I was one of the last people to arrive for Wayne Miller’s morning presentation at last month’s South Dakota Festival of Books in Deadwood. He hadn’t started reading yet, and looking back, I’m glad I didn’t miss a minute of his presentation. His poems live well on the page, but as is so often the case, hearing the poet read his own work adds a dimension of emotion that otherwise does not resonate.

After his reading in Deadwood, Miller asked me if I knew where he could get a good breakfast in Deadwood. But being not so familiar with the town, I couldn’t give him any advice. Later, I overheard him telling another one of the festival poets how dreadful his hotel breakfast was. Sorry, Wayne. Deadwood’s just not a real breakfasty sort of place.

Had I read Miller’s “The Book of Props,” though, I would have tried much harder to make sure he got a decent meal. Anyway, Miller’s bio:

Wayne Miller is the author of two collections of poems, The Book of Props (Milkweed, 2009) and Only the Senses Sleep (New Issues, 2006), which received the William Rockhill Nelson Award. He is also translator of Moikom Zeqo’s I Don’t Believe in Ghosts (BOA Editions, 2007) and editor (with Kevin Prufer and 22 regional editors) of New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008). The recipient of the George Bogin Award, the Lucille Medwick Award (in 2004, 2005, 2007, and 2009), and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, as well as a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and the Bess Hokin Prize from the Poetry Foundation, Miller lives in Kansas City and teaches as the University of Central Missouri, where he edits Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.

AFTER LONG BUSYNESS: Who do you consider to be the biggest influences on your poetry?

WAYNE MILLER: Like most writers, I’m pretty much continually reading, and what I read affects what I write. Which is to say that, at different moments in my writing life, different poets have been important to me.

The first poet whose work I really fell in love with—back in what I believe was my sophomore year of college—was James Wright. I’d read poetry before; in fact, I’d had an excellent high school teacher in Cincinnati who’d brought contemporary poetry into the classroom, and I owned a copy of Leaves of Grass. My dad was an English professor, and I remember flipping around in his collected William Carlos Williams when I visited him.

But James Wright opened up doors for me. He was writing about Ohio, where I was from, in ways that made the Midwestern landscape feel charged with poetic possibility. And his work was deeply affected by contact with the works of non-American poets such as Lorca, Vallejo, Rilke and Trakl—something that, ironically, allowed him to write more directly and effectively about the American landscape.

Partially inspired by Wright, and aided by the fact that I attended Oberlin College, where all the poetry professors were also translators, I found myself very early on reading non-English language poets in translation—and it was then that I first discovered Rainer Maria Rilke, whose work (though I still can only read it in translation) has been perhaps the most enduringly important to me of any poet’s.

The other poet I go back to more than any other is Wallace Stevens, whose sense of music and rhythm is extraordinary and who, like Rilke, is interested in (among other things) the phenomenological complications of our experience of the physical world.

At this point, I feel compelled to list off the names of all the other poets I admire—whose work I go back to at least semi-regularly. But rather than miss folks and feel guilty later, perhaps I should end my answer there.

ALB: How much revision do your poems usually go through?

WM: I know some poets whose first drafts emerge pretty close to the poems’ finished versions, but I’m definitely not one of them. When my first book, Only the Senses Sleep, came out, a student of mine asked how much I’d had to revise the poems in it, so I went back through my drafts and looked at when the poems began, when I published them in magazines, and when they arrived at their final, in-the-book versions (which sometimes included significant revision after magazine publication). There wasn’t one poem in the book I’d worked on for less than six months—and many of them I’d worked on for several years.

Of course, that was also my first book. In the room of every new poem, I find myself stumbling around in the dark, but in those early poems the rooms were often pitch black. I’m a more experienced poet now, and though I still do quite a lot of revision, it’s somewhat more rare that my poems need the truly radical revisions that my earlier poems often did. These days I tend to spend several months off-and-on-again revising.

ALB: Your most recent collection, “The Book of Props,” has a sequence of 23 poems called “What the Night Says to the Empty Boat (Notes for a Film in Verse),” which sketches out a screenplay for a film. How did you arrive at the idea of using a screenplay as a device to frame your poems?

WM: “What Night Says to the Empty Boat” began with a couple drafty lyric poems that were failing because they were too sentimental and/or could too easily be read as autobiographical. In each of them, I found myself wanting to distance the speaker from the emotional content, so I switched from first to third person. But then I found that a random “he” in a poem didn’t seem particularly distanced—a reader could quite easily still read that “he” as me. So I switched one of the poems to “she.”

At that point, I thought, hmm, what if those “he’s” and that “she” know each other; in other words, what if they’re characters.

Then I decided that if pronouns without antecedents are annoying in prose, they’re probably at least as annoying in poetry (T.S Eliot notwithstanding), so I gave them names—based loosely on three particular people I knew.

I’d also, at the time, been trying (miserably) to write some fiction, and I think the resulting interest in narrative and character propelled my desire to allow a background storyline to accrue across these poems. I liked the visual, image-based nature of film, but I didn’t want to have a full “film in verse,” because that would require me to construct a complete narrative, and I was much more interested in the poems being lyrics. So “notes for a film” seemed to make sense—it further distanced those early failing poems and, in the process, added a fourth character—the filmmaker talking to himself about the film he envisions making.

At this point I think I had four or five poems. Then summer hit and I moved back to Houston to live with my girlfriend, who’d been there finishing up school while I’d been in Missouri in my first year of teaching.

That summer, when she left for work each day I found myself alone in her cramped apartment, with my laptop, little money and nothing to do—in a kind of limbo between my life in Missouri and my former life in Houston. Writing into a developing sequence seemed a perfectly good way to spend my time—which meant I gave myself more leeway to “play around” than I otherwise might have. And the experience of being reunited with my girlfriend after a year apart colored the overall themes and content of the sequence. In my mind, it’s all really one big love poem.

ALB: I assume that, as an editor of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, you spend a good amount of time reading poetry by a wide range of poets. How is the state of the art these days?

WM: Every six months, it seems, someone or other is decrying some aspect of the state of contemporary poetry—whether it’s John Barr, Ron Silliman, or someone in between. From my Stylite’s perch atop the Pleiades slush pile, however, the state of poetry looks pretty good; the best work showing up in our mailbox is consistently varied and strong.

There was a time in the mid-1980s when what seemed to matter most about much of the poetry that was being published was that it was TRUE—that an uncle really had been mean to the poet, or that the poet’s grandmother really had been dying, or that the poet really did feel bad about failing as a parent, or that the poet really had fought off cancer. Form seemed less important than content, in other words, and content seemed primarily ad misericordium.

In the mid-1990s, a lot of interesting poets started resisting that baldly autobiographical impulse, and many of the poetic strains getting press these days are various versions of that pushback against post-confessionalism. For example, we have Steven Burt’s injection of confessionalism with aspects of Language poetics (“elliptical” poetry), a return to the Objectivists (what Burt calls the “new thing”) and other Modernists, a renewed interest in the New York School poets, neoformalism, a focus on personas and dramatic monologues (e.g., Maurice Manning and my colleague Kevin Prufer), a turn toward European surrealism and/or classicism, etc.

In my mind, all these diverse approaches to keeping form and content, technique and raw emotion, in balance are good for the art. And Pleiades has pretty consistently received—and enjoyed receiving—the work of many good poets mining these various aesthetic veins.

Adrian M. (Mike) Forrette is a poet and essayist who lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota. His poetry collection,“Pears Tell the Apples,” was published by De Danann Press.

AFTER LONG BUSYNESS: What is it that drives you to write poetry?

ADRIAN M. FORRETTE: You ask a provocative and difficult question, “What drives me to write poetry?” I will attempt to answer the question, but am certain that in the end I will fail because in some ways, it seems to me, that the process of writing, itself, is an attempt to answer that very question re-phrased: “What is it that makes one uniquely human?”

Although fairly popular in school and a fairly good student, a seemingly watershed moment, placed me irrevocably in the position of being an “outsider.” But I imagine that most artists and writers, by default, sooner or later, arrive at a similar estimation of themselves.
At any rate, from that day forward, I’ve kept my dues current, and remain a member in good standing.

I also learned to think for myself at an early age. I have always read and encouraged my mind to go where it needed to go. Of course, the price of all of that is “loneliness” and alienation of a kind. I think my first impulses to write poetry were psychoanalytical in nature, you know my own well designed self-help program … an attempt to deal with sadness and injustice, an attempt to explain myself to myself and the world at large.

Inevitably, a person matures, and somewhere along the line, I internalized the realization that we are all in this “soup” together, and poetry became a way to get at the essence of things. In this sense it closely parallels the quest of science, for which I have always had a passion. (Probably, if I had it to do all over again, I would become a theoretical physicist.)

As you are aware from the writing of your own beautiful poems, if a person can divorce the ego from the writing process, and permit the poem a chance to breathe and live on its own, then something quite miraculous and mysterious occurs. Perhaps, we are always trying to breathe life into a man made of clay … I don’t know. (Or, always trying to return a “rib.” Lord, Eric, I am on shaky ground here.) But at its best, the art of poetry is transcendent and sublime … and once a person experiences that kind of phenomenon, he or she wants to try it again.

Most of my poetry and prose these days is a synthesis of ideas and feelings, experiences, some of them quite disparate. Perhaps, I’ve got a lyric poem or two left in me; we’ll see.

ALB: In the first line of your poem “Please My Country, Do Not Mow the Lawn Today,” you mention Walt Whitman. The poem certainly has a Whitmanesque flavor. Do you consider him to be an influence on your poetry? Who else is?

AF: Eric, Walt Whitman is absolutely an influence. Even if one wanted, I don’t really think an American poet is able to escape Whitman’s influence, for the simple reason that as a fait accompli Leaves of Grass profoundly expresses a quintessential and egalitarian point of view that defines, in my opinion, what is best about America. What poet doesn’t want to be associated with what is the “best in all of us.” What American poet in their right mind would adopt the stance, “Don’t I write well, that makes me just a little better than you.”

Pablo Neruda is a great influence. When I was young, I couldn’t fully envision the nexus of poetry and politics. In the best of worlds, politics and art address the frailty and beauty of the human condition, simultaneously. Neruda was both a consummate poet and politician, and he proved that the two art forms were one and the same, again and again.

When Neruda was campaigning in the Copper mining districts, illiterate miners would recite his poems back to him, as a sign of respect. They loved Neruda the senator who represented them tirelessly in Congress and they loved, Pablo Neruda, the poet, who expressed his love for them in his poetry.

ALB: What are your two favorite poems and why?

AF: Hmmm … I have many favorites. One very favorite poem, in part for sentimental reasons, is Richard Hugo’s “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg.”

If ever there were an argument to be made that poetry is an oral art form, it is probably a Richard Hugo poem; in particular, “Degrees of Gray …” epitomizes this stance. If a person first reads one of Hugo’s poems, and then hears the poet reading the same poem … it’s a little like reading about polar bears, and then seeing one for the first time.

Oh, and I love Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Duino Elegies.” Here’s a couple of lines from “The First Elegy” (I highly recommend the Stephen Mitchell translation): “Yes—the springtimes needed you. Often a star/ was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you/ out of the distant past, or as you walked/ under an open window, a violin/ yielded itself to your hearing. …”

Isn’t that quite an observation: “Yes—the springtimes needed you.” You know, secretly, I have always believed that the oceans and mountains loved me, the springtimes of the world, so to speak. I just thought there was something wrong with me to believe such a thing. Then, to have a great poet like Rilke render such an insight poetically … how incredibly life-saving, and life-affirming. And, that’s just two lines from a series of incredible poems.

Jim Reese

Jim Reese is an assistant professor of English and the director of the Great Plains Writers’ Tour at Mount Marty College in Yankton, S.D. He is also editor of “Paddlefish.”

His most recent collection of poetry is These Trespasses (Backwaters Press, 2005, 2006), which includes Pushcart Prize nominated poems.

His writing has appeared in New York Quarterly, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, Paterson Literary Review, South Dakota Review, New Delta Review and elsewhere. He is the 2008 National Endowment for the Art’s Writer-in-Residence at the Yankton Federal Prison Camp.

Patrick Hicks is Writer-in-Residence at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, S.D. He is a dual citizen of Ireland and the United States, a native of Stillwater, Minn., who attended Saint John’s University. His book, Finding the Gossamer, reveals both worldliness and intimacy, sometimes in the same poem.

He has taught in Spain and Germany, and his essays, poetry and fiction have appeared in more than 75 journals, including Ploughshares, The Progressive, Cimarron Review, Indiana Review, Nimrod, Chelsea, Rattle,  Poet Lore, Poetry East, South Dakota Review, Briar Cliff Review, The Hollins Critic, The National Catholic Reporter and Studies. He has been nominated three times for The Pushcart Prize, and he is the author of chapbooks Traveling Through History (Moon Pie Press, 2005), Draglines (Lone Willow Press, 2006) and The Kiss that Saved My Life (Red Dragonfly Press, 2007).

After Long Busyness: The poems in Finding the Gossamer cover a lot of ground geographically, chronologically and personally. Was it hard to get such a diverse group of poems to “get along”?

Patrick Hicks: In a word: “yes”. Some of these poems were written 15 years ago when I was a completely different person so it was hard to find a unifying thread. I was trying to find a metaphorical link to hold all these diverse poems and, as I kept thinking about how to keep them stable between the covers of a book, the concept of a web came to me—how we and our lives are interconnected, that sort of thing. Once I had that, the four subchapters of “Finding the Gossamer” came quickly. It’s no wonder that many ancient forms of mythology have the spider as the originator of the universe. Webs and spinning stories that stick with us go together naturally, I think.

ALB: “Travelling with My Father” is a poem with three sections covering trips dated between 1995 and 1999. Did those sections start out as separate poems that you strung together after the fact, or were they intended to be a single poem from their inception?

PH: They began as separate poems. In fact, I wrote the first one in Germany (maybe even in Berlin, I can’t remember) when my father came to visit me. It seemed like a good idea a few years later to write another poem about our trip to Dublin together and, as I looked at these two poems, it seemed that a third would round off this “father/son trilogy” nicely. So, when we visited the North Shore of Minnesota, I was looking for a poem from that experience. I think all of them hang together nicely and, to my surprise, a number of people have been moved by it. Maybe this has happened because I’ve tapped into the father/son bond in a way that invites others to join my own father and I as we travel around? Many readers project their own father into that poem, which I think is just wonderful.

ALB: The concept in “Lipstick Traces” intrigues me: “What if our parents had never met?” How did that idea come about?

PH: My mother is from Northern Ireland and the fact that she met my American father is…well…the odds are just stupidly high they would meet at all. The window of opportunity for them to come together in Montreal was so slender—they should have walked right past each other—but fortunately for me that’s not what happened. They met, they fell in love, they got married, they had me. But it just as easily could have gone the other way, which would mean the life behind this very sentence wouldn’t be here. That’s a humbling thought.

Plus, when I consider that my wife is English and that we met on a doorstep in Brighton, England, on fine day in July…that equally shouldn’t have happened. The life that I have with her now came so close to not existing. It’s like this for all of us though. And when you consider our grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great whatevers, it gets even more ridiculous that any of us are here as we are today. Forget about winning the lottery. We already have. For each of us to exist as we do, the odds are just breathtakingly enormous. Whenever I have a bad day–when things don’t go as I want them to–I sometimes think of this. I’m here. I’m breathing. I’m alive. It just as easily could have gone the other way.

ALB: What advice do you have for emerging poets trying to get a collection published?

PH: Hard work and luck go hand-in-hand. Aside from getting individual poems in the manuscript published in nationally recognized literary journals, it’s good to have a chapbook or two under your belt. Enter poetry contests as well. Even if you don’t win first place, your manuscript may be considered for publication. Know the business and start reading your work in public. There’s no magic formula though. Write something every day, and mail something out for publication every day. If you do this you’re likely to find success.

A while back, I was talking with South Dakota poet laureate David Allan Evans at a writers’ conference at which he had just coached the participants in writing haiku and senryu. He recommended that I interview a poet named Chad Lee Robinson for the blog. So I did.

Robinson was born and raised in Pierre. He holds a degree in English from South Dakota State University. His haiku, senryu and tanka have appeared in over thirty print and online journals, including Acorn, Bottle Rockets, The Heron’s Nest, Frogpond, Modern Haiku, and Mayfly, and in countries such as Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Romania, the UK and the USA. His work has also appeared in a number of anthologies, including Red Moon Press’ annual Red Moon Anthology each year for the last four years, and most notably in Baseball Haiku: The Best Haiku Ever Written About the Game (W.W. Norton, 2007). He is a member of the Haiku Society of America, the Haiku Poets of Northern California, the Tanka Society of America, and the Skipping Stones Haiku Group. Chad has also been the Plains & Mountains Regional Coordinator for the Haiku Society of America since 2006. He currently lives in Pierre with his wife, and helps his dad run a small grocery/catering business.

After Long Busyness: How did you find your way into haiku?

Chad Lee Robinson: All it took was one haiku, and I was hooked.

The first haiku I ever read was in the Fall of 2002 in a creative writing class at SDSU. The professor, South Dakota Poet Laureate David Allan Evans, put the following haiku on the chalkboard:

a crow

settled on a bare branch

autumn evening

Written in about 1680 by Basho, Japan’s first and most famous haiku master, this haiku contains images not unfamiliar to me, but presents them in a new way. It was a revelation to me that this was poetry. I was immediatley drawn to its smallness, to its brevity, to its clear and uncluttered images, and to its impact. After class I went straight to the campus library and checked out every book I could find about haiku. I had to write some haiku as an assignment for class, and I’ve been writing them ever since.

ALB: The Rapid City Journal recently sponsored a haiku challenge, soliciting haiku from readers, and received over 200 responses. What is it about haiku that resonates with people?

CLR: There are so many reasons, and each person’s is probably different. Some might say they like haiku because they don’t like reading longer poetry. Others might say it keeps them focused on their surroundings, on the small details of daily life. For some it may be more spiritual, and for others more for the fun of it. The list goes on and on.

ALB: What is the key to writing a good haiku?

CLR: I don’t know if there is a “key” to writing a good haiku. At the risk of sounding like a text book, here are a number of elements found in successful haiku:

A) immediacy – haiku should be written in the present tense;

B) common language and natural syntax;

C) literal imagery – images should be sharp and clear and should make the reader use one or more of the senses;

D) conciseness – most haiku are written in less than 17 syllables; adding words to reach a certain syllable count is not advised;

E) a sense of season – this can be done by either naming the season (spring, summer, fall, winter) or by using an image that evokes a certain season (ie, pumpkins = autumn);

F) suggestion – readers of haiku don’t want to see the whole cow; show them the cow’s lips or the cow’s udders; also choose words that make sense within the context of the poem but that will suggest more than one interpretation;

G) juxtaposition of images – most haiku have 2-3 images in them; the images you choose for your haiku should add depth to one another and create layers of meaning; the images shouldn’t be thrown together at random;

H) sense of mood – don’t tell the reader how to feel, let the images do the talking.

This is probably far more technical than I need to be. One thing I’ve found to be true about haiku is that haiku are easy to write but they’re hard to write well. Whether you’re writing haiku to publish or just for fun, you should always write about things that mean something to you.

ALB: Name some of the best publications/websites for readers and writers of haiku.

CLR: Keep in mind: what’s listed below barely scratches the surface of what’s available on the internet and in print.

Here are some websites that should provide a way into haiku on the internet without having to sift through the garbage to get to the good stuff:

www.hsa-haiku.org is the Haiku Society of America; publishes Frogpond, one of the most well-known English-language haiku journals.

www.modernhaiku.org is the website for Modern Haiku, arguably the most prestigious journal in which to have a haiku published.

www.geocities.com/bottlerockets_99 is the website for bottle rockets. A huge success story, this is the most Zen-flavored and fun haiku journal out there. Currently celebrating its 10th anniversary.

www.brooksbookshaiku.com is home to Brooks Books, a publisher of haiku books as well as Mayfly, a small but powerful little journal that showcases the individual haiku at its best.

http://home.earthlink.net/~missias/Acorn.html is home to Acorn: A Journal of Contemporary Haiku. Another top haiku journal that’s also celebrating is 10th anniversary.

http://www.theheronsnest.com is home to The Heron’s Nest, a quarterly online journal and print annual. Another one that’s celebrating its 10th anniversary. Features a 5-member editorial board. One of the best haiku journals on the market.

http://www.simplyhaiku.com The largest online only haiku journal, Simply Haiku publishes a range of Japanese-style verse such as haiku, senryu, tanka, haibun and many more. Well worth a thorough read.

There are a number (too numerous to mention here) of great haiku collections by individual authors as well as anthologies out there. Here are some haiku anthologies that proved to be helpful to me in getting started as well as ones I go back to again and again:

The Haiku Anthology, 3rd edition, edited by Cor van den Heuvel (Norton, 1999)

The New Haiku, edited by John Barlow and Martin Lucas (Snapshot Press, 2003)

Haiku Moment, edited by Bruce Ross (Tuttle, 1993)

The Haiku Handbook, edited and complied by William J. Higginson with Penny Harter (Kodansha, 1985)

Haiku World: An International Poetry Almanac, edited and compiled by William J. Higginson (Kodansha, 1996)

Haiku: A Poet’s Guide, by Lee Gurga (Modern Haiku Press, 2003)

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Andy Thorstenson lives in Hot Springs, SD, with his wife and two children. He was born in Vermillion and began writing poetry in college.

I have gotten to know him through the Write Now! Writers Conference, which was held in Hot Springs in March. He was one of the event’s organizers and, being familiar with this blog, invited me to give a presentation about how writers can use blogs, social networking sites and other online venues to get their work out into the world.

Andy’s book of poetry, “crossing the 100th meridian,” came out last year. It is imbued with a definite sense of place attributable to the author’s travels in exotic locales around the world. Andy reveals a close connection to the landscape through his astute observation and keen interpretation of the surroundings.

After Long Busyness: The first time I read “crossing the 100th meridian,” I was struck by how connected the poems are to the natural landscape. When a poem has a person in it, he or she has a small role. Was it a conscious choice to keep people out of your poems?

Andy Thorstenson: The book itself was intended to be a collection drawn primarily from a sense of place, beginning with the title. So I attempted to make landscapes and natural events central to the inspiration in these poems. In so many instances, I find the inspiration for poetry comes not from human elements but in natural occurrences. This is not so much a conscious choice but reflects where I am most attuned and where my descriptive skills reside.

Oftentimes the person in the poem is me because I write primarily from personal experience. I have been fortunate to visit fantastic places and witness phenomenal events, the result being poetry highlighting the grace, beauty, and wisdom of nature with me as the astonished chronicler.

ALB: At times, you have a somewhat technical/scientific vocabulary in your poetry. I’m thinking of lines like: “the upper mandible adorned with/a reptilian protrusion,” from “pelicans.” Where do word choices like that come from?

AT: Some words come straight out of field guides or technical references for plants, animals, or geology. Many of these words have Greek and Latin roots and have typically been limited to use in science. But they have such good sounds and can often be deduced from context or their relations to other more common words. I hope that they don’t carry along their academic baggage but instead give readers or listeners a sense of fine, descriptive detail. Poetry is the place to expand the boundaries of language and, in doing so, expand the opportunities to imagine the extraordinary.

Certainly I am guilty of using adjectives from science as descriptors for nontechnical subjects. “Tannic” for instance, is usually used to describe an acid, but that should not preclude the term from being used as a color to describe “turbid tannic bubbles.”

In some ways, my hope in writing is to create readers who will take the message to observe more critically and to consider thoughtfully the words they use. To discard mundane figures of speech and reconsider preconceived or cliché descriptors. Finding an unusual usage of a word by making a verb of patina, an adjective of flora, or an adverb of rhythm makes words unusual but still understandable. Taking the common word “unraveled” and unnegating it makes it “raveled.” This causes a reader to pause and decipher its meaning.

ALB: When I have heard you read your poems, they come to life, revealing a dimension that’s not apparent on the page. How much do you consider the aural impact of your poetry when you write?

AT: The impact of crisp words, sounds that play with adjoining sounds, and phrases that increase the tempo of spoken words are critical to poetry. Cadence, inflection, and tempo add immensely to a poetic work. I don’t have a completed poem until I am satisfied with the way it sounds aloud.

Reading my work aloud is an integral part of the writing and particularly the editing process. New words emerge in this process, content becomes clear, and syntax carries the piece to its natural conclusion. I want the spoken poem to underscore the emotional root of its meaning. The literal content of a poem can perhaps be best understood from the printed page, but its essence can be best felt from the spoken word.

A friend heard an early version of the orchid show and laughed upon hearing the phrase “a mate for pollinate” — this in a poem where rhyme is virtually absent. That one small laugh opened an amazing door for me to explore the possibilities of using sound to deliver more than the words alone are capable.

Another aspect of spoken word is the theatrical part, the performance. Compare the printed sheet music of any inspirational song with a live performance of that same piece and that should apply to the printed page versus a poem performed aloud. The author has an entirely new set of tools to deliver the content of a poem. Increase the tempo for drama, highlight the interplay of sounds for humor, emphasize the critical words to enhance their impact and poetry becomes a living creation.

And here’s a poem from Andy, reprinted with his permission:

Pelicans

Who could expect them to be so primeval,

their eyes close-set and

rimmed in a striking vibrant yellow,

their bills garish orange.

the upper mandible adorned with

a reptilian protrusion

that would be the envy of any

jurassic pterosaur flashing for a mate

designed undoubtedly at the dawn of flight

flying like tankers on

broad wings with bulky bodies

slow, level and steady

on the water so swanwhite and graceful

as they are doubled in reflection

on the windrippled mirror of the lake

seven of them,

bowing in near-unison,

heads, long necks and beaks submerge and

arise to toss back some equally ancient fish

quivering in the orange folds

of their pouchy throats

as it passes.

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For the first in what I hope becomes a series of inteviews with poets, I talked with David Allan Evans, the poet laureate of South Dakota since 2002.

He has lived in Brookings, S.D., since 1968, where he was a professor of English and Writer in Residence at South Dakota State University until his retirement this spring. He is the author of five books of poetry and the author or editor of seven other books.

Born in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1940, Evans went to college on a football scholarship, and by the time he graduated, he was writing poems and short stories. He has degrees from Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, the University of Iowa, and the University of Arkansas, where he got his MFA in creative writing.  

After Long Busyness: Let me start with a rather broad question. How is poetry vital in American life today?  

David Allan Evans: That’s quite a question. Without getting too far into American life as such, I would say that poetry, as is true of any art, has its uses to communities as well as nations. Mainly–and let me qualify this further by saying that I don’t think poets have this in mind when they make poems necessarily; that is, I’m talking about effects and results more than causes and motives–poetry is something that, in the words of a well-known but underrated American poet who died recently, Richard Eberhart, “can make us bright.” In other words, it can at least slow by some degree the corruption we suffer when we aren’t aware of what is going on around us. Poets show us things clearly, they describe and tell stories with words and phrases that, when we pay attention, make us more awake and aware than we’d be if we hadn’t read them or heard them spoken aloud (spoken words, obviously, are tens of thousand of years older than written words, which have been around for a mere eye-blink of human time on the earth). The first poets must’ve been persons with unusual verbal ability who could describe and narrate so well that others around them were made more aware of what was going on in a dangerous world they all lived in–just like the cave painters doing those wonderful etchings of animals in motion, perhaps aimed at young hunters who had to know the dangers of hunting. Of course there have always been clever persons who could use words so effectively that they could make us buy damned near anything! It’s the same talent, the same impulse, I think. It’s a word talent.  

I like Barry Lopez’ phrase when he refers to the traditional Eskimos’ habit, after they had killed a polar bear, to propitiate the kill with gifts: “technique of awareness.” Poems, to me, are techniques of awareness. All art is made up of techniques of awareness. Maybe art began this way, who knows? But people do pay attention to those who can use words effectively. or who can represent reality with visual images, etc.    

I don’t think poetry can make a huge difference in American political movements. The great Irish poet W.B. Yeats said in his poem, “On Being Asked for a War Poem,” “We have no gift to set a statesman right.” In the same poem he implies that a poet can only hope to “please/ a young girl in the indolence of her youth,/ or an old man upon a winter’s night.”  I agree. Of course words CAN and DO have power, as Dylan Thomas said: “The hand that signed the paper felled a city.” But I don’t think that poetry, per se, has a lot of power to change things. It does have more power in other countries, evidently. The ancient Chinese emperors were poets, a lot of them anyway. They had to be poets in order to pass the test that gave them political office in the first place. I wonder how much their poetic gifts affected their power to govern, to influence others. Mao, the first great communist leader, was also a poet, and he took poetry seriously believed in poetry’s power to influence people. But power, as he said, famously, “comes out of the barrel of a gun.”  

9/11, the death of Diana in England–these events brought forth all kinds of poems, poetry websites, books of poems expressing anger, bereavement, and so on. There’s a human instinct to reflect verbally on public and private things that shake us.

 ALB: You recently read at the South Dakota Festival of Books in Deadwood. How is poetry doing here in South Dakota? Who are the poets in the state or region worth mentioning? 

DAE: How is poetry doing in South Dakota? Lots of things are happening. The South Dakota Poetry Society is alive and well, taking on new members, having all kinds of contests in schools, including at the college level, and with adults. They helped sponsor me to attend the third gathering of state poet laureates this past summer, in Indianapolis.  

There are poetry slams in Sioux Falls, Vermillion, and Brookings and I’m sure elsewhere in the state. In Sioux Falls, poets took part in the annual Jazz and Blues Fest, for the third year in a row. In Sioux Falls there are regular readings at the Horse Barn and at Michelle’s, a restaurant downtown. Jim Reese, a poet and professor at Mount Marty in Yankton, started up a magazine called PADDLEFISH, which publishes poetry and prose, and started up a reading serious as well, at the college. The reading series is becoming quite popular, with a good-sized audience. There’s lots of poetry going on in Vermillion, with annual slams and writing contests, and even a new magazine.

I should also mention Lee Ann Roripaugh at the university there; she’s published several books of poems and won awards for her poetry. Her father was recently the poet laureate of Wyoming. I’ll mention the names of a few of the poets in the state (beyond those listed above) whose work I’m familiar with, but of course there are lots more than are on my list: Linda Hasselstrom, Kevin Woster, Eric Lochridge and Bruce Roseland in West River; Charlles Luden, Janice Mikesel, Patrick Hicks, Ruth Johnson, Rosemary Moeller, Leo Dangel, Darla Bielfeldt, Mary O’Connor and Carlee Swann in East River. As I said, there are plenty more poets around the state; these are just a few. And I’m more familiar with poets on the east side of the river, where I live.  

Poets in the region? I don’t know how big a circle to draw, but here are a few: Ted Kooser, Bill Kloefkorn, and Greg Kuzma in Nebraska; Jim Heynen, Robert Hedin and many, many more in Minnesota; Robert Dana, Marvin Bell and many, many more in Iowa. We’re surrounded by hundreds of fine poets all over the Heartland. Take a look at the Heartland books edited by Lucien Stryk if you want to get a sense of the richness of Midwestern American poetry.  

ALB: What advice do you have for aspiring poets, as far as getting published, getting recognized and otherwise developing a career in poetry, if there is such a thing?  

DAE: My advice for aspiring poets: The most important thing is to work very hard at your writing. I have always said that it takes about a decade to be really proficient at something, and that’s certainly true with any kind of writing.  Another thing connected with the first point: Be appreciative of any kind of help you can get from fellow poets and especially experienced poets, those who have been around the block a few times. You can learn a lot from persons who are really good at what you want to be good at. Never forget that. Now as an aspiring poet, you get sort of silent advice and pointers by—guess what? —reading a lot of poetry. Somebody asked me recently why I write, and I said that I began to write in the first place because I wanted to be able to write as well as those poets whose works I admired in the ‘50s especially: Eberhart, Nemerov, Whittemore, Shapiro, Larkin and so on. I looked at those poems and said to myself: “Man, if I could do that with words!” And of course, I’m like any artist or writer: I want to produce something so damned good that a whole lot of people won’t be able to forget it.  Also, you’ll find yourself writing poems like the poems you admire. That’s okay. You’ll have to do that in order to some day get to your own way with words. As I said, it takes a while. Tons of dirt for every nugget you find, James Dickey used to say.

And never forget that you’re not a writer as much as a reviser. All writing is revision. Re-seeing, re-doing, checking for accuracy, etc. When you err, make sure you err on the side of too much work rather than too little … I’m beginning to sound like a professor again…  One way to get help early in one’s career is to get around to workshops and conferences where poets gather and read and talk. I read Bob Dylan’s first volume of his autobiography recently and was struck by how eager and ambitious he was early in his career. He hung around the best musicians and singers, young and old, mostly in New York City because that’s where they hung out and performed, and befriended as many as he could. He was extremely gregarious. Now some poets and writers are more gregarious than others. It comes naturally to some people (never has come naturally to me, by the way, since I’m pretty inner-directed). But it’s good to get around and meet people, find out whose publishing what: magazines, presses, etc.

You learn this—it doesn’t just happen by osmosis. “I happened to have met a fellow who knew a fellow who” … you know how that story goes … and it all helped me in getting my first book of poems published back in the ’70s.  I’ll put it this way. Eventually you realize that there are two main things involved in being an artist. First, you produce the art (or poetry). Second, you find a market for it, somehow—or else. Some people are excellent at doing the first part and lousy at the second part. Or vice versa. Selling your stuff to others is a talent in itself. Shakespeare, of course, had both talents in perfect balance, and he even ended up rich! But an aspiring poet must learn the marketing aspect. You want to be good, sure, but you also want people to read your stuff.

Don’t neglect the second part. Be pro-active: get readings, go to readings, exchange readings with others, and so on. Reciprocity is always a good thing.  It all helps. And there’s another consideration, a sort of downside to what I just said: Every aspiring poet should know that he or she won’t get lot of help from other poets, generally. In other words, like any endeavor, writing and publishing are competitive endeavors. The great big invisible elephant always in any room you happen to be sitting or standing in is competition, status. You don’t have to read Darwin to find that out. Just go to a Little League game some time and watch the kids and especially their parents … We’re all wanting to be published, all wanting attention. After all, being an artist means to be a person who really believes his or her work is, if not the best, damned good and should be read widely by thousands of people.

That brutally honest writer, George Orwell, was right in his well-known essay, “Why I Write”: one of the strongest motivations to be a writer is “sheer egoism.” And in our own time, Joan Didion seconded Orwell in her essay, also called “Why I Write” (admitting that she stole the title from Orwell because she agreed with so much in it): “In many ways, writing is the act of saying ‘I,’ of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying ‘listen to me, see it my way, change your mind ‘ . . . There’s no getting around the fact that setting words to paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.” So, realize that you have to go on your own steam as a writer, pretty much, just as in anything you do in life.  Also, I would say to the young American writer: appreciate the fact that you live in a country where you can pretty much say what you want to say. In a recent Atlantic Monthly, a number of writers, philosophers, scientists, etc. were asked to say something about “The American Idea.” I really like what John Updike wrote: “The American idea, as I understand it, is to trust people to know their own minds and to act in their own enlightened self-interest, with a necessary respect for others.” That’s wise enough to cut out and hang up on your refrigerator or close to your computer. It speaks well to the give and take of being human as well as being an American writer. 

I would also say this to aspiring poets and artists: Make sure you have a day job, preferably with good benefits such as savings and insurance. Even the greatest of us all, Mr. Shakespeare, had a day job. He was an actor.  You simply can’t make a living at writing poetry, period. You can make a little money doing readings and getting a poem published, now and then, but not enough to keep beans and bread on the table. I was lucky in my day job for the last 40 years: I was a professor and so I didn’t have to feel guilty by writing on the job. PART of my job was to write, part, to teach. There’s no better day job for a writer than that. And what I taught I learned from. I never felt that teaching was an impediment. The more I taught the great poems, the more I learned from them myself, as a writer. (The 21st century may be the first year of The Age of Multi-tasking.) I was never shy to admit this. No wonder most poets and writers work in academia.  

If a young poet or writer wants this kind of job, of course, he or she has to have a degree, usually an MFA. It’s like a union card these days. No guarantee either—there’s lots of competition among MFA programs too, lots of people with the degree competing for jobs, which are more and more part time and not full time. 

ALB: You’ve retired from the university, but you’re still the poet laureate. What’s next for you?  

DAE: Yes, I’m still poet laureate and I’ll keep doing what I can do to promote poetry in the state and region. What’s next for me? Nothing has changed except that I no longer have a steady day job. I still spend a great amount of time in my basement office, writing, revising, corresponding, reading—doing all the things I’ve always done. One thing I’ve learned about retirement is that if you haven’t done something you’re not used to doing, you probably won’t do it after you retire. Fishing, bowling, working a garden. (I thought I’d be cooking, but that hasn’t worked out either—yet anyway.) You go on doing what you’ve always done. And I’ve always—at least since my 20s—been writing poems and stories and essays. I just want to see how long I can keep doing these things. I will, by the way, still teach workshops and maybe even a class now and then, but no more full-time work if I can help it.