Interviews Page

MSR does not publish complete interviews on its website. The following are snippits from our magazine. Most back issues are still available from Main Street Rag for between $5-7 if readers would like to read the entire interview.

 

Jeffery Beam / Gwendolyn Brooks / Lynda Calabrese

Rita Dove / Joy Harjo / Yusef Komunyakaa /

Richard Peabody

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Life Distilled:
An Interview with
Gwendolyn Brooks

by Kevin Bezner

On January 27, 1986, I visited Gwendolyn Brooks at the Library of Congress, during her tenure as poetry consultant. I was there to interview her for The Washington Book Review, as the publication’s poetry and fiction editor. Unfortunately, the publisher of the review soon found that he could no longer stanch his loss of green, and before the interview could be published, the magazine folded. Then, about that time, I moved from Washington to teach in Jacksonville, Florida.

About a year after our interview, I met Brooks again at the home of one of the organizers of her reading in Jacksonville. Because of my move, I was not sure whether I had sent Brooks a copy of the interview, so I brought one to give her. When I approached her, she was sitting alone in a room, the swirl of the reception off in other rooms. She said she wanted the quiet, but that I was not intruding. She remembered the interview, remembered being pleased with it, and accepted the second copy. We spoke about my plans for including it in a book, and this also seemed to please her.

But once again, the interview didn’t make it into print. A university press had made clear its intent to publish a collection of my interviews, if I would add several more. By the time I had completed this work, the director of the press had left, and the new director had decided to cut uncompleted projects, including mine. Even the intercession of a highly influential literary scholar could not change the decision. The manuscript was considered by several other presses, but always with the same result. We would like to publish the book, they would say, but interview collections do not sell, so we cannot commit our limited funds to this project.

So the interview remained unpublished. Until now.

During a conversation with this magazine’s publisher and editor, Scott Douglass, he brought up Brooks, who had been scheduled to read at Johnson C. Smith University in the spring. Douglass had hoped to get an interview with her, but Brooks had died December 3 at the age of 83, in Chicago, just where she had said she would end her days. When I told him about this interview, he decided to publish it.

I clearly remember the day I interviewed Brooks. And I clearly remember this interview. I cannot even count now the number of interviews I’ve done, but I can tell you which are most memorable. This is one of them. Brooks was articulate, engaging, conversational in a way that few writers being interviewed allow today, kind, and most attentive. Now, I can read this interview and hear her speak. I can hear how genuine she is about her work and her desire to connect with one person in a room, how unaware she is of the tape recorder. It cannot always be said of writers that they are down to earth. But this can be said of Brooks.

Over 50 years have passed since Brooks published her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, in 1945. That book and her second, Annie Allen, published in 1949, clearly established her as a poet. Another 25 books would follow, mostly poetry, including Riot (1970), The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (1986), and Blacks (1987). Throughout her career, one hears echoes of writers as diverse as Dickinson, Frost, Hughes, and Sandburg. She wrote in closed and open form. And she received numerous awards, including one from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Frost Medal, and the Shelley Memorial Award.

I hope this interview returns readers to Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry, not just her selected poems. I hope they discover what a refreshing voice hers is today. I hope they spend some time with her poems and really hear them. I hope they also really hear how wonderful a human being this poet was.

If you'd like to read the rest of this interview, it's in the Summer 2001 issue of MSR, available in The Main Street Rag Bookstore.

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An Interview with
Yusef Komunyakaa
by Kevin Bezner

 

Yusef Komunyakaa, who is originally from Louisiana, has the quiet voice of a man perfectly at ease in the late hours. As we spoke by telephone one recent morning, I pictured him sitting at a table in a club with a long history of jazz, slowly sipping a drink while listening to a groupin the background, perhaps tenor saxman Wayne Shorter’s playing "Virgo." Komunyakaa, I thought, would be perfectly comfortable carrying on the conversation, slowly, a phrase at a time, without losing track of the music or the talk. That morning, he, of course, was not in a club but was speaking from his office at Princeton University, where he is a professor in the Council of Humanities and Creative Writing program.

This March, Wesleyan University will publish a long history of Komunyakaa’s own—Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems, a compilation of more than twenty-five years worth of poetry. Also recently published by the University of Michigan Press is his Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries. Both books follow the success of his remarkable Talking Dirty to the Gods, which was nominated for the 1999 National Book Circle Critics Award. The winners will be announced in March.

Although Komunyakaa’s first book, Dedications & Other Darkhorses, appeared in 1977, it was the publication of Copacetic in 1984 where he first seemed to gain a reputation. This was further bolstered by the 1988 publication of Dien Cai Dau, one of the important books that concern the American experience in Viet Nam. His Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems 1977-1989 won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994.

Komunyakaa’s poems are clearly informed by jazz and blues, but also by his discerning eye for detail and image and his expansive knowledge. They are often deceptive. Starting with simple language, they are built with phrases and images that lead the reader, often, either to a recognition of a pleasurable moment that lingers, or to a profound realization. He is a poet of jazz, but don’t stay on the surface with this label. Komunyakaa is a poet of great range, fully at ease writing of a Hopper painting or Miles Davis as he is Athena, Catullus, or Ariosto.

During a roughly thirty-five minute conversation, we spoke mostly about the new poems in Pleasure Dome, with a short trip to Talking Dirty to the Gods.

If you'd like to read the rest of this interview, it's in the Spring 2001 issue of MSR, available in The Main Street Rag Bookstore.

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If you're a computer geek kind of artist, you may already know that Joy Harjo is all over the internet. There are sites for her poetry, sites for her music, interviews, biographies, publishing credits and awards–anything you want to know about Joy Harjo is findable. It's a measure of the effectiveness of this media-savvy activist who has managed to merge her art with her passions.

Joy was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is a member of the Muskoke Tribe. At sixteen, she moved to New Mexico to attend the Institute of American Indian Arts and later earned a B.A from the University of New Mexico (1976) and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa (1978). She is poet, musician, artist, and teacher. She is also mother and grandmother.

Harjo has been published by magazines such as American Voice, Beloit Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and Massachusetts Review. Among her many awards are the Lila-Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award, the New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, and the William Carlos Williams Award. She has held NEA Fellowships in 1992 and 1978 as well as the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in 1993, the Witter Bynner Poetry Fellowship in 1994, and an Arizona Commission on the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 1989. Joy has also served as board member of the PEN Advisory Board and PEN New Mexico Advisory Board, among other arts organizations.

Twice she has been included in the Pushcart Prize Poetry Anthologies and her better known books include The Last Song (1975), What Drove Me to This (1979), She Had Some Horses (1983), Secrets from the Center of the World (1989), In Mad Love and War (1990), The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (1994), and A Map to the Next World (2000).

Joy Harjo lives in Hawaii and teaches at UCLA. I caught up with her at home during Christmas break and we had the following conversation.

If you'd like to read the rest of this interview, it's in the Spring 2002 issue of MSR, available in The Main Street Rag Bookstore.

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The Poem Perfected:
A Conversation
with Jeffery Beam

By Kevin Bezner

 

 

 Jeffery Beam was born in Kannapolis, North Carolina in 1953. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, he is the author of eight collections of poetry, including The Golden Legend (1981), The Fountain (1992), Visions of Dame Kind (1995), and An Elizabethan Bestiary Retold (1999).

A poet of great compression and ecstatic vision, Beam’s poems offer readers a confluence of the poetics of Blake and Eliot, as well as William Carlos Williams, Cid Corman, and Robert Creeley. The poetry editor of Oyster Boy Review, an innovative magazine now based in California, Beam makes his living as Assistant to the Biology Librarian at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

I spoke with Beam early this year at his home outside Chapel Hill, a quiet country home brimming with books and the art of his many friends. The house was designed by Stanley Finch, Beam’s longtime companion.

Bezner: Do you know many of your poems by heart, since you place so much emphasis on performance?
Beam: I know most of them by heart. The most important part of a poetry reading is to feel that the poet is intimate with what he or she has written. I started reading again in public around 1983 or 1984.

I had stopped reading because I had realized that I hated poetry readings. They were incredibly boring. Everybody else was boring and I was boring.

One of the things I realized was that we weren’t paying attention to the orality of the poems. And orality was very important to my composition of the poems. That’s when I decided that I was going to learn them and start performing them from memory.

Bezner: Do you feel you can be more expressive this way?
Beam: I’m very theatrical when I read. I’m very physical when I read. I don’t want to be too tied down to the podium. It’s important to be free of the page when I’m reading.

Bezner: Would you like to recite a poem?
Beam: Yes.  This is a poem called “I Have Never Wanted.”  It’s about poetry and the images and metaphors that appear in my poems.

Beam: (After reading the poem.) In the beginning of the poem I say I have never wanted to write the perfect poem, and in the last line I’m saying I have always wanted to write the poem perfected. But of course the perfect poem and the poem perfected are two totally different things.

Bezner: The poem perfected is capturing all that is unseen?
Beam: All of the unseenness, the edge of things we don’t normally see. All of the things we don’t want to look at. The realization that the most interest is in imperfection. That imperfection is the perfect thing. I think that appears over and over again in my poems.

Bezner: The poem is also concerned with acceptance?
Beam: Absolutely. To accept the dark side, or whatever you find under the stone, or hidden in the moss. I don’t think any of that denies the importance of light. Or the energy of light. Or what some people might see as positive energy.
I see this dark energy as very positive too. It’s a demand that we accept all those things we don’t want to look at, or see, or forget to look at. The important thing is to look. As human beings, we are animals who are part of the natural world. The natural world is a good schoolhouse for learning to see. I just happen to want to stay in the schoolhouse.

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If you'd like to read the rest of this interview, it's in the Fall 2001 issue of MSR, available in The Main Street Rag Bookstore.

 

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Finding the Pulse...

Rita Dove

Interviewed by Don Mager

 

Rita Dove was featured poet for the 2001 Worlds of Words: An International Poetry Festival at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte. On April 4 she conducted a workshop with students at 3:00 PM and gave a public reading at 7:30 PM in Biddle Auditorium. Between those events, I had the pleasure of interviewing her and later hosting Dove and her husband for dinner.

Dove was Poet Laureate of the United States for two terms beginning in 1993. Her books include Thomas and Beulah, Selected Poems (1993), Mother Love and On the Bus with Rosa Parks. She is a Pulitzer Prize Winner.

When I first contacted Rita Dove about an interview, I was invited to send her a list of possible topics and questions for discussion. She said that a number of questions were on issues she preferred not to speak.

In particular, she did not want to discuss anything about how she generates ideas for poems, and how she "interprets" or explains them after publication. She stressed that she doesn't find the left-brain/right-brain distinction useful.

When the interview began, I explained that as a poet I was interested in dialogue about Dove's practices and processes of writing—that I was interested in watching over her shoulder, as it were, during a typical day in her writer's workshop. This struck her as an inviting line of inquiry, and as the interview went forward, she became animated and passionate.

 

Don Mager: Helen Vendler says: "Technically, [RD–Dove's] poems "work" by their fierce concision and by an exceptional sense of rhythmic pulse (Dove used to play the cello, still plays the viola da gamba, and is a trained singer). No matter how painful her stories, no matter how sharp-edged her lines, her poems fall on the ear with solace...."Can you comment on pulse, concision and ferocity as descriptions of your being in language?

Rita Dove: What she refers to as pulse, I think of as cadence, which is different than rhythm. Rhythm is less interesting to me because it is more confining. You can't play around it, you can't weave around it, as much as you can with cadence. Cadence suggests to me that each poem has its own rhythmic punctuation mark, so to speak. I come from a very musical tradition. I play the cello. The cello tends to have an interweaving sort of counterpoint, whereas the violins have the melody. So, I grew up musically loving the way an instrument can move through the layers of musical texture, and weave around a basic pulse. Therefore, when I write poetry I do think of music.

If you'd like to read the rest of this interview, it's in the Winter 2001 issue of MSR, available in The Main Street Rag Bookstore.

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The Business of Small Press

Gargoyle Magazine Founder & Co-Editor
Richard Peabody Speaks up

Interview by M. Scott Douglass

It was a beautiful Saturday in November, the day after Rick Peabody, founder and co-editor of Gargoyle Magazine stopped in Charlotte for Main Street Rag’s monthly reading event: Poetry Night at The Wine Basket. He was on his way home from a similar gig at Appalachian State College in Boone, NC. We met for what was planned as a thirty minute interview. It evovled into a three hour discussion/debate/war story swap.

This is the first time I’d met Peabody, although we have been exchanging mail for over a year and MSR has published some of his work. Rick was also key in helping get the word out about MSR needing short fiction submissions. The fact is, Richard Peabody knows so many people in the small press arena that, once he spread the word, within weeks, we had more than we could handle.

So what is his background? Well, that’s what much of this interview is about and his comments contain plenty of meat for both readers and writers to gnaw on. He currently teaches in Johns Hopkins University’s Graduate Writing Program and at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. He has taught creative writing at the universities of Maryland and Virginia as well. A rabid Washington Redskins fan, he’s a graduate of the University of Maryland and American University and lives in Arlington, Virginia with his wife Margaret Grosh and their daughter Twyla.

For years Rick co-owned and operated Atticus Books & Music on U Street in downtown DC.

Along with Gargoyle Magazine, Peabody is best known for the mondo series he co-edited with Lucinda Ebersole—Mondo Barbie, Mondo Elvis, Mondo Marilyn Mondo, and Mondo James Dean—which collects fiction and poetry by Marge Piercy, Charles Bukowski, Denise Duhamel, Laura Kalpakian, Mark Childress, and others.

He was one of the first anthologists to bring attention to women Beat writers as editor of A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation, which includes works by well known Beat writers Diane di Prima, Joanne Kyger, and Anne Waldman and offers many readers their first look at writers such as Mimi Albert, Sandra Hochman, Margaret Randall, and ruth weiss.

Peabody is the author of five collections of poetry: cult classic I’m in Love with the Morton Salt Girl, Echt & Ersatz; Buoyancy and Other Myths; Mood Vertigo and Sad Fashions. His story collections are Paraffin Days and Open Joints on Bridge. He is also author of the novella, Sugar Mountain.
Rick and I sat across from each other at a mutual friend’s house. He worked on a breakfast bagel while my stomach grumbled about late lunch. We talked.

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MSD: You have so many aspects to your experience—you are writer, editor, publisher—I want to know about the publishing part of your personality.
RP: I need to interrupt to mention the worst interview I ever did in my life. About the third question the guy asked was if I ever had sex with my cat?
MSD: I’ll do my best to avoid that subject. Who asked that?
RP: Some idiot reporter. What could I say? “The interview’s over.” I don’t even own a cat any more. My wife’s allergic.

MSD: Gargoyle was originally a monthly, how did you get started?
RP: Started in 1976, I had just hitchhiked around the country and stopped in Madison, Wisconsin. There I saw a poet named John Tuschen, an incredible poet who has a stutter. It was amazing. When he introduced the poems he’d stutter, then read them perfect. Reading was the real him. And there were some magazines there like Abraxas and some editors. So I went back to DC and I had two buddies who were talking about doing it—having a small press, running a magazine. And we did—just because I’d been at that gig in Madison. Up to that point I’d only seen established things like the Evergreen Review.

MSD: This was 1976, there weren’t many publications like this sitting around, were there?
RP: Actually, there were. City Lights, Evergreen Review,...it never occurred to me that I could do something like that.

MSD: So when you saw these and decided this was what you wanted to do, how did you go about getting started? Let’s talk financing first.
RP: Financing (chuckling). Well, we did the first three issues without any money.

 

If you'd like to read the rest of this interview, it's in the Summer 2002 issue of MSR, available in The Main Street Rag Bookstore.

 

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