A Conversation With Alison Touster-Reed

by Patty Jameson

Alison Touster-Reed has achieved that to which every artist aspires—to inspire other artists to work, to write, to sculpt—to create a piece that tells a story, a mood, a moment; that is, to create out of a need to release what’s burrowed deep. Her convictions, her methods, her words—every facet of her self and how she approaches life and living it—are all based in creating, and in how those creations act as her muse.

Alison has published more poems in more journals than most of us have read, and she is also a successful sculpture artist with a broad portfolio of figurative clay sculptures, each one depicting its own emotion and its own personality. Her new book, Bodies: Poetry and Sculpture (Negative Capability Press), shares with us Alison’s stories and her figures—the bodies from which they came—blended into words and served to readers desperate for the truth and honesty that her poetry reveals.

Her admitted aspiration is to create, to flesh out an image into a poem or a sculpture, and the result is her succession as one of America’s great contemporary poets. Perhaps she wouldn’t expect such a distinction, nor would she expect that through her work—her convictions, her methods, her words—she would inspire other writers and artists. My interview with Alison Touster-Reed inspired me—to work, to write, to sculpt. She inspired me to tell my story, my moods, my moments. To release what’s burrowed deep.

You’re invited to eavesdrop on our conversation and to glean your own inspiration from Alison’s insightful comments. Don’t forget to look for her new book, Bodies—available this summer from Negative Capability Press. 

Your sculptures are absolutely beautiful and exhibit great depth. Your poetry exhibits those same attributes. I am also a clay artist—and a poet—and I know how difficult it can be to bring both media to life. How do you, as a visual artist and as a poet, choose your subjects and what they have to say?

First of all, I would answer that my subjects choose me. Sometimes in my life I think I've got something like Yeats's automatic writing going on. For example, the family of the Gorsteins: I have never in my life had any experience with any such folks, not even close—no clues, no hints, nothing. They just popped out of a gooseflesh cloudburst and came into me, rather like a vapor. I have about 2,000 pictorial images of what I call "blind drawings.” What I do is close my eyes and put the pen to the paper and just make emotional marks, and then I look at the markings, turning them every which way, and "see" things in the designs—faces, animals, anger, despair, desperation, birds, etc., rather like what a child does when looking at cloud formations. Something like that happens when I’m working with clay. Sometimes I'll have wads of scrap clay and they'll look like faces or literary figures (often from Shakespeare), or birds with a particular beak expression or a body with something a bit off, say, like a Picasso eye, or something hidden within a smile, or one tiny extra line under the mouth that changes the ENTIRE face. These are NOT "found" pieces of art—that is, they're constructed in the most peculiar sense of the word, and imagined, but they do happen, as it were, in and of themselves. A bird that's just been glaze-fired, for example—I see it moving on the table.

That's an interesting way to approach it. I've done blind drawings myself—they are a lot like staring at clouds in the sky—you can see a lot if you look hard enough. 

Do you know Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author? It’s a little like that. "Characters" already come to life IN the clay—the clay makes them, and I "see" them, as if they were emerging, like faces from a cloud, I guess.

Your response brings me to another question—and you answered it regarding your sculptures. With your poetry, do you just start free-writing and see where you end up—what the poem wants to be—or do you start with a specific plan of where the poem is going, how the story ends?

No, I NEVER FREE WRITE. Most of the time a poem begins with a concrete image, à la T. S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens. One thing I need to say: it's ALL the imagination. There's a book called Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process, by Lawrence Kubie. It's about how the ASSOCIATIVE dimension of art is the stuff out of which it's made—how neurosis distorts that in mental illness, and how the really richest mine of all man is the associative imagination. It's the way the imagination moves me, and from that, how I move the imagination and how that interplay plays out and how the TEXT is the most important thing—NOT the therapy of writing, for example. It's not a free for all or a confession of self. It's a honing of image in the language. It all goes back to form (sculpture) and language (poetry). Very often, a poem begins surreptitiously with two things that are completely unlike each other getting linked somehow.

You mentioned “honing the image” in the language. Something I noticed about your poetry is how each word seems to play with the other words surrounding it—in the same line and above and below—you've mastered the art of weaving words together to create a picture, to pull human experiences into the lines of your poems. What have you found are the most useful tools in selecting each word for your poems?

What a question! It's a demand that the word has to be uttered (written), I guess, not so much that I "choose" a particular word, but that it "walks" just ahead of me like a nuthatch on the grass and I HAVE to follow. Another thing: poetry NEVER works without its music, the music that’s in the language. Some years ago I was asked to read poetry to two- and three-year-olds, and I thought, what can I read that will TAKE them? I hit upon the very early years of Yeats’ writing, things like “The Fisherman,” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “Song of the Old Mother,” etc. The group of children included a two-year-old with ADHD—severe—and I'd been warned about her. You know, Patty, for two solid hours I read the early poems of Yeats and not a single part of a body or eye stirred in the room. These kinds of experiences have taught me that it's in the MOVEMENT OF LANGUAGE, THE COLORINGS, THE HINTS, the ways the words speak to the ways of the other words—it's not statement or fact, though those are crucial too. It’s the music.

Another thing: art needs to give pleasure. I know that's an old traditional viewpoint, but I believe it. It's the image that is bound to be beautiful, and to give sensory pleasure to the reader, that is important.

I agree with you that art needs to give pleasure. I'm an English major with a studio art minor (ceramics), and both writing and sculpting, for me anyway, are a cathartic release. Sometimes I think clay has that power more than poetry does, I think because it's more physical.

Now, academics: I read that you were the first to receive a doctorate in creative writing from Vanderbilt University, and I believe one or both of your parents were on faculty at Vanderbilt. How did growing up under the umbrella of academics influence you to pursue a formal education as a writer? How has your education helped you in your career as a writer? (I ask this from the perspective of a student wondering if it's worth pursuing an MFA or beyond.) And back to visual art—did you have any formal education in ceramics/sculpture, or did you just fall into it?

I just fell into art at age seven. My first poem was called “Images” and it went like this: “Images are wonderful things. / Pictures of beautiful and ugly kings. / Pictures of bobbles with little brains, / And sometimes long and lovely trains.” That was the very first poem I ever wrote. I've been working in a variety of media (wood, wax, etc.) all my life. Both my parents were professors. My mother was professor of English, and my father was professor of biochemistry and started the Molecular Biology Department at Vanderbilt. I don't think it's possible to teach anyone how to write. The way you write is to read what the great folks have written and then sink! The courses that had the most influence on me as a student were not in English but in anthropology and philosophy. I will never forget the Semai tribe in Africa, who have no word or concept for war, and the Yanomamo tribe in South America who have no word or concept for peace. When I learned of these two tribes living in the same world, I was psychically changed.

I love that you mentioned anthropology. I took the course last semester, and I really wished I had taken it early on in college and maybe even focused my degree in that discipline, because like you said, you can't teach someone HOW to write—college just forces the writer to actually write. Learning about the past taught me so much about human nature and why we do what we do, probably more so than a psychology class ever taught me.

Have you read Middle Passage by Charles Johnson? A slave ship returns to Africa from New Orleans, and there's a metaphysical twist about that tribe. Their language reflected their nature – a bed was called a resting, a chair was called a sitting, etc. What you said about the Semai and the Yanomamo reminded me of that. It might not be completely relevant to our discussion of art and poetry, but it's certainly an example of how cultures and histories are what make us, and that expressing those things—through art of any medium—is such an important part of just existing.

Yes, you've got it. About my book Bodies: it's called that I think partly because I've always searched for God—to be embodied. Nevertheless, I get more and more utterly atheistic. It's a real sadness to me that I don't believe in things outside myself – or in myself for that matter, either. I question and have always questioned whether there's such a thing as reality, as for example, when you say the word murder, does that mean a murder has just been committed, or is this just a part of man's magical thinking? Anyway, poetry is a kind of magic and it's the imagination that ultimately gets man through the very worst things. Sometimes, too, it's physical touch – that of another human being, but when you don't have that, then it's got to be the imagination.

Quite a lot of your poetry—and sculpture—relies on plants and birds and other forms of the natural world. Do you draw your energy from the natural world from direct experience or from a purely imaginative relationship with nature, or both?

Purely in my mind. Actually, in some ways being in nature is traumatic to me. I've had experiences of great unreality that are often exacerbated by being outside in nature—in the sun, in the world. Birds are very important to my father and I do love plants, but for the most part, I'm a home-person.

When you start working—when sketching for either a sculpture or a poem—do you have a particular place that you work? A happy place—a writing desk, a studio? And, do you keep any “muses” nearby to help you along?

I am ALWAYS either on my bed on my stomach in front of the TV (usually on mute) or right next to the bed in my room where my sculpture table is. I do my glazing in the garage (by necessity). The only "muse" is the ritual of the television, having all the lights on, and being in a hoodie.

One of my worst habits as a writer is that I don't read enough—for me, it's a time and concentration issue. Do you get a chance to read when you're not working, and what kind of book might we find in your hands?

You may be very, very surprised by my answer. I have not read anything in years, not even the newspaper. I have got some idea that because of a trauma, I can't "read." The last book I read was about a decade ago. It was Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, and I read it only because my daughter asked me to. Actually, I did get many, many phrases for my poems from that book. The way I write is to "collect" phrases and make lists of them. Then I get on the bed on my stomach, and just "put them together." 

Yes, I'm surprised by your answer, but glad to know I'm not the only one!

You have been published in numerous journals and you're also credited as being a founding editor of the Cumberland Poetry Review, which published for more than twenty years. From your experiences in both sides of publishing, do you have any advice for writers seeking to submit for publication?

I rue the day when the literary world changed and when in order to be published, you have to "have a connection." It's mainly a matter of luck and knowing someone at the journal. I gave up long ago sending out material. It's true I've been published in over 100 magazines all over the world, but those publications came from about seven or so years of really sending out conscientiously. It was about six or seven years ago when I essentially "gave up" on trying to get published. Anyway, at least half of the places I never heard from—ever—and manuscripts of mine have been at presses for decades and have probably been trashed without any communication back to me. At first all this made me angry; then it just made me sad, and then I got to the point when I almost didn't care. I say "almost" because in a way I care too much and that has caused me too many problems.

One more thing: at Cumberland Poetry Review, we were probably the only editorial board that read everything by everyone (and all the editors read everything) and then after we made initial selections, we ALWAYS read the poems OUT LOUD in editorial meetings. You have to read poetry out loud.

For more information on Alison Touster-Reed, visit www.sculpturebyalison.com and explore her stirring world of poetry and sculpture.

In Their Words... with Irene Latham

by Patty Jameson

My Tuesday night Poetry class met one muggy, January night at Satori Coffee, a few skips away from the University of South Alabama campus, for an evening reading by a traveling poet. We squeezed close together on couches, our shoulders nudged our neighbors’, and we listened as Irene Latham charmed us with The Color of Lost Rooms, her latest collection of poetry.

Each poem is a painting—of someone you know or someone you might have been—and each painting is in a room, and you’re invited in. The Color of Lost Rooms (Blue Rooster Press) is a captivating look at the real and the imagined, a moment from history stolen and pinned inside of a page.

Irene is the kind of poet that all aspiring poets should talk to—she has published over 170 poems in various journals and anthologies, as well as two poetry books and one novel. Her new novel, Don’t Feed the Boy (Roaring Brook Press/Macmillan), will be available later this year. Her first poetry collection, What Came Before (Negative Capability Press), was awarded the Alabama State Poetry Society’s Book of the Year, her first novel, Leaving Gee’s Bend (G.P. Putnam's Sons), won the Alabama Library Association’s 2011 Children’s Book Award, and The Color of Lost Rooms holds the distinction of winning the 19th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Prize for Poetry. Irene also serves as the Poetry Editor for the Birmingham Arts Journal.

I had the opportunity to chat with Irene before and after her reading, and she was kind enough to share some wonderful insights about writing and publishing, from both sides of the submission deadline.

I read on your website that even as a young girl you wanted to be a writer, yet you never took a writing class while you were in college. Instead, you pursued an education in social work. What led you on that path, and how has that knowledge helped you as a writer? 

While my parents were very encouraging of my writing, they also encouraged me to be practical. I’ll never forget my father saying, “you need to have a job in your back pocket.” So I chose the oh so lucrative field of social work. And even though I don’t currently practice social work, what I learned in those classes still informs my writing today – family dynamics! communication! dysfunctional relationships! It’s what great stories are made of.

Have you since taken any courses on craft and writing?

I was a closet writer for many years, just writing for my own pleasure, and didn’t really feel the urge to publish until I was the busy mom of three boys. I loved being a mom, but I craved something that was just mine. And when I looked around my house, all I saw were stacks of paper overflowing my counters and spilling out of my drawers. So I enrolled in a community education class at UAB on Freelance Writing for Magazines. And so my self-education began.

I tend to be a private writer – I’m protective of my process, so a lot of feedback, especially early in a project, is not good for me – and I never considered pursuing an MFA. I’ve always been kind of stubborn and wanted to do it my own way. But I have found writing conferences – particularly ones sponsored by the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) – to be of tremendous value both in terms of teaching craft and for learning the publishing end. I’ve also attended writing conferences sponsored by Alabama Writers Conclave, Mississippi Writers Guild and others. I adore books on craft, and love how the internet has all sorts of suggested remedies, whether I’m struggling with character development or plotting or how (and where) to submit a collection of poems.

The key for me has been to write and write and write. I know a number of writers who attend all the best writing classes and conferences, yet don’t invest the same amount of time actually practicing what they’ve been taught. For me, the most important learning has happened when it’s just me and my computer in a room.

You traveled a lot as a child and also as an adult. Which of your destinations has spoken the loudest to your inner muse?

The thing about having a vagabond heart is that you can’t possibly choose one destination over another. They all speak to me. In fact, it’s one of the things I struggle with. I feel pulled in a lot of different directions. I’ve had to train myself to stay put, to see one journey through before embarking on another. Right now I am exploring the weeks during my childhood that were spent at my grandparent’s orange grove in Polk County, Florida. My muse, in general, seems to be a nature-loving gal who enjoys romantic, rural landscapes.

Your book, The Color of Lost Rooms, features several ekphrastic poems. Is there a particular genre of art that you find inspires you more than others, and how do you approach the process of turning a visual object into a poem on a page?

I really enjoy the interaction of the arts and am constantly inspired by other media – film, visual art, textiles, nonfiction, nature. If it makes me feel something, I want to write about it, must write about it. I actually give a whole lecture on how this process works for me. It involves moving beyond simple description and often requires research. Then it becomes an exercise in empathy, and finally an imaginative leap. It’s about putting oneself inside the painting or film or whatever and making those very personal connections.

How did you come to be poetry editor for the Birmingham Arts Journal? How do you think the experience has made you a better poet?

A poem of mine appeared in the inaugural issue of Birmingham Arts Journal, and I was so thrilled with the publication and the folks running it – especially editor Jim Reed. I started hanging around, volunteering to promote the magazine, and eventually, when the first poetry editor moved on to other things, Jim invited me to take over the position. I’ve been there ever since and love meeting and working with the poets who submit their work for publication. The job helps me better evaluate my own work, and I am often inspired by the poems that find their way to me.

Sometimes you have hundreds of submissions to read through for the journal. How would you characterize what makes one poem stand out from all the others, and what is the greatest weakness you've noticed in the poems that aren't selected?

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was this: It’s more important to be different than better. This is certainly true when one is selecting poems to fill such limited space. I will choose a less polished piece over a heavily worked one any day, if the poem is fresh and gives me something unexpected. I really want to be surprised, and I really want to feel something when I read a poem. The biggest weakness I see in submissions is when poets settle for the early images that come to their minds (and everyone else’s mind) and not digging deeper for that astonishing observation or analogy.

Do you ever stop revising your poems?

Perfectionism is the enemy of any creative pursuit. It’s important to understand that work can only be done in stages. It takes time. So I revise long enough to get a poem in shape to submit for publication – and then later, often after publication, find ways to improve it.  Sometimes I stop revising and abandon poems not because they can’t be any better -- simply because I can’t make them any better yet. At which point I move on to the next poem, and the next. Growth requires movement. Each writer has to find her own balance.

Can you tell us a bit about your new novel, Don't Feed the Boy? How did you research the zoo setting? 

I’m so excited about this book! I remember the moment I got the idea: I was in a bookstore with my father (an avid reader – he reads a book a day!) over the Christmas holidays. I had been thinking about how we adults have these passions, but what happens when our children don’t share them? So I said out loud to my father, “how ‘bout a story about a boy whose parents are zoo people, and he feels like he was born the wrong species, and he wants to escape the zoo?”  My dad laughed, which was a very encouraging sign!

Soon after, Whit was born. The book is really about finding the place where you belong in the world, finding your very own passion and being strong and brave enough to go after that thing, whatever it may be.

Research included a lot of reading zoo veterinarian and zoo director biographies, interviews and trips to the zoo as well as drawing upon my own experience training as a teen zoo volunteer at the Birmingham Zoo.

Where to go from here:

For more information on Irene Latham or to order one of her books, visit her website at http://www.irenelatham.com/index.html.

Intersted in submitting to the Birmingham Arts Journal? Visit http://www.birminghamartsjournal.com/index.html.

In Their Words... with Mark J. Mitchell

by Patty Jameson

I’m excited to introduce you to Mark J. Mitchell and his award-winning chapbook, Three Visitors, which won Negative Capability’s National Chapbook Competition. Mark’s book introduces us to a series of three characters who welcome us into their daily doings and private thoughts. I had a chat with Mark about his visitors and their muses, and learned quite a bit more about welcoming inspiration from traditional texts and forms.

Three Visitors gives us a unique look into three distinct personalities, which you introduced with literary and historical relationships. Can you tell us more about Guenivere, your reference to Montale, and the story behind the Gangetic Plains? How did your characters grow out of these inspirations? 

The book is called Three Visitors because these characters came to me of their own accord. They arrived on their own with stories to tell. So it’s not so much their growing out my inspiration, but growing as I got to know them better.

“The Woman Who May Have Been Guenivere” turned up during a time of year when I write a poem every day. She first appeared in “Her Housekeeping.” After that she had something to say in various forms, and she tended to choose Welsh or French forms to have her say. I included a note about her when I distributed those poems to friends: I’m not entirely sure who this person is and I don’t want to impose my own will on her. I just want to make it clear that she doesn’t think she’s Guenivere—she is, in some way, haunted by her. She was either Arthur’s wife in some former life or somehow this idea has leaked into her subconscious mind. After she appeared in a couple of poems I realized I should revisit Jack Spicer’s book, The Holy Grail, as well as his Vancouver lecture where he talks about dictation.

The other two visitors each turned up in December—different Decembers, mind you—and had their own say. “The Girl in the Mandarin Collar” (who appeared long before Steig Larrsen’s book turned up in English) seems to have been a very young woman, 17 or 18, in San Francisco in 1978, at the beginning of the punk scene here, when it was still very mixed up. The center of that scene was a Filipino nightclub called The Mabuhay Gardens (or the Fab Mab as it came to be known). I’d been reading Eugenio Montale for some time by then, in the doorstop of an edition that came out around 1998. The title of the first poem in his first book, Cuttlefish Bones, is “In Limine,” which means “on the threshold,” so that’s the title of her first poem. She spoke in the form of that poem and just kept speaking that way until she was finished.

My gravedigger, as I think of him, appeared in the same way. He wanted to speak in these short bursts of blank verse. It seemed obvious to me, as we got to know each other, that this was a person who had actually heard the Buddha speak. I think, at the time, I must have wanted to write some small, hard nuggets of verse, but I don’t think my intention was much involved in the decisions.

What’s odd about these December appearances is that I was working retail at the time. Physically strenuous work, sixty to eighty hours a week, and I would come home exhausted. But these characters had to have their say. Once they did, they left as suddenly as they arrived.

After looking at all three sets for some time, I realized that they belonged together.

Is the Coda giving us more on any of these characters, or is she a completely different personality? What inspired this fourth section of Three Visitors?

The Coda was actually the first poem of the book to be written. However, over the years I have tended to think of this woman as the animating spirit of the woman who may have been Guenivere. She died at the end of her poems and this is the way she makes her way back into the world. Of course, it is also the first time she knocked on my door.

You write from both male and female perspectives, and you capture the personalities of each quite well. Which perspective do you enjoy writing most, and why?

Thank you for the compliment. I credit the characters themselves. I do write fiction from time to time (I have a novella in print). It’s not unusual for female characters to turn up in my work, especially when I am in a period of intense poetry writing. One of my personal favorites is a woman known as “The Existential Ecdysiast.”

It would be disingenuous of me to say I prefer to write from the female perspective more than the male, but I always enjoy it when female characters come to call.

Do you have any formal writing/poetry education? When did you begin writing?

I began writing about the time I began to read, I suppose. I took creative writing classes all through high school.

I majored in “Aesthetic Studies: Creative Writing: Poetry” at UC Santa Cruz in the early 1970s. My first writing teacher was Raymond Carver. George Hitchcock took me under his wing while I was there, as did Barbara Hull. I also studied Medieval Literature—Dante, the French Arthurian Cycles, Sir Thomas Malory’s versions and Cervantes, under the tutelage of Robert M. Durling.

Ray encouraged a poetry of character. George favored the surreal and the possibilities of automatic writing. He also taught me to appreciate different types of poetry, even the sort that I would never write myself. Barbara tended to stress the idea of control within freedom. Professor Durling taught me to respect traditions and conventions and guided me through some of the greatest writing in history.

Have you been published previously? Where can readers find your other published work?

This is the first time I’ve had a volume of my poems come out and I couldn’t be more thrilled.

I’ve been publishing poetry for over 30 years in various magazines. One of my first major publications came in George Hitchcock’s legendary kayak in 1978. I helped mail out that issue and was excited to put the stamp on the envelope going to Octavio Paz.  Poems of mine have appeared in a few anthologies, the best known of which is Good Poems, American Places (Viking, 2011) edited by Garrison Keillor. That same poem appears in the anthology Line Drives (SIU Press), it’s sort of my biggest hit. Recently my poems have appeared in Third Wednesday, Blue Unicorn, J Journal, Poem, and others. They have also been published on-line in The Buddhist Poetry Review, Jerry Jazz Musician, The Road Not Taken, Numinous, and Snakeskin. My novella, Sir Gawain’s Little Green Book is a print-on-demand book and an e-book available from Amazon or Barnes and Noble (look me up as Mark J. Mitchell, since my name is a common one).  (psst...We've saved you the trouble of searching for Sir Gawain's Little Green Book yourself.)

Amazon Kindle or print-on-demand

Barnes & Noble Nook Book or paperback

You show a reverence for traditional poetic forms, and mentioned that you are currently working on translating poetry by Aragon. Can you talk more about what you enjoy reading and how it has affected your own style? 

I enjoy working in forms for a couple of reasons. The first is the element of play involved when you have rules to follow. Secondly, I love formal verse because I don’t think my own ear is a better conduit for musicality than a thousand years of tradition, from the troubadours on. Writing in forms helps to keep my own ear honest. I first fell in love with form when I read the great Middle English elegy, “The Pearl,” in the early 80s. The shape of that poem is just amazing.

When I was seventeen I picked up the paperback edition of Modern European Poetry, edited by Willis Barnstone. That exposed me to a whole world of poetry that hadn’t turned up in my high school yet. That’s where I first encountered Montale and Louis Aragon. I’ve been working on translating Aragon because there is no edition of his work in English (at least not since the World War II years) and because he wrote some of the most beautiful love poetry in the French language, and that’s saying something. Since he wrote those beautiful love poems for his wife and I like to write love poems for my wife, I’ve always felt a connection.

Barbara Hull, my teacher, had studied with Theodore Roethke, and so she pointed me in the direction of Elizabethan songs. I’ve always thought that poetry was speech that aspired to song.

Do you have any advice for writers--young or old, aspiring or seasoned?

Marry money.

Seriously, I think that if you’re going to write poetry seriously you have to take a vow of poverty, and be willing to live with that and never give up.

I think every poet should be able to scan a line of verse and to write in forms, even if that’s not how they do what they might consider their real work. It’s like being a musician, you should be able to read music and practice your scales every day. It will strengthen your free verse. Never lose sight of the fact that the patron saint of free verse, e.e. cummings, was also the great master of the American sonnet.

Also, read poetry from other countries in other languages. We have a wonderful array of translations available to us these days. Try to pick up copies that have the original on the facing page so you can get the shape and sound of the original.

Keep all your tools sharpened and ready. You never know when a visitor might drop by.

If there's something I didn't touch on that you wish to answer to, feel free to ask your own question and add it in. 

I just wanted to add that Three Visitors is a very unusual group of my poems. It’s odd to see this many of my poems gathered together and not one of them is a love poem to my wife. I wouldn’t be able to keep writing without Joanie’s daily love, support and inspiration.

Mark's admiration of traditional forms are evident in his poetry, and his ability to insert a contemporary voice into a traditional setting takes the reader on a unique journey with three new friends. Keep watch for the Three Visitors -- available soon from Negative Capability!

Interview with Diane Beth Garden

by Kellie Webb

I recently had a chance to sit down with Diane Beth Garden who has an upcoming book, Measures to Movements, that will be published by Negative Capability Press. She is a very interesting and talented poet and person. I recommend her book to anyone intersted in art and poetry.

Until it is available, though, here's a little sampler of the auther herself. Enjoy!

1) Where have you taught and what did you teach?

I have a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from NYU. I taught part time at NYU in the Village, Rutgers in New Jersey, and St. Peter’s College in Jersey City while living in New York, all within commuting by the train. It was funny--while I was a graduate student at NYU I took the railroad out to Rutgers, and then when I moved out to Princeton I commuted back to NYU. I was always going the opposite direction, but it gave me time to grade a lot of freshmen essays. I taught here [USA] at the English department and at Springhill part time for five years, and then I went on to teach gifted high school students at first Murphy High School and then Daphne. I retired two years ago, but I’m going to do some volunteer teaching.

 2) What made you interested in poetry?

I took poetry workshops when I was at NYU, and it got me interested in the whole process. I joined around the same time a writer’s workshop in Princeton, New Jersey, called U.S. One, whose accomplished members helped and encouraged beginners.

 3) What inspired you to use art as the focal point for your book?

I’ve always loved art. I spend a lot of time at museums, and I have an Art History minor from college. I would just go to the museum and stand in front of the paintings. When you have a painting you’re already given a little advance because you start with some very rich material—like someone gave you ten points in poetry writing before you even started. The aim isn’t to reproduce it, not to just describe it. You have to add to it. You don’t have to be able to paint, but its almost like one step away from having a paintbrush. With the words you can paint.

 4) My favorite piece from Measures to Movements is "Snow At Giverny" based on the oil painting by Claude Monet. Do you have a favorite poem and painting?

That’s one of them, and “The Milkmaid”, and “Measures to Movements”, the title poem.

 5) How did you choose the art pieces and photographs to write about?

They choose me. I don’t go to the museum with an idea. Just one painting will grab me and I’ll stand there. When my daughter was four she would say, “paintings talking to mommy” because my husband would be several rooms ahead of me, and I would be way behind, not even making it past that painting. The painting chooses me because there’s something I’m responding to, some emotion, some theme in the painting is really grabbing me.

 6) Why did you decide to divide the book into five categories: Quiet Corners, Barriers, Desire, Defiance, Blessings?

Dividing it into the different themes is really one of the more common ways, but I couldn’t believe how it fell into those five themes. It just fell. I mean, it was as if I could have set out with these themes in front of me, and I could have said “all right I’m going to write five poems on Defiance”, but I never did that. They just emerged.

 7) There aren't any paintings or photographs in your book after 1956, nothing contemporary. Was that by design?

No. I was always interested in the nineteenth century. That’s the period that I studied in literature. It wasn’t intentional, but I guess it was a little bit by taste.

 8) Is this your first book of poetry? If not, what are the titles?

I have a chapbook, the Hannah and Papa Poems that was also published by Negative Capability [Press], and it’s autobiographical. Half of the poems are about my daughter and half are poems about my deceased father. I don’t think he had died at the time yet. They’re very personal, and interconnected.

 9) Is poetry the only genre you write in?

Yeah. Maybe non-fiction or magazine articles one day, but I don’t really see myself writing a short story or a novel. I’m just really dedicated to poetry.

 10) Any future projects?

I’ve written two or three poems since the book, and I’m letting it evolve the way I let this book evolve and see what happens when I have a book of poems. I have an idea, maybe a project, which I haven’t committed to or started exploring—maybe picking one painter and doing a whole book on one painter. We’ll see.

 11) What advice would you give aspiring poets?

I would tell them you have to be alone when you’re writing because, as everyone knows, writing is very solitary. I would advise them to get in contact with other writers, to join a writers group, or take a course at the university, and to read, read, read other poets, to go to conferences and to keep doing writing exercises and keep sending things out. Just to get yourself involved.