Just a reminder that Alice B. Fogel, current NH Poet Laureate, will be at Elms tomorrow. Its sure to be a fun, informative night and I hope to see many of you there! Here, with her permission, is an excerpt from an interview she did when she was appointed poet laureate: How do you explain your personal approach to poetry? Do you follow a certain “school” in terms of craft/technique? I really like to change things up, so in the last 15 years I’ve been regularly trying new approaches and styles. I know I’m not making things easy for myself—though I am making things fun—but eventually I’d love to have a series of books that range in style from lyric and narrative to wildly experimental, all of which have some thread of my sensibilities in them, but which in other ways are not much alike. Tell us about your background and first foray into poetry. I grew up with parents who loved reading and the arts, so they supported my own love of making things. As soon as I knew how to write, I started writing stories. When I was 6, it was endlessly fascinating to see the little letters show up on the paper in my father’s typewriter as I hit the keys, and to know that they added up to words that created images and meant things. At 8, it just blew my mind to look up words in a dictionary, to find a specific word exactly where it was and not somewhere else—only I often got sidetracked because there were just so many other words all around them. As for poetry, I started writing something like it as soon as I knew what it was. When I pulled books off my parents’ shelves I could jump indiscriminately from Ogden Nash to John Milton. That has to have some kind of effect on a person! What projects are you currently working on? I have two very different projects I’m immersed in. One is a series of “abstract expressionist” poems, each based on a piece of art. I’m trying to explore what happens to our consciousness or cognition when we’re confronted with non-representational art. The other is poems about hiking the Appalachian Trail. What advice would you give to both new and “older” students trying to learn the craft of poetry? How much emphasis do you put on craft? Craft is hugely important to me, in my own writing and in how I respond to what I read. I lean into my drafts hard to make each into a piece of art with as many elements of poetry—effective interconnections, shapes, sounds, language and syntax, image, and provoked emotions and thoughts—as I can. If someone of any age is interested in writing poetry, I would always recommend reading, reading, and more reading. Read poems, as well as prose by poets on poetry. Write responses to them in your journal. Keep letting what you read seep through you by having an ongoing dialogue with the traditions and innovations throughout the international culture of written voices. Alice B. Fogel ~ New Hampshire Poet Laureate
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 02:48:22 +0000
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