Terry Wright - Interview by Robbie Brown

The American Artists Gallery Interview 3/27/12

with Terry Wright...

...on poetic structure, the complexity of inspiration, and how to uncork the creative juices.

by Robbie Brown, Senior Editor - The American Artists Gallery

Up to this point, The American Artists Gallery Interview has sought to add words to the works of visual artists, and when a picture says a thousand words the beauty is easy to transcribe. The art of the written word is not as black and white or as plain as the nose on your face. It’s full of subtext, subtle allusion and illusion, and like rightys and leftys, artists who use a canvas and a brush and those who use an eight and a half by eleven sheet and a typewriter will always look at each other with a sideways glace and at those who can tackle both in wonderment.

I’ve known Terry Wright for a number of years, and when I first met her, she was on her way to spend a month at an artist’s colony. Her personal and emotionally charged poetry reflects life, but most significantly the life of an artist. Some of her poems address it head on, but even when it isn’t mentioned directly the subtext of a life of artistic passion very often comes through.

This understanding of the way an artist views life makes Terry the perfect subject of the first AAG interview to feature a poet, and I talked with her about her creative process, and how she seeks growth as an artist.

Robbie Brown: One of the difficult aspects to creating is striving for excellence and learning to let go of perfectionism. At what point do you decide to keep working or that the project is complete?

Terry Wright: It’s different for every poem. Some poems I keep going back and changing a line break or a word choice for years, really. Some poems, especially the handful that just seem to fall out of my head and onto the page, just feel…complete. I let them stand and just back away from the page. And there are a few where I seek out help—ask a few other writers what they think of where I am in the poem. Surprisingly, a lot of the times when I feel stuck, when I’m trying and trying to “fix” it, they will tell me they like the way it is. And then I just have to trust the reader’s experience and walk away.

RB: When I have a creative block I…

TW: The short and terrible answer is drink some wine. Sometimes you just need that (I guess, artificial) help over that obstacle. A better answer is that in the last year I’ve been doing writing exercises with a good friend and having something concrete to work on really removes roadblocks. Which seems counter-intuitive, in a way:  if I have a specific prompt with specific restrictions, it might seem like that should end up compounding the creative block. But having a specific prompt and/or specific restrictions is a way of going around the block.

RB: What do you think is the biggest hindrance to creativity?

TW: Oh, self-doubt, for sure. Just endless questioning:  is this good? Is this terrible? Why am I doing this when there are so many better writers out there? And maybe that pressure to show some kind of progress, in subject, technique, or some kind of external, tangible result:  praise, reaction, publication, awards.

RB: What do you feel is the responsibility or role of the artist in the world?

TW: Wow, that is a tough question to answer. Because in some ways I do agree with the idea that the artist has to speak up, engage with the world, reflect the world, connect people—like the poets against the war movement back in the early days of the Iraq war—the artist is in a position to bring people together and not feel so alone. But more selfishly, I think this issue relates to the previous question, really. I mean, isn’t that an added burden, in a way? To feel like you have to have some kind of impact or responsibility? I just want to write poems and have them read and make readers experience something. Maybe that’s the only responsibility or role of the artist in the world:  communication. So that the artist maybe doesn’t feel so alone, and a reader doesn’t feel so alone, even if the initial aim of the poem is something different than the reader experiences—who cares? It’s enough that I feel I’m being heard and the reader doesn’t feel so alone. 

RB: What has influenced your work the most?

TW: Well, I’m not sure if you mean influenced in the sense of, what artists have affected my work, or, what has been the genesis or motivator behind my work. Because if it’s the latter, I have often worked out of straight-up fury. Something has made me mind-boggling furious and so I sit down and work that out in writing, one way or another. Some people think I’m joking or being facile when I say that, but, it’s real. But also I hate to say that, as honest as it is, because I’m TOTALLY AGAINST people who slap fragmented thoughts together about a personal event or strong emotion and say “there, I wrote a poem about it”. Franz Wright has this great line where he says that poetry is not therapy. And I wholeheartedly agree with that. Like any other art, it’s a craft. There are, not rules, exactly, but there are things you do as a craftsperson. So I might slap some phrases or images down out of pure fury, but then I have to also be an artist about it, and shape it and work it and bring all those tools and conventions and rules of poetry writing to the initial pile of emotion and make it something worthy. As far as writers who have influenced my work…I think as a very broad rule I tend to really be influenced by writers who move back and forth between poetry and prose, like Raymond Carver, or Margaret Atwood, or even Anne Carson. Generally poets who write what I call accessible pieces (although I wouldn’t say that of Carson—she’s really tricky). There is of course a whole school of poets who write completely abstractly, or who write with a million allusions per line, or who work solely as “language” poets—they’re manipulating language as an art form. I don’t get into that at all as a writer, which I guess is influenced about what I said earlier that the role of an artist is connection, or communication. But I admire it, of course. Just…from a distance. 

RB: The world would be better if…

TW: Artists were subsidized so they can work on their art. If artists were valued in American society instead of ridiculed. 

RB: What are you reading?

TW: Ha, that’s a very interesting question. I’m a voracious reader, normally. I mean, usually reading at least two books at once, and just reading piles and piles and piles. In the last few years I’ve totally moved into reading almost solely nonfiction. I’m embarrassed to say I don’t read as widely as I should in poetry. I think most poets would think that’s ATROCIOUS and would mark me as a total amateur and I’d shamefacedly agree. For me, it just ends up being—well, first, inspiring, when you find a writer that really speaks to you, who really inspires you, moves you—but then on one level I worry that I’ll just become imitative, but really, I just find it depressing:  I’ll never be as good as THAT poet, SO WHY BOTHER WRITING. And really there’s just the realization that to be a published poet is full-time job and it makes me feel terribly lazy and unaccomplished. Most poets I know read almost solely poetry so I’m totally an aberration. At the end of last year I went through this huge personal trauma and I literally stopped reading altogether, which for me is also a total aberration. I just couldn’t focus on any sustained writing at ALL. I mean, I REALLY stopped reading, totally. It was like suddenly going blind or suddenly being paralyzed, in a way. In the last few weeks I’ve finally started reading actual books again and I almost wept the first time (in months and months) I read an entire book through. It was like coming back to life again.

RB: What are some things that inspire you outside of art?

TW: Wow, strangely, my completely instinctual answer was “nothing”. Is that weird!? That seems so cynical or depressive! I mean, other art (I mean, other than writing) inspires me. I’m totally into looking at photography, especially what I guess might be called documentary-style photography; just thinking this over I think that reflects the kind of writing I prefer to both read and write. Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by “inspires me”. As an artist I’d have to say other artforms is what inspires me—I’ll hear a line of dialogue from a movie or see a still image and start a poem in my head. If you mean, what inspires me as a human being, that’s a completely different question and I’d have a totally different answer. Which I guess brings up an interesting question—should an artist be inspired in such different ways..? Maybe I am an amateur, then. I would think a “real” artist is inspired as both an artist and a human being because those things are inseparable for them, but for me, who I am as a human being living a daily life in the “real” world is different from who I am as an artist, which is some kind of really private thing.  Huh.

RB: When you mentioned “pillories” in your poem “Storybook Land” (shown at the end of this interview), and I wondered why you didn’t use the word “stocks”. Then later in the poem you use the word “stocks”. Is there a difference?

TW: Honestly, that’s a total typo. I meant to change all the stocks to pillories! And I didn’t. Maybe that was subconscious rebellion, because I was actually really angry when it was pointed out to me that what I was talking about (this poem was based on a photograph, and the item I was talking about was, exactly, pillories—and I felt this nagging sense of purity, or as you said earlier, perfectionism!—I have to be accurate because the physical images in another poem related to this one are totally dependent on specifically what a pillory forces the victim to do) was pillories, simply because that affects the rhythm of the lines. So I’m really bummed that I HAVE to say pillories. I mean, that internal rhyme between “locked” and “stocks” is way better than “locked” and “pillories”!

RB: The structure of “Lament” (posted in the American Artists Gallery group on Facebook) is a departure for you.

TW: Yes, a total departure. I really write what I used to call narrative poems. David Orr wrote a book about contemporary poetry titled Beautiful and Pointless, which I think is a great title AND a great comment about writing poetry! Beautiful and…pointless. Anyway, if I understood him correctly, I write what he calls “lyrical” poems. There is a structure—line breaks and rhythm are really important. But a sonnet has very strict rules. And of course people play with those rules all the time, and that’s a kind of artist’s comment on the form itself. But I’m not that way. If there is a rule, I follow it;  playing with or breaking that rule is cheating! Ha. (Or else what’s the point of saying you’re writing a sonnet if you then pick and choose which rules to follow? That’s the Puritan/perfectionist in me. Heh.) Anyway, so, back to the subject at hand. As I said earlier, quite a lot of time I write out of fury, or some kind of overwhelming emotion. And at the time I wrote this poem, I was wrestling with some overwhelming emotion, and having a hard time expressing it in writing. So, oddly, I took a really strict structure and used that to wrestle some poems into existence about the emotion. It helped me: it gave me a way to approach the emotion and work with it without letting it swamp me into inarticulateness. And it was a distraction, too; I didn’t have to sit with the emotion too long—I had to focus on counting syllables and finding rhymes. It was a really good distraction. And then I had—still have—a fascination with fairy tales, so I ended up working toward a project where I would have a collection of fairy-tale-imagery based sonnets about a totally contemporary subject. This was one of the poems that resulted.

RB: I love the last line of “All the Difference in the World” (shown at the end of this interview).

TW: I love hearing what people respond to! Maybe I should have said THAT inspires me. Ha. It’s funny, “my” readers found the ending of—really, the whole thing—this poem humorous. I didn’t actually mean it that way, really. But I don’t think I should say what it was “supposed” to mean, since, everyone has their own response to it and who am I to argue with them? I do tend to a kind of dry or wry sense of humor in my poems and I guess I didn’t keep it out of this one either, as—like I said—a lot of people either find this kind of humorous, and/or, just a sort of bemused or wry comment on writing. Which—is the point, as I’ve been saying, right? I meant one thing, and readers take it a completely different way, and that’s all actually exactly right, meaning, as it should be.

Storybook Land

There we are, the two sisters,

(the name we planned for our

children’s bookstore,

visiting Storybook Land

When we are seven and ten

taken by a cousin who

took pity on us, I think,

raised in such compromised

households, ignored when

not the target of sighs and

shaken heads, shaken fingers,

you are such a disappointment to us.

So there we are, the future

bookstore owners, in Storybook Land,

in pillories. In pillories!

I wonder now who thinks pillories are

a good idea for a children’s

amusement park. For whose

amusement exactly? At any rate

it isn’t until I think about the connection

between our mutual adult dream and

our childhood trip to Storybook Land

and then realize within this magical realm

we are locked into stocks

that I realized one of our first failures

in adulthood:  the mistaken idea that

words alone could save us.

All the Difference in the World

At what point does a poem become

a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Because there is a danger in writing a poem

About which even a high school sophomore

Could pass a pop quiz:

The theme of this poem is:

b. the author feels like she can’t go on.

Certain lines begin to swim in your head

and after a while it becomes blurry:

what really came first? The poem or the thought?

A soldier learns about death this way:

first, he believes it won’t happen to him.

Then, he realizes:  it might happen to him.

Finally he knows:  it’s going to happen to him.

When you get right down to it,

it’s fairly simple:  either you will die or you won’t.

One could argue this is the same thing.

But the progression—well, it’s just not so linear.

First, you write, I don’t think I can go on.

Then, you admit:  I can’t go on.

Finally:  I won’t go on.

But where it’s difficult to go from

it will happen to you back to it might happen to you,

one day you write I can’t go on and the next day I don’t think I can go on.

It’s like driving backward through a fog bank.

There’s all the difference in the world in a little hedging.

Even on a day when you finally commit:  I won’t go on,

And you slump in a kind of relief

Who’s to say the next day you won’t be back to

I don’t think I can?

The answer of course is plain:

Stop writing poems.

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