"Ars longa, vita brevis"

So this was my final paper for poetry class, an interview with myself:

First question, why bother?
Bother writing, or bother getting up in the morning. I’m not sure the first can be answered without referring to the latter. I can’t say writing poetry was something that I wanted to do up until the last couple years. Even now I tend to cringe saying that word: poetry. I always wrote stories, since I was a little kid, and have always found some sort of pleasure or at least temporary satisfaction in creating characters and situations or adapting the events of my life into something of interest. Poetry really came into its own, in my life, while I was at university studying Civil Engineering. I had written poems previously, as a teenager or whatever, but looking back they are vaguely embarrassing. Things you write at that age, no matter how genuine your intent, sound immature. They sound like they have a philosophical latency that requires another half decade of experience at the very least. At university, I found my time was consumed by mathematics, the application of scientific principles, et cetera. I didn’t have a great deal of free time to construct meaningful fictional stories. Poetry became this sort of release that I could indulge in on the margins of my notes. Five or ten lines, hopefully mirroring some of that efficiency that engineering convinced me was crucial for everything . . . .





So, not being a student of liberal arts until recently, would you consider yourself a sort of “outsider” to the literary world?
Not at all. I suppose my literary education has been a bit unconventional. Public education only really scratches the surface of literary studies. So back in high school, and this continued into my college years, I read everything I could get my hands on. While in class we were spending a half-semester on Beowulf I was reading the Beats, Sartre and Camus, Nietzche, Buddha, Henry Miller, Kafka, Hesse. I didn’t delve into poetry headlong the way I did other works, but I was deeply familiar with Ginsberg and Corso and Kerouac’s poetic works. I also tried to familiarize myself with some of the “classics”, Shakespeare and the like. I think I was very well-read and very deliberate in what I read over those years. I’m still very influenced by the work that I came across in my personal studies.

As far as poetic works, what other individual or movement would you say most influences you?
Poetically, I think I can sort of see of certain influences hold some reign over certain aspects of the poetry I write. For example, though I don’t think that my poetry mirrors Kerouac’s strongly I am an advocate of the sort of spontaneity that he emphasized. I used to try and practice that with fiction as well, but the results were not entirely satisfying. As far as the spiritual or cognitive elements that I am trying to provoke, I must say that I try to do what Kafka did. I think there’s this capacity in surrealism to better explain the real world. Or at least make it substantially more interesting.

More interesting in what way?
Well, the movement of surrealism, no matter what anyone else says, originates from the dreamtime. We’ve attached science and psychology and the crafts of various arts to it, but surrealism would be a non-starter, especially for the audience, if we didn’t all have some familiarity with the logic of dreams. What’s interesting about what Kafka did (and this feat was likewise accomplished by Oe and Barthelme), is that he was able to turn the logic of the dream, elements of the dreamtime, and the stunted architecture of dreams into a sort of universal image of our subconscious. He created a sort of mythological environment that played by the rules of dreams and thus indulged in this sort of secret logic that all of us sort of understand. I want to try and create the architecture of the same sort of mythology through the briefest glimpses.

Forget subject matter for a moment, as far as tone. You don’t seem to be afraid to use rhyming or alliteration, what is the motivation there?
I listened to a lot of hip-hop. Listening to hip-hop made me feel like poetry was still vital and was actually important to our culture. Poetry became something other than self-indulgent navel-gazing written by dead people. The power of hip-hop comes from several aspects, but to answer this question, listening to Aesop Rock or The Roots I came to understand the effectiveness of beauty in sound. Whatever experience one is trying to transmit to the audience, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t have a beautiful sound. To some extent the opposite is true. However, I think something that sounds beautiful strung together (and this is related to rhythm and rhyme and alliteration and all these other devices) has a much greater chance of burning a hole in a reader or listener’s mind.


When you say “self-indulgent navel-gazing written by dead people”, what exactly are you talking about?
I don’t mean to speak ill of the accomplishments of the proponents of this tradition. What I mean is that poetry became important to me when I realized that it could do something. That what is often considered the “best” poetry often, upon closer inspection, falls apart when you try to determine why its actually important. For example, Ezra Pound had wonderful thoughts on poetry and probably on life in general (I find his biography fascinating), and yet his poetry fails to either dance or make me want anything or imprint any experience on me. I don't even care to know why it fails in these things, it simply does. Contrarily, I would submit that I love William Blake. So who knows.


What is the importance of image, in poetry; or where do you think it falls in the priorities of a poem?
Image is crucial, in that in our understanding of how memory works and how emotive impulses are aroused, we have a strong bond to the visual. In photography, an art form that may have very well been dismissed early on, the power is in the image the photog obtains from the world around them. A powerful photography puts us in that instant and yet universalizes the instant; appeals to a common, or somewhat common, sensibility. Imagery in poetry can work in the same way, though because its textual it is perhaps more difficult to convey an image. Thus in poetry, the thrust isn't accuracy or framing or lighting the thrust is in the delicacy of the diction. There are particular words that strike a chord, much like the image of a child in Bangladesh with a bloated belly strikes us. And a poet has to focus on the essence of that image, to somehow convey what that image conveys in a line or two.

How can poetry stay relevant in our culture, in spite of technological advances that might push it to the margins?
As far as duking it out for a place against film or whatever, poetry doesn't need to “fight back”. It will remain relevant, and I would think perhaps increasingly more relevant, in impoverished nations. It will remain married to modern music as well. I think poetry is such a broad thing; when we don't try and convince ourselves that artistic culture falls into these neat little buckets it will remain relevant as long as we have something to say.