Today’s special guest is poet Maureen Owen to chat about her new chapbook, everything turns on a delicate measure.
Bio:
Maureen Owen’s title, let the heart hold down the breakage Or the caregiver’s log, is recently out from Hanging Loose Press. And hot off the press is Poets on the Road, a collaborative reading tour blog with Barbara Henning in print from City Point Press. She is former editor and chief of Telephone Magazine and Telephone Books, currently celebrated in a two vol. recap by The Poetry Collection at The University at Buffalo. She is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Edges of Water from Chax Press. Her title Erosion’s Pull from Coffee House Press was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize. Her collection American Rush: Selected Poems was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and her work AE (Amelia Earhart) was a recipient of the prestigious Before Columbus American Book Award. Other books include Imaginary Income, Zombie Notes, a brass choir approaches the burial ground, The No-Travels Journal, and Untapped Maps. She has most recently published work in Three Fold, Dispatches, Positive Magnets, Hurricane Review, The Denver Quarterly, Blazing Stadium, The Brooklyn Rail, The Cafe Review and Posit. An instructor of numerous workshops and classes in poetry and book production, her awards include grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Fund for Poetry and a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has taught at Naropa University, both on campus and in the low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program, and served as editor-in-chief of Naropa’s on-line zine not enough night. She can be found reading her work on the PennSound website.
Welcome, Maureen. What do you enjoy most about writing poems?
To me writing/poetry is a magical act. It inspires me to portray the truth and reality of what I see to a reader with the same energy and immediacy that I am experiencing as witness. Solving the mysteries of everyday allows me to perform magic through language.
Can you give us a little insight into a few of your poems – perhaps a couple of your favorites?
My titles are often long and often I have more than one title above a poem sometimes separated by “or.” For instance, the title poem in this book is:
“everything turns on a delicate measure
was it the same night they were to meet
or had that night already passed
how fragile was the night they were to meet
never mentioned again”
That is the full title of the poem that follows it.
So, the title might float above the poem disconnected, or as a hint about the poem’s content, or seem to have nothing to do with the poem, or even flow into the poem as in my work titled “Whenever I snow,” where the title moves straight forward into the poem:
Whenever I snow
I think of Black
Beauty
when he was
pulling a cab
standing
streetside
under a lamppost
his dark harness gathering flakes
a jet horse becoming white powder
a dark horse
disappearing
What form are you inspired to write in the most? Why?
I want to approximate a speaking voice, so the reader can visually hear the words, using spacing to emphasize sound and the importance of a word. Using long spaces sometimes between words that create a visual silence. To let the reader’s eyes hear the poem.
Also I’m a visual writer. To me the spacing is a visual component of the page. I feel very much an artist, a painter, and that the page is my canvas. A word hung out in pure space is gorgeous to me. It’s so important to me to create a pause, a silence between words in the language on the page. I am thinking as much for the eye as for the ear.
I am also very fluid in having the voices of others speak directly within the poem.
What type of project are you working on next?
Poems of poesis.
When did you first consider yourself a writer / poet?
As strange as it sounds it seems I was just born this way. When I could hold a pencil I drew and painted and when I learned to write, I wrote. Somewhere Ron Padgett, when asked this question, said it is a complete mystery. I agree totally.
How do you research markets for your work, perhaps as some advice for not-yet-published poets?
I’m an extremely grassroots writer. I came up through The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, an incredible community where I learned more than a thousand universities could have instructed me. My advice would be find your community, research poetry zines, start a poetry zine of your own and other poets will find you, introduce yourself at local bookstores, get involved, talk to other editors, it’s widening circle, ever widening.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
Having a surreal sense of humor.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A painter explorer.
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
Don’t give up. Ray Bradbury said “you fail only if you stop writing.”