Part of what keeps me going is the challenge: I become so enamoured of other writers' works: Edwige Danticat, Lucille Clifton, ZZ Packer, Zora Neal Hurston, my fellow artists and friends. Right now I am reading Kiran Desai and it was enough to strike me dumb for a bit. I couldn't think of creating for a couple of weeks. And then... something, as usual, popped in my head, deep in it, like a blooming cereus in the desert night. And then all was/is well. I feel/felt right with the world. Stumbling this practiced way is the only way I have of staying in love with process, thickening with it.
What's coming down the pike? For the past three or so years, I've worked to meld poetry and fiction, to blur the lines. I believe muddling the genres can help you strengthen the muscles for both. For example, in my own work, my dialogue in fiction stopped being stale and my poem-spaces have grown. I tell my students to listen in elevators, on the street, in restaurants. People don't know the way they speak is poetry. I use this exercise myself, fixing my ears to this magic has helped me hone in on my own work and shape it. I listen more to people, especially children. Their sounds and word choices, image constructions are so musical and poem-perfect. Children carry in their little mouths the very best metaphors. They have an intricate relationship with the power of image. They aren't held back by what keeps us, even writers, from say what needs to be said. They aren't full of the flowery language, yet they are such glorious gardens.
What would you describe as your major themes?
Do you have enough room? My poems explored my race and nationality; they interrogated my father and his abandoning my family; they looked at migration and the grasp of one's culture over assimilation. In one of the poems I sent you, "Smoke," I was dealing with the idea of my father's depression, something I had never in my youth or early adulthood even thought to explore. But being able to look back with twenty-thirty sight, I can deconstruct my memories, see my father staring out a lot, having several afternoon drinks till he fell to sleep at night, bark at us though we'd done nothing to inspire ire. His beer-thick fog of unhappiness started to speak up, some fifteen years after he'd left us. It started to speak up in poems, interrupt rooms of poems, move through my writing like a bull in a porcelain shop. I could not ignore its chatter, its rumble. It's this way with most of my work, the stories too. Characters (whether in a stanza or paragraph) just won't leave me alone. The only way I have of shaking them off my back is to pay attention. Close. Jot down what the monsters say when they say it. Then I'm free. Somewhat.
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