February 17, 2014
My thanks to Joe Harrington for tagging me as part of The Writing Process Blog Tour. Joe is the author of Things Come On (an amneoir) (Wesleyan Univ. Press 2011), a mixed-genre work relating the twinned narratives of the Watergate scandal and his mother’s cancer, and is the author of the chapbooks Earth Day Suite (Beard of Bees 2010) and Of Some Sky (Bedouin, forthcoming), as well as the critical work Poetry and the Public (Wesleyan 2002). Joe's creative work has appeared in Hotel Amerika, Rumpus, Atticus Review, BathHouse, 1913: a journal of forms, No Tell Motel, With+Stand, Otoliths, Fact-Simile, and P-Queue, among others. He is the recipient of a Millay Colony residency and a Fulbright Distinguished Chair, and is currently Professor of English at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
I can only write like myself, and I can’t know who this “self” is without writing it—but this “self” keeps changing, which means I have to keep writing it.
I’m probably too close to my own work to be able to answer this question adequately. I can talk about my major influences, which, in addition to poetry, include film, TV, music and comic books. Poems like George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous” and Harryette Mullen’s “We Are Not Responsible” remind me why I want to write (and read). David Lynch is the patron saint of everything creative in my life. I miss Ronnie James Dio's voice every day. Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead comic book made me want to write poetry, and Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor taught me how to experiment with narrative and make it strange.
It works slowly—I have to be patient and allow for the language to accumulate. Whether I’m writing poetry or criticism, I absorb each new project in small, digestible chunks. As long as I’m writing when I have time to write, I know that the work eventually will emerge as a final product. Most poems begin in my notebook, and most are written initially in a phonetic alphabet I created with a friend back in junior high school, which allows me the chance to hear the sounds of each word in more detail and less encumbered by meaning. By the second or third version, I’ve transferred the draft to the computer, which is where I continued to revise the poem (going back-and-forth between hard copies and the screen).
I’m about 1/3 finished with a draft of Book 2 of The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood). Book 1 was just released by BlazeVOX. I’m also close to finishing a draft of a new manuscript, tentatively titled Proof Something Happened, a series of poems on the 1961 alleged UFO abduction of Betty and Barney Hill in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. And I’m writing new poems, unconnected with the Dark Shadows books and the project on the Hills. As an editor, I’m excited that we’re going to start reading submissions soon for Court Green #12 (reading period is March 1 to June 30).