When I was a child, my mother and I read Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses at night before bed. My mother had memorized the poem “Where Go the Boats” when she was a kid, so that poem is most prominent in my memory.
In terms of music, I remember listening and singing along to The Monkeys with my dad and my sister when we did the dishes after dinner at night. And I remember listening to Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA with my mom. My mother had a huge LP collection, so I used to rifle through her records and listen to whatever looked interesting.
When I was a teenager, I gravitated towards poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. My guess is the overt emotion in some of their poetry appealed to my teenage sensibilities.
Would you say your childhood and teenage experience of poetry has had a distinct influence on how you write poetry now, and why?
Yes. As a child, the first poem I ever wrote was entitled “The Sea,” and was basically just a meditation on loving the sound of waves. The Stevenson poems I gravitated towards the most were about watery locations and subjects. And in terms of other poets I read, those poets became part of my own process of maturation as a writer. This is not to say that I’m somehow fully matured now—I’m not—but rather that different writers become models at different times in one’s life. Plath and Sexton were valuable to me as a high school student. I’m sure I imitated them stylistically at that time. Later, I loved Frank O’Hara, and I imitated the unique voice of his poems. Still later, I became obsessed with Wallace Stevens and many of the poems in my first book bear that obsession. What I’m reading now will probably influence the poems I write in six months, and so on. But what’s interesting about influence, I think, is that one’s own work becomes a space in which the ghosts of all of these poets and their poems reside. Even if I no longer go to Sylvia Plath when I feel like writing, her work is somewhere in the background when I pick up a pen, and the same goes for other writers I consider to be influences.
Who is another poet whose poetry you admire and why?
In the last couple of years, I’ve read a lot of Emily Dickinson. I admire her work for the ambiguity of her syntax; for the metaphorical combination of concrete language and abstract concepts; and for certain formal qualities of her work, such as the much-discussed dash. I love the last stanza of “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”:
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –
The concrete “Plank” in the concept of “Reason” calls up any number of possible referents—a coffin, a house, or a gangplank—while the final “then” surrounded on either side by the dash offers us two semantic possibilities: either the speaker finished knowing at the moment she “dropped down, and down,” or the speaker finished knowing, and then something else happened that the reader is not privy to. I love that the last line effectively undoes the idea it declares.
How would you summarise one of your poems in one paragraph?
The poem “Backpedaling for Statements,” which appears in my book Rust or Go Missing, is an amalgamation of a number of conversations, and is a record of where the mind goes when considering all of these different conversations. So the poem includes not only reflection on multiple conversations, but also the present moment (the moment of composition) when the speaker looks out a window and reflects on how a window frames a natural scene, and then what world that framing creates. In this way, the speaker creates a corresponding visual analogue to the way conversations can lead to verbal posturing, internal meditation, and finally in the poem, an improvisational voice—a voice that experiments with sound and speech in the space of the poem.
How would you describe the appeal of this poem to readers?
I hope the poem creates a space where a reader might find herself taking pleasure in the way words feel in the mouth. I hope the poem sends a reader away thinking in some way (however slanted or abstracted) about natural spaces in the context of architectural constructs, or thinking about how the landscape around us (natural, conversational, visual) directs our eyes and, in turn, our thoughts. But most of all, I want a reader to find her own meaning in the words of the poem, and I hope the poem leaves space for the reader to do that.
Could you share a stanza or small section of this poem?
From “Backpedaling for Statements”:
She says the book can’t feel the smart
of tumble and hit. But here, in the office,
window cases mini-landscape. Window cut
by brown rulers, run through and across
the grass. Now a world—impression
of groundcover and tree with sunlight.
She says the book can’t feel
but I’m inside. The book has many
minds. She wants to know the climate
of the room where I last wrote.
Was it the living room? Was it the staircase,
the memory of a staircase? I make a lie
of the absolute, space like a reflection
that never changes.
How would you describe the contribution this stanza or small section makes to the poem?
This opening section of the poem introduces the idea of conversation as a space where various kinds of framing occur, and the speaker introduces the visual analogue of a window framing the exterior world.
Would you describe your poetry primarily as narrative, thematic, character portrait, or how would you describe your poetry?
I would describe my poetry as thought-driven. The poem is a record of the mind thinking, and of all of the movement and variety that can arise in the course of thought (i.e. memory, sensory data, the place where the writing takes place, what day it is, who’s around, whether the dog jumps on me, etc.).
Do you read your poetry aloud to people? If so, how would you describe the size and response of your listening audiences?
I read my poetry aloud when I give public readings. Audiences vary for these events from a few people to maybe a couple of hundred (at a big conference, for example). It’s hard to gauge the response of an audience, as it completely varies from group to group. I don’t think my poems are very funny, but once in a while I feel gratified if someone laughs at a moment that has some dark humor to it. I suppose the responses of different audiences can be characterized most accurately by their variety.
Do you write groups of poems to form collections? If so, how were the poems connected in your most recent collection?
I don’t usually write groups of poems to form collections, but the poems are connected regardless. The poems in my most recent collection are connected by an interest in the relationship between humans and the natural world, by ideas about the photographic image and the poetic image, and by relationships between people and how people treat each other in both public and private spaces and situations.
Author website: http://www.csuohio.edu/poetrycenter/AuthorBook/Brown.html
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