What drew you to submit your work to RED SKIES?
I was attracted to the name of your website enterprise – “splintered disorder”. I thought that title perfectly describes the sociology of the US in its social upheaval, political discord, and civil disorder in 2020. I have been writing a few poems that respond to that situation and was looking for sites to publish them.
How has your regular daily experience changed throughout 2020?
My wife and I are retired from professional careers in Southern California. We now live in West Virginia on a farm, raising cattle and keeping horses and goats. We live a rural social life, geographically separated from our neighbors, occasionally going into town for shopping or dining. We see a variety of friends through arranged social engagements. When the guidelines for dealing with the epidemic were announced, we were already complying with them. We took to wearing masks without hesitation. There are some farming operations where we have to wear masks, such as grinding up feeds for horses; we were used to doing so. Our regular daily experience changed little. Our children live in New York City (Upper East Side, Manhattan, and Brooklyn). We use iPhone Facetime often, but the quarantine made visiting them impossible, that has been the greatest emotional trial for us. My artistic life as a poet changed little, as I have conducted it at a distance from poetry communities anyway.
If you could only have a single book during quarantine, what would it be?
It would be a book that I would refer to or re-read for writing poetry in the peculiar creative situation of the lockdown. As it turns out, I been so engaged with T. S. Eliot’s collected poetry.
You have dabbled in a variety of mediums within the wide expanse of poetry. What is your favorite form? What style did you originally start in? How does written compare with spoken word? I started writing Haiku in college. My first several Haiku publications were in an independent poetry journal founded by a friend. I was much influenced by the Imagist movement in poetry, which was still underway then, so my poetry was grounded in detailed concrete images rather than general words. I wrote/write almost no didactic poetry. I would describe my favorite form as free verse storytelling. I continue to write a lot of Haiku. Though I wrote voluminously for 40 years, I did not try to publish. I did not have the time to revise for a general audience; rather, I occasionally Xeroxed copies of typed poems (before computer word processors) to give to friends. When I retired, with some free time, after daily farming chores, I decided to write for publication. I have also moved my poetry into video – vocal readings and filmic interpretation, a natural move for an imagist poet. Though I will continue to write poetry for solely print publication, as movie production takes a long time, I consider videopoetry the medium I want most to work in.
Who influences your work?
After imagism, the most abiding influences on my work have been story-telling poets rooted in time and place, Robert Frost when I was young, now, especially, Charles Olson of the Maximus poems. That is not to say that contemporary poets do not influence me. I read poetry voluminously in Webzines. I read brief prompt-driven poems on Twitter. I admire many poets writing today, envy their grace with words, their brilliant verbal acrobatics, the various experiences they draw upon, but few draw me back for repeated readings. The engines of my inspiration are elsewhere.
Are you engaged in any creative projects currently?
I am trying to give voice to persons of the past to whose legacies I am indebted. This quest has of course involved me with my personal family. It has also pushed me to encounter the living environment, not simply for how I use it, but as it represents the efforts and ideas of past builders. For instance, the agricultural fields we work on our farm and that surround us in this area of West Virginia are historical products. The fields were cleared out of forests beginning 200 years ago by hand labor by immigrant men and women, many Irish, and some fields by black slaves. They were cultivated and maintained by horsepower. So also the many houses and barns now derelict. It appalls me that as a society we simply abandon the products of such prodigious labor, it’s almost offensive. I want to approach this quest by putting poetry in voice and imagery in brief movies.