Interviewed by Jerry Wheeler
- bryanborland
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
I am super grateful to Jerry Wheeler at Out in Print for this interview!
Check out the full interview here.
Here's a taste:
OiP: I’m always interested in writers’ processes. How do you begin a poem? Does it start with a line, an incident, a feeling? Is it purposeful? I mean, do you sit down and say “I’m going to write a poem about that,” or does it just happen? And how can you ensure sparks fly?
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BB: Poetry is invigorating to me. Poetry changes the way I see the world. It changes the air in the room. The poems I love the most are the ones I sit down and write in one shot, with only light editing. When this happens, I am lucky enough to get into the flow of things and grab that energy and put it on the page. The poems that I really have to work at, I can be very proud of in a different way, but often there’s not that spiritual connection to them in the way I feel connected to those spontaneous poems. I need to turn down the noise to make sure the “sparks fly.” Anything compulsive has to go, habits that pull me from the present moment. I need to have the noise down so I can hear that static and translate it into something on the page. I am a big believer in a collective creative consciousness. I think we all can access it. It’s this creative energy full of ideas and fire, and all we have to do is figure out how to put our hands up and capture some of that. If you have an idea and don’t do anything with it, that idea is going to end up somewhere else, in some other artist’s hands. Sometimes that happens anyway. That’s why you see two movies come out with the same premise around the same time, or two novels, etc. There’s something to it. I almost understand. Almost.
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