Writing the Life Poetic

Poets to Know: An Interview with Daniel Nester

Daniel Nester and I grew up in the same town in suburban New Jersey. But our first meeting was in our mid-20’s when we attended the same graduate creative writing program in New York City, taught poetry as a team in a residential hospital, and wandered around SoHo and the East Village experimenting with the urban chic of the life poetic. Daniel is one of the most approachable, prolific and community-minded poets I know. In the complexities of making a life and making a living, poetry seems to have stayed front and center for him in the fifteen-plus years that we’ve known each other. For this, I’ve held Daniel as a beacon of possibility for how I might stay true to my own course over the years.

Why do you write poetry? What brought you to it and what has kept you writing?

I was brought to poetry because I wanted to elevate my life with language. I think I wanted to use what I thought was a higher language than what I used every day. What has kept me drawn to poetry is the desire to make that higher language deceptively simple. I write poetry because I love to mess around with language and then see if it makes sense of my world. I like to make sense of my world and then see if I can mess it up with language. I like the sound of words, the way words that shouldn’t be next to each other sound next to each other.

 

You are a man of many literary talents and seemingly infinite energy! How does your relationship with poetry live alongside the work you do as journalist, essayist, poet, editor, teacher, and family man?

I am not sure about my energy level these days. I can definitely feel myself slowing down, especially to watch my kids do their thing and interact with them. I do like having a range of different projects in the works at one time time. That way, when I do show up at my desk to write, I don’t have any excuses. I can look at a poem, or an essay, look at my student’s writing, or work on some story I need to get done for somebody who wants me to write something. All these things use a different side of my brain, and keep my typing skills up to snuff.

 

These days, poetry lives around the edges of my projects. I love reading writer’s fragments, aphorisms, commonplace books. Random examples would be things like John Richardson’s Vectors, The Poet’s Notebook . New York Review of Books published a book from 18th century scientist Georg Lichtenberg called The Waste Books that is just terrific. 

 

You wrote an essay, Goodbye to All Them (that appears in your book) about your experience in the New York City poetry scene. I'm wondering if your relocation to Albany, NY has had any surprising influence in your poetic life.

Moving to Upstate New York was one of the best decisions my wife and I made. It gave me more time to write and space, mentally and real estate-wise, to do so. My years in New York City were terrific—I don’t regret living there for a minute. But I think my experience there ran dry. I was working too hard on jobs I didn’t really want. Moving out of the city gave me a chance to teach full-time, which I love to do.

I was growing tired of being around so many writers. The thing is, as soon as I moved to Albany, I started missing all those writers! The good news is there’s a good community of writers around Albany and upstate. There is enough of a scene to keep things interesting, and I have made friends with different writers I might not have met in the city. I also run a reading series at my college called Frequency North, which is a direct descendant of a reading series I started with Shanna Compton called Frequency. It gives me a chance to bring writers from out of town and have them visit classes.

 

What gets you in a poetic state of mind?

This might sounds smart-alecky, but: boredom? Silence? Also: a fresh legal pad page or Moleskin page. I still handwrite my poems, and I still think of poetry making as a very tactile experience. I need a good Uniball fine pen, a good notebook, and some time to myself. I just like making words with my hands.

How has your relationship with poetry shaped who you are today?

I am sure it’s kept me sane, as sane as I am, at least. It’s a cliché, but whenever I was feeling down or disturbed or couldn’t make sense of things, from a very young age, I would turn to writing. It felt it was a sacred, religious thing for me to write things down. There’s some on-the-spot self-mythologizing there, but we’re talking about me as an eight- or nine-year-old, taking out a notebook, and writing little rhymes.

 

How has your life poetic informed the development of your newest book, How to Be Inappropriate (Soft Skull Press, 2009)?

 

My practice as a poet, more often than not, has not been an organic one; I feel as if I loved poetry so much I sort of willed myself into being one. That being said, my life poetic has influenced how I see the world, how I translate that world into words. When I write poems, I look for what is seen by many as un-poetic: that includes popular culture objects, crudity, embarrassments.

 

The same applies when I write prose, which perhaps demands more of narrative and expository inclinations, sure. But there is still, ideally, a desire to compress language, make lasting images, and offer wisdom. There is a literal informing--there's the essay on leaving the New York poetry scene that you mention, and an essay on references to farts in poetry, which was in an issue of Humor: The International Journal of Humor Studies, guest-edited by one of my favorite poets, Denise Duhamel. There's an autobiographical informing--my life as an aspiring poet is covered in the book as well. I think when I thought about the sequence of the pieces, I thought like a poet; how, when writing a poem, I would think about images working before and after each other, foreshadowing and combining for the most effect.

 

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Daniel Nester’s newest book is How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of humorous nonfiction. He is the author of God Save My Queen and God Save My Queen II, collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen, and The History of My World Tonight, a collection of poems. His work has appeared Poets & Writers, The Morning News, The Daily Beast, Time Out New York, The Rumpus, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and Bookslut. Daniel’s work has been anthologized in Lost and Found, The Best American Poetry 2003, The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 1, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, and Isn't It Romantic? 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets. The former sestinas editor for McSweeney's, he teaches writing at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY.

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La Via Lactea

This time last year, I was nine hours into labor, with 51 more ahead of me until my dear son Theo was born. In celebration of the fact that the birth experience is fading as the Theo experience is exploding with light, I share with you this poem written for me by my dear friend Joseph Gallo.

La Via Lactea
For Sage
 
When we met, they were tumbling inside you
in a local cluster and I could hear them behind
voices that buffeted the brick walls of the Bold-Sky
Cafe, the clink of glass and plate, our unread poems
sheaved neatly in folders like literary flatware.
 
They were your star-eggs—born to the cosmos
circling in every woman, children clinging to
all that is possible in waiting to become, novan
threads tethered by a theory of mother, suns
longing to be daughtered by gravity and love.
 
As I foundered in the wake of a lost woman,
you were the bright echo of her possibility.
You taught me what it was to lose with grace,
to continue through a darkness bearing only
what luminance we are willing to let freely.
 
You did not know this for I did not tell you.
I saw the comet-tailed boy inching within you
among a scatter of worlds yet to be, moving
across the vast and brief coil that is your time
to bring such perfect mass and light into being.
 
And so he came up and through you, this
expression of what must yet remain un-
knowable, that dares to sit up and speak
itself, to cherish and behold all that conspired
to make this so—father, child, matris lacteus.
 
Perhaps it is the divine business of children to
teach us that parenthood is a sacred accord, that
from our own blood pour the songs that summon
us home, reminding us that we shall yet return to
that place in the sky that holds the sweetest milk.

Joseph Gallo
July 29, 2009

Samples of Joseph's work may be found at:
Drachenthrax & Mystic-Lit

Shawn Sorensen takes the Oregon poetry world by storm!

I am so proud of my friend Shawn, I could burst! He has just won first place in the Oregon State Poetry Association's Spring 2009 contest, New Poets category for his poem "The Yard." Shawn is one of the most hard working, generous, enthusiastic, hilariously funny, and TALL poets I know. His dedication to his craft and his community always uplifts me and inspires me to push a little harder toward my own evolution. In fact, that's why I invited him to be a columnist for the Writing The Life Poetic zine...so all of you could benefit from his charisma and know-how! But I digress...

With no further ado, I bring to you the first-prize-winning poem of Shawn Sorensen:

The Yard
 
For William Carlos Williams
 
The frame of a garden bed
rests in the yard,
stoic while dandelions
proliferate.  Its four boards,
 
weather-treated, stained,
enclose small tufts of grass - 
like random thoughts, like
innuendos incomplete,
 
ready to be moved
again, ready to
add another location
to this whole view
 
of the yard, which
the newlywed owners
can’t decide on, not knowing
where the flowering
 
nugget of land will
finally flourish, its elevated
status in environs otherwise
flat and commonplace.

-- Shawn Sorensen

Introducing the Writing the Life Poetic e-Zine!

I am thrilled to introduce the Writing the Life Poetic e-Zine, a monthly publication chock full of information and inspiration to keep your poetry fires burning bright! Writing the Life Poetic e-Zine brings you the wisdom and wit of the following  superstar contributors: Brittany Baldwin, Dale Favier, Sara Guest, Jenn Lalime, Christopher Luna, Toni Partington and yours truly! Each of these beautiful writers will offer a monthly gem exploring some dimension of poetry writing, living and community-building.

Writing the Life Poetic e-Zine will launch in April, in celebration of National Poetry Month! Each contributor's column will be featured here throughout the month--and every month after. Plus, you can subscribe to receive the complete monthly zine in your email box every month! To get yours, just enter your email address in the top right column where it says: "Sign up for our e-mail newsletter."

We look forward to writing and living the life poetic with you! 

Touch Me

Thank you, Mari, for sending me this link to Stanley Kunitz reading one of my very favorite poems of all time!

Fifteen years ago, I memorized "Touch Me" in graduate school. When I recite them, Kunitz's words come through me as if born of my body. As precious as my own past, the poem lives alongside those moments I hold onto and pours out in a sweet mix of grief and tenderness when I am moved to speak of love--as I was at the dinner preceding Mari's wedding.

What a thrill to hear for the first time Kunitz speaking his own poem...I hope you will listen and let me know what you think!

Jason Mashak publishing success

Jason Mashak was one of my first poetry friends in Portland. A masterful bringer together of people, he introduced me to many of my most valued poetry colleagues and friends, most of whom are named below. Over the past few years, I've watched Jason transform from a talented poet to a talented, focused and dedicated poet--one who is meeting much acclaim these days. I wanted to share and celebrate his two most recent publications with you: Heavy Bear and the Refined Savage Poetry Review. Bravo, Jason, for writing such fine poems and sharing them with the rest of us! (Both publications also feature the poems of poet and friend Dan Raphael. Check 'em out!)

I asked Jason to share a bit about his poetry journey with us. He replied:

It's been a long, strange road, where I started young and naively full of ideals and frenzy and, somewhere around mile marker 33, I saw myself in the reflection of old car windows... looking haggard and curmudgeonly... and I noticed the papers I was carrying were now coffee-stained, scribbled upon, and folded into airplanes -- some crashed upon mad fields of battle, others reaching the moon's orbit... but nonetheless in-hand, and every bit a part of that wind-swept journey.  Mostly, for these bringers of flight, I give credit to living mentors and friends:  Doug Marx, Bill Shively, Dan Raphael, Sage Cohen, Christopher Luna, Sean Patrick Hill, Chris Cottrell, Emily Riley, Brittany Baldwin, Bill Bell, Colin Smith, the Multnomah Village Writers group, and more.  They were the traveling companions who helped me know when to stain, scribble, or fold.

jm

Jason Mashak (b. 1973) is a Michigan native who spent his teens and early 20s in Georgia and Tennessee before living eight years in Oregon.  Since 2006, he has lived in the Czech Republic, where he writes, edits, and invests much of his time with his baby girl.  His first book, Salty As a Lip, will be published by Haggard and Halloo Press (Austin, Texas) in 2009.  You can keep tabs on him via facebook.

And are we not of interest to each other?

What is poetry? As long as there have been poems, poets have been weighing in on this question. I have always loved reading such navel-gazing poems, turned self-consciously into themselves, and have included a few in my book. Check out Elizabeth Alexander's answer in "Ars Poetica #100: I Believe," as she explores what poetry is and what it isn't. Here's a little taste of what awaits you:

Poetry (and now my voice is rising)
is not all love, love, love
and I'm sorry the dog died.

Thank you, Garrisson Keillor and The Writer's Almanac for this and so many other fine poems. Thank you, Elizabeth Alexander and every other poet who has looked themselves in the eye and attempted to define this golden thread of poetry that we faithfully (and often clumsily) follow into the unknown.