|
Emma: Thank you Mary for taking part in this interview! I love reading the variety of forms you use in your poetry, especially in your collection Field Notes, where there’s ghazals, sonnets, ballads, word clouds, and riddles. What’s your process for these more structured poems—do you have an idea of what form you want to tackle before you begin to write? What is appealing to you about writing with these various forms?
Mary: I can’t possibly separate poetry from form—my father’s favourite way of keeping children quiet was either reciting formal poems at us or “capping verses”—tossing out a line and waiting for us to make up a new, answering line that (1) rhymed, and (2) echoed the meter. (And this was long before school age)… I know we each have a unique definition of poetry, and mine is “licence to play silly buggers with words”, which of course can lead to anything. I often do start playing with a single line. Sometimes it turns into a couplet that would be a good end to a sonnet; sometimes I use someone else’s line as an epigraph or a refrain; sometimes I let accidental alliteration call the shots. My feeling is that the choice of form, the original decision, just happens by itself; my job is to catch it in the act.
0 Comments
Being both a classical musician and a poet, I often straddle an interesting divide between art forms. The poets I meet at various book launches have often never seen an opera and tentatively enquire if they have captions these days (which yes, they do—I certainly don’t speak Italian!). The worlds of poetry and music sometimes seem shrouded in mystery, impenetrable forces to anyone outside of them. One of my friends, who is also a musician and poet, jokes that among poets, we’re musicians, and amongst musicians, we’re poets.
Despite this, there are a lot of similarities between the two crafts. Being so ancient and established in the Western canon, they’re often thought of as dead or irrelevant. Perhaps this is just a hangover from the Romantics, but it seems that many depictions of the composing or writing process show hermit-like figures who sit in rooms and frenziedly create their art. Paintings of pivotal composers like Beethoven show him scribbling feverishly, surrounded by crumpled pieces of paper. Whether or not these depictions were true doesn’t even really matter—they add to the mythos of the 19th-century tortured artist archetype that still seems to linger. “So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars…”
— Pádraig Ó Tuama Poetry as an act of listening. Poetry as an act of dancing. Poetry as an act of bowing before sky, ushering the dawn. For Jane Hirshfield, poetry thrums with “fierce aliveness.”[1] It is not a pulseless scaffold. It is not a fretwork of verbs and nouns imprisoned in reasoning, corseted by rational knowledge. “A poem,” Hirshfield sings, “is the root tendrils of ivy making their way into the heart’s walls’ mortar.”[2] A poem throbs with presence. A poem honours the animal. Tucked softly under its syntax, a soul flutters. Poetry sprinkles signs of its livingness in its sister word, its semantic companion: creation. Creation invokes creature. They drink from the same etymology.[3] Together, they stir “prismatic grief and unstunted delight.”[4] That which is creature swaddles wildness close. That which is creature follows the traceries of rivers, oceans, the soft shores of forests. And that which is creative--electric, glistening, a glissando of weaves and threads--greets the world with loud, savage hope, a sensation that we raise “honourably, with small hands and inked words.”[5] |
