J.G. McClure holds an MFA from the
University of California – Irvine. His poems and prose appear widely, including
in Best New Poets, Gettysburg Review, and
Birmingham Poetry Review. A three-time
Pushcart Prize nominee, he is the author of The
Fire Lit & Nearing (Indolent Books 2018). See more at jgmcclure.com.
1 - How did your first
book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous?
How does it feel different?
When
I first started writing, I felt the need—probably a common one among sophomore
English majors—to be a Serious Poet. Well, when I first started writing I just sort of flailed around with no idea
what I was doing. But shortly thereafter: Serious Poet. As such, I would only
write Serious Poems, which would be read seriously by Serious Readers.
Eventually, thank god, I realized how boring this was for everyone involved,
and started getting interested in the zany, the weird, the funny in poetry. I
realized that these things could be
serious, as in poets like Dean Young, Thomas Lux, or Amy Gerstler. Suddenly
writing the poems was fun again. Reading them too, I hope.
2 - How did you come to
poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I
needed a class to fill a requirement in college. The fiction workshop was full,
but the poetry workshop had one seat open, so I took it. I’d never read a
contemporary poem and hadn’t the slightest idea what I was getting myself into.
But hey, how hard can it be, right? Hard. Go figure.
I
was pretty sure I was going to fail the class, and maybe have to flee the
state, because of how bad my poems were. So when I had my mandatory midterm
conference with the professor, Michael McFee, I was bracing for that crushing
but not unexpected blow to my ego. Instead he encouraged me to apply for the
next level of workshops. In retrospect I’m pretty sure the poems were still
terrible, but I guess he must’ve seen how much I wanted them to be good and how much I was willing to work at it.
I
had no idea how lucky I was – UNC had brilliant poets on staff, and I’d
stumbled into the middle of their workshops. I ended up going through the whole
program and spending my senior year working on a book-length manuscript with
Alan Shapiro, another wonderful and wonderfully inspiring poet-professor. That
was my first attempt at a book, and it’s still on a shelf somewhere deep in the
bowels of Davis Library, if you’re ever in the neighborhood.
Anyway,
through the course of the three years I spent doing poem things in college, I
fell increasingly in love with poetry, and now here we are!
3 - How long does it
take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come
quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their
final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
It’s
pretty much always been a feast-or-famine thing for me. Either I’m writing all
the time and fired up about it, or I can’t make myself write a single line. Even
during my most productive periods to date, there were still stretches of a week
or three where I had nothing. As far as the revision process, that also varies
wildly. I tend to revise as I go, so it’s hard to get a count of how many
revisions any given piece has gone through. Some of my favorite poems were
written in a day or two, and changed little from first to final drafts. Another
favorite I remember spending months on before I finally got it to work.
4 - Where does a poem
usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining
into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very
beginning?
Short
pieces that add up – I didn’t realize that my book was a book until I started putting
the pieces of it together.
I
wish I could give credit where it’s due, but I’ve forgotten the source of what
I’m about to talk about. Anyway, the idea was that writers shouldn’t worry too
much about what the unifying themes of their oeuvre are, because the writer is the unifying theme. Your
obsessions are your obsessions, and they’re going to be there whether you like
it or not. I very much doubt that Whitman set down one day and said “I am going
to write about 1) grass 2) death 3) sex and 4) AMERICA.” (Well, maybe that last
one). But the point is, he didn’t have to—he just wrote about what interested
him, and thematic unity took care of itself.
5 - Are public readings
part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who
enjoys doing readings?
I
love doing readings! But I’m not sure I’d say they’re part of my creative
process. They’re kind of a separate thing—after the poem is done, then I can
read it, but I’m not really thinking about that as I write.
As
I said, though, I like doing readings a lot. Writing is a mostly solitary
activity, and it can be easy to feel like you’re the only person who cares
about it. Even when your poems get published, you never really know if anyone
is reading them. Doing readings helps connect you to others and remind you of
why you’re writing at all.
6 - Do you have any
theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you
trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions
are?
This
is a tricky one, I think. There’s a quote from Robert Frost’s prose that I
agree with:
For ourselves, we
should hate to be read for any theory upon which we might be supposed to write.
We doubted any poem could persist for any theory upon which it might have been
written. Take the theory that poetry in our language could be treated as
quantitative, for example. Poems had been written in spite of it. And poems are
all that matter. The utmost of ambition is to lodge a few poems where they will
be hard to get rid of…
But
you have to be careful here, because it’s not as if theory can be removed from the equation. Isn’t all good writing a way of
testing out certain theories about ourselves and the world we live in? What’s
Frost writing about in “The Road Not Taken” if not a theory about personal
choice as narrative illusion? What’s he writing about in “Design” if not a
theory about the absence or indifference of God in a cruel universe?
Maybe
this seems like equivocation. I can imagine a reader saying, “The question’s
not talking about theories, it’s
talking about Theory.” Fair enough.
But whether your obsession is with the Problem of Evil or with the problems of
a Lacan or a Derrida, if the poems are going to be any good you have to come at
them with the same urgency. Take a book like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, or her The Art of Cruelty. Or something like
Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet. These
are books that deal with very technical literary-critical (Nelson) and linguistic
(Carson) topics, but they do so in a way that even a dabbler like me feels
deeply the importance of getting it right.
7 – What do you see the
current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one?
What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Another
tricky one. On one hand, I know that infinitely more people will see, say, that
video of the dramatic chipmunk turning its head than will ever see anything I
write. (And in fairness, I’ve watched that chipmunk a lot myself).
But
on the other hand, I think that the writer has the same role they’ve always
had: to remember, to record, to challenge, to tell us what it’s like for others
to be alive, to let us know we’re not alone. And if anything, poetry is more
important than ever as a place in which we can think about the big existential
questions and find some sense of meaning which no longer seems to exist in the
world at large.
8 - Do you find the
process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I
haven’t really done this a whole lot. Indolent Books, who published The Fire Lit & Nearing, is big on
letting authors make their own artistic choices. If they like the book they
take it as-is; if they don’t, they don’t.
For
individual pieces in journals, I’ve had editors suggest changes, sometimes
dramatic ones. Most of the time, I’ve agreed with them, and the changes made
the work better. The few times I haven’t, I explained why I disagreed, and they
let it stand. Maybe I’ve just been lucky to have especially hands-off editors.
9 - What is the best
piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I
can’t think of one specific piece of advice. But on a more holistic level, I
think that studying at UC-Irvine for my MFA and having workshops with Michael Ryan on one hand and Amy Gerstler on the other was really important to my work
and how it shifted over time. Michael is more old-school, interested in
traditional forms, and a believer in Frost’s views on poetry (he’s the person I
got that Frost quote from above). Amy is more interested in experimental forms,
hybrid forms, the weird and the wacky (she introduced me to Russell Edson’s work, for instance). Learning from both of them did a lot to shape how I think
about what poetry can do as it works within and against poetic traditions. If I
were to try to translate that into a useful piece of advice, it would be “Read
widely and learn all you can from very different poets.”
10 - What kind of
writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a
typical day (for you) begin?
I’m
still trying to figure this one out. Between my day job and my side gig as an
online writing teacher, it’s hard to find regular time for my own work. Somehow
it still gets done—I recently finished translating a book of poems from
Spanish, which will be published soonish—but there’s little routine to it.
11 - When your writing
gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word)
inspiration?
It
can be a number of different things. Sometimes just walking around looking for
something to write about (my poem “At Mason Park…” was one of these), sometimes
scouring the internet for weird facts (my poem “Ars Poetica”), sometimes
riffing on work that I admire (“Café Terrace at Night”).
12 - What fragrance
reminds you of home?
My
first house had this really musty basement. For some reason, I dug that smell
(I was a weird kid). To this day, any somewhat-musty basement reminds me of
that particular Missouri basement. I have no idea why this is the strongest
scent-related memory of home, or of anything else, I can think of. It was just
a cool-smelling basement, I guess.
13 - David W. McFadden
once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that
influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Absolutely!
I think it’s important for writers to read as widely as possible. Otherwise,
it’s just writers writing about writing for writers who read the same writers
when they write. Most people don’t have a vast knowledge of poetry, so if
you’re going to write something that’s interesting to people outside of po-biz,
you’ve got to engage with as many other aspects of the world as you can. One
writer I admire for this is Albert Goldbarth. He’s a poet but I mostly know his
essays, which can manage to move from talking about the history of the
microscope or of pulp sci-fi novels to talking about his neighbors’ messy
divorce in a way that feels totally natural. Of course these things belong together, how did I not see it before?
In
my own book, I have poems inspired by entomology, spaceflight, visual art, a
(real) former concert hall now stuffed with junk pianos which also happens to
be underground, 80s B movies with Kurt Russell, multiverse theories, and yes,
books too.
14 - What other writers
or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your
work?
Way,
way too many to list. But I think the two books that have had the most direct
effect on my life might be the textbooks we used in the first poetry class I
took: Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook and
the Penguin Pocket Anthology of Poetry. From Oliver I got the sense of why
poetry matters, how difficult and vital it is. From the Penguin I got my first
real introduction to contemporary poetry, set alongside a sampling of older
work going back to pre-Shakespearean anonymous ballads. The two of them
together made me want to be a poet.
15 - What would you
like to do that you haven't yet done?
Lately
I’ve gotten really interested in short fiction. I’ve written and published flash
fiction before, but that still feels almost like a form of writing poetry to
me. I’m interested in trying out traditionally sized short stories.
Outside
of writing: at my work, there’s a Shiba Inu who hangs out in the office across
the hall. I want to pet it. I want to pet it so much.
16 - If you could pick
any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you
think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Right
up till the end of my senior year of college, my intention was to go to law
school. I’d taken the LSAT and everything. But something like two weeks before
the last applications were due, I realized I wanted to do an MFA instead. So, I
switched gears at the last minute (much to the annoyance of my recommendation-letter-writers,
I’m sure).
17 - What made you
write, as opposed to doing something else?
I
think I was always looking for a creative outlet, without realizing I was doing
it. In middle school I drew (very badly), in high school I played the guitar (somewhat
less badly). But I always hated the “creative” assignments in school. I
would’ve much rather just written the essay or taken the quiz or whatever.
Still, once I started writing and workshopping poems, I realized that’s what
I’d been missing.
18 - What was the last
great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m
awful at remembering things. I keep a spreadsheet of books that I’ve read, with
columns for genre, author, rating, and notes, because otherwise I have no idea
what I’ve already read. The last great book I read was Madeline Miller’s Circe. My spreadsheet doesn’t have films
on it, so I don’t know about that one. Come to think of it, I should make a tab
for films.
19 - What are you currently
working on?
As
I mentioned before I’ve gotten interested in short fiction. I haven’t really
started writing it yet, but I’ve been reading a lot of stories and books on
craft. In any piece of writing, it’s hard for me to start if I have no idea what
I’m doing. If I have some sense of what I’m doing, I can start, even though the
thing I think I’m doing is almost
never what I end up actually doing by
the end.
Aside
from my own writing, I teach several online writing workshops. My essay
workshop just wrapped up, and I’m starting my Intro to Poetry one soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment