentric, singular, possibly heretical voices on the edges of things—Blake, Dickinson, Whitman. I get more nourishment from Rumi and Li-Young Lee than from the defenders of orthodoxy. If I believe anything for sure, it’s that God isn’t done with us yet, and that the work of poets is to listen for that voice that comes from within and outside ourselves.

CC: Literary writing has taken quite a hit lately. The publishing industry has come under some scrutiny, many quality writers are going the self-publishing route and some critics have even suggested that our age will be the “end of the book.” In the face of it all, though, writers throughout the nation continue to enroll in MFA programs. How do you see the value of the written word changing? Who are some young poets and writers you could see carrying the art into its next dimension?

JG: As usual, it’s the best of times and the worst of times. I was part of a fascinating panel at the 2011 AWP conference in D.C. on what makes a project into “a book.” The two “literary” writers on the panel (poets with academic jobs, one of them me) talked all about the magic and mystery of the process, about patience and pursuing visions of Art and Truth. The agent talked about what would sell in New York: nonfiction books with clear hooks, about tiger mothers and how the web is changing human nature and so forth. She was (I think) absolutely right in terms of what will sell, and people lined up afterwards to talk to her, and I found myself thinking that I had pretty much zero interest in any project of the sort she’d described.

But one very young guy came up to me, thanked me enthusiastically for my unrealistic talk about writing great poems and not caving in to commercial pressure, and sent me two of his own poems later.

It’s hardly a new thing that what sells is not what will endure—assuming that we endure as a dominant species. If Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville had taken the market as the arbiter of what they wrote, we wouldn’t have their best work. Of course, this is easier to say while I’m not trying to make a living by writing.

As for all those MFA students and programs, I think they’re wonderful as long as people go into them with a clear head. There can never be teaching jobs for everybody who comes out of them—that’s simple mathematics. I tell my students that they should see grad school as a chance to spend a few years doing the work they love and learning as much as they can, not as a path to ready employment—and to avoid piling up big debt if at all possible.

But I want to stand against those who argue that the writing scene would be better if somehow “we” kept the little people out of it. There’s a really snobbish and anti-democratic thread in American writing, an elitism that looks back longingly to the (partly imagined, partly real) day when a small circle of the privileged passed the honors and awards around, congratulated themselves on their own brilliance, and kept the hoi polloi where they belonged. Some of the elite magazines and presses still do their best to function in that way, but that’s probably inevitable; there’s just not room for everybody to read everything, especially when the reading audience for poets is composed largely of other poets.

Like every other poet I know, I wish I had more readers. But then I discover another grand book by someone new to me, and feel humbled and astonished that I’ve been able to take part in this grand and ongoing project of poetry at all. Part of what makes the descendants of those people nervous is knowing that things have passed out of there control—that their sons and daughters are beyond their command. Too bad.

The diminishing centrality of New York publishing and the emergence of so many regional presses and literary circles is an excellent development overall, I think, and so is the flowering of writing by all sorts of under-represented people. The web is obviously a great leveler as well—does anybody even know how many literary magazines there are any more? I keep discovering new ones that are publishing great writing. All right, most of it will be ephemeral, but that’s always been the case, and if a good poem finds even a few readers who are moved by it, that’s something.

The physical, paper book will play a smaller role in the reading people do, as handwritten manuscripts and papyrus scrolls have been mostly replaced by other technologies. How we read will no doubt change as the technology changes, but I don’t think reading and writing are in any danger of dying out.

CC: Lastly, you were recent included in Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets but what’s next for Jeff Gundy?

JG: Well, who knows? I’m working on several projects, as usual. One is a book of poems that’s currently titled Somewhere Near Defiance, after a little town not far from Bluffton. It got its name from a battle between Native Americans and soldiers led by General Anthony Wayne, aka “Mad Anthony,” and a fort he built there after his triumph. There’s a political strand in the book, along with a lot of lyrical attention to the natural and human worlds and what lies within and around them.

Another prose project is a venture into the intersection of poetry and theology, or what some people are calling “theopoetics.” For a long time I’ve been both fascinated with and troubled by the enormous discourse and practice built up around what we call “God,” and interested in approaches that lighten the burden of doctrines and systems and put more trust in image, narrative, and mystery.

And a third project comes out of my time in Salzburg, a beautiful and prosperous city, for centuries near the center of a mighty empire in what is now a small, obscure, yet apparently quite viable country on the other side of empire. It’s still a very Catholic city—they killed some Anabaptists there in the sixteenth century, and drove out the Protestants en masse in 1731—and yet in some ways it comes closer to creating the sort of “beloved community” that we dreamers envision than any place I’ve ever lived, without the burden of empire to drain off so much energy and treasure. I’m still sorting out the personal and political implications of that experience, and aiming to put together a manuscript exploring it in both poetry and prose.

This article was originally published by Cameron on Examiner.com.

Aug
05

Man Food

By | Good Men Project, MMA Nutrition

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All the talk of “Man Food” is just stereotypical nonsense. Click here to read Cameron’s reflections and meditations at the Good Men Project.

Here’s an excerpt:

“In Chiang Mai, Thailand, the McDonald’s is attached to the Imm Thapae, a hotel across the street from the historic Thapae Gate. The Gate was where monks and businessmen once traveled through to conduct meetings and trade. The old, blackened bricks stand strong, plants growing between their cracks and all; a symbolic monument to days long gone. Still, it’s the main entrance to what is called the “old city,” and as I sat looking out at it from inside of McDonald’s it provided the juxtaposition necessary to wax philosophic. In my peripheral was a plastic, life-sized Ronald McDonald – hands together sa-wa-dee-krup Thai style – there to greet incoming customers in all his simultaneously culturally crushing and embracing ways. This is to say that the McDonald’s is an easily recognizable place for people to meet before they go elsewhere. As I sat there waiting to be picked up by Ricky Tan, founder of Care Corner Orphanage, I couldn’t believe what came out of their public announcement system.”

Aug
05

Social Media or Social Medea?

By | Good Men Project

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It’s more than a pun. Cameron views the similarities between Euripedes’ play and our current world of “Likes” and “Tweets.” Click here to read the full article on the Good Men Project.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Jason of the Argonauts wanted the Golden Fleece so he could claim his inheritance to the throne—this meant he had to run all kinds of simple, everyday errands like plough a field with fire-breathing oxen and sow the teeth of dragons into the field (they didn’t have Wal-Mart at the time). The teeth grew into warriors that wanted to attack him. Likewise, what we want (more followers, more news, more entertainment) is perhaps even more dangerous than Jason’s little jaunt.

“You see, Dear Reader, I’ve been dying to write to you. Literally. And you’ve been dying while reading what I write. The act of sitting for hours at work or like we do to check our social media pages and emails—even if our posture is rockin’—is killing us. If you stand and hold your handheld device, great, but the looking down at it can lead to cramps and pinched nerves and spinal problems. If you’re standing and have good posture the screen’s million little unnoticeable flickers can be a detriment to your eyes. Being a poet is perhaps more dangerous than slaying dragons. But danger is cool in the male culture. Wait, so might being a man and a poet be cool? I don’t think that’ll fly with the people who think poetry is purposeless or with those who think male poets must be gay…”

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