~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Carolyn Hembree's Interview by Susan Swartwout

DPR: I think that most writers, and certainly those beginning their own serious foray into crafting poetic devices into surprising and impactful communications for an audience, struggle with creating unique expressions in a huge world of literary formulations. What do you teach your students about the quest for voice?

CH: For its spirit and wisdom, I direct my students to Rainer Maria Rilke's famous letter to Franz Xaver Kappus that states: "No one can advise you or help you—no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself." I remember finding and reading the letters in the stacks of the University of Arizona library the day my teacher Jane Miller recommended the collection. To more directly answer your question, I'm not convinced that there is an external voice—not a single voice at least—that the poet needs to locate. For my writing, it's more helpful to consider the proliferating voices within the poet—outside voice, inside voice, friend voice, neighbor voice, ancestor voice, poet voice, mother voice, lover voice. Though I have a weak education in theory, Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of polyphony gave me permission to think of a dialogic speech that includes a variety of registers and voices. Hélène Cixous's "Laugh of the Medusa" also resonated with me because I use my body and vocal instrument a lot when I work. Currently, I am teaching a deaf poet with a great "ear." So, I am learning from him to reconsider much of my go-to advice: "read aloud as you write," "we must hear the poem," and so on. There has to be a better, more inclusive way.

DPR: Setting is often difficult to render well in poetry or prose, avoiding the timeworn approach of “I remember back in 19-ought-six, I was sitting on the porch watching [insert object list here].” But you have a fluid, inclusive approach. In several spots in your book For Today, I admire how you take us with you on the journey through the neighborhood, passing familiar buildings and activity, as we watch all the shapes and colors go by on the theatre screen of the page. These flow-by scenes are beautifully constructed, yet I know that there is an element of careful choice in which objects to include and how to connect them. What do you consider when building such scenes?

CH: "The theatre screen of the page"—I love this metaphor for field composition. Because the poem is so visual, the white space of the page helped me think about pacing. As for the "timeworn approach" you mention—a kind of telegraphing as I understand—I think we all start out with just getting the damn thing down, something, anything. Among the best writing advice I've received was LSU Press Barataria Poetry series editor Ava Leavell Haymon's note to make my long poem feel like it contained everything but to make sure the music, energy, movement didn't get bogged down. Not a fancy line but one that took a lot of work was "Fruit trees rats strip every year (no huntress, our cat)." I went back and forth between "fruit tree," "lemon tree," or "lemon." "Lemon tree" particularizes in a way that draws attention, and while I like the casual feel of "lemon," it may call up the object a bit much. Ultimately, I chose to blur a bit with "fruit tree" as I guess I was pulling more for the rats and the cat in this instance. How many words can gleam in a line, and what needs to be dimmed or blurred a bit? Now, I'm not convinced I made the right choice, but it felt right. All this to say, "careful choice" is the only thing that distinguishes a more finished poem from a less finished one to my mind. I'm all for starting with the "timeworn," cliche, mental garbage, the mess, then slowing down to dwell in the work.

DPR: In For Today I especially love the steppin’ out strut of “Funk Hour Fantasia,” and I’m so happy that we can include it in this Delta Poetry Review feature. The poem plays with both images of being mesmerized by blue funk and a funky magic rhythm in the lines that is charged to “dis-spell” funk. Then the music turns to the gentler lyrics of a mother-daughter morning, full of sweet, tart tangles. Tell me about this relationship between funk and funky.

CH: Thank you for carrying "Funk Hour Fantasia" as part of this Delta Poetry Review feature. Characteristic of the poems in this collection, "Funk Hour Fantasia" collages song lyrics and narrative episodes. The way you describe the poles of funk, "blue funk and a funky magic rhythm," interests me as a poet and as a person in the world. Luckily, I live in a place where we express all the meanings of funk through public ceremony and ritual as well as spontaneous happenings, many of which are accompanied by music. In this poem, which treats the domestic and private, the Brides of Funkenstein's raucous "Disco to Go" and Beethoven's gender-bending Fidelio represent the two poles you describe—the high and the low. I also have a deep affection for radio, especially my local stations like WWOZ.

DPR: Tell us more about the ponies of South Derbigny in the lovely incantation, “August 29, 2005.”

CH: The summer before Hurricane Katrina, nonfiction writer Anne Gisleson and visual artist Brad Benischek founded Press Street, which has flourished and evolved over the past eighteen years. For the press's first publication, Intersection | New Orleans, they invited New Orleans writers and artists to create work in response to local intersections. So, in a kind of blind collaboration, one artist and one writer created work in response to the same street crossing. Unbeknownst to one another, the outstanding artist Usen Gandara and I were assigned South Derbigny Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. Before we finished our pieces, Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005, breaching the levees at several points, as the Army Corps of Engineers had not built the levee system to specifications, a failure which killed approximately 1400 people in this region. When I returned to New Orleans after the mandatory evacuation, I saw that the church (blighted before Katrina) had flooded along with the equipment in the play area, including a carousel. I drove past the ponies frequently; they remained for some years before the church was razed.

DPR: Our relationships with our fathers almost always include gifts from their own lives and loves that we carry with us—such as a particular music preference and playlists or books or emotional reactions (good or bad) or ecoskills—elements that shape our lives. The first section of For Today, the sonnet crown, relates music and poems you carry with you from your father. What behavioral epigenesis might you be channeling from your father, through you, to your daughter.

CH: Yes, the blank verse sonnet crown, “Some Measures” addresses the speaker's father. Of course, the speaker is me and not me, an artifice created to get closer to the core. In this poem, there's a lot of overlap between my experience and the speaker's. My father died suddenly when I was six months pregnant with my only child. I wrote a lot of the poem by speaking aloud to my late father. When she visited Tulane, Marie Howe told us that she tested the truth of her addresses to her dead brother in What the Living Do by considering how he might respond. Following her practice, my language, structure, and allusions served a single purpose: to bring my father back from the dead. A mentor as much as a father, my dad translated German poetry, read and critiqued my teenage juvenilia, and shared his musical tastes with me. To bring him back, I had to first make him listen, so the poem adheres to a traditional form; references lyrics from The Fugs' "Wide, Wide River," my dad's translation of Rilke's "Autumn," the Violent Femmes' "Blister in the Sun," and a poem my dad composed but never wrote. A very capable young writer, my child will determine what I have and haven't managed to pass on, for good and ill.

Carolyn Hembree's Poetry and Bio

Carolyn Hembree's Book Review