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It’s the ordinary things that make up poetry.

Angela Decker grew up in Fresno, California, and received a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a master’s degree in English from Notre Dame de Namur University. Her poems have appeared in The Jefferson Monthly, Comstock Review, Hip Mama, Carquinez Poetry Review, Red Rock Review, Sand Hill Review, The Wisconsin Review and Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California poets. She taught writing and literature at the College of San Mateo and Notre Dame de Namur University. She is the mother of two energetic and talented boys, a freelance writer, and a columnist for Ashland Daily Tiding.

EB: What does it mean to you to be a poet?

AD: I think being a poet means looking at the world, at every day life, from a different perspective. To take something like an apple on the table, and connect it to the hands of the farmer who planted the tree, or the pie that makes you remember your Aunt Hattie. There is so much beauty in day-to-day life and in people. I like my poems to reflect my own sense of wonder at that everyday beauty. That doesn’t mean that there are not a lot of serious issues for poets to address, but we can do both. For me, it’s ordinary things that make up poetry, that inspire it, the stuff you are doing when you aren’t writing: raising kids, riding a bike, burning dinner, whatever.

EB: How has being a poet affected your feelings about language?

AD: I like this question. I don’t think I can answer it well, but I like it. Poetry’s job is to sort of maximize all aspects of language whether figurative or literal. I think since I’ve been writing poetry I am more sensitive to the nuances of language. Or as I write this now, I may write poetry because I am sensitive to the nuances of language, to all one can do with it. I love being around people who speak multiple languages. I think it’s a gift to be able to express yourself in more than one way. I’m not fluent in another language, but I can express things in poetry that I can’t always express in general conversation.

EB: When did you first begin writing poetry?

AD: My parents were big readers, mostly fiction but there was poetry around the house too. Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes. When I was maybe 8 or 9 I started writing poems and leaving them around the house for my mom and dad. They were usually funny or silly. My mom says a lot of them rhymed with “butt,” or complained about dinner. At that age no one is self-conscious about their writing, so I just had fun. I think I lost interest around high school when all the poems seemed sort of heady and out of my reach. It wasn’t until my late twenties that I rediscovered poetry. Just for kicks, I took a creative writing class at a community college in the Bay Area and the teacher really emphasized poetry. We shared our poems, talked about them, some of us joined a writing workshop group. Suddenly poetry was a big part of my life. We picked places to submit poems, published our poems, had readings, all that fun poet stuff. That workshop group was great and supportive and the people in it (including local poets Amy Miller and Amy MacLennan) became lifelong friends.

EB: How do you write?–At a desk? Walking around? Filled with coffee?

AD: I write in total chaos. I have two peppy little boys, too many pets, a husband who likes power tools and an erratic freelance writing schedule. It is never quiet. Sometimes there’s coffee, sometimes there’s Cabernet. I write a lot of poems while I’m cooking dinner (which now that I think about it, may be why I have a lot of food images) and the kids are playing or watching a movie. I’ve written a couple while driving (only at the stoplights) but even then, the kids are in the car and NPR is on. There are a lot of first drafts written on scratch paper or napkins, in pencil or lipstick. I don’t always have pencils, but I always have lipstick. I can’t remember the last time I sat at a desk and wrote in silence. If I’m lucky enough to be all alone in silence I don’t want to busy myself with a poem, I just want to sit and enjoy the quiet.

EB: Who are your poetic influences and heroes?

AD: Wow, there are loads. I love big, gorgeous images in poems, so Elizabeth Bishop, Ezra Pound, folks who can distill something complicated and emotional in one quick image. Mark Doty does this as well. I’m a big fan of his work. I heard him read “A Display of Mackerel” years ago and I was just slack-jawed with amazement. Yusef Komunyakaa, too. Simple language that just punches you in the gut. Anyone with big, juicy images. My first two poetic heroes, the poets whose books I bought and bought were Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton. I think Brooks is famous for saying poetry is life distilled. That’s what she and Clifton do. They take moments in life, gorgeous or painful or both, and they distill it to something universal. I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve read Lucille Clifton’s “Terrible Stories” They are heart breaking and inspiring. Simply beautiful. I also get a lot of inspiration from science-focused books and magazines. I am the least scientific person around, but the language of science is so unfamiliar and exciting. Years ago, I had a job abstracting science textbooks and magazines. I learned all sorts of fabulous things about dragonflies and meteors and time travel. They were great seeds for poems. My sons love science, so I’ve been reading more about bugs and slime.

EB: What are you writing at the moment?

AD: I want so desperately to say that I am writing some groundbreaking poem series or a thrilling spy novel, but mostly I am writing reviews and columns for the local newspapers, and a travel article for a regional magazine. I have started several times to compile a poetry chapbook, and might actually get around to finishing it.

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“Isn’t thwack an amazing word? Isn’t that gorgeous?”

Amy MacLennan grew up south of San Francisco, and received a Master of Arts in English from Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California.

Her chapbook The Fragile Day was published by Spire Press in 2011, and her new chapbook Weathering is forthcoming from Uttered Chaos Press this year. Her poems can also be found in the collections Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems (Ragged Sky Press, 2009), Not a Muse: The Inner Lives of Women (Haven Books, 2009), Blue Arc West (Tebot Bach, 2006), and So Luminous the Wildflowers (Tebot Bach, 2003).

She has also published in the Broadsided Press, Cimarron Review, Cloudbank, Connotation Press, Folio, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Linebreak, Naugatuck River Review, New Plains Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Pearl Magazine, qarrtsiluni, Rattle, River Styx, South Dakota Review, Windfall A Journal of Poetry of Place, and the Wisconsin Review, and has taught poetry workshops through the Sequoia Adult School, the Oregon State Poetry Association and at the Northwest Poet’s Concord.

Her article “Social Networking and Poetry Publishing” appeared in the 2011 Poet’s Market and she is the Managing Editor of The Cortland Review. By day, she is a marketing consultant for the Southern Oregon Media Group.

EB: What does it mean to be a poet?

AM:I suppose I could reference, “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” from William Carlos Williams. I guess I could go for something loftier. It’s just that poetry doesn’t matter for greater things necessarily. Poetry matters because it is a way to express deeper emotions. Everyday emotions. Political emotions. Love emotions. Fear emotions. Poetry worms its way into our mind through language and imagery and that unexpected last line of a poem that throws us way off course. Poetry will never be facebook. Poetry will never be Twitter. It’s just the sound of words and mouthing those sounds and crisp images that take us very directly into a new place that hits us hard. Nothing is better than that.

EB: How has being a poet affected your feelings about language?

AM: I’m kind of the opposite. My feelings about language affected my feelings about poetry. For almost of all of my life, I’ve been one of those slightly crazy people that hear a special word and want to talk about it. Like the word “thwack.” Or “rasp.” I’ll sit in front of you and speak the word again and again. I’ll literally say, “Isn’t thwack an amazing word? Isn’t that gorgeous? Thwack. Thwack. Come on. Say it with me. Thwack. Doesn’t that feel great coming out of your mouth?”

EB: When did you first begin writing poetry?

AM: I only started when I was 32. That’s kind of late to find a new creative passion. I originally wanted to write fiction. When I took a community college course that presented fiction AND poetry, I quickly changed my mind. Of course, the poems I first wrote were awful. Um, yeah, no, worse than awful. Terrible. Really, really, trite, cliched stuff. It hit me so hard, though, that I couldn’t let go. I promised myself that I would keep writing until my work wasn’t godawful.

EB: How do you write?

AM: In bed. On a weekend morning. Generally before 8:00a. Before I’m really awake. I try to trick my objective/linear/controlling mind into thinking that I’m kind of taking a nap. In my half-awake place, my subjective/random/creative mind can take over without much of a fuss. My handwritten drafts are a complete mess, but I think I’m getting to the more interesting part of my mind.

EB: Who are your poetic influences? Who are your poetic heroes?

AM: Influences: Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams
Heroes: Thomas Lux, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Jane Hirshfield, Dorianne Laux, Paulann Petersen.

EB: What are you writing at the moment?

AM: I am stuck in the place where poem influences come from any conflict in my life that scratches at the back of my mind on a Saturday morning. Or a weekday morning. Or every morning.

EB: What books of poetry should everyone read?

AM: I’m kind of sandbagging on this question. I think anyone interested in poetry should read *anything* that contains poetry. If you like the sound of someone’s poetic voice, then go ahead and buy that poet’s collected work. Or their first collection/chapbook. Or anything you can find online. Or look at some literary magazines that publish work that matches what you love. Just read.

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“With poetry, I’m always trying to make sense of the world.”

Amy Miller is a Publications Project Manager at Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the author of eight poetry and nonfiction chapbooks, including Tea Before Questions(2010) and Beautiful/Brutal(2009). She won the Cloudbank Poetry contest, the Whiskey Island Poetry Prize, and the 2010 Cultural Center of Cape Cod National Poetry Competition. She has also taught workshops on writing and publishing for the Jack London Writers’ Conference, Oregon State Poetry Association, California Writers’ Club, and San Francisco State University, and was a co-founder of the Piccolo Poetry Series, the largest poetry open mike on the San Francisco Peninsula.

You can read some of her work at Poets & Writers and Oregon Poetic Voices.

EB: What does it mean to you to be a poet? (What is the poet’s goal? Why do you think poetry matters?)

AM: I suppose poets are like any artists; there’s a certain mystery about why we do what we do. With poetry, I’m always trying to make sense of the world. And for me, making sense begins with patterns. That may come from the fact that I grew up around a lot of music and visual arts. Poetry has become a natural outlet for expressing ideas in language that repeats and rings and has rhythms and patterns of its own. And I can’t speak for all poets, but my goal is to try to turn myself on my ear—to make myself look at something differently than I might have otherwise. And then, if I can turn the reader on his or her ear, all the better. With that in mind, I think poetry matters very much, as much as music, as much as fiction. If a reader remembers a few lines of a poem while she’s standing over the sink doing dishes, then it calls up a creative force in her as well, an expansion, maybe, of what she thought was possible—I can say this differently, I can look at this differently. Poetry is an active art; the person reading the poem brings his or her own life and experiences into the transaction, and the transaction doesn’t stop when the poem is consumed, because it’s never consumed but instead takes root in the reader and grows into something else, something unique. That’s a powerful, organic process.

EB: How has being a poet affected your feelings about language?

AM: I tend to think about concepts in terms of metaphor. It’s a chicken-or-egg thing (also a metaphor!); I don’t know if I naturally gravitated toward poetry because I use metaphor a lot in everyday life, or if I use metaphor because that’s the way my brain’s been trained by poetry. But I often have trouble grasping a concept in everyday life until I can find a metaphoric way of thinking of it—oh, okay, this work project is like a train; people get on and off at these various stations, and other tracks meet up with it here and here. Often, processes and procedures are meaningless until I can explain them in terms of something else. This goes back again to making sense of things by finding patterns. And humor is often expressed in simile; a lot of good jokes come from simile, because absurdity is fun—It’s like [this other thing completely unrelated].

EB: When did you first begin writing poetry (and why?).

AM: I started writing poetry when I was 12 or 13. I remember being very taken with e.e. cummings; we must have been reading him in school. I used small i’s and wrote in fragments on drawing paper, usually at a slant so I wasn’t a slave to the line. I wrote about horses and boys and war and the usual preteen angst. I also drew a lot back then, in charcoal and pen-and-ink; I always planned to be a visual artist. The two arts had a similar feeling—that splash on the blank page, the brain taking the chaos of creation and balancing it into some sort of order. I got away from that cummings fragmentation for a long time, but recently I’ve been going back to it, and it’s very freeing.

EB: How do you write? (At a desk? Walking around? Filled with coffee?)

AM: I usually write poetry in my favorite chair in the living room, or in bed in the middle of the night. I almost never write poetry at a desk, and I always write it longhand. A computer keyboard is too speedy for poetry; I’m used to that delay between the thought and the word getting written down, which serves as a sort of first edit. I try not to have too many rituals about writing—coffee, etc.—because I get bored with routine. But I am superstitious about pens; some seem to have better poems in them than others, and most of my favorite pens are cheap ones from hotels.

Most of my best poems, the ones that I thought really took a creative leap, were written at 3 or 4 in the morning. I usually wake up during the night, and that’s a fruitful time to write, when the barrier between waking and dreams is thin. For a poet, the subconscious is an invaluable ally; it’s got all the best ideas.

Writing poetry is a very different process from writing prose. I can say, “I’m going to sit down today and write an essay about how it feels to quit a job.” And then I’ll sit down and do it. But I can’t say that I’m going to sit down and write a poem about it; if I try to, nine times out of ten, I’ll end up writing about something else, or I’ll just end up writing crap. Thomas Hardy said something about how poetry is a seedling you find in the morning, meaning that part of it simply has to come to you, and you don’t have a lot of control over that.

EB: Who are your poetic influences? Who are your poetic heroes?

AM: I already mentioned e.e. cummings—a big influence early on. My favorite poet is Anne Sexton. I went to high school in Massachusetts, and she was a Mass. poet and had died just a year or two earlier; she was a favorite of my poetry teacher and we read her all the time. Anne was a master of taking words that had never seen each other before and putting them together to make a surprising new phrase, like “the swan-whipped Thoroughbred.” She also wrote often in rhyme, but she used enjambment (ending lines where you wouldn’t naturally pause) so effectively that sometimes you don’t realize that the poem rhymes. There’s a certain free association to her writing—as if she pulled words at random out of the air and made them work in the context of the poem. Her writing is full of surprises.

Louise Gluck is also a big influence. One of her hallmarks, in my mind, is the ability to start a poem out in a particular direction in the title or first line, and then immediately veer off someplace else, someplace you were not expecting to go. She also has a blend of elegance and harsh cynicism that I like; she keeps the reader off balance. She lures you in, and then—the knife.

I was also influenced very much by Dylan Thomas. He had that free-association thing going on too, those wild turns of phrase that were like a well-trained horse jumping the pasture fence. And one of my professors at San Francisco State, Truong Tran, turned me in a new direction. He was always urging me to look at white space, to use the space available and give it meaning. He works in all these unusual forms—a single line that makes up an entire book (one line per page), skinny poems, prose poems. I also read a lot of John Witte, a Eugene poet who works in unusual forms too, tercets and intricately shaped poems. I’m also highly influenced by literate songwriters like Richard Thompson and Neko Case.