My father had memorized many poems and spouted them off at will. I remember “Invictus,” “The Highwayman,” “Gunga Din,” “Jabberwocky,” and on and on. He could quote them all flawlessly and with great enthusiasm.
Would you say your childhood and teenage experience of poetry has had a distinct influence on how you write poetry now, and why?
Maybe. I am more a narrative poet than not, although what I write may not look narrative enough to suit my father, there’s a strong thread of story underlying whatever disjunctive dream-material may enter the poem. When I was a teenager, I studied the usual, Wordsworth, Browning, Dickinson, Shakespeare, etc., and I am sure the formal quality of most of that work influenced me. I found that the free verse anthologized poems were often boring ones. The real “meat” was in the formal ones. I hardly ever write very formal poems, or at least traditional form poems, but my poems are very sensitive to chiming sounds, stresses, and other formal qualities.
Who is another poet whose poetry you admire and why?
Pick one other? That’s hard. Maybe Emily Dickinson, because she manages to surprise me in every single poem. She is almost preternaturally sensitive to sound, which enables her to slip around the edges of expected sound, so the surprise is there, too. Her subjects appear to be hermetic, but they are about as deep as a person can go into the psyche and remain readable. And when a poem can do that, I dare anyone to call it hermetic! The poets who seem most narcissistic to me are often ones who appear to be very “social” and “public.”
How would you summarise one of your poems in one paragraph?
If I did that, the poem would be missing. Only its poor skeleton would be strewn, detached, across the sand. I will pick one: “The Kayak and the Eiffel Tower.” It is “about” a memory of what happened when my father received a postcard from a woman he must have had an affair with while he was stationed in the Phillipines.
How would you describe the appeal of this poem to readers?
It moves between the mind of the adult, remembering, and the feeling of being a child, helpless and confused. I think the disparate images of kayak and Eiffel Tower are interesting.
Could you share a stanza or small section of this poem?
This is the way the poem begins:
The white sheet I remember, flashing across
the bed and I was watching my mother and the crying
and the bed disappeared and all was white
but it was not snow, it was my mind, and then, oddly,
she took us in a taxi to the movies, I think
it was Ben Hur. It was his postcard, now I know,
from that woman in the Philippines, back when
he was a soldier. All this, a movement
of shapes, nothing to hold onto. The kayak
is like that. It slides through the water and the paddle
goes on one side then the other, and there is the sway
of the boat and then the correction. It was
like that, and it was like the Eiffel Tower, all filigree
and lace, because I couldn’t see anything solid . . . .
How would you describe the contribution this stanza or small section makes to the poem?
It locates the poem in time and space. And it begins the two images that move through the rest of the poem.
Would you describe your poetry primarily as narrative, thematic, character portrait, or how would you describe your poetry?
My poetry used to be more narrative than it is now, although as I said, the thread is always there. I am strongly convinced that poetry should be accessible on the rational level as well as pointing our way into the irrational, non-linear place we often call the dream-world.
Do you read your poetry aloud to people? If so, how would you describe the size and response of your listening audiences?
I give public readings fairly often, to audiences of varying size. I have read for hundreds and I have read for six people. I have read in public arenas and for book clubs.
Do you write groups of poems to form collections? If so, how were the poems connected in your most recent collection?
Good question. In my most recent published collection (I have a new one coming out from BOA Editions in 2013), called Reunion, the poems were loosely connected by the thought of things coming together, having a reunion, of sorts. There were a few poems I wrote after my high school reunion, but that part didn’t form the basis of the book. There were poems about the three places I’ve lived: Delaware, Michigan, and Arkansas, and in a way, bringing those together made a reunion.
Author website: www.fledabrown.com
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