Interview with Paul Piper

I had the excellent opportunity to pick the brain of writer/teacher/librarian/and generally-just-nice-guy Paul Piper. Dogs and Other Poems, his fourth collection of poetry, celebrates the sweetness and humor of life’s mundane and often glum aspects. Told from the perspective of both man and dog—we rediscover the world from a new angle—the tip of a cold, wet nose.

Dogs and Other Poems is your fourth book of poetry…what inspired this collection? How long has the process of writing and publishing Dogs taken you? What distinguishes the poems in Dogs from the poems in previous collections?

These things are always mysteries to me, but I began writing poems after walking my dog each morning or evening, or things would come to me during the day. Pretty soon I had around fifty poems written from the point of view of my dog. I think about how different creatures perceive us humans a lot so this was an offshoot of that. These became the core of the book. Other poems accumulated, and after I had enough for a book I began sorting them and working with my editor Allen Frost. My books, other than my two initial chap books, have not been consistent with regard to theme or format; they are rather collections of work I’ve done during different time periods. The poems in Dogs took roughly 2 years to write, put together and publish.

For several weeks now, I’ve been focusing on the issue of getting into the “writer’s” head space. Do you find you have any rituals or methods for getting into the mood to write?

None. A lot of poems come to me when I’m out walking. I’ve been at this long enough that many poems come almost fully formed and don’t require a lot of fiddling. I have never been successful at “creating” or “regulating” or bringing into being the head space that shapes a poem. That’s part of the magic of it. Since I am not a “poet” per se, and write non-fiction as well as fiction, I’m not devastated if I don’t write poetry for months on end. I simply turn to another form of writing.

Do you find that certain content chooses a certain genre?

Well, I think certainly that is true. For me, poems are small packages, and they possess an inward and outward movement (for me). I know that’s not true of all poetry, since there are incredibly long, narrative poems (Beowulf, Merwin’s the Folded Cliffs, The Inferno). So if the idea/impulse/inspiration has a strong narrative arc I turn to fiction. Then it just becomes a matter of how long the arc seems to be, which determines whether it’s a short story or novel. Non-fiction is often just a subject (Wikipedia) that I want to learn more about, and I have several markets for this type of article. I am working on a book about Wikipedia however as well, exploring the way information is produced.

You say all of your poetry “is in some form, praise,”—is this also true of the fiction and non-fiction you write? Do you consider all poetry, anybody writes, a type of praise?

It’s really only true of a certain number of poems in that book (Dogs), so that was a bit of hyperbole.
Not at all. There are multitudes of poetry. Many are condemnations or written in anger. I think a lot about hubris these days, and I also think a lot about my influences. I am extremely grateful that I have been significantly moved and shaped by other voices. No artist is original. We are all an evolution of one voice.

I’d love it if you’d elaborate on who your influences are, and how hubris plays into that.

I’m not sure if (or how) hubris plays into my influences, except that I’m typically drawn to people who seem to have a generous spirit. My mind was wandering a bit there. I have tons of influences – the Black Mountain poets, the San Francisco and New York schools of poetry; Asian poetry, surrealism, language poetry, experimental and avant garde work. One area I haven’t investigated as much as I should is spoken word/slam.
If I can say something else about hubris, is that it seems to eclipse a sense of wonder that is important to me.

How about giving us a little insight into what you’re working on now…

I am primarily working on a novel entitled (tentatively) A Soul Loves Most What Is Lost. The title comes from C.E. Morgan’s amazing novel called All the Living. I’m not sure who she stole it from, but quite possibly the Bible. It’s about a Japanese American woman who is facing death by pancreatic cancer. She was raped in a WW Two internment camp, and is returning to those memories with the intention of confronting one of her rapists.
It’s tough going but I have around 80 pages thus far. It’s tough not only because of the subject matter, but also getting into a woman’s, and a Japanese woman at that, head and soul.

And is your process with this similar to poetry—letting the Muse inform you in the moment?

This varies depending on the day. Sometimes I’ll have a scene in my head that I want to write, and other times (like today) I’ll read back through the previous page or so and let the muse hold my hand. Sometimes we actually cover some ground.

Decay and Ruin a Writer's Companions

For some time now, I have been hypnotized by ruin.  I don't mean the moral ruin that I was always warned about in church, but the ruin that comes to everything as the result of time.  None of us is safe from decay.  

My first lesson in ruin came from the continual round of seasons in Montana.  The biting, frigid winters and the sometimes brutal summer sun baked and broke open anything that was left outside.  Wood weathered, paint peeled and the asphalt split and fissured.  Every year hard freezes pushed up a new crop of rocks into our garden.  The elements stripped and cracked the paint from the picket fence, turning the wood gray.  Potholes and crevices gaped open all the roads in town from the freeze-thaw-freeze of spring.

Ruined library books swollen with summer rain.  Rusted cars that I buried in the sand pile only to discover years later.  The small African frog who didn't last long as a pet, reduced to a perfect tiny milk-white skeleton three months after I exhumed its grave.

Growing up in a rural environment taught me that I too would one day be reduced to so many brittle bones in earth.

Perhaps this is one reason that the poetry of Richard Hugo appeals to me so strongly.  He wrote about a landscape in decline.  Boom towns became bust towns in a matter of years.  Hugo's poems speak not only of rural decay, but also of the slow decline of the inner life.  Hope slips away like so much snow melt in July.

I have spent the past two 4th of July holidays in Butte, Montana, perhaps one of the greatest examples of urban decay in the west.  Butte boasted a population over 100,000 people from more than 75 countries in 1910.  Now only 34,000 remain.  Butte, once the copper mining capital of the United States is more relic than the "richest hill on earth."  Nearly one dozen mining headframes dot the landscape.  Uptown Butte displays its former glory in brick, weathered wood and fading advertisements.  It is still standing, but just.

Ruin calls on me to mourn.  Decay resonates with some inner part of me that whispers, "All shall fall to time."  I admit that I am melancholy by nature, but urban ruin also elevates my vision.  My imagination rises to fill in the crumbling walls, empty windows and fades signs with new life.  

I begin to realize that as so many others have faded from these places, I will as well, but perhaps some writer or artist in the future will also wonder about me, in the same spaces--where I called to the past and it answered back.

In the Beginning

I remember how I became a writer.

It was a couple weeks into my first college level literature class, the topic of which was modernist poetry. I had been confounded by Ezra Pound's lines: "The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/ Petals on a wet, black bough." Why was there no explanation, no dramatic sweeping declaration of love and/or death? It was up to me, and only me to understand these scant 14 words--and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the intrigue.

Then there was William Carlos Williams and ee cummings (and MANY wonderful others). For the first time I was reading poetry that resonated with me as a human being. The mundane, the broken, the lustful, the anger and outrage, the grit and fists and dimension of the language--to me--it blew Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Poe out of the water (I like to envision it like a game of Battleship).

So after class, I went out to my car, found a scrap of paper and described something I had seen that day. Something simple but that I couldn't get out of my head. Of course, I had written other poems, diddies with ABAB rhyme schemes about a blue-eyed love--but I had never written an honest poem about something that existed in my reality.

I wish, for the sake of symbolism and nostalgia, I still had those lines, but like many other things I've written and forgotten, it was the act itself, not the product, that mattered.

Though I have read and loved many other writers since that time, the modernists will always be where it began for me--how I learned to relate to the world as a poem and write poetry that others relate to.

In parting, I'll leave you with my favorite WCW poem:

To Elsie

The pure products of America
go crazy--
mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure--

and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags-succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum-
which they cannot express--

Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder

that she'll be rescued by an
agent--
reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs--

some doctor's family, some Elsie--
voluptuous water
expressing with broken

brain the truth about us--
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

ben shahn

There's been a big debate happening on a few blogs right now about Ben Shahn, a Social Realist painter who gained notoriety as a fine artist in the 30s and as a commercial illustrator in the 60s. Some say Shahn spawned a generation of bad artists today that hide behind a history of faux naïve art, while others claim that they can certainly draw "good" if they want - but they choose this childlike effect because it interests them personally.

Personally, I'm a little torn. Certainly, anyone who says that Shahn was no artist and couldn't draw worth an ice cream sandwich must be unable to see the amazing deliberate way Shahn could use a simple line to express weight and motion.. and also has never tried to draw like Shahn themselves. Sorry, Soccer Mom, but there's a good chance that your kid couldn't draw that - because there's an entire life of proper fine arts training behind these "crude" appearing lines.

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However I do grow slightly weary of artists from every era calling the faux naïve card who pick up this style without much training or experience. Folk art might draw from the "uneducated" with no background in the arts - but while it can appear similar to this style it's not the same. But! An illustrator who has diligently worked on their craft and has landed in this style will always catch my eye over an illustrator based more in realism.

Personally I feel that one must really explore their relationship with art and work through many stylistic phases before moving into the simplistic. It's a style that I would love to be able to claim someday, but I know I'm still working on it.

I'm still kind of torn on the whole subject, though! It's a pretty tricky one - what do you guys think?

my own little blatant Shahn rip-off from a few years ago, a portrait of Marlon Brando from "On the Waterfront".