Interview with a (Published/not Starving) Poet and Musician: Part 2

BfW: How do you feel about networking, about knowing people, and using it as the stepping stone? Or perhaps as even the plateau, to know certain people…

Nathan Brown: It’s not my nature, but I have gotten better at it, and I have to be honest and say it does make a difference. I had to figure out ways to do it where I could live with myself. Honestly, the folk musician in me, which is sort of my background, taught me how to handle my poetry. Get out there and do it. Don’t network in the sense of meeting all the professors who know the people who own the prizes, but network in the sense of performing, being out there, being in front of people, speaking, reading…building an audience that way, and then meeting people.

I have to say that I do agree with it though, because the days of publishers picking up writers and making them famous are over. It’s up to the artist now whether or not they’re going to be heard or read. It’s going to take a lot of our energy, and there’s a lot of writers who don’t want to hear that.

I have friends who are novel writers. One of them has won the American Book Award and the Pen Faulkner Prize and she says that even at her level, when she meets with her New York publishers, all the publishers now are looking at the writers and saying “So what are you gonna do to sell this book?”

BfW: You’re a performer. How do you feel about bringing performance back into poetry, about poets being their own street teams, so to speak?

Nathan Brown: In essence, that’s what I do. It’s not slam, but I go out and perform, and it’s many kinds of different events, not just universities and conferences. I get out there and people say “Oh, poetry that I understand!” and so they buy the books, word passes around. It’s taken many years, of course, but I’m pretty busy.

Poetry struggles—there’s no getting around it. It’s not the most popular literary sport. But I think it’s coming back, and I love it. I will stick with it and will continue to do it for the rest of my life. I’m also back into music now, and one of the ways I make my living now is by doing house concerts that combine music and poetry. That’s my bread and butter, to be honest. There’s a huge house concert circuit. It’s in a house, there’s no PA system, just a guitar, a voice, poetry, songs. It’s one my favorite things and they do it all over the states now. It’s really great.

That’s an excellent networking system there, but being in front of people is how I’ve done it, not meeting the academics. And I went all the way through, I got my Ph.D., but I’m very frequently in trouble with academia. If I speak at a conference, I’m always pissing somebody off with what I’m saying. I’ll get up and say “By the way, nobody likes us, so when are we going to start talking about why?”

You can read entire literary journals and read nothing that you actually like. You go through and feel like you should like it because it’s in there, but you don’t like it. Until we address that, we’re dead in the water.

 

The interview was a bit longer but I cut some things–I should have been better prepared. I’ll be interviewing Nathan again sometime this month, I hope, and I’ll have written the questions in advance, so expect that interview to be the most interesting thing you’ve ever read. I expect it to be quite practical.

Interview with a (Published/not Starving) Poet and Musician: Part 1

Hi guys. I thought I’d interview someone who’s sort of living the dream and post about it on Books for Writers. Here goes the first half of the interview.

BfW: Who are you, what are you, and what do you do?

Nathan Brown: I’m Nathan Brown, and I am a poet, a photographer, and a musician/songwriter. Primarily a poet, but I’ve done music longer, and right now what I do is I travel and I teach creativity workshops, creative writing workshops, and I do musical performances and poetry readings.

BfW: When did you decide to dedicate your life to artistic goals? Specifically poetry, but music as well.

Nathan: Well, musically it is very easy to pinpoint. I was eight years old and I started learning to play the guitar because I wanted to be John Denver. In my teens I started playing in bands, and by the time I was in my 20’s I started writing music. Eventually, in my mid-twenties, I moved out to Nashville and worked as a professional songwriter there, and then I came back here from Nashville because I kind of burned out on music a little bit and I took creative writing at OU (University of Oklahoma). I had a professor there who turned me around, and then a certain poet, Stephen Dunn, who’s one of my favorite poets writing in the English language right now. Stephen Dunn is phenomenal. He had a book of poetry that I read and said “Man, if poetry can do that, sign me up.” I’ve been doing it ever since. I’ve published 8 books of it and it’s now a big part of my life. I travel and read and speak at schools. It’s pretty fun.

BfW: A lot of people would say that in poetry today, the market, the audience isn’t what it used to be. Do you agree or disagree? Also, is there any particular changes you would like to see in contemporary poetry today?

Nathan: I do agree, but I also think it’s somewhat turning around. The crash-course in it, which is completely unquotable—there’s a lot of people who would probably disagree with me—but the bottom line is about fifty or sixty years ago, poetry basically just crawled up in the attic of academia and it never came out. And so nobody understands a single thing that we’re saying, and so nobody cares , and so audiences left; it’s very easy math. When you start doing poetry that basically reads like somebody put a bunch of words into a blanket, shook the blanket up and wrote down how the words fell out and call that a poem—

BfW: Like a found poem?

Nathan:–Yeah! Yeah, and so everybody goes “Whooo” and they think it’s profound and deep. And it’s not. It’s crap. Nobody gets it and the authors don’t even get it. Some of them will pretend like they do, and some of them will give big long lectures pretending like they do, and it’s all just crap. Now that’s my opinion, and a lot of people disagree with it, but not audiences. Audiences hate that stuff and it’s boring as hell.

I write serious poetry, but tonight I read a couple of funnier poems. In performance, people’ve gotta smile. We’re all depressed enough; people don’t need my help to become more depressed. A lot of American poetry over the last sixty years has felt like an inside joke. Nobody gets it, so audiences left. Now, though, we’ve got a crew of American poets who’re coming back, and they’re daring to make sense. They’re daring to try to say something that somebody can understand, but to say it in an artful way. There’s a big movement with that right now, and I think everyone’s pretty much had it with the other thing. I think that’s run its course.

BfW: Care to name any names of those poets?

Nathan Brown: Well, Stephen Dunn, I mentioned earlier. Absolutely Stephen Dunn. Billy Collins I refer to as a gateway poet. For people who got disenfranchised, Billy Collins is sort of a gateway poet for people to come back to it. Sharon Olds is fabulous, a little more hard-hitting. Wonderful nature poetry, cause a lot of nature poetry isn’t—Mary Oliver. Tony Hoagland will turn your head around a couple of times, and so will Bob Hickock. I’m gonna miss a few, but that’s a good list. Another thing that I tell people is, if you ever start taking yourself too seriously, you just need to back off and read some Bukowski. He is the original dirty old man in American letters. I love what he said, “An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.”…so many people hate him.

The problem is that academia owns all the prizes, so the only way to win the prizes is to sound profound to impress your professors who know the people who judge the prizes. It’s inbred, is what it is. It’s inbreeding, pure and simple.

BfW: That’s a great word for it.

Nathan Brown: (laughs) Oh, well…

I’ll try to post the rest soon. For those of you who are snobby about this (anyone?), Nathan does have a Ph.D. Here’s a link to his site: http://www.brownlines.com/

Very cool guy. I’m having a good time just writing out the interview here, which was totally impromptu, so excuse me if it’s not up to the quality of any Journalism majors.