722: Barbara Hamby!

0:00Oat on being a little drunk at parties. My brain is such a bully, wash your face, comb your hair, brush your teeth. But drink a glass of wine and my id rises up like Venus on the half shell and says, Baby, you're beautiful, even the stupid shit you say is smart. And this is when a party begins to shimmer. And if I'm lucky, the music instructs me in the fundamentals of moving through space and time. But with rhythm on this occasion, not the white girl cubist, Automaton beef jerky. Oh, no, arms, a Kimbo hips like silk kites in a summer sky. And I am talking to the gods. Aritha is unlinking my chains and Prince tells me what it's like to kiss. And if I'm extra lucky, I'll find someone to buttonhole so I can talk about time travel. Because now I want to talk to the gods as in Athena. What's your problem, girl? You've got it all. How was your tits and a brain the size of Olympus?

1:01And all you do is cause trouble among the chuckleheads on earth. Oh, I get it. It's hard to feel sorry for humans. We're a hot mess. And by the time some of us figure it out, we're playing our end games. What's the story on Aphrodite? Is she stuck up or what? And Hermes, I want those silver shoes with the little wings. Now that's a look because with those shoes and a glass of champagne, I could rule the world. But who wants to be zoos with his beard or Poseidon riding the waves with his trident? Not me, that's for sure. Because I can hardly make it through each cantankerous day with its roadblocks, red lights and hurricane sirens. God, the noise. So a party is like an invitation to take off your straight jacket, slip into a silver kimono. And off we go to Monte Carlo. Well, not there, but the bea-rits of your dreams, which is like an opera by Duna Zetti with lyrics by Cupcake Delgado,

2:01a name I just made up out of the blue, which is one of my favorite activities, maybe more fun than parties or wine or dancing to songs that nail your scalp to the wall of your orangutan brain. Welcome to the Drunken Odyssey of John King, a podcast about the riding life. And now your host, John King.

3:10Welcome to Episode 722 of the World's Greatest Riding Podcast. My name is John Kay and I'm back from the dead, chilling on the beach down at club. No, that was my D. I still am John King and if you're into the writing or reading of Capitol L literature, or whatever other kind of art grab my fancy, then you are in the right spot. On today's show, I share my interview with Barbara Hanby about her latest collection of poems, Burn, Now Out, with the University of Pittsburgh Press. I believe in the last episode, all the way back in July, I indicated that I wanted to switch topics from week to week, from fiction to poetry to memoir to miscellaneous. In honor of that directive, September will be all poetry, as those are the books that need to be discussed now,

4:13and the poetry in those conversations is so good to your listener. Why wait? And October will be consumed by my Schlacht-Oberfest conversations of wild cinema with Jeff Schuster, and this year we are covering the 1950s. Soon I'll be sitting down with Diane Richardson and Todd Cavaness for our third game of Fire by Fire by Fire, which is an evening of drinking and poetry in that order, and probably a lot of indiscriminate laughter as well. That will be an episode coming out later this year, Barring, catastrophe. How are you doing, dear listener? How's your writing going? I am readying my newest horror screenplay for Entry into Screenplay Contents. This merge I'm attempting into screenwriting is itself a work in progress, and I think I need to start making a plot for my follow-up

5:17to my novel Guys I Go in the Zigarata of Shame, so that I don't know if I could maybe write that book or something. That's what I've been up to. Hope you've been well. And I hope you enjoy this conversation with a great poet, Barbara Hanna, Barbara Hanby. Music And now the interview of the day. Music My guest today is the poet Barbara Hanby, who's the author of numerous volumes of poetry and works of prose as well. Her latest book is Burn, out with the University of Pittsburgh Press. Burn is a collection of Oads that make me so happy as a reader,

6:19and poetry doesn't automatically do that for me, but the best poetry does. These are poems that envelope us in the mind of Barbara Hanby as she weaves in and out of praise for the world and praise for herself, flaws and all. Maybe the flaws most of all. Barbara, thank you so much for giving me some time. This is such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. So these poems, I don't want to say they're on the longer side, but the lines tend to be a little bit long. And so if they're like the normal page length of like most poems these days, there may be twice as many words in there. And yet there's a very fluid sense of sentencing for the most part. These poems read so easy despite the fact that your mind is roaming beautifully.

7:20So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how these poems came about, and if this style is for you, importantly related to the Oad as a tradition. Well, one of the things I love about the Oad is that it's a... you can call it a form, but it's really more of a stance. And in different periods of time, it has different forms. So you can really take it and do anything with it. You know, I started off as a free verse poet, and I am now still a free verse poet, but I went through a highly formal phase because I wanted to figure out what poetic form could do. And it was a wonderful experience for me. I really got into rhymes, in rhymes, and internal rhymes, but actually a reviewer really helped me on this. And my first book came out, somebody wrote a review and said,

8:20she favors 12 syllable Alexandrine lines, and I thought, I do. And then I started going through and counting the syllables of my lines, and lo and behold, it was like 11, 12, 13 syllables per line. And I thought, oh, this is something that I wasn't aware of, but I was doing kind of intuitively. And so it gave me a lot of momentum in my line. A long line is a fast line. A short line slows the poem down. I'm trying to think, oh, it was Denise Lebertop that said, at the end of a line, even if it doesn't have punctuation, there's a pause. You know, there's a stopping. And so, you know, when I'm teaching, if I have a student who's a lyric poet, you know, I try to have them have shorter lines so we can really get into those images. But if your work is voice driven, narrative driven, as mine is, you know, a long line is fun, you know, because it can go really,

9:21really, really fast. So that's kind of where I started counting those syllables. And that got me into a more formal kind of verse, which, you know, I felt like maybe in my fourth book of poems, I, you know, really kind of learned everything. I wanted to learn at that point. And then I went back to free verse, which was kind of a hard transition, actually. But because there's a real thrill about being able to hit the formal, I wanted to write a formal poem that was not boring because a lot of times formal poems are very, very, you know, they hit all the marks, but you think, oh, my God, this is a snooze. So that was my goal is to learn how to write a formal poem, but make one that, that really worked with my voice and that was, and you know, it was fun. I enjoyed it a lot, but then at the end of that fourth book, I saw myself really painting myself into a corner with it.

10:23And I said, okay, you need to step back from this baby and do something, you know, go back to free verse. But then when I did go back to free verse, the first poem that I wrote in free verse, I could see all of that experiment with form was paying off. I think any career in writing is, you know, you find your voice and then then you have to figure out how to change it, make it better. That's always hard, you know, because it's so much fun, just to look rest on your laurels. To, you know, lean too heavily on the thing that people tell you you're good at. Yeah. One of the lessons I had to learn was, I'm funny, not stand up comedian, persuade total strangers who are drunk to laugh at my jokes funny, but you know, for a writer, funnier than most. And yeah, I had to learn how to respect my topic instead of always chasing a joke, because I was so hungry for approval.

11:28And the approvals find up to a point and that it stops being helpful. Yeah, that's so true. Well, I mean, there are certain poems that I love to read, readings because, you know, the audience loves them. And I always feel like a missionary for poetry, because you must have been poetry readings where you just think, oh, where is a pair of scissors? So I can, you know, dig out my brains through my ears, you know, it's so horrible. And, you know, you're just so boring and the poet doesn't set the poems up. And, you know, you think, here I'm somebody who loves poetry. If I feel like this, what are the poor people who have no idea doing in this audience? You know, they're going to hate poetry. So I really feel like my readings are a different thing altogether. I'm trying to reach that boyfriend of the girl in the poetry class who doesn't want to be there, but he really wants the girl. So he's doing everything she wants him to do. And when one of those guys comes up after reading and says, I didn't know poetry could do this.

12:33I feel like, oh, I've done my job as a poetry missionary. Yeah, when a poet arrives at the podium and mentally you're trying to count how many pieces of paper are in the packet, you're like, okay, how many pages is that? And how many pages do I have it in me as a listener? And a good poet, a lively poet who can read a room, you don't have to count the paper. There's no need to count the paper. Oh, is that just one page left or is, you know, can I see through that? Oh, yeah. Well, one thing I tell my students is that, you know, writing is a miracle because on the one hand, we have to deliver something recognizable to our audience. They have to know what it is. They have to have enough of a ground upon which they can put whatever we're sharing in context.

13:33And that recognizable thing has to be fresh and exciting and new. And that's the way I feel about the poems in burn where each poem is a dance. Like, it feels like a dance. All I know is the rhythm will carry me just fine. And I'm going to be surprised and usually delighted by what I find. And when I'm not delighted, I'm still surprised and awake. Well, good. You know, whenever you put a book together, you think, oh, maybe I should have left that one out, you know, or maybe I should have left that one out. But, you know, sometimes you work so hard on a poem that you think, I'm going to put this in anyway, even though it's not the most successful poem in the book. I think there are a couple like that in there. But then there are also two, one of the things that is working for me is surprised because when I find the opening to a poem, that's it for me. And then I just follow my mind. I don't know how it's going to end. I never know how it's going to end.

14:35And so if I'm not surprised, then there's no way for the reader to be surprised, according to me. So you mentioned rhyming earlier and being more formal. And I think of your rage ode where, you know, there's plenty of rhyme, even if it's not formally laid out. I think that that might have been one of the first poems I wrote for the book. I was during the pandemic, which is when my previous book had come out, holo holo. And, you know, we were listening to a lot of music. I live with David Kirby, who is a music critic. And so there's music in our lives. And he said, you've got to listen to this rap song. I know you're going to love it. And I did. It's an early rap song that is by the Sugar Hill gang. And I just love the rhythms of that. And so that just set me off. I had my... I didn't need to say, I was just mad, you know, because the pandemic was hard.

15:39Plus there's all of this rigour moral going on in the political sphere. Plus, you know, the ones in your personal life. And, you know, you just... Sometimes it just boils over. So I thought, okay, let me see what I can do with this. And I just... The rhythm is what really took me through. And then the rhymes came and it was so much fun. But I think I had a baby about five lines of that. And then I stopped. That sometimes happens to me. And I thought, I'm going to ruin this if I don't stop and let it just eight for a while. And so I think I did that and then picked it up again. So it was a lot of fun to write. I have to say. Well, would you read it, please? Okay, sure. Ray Joed. You know how it is when you're being so nice and the girl at the counter treats you like a slice of cold pizza, three days old with curled up a peroni and a coating of mold. And you don't want to do it, but you're tired of her shed. So you turn on your heel and leave in a snit.

16:41Blow it down her cool with your art ex-squeeze, your cleopatra frown and your brain disease. But she doesn't care because she's sixteen. Her boobs sit high and her minds is screened of everything she'll never do. The screening brats and the jerk who's Mr. libido and a dented wreck waiting on the corner to cash her check. So what do you expect in your current state? Beautiful manners on a china plate. Get real, baby. That's not the scene. Your Jane Austen worlds and smithereens and lady Murasaki's not at the door to usher you out to the ballroom floor. Where Prince Andre waits in his tux his heart full of flowers, his pants full of fucks. No, you're out of luck or you've had a stroke because you're translating poems to an asyncopated trope of truth and beauty and beauty and truth. What's the difference when you're tightening the news and you blame Zeus and all those guys Satan and Jehovah with their gym rip. Oh, with their gym rip. BODds. Superman too. Though he knows how to shave.

17:42But what can you do when you're born to crave a broom of your own and plenty of time to lie in bed and make up rhymes? But who should knock on your sanctuary door but the ghost of your mother and her Christian lore saying forget this world where a woman can rave? Make up stories and ride the wave of her own plabber because that's not real. You got to serve your god. You got to serve your man. Keep your house thick and span. Oh mom, it can't be true. There's got to be more than popping out babies and cooking up stews, changing sheets and marking time, counting out the days and gin and limes. What about Italy? What about France going to parties to drink and dance? Juggling words like a circus clown, 700 verbs and a zillion nouns, spinning in the sky like an alien invasion, a shimmering mess, a mathematical equation, or some crazy budu in a smoking drink. Shaking like a hurricane ready to sink the whole human race in a pandemic rage of virus blowing through the human cage.

18:42Now's not the time to regret your life. Slice it up with a kitchen knife. For the moment we're all alive though everything seems stupid and jive and nest up to what with all the wars and the nasty talk by presidential wars. Let's glue the pieces together my friends. I know that sounds a little zin with some quaker do up on making amends, but who wants to be in a feudal state, a mode full of plague and hearts full of hate. Let's save the elephants and the bees too, the gorilla that she'd end the whole damn zoo, and the girl at the counter with her lethal cool. Oh my sister, let's put down our weapons such as they are and make a truce before we go too far on this beautiful planet with its luminous star. Because the night is storming and the coming age looms with darkness and armies of rage. Extraordinary. That was a lot of fun to write. You know when I'm reading it I think, oh my god I remember that fun I had.

19:45Well I think people who can't express rage from time to time have anger issues. Oh yeah. Oh well you know there's always a gap between what you want to do and what you can do all through life. One of the things I've been thinking about lately is that the David and I have been able to go to Italy after our spring semester for a month every year and it's like a riding workshop. I mean we were, I came back with a new book, a rough draft of course, but a new book and we get so much work done because you know you don't have all of the distractions in your real life. And it's just one of the ways we can do it is through social security. I mean once it kicks in you think oh my god this is so I knew it was going to get this but our hope I was going to get it. But you know it's so much more than you thought it was going to be you know and I love to think of the young waitress which is how I worked my way through college.

20:51You know wanting to be a poet, loving poetry but never knowing that she could possibly you know write a poem that anybody would want to read or publish a book much less eight. And and I think about that young woman funding my writing as an older woman and it makes me so happy. I think she'd be happy too. Well one thing I've learned about more formal poetry and what it trains one to do is extend the thought. I'm primarily a prose writer a purple prose writer but when I write poetry if I pay much attention to it and put work into it I feel like I'm having an affair. Oh yeah but you're still right. Rather than working on the screenplays or the novel and whatever I tend to write in terms of poetry yeah the lines tend to be shorter and.

21:52What I have found is on the rare occasion when I seem to be approaching a sonnet I'm like you know that's too close to being a sonnet I have to either rip this up and spread it out or make it something closer to an honest sonnet and what I found is oh the poem got better when I made it a sonnet. Yeah. It wanted to be a sonnet. That's something I really in a classroom that's all I do is you know somebody has you know writes a poem and you think I want more of this and when you say you know this could be longer you know why don't you let's figure out how to go to the next step or. This is a sonnet or how about a villain now for him it's a beautiful thing I really love it although it can be addictive. So can you talk a little bit about when you were younger and you know you didn't necessarily have a career path as a poet.

22:58In mind because I do think that there is a great tendency for us culturally to kill poetry. In middle school in high school and by the time most of us are adults and can make up our own minds about the poetry we might like or not like it's already left as an option for most people it's just not something they they take seriously so I'm with you in terms of being evangelical about. Try to persuade people that if they look around they'll be poetry that will add a little light to their life. Absolutely and also to one of the things I feel like I do as a teacher is when I'm talking one on one to my students they'll start telling me stories from their lot and they go that's a poem that's a poem or you know it's just they have the all of these poems inside of them and they just don't recognize them as poetry. But I know when I was in college I took my first poetry writing class and the only thing I can do to give myself credit is that it was so cheap to go to college then that I could just you know leave a class wasn't working and in this class the teacher was so boring.

24:18And the class was so boring and I thought this is the thing I love most in the world if I stay in this class I'm going to hate. So after three classes I just get at all I lost the money and I was working hard for that money to it was not an easy loss but you know I just thought I got to protect myself from this but you know yeah my career I majored in English and I minored in art history. To the most lucrative major as they possibly do I just because I was paying for it for myself you know I could do what I wanted and it was wonderful you know because you know I got to take a lot of classes that I love science and so I got to take lots of science classes. I had one teacher who tried to lure me into the sciences because I really loved the experimental process especially in labs but not like I love poetry so it's a poetry in art history.

25:22Go figure. Well I have four college degrees my mom said I can't go to college anymore I'm allowed to teach but I can't be a student and yeah so long as she's still alive yeah okay I'm not going to be a student again but there's a part of me that just always wants to be a student like I just want to keep oh and what's what's there to learn over here. Oh turns out I know almost nothing about this I really want to start a whole new life just to think about that. Well I have a nephew who's got them absolutely the best job title at one time I said what do you do now and he said yeah Barbara the best way to describe it is I design roller coasters but he has an interest in philosophy and Yale University has this free online school. And he does in his spare time so by day he designs roller coasters and I guess by night discusses philosophy with other you know interested people on the zeal forum so there are ways to learn out there and I find that my projects kind of lead me into learning about new things to I'm working on a novel now sit in Paris and there are two books at the same time.

26:43There are two books actually within one book and one is set in 1928 and it's really been fascinating for me to learn about the Harlem and Mommatra and the clubs there in the musicians there and one of the things I found is that reading the as told to biographies or autobiographies of some of these characters there's so much more interesting than the academic books. The academic books have the info but the voice and the Shwada Viva comes from the as told to books I love those. So who are some of your poetic influences I think for me my first great humanitarian act was I stopped running poetry. And I was locked into a very academic mode you know Elliott Whitman you know just I was the Messiah of myself and you're welcome world and I think I was writing poetry not even I really wanted to read because I thought that's what it was supposed to be and wasn't until Billy Collins made it look easy where there was a.

27:59I could look easy and it's so not you can write a mediocre Billy Collins poem pretty easily but you can't write a Billy Collins Billy calls poem easily but as an example it's like oh he's just saying what's on his mind and like the syntax isn't so fragmented that there's no hope of getting a grip on what this person's trying to communicate so i'm just wondering what your process was like early on in. Finding your voice as a poet. I started with Elliott too you know I grew up in a really fundamental is Christian family but my dad loved poetry and he had that Oscar entrepreneur and the only two American poetry and so I found that you know like when I was in more early teens and started reading and you know loved I loved Elliott I loved Elliott. Four quartets was one of my favorite poems and of course proof rock and you know it was too young and stupid to even begin to approach the wasteland but those were you know poems that and I thought that's what poetry was and it was really hard to shake that.

29:11You know Franco here of course Walt Whitman Franco here I am leaving I didn't really come to Emily Dickinson until late you know I love the beads ask about the carouette house because I'm getting ready to teach my graduate class on the letters of the poets and I start with Horus and all that in ancient a room but the last set are the carouette Ginsburg letters which are just unbelievable unbelievable letters. Letters between two fabulous poets to fabulous writers. So what Billy does in his poems and when I say he makes it look easy and it's not that kind of fluidity what I want to do is give somebody a sense of how my mind works go jumping from one thing to another now that can be kind of boring I mean sometimes you'll think you'll be in a certain place and then you'll kind of come to your consciousness. And you think how did I get here you know that happens when I'm doing yoga on my own you know I'll start out thinking something beautiful and then I have I you know I'm just thinking about somebody I hate and I think how did I get there and then I go through and I I can pretty much pick up the train of thought but when you're writing a piece of art you want to make that interesting rather than you know just the way your mind works and so that's what Billy's doing is just giving us a sense of how I'm doing it.

30:38It's just giving us that joy of following someone's mind but it's a mind that's is it artifying it's artifying it's making a beautiful piece of art and taking you there and I think I'll sometimes that's you know difficult because you know people say oh this is easy I could do this what it's like going to see a Jackson Pollock painting and saying oh I could do that yeah we'll try it and see what that you know see what happens or a mark Rothka I just want to say I can do that. I can do what happens or a mark Rothka I just saw a Mark Rothko exhibit and I mean God what a beautiful beautiful collection of art that was I had a student who went to a Mark Rothko exhibit and she heard somebody say oh to his kid oh you could do this you know will you try that it took him a long time to figure out how to do it and and even then he didn't know what he was doing you know I read that he went to Italy and saw all the temples. He's too many said oh this is what I've been doing all these years painting temples so I just love that as a realization.

31:47When an adult says of an abstract painting to a child oh you could do that my response is the child maybe could there's no fucking way the adult could make that painting and the child can make the painting once. You know but it takes such radical skill purity of mine to be able to achieve those effects and I like your phrase artifying he's able to direct traffic in a way that doesn't feel mechanical he makes it feel elegant and now we're moving over here and it's not quite as abrupt as that one Saturday at live sketch where Dieter Mike Myers would say and you know I'm not sure what I'm doing. Mike Myers would say and that was the time on sprockets when we dance and then they do that really destroying to dance that just it comes out of nowhere and there's the potential to be alienating oh now I'm in barber hand bees mind and so you need to tidy up a bit even if it's not just oh randomly you know I'm in possession of her mind it's like here is another dance.

33:00Also too I find that that travel really helps me because sometimes I'll have an idea or you know image start a poem with and I don't know where to go with it and then I'll go I love to look at art I mean I had the best art history teacher in college and she taught me how to just go in and you know see a piece of art it was such a always treasure that experience I think I took five classes with her it was just you know I was like I'm not sure if I could do that. I was you know I was like an acolyte it was so beautiful and you know she didn't teach modern art she taught Renaissance art so in the history of graphics but you go into an art exhibit sometimes it'll open up a poetic thing inside of you and that to me is super exciting now might not work for everybody but it certainly works for me it takes you know two of my great loves visual arts you know in poetry and they say okay as you say a dance they start doing a dance. Well what I love about art museums especially the big ones is how much they spoil me I think the statement is more about me than about anything else that might be meaningful but when I go do like the met in New York or the good high more the moment I could ignore 99% of some of the world's greatest art going to be a great idea.

34:29Another ran brand does not interest me today and no I don't need to look at that dolly and. Frances bacon it's all about Frances bacon for an hour and I'm just practically drooling just staring at a painting for an hour. You know when you mention Jackson Pollock the people who think. That they could make a Jackson Pollock I don't know that they've stood right in front of one and actually looked at it. To see it reproduce small in a book or a magazine is not the same thing as. Baring witness to the actual painting itself so. Layers in the texture and and I don't think I could do it which is why I love staring at it because. There's no part of me that's like oh and I'm going to use that to like I I have no tools so I get to stand there and rule in admiration. And also I guess it's the way my brain works I could just turn off curiosity about anything that just isn't.

35:35Electrifying me despite the fact that on a different day like who knows what switches come up. Yeah you could be in a Rembrandt a. I know when time I went through went down a rabbit hole of his self portraits. I mean what a series that is throughout his life rich poor on top not on top at all but he was still working and that's something that I sage myself over and over again and to my students to it's a quote by the castle inspiration exists but it must find us working you have to find a way to work and you see it in you know Picasso I wouldn't want to be his girlfriend but man what. And that's something I have to do with with my students a lot is just it's missing artists because you know they were below average human beings and you know who isn't I mean you know I think that we all kind of in our human lives kind of hope to stay on an even keel with you know being average maybe do a couple of

36:39really above average things but to expect like Byron kind of a below average human being and a lot of ways but God what a poet and his letters they're magnificent so you know Keats you know everybody gives him a break but he died when he was 25 so he didn't get a chance to make a lot of the mistakes that other people. An Emily Dickinson she really you know kind of kept it she played her cards close to her vest and she yeah her Jane Austen yeah if there was a scandal to be had we won't know about it. Well you can read Anne Bremotians biography of of Keats there there's some scandals there but you know Oh I was thinking of Emily Dickinson and Jane Austen there are some speculative movies about Jane like being Jane the coming Jane I think is they're kind of interesting too. I just read an article about

37:40the inspiration for persuasion came from a newspaper which was fantastic I just love her reading no I think oh this is a great idea for my new book underrated novel. Oh God it's my favorite of all the novels. It doesn't fit the the titling sort of conventions of the other novels but it's a great great great novel well especially for an older person and now you're making me think it's I probably need to go back a good look at War Henry James. Oh yeah I loved him in my 20s which maybe was early. I think I read all most of him hmm well you know it's my 20s so yeah I have to go back David just read I read the turn of the screw allowed to me and that was a real that was a thrill that was so good I had never read that. See but I would rather read more Barbara Hanby than Henry James at the moment and I think it's because of how intoxicating your poems are and how

38:48finite each poem is even though I can feel like you're playing with history and you're imaginatively engaging with the people who've been in your life and the figures who have been important to you and yet each poem you know it's a very full experience unlike my poems but it's very full experience and I don't feel like I'm going to be straining my mind going okay and Henry what was the original subject in this sentence because I I feel like I'm 60 words in and I don't remember where we started. That's what revision does doesn't it because probably you know there are a lot of instances of that where my mother was still alive we go to visit my mother and Hawaii my sister and I would visit her her and she wouldn't use nouns she was just use pronouns and I got really good at figuring out what she was talking about my sister would say just stop her and say

39:49mom we need a noun here and I would say oh she's talking about Dolores and she said how did you know that and I said well you know she was talking about Dolores you know 20 minutes ago and so she doesn't need another noun in her own mind you know but it was I think sometimes I have that capacity myself and here I did I'm sure for my mother and you know when I'm reading a poem allowed to myself in the revision process I think okay I need to repeat a loop you know I need to orient my reader here. I think of David Foster Wallace who his weird way of revising towards that end is he would keep the pronoun and then he would put the noun that was the reference in parentheses afterward oh wow that's like that's that's so inefficient David why would you but it was his way of trying to keep the conversational flow of the way it came out the first time which

40:51was important to him because this style was so maximalist yet conversational yet laden with jargon but also full of bethose and just combining all different kind of like registers of language I guess that's a way of my saying you know your work is just so damn readable so it sounds like you read your work to yourself out loud as part of the revision process. Oh absolutely my work is voice driven for the most part I mean everyone's well I'll have something a little bit more contemplative but you know I like fast poems you know like to build up velocity what I don't want is to have somebody say what what was that I have to go back to the beginning you know the poem and check it out you know you want them to keep moving with you and you know you have to sometimes help you know you don't have to help yourself because you know what you're thinking as my mom with Dolores but it's not gonna happen for a reader who's um you know not in you know not you

41:54one thing I find when I read my work aloud is I find out when I'm being long-winded if I can't get through a sentence without gasping I know I need to rethink the structure of a sentence or you know the organization like when I was doing one of the final readthroughs of burn I read the whole book aloud to myself and there were like maybe three poems where I'd get lost and I thought oh I need a breather here and so I put them into stanzas because if I was getting lost in those long lines I knew that the you know a reader would as well so they probably were some of the poems that now I think oh you could leave that one out live and learn so let me ask a dumb binary question that's not on the face of it is an essential but might lead us someplace interesting what do you think is more important to you the experience a poem would have if read aloud or

42:57the poem on the page oh gosh that's super hard there are some poems I just never read aloud because there are other ones that you know you know they're just electric you know some poems I think are primarily page poems of course you want them to all work on the page if you put them in a book but then there's some that really work in front of an audience and so you know sometimes I just concentrate on those and readings but you want them to all work on the page but something out of that rise up the poems that you know really seem to work for an audience when read aloud yeah I do wonder if my yearning for approval makes me want to prioritize plums that seem to be crowd pleasers and you know I worry that I might be trying to chase down okay I think this might work on the crowd let me let me overreach over here rather than paying attention paying closer attention

44:02to my own mind and allowing myself to maybe be quiet or sometimes you know sometimes I think that being a woman has kind of helped me with that because number one like I remember it was not until I published my second book of poems that I could call myself a poet I go okay you think I think you might be on to something here you know you can say you're a poet but when I was in grad school guys that were just pooping out little poems they could say I'm a poet and they had really not accomplished anything but so I mean you know it was like there's a level of confidence I think that men are raised with and dealing with the world plus there's extrovers versus introverts I'm pretty introverted and so I mean I just never thought I was funny never thought I mean every once in a while I you know come up with a good boom but you know I don't think of myself as a funny person but I live with somebody who's extremely extroverted extremely funny and loves to

45:10showboat and so it's really been a you know study of my adult life to see the differences between the male psyche and the female psyche it's just a study of two but still you know that's all I have just amazed by the level of confidence my husband has you know he was raised by people who told him he was smart all the time and got his PhD when he's 24 I mean you know he's you know high achiever he's an A type personality whereas I did well in school and my teachers always encourage me but when my parents especially my mother she would just expected me to get married and you know have a family and that's it she was still mystified by my choices when she passed away 15 years ago she put my books on her coffee table but I know she'd ever cracked one well my mother did read my novel and gave me praise in such a way where I know it was legit oh that's nice isn't it she said reading your book and you would set the scenes and I could see

46:18them in my mind the way you wrote them and she was pleased that I wrote something comprehensive she had seen some of my like early work and then like two decades goodbye without me showing her anything because why inflict that on my mother but the sacrament of the book it's like oh no that somehow changed the dynamic but she read it and she felt like she could read it like a normal book and uh yeah that's it I'm not sure I got anything else like I'm that's that's gonna be my that's lovely I'm gonna end with a winning streak if I can help it so what are the reasons why I find a book of of Odds called burn exciting is because I don't know I have a really sardonic relationship with the world and I don't think I'm cynical I don't think I'm morose I am pretty consistently sardonic

47:19and my way of wanting to be in the world is by feeling gratitude for the things that I love yeah and for the beauty that I find and so a collection of Odds is so refreshing and if someone told me oh I'm gonna hand you a book of Odds read them I might think after about four they might feel samey or they might and like that is not the case here this is just a wonderful volume and on more than one occasion socially unacceptable just makes the Odds perfect in my opinion I'm yeah I noticed in the two poems that you asked me to read that they both had shit in them and I thought oh okay but at the end of the book I have this little essay about the Odd and one of the things you know when you read about the Odd its reason why I'm writing this book of essays on the Odd is that it's a poem appraise well it is and it isn't I think it's a negotiation and as I

48:20said in the in the little essay you know I've started out being a negotiation with the gods and then during the romantic period it became a negotiation with our own consciousness we're always trying to figure out two things one why is the world so beautiful and horrible at the same time and we're living in a world now that is like really the epitome of that you know the push between beauty and just complete horror and we have to come to deal with that and if you read Odds from the very beginning people have always had to do that and then the other thing that we have to come to grips with is that we have a very very short time on earth and how do we deal with that so those two you know yeah the world is beautiful but it's terrible and we're not here long enough to do very much about it what do we do what's our role so there's serious issues there but then

49:21I think within that framework you can have a lot of fun and especially with the variety and beauty of the world and the stupidness of it and the rambunctiousness of it and the chaotic nature of it it's you know one of my favorite subjects is language the English language I just love how nuts it is you know and how omnivorous it is and the vocabulary is just unbelievable it's such a pleasure to write in English I just found this little essay by Borges in which he said he did all of his reading in English because it had two registers and you know it has the angled sacks and then it has the the lathnate and register and he said he really loved that double register and it's something that I'd never called it that before but I love it too in my book of really a formal poem so I really got into the angle of sacks and words the ones that ends in case I have a couple of monorimes that every line ends in a k sound but most of them with the letter k and

50:28that was enormous fun you know just to really get into the fundamentals of the English language and have fun with it too I think I had a lot of fun with it so we should finish with a poem okay and I think the last one is probably a marathon in fact my computer won't last okay let me tell you it takes about 10 minutes to read how about ode to my burning that's one that's really interesting it first appeared in the American poetry review it doesn't matter how many times you've been in that magazine it takes a year so I sent it off with a bunch of other poems and when Elizabeth said yes we wanted to do all of these poems I said oh my god I looked at this one and I thought this is like not what I wanted to be and so I spent I think a couple of weeks rewriting it when I sent the poem's tour I didn't realize that this was going to be the title poem at the book so ode to my burning you're a campfire on the outskirts of hell the gas burner on Satan's stove the

51:31rigging a roll of tender and hate bursting from the tv screens o sister what fire rages in your furnace of tribe and gizzards blood and iron you're in the choir of backseat drivers on the dirt road to a jute joint in the woods hopped up on red eye whiskey and coke looking for trouble and guess who's waiting for you in a cheap suit doping his crease brim with hat purring hey honey when a dance oh yeah your crisp as a deep fried corn dog on the last day of the circus when the high flyers come down from the trapeze and the clowns take off their noses bury them in the dump by the radioactive lake while you sleep with the lions who ditch their wigs to dream and caravans of squalor and storm oh baby you're the raging neon on the stripping vagus lighting the low impact skies with your sleeves and squeeze box feno you drop into a casino with its racket and roll of the dives a shining

52:32slice of the american bad apple pie and bet everything on number three because you're burning on your cross again like a polo for daphne his fingers touching her skin as it thickens and turns but your daphne too as your arms become bark and the pith of sap rises in your womb and you see the earth for what it is a river a bell a tomb that is the show for this week i would like to thank barbra handby and samatha nickerson for editing this week's episode don't forget to check out our youtube channel for all kinds of great content and also we have written content throughout the week over at the truckinodyside.com including heartbreaking comic book reviews by drewbarth mind bending music playlist by steven

53:35mcclurg reviews of dubious cinematic masterpieces by our curator of schlok who is jeff schuster and monthly reviews of classic harsh cinema by demetry cockney who want to write in let me know how i'm doing make suggestions about topics you'd like to see covered the email address is the drunken odyssey at gmail.com all right gang until next week put your ass in the chair keep attacking those keys and don't swallow the worm the nevermind job pass me the bar you a while back john king endowed the museum of schlok and tasked me jeff schuster with curating the

54:38bugger each week i curate one more entry into this proud genre of film i think truth is i'm really not sure what schlok is but my writing about it is sublime read it every friday at the drunken odyssey.com thank you for listening to the drunken odyssey with john king a podcast about the writing life this is your announcer moron butler