Philip Brady’s www.philipbrady.com most recent
release is Phantom Signs: The Muse in
Universe City His book-length poem, To
Banquet with the Ethiopians: A Memoir of Life Before the Alphabet, appeared
from Broadstone Books in 2015. He is the
author of a previous collection of essays, By Heart: Reflections of a Rust
Belt Bard, (ForeWord Gold Medal,
2008) as well as three books of poems and a memoir. His work has
been awarded the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press, the Ohioana Poetry
Prize, the Ohio Governor’s Award, six Ohio Arts Council Artist Grants, and a
Thayer Fellowship from New York. He has been a resident of Yaddo, Hawthonden
Castle, The Headlands Center for the Arts, Fundacion Valparaiso, and the Tyrone
Guthrie Centre. Brady has taught at the National University of Zaire,
University College Cork, and Semester at Sea. Currently, he is a Distinguished
Professor at Youngstown State University and Executive Director of Etruscan Press. He also serves on
the MFA faculty at Wilkes University.
1 - How did
your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to
your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book is old. Now I am.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed
to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
It began at home, like this.
“Song comes from a place, means what the place does.
Flushing: noun & verb. "G" not pronounced as in Long Island nor
dropped like Brooklyn.
The place: a cabinet Hi Fi. Press the last key on the right
it thumps & sticks. Two racing stripes light green; the Hi Fi thrums.
The place singing comes from is the right lobe. The LP fits
in the left drawer. I crouch before the dashboard, ear to scruff of speaker,
and hear four electric pulse beats: buff
buff buff buff.
Father's downstairs. Mother's lip curls and her foot stamps
time. "Up the Rebels!" says her jutting chin.
I rock. On hands & haunches back & forth, haunch to heels
& palm to rug, speed adjusted to song.
Father screams up, "Turn that noise down."
Mother screams down, "Narrowback!"
Understanding and guile share the left lobe. I understand moonshine, porter, stout, poteen; sassanach is
my hissed curse; I am langers; peelers,
pishogues & fenians harry & cock; I rove; I stand &
deliver--fore & aft, a bloody briny daft shoneen with an eye peeled for
a crubeen or a colleen, a dragoon, an omadon, a quay.
Soon I begin to understand Gaelic & ad fiason la port laragot, fa dow, fa dee, fa le god-e-lum is as
clear to me as with houls ime shoos ame
tows peepin troo siyin shinnymarinkadootaloffin ould jonny doo.”
from
“The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba (in Galway)”
After mastering Gaelic, I learned Latin—as second acolyte at
wintery 6:00AM Mass.
Poetry came to me as utterance unmoored from consequence.
From there, the self, the place, the world could be remade.
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?
Each is different. For instance, my first book, Forged Correspondences, came out of my
desire to understand my experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Zaire, without
resorting to exoticism. My memoir, To
Prove My Blood, came after the death of my parents, when It felt possible
and incumbent to remake my history. To
Banquet with the Ethiopians, a book-length poem, came after heart surgery,
when I felt the need to reconceive my body in verse. My most recent book Phantom Signs, is composed of essays
reflecting on the tension between sound and sign.
4 - Where
does a poem or work of prose 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?
As Kabir says, four things are needed.
Satisfying work,
ecstatic love,
mystical experience,
and deep sleep.
This applies to poems, prose, and life.
5 - Are
public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort
of writer who enjoys doing readings?
No
readings, but thousands of recitations. Usually private—walking, or in cars or
planes, or on long lines or falling asleep. Sometimes other people, unaware, are
present—in malls, on city sidewalks, in stadiums and offices—anywhere I am
invisible. On rare occasions, there are attentive
audiences
And
here’s someone else’s.
I
met Philip Brady on a mid-summer eve at Hawthornden Castle. I had come to this
Edinburgh keep, where Ben Jonson and Dr. Johnson and Queen Victoria had slept,
to hear three Hawthornden Fellows: the Israeli poet Amir Or, our own Dilys
Rose, and the American Philip Brady. He is an eerie figure, this Queens bard.
Near two meters tall, bawheid and bristle-chinned, he listed over the podium as
if poised to incinerate the lawnchairs. His performance—if that’s what it was,
for innocent of text it was no reading—seemed part liturgy, part wren-song,
with a flourish of pantomime. “Rocking and chanting,” chanted Brady, “He had
fed the voice and the voice had fed the utterance.” And I felt, in that smitten
air, the imminence of voice and utterance.
Professor
Solia Jephardt
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?
“I write those poems which I have not found elsewhere, and
for whose existance I feel a deep need.”
--Jerome
Rothenberg
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?
One role would be to replaces the word “writer” with
“composer.” Let language enter in, in all its wayward forms.
8 - Do you
find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or
both)?
This is a tough one, since I am an editor. www.etruscanpress.org
Kind of like my sister/my daughter in Chinatown.
9 - What is
the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and
crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not
concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your
hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with
powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families,
read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life,
re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss
whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and
have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its
lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint
of your body.”
--Walt
Whitman
10 - How
easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to memoir to essays)?
What do you see as the appeal?
from “The
Book I Almost Wrote” in Phantom
Signs: The Muse in Universe City.
“I have a love-hate relationship with
sentences. I love the freedom and the buoyancy, the smooth texture on your skin
and the way they go on and on, executing a flip turn at the margin. But, they
do go on. I compose them only in daylight or lamplight, always alone. They
can’t be learned by heart; they can’t breathe for long away from print. They
are—or at least my sentences seem—foreign. Sentences have no darkness. They are
devoid of mystery. If you think of something that might go in a sentence, you
stick it in. Bent on transposing whole cartons of toxic reality on to the page,
you get woozy.”
11 - What
kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does
a typical day (for you) begin?
This gets asked a lot—on panels, in classes, in conferences.
We desire to see into the very source, where the Muse touches the pen. Here’s
an excerpt from an essay, “Face”
from Phantom Signs.
“But
watching me opening the cell into the writer’s dark is never enough, is it? You
want to open it yourself. You want to violate the dark. You want to see the
drafts, variorums, notebooks, letters, diaries. You want to be there. You want
to insinuate yourself into the moment before nothing was written into
existence. Before identity. Before anything could happen. I understand.
I stay because I know that failing
to gain access, you’ll buy. You’ll shelve a title in your library, or place it,
as if casually, on your coffee table. Its gloss and blurbs and colophon and Garamond
draw the eye and gratify the touch. But deep down, something’s missing.
Something has been covered over. Something writers would not willingly reveal.”
13 - What
fragrance reminds you of home?
Jamesons, Frank Torre’s first baseman’s glove, Detective
Brady’s crumpled Camels, Ballydehob sheep, Radio City throne velvet, the
Chelsea market, Diva’s cheesecloth, the Beamish brewery, Ladinar’s unfurled canvas,
Lubumbashi palm oil, a Hedwitschak bodhran, Elsa’s clavicle, Point Reyes salt
spray, the sky, enduring shame, and
droplets of sweat from the stool spinning in the cellar of my untapped lust.
14 - 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?
15 - What
other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life
outside of your work?
I am pleased and honored to have published these writers.
Kazim Ali, Nin Andrews, Jennifer Atkinson, Claire Bateman, Stephen
Benz, Remica Bingham, Bruce Bond, Laurie Cannady, Scott Coffel, Brian Coughlin,
August Corteau, Renee D’Aoust, Dante DeStefano, Karen Donovan, Will Dowd,
Robert Eastwood, Bonnie Friedman, Peter Grandbois,Eamon Grennan, William Heyen,
H.L.Hix, Patricia Horvath, Milton Kessler, David Lazar, Michael Lind, Paul
Lisicky, Lynn Lurie, Roberto Manzano, James McCorkle, Bruce Mills, Robert
Miltner, Carol Moldaw, Thorpe Moeckel, Mihaela Moscaliuc, Kevin Oderman, Meg
Pograss, Aaron Poochigian, Paula Priamos, Sara Pritchard, Diane Raptosh, Steven
Reese, J.D. Schraffenberger, Alix Anne Shaw, Jeff Talarigo, Tim Seibles, D.M. Spitzer, Alexis Stamatis, Alex Stein, Sheryl
St. Germain, Myrna Stone, Diane Thiel, Allison Titus, Spring Ulmer, Daneen
Wardrop, John Wheatcroft, and Joseph Wood,
16 - What
would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Imitated from the Japanese (1938)
A
most astonishing thing
Seventy years have I lived;
Seventy years have I lived;
(Hurrah
for the flowers of Spring
For Spring is here again.)
For Spring is here again.)
Seventy
years have I lived
No ragged beggar man,
Seventy years have I lived,
Seventy years man and boy,
And never have I danced for joy.
No ragged beggar man,
Seventy years have I lived,
Seventy years man and boy,
And never have I danced for joy.
--W.B.Yeats
17 - 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?
Wouldn’t mind giving this another forty years.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Insufficient height, weak elevation, indifferent
conditioning, lack of speed, questionable shot selection, clumsy handle,
unfocused motivation, feckless coaching, proclivity to ankle sprains, and
ultimate unwillingness to commit to the game of basketball, or any other life
endeavor, except poetry.
19 - What
was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Milkman
by Anna Burns (the
audible version featuring Brid Brennan).
20 - What
are you currently working on?
The
Elsewhere: Selected Poems & Poetics, forthcoming from
Broadstone Books, 2020.
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