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INTERVIEW:
William Mawhinney
Author of Songs In My Begging Bowl

When you read poetry, what do you look for besides the depth of the moment within the poem?

I'm constantly poking around for poems that stick in my teeth and invite me to chew on them again. I want a poet to stretch me into an experience just out of reach, or shove me through a door into a strange, uncomfortable room in myself.

As I walk through poems, I'm always a sucker for paths of shimmering music like these:
• "Down the rivers of the windfall light"

• "After many a summer dies the swan"

• "Man is not a town/ Where things live,
But a worry and a weeping/ of unused wings."

• "Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs"

• "I had the swirl and ache/ from sprays of honeysuckle
That when they’re gathered shake/ Dew on the knuckle."

• "Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."

• "in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry eating in late September"

I don’t invite my left brain to take charge the moment I engage a poem. I cringe when I recall the poetry courses at Pitt in the 1960’s encouraging me to tear wings from these butterflies. When I flunked my master’s oral exam, I was told to "hold my nose and read more of the source material." I fled grad school right after that. For me, art is a verb, not a noun for arms-length analysis. Today, when I read poetry, my right brain relishes the sound of words, their physical and sensual presence—the original "mouth-fun" in baby talk, bedtime tales, and nursery rhymes.

If a poem gets up and starts to dance, I’ll speak it to myself—the poet’s medium is my breath, not black marks on the page. And, when it’s a real winner, I’ll offer it my entire body by walking along the nearby dirt roads and reciting it out loud. My neighbors already know I’m weird!

How important are poetics to one’s creative process, and the expression of that process in anything one does in daily life?

Questions like that taste like bowls of Styrofoam peanuts. These days, too much abstract headfood gives me the bends, so I won’t pontificate about "poetics" or "one’s creative process." But I’ll offer Issa’s wonderful haiku: "The man pulling radishes/ pointed the way/ with a radish." I can make some "I" statements about what lights my fire, then I won’t lose myself in a fog of highfalutin gobbledygook.

When I walk along my dirt road into the cycling life of the forest, abstractions drift away. The land has its own timing, its rhythms of dawning and dusk, its seasons of bud and blossom, of snow and mud and dust. It is here, not in literary theory, that the ravens and pines and poems reside.

Like Robinson Jeffers, I’ve "fallen in love outward" with the world around me. My daily life occurs on ground wilder than I can control. Even when indoors, I sense the moon’s gaze upon my roof. I hang out with words and rub them together to voice my wonder at fully inhabiting this whirling world.

My heart holds an admonition that says: "My own way is essential." It’s supremely important that I pay attention to what I love and nourish by my words.

As I approach my writing desk each morning, I know that I can’t go deep until I go slowly. It has to do with unburdening, with giving myself a break, with letting fresh air in through the windows. Every day I resist our cultural bias that more words are better than fewer, that harder work is better than work arising out of a gentle, relaxed mind.

For me, "poetics" seem clamped in mentally envisioned theories like the postmodern deconstruction so fashionable in universities. That’s abstract junk food—a drab and pleasureless repast.

I plant words, like seeds, under rocks and fallen trees – let language root in the earthen silence of shadow and bone and leaf. After planting them, I tend the budded, earthly intelligence of poems to keep me alive every day, and to harvest connections with the human heart in all of us.

I’m still intrigued by the title of your book: Songs In My Begging Bowl. Can you tell us how the words "song" and "poetry" intermingle in your world, your voice and your work? Are they one and the same?

That title suggests how I make songs in my "body electric." Poems don’t begin in my head, rather they nudge me in my gut—in what I call my "soul bowl."

Beauty bombards me from wherever it can. An image, usually occasioned by a small event, unexpectedly sticks to me like a burr. It drops into my consciousness—my begging bowl proffered trustingly toward the world.

If the burr persists in nagging me, then I grow down into the image, descend into its details and listen quietly before I hear its authentic call to life. Sitting with "not-knowing"—simmering the burr in my "soul bowl"—is fertile and powerful. Other images gradually gather around; I pay attention and trust what emerges. I don’t impose form on a poem, I discover it through accretion.

The burrs, by themselves, are modest: my father’s crematory box, a spider’s web, an oil painting in my parents’ home, a battered pet bowl, or a tree full of sparrows. Yet, they longed for transformation, for some alchemy in language.

Changing lead into music is my work, my craft of poetry. The search for gold blossoms in my solar plexus as I hear my writing voice expanding downward into open vowels that carry emotion. There, I braid the occasion with grounded, evocative language.

Poetry and song intertwine with craft and voice. Songs In My Begging Bowl captured knots of energy—burrs I couldn’t ignore—and offered them in the clearest language I could muster.

They’re images I had to sing into existence, gratefully returning their gold to the world.

We had to wait for 62 years for your first collection of poetry. What are you working on right now? When can we expect to see another collection from you?

I can’t spend another 62 years on a second collection. I don’t have time! But if I promise one in, say, 18 months, I’ll regress back into "cubicle city," feeling hounded by a corporate deadline, all dry mouth and shallow breathing. I don’t set myself up for performance anxiety anymore.

Right now, I work at showing up. And, I work without expectation. In the mornings I sit at my desk, noodling with notes and fragments. I follow the path a poem takes, not my preconceptions. This whole poetry writing gig seems largely a matter of letting go, of release, of luck. Perhaps some decent ones may emerge while I sit here.

When I can’t write, I lie on the floor awhile or walk my neighborhood’s dirt roads.

I don’t want to imitate Songs In My Begging Bowl or backslide into old, safe stuff. That first collection threw open long hallways of doors, freeing my shadows—those hungry-ones-with-mouths-open, always performing for praise. I don’t need to tread that ground again.

Occasionally, poems fall into place suddenly. For me, good ones tend to happen in streaks; if I do finish a good one, I don’t gloat, I start another.

A new collection is forming apace. Ripeness is all!

It’s pretty much a unanimous vote that you’re one of the best live readers of poetry that anyone has ever seen. Are you working from any sort of prior professional background in public speaking when you read? Or is it simply a matter of convergence between your spirit and the emotional core of the poem you are reading?

Thanks for the compliment. I did some public speaking as a corporate trainer at Raytheon. When the company embarked on a year-long hiring spree, I was the MC of New Employee Orientation, welcoming fresh arrivals every Monday with an official "good-news-for-happy-people" spiel. After each session, someone would invariably stop me and say, "Your voice reminds me of that guy on public radio. You know, Prairie Home Companion." I’d brush off their praise. Looking back, I realize that I deflected those blessings because I distrusted the company and felt like a shabby pitchman.

Only after reading my poems in public have I understood the effect of my voice. My heart converges with my words in my throat—that’s power! Last year, I won a prize in a Tucson poetry slam. Believe me, that’s tougher than any corporate speech; I had three achingly short minutes to rock the house.

But it’s not wholly about physical resonance or timbre. My voice resounds when aligned with authentic words. Power and authenticity rise and fall on the same tide. Reading poetry, for me, is a bodily art, as physical as dancing. When true connection is in the air, my poem enters an audience’s body. When that’s working, it’s palpable; I feel it in the room. I’m blessed when people ride my poem’s rhythms in my voice, then allow it through their ears and into their hearts.

What do you think would happen to the educational process and degree of literacy in this country if the spoken word again became a central part of education (as it once was), rather than sitting on the periphery as it does now?

It seems to me that today’s schools knuckle under to the tyranny of standardized tests. Teachers worry about preparing their students for proficiency exams and SATs.

Every day this country floods us with inflated jargon and abstract communication that hooks our brains, not our five senses. If the spoken word once again energized our educational process, teachers could help students become alive instead of being adept test takers.

Learning is not a short-term problem to be solved, but a mystery for a lifetime. I believe that no institution—political, social, religious or educational—is larger than a single human soul. That soul is nurtured by engaging the world in its own unique way.

Activities like writing, speech, drama, debate and oral interpretation help kids embrace all their senses. Don’t skim through anthologies; get the kids to chew on good poems—demand that they memorize and recite them.

Poetry, in the way it’s been traditionally taught, has been so abstracted. Actually, it’s a living art form, human speech at the edge of discovery. Poems mean something to kids only when they sensuously experience them. Earning a diploma without ever feeling language in your body is like reading fifty books about swimming without getting wet.

Don’t get me wrong. I salute dedicated English teachers who shovel sand against the tide every day. They’re given little time to engage kids deeply with the spoken word.

The environment in which we live, the "bottom-line" world we’ve created is mechanistic and impersonal. Our cultural drums beat the prevailing trance: "Be productive!" Education no longer teaches kids how to live, it trains them to make a living. A whole side of the self goes unaddressed.

I often attend a Friday evening open mic at a local coffee house. Teenagers from surrounding high schools hang out and sometimes share their poems. On stage, they hang their heads and mumble through their pieces, almost terrified of the microphone. I know that’s a painfully shy time for them, but, from a table in the back, I urge them to hold that mic to their lips and rattle the walls.

That sounds like a small thing, but it has huge implications for our future. As an artist, I won’t allow the collective to shame wonderful voices into silence.

You coordinate both an adult poetry circle and a poetry course for fourth graders in Show Low. Can you tell us the advantages to a child’s development process when poetics are encouraged and emphasized? Do you feel that the poetic voice & rhythm is one of those things that is natural to the young child? What more can we do to keep it going for our young people?

I’m no professional educator and have no grandiose theories. I appear in classrooms once a month, bring enthusiasm about word-fun and goofy rhymes and invite kids to get crazy with language.

Initially, they seem astonished that a gray-bearded character like me gets a kick out of the same stuff they do. Kids dive into word sounds and rhythms like ducks into a pond; it’s natural for them. By 10 years old, they’ve learned our language by imitating sounds. They love to juggle and play with them.

How can we keep it going? First, keep vital language in front of them. From kindergarten through senior year, inject good poems, plays and stories in their ears and hearts to lift them into articulateness.

Next, ban TV from classrooms. I believe a single child brings more color and texture to a poem or a fable than the entire Disney animation factory.

Media bombardment sucks life juices from children. If I recite a few lines about trolls under a bridge, boys and girls light up with incredible pictures. Then play a video of that story and watch what happens: they slump into passivity, yielding their imaginations to a flickering electronic version. "Yep, those are trolls, that’s what they look like." Any joy is gone. It’s over!

Volunteering with poetry in schools is how I bless young people. It’s what I do to encourage and hear their authentic voices, hoping they rise above our electronic babble.

Further Information:
• Excerpt from Songs In My Begging Bowl
• Review of Songs In My Begging Bowl