Interview With Poet Helen Losse
Posted by Robert
Okay, as anyone who's been reading this blog knows, it's been a while since I've posted anything other than prompts here. Most of that is just me trying to keep up with my (ab)normal workload. Part of that is just me trying to get my own poetry together. But I can't sit on this great interview any longer!
Helen Losse is the Poetry Editor of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. She has two chapbooks, Gathering the Broken Pieces (FootHills Publishing) and Paper Snowflakes (Southern Hum Press). In 2009, Rank Stranger Press published Losse's collection Better With Friends.
Here's one of my faves from Better With Friends:
Starting Over
Pretend your first letter is A,
your first number is 1. Pretend you
recognize the word is--nothing more:
(You are 6.) And "Is is is" is
a sentence you can read. But forget
that. Forget is. We're starting over.
Pretend your mind is clean.
As clean as your feet before bed.
There is a tree in the garden,
and the fruit looks good. There is
a voice and a man. There is a snake.
A voice and a man and a snake and a tree.
(Forget what you think you know.) Listen.
The teacher's voice is saying, "The snake is like
the caterpillar we read about last week.
Do you think the snake is very, very hungry?"
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What are you currently up to?
I'm promoting Better With Friends through readings and book signings and writing book reviews for books by other poets. I've started a new poetry manuscript, with the working title Seriously Dangerous, that I hope will become a second book or at least another chapbook. I'm submitting poems to various magazines. I'm also enjoying other aspects of my life—like watching sports (NASCAR, football, and basketball), networking, and decorating the house and sometimes cooking for various holidays throughout the year. I've learned that promoting a book takes quite a bit of time and energy and that "down time" is good. Mostly, my husband and I enjoy a quiet life.
Your collection Better With Friends has quite a few poems about trains, and you've let me know that you and your husband both enjoy rail fanning. Could you explain what rail fanning is and how it relates to your writing?
Rail fanning is seeking trains to watch (and often photograph). I leave the photography to my husband. Rail fanning differs from chasing trains in that rail fans often remain in one place and wait for trains to come to them. It's a slow hobby that my husband compares to fishing. You sit—rail fans sometimes bring chairs—or stand around talking until a train comes. When it does come, you watch hard. You smell and feel the wind off the train, note the kind of cars and how many, wave at the engineer or conductor and know which is which. Serious rail fans often have radios that pick up the frequencies used by the railroads so they have a better idea of when the next train should arrive and which direction it will come from. I love the sights, sounds and smells of the engines, but I also notice that wild flowers—maybe called "weeds" by some—grow beside the tracks. We created a ritual in which every day I choose one flower as the "official railroad flower." This flower always gets photographed. The next day there will be a new one. Just part of the fun.
My husband and I have taken vacations that involved mostly rail fanning. (It's good to have a back-up plan in case of rain.) We've been to North Platte, NE, where the largest switch yard is located and through the Powder River Valley in Wyoming, watching coal trains that supply most of the low sulphur coal to the nation. This year we followed the rails through Kansas from Arkansas City north toward Kansas City. The best place we found for rail fanning was at the back of a cemetery in Paola, KS, where BNSF and UP lines intersect.
The title of my book Better With Friends was taken from a railroad trip my husband and I took to the "loops" near Black Mountain, NC—a section where the rails loop back on themselves as they wind up the Blue Ridge Mountains—with a dear friend Paul Cherenzia in which he said, rail fanning is "better with friends." I wrote what became the title poem for him. Sadly, he died before the book was published. Another poem is about a hobo we met in Hamlet, NC. Travel is always a source of material for a writer, and rail fanning is no exception.
Rank Stranger Press published your collection Better With Friends. Could you explain the responsibilities and expectations from both the publisher and the writer?
I didn't want to self-publish Better With Friends, and I didn't. Charlie Whitley, the editor of Rank Stranger Press, served as a "go-between"—between me and the printer—to make sure everything about the book turned out the way I had envisioned. He insisted things be done a certain way. He did his job well. I have a beautiful book. I knew from the start that the book would be high quality because it was being printed in Charlotte by Main Street Rag. I had shopped this book to various publishers for over two years, when I asked Charlie for help. Charlie Whitley did for me what no one else seemed willing to do: He published my book.
The division of labor was clear from the start. Whitley was upfront about his involvement. I knew that I was responsible for selling books. That said, if I had known then what I know now, there are steps I would have taken earlier. For example, I would have put my book on Amazon months ago. I would have sent out more review copies. I would have done what it seems distributors and publishers do for writers on larger presses. The problem was, I didn't know what they did. I didn't know how to accomplish even small tasks. In some ways, I feel as though I am playing catch-up to people whose books have come out months after mine. I still hope this book will get noticed on a wider scale. But, at least for me, life isn't a contest and selling books shouldn't be either. I have a book I wish more people would buy and read. I think I have something important to say.
How important do you feel community is for a poet?
I think community is important to life in general not just for poets, but it is essential to promoting (read; publishing and selling) one's work. Writing is a solo experience, but, once written, poems are usually made to be shared. Writing and marketing are two entirely separate aspects of the writing life. It is fine to write poems and put them in a drawer, but it is better to share them with others. My goal—or, at least, one of my goals—is to write so that others see themselves in my poems. I want to be the kind of poet whose images make a reader feel and think. I want to find truth and point other people toward it.
I know it probably changes from poem to poem, but are there certain things you check for when you revise your poems?
I try to make sure I don't have unnecessary words in a poem. That's what makes revision challenging. Poetry differs from prose in its exaggeration of image and the musical element of language, so words that would be unnecessary in prose may be needed in poetry. This is especially true of repeated words or phrases. The very nature of poetry sometimes makes it necessary to say something in a roundabout rather than a straightforward manner, but if I do use repetition, I want to make sure it adds to the overall effect not just the length of the poem. I want to get the pacing and emphasis right and be sure the stanzas occur in the right order not just the order in which they were written.
In serious revision, I often break the poem into sentences—a big "Thank You" to poet Dennis Sampson for telling me to write clear sentences—then rearrange the order of sentences, experiment with line breaks and stanza breaks, using couplets, triplets, quatrains, and stanzas of varying lengths on most poems before I'm finished. And finished is—at least, for me—a relative term. I will revise any poem I have written, published or not, if I see a way to improve it. After all, it's my poem, so I have the right—no, the responsibility—to make it the best I can. I love revising poems.
Do you feel poets should have an online presence?
I do. The world is a technical place now, and poets are expected to have a certain degree of technical competency, actually the more skills the better. No longer can a poet write poems out longhand and expect to be taken seriously. All poets—not just self-published poets or those on a small press—must be, to some degree, their own promoters.
This pertains only to poets who seek publication. I have no interest in telling people how to live their lives. Hand-written one-of-a-kind birthday-poems are lovely. And I am sure that somewhere there is a successful poet with no online presence at all. I just think the Internet is a tool that writers in this day and age ought to learn to use.
You're the poetry editor of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. What do you look for in poetry submissions?
I look for variety. The south is a large, diverse area, and it is untruthful to pretend otherwise. The editors of the Dead Mule do not pride ourselves with how few poems we accept. Instead, we pride ourselves by acting like "the big ole southern family" that we say we are. That said, we want good writing.
The Dead Mule is a good beginner’s market, where many poets have earned their first publication credit, and we do offer advice to beginners from time to time. We also publish a poet laureate of a southern state each April. More and more, established writers are submitting to the Mule. We live in the south and know that the south contains its share of racists. While we don't hesitate to publish them, we will not publish racial or religious slurs. We hope to help break down ignorant stereotypes concerning the south, while publishing quality southern literature. If someone writes about a stereotype, we hope he/she does so in a lighthearted tone.
Who (or what) are you currently reading?
I find myself reading more and more poetry books by poets who are local or who I meet online but that live close enough that meeting them is realistic. I read poetry online a lot. I also try to read poets who are better than I am, so I can learn as I read. I read and enjoy biography and autobiography. This weekend I read Driver #8, the story of Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s rookie year in the NASCAR Winston Cup Series, by Earnhardt with Jade Gurss. I don't read much fiction except online, but I do read and even review novels by people I know.
I'm not doing much with it now, but I wrote my thesis on Martin Luther King Jr. and remain interested in African American history, especially the Civil Rights Movement of the '60s and how that effects American life today. I continue to update my collection of books toward converting my thesis into a book concerning King.
If you could offer only one piece of advice to other poets, what would it be?
Write for yourself first. I don't mean write cryptically, so that no one knows what you mean; that is silly. I mean, find your own voice and use it. Writing, reading, and selling poetry will not make you rich, so don't sell out and try to be something you are not. Make sure you like what you write. Be your own worst critic; don't think for a minute you can write without revising. Remember, if you won't like a poem in ten years, you aren't finished with it.
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Check out Helen's blog at http://helenl.wordpress.com/
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