GU brings Kearney to town
Douglas Kearney is more than a poet.
He’s a teacher, at the California Institute of Art in Valencia, California. He’s a librettist, having written the words for the operas including “Crescent City” and “Mordake.” He’s a performer as well, bringing his poetry to life on stage and on video.
Kearney’s latest collection of poetry – his third – is “Patter” (2014, Red Hen Press). As he told NPR last year, it was a deeply personal collection. He and his wife spent eight years trying to conceive. Using in vitro fertilization, they are now the parents of twins. The poems contained in “Patter” are tough. They deal with miscarriage and infertility and the toll those can pay on a marriage.
He’ll read from “Patter” and some of his other works on Wednesday at Gonzaga University, as part of the Visiting Writers Series. In this 5 Questions With email interview, Kearney talks about his love of poetry, his penchant for playing with form and his advice for young writers.
Q. As a “he does it all” kind of guy, is there one of your art forms that is closest to your heart?
A. Oh, now you have me picking favorites! I love poetry because language, music, and visual considerations converge most meaning- fully for me there.
Q. It’s clear you love to play with form in your work. Do you envision a form and write to it? Or do the words come first then lend themselves to presentation?
A. There are certainly poems I begin first with a formal consideration – that doesn’t mean they end up in that form. I tell myself that forms can act as cognitive technology, models for particular kinds of thought. Additionally, familiar forms (from sonnets to word searches) give the reader information the writing itself can eschew, which strikes me as powerful because the reader recognizes as well as reads in that moment. If the poem’s structural movement is in accord or generative tension with the architecture a form dictates, AND the form (extant or nonce) allows for the right sounds, then it usually remains.
Q. I mean, Darth Vader filling out an application for Father of the Year? And the poem structured as a questionnaire and his handwritten answers? That’s some cool stuff. How do these ideas come to you?
A. Thanks! For “Darth Vader, King Laios (Fill Out Their Applications As, Across the Lobby, Genghis Khan’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” Ringtone Plays): Fathers of the Year” it was ultimately a matter of nothing else working correctly. No other way of doing it added up. I needed a kind of distance between the questions and the answers, especially because the questions would be repeated for Vader and Laios (Oedipus’ father) and their answers are revisions of each others’. The questions had to still be a part of the poem even as they seemed apart from the poem. Making an actual application for “Father of the Year” provided the shift in register I needed and grounded the other “Father of the Year” poems in a kind of “reality.” I designed the application, asked a colleague to fill out Vader’s, and it all clicked.
Q. It seems as if in your work you’re showing us that poetry, art, music, it’s everywhere. Is that a correct assumption?
A. Hmm. There’s all this, well, stuff around us and we make poetry, art, and music out of stuff and our experience with it. So the catalyst of any poem, art work, or piece of music is everywhere.
Q. What is your favorite piece of advice you like to give young writers as they struggle to find their voices as poets?
A. Well, if you want to find your voice, I think you have to be honest about what you care about. That doesn’t mean you aren’t critical about your concerns, planning to merely state them, or uninterested in expanding them, but it helps to start from that initial place of honesty. The tension between that honesty, an attention to the poetics/prosody that interest you, and the artifice of making a particular poem is a good site to look for your voice.