Carrie Fountain and Poetry's Slow Burn [Texas Book Festival Interview]
Saturday, October 16
Texas State Capitol (1100 Congress Ave)
Capitol Extension Room E2.016, 12:30
[info]
Born and raised in Mesilla, New Mexico, Carrie Fountain knows a little (read: a lot) about the idiosyncrasies of life in the American Southwest. With the region's cultural, historical, and environmental hues forming the backdrop of her first book, Burn Lake (which was a winner of the prestigious National Poetry Series in 2009, mind you), she’s certainly a strong advocate for the relevance of place and narrative in contemporary poetry. While a visceral sense of location is ultimately central to Burn Lake, the poems within are never merely local: notions of adolescence, history’s configuration within the present, and the nature of experience at-large are all explored with equal dexterity.
Prior to her appearance in next Saturday’s “110 in the Shade: Writing about the Southwest” panel at the Texas Book Festival, we sat down in Carrie's east-Austin home to talk with her about some storied instructors she’s had, her affinities and attitudes as a writer, and the practical life of the teaching, post-MFA poet.
So you had Tony Hoagland as a teacher. What was that like?
I had him as an undergraduate. He was at New Mexico State University when I was there as an undergrad, and his first book, Sweet Ruin, had been published - it won the Brittingham prize. I didn’t really know much about contemporary American poetry at the time, and he was not anywhere near as well known as he is today. So, I think that I was really lucky. I think he was only at NMSU for a couple of years. He was really smart and obviously has a passion for poetry.
Speaking of Tony Hoagland, in a recent article in Poetry magazine, he identifies two distinct kinds of poetry: one of “dis-arrangement” -- poems that “aim to disrupt or rearrange consciousness,” as he puts it -- and another that sort of “clarifies” experience. This obviously amounts to dangerously diluting an amazing essay, but what’s your take on that as a poet?
I think that what makes it difficult to talk about those two intentions in poetry is that it’s not pure intention - you’re working with language, right? A lot of my poetry is narrative, and I think that a lot of the intention behind my poetry is a kind of attempt to understand my own experience with the world. Especially the experience of the unknown or the spiritual. So there’s that, but I think that what I really admire in my reading and what I aspire to as a very young poet - I still consider myself a beginning poet - is to really get at language that leaps gracefully and can tumble all around in the sentences. What I love about Tony Hoagland and Larry Levis as well is that way of putting together a sentence that unravels and unravels and can sort of modulate its own tempo through line break and syntax, putting clauses together - it blows my mind. I think that’s what turned me on as a beginning reader of poetry - I didn’t have the vocabulary to identify what it was, but I loved that. I loved following a sentence. I love getting lost in poems.
So it took you a while to write your first book—Burn Lake…
Yeah, some of the poems are from my thesis from graduate school [Note: Fountain attended the Michener Center for Writers from 2001-2004].
When you’re talking about unifying a body of work written over such a long period of time during such a formative stage - you said you still consider yourself a young poet - did you encounter any particular challenges with respect to unifying disparate voices? So, you know, the poet writing a poem in 2009 vs. the poet writing a poem in 2006…
Yeah, essentially what I did was every year - for like five years - I annoyed all of my friends by saying, “I’ve finally finished my book, it’s done, I’m not going back to it - here it is, read it and give me feedback on it.” Then I’d have really smart readers like my husband, a handful of poet friends… I’d have these friends read this and give me feedback and of course I’d go on writing. And so what I was revising and revising and revising was essentially taking out poems that seemed to not fit (for whatever reason) and sort of try to incorporate newer work…
Kind of "pruning" the book, yeah?
Yes, yes exactly. And then I got to a place with the book around August 2008 and gave it to Naomi Shihab Nye, who I sort of consider my poetry mentor - she’s a great reader - and I went down to San Antonio and was hoping beyond hope that she would say, “It’s done, it’s great.” She was very encouraging but she said, “This book needs to be about thirty pages longer.” Which is a lot of poetry…that’s a lot of work! Especially for a poet like me. I’m no Bob Hicok - I don’t see myself publishing another book of poetry for another few years. I won’t be publishing books of poetry every two years. So I was sort of heartbroken and she gave me some specific advice. She said she wanted to know more about the place where these poems were happening. I sort of said out loud in despair, “Oh my god, thirty pages, how long is that going to take me?” It was August, and she said, “Well, it will take you until Christmas.” And I was like…”You’re Naomi Shihab Nye, you’re writing a book of poetry under the table right now, I’m sure of it.” So I came back to Austin and I tried to do that. All of the poems about Don Juan de Oñate were written in that time period. That was what I kind of considered my attempt at unifying the collection. And I was done with the collection as it stands by October.
So, you’ve been teaching at St. Edwards - how does that affect your writing? Do you find any parallels between the crafts of teaching and writing?
Well, [teaching] gives me a lot less time for writing. I think that I’m a good teacher. I taught second grade before I went to graduate school. I like teaching - my mom’s a teacher, my mother-in-law is a teacher - I feel very much at home among teachers. But I don’t necessarily think that teaching and writing have anything to do with each other. That said, in planning for my content next semester, which, now that I have a baby, is like having two full-time jobs on top of the full time job I already have, I’m freaking out about my time and thinking about how I haven’t read anything. So my time is so limited that I started thinking that what I really want to get out of teaching and put into teaching is really what I want to read - I want to read with these students. They’re great readers - young poets are great readers once you convince them they actually need to read and that poetry is important to read and not just to write. So I think I’m going to focus in the future on the idea that reading and teaching are not two separate things I need to get done.
Right.
I also think writing and teaching can go hand in hand in a way. Teaching helps you clarify in your own mind and gives you language to what you do instinctively as a writer, so you have to parse out what your craft is and talk about it. Which is great - though the act of writing is unlike anything else. Nothing helps you with your writing aside from, like, living in the world.
It’s definitely a solitary thing…
Right. It’s an art that happens alone in a room. So that’s what I’m feeling about teaching. And I think my students will appreciate that. They want to be challenged… they want to read stuff that’s interesting.
Are you writing another book right now?
Mhm. Yeah.
How’s that going?
Well, it’s slow going with the baby and everything. It’s picking up. I feel like I’ve been doing a lot of thinking - which is good. Soon, the writing will come as well. I’m having faith in that. Every poet I know who has a baby who is a woman [says the same thing] - including Naomi Shihab Nye - who I consider to be the most prolific poet ever. She writes every morning diligently at like 5am. She said, “Oh, forget about it, it will be a few months before you’ll write. Just write down sentences and start from there.” But I am working on a second collection. There’s an organizing principle there. I’m sort of interested in further exploring ideas of… how to say it…I mean, any way you say it it sounds sort of terrible. Sort of ideas of the unknown made manifest in our own lives. Whoo! (laughs) I never want to use the world “spirituality,” but it keeps coming back.
It’s okay, you’re a poet…you can say that.
Yeah, right, I know, so I have some poetic license to use the word spirituality (laughs). So that book should be finished within the next seven to ten years (shared laughter). I want to be like Marie Howe. She publishes a really great book of poems every ten years. She blows me away.
