Stan Galloway, nominated Best of the Net in 2011, teaches English at Bridgewater College in Virginia.
His chapbook Abraham is available from Sierra Delta Press. His full collection Just Married is forthcoming from unboundCONTENT. He has also written a book of literary criticism, The Teenage Tarzan (McFarland, 2010).
Friday
Nov
22
Stan Galloway - Poetry
Stan Galloway, nominated Best of the Net in 2011, teaches English at Bridgewater College in Virginia.
His chapbook Abraham is available from Sierra Delta Press. His full collection Just Married is forthcoming from unboundCONTENT. He has also written a book of literary criticism, The Teenage Tarzan (McFarland, 2010).
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Stan Galloway Interview, with Nicelle Davis
Your poems read as reflections—little mirrors filled with beautiful images. How important is it for people to recognize beauty?
Thank you for that thought, Nicelle. I recognize two questions here, in a sense. The first is not really a question but an observation about mirroring life in words, and in this case words that create images. Good art, including writing, holds up a mirror to life. Robert Frost said that a good poem “ends in a clarification of life” but “not necessarily a great clarification.” The mirror of the poem needs to have some recognizable element of real life, something that each reader feels pricked by or at home with. Readers who have felt the absence of a loved one know the disappointment and disorientation that can accompany it. The images in “Missing You in Late Spring” try to reflect those emotions. To the ability that any poem reflects a reader’s identification, it succeeds as an important mirror for the reader. I see it in Claudia Emerson’s Late Wife and in Nora Olivares’ Soulscapes, in particular, as well as in a whole range of poets that I’ve read.
How important is beauty? Keats said “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” I think you must have been thinking of his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” when you asked. I have been working on imagery lately. Writing a narrative poem comes fairly easily to me. It is the conversion of non-narrative elements, either to create narrative or to foster an emotional response in the reader that has my focus at present. Though I don’t return to William Wordsworth’s poetry very often, I find I hold tight-fistedly to his philosophy in Lyrical Ballads, to make the ordinary extraordinary. And this is done largely through the use of the apt word in creating an image, maybe commonplace in life, but strikingly original, dare I say beautiful, on the page. To miss details is to miss the beauty. I can’t prove it, but I believe those who do not see beauty around them are the unhappiest people on the planet. One role of the poet is to draw out that beauty from the mundane, to capture it, for the reader, who may or may not have been taught to do it for himself/herself. I study other poets and try to understand how their words do this, so that I can be better at it myself.
Can time be frozen with poetry?
Keats, again in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” suggests something of the immortality of art. His argument in that poem is superior to anything I can write. He suggests, though, that immortality comes at the price of action. Just as a photograph can be a pleasant reminder of an event, it cannot relive the moment, only the viewer or, in the case of the poem, the reader/listener can do that. “Dawn, Descending” is a poem that acts as a photograph. The allusions to art, beginning with the title, reinforce the visual aspect of the poem. Readers familiar with Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2” have a much clearer (forgive the paradoxical term) conception of the sight of airport lights after a long night flight. In that sense, the poem attempts to freeze the moment. But a poem can do much more than pseudo-Polaroid reproduction. The Imagist poems of a century ago found that visual reproduction of itself did not work as effectively as a poem that reproduced more than the visual, ones that appealed to more than the sense of sight. The sixth line springs the reader outside the visual by the reference to Eric Satie, whose impressionistic work for the piano would have been contemporary with Duchamp’s earliest work in paint. In this way, the reader is pushed into reconciling a sight-based image in terms of a sound, in a sense making the poem move from one-dimensional to two-dimensional (or for literalists, it would have to be from two- to three- since one-dimensional objects can’t be seen).
How does your attention to the senses increase the effectiveness of a poem?
One of my current emphases is to try to touch all the senses – sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch – in a poem. It is part of the truth/beauty of any real experience, but in a sight-dominated culture, the impact of the other senses is often unnoticed. “Cherry Garden,” for example, is a poem built on smell, but I had to fight myself to make it that way. My first impulse in a poem is nearly always visual. I don’t want to ignore the visual, but I want to acknowledge that there is more to every experience than just the visual. “Missing You in Late Spring” is, at one level, an exercise in blending all the senses to create an emotional response. I purposely start with a non-visual sensation. Conveying an emotion – missing someone, in this case – involves the feeling more than the sight. Here the sound creating a tactile response mixes two less-noted senses. The third stanza appeals to smell, the fourth, to taste, returning to tactile sensation in the fifth. The final stanza is visual, but supported at this point by all the other senses. To return to the question, the poem is much more effective by involving all the senses in portraying the sense of separation. The poem could be written entirely of visual images, many poems are, but a poem should do more than help the reader see; it should help the reader experience. That’s what I try to do in poems like “Missing You in Late Spring.”
You’ve mentioned a number of other poets. How important is it for you to read the work of other writers?
It is essential to me. I came to writing poetry after years of reading it. It was only after teaching how some poems work and how some poets create meaning that I decided I had something to add to the literary conversation. I keep poems on my desk to read at odd moments. I sometimes keep a book of poems in the car, for unexpected delays. I keep poetry beside the bed for filling my mind before I sleep or when I wake in the night. Currently I’m finishing a book on Arthur Rimbaud at the office and I’ve got Seamus Heaney beside the bed. Some poets I know are concerned that their own work will become derivative if they read too much of another writer. I would call those poets speech-makers; they are interested in their own voice. And the literary world needs such writers. I’m more of a conversationalist, though. I prize the interplay between what I write and what others have said. Sometimes a poem is just my attempt to speak back to the initiating poet what they’ve said, in my own words, to see if I have understood it. Sometimes it is my contradiction of their claims and sometimes it is simply a tangent on an idea peripheral to his or her poem that I want to make central. The poems here do not come directly from poems by others (though my poem “inside” published in Connotation Press in May, 2011, certainly is), but I can remember some of the genesis of each. “Missing You in Late Spring” came while I was reading and studying Julie Ellinger Hunt’s image-craft. “Cherry Garden” came from an image suggested in an e-mail with another writer, though now I couldn’t pinpoint it. “Dawn, Descending” came not from written text but my identification of Duchamp’s visual work. All of them are part of conversations.
What new poetry projects are you working on?
I’m at an ebb. My chapbook, Abraham, came out in June from Sierra Delta Press. My collection on young love, Just Married, has been accepted for publication (tentatively scheduled for March 2013 at unboundCONTENT). My themed collection on the book of Genesis, tentatively titled First Questions, is ready for proofreading and submitting. So, while I tend to more managerial tasks, the creative end, the writing of poems, is rather untidy, no themes ready-made. I’ll need to look through what I’ve written and see what coherent units I might discover and write more poems to fill those out.
A second item on the poetry front for me is putting together the Bridgewater International Poetry Festival. I’m hoping to attract poets from outside the United States to add to poets from inside the United States for a weekend of readings in January 2013. The webpage for the event is here. With success, I’m hoping to do this every odd-numbered year. Thanks for asking.
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Missing You in Late Spring
Visceral bass,
distant and insistent,
quivers my kidneys.
Forsythia-bold sun bits
refract dust
inside my retina.
Impossible incense
shimmers
from my dehumidifier.
Strawberries
turn cran-
in tongue-edge eddies.
Even my pen
lynx-licks the fissure
between thumb and forefinger.
The sun sits
on the timber
sooner than I wish.
Cherry Garden
Cherry garden
fragrant blossom fantasy
without a tree
inside these oh-too-real walls
I must mind the gap,
daydream in the night
to catch the scent
and anchor it unseen.
Dawn, Descending
LAX to IAD, 5 March 2012
The little glitter of your lights
proclaims the vigil ending,
held for wanderers arriving
to the silent fanfare in the east,
coronet of red and silver
Satie-ribboned Duchamp arms
stretched in cosmic welcome.