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An Interview with Author and Poet Jeanne Shannon, Part 2

Readers of Jeanne Shannon’s work find her “vitally rich and engaging” poetry to be imaginative, captivating, and meticulously crafted. Her articles, poems, memoir pieces, and short fiction have appeared in numerous publications. Summoning (Mercury HeartLink, 2015) is her newest book of collected poems. You can find Jeanne on her Amazon author page.


Summoning2

What inspired you to create Summoning?
I wanted to publish a “collected poems.” The poems in this book have been published in journals and in my chapbooks over the course of decades, and I wanted to gather them into one volume. But it turns out that this is just “Volume One” of my collected works, for I have enough poems for another book the size of Summoning that I hope to publish in a year or two.

How did you choose the poems/prose to include in this book?
I divided the book into sections organized around themes that I most often write about, such as the natural world (“Honey Locust”) and memories of childhood and meditations on mortality (“Summoning”), and chose poems that would fit into those themes. I tried to include only the poems that I consider to be my best work. No pieces were written specifically for this book. I wrote a first draft of one of the poems as long ago as 1955, and the rest of the poems date from the early 1980’s to around 2010.

What was the most rewarding aspect of putting Summoning together?
Knowing that I had complete control over the content of the book—it would be exactly what I wanted to give to the world. Because it was self-published, there would be no editor or other person trying to put their imprint on my work by telling me what to include or what to leave out or what to change. I take full responsibility for whatever shortcomings the collection may have.

Should a reader have to work to understand a poem?
No. Reading poetry should be a pleasure, not a classroom exercise in which a hard-and-fast meaning has to be identified. I think the idea of having to figure out what a poem means has caused many people to avoid reading poetry. Poetry can have its own logic, which doesn’t always match ordinary, “logical” logic. Archibald MacLeish said it best, “A poem should not mean, but be.” Learning to read differently—to listen for the music of the language, for example, as I did in the case of T.S. Eliot (see part one of the interview)—will free the reader from the notion that we always have to know exactly what the poet had in mind in writing the poem. As Eliot himself said, “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

What do poorly written poems have in common?
That’s a big subject, but I think that too much focus on the ego of the poet is a common failing. Too many first-person pronouns. That is, instead of focusing on the subject of the poem (the view from the top of a mountain, for instance) the focus is often on the “I” of the poem. The spotlight is on the poet—“Look at me, how perceptive I am to see what I’m seeing down below”—rather than on the scene itself.

Another common failing is what Steve Kowit calls “sentimentality and emotional slither.” That is, vague and generic declarations of emotions without providing scenes and concrete images that convey those emotions that let the reader experience the emotions rather than simply hearing a boring recitation of what the emotions are.

Then there’s the dull prose that’s broken into lines to look like poetry. Dull prose is still dull prose, no matter what it looks like on the page. And there are gimmicks to make the poem look more interesting than it is; centering every line is one example. Occasionally that can be effective, but it can easily be overdone and call too much attention to itself.

What do well-written poems have in common?
♦ Charged, compressed language: words selected for conciseness and clarity and for their emotive quality.
♦ Musical elements such as rhyme (if it is used well and not just cobbled together for the sake of rhyming), meter and repetition.
♦ Intensity of detail (concrete rather than abstract).
♦ Simile, metaphor, and sometimes symbolism.
♦ Vivid and fresh imagery (images that appeal to the senses—all or most of the senses, not just the visual).
♦ Euphony—a pleasing combination of words. Poets must think about how they want something to sound as well as the thought they want to convey.
♦ Effective use of line breaks and stanza breaks.
♦ If it is a narrative poem, attention to the narrative arc and the scenes just as in fiction.

Poetry may well be the art of the unsayable. Poet Marie Howe defines poetry as “a cup of language to hold what can’t be said.” The best poetry is “the language beneath the language.” Any poem that can be completely paraphrased is not a poem, but simply versified or emotive prose.

Readers who want to learn more about what makes a poem work or fail to work can find few better sources of information than Steve Kowit’s In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop (Tilbury House Publishers, 1995).

In part one of the interview you told us about your favorite poets. Who are your favorite fiction authors, and what do you admire most about their writing?
Paula McLain (The Paris Wife and Circling the Sun) comes to mind, because her prose is often vivid and lyrical and she tells compelling stories. Lydia Davis for, among other things, her flash fiction that is like nobody else’s. (She has been characterized as “one of the most original minds in American fiction today.”) Carole Maso for her unique novels and her willingness to “break every rule.” Kate Braverman, especially for her novel Palm Latitudes that seems like a long poem in prose. Ron Hansen for Mariette in Ecstasy. James Salter for A Sport and a Pastime and everything else by him that I’ve read. Truman Capote for Other Voices, Other Rooms and some of his short stories. F. Scott Fitzgerald for The Great Gatsby. Lee Smith, especially for her novel Fair and Tender Ladies. She writes about the South where she and I grew up (about fifty miles from each other), and is the author I most want to emulate when writing fiction set in the Appalachian South. And always, always, Eudora Welty, especially for The Golden Apples. What all these authors have in common is language that burns with intensity and is perfect for its purpose.

What are you working on now?
Short fiction (I recently finished one short story and am working on another one) and a novel that is a blend of memoir and fiction.

For the first part of this interview, go to An Interview with Author and Poet Jeanne Shannon, Part 1.


KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. She has a new speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.




An Interview with Author and Poet Jeanne Shannon, Part 1

Readers of Jeanne Shannon’s work find her “vitally rich and engaging” poetry to be imaginative, captivating, and meticulously crafted. Her articles, poems, memoir pieces, and short fiction have appeared in numerous publications. Summoning (Mercury HeartLink, 2015) is her newest book of collected poems. You can find Jeanne on her Amazon author page.


Summoning2How do you describe Summoning?
Summoning is a collection of poems and hybrid works—that is, pieces that blur the boundary between prose and poetry. Historically, poetry has been thought of as a rigid structure to hold the movement of the poet’s mind. At the very least it had to be broken into rather short lines and “look like a poem.” But that has changed with the acceptance of the prose poem and the lyric essay into the poetry family, and I am drawn to writing in those forms.

What do you hope readers will take away from it?
I hope readers will experience some of the poems as paintings in words, and just enjoy the language—the way the words “bounce off each other”—and the imagery. That they will be reminded to pay more attention to the natural world, particularly the plant life, that is all around them. That they will feel free to attach their own meaning or significance to the poems that may not seem particularly accessible. I hope readers who also write poetry will feel more liberated from conventional ideas about what a poem must be, and will be inspired to experiment with different ways of shaping their creative expression.

What unique challenges did this work pose for you?
It was difficult to decide where in the book to put certain poems that seemed to fit into more than one theme. And I had a few other poems that didn’t seem to be appropriate for any of the sections, so I put them aside for a future collection.

Do you remember what inspired you to write your first poem?
What inspired me was reading poems in two books my family owned. One was a collection of classic poems, One Hundred and One Famous Poems. The other (which I preferred) was The Lyric South, a 1924 anthology of poems by Southern poets that my mother had studied in college in Virginia where she and I grew up. The first poem I wrote was about “the people sleeping” in the graves in Bruton Parish Churchyard in Williamsburg, Virginia, where I had never been. It was inspired by a poem on the same theme in The Lyric South. I promptly copied it out on lined Blue Horse notebook paper and sent it to Grit newspaper without a self-addressed stamped envelope. Needless to say I got no reply. That was around the time of my eleventh birthday. By then I knew that writing was what I was going to do. Maybe I knew that even earlier, at age six or seven, when I wrote the life stories of the animals on our farm. When I was twelve I read Gone with the Wind and wanted to write a novel, but since I couldn’t think of a plot I decided to stick with poetry.

How important is accessibility of meaning?
Not very. At least not for me. For example, I did not major in English in college (chose music and French instead), so I never studied the “difficult” poems of T. S. Eliot such as The Waste Land and Four Quartets, but when I read them years later I was spellbound by the language, and I didn’t care what Eliot meant. In recent years I’ve taken classes on Eliot’s work and when the instructor assured us that such-and-such was what Eliot meant, I thought, “That’s plausible, but I still don’t care. It’s Eliot’s magnificent language that matters.” And I once read a remark attributed to Eliot to the effect that too much significance was being attached to what he is supposed to have intended when he wrote The Waste Land.

Who are your favorite poets, and what do you admire most about their writing?
Charles Wright is my favorite poet. He writes like nobody else. His poems have a sweet-and-sour melody, a jagged elegance. They jump-cut and loop back. His images are like no other poet’s—not only the images themselves, but also the way he juxtaposes and layers them. And I feel a kinship with him because much of his work has echoes of the upper South. He grew up in eastern Tennessee, not far from where I grew up in southwestern Virginia.

Other favorite poets include Ronald Johnson, Denise Levertov, Jane Kenyon, Robert Hass, and Mark Strand. I am also drawn to the highly individualistic poetry of C.D. Wright and I was saddened by her recent death. She was not a member of any of the postmodern schools of poetry such as the Language poets,* but her work is not easily accessible. She was from Arkansas, and had a lot of that mountain-woman “rules be damned, I’ll do what I want to do” attitude—which I certainly have as well.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know?
Readers of Summoning will notice many references to science and to spirituality. I believe that the two are related, and that quantum physics can point toward the way that connection works. I read books about quantum physics and spirituality, as my biography on Amazon says. I probably started with Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe. Then I read Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, the 1975 book that brought the mystical implications of subatomic physics to popular consciousness for the first time. More recently I have read, for example, Amit Goswami’s The Physics of the Soul and T. L. Baumann’s God at the Speed of Light: The Melding of Science and Spirituality.

*Language poetry, dismissed by some as “gibberish,” was a movement that appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It emphasized the reader’s role in bringing significance out of a work and was at pains to avoid indicating any “meaning.” It saw the poem as a construction in and of language itself. Expression of emotion, use of musical language, and letting the poem “tell a story” were not permitted. While the movement itself is somewhat passé now, it opened the door for other kinds of experiments in poetry.

For the second part of this interview, go to An Interview with Author and Poet Jeanne Shannon, Part 2.


KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. She has a new speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.




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