On the eve of the 2017 Lubbock Book Festival, during which he will be honored as the city’s new poet laureate, Wenthe took time out to discuss, via email, topics ranging from poetic inspiration to politics, with some practical advice for writers and readers along the way.
LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: Bill, you came to Texas Tech University in Lubbock — some years ago — by way of the University of Virginia, from an upbringing in New Jersey. Can you tell us more about your journey from East Coast to South to Southwest, and how that journey has influenced your creative development?
WILLIAM WENTHE: I’ve lived in a sixth-floor walkup in Manhattan and I’ve lived in a cottage in a 500-acre forest in Virginia. So I’m pretty adaptable. The relation of my writing to place is really complex, and something I’m always exploring. But very broadly, I did not identify with the suburban/industrial landscape I grew up in; much of the poetry I wrote then was by way of complaint. And then I loved, just loved, the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. In Virginia, I felt I understood the place: its natural history and human history, and that deepened my writing. Moving to West Texas was a kind of geographical shock, after Virginia—one of the first poems I wrote was titled “After Moving to a Place Where I Do Not Know the Names of Plants and Birds.” But after I moved here, I swore that I wouldn’t let unfamiliarity stop me from writing. So West Texas is the place where I became a more deliberate, determined, and practicing writer; and where I learned to mine my own imagination more when it comes to inventing poems.
How, and when, did you know that poetry was your particular calling?
I had some amazing teachers in high school—my latest book is dedicated to some of them—but they never taught poetry. I happened to see Allen Ginsberg on TV when I was eighteen, and I was blown away by his unconventionality, and the poems he read (and sang) of William Blake, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound. I immediately started buying books by these poets, and others, and that pretty much did it for me. I dabbled in drawing and dabbled in music, and I think the visual arrangement of a poem—that you can see the whole thing taking shape, so to speak—and the sound texture of poetry appeal to those desires in me.
At one time I had a notion I would write poems and then move on to short stories and novels. Over forty years later I’m still learning to write poems.
You’ve taught creative writing at Texas Tech for twenty-five years now. How have you adapted to life on the South Plains? How have Texas and Texans come to figure in your writing?
I think of where I live not so much as a political entity but a region: a giant triangle ranging from the South Plains to the Conejos River in Colorado to the Sacramento Mountains in New Mexico. Not so much a state as a habitat.
Unfortunately, I think the one place Texas becomes most stereotypical and homogeneous is in the state government, which has come under the control of white men who legislate a selfish agenda that most of the people—I mean, actual persons—in the state disapprove of. They are champions of ignorance who have become a caricature of themselves. On the rare occasions I write about “Texas” per se, I’m writing in opposition to that.
So compare that narrow-minded government to the actual persons you meet in the state, and you can see why for twenty-five years I’ve been able to lead a good and welcome life here, even though I’m not native to the area. When it comes to day-to-day life, Lubbock is very amenable. And as a teacher I get paid to walk into classrooms and talk about poetry. I’m grateful because at this point of my life I’d probably be unemployable in any other capacity; but I’m more grateful for the excellence of the job, which has everything to do with the excellence of the students and colleagues I work with.
“Art / Faith / Mystery” — the tagline of the journal Image, in which your delightful poem “Impromptu Novena in September” appears — sums up the subject matter of your work pretty well for me. Which of these three characteristics, would you say, comes first for you?
Mystery, for me, is first, second, and third. Whatever triggers a poem—it could be an external experience; it could be something internal like a memory or desire or dream; it could be language, such as a word or phrase that somehow lodges in my head, or something I’ve read, or even a rhythm—but there’s always something about it that is mystery, that makes me feel larger for encountering it. If a poem succeeds, it too has some of that mystery in it. But I’m talking more about other people’s poems here—though sometimes one of my own poems will hit me that way. Yet there’s also mystery in writing and rewriting—there’s an old sense of the word “mystery” that has to do with the knowledge of a craft. But writing a good poem means writing something beyond your own limits—and if that sounds mysterious, then it should. Of course, this means a lot of failing along the way.
Your volumes of poetry are rich with settings from around the globe — a London pub, a Russian museum, a Parisian bridge, for starters. How have these and other far-flung locales inspired your writing?
I’ve not traveled as much as I’d like to, but the traveling I’ve done has mostly been pretty independent, and low-budget. And pretty much in Europe. Rather than touring, I like to go to a place and stay a while, become immersed in it. While there are elements of sheer wonder and awe in the cultural monuments you see, there’s another level of wonder in the day-to-day matters of finding a meal or a place to sleep, to communicate across a language barrier. A sense of taking nothing for granted, for routine. But the trick for a writer is to bring that quality back home, and in the midst of your normal routine, to find ways to see it freshly: to be kind of a stranger in your native locale. Writing happens mostly in the gap between familiar and unfamiliar.
In a day when readers seem to have less time for any sort of reading — and especially poems, it seems! — what makes poetry worthwhile for us?
There are so many ways I could answer this, but I’ll just focus on a kind of practical angle. A good poem isn’t just a message—we get too many of those. It’s a space, a mental space and even, since it has sound, texture and rhythm, a physical space that you can enter. Unlike a lot of writing, a lyric poem can be read in its entirety—its whole shape and its various parts taken in all together. In this sense one doesn’t just read a poem so much as be with it, the way you would with a painting or a statue. Or a meditation, or a prayer, or—back when I could play—a basketball game. It’s a special kind of attention, and in a world of so much distraction, attention is one of the things that renews us. A short poem can stay with you as much as a novel or a movie or a symphony.
I enjoyed your mini-lesson on sentence and syntax in Wingbeats, Scott Wiggerman’s edited volume of exercises to prompt poetry writing. What other quick exercise would you suggest, to help a writer experiment productively with verse?
I’ve never been very “quick” about writing—I don’t know if that’s a virtue or a handicap. But one thing exercises can do is disarm your brain a bit, and take away that pressure of having to write a POEM. To that end, I think one of the most fundamental, easy, yet profound things you can do is to write out a poem you admire by someone else, in longhand. Preferably a poem you don’t quite understand. Writing it out by hand means you literally handle every syllable, and you come to discover the poem as you write. You become intimate with how the poem works. It’s a kind of mental traveling—as I said above about travel, it lets you see differently; only here you’re looking at language. What you discover will influence your writing, but in a deeper and more indirect way.
And I’d say the same, but more so, about translating a poem from another language.
Readers who enjoy other genres of literature often say they’re reluctant to tackle poetry. Are there poets and poems you’d suggest for a skeptical newcomer to try out?
I started to answer this with a disquisition on the nature of poetry: but let me just cut to the chase. There’s a wonderful book by Kenneth Koch titled Making Your Own Days that is part how-to, and part anthology. Koch is really good at talking, in plain terms, about how poetry works differently from other uses of language. His book is written for someone who’s never read a poem in their life; but when I read it, after forty years of having lived poetry, I found much wisdom that had taken me years to discover, but could never explain the way Koch does.
Personally, I tend to like poems that ground themselves in real-life situations. This, too, is a way into poetry, and there are some fine Texas poets who come to mind. I think of Jan Seale, Jerry Bradley, Naomi Nye, Dave Parsons, Cyrus Cassels—there are so many. And of course, Lubbock’s own Walt McDonald. Their books are all available on Amazon.
A good way to experience poetry for the first time is through poetry readings. Consider this a plug for the Lubbock Book Festival, where many poets will give you a fine reading. To hear a good poet read her own work, and talk a little about where the poems came from, and what her influences are, is illuminating. If you live in a city of any size, or a college town, there will be poetry readings. Of course, sometimes there’s a reading that’s just plain awful. If that happens, give it another chance, try another poetry reading. A good reading can change your own reading and writing life.
Another avenue: Go to Poetry Daily, at www.poems.com, and check out the poem of the day. The editors read a huge variety of books and literary journals, and cull one poem each day to post on their website. When you see a poem you really like, get that poet’s book, or the literary journal where the poem first appeared, and explore it more fully.
Congratulations on being named Lubbock’s next poet laureate, a role that in other cities has fostered an appreciation for the literary arts among readers of all ages, and helped preserve poetry as a relevant art form. How do you foresee the job of the poet laureate in the literary life of the Hub City?
To be accurate, we should say I’m the second poet laureate. To me, that title belongs foremost to Walt McDonald, a Lubbock native and internationally known poet. Between his own poetry, and starting the Texas Tech Creative Writing program, Walt has everything to do with Lubbock having become a literary town. But lately I found out something interesting: that in point of fact Walt McDonald IS the first poet laureate: he was appointed Lubbock Poet Laureate by then mayor Windy Sitton in 1999. You can Google it. Then in 2001 he was appointed Texas Poet Laureate.
This latest version of Lubbock Poet Laureate is modeled on the statewide version: it’s a one-year position, that will be rotated annually among poets, writers, songwriters, the whole gamut of wordsmiths that make Lubbock unique. I see this role as not so much about a person, but about the whole community—the city of Lubbock recognizing and claiming its own artistic life, from the nervous guitar player on open-mic night to the Lubbock Ballet and the Lubbock Symphony.
Personally, what I imagine doing is trying to bring poetry into some schools in a way they don’t normally get to hear. Then I will look forward to passing the role on to the next poet laureate, and so on.
Is there a favorite Texas locale that’s inspired an image or poem for you? Leave us with a tidbit, and we’ll look forward to hearing the entire poem at your inaugural reading on Saturday evening, Oct. 28, 2017, in Lubbock.
Is the sky a locale? It’s not just that the sky is so big out here, it’s also active—it brings us things. Everything from tornadoes to butterflies. My latest book, God’s Foolishness, begins with a bird call coming out of the night sky, and ends with a poem about the light here in mid-September. The sky brings us our water, of which this year, thankfully, we’ve had plenty; it also brings us poison in the form of pollution.
As for places on the ground, I get a substantial amount of material just walking around Lubbock. I like to walk in places where people don’t normally go. Alleys, railroads, windrows, isolated patches of wood and shrub. I may be after birds, but there’s always something more.
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