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Pulitzer Poetry Nominee Harvey Stanbrough
Part 2

An outstanding poetry, flash fiction, essay and creative writing teacher and workshop presenter, Stanbrough has written five collections of poetry. His first collection was Melancholy & Madness. His second collection, On Love & War & Other Fallacies, was nominated for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in Letters. Residua, his personal favorite, came out in 1999. It is now out of print, but some of these poems have resurfaced in Intimations of the Shapes of Things, currently in the process of being published. Between these efforts, in 2000, Stanbrough wrote an electronic book, Lessons for a Barren Population, which was nominated for the Frankfurt award. He also edits Raintown Review: A Journal of Metrical Poetry.

In the final installment of our exclusive two-part interview, Stanbrough talks about the need for poets to remember the inherent structure and music of the poetric form, his favorite poets, the impact of an accelerated and media-saturated world on the inner ear of poetry, and the vital importance of staying close to what shapes our character as human beings.

WordJourneys.com: Where did much of our poetic community go astray from traditional verse? Was it the baby boomer generation's attempts to imitate the fabulous free-verse writers -- like Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, etc. -- from the Beat and Psychedelic eras?

Harvey Stanbrough: I don't think the real poetic community has gone that far astray from the craft of poetry. By the "real poetic community," I mean those for whom writing poetry is synonymous with breathing or eating. For awhile, there was a lot of so-called poetry being written that was so full of personal symbolism that it was too obscure for anyone to understand it. If you write a poem in which you use the word "bland" and to you "bland" means "juggernaut," how is your reader supposed to know that? The real question is not whether our poetic community strayed from one thing or another, but why our audience has shifted from the people on the street to huddled gatherings of academes. And although the advent of television had a great deal to do with that, I will always believe the primary culprit was the obscure poem. Do you remember sitting through an English Lit class during which the professor would assign some thoroughly obscure poem, then ask students what it meant? No matter the students' responses, all were wrong. Only the professor (allegedly) knew what the poet was trying to say. Poetry, for a time, was supposedly not meant to be understood. Consequently, books full of obscure poems were published, and the common reader on the street, who never has been foolish enough to spend good money on something that makes him feel less than intelligent, stopped buying poetry books.

Today, thankfully, many traditional and free-verse poets are writing poems that are accessible, and our audience is beginning, very slowly, to return. Some of the best free-verse poets writing today are Len Roberts and Elaine Preston, both from the north east part of the country; Dara McLaughlin, who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico; and, of course, Robert Pinsky, our former two-time poet laureate. Some of the best traditional poets writing today include Bill Roberts of Colorado; William Baer, who is also the editor of The Formalist; Mary Gribble, who lives in California; and Virginia Artrip Snyder, whose biting wit reminds me a great deal of Dorothy Parker's poetry. Most of these poets have contributed to my poetry journal, The Raintown Review.

WordJourneys.com: Who are your favorite poets, and why?

H.S.: My poetic gods are Yeats, Frost, and Nemerov, primarily because Yeats advanced blank verse from where Shakespeare left it, Frost carried it through Pound's "experiment gone horribly awry," and Nemerov brought it into contemporary times. I also very much enjoy Anthony Hecht's poetry and have learned much from studying it. Other past masters include the poets of the Romantic Era, most notably Keats and Wordsworth; and some of the World War I poets, especially Wilfred Owen and, to a lesser degree, Sigfried Sassoon. Other contemporary favorites include Richard Wilbur, Octavio Paz, Robert Pinsky, and Derek Walcott. I also like the works of both Robert and E. B. Browning, William Stafford, Ray McNeice, Dorothy Parker, Maya Angelou, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, and the list goes on. In the case of all of these poets, they are my favorites because their dedication to craft is evident in their poetry.

WordJourneys.com: What are some of the most important aspects of the poetry writing process that you try to instill in attendees at writers conferences, or students in your other workshops and classes?

H.S.: Poetry should be written by the heart and revised by the mind. As Wordsworth put it, it should be the result of "a spontaneous overflow of emotion . . ." (written by the heart) ". . . recollected in tranquility" (revised by the mind). Poets, above all others, should write naked. That is, they should spend no time worrying about politically correct polemics, should - as Pinsky put it - "say the world," but not only that - they should say the world loudly and boldly. And perhaps most importantly, if they aren't passionate about poetry, they shouldn't try to write it.

I routinely tell would-be poets that if I or anyone else can dissuade them from writing, they aren't poets anyway. It amazes me how many of them take offense at that notion. I am amazed, too, when I receive the occasional angry letter from a poet after I've recommended he should rewrite or revise his work, or that he should study the works of other poets whose work he admires. Some people take great offense that I would presume to tell them, after they've asked my advice, that they should revise their work or study and learn the craft; remember, these are the same people who think nothing of spending years learning to be a great electrician or plumber or teacher.

WordJourneys.com: Is there a concern that with the flood of media, television, constant bombardment of distractions and noise, that we as a people are losing our ability to hear the inner music when we observe something? And thus, the innate ability to transform that experience into a poem?

H.S.: No. I enjoy some television and radio programs, and I spend more than too much time surfing the Web, but I'm also aware of the world around me. There are gods or spirits or voices in everything around us, probably even in the radio and television and computer - we need only listen for them and they will give us more than enough grist for our poetic mill.

All things are or can be texts, and as such, all can be intertextually related. An example: A painter sees a sunrise (an original "text") and is inspired to paint a picture of it. Several years later, a fictionist is inspired by the painting to write a short story; later, a novelist reads the story and develops the basic idea into a book; the book is developed as a screenplay; and some poet, moved so by the film, goes home and writes a poem. That poem is intertextually related to the original sunrise that gave birth to the painting and to all the other works of art in between. Anything can inspire us. If anything, in the midst of this so-called information age, we are being given too many "original texts" from which to choose for our art. But how can we decry it? Look at the wonderful venue in which this interview appears.

WordJourneys.com: Gary Snyder, certainly one of the greatest poets and environmentalists of the 20th century, once wrote, "If a man loses touch with the wildness of human nature, he loses touch with the wilderness." As a man who spends a lot of time on his farm, in nature, could you elaborate on this and speak for how it affects one's ability to hear the music and see the fine details of what becomes poetic writing and poetry?

H.S.: I have to preface my answer by saying that I've never much cared for the phrase, "Man versus Nature." From my childhood, I've never understood how humankind could imagine themselves as an opponent of something of which they're undeniably an integral part. Civilization, society, and our desire to live affably with each other require that we suppress many of our instincts, but we needn't suppress them on what I consider a spiritual level, and those who do also suppress what Snyder calls "the wildness of human nature." That we are one with the land and the sea and the earth and the solar system and the universe and whatever lies beyond the universe is a fact that cannot be argued - yet as a species, we believe we've steadily moved away from being a part of those things. We've steadily increased the speed of our lives as we move through the world and, in so doing, have stopped noticing or caring that we're part of it. We misinterpret the speed of our development for some kind of self-centered separation from Nature.

It takes only a tornado or hurricane or firestorm or earthquake to remind us how much a part of Nature we really are. Fortunately, some of us are able for whatever reason to slow down and notice that tree trunks aren't brown (they're multi-colored and the colors in them are multi-toned), that not allcrows say "caw" every time they open their beaks, that some shallow streams sing and tinkle over rocks and others actually seem to mumble, as if they're a little worried or upset about something.

We sometimes see finches and robins and even sparrows as lesser creatures, as if they were put here to sing and flit about for our amusement, but we see them in a whole new light when a mother robin pecks us on the head at a full dive when we try to pick up a fledgling who's recently fallen from its nest. All of these things and many more tell us, as strongly but not as harshly, that we're part of Nature. And it's those "fine details," good and bad, that become thought and prose and poetry. To see those details and hear that music, we have only to look and listen. We have only to acknowledge that we're part of Nature, not something that's striving against it.

To briefly further illustrate the point, Howard Nemerov begins his poem, “The Companions,” with the following lines:

“There used to be gods in everything, and now they've gone.
A small one I remember, in a green-gray stone,
Would watch me go by with is still eyes of a toad,
And in the branch of an elm that hung across the road
Another was; he creaked at me on windless days.”

I can't say it better than that.

WordJourneys.com: As one who also writes essays and short stories, what do you see as the common threads between poetry, the essay and the short story? How can one tune their ear to hear the nuances of dialogue and convert it to writing?

H.S.: The most obvious common thread is the sound inherent in our language (or in whatever language the writer uses). The writer who is serious about her craft must learn to observe with her ears and her other senses as well as with her eyes, then to transfer the emotions in those observations to the page. Unfortunately, the ability to observe in that manner requires a return to wonder. Instead of immediately judging what she sees when she sees it, she must look more closely, strain to see things in a new way, wonder what's really there, then write about it.

In most of my writing classes, I ask the students "What color is a tree trunk?" After most or all of them have answered, "Brown," or given some other generic response, I have them accompany me outside and observe tree trunks. I require them to look at the tree trunks from distances that vary from several feet to a few inches. I make them lay their notebooks on the ground and approach their subject tree trunk with their hands, silently, palms open, and ask them to attempt to feel the warmth that radiates from the tree at a distance of a few inches. All living things expend energy in the form of radiant heat; some students can feel it radiating from the trees and some can't, but the point is that they all come away with a new appreciation of a living creature and what they believe are “new” powers of observation. Actually, their “powers” are just being reawakened.

I'm not sure how writers can “tune their ear” to hear the nuances of dialogue, except to say that they must learn to listen closely for repeated nuances. Writing great dialogue consists of only two things: mixing in sentence fragments (because we seldom speak in complete sentences) and not allowing a character to say “I don't know the answer to that” in one exchange and "I ain't sure" in another. If a character prefaces every other statement with “Wellsir” (or "Well, Sir" in the Nob Hill section of town), the writer shouldn't forget the character talks that way half-way through a story.

We have a wonderful spoken language, rendered almost magical in its diversity. Writers have to learn to capture that magic, and then work very hard and pay great attention to detail to make sure each character's voice is unique to that character.

WordJourneys.com: Finally, your background before you started publishing poetry and teaching bears mentioning, because it's so unusual for a writer to be a former career Marine. How does a man who spent 21 years in the Marine Corps maintain such a sensitivity of heart, mind, soul and ear to be able to write poetry with such excellence, grace, frankness and metrical precision? How did you keep this gift and skill afloat while you were serving the country?

H.S.: I'm not sure everyone would agree with you about that "excellence, grace, and metrical precision" bit, but thank you for the gracious analysis anyway! I suspect the "frankness" is a by-product of what some have called my attitude problem. I've been attuned to the rhythms and feel of the language for as long as I can remember, which I believe is probably true of most poets. Writing, and especially poetry writing, always has been the one constant to which I've returned. Poetry is the nearest we can get to taking something abstract - emotions, feelings - and turning them into something concrete - a physical work of art. We select an emotion, strain it through the filter of our experiences, and put it on paper as a poem; then the reader takes the poem, strains it through the filter of her experiences, and derives an emotion from it. Nothing can be better than that.