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.

Instant Watch Alert #2

I’ll just come out and say it: the Instant Watch version of this film is dubbed. People, please, hold your groans for a moment; this particular dub becomes bearable. Before I get to what the movie is and why you should watch it, I’d like to say something about dubs. I’ve watched some anime in my time and, since I made sure beforehand that I was not about to watch the pedophiliac god-awful shit that Japanese males seems wont to produce, I’ve really enjoyed a few of them, and I watched all but one of them dubbed. Since I don’t understand Japanese, I don’t want to miss any subtleties in spoken dialogue–nor do I want to hear whiny voice actresses.

One thing about anime that makes it comparable to writing is its static element. Though it varies with quality and budget, the faces generally aren’t going to move anything close to the amount they do in real life, and they aren’t going to be as capable of expression. So what? Well,  dialogue and word choice become that much more important. I don’t want to spend much time on anime today, so I’ll skip to the writing lesson. Poetry, prose or dialogue: do you think what you’ve written is good? Hopefully the answer is yes. But have you tried reading it in as dull a monotone as you can, or, better yet, have you had someone read it to you that way? You may find it educational. To keep myself honest, I’ll tell you where I got this idea: Sol Stein’s Stein on Writing. I recommended it earlier and still recommend it–it’s good.

Now for the movie: Vittorio de Sica’s Two Women, starring Sophia Loren. I can’t find a picture for the movie that I like, so I’ll put one of her. As with other agonizingly beautiful women, one picture of Sophia Loren will not suffice. For now, though, it is all I will do.

That is enough reason to watch the movie. I’ll say it for you: mio dio! Be still, my beating heart…

Two Women is a beautifully filmed story of a widow and her daughter during WWII. If you’re a fan of Pedro Almodovar and enjoyed Volver, you will probably enjoy this movie too; Volver owes much to it.

I want to write a good post but don’t want to ramble, so here’s the skinny: women’s struggles persist here and abroad, in developed nations and in those faraway third worlds. (Of course I’m being facetious: the third world today is a short journey from any spot on earth.)

But then again, women have come a long way. The world superpowers should focus on solving world hunger, violence in Africa, etc., correct? Yes, but not at the expense of women’s rights or education or anything else, because there are too many smart people and too many good people to make unnecessary compromises. Women, like gays, are continually subject to abuses of power, and I truly believe my generation (and our friends) can end that for good. Certainly others are subject to such abuses, but this is just one movie, alright? The point is it’s still an issue and people need to be reminded. It is our great fortune that Vitorrio de Sica and Sophia Loren created in Two Women a true work of art which serves that purpose, even if it’s not in the original Italian–it doesn’t need it, the acting is so good. Watch it, per favore!

Quotes for the People No. 6

“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.” — W. H. Auden, from The Dyer’s Hand (recommended reading).