Montag: (Q20) The richness of your language makes these poems especially attractive to me. I'm speaking here about the sound of the words, irrespective of their sense. Examples:
From "Harvest" (p. 52) we find these phrases almost rhyming, though they are not in a typical rhyming relationship:
"... is a low dark hum..."
"... claiming the horizon."
From "Days of Awe," (p. 67):
We begin the first blessing,
as we have each new year
and as we shall again
to remember the way
you turned from us.
What of us? Root ends
in night's dense loam.
I've noticed the following:
How have you developed an ear for this kind of language, how do you arrive at this richness?
Benet: The "richness" of sound in my work is probably the least "conscious" aspect of my poem-making. I do love music, I even play the piano a bit, but I am not a trained musician. In the past, I have, sometimes, written drafts of certain poems while listening to music. Usually the kind of music that would evoke something about the speaker of the poem, or the setting of the poem. I suppose, you could say that parts of "Incomplete Requiem" were "composed" while listening to Mozart’s Requiem, not only because it is about death, but also because my father’s favorite composer was Mozart.
Other than that, during my MFA classes at Warren Wilson College, I did pay attention to Ellen Bryant Voigt, whose lectures on the lyric contained many fine examples of poems in which the patterned use of certain vowels formalized what could have been just a personal utterance into what became a formal poem.
Oh, and I read a lot. Sometimes even poetry... all with my ear, hearing the words, even as I read silently.
Montag: (Q21) Could you talk about how you measure your lines? We might say we find more "free verse" here than iambic pentameter. Yet many times the lines maintain the sense that they are as measured and formal as a sonnet's? How do you know when to turn your lines?
Benet: If you sense a formality in my lines, it’s because I try to make the form I use work for the poem. The form itself sometimes becomes part of the content. Or, sometimes, a counterpoint, to argue with the poem, and so enrich it perhaps.
I don’t measure my lines consciously. I don’t "sound" out the meter. Each poem, depending on the subject, images, and the urgency in the voice of the speaker, lets me know if the line should be long or short. Lately, I started to write prose poems, but I am finding out that a prose poem is more than just a poem without line breaks.
How do I know when to turn my lines? Well, first let me refer to Susan Stewart again:
"The Greek adverb boustrophedon describes both the turning of oxen in plowing and writing from left to right and right to left in alteration. This deep analogy between the turning that opens the earth to sky and the turning that inscribes the page with a record of human movement is carried forward in the notion of verse as a series of turns and in the circling recursivity of all lyric forms." (Susan Stewart: Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, U. of Chicago Press, 2002 - p. 85)
I am a peasant at heart. I remember the plows and what it takes to open the earth to the sky. I know that the taste of bread starts in that turn of earth. So, I go about "turning" my lines with a hunger born from that taste of the senses.
In other words, I turn my lines the ways in which it makes the most satisfying sense for my senses!
Whew... that was some answer, eh? When I set out to answer this one, I had no idea this was going to turn up. See how that sense of plowing works then... even without the formal rut of a line? Does this give you an idea - a peek into - how I work, then?
Continued at BENET INTERVIEW - 9, below
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