{ in this interview, poet amber nelson brings the heat discussing vision, revision, and attentiveness }
when you picture someone reading your poetry, how do you see them? what do they think about, wear, and do? or, maybe a better way to say it: who do you write for? and how do you see your writing nourishing others?
I can honestly say I forget that people might actually read my poetry. I live most of my life living away from the densely populated literary community – which is not to suggest that I don’t have writer friends, but that most of my life is spent with people watching movies and eating and drinking and complaining about work and trying to pay bills. It’s like living in a bubble. I write poems. I read poems. I talk to writer friends, mostly online, about poems. But most of the time it’s like it isn’t a part of my consciousness because it’s in this other world. I have to go to a different space to enter that world, whether I’m writing it, reading it, or talking to other writers. So I’m always a little bit surprised when I discover that someone knows who I am, has read my work, has opinions about my work, wants to see more of my work.
how do you use poetry as a practice for your own life exploration, discipline, or growth? can you offer any practical advice or sure-fire practices for folks interested in allowing writing to inform their own flourishing?
Poetry – both what I read and what I write, regular informs the way I think every day. A single line in a poem can stick with me for days, and often the experiences of a day can inform a line. Over the years, the poems that I write have come more and more to be a way of processing whatever is on my mind, whether I’m really aware of it or not. At a time in my life when I was hiking a lot (my friends and I call it going to church), but also lonely, I spent a lot of time thinking about hunger—not just hunger as it relates to eating, but hunger as it relates to all forms of desire. I was also reading Clarice Lispector – I started reading books on hunger, the ecology of eating, I saw the world around me devouring and being devoured—and they all became connected in my mind. All the things in a life are connected in my mind and the poems have become a way of reflecting on that connection.
when you approach your desk, journal, computer—where ever it is you tend to create—what are some of the processes you use? what’s going through your mind? tell us about your habits of writing, no matter how quirky, mundane, strange, or small.
I don’t think I have those. Sometimes I write at a computer, sometimes in a journal, sometimes at home or work or a bar or coffee shop. I’ve written on busses and written using the notes function on my phone.
Lately, most poems are born of a compilation of notes. There’s a note in a journal, one in a computer file, a couple margin notes in a book, the notes on my phone – eventually I realize the connection, what they are all working toward, realizing I’ve been writing a poem this whole time. At that moment it becomes about bringing those things together.
Since my writing practice is not daily but of the moment, there’s nothing really habitual about it. Sometimes I get frustrated when I feel I haven’t produced anything in a while. But I figure I didn’t have anything to say just then. I try to trust that it will come together eventually. The one time in my life that I tried to hone a daily writing practice, I wasn’t necessarily producing more better or interesting poems. Just more poems, mostly dead.
when you go to revise work, how do you typically go about it? are there best practices you follow? give some wise instruction for those of us ready to get cracking on revision!
Revision is usually a part of the process of composition – I revise as I write. I read aloud as I’m composing and then make changes based on sound and flow, some instinct about whether a word or phrase is “right” – but I’ve rarely been party to a lot of revision after the poem is whole. Certainly some tweaking happens – a greater consideration for line breaks, a word here or there, often some darling murder, but most of the revision happens while I’m writing. As far as best practices, for me? The most important thing is to read the work aloud. And I think more people would benefit from the practice.
what’s the best advice you can give to a person just beginning to write, struggling to write, or feeling stuck? what’s something you wish someone had told you starting out?
Read a lot. Read everything. Read in the genre and style that you write, and also don’t. Read non-fiction. Learn anything. Pay attention. But also live your life in the world — have adventures and experiences. I think that helps the writing to not be dead.
would you like to share a poem you’re working on or have recently finished and comment on how it was written in light of the comments above?
This is an excerpt from a poem that I’ve been working on, am still working on, called “Thirst–Spacetime”:
The world shattered at the moment of creation
and everything is now broken, even God,
a whole universe flooded with time.
And then stars and fire. Darkness. I remember the future
and the past in an instant: everything breaks
down at the beginning of the universe.
That’s the law: things break down over time.
I would like to drown my memory
into a forgetting. Another year or moment passes.
The lakes and rivers dry and disappeared
leaving only desert and dust.
From this present distance, all risks taken
promise carnage and destruction.
The desire to know, then, is already
flooded with cruelty, since all discovery
destroys and we are always discovering.
I discovered love, tangled in space and time,
tangled in risk and return. It was a cold year some place. It was hard
to breathe. In the winter. The wind was brittle.
The wind was brutal. But what chills
is what happens inside the heart, that emptying
of blood and water, of warmth into winter.
***
This is sort of near the beginning. And it’s rough – but it sort of points to how what I’m thinking of sort of compiles. It may change shape as I continue – lines may change or move. New ideas might be inserted into the middle. The poem is sort of born of several things: reading Dune by Frank Herbert, a book I was surprised to learn was largely about water, the importance of a balanced ecology; reading A Brief History of Time; thinking about lives over time and space and the way we perceive time itself; thinking about the difficulties of living while in the wake of a really rough breakup. But it’s, as mentioned above, born of notebooks filled with notes. And still building.
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Amber Nelson is the co-founder and poetry editor of alice blue review, and the founding editor of alice blue books. her first book, In Anima: Urgency, is available and her second book, The Human Seasons, is forthcoming from Coconut Books.