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q & a

robyn art

The poem-as-series mode seems to be the one in which I'm most inclined to work these days. I don't really come to the poems with the initial thought or plan that they'll end up forming part of the series; rather, it seems to turn out that way because I end up having more to say and I want to explore something further, without the confines of the single poem structure. I really like having all that open space and possibility in which to work something through, the open-endedness of the series form as a whole. So, yes, one poem definitely leads to another in that each begins out of one particular impulse, and where it goes from there, I just never know.

Regarding typography, for me that always involves a sort of intuitive, spontaneous proccess; I always write poems out longhand first, and I find more often than not that I'm putting in the line/stanza breaks and envisioning the typeface (regular, italics, etc.) as I go along, but not in a conscious manner. Sometimes a piece will feel like definite italics material if it seems to require a hushed/contemplative or otherwise variant tone; I work a lot with what I call "lateral narratives," defined loosely as pieces held together by a similar thread, but which come at that unifying impulse/idea from different places in terms of voice, tone, perspective, etc. I like longer lines for some of the super-saturated, image-heavy, litany-and-list poems because this line form closely parallels what I think those poems themselves are trying to do: that is, present a window into the very "experience of experience," as John Ashbery would say, in all of its overlapping and sensory-overload manifestations.

When I start writing in the voice of a character, it's very liberating in that I can kind of lose any self-consciousness I might have about constructing fictional people, events, places, etc. Actually, I think writing this way satisfies in part my unfulfilled desires as a failed writer of fiction; i.e., I have no talent whatsoever in that genre, but these voice narratives give me the chance to construct a character without having to be responsible for plot, cohesion, or any of the other things fiction writers have to deal with. I've always been drawn to different regional dialects and incarnations of the vernacular, so being able to construct a character based around patterns of speech is continually an engaging experience for me.