When I recently met Seth Brady Tucker, our newest poetry instructor, at Fluid Coffee Bar, he showed up with a bunch of stitches in his lip. Still, though, he could smile. Which makes me like him all the more. And reconfirms for me that poetry is not for wimps. It’s a blood sport. (He actually hurt his lip playing basketball, but still….)
To get to know Seth a little better, I’ve asked him a couple of questions about the nature of poetry, his own work, and something about containers.
Q: What would you say makes for a good poem when you read it?
A: Questions like these are always difficult to answer simply because the rules I tend to assign to poetry are broken so often by talented writers. I am constantly surprised and humbled by poets who can make “uninteresting” subjects compelling–I have never knitted, or collected stamps, or lived in Farmington, Iowa, yet there are undoubtedly poems written about these subjects that would blow me away. That said, I do find that I tend to love poems that do two very specific things: they reveal what is at stake for the narrator (the conceit of a poem), and they unveil what is at stake for all of us as readers (that difficult ability to pay attention to audience–whether it is through pathos, ethos, logos, or some mixture of all three).
The former makes the poem your own. The latter makes the poem “ours.” Very rarely do I find poems compelling that only have one or the other. I think the most popular example of this would be seen in William Carlos Williams, “So Much Depends,” a poem with which most of us are familiar. Some poets are able to achieve this feat through similarly simple means as WCW, while others manage it in truly complex and original ways (I am specifically thinking of James Dickey, a poet I return to again and again). Either way, it seems to me that all good poets produce their best work by paying attention to the dual nature of “what is at stake” in their own poetry.
Q: In “Tag” you use four-line (quatrain) stanzas, and employ a relatively long line—where did this shape come from? And in general, how and when do you tend to settle on a line-length and stanza form?
This may sound a bit metaphysical or abstract, but when it comes to length of line, and stanza break up, I often find it works itself out by “listening” to the poem. ”Tag” [see below] is a strange animal because it started out as a prose poem. Upon reading it aloud, however, I began to hear how it was broken up both by the images and by the rhythm of how it “needed to be read.” As I re-read this answer, I notice that I seem to refer to my poems as distinct individuals—and this may be closer to the truth than anything. But I digress. I find that rhythm, and the natural beat of language, inform the structure of my poems much more than my own pathological need to control the lines in some way.
In much of my formally lineated poetry, I work with repeated or contorted images, which create their own “form.” These poems make it easy to decide how structure will work. The more difficult task for me is how to find a way to listen to those poems that come organically to me, those poems that get written out without a specific concept of how the lines will take form—these are the poems that require close and careful “listening,” but even in this I think I fail as much as I succeed.
Q: I’m a big fan of poems being containers for stuff—objects, emotions, actions. Your poetry seems to abide by that as well. (“Tag” for example, last several wonderful run-on lists of things.) Can you talk a bit about that?
A: I hadn’t really thought of poems in this way, specifically as “containers,” but I think the metaphor is great (and with your permission, I will now be stealing it!)—especially if one considers it in relation to the old allegorical example of how one should “fill the bucket” of their lives. For those who aren’t familiar with this metaphor, it is simply this: if you have a bucket that represents what you think is most important for your happiness, how would you fill your bucket if stones represent the primarily important aspects of your life, pebbles represent secondary elements, and sand represents tertiary considerations? How would you then put them in the bucket to have the most potential for happiness in your life? The answer, of course, is to put the stones in first, then shake in the pebbles, and then sift in the sand so that everything will fit.
I think this metaphor works for poetry as well—we have to consciously put the stones into our poems first, so that all the secondary aspects of the poem will also fit into whatever concept we have for our narrative. Otherwise, if we simply fill the bucket (or poem) with sand first, there’s no way to put the important stuff in there to make it work. I think “Tag” is representative of this idea—if I had simply let the running lists of things be the “stones” in the bucket, it wouldn’t work very well. It is the “story of the narrator” that forms the stones, and the litany and the metaphor of the trains are the sand and pebbles, and this is what makes this poem compelling, I think. Anyway, this idea of filling the bucket with only important stuff is something I am still working on, and I suspect most poets struggle with this as well.
–MJH
PS Seth will be leading the January session of the 8-week Poetry Workshop at Lighthouse. Here’s his poem, “Tag”:
TAG
In a city such as this, you steal Kenwood
and Harmon-Kardon stereos from row houses
and from the dashboards of badass tinted
and chromed and lowered hydraulic-injected
turbo rides with even bigger and more badass
owners and dealers and pimps and embezzlers
who all sport hate tattoos on their elbows
or ears or necks or calves or privates or scalps.
So you steal to get the slick acrylic paint
you need to spill your colors and your messages
on the rail cars. The security guards at the rail
yards have guns, so you have made your own
invention to attach to the spray cans—a silencer
made of cardboard tp rolls, duct tape, and a plastic
bucket with a hole cut in the bottom. You tag
with the hard acrylic so that the epistles you send
out to small towns like Flagstaff and Santa Fe
and Barstow and Huntsville and Tallahassee can
be seen for what they are: a shout out into the void
of America, a note in a bottle that rattles on hot rails,
and you hope deep down that someone will see your words,
that they will travel the hard track back into the wild night,
that for once someone will come looking for you without
punishment or violence or retribution on their minds,
and when they arrive, accompanied by the deep echoed wail
of the rail cars and the hot dark breath of swirling prairie dreams,
you hope they will finally carry the message that saves you.
Originally published in Atlanta Review.
mjhenry
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