John Sweet responds

john sweet - a man of infinite contradictions and                         serious ramifications 

                   - a practitioner of the cult of 

                     synesthesia? definitely

                   - silence/word/silence is the key. all 

                     locks open. 

                   - catharthis.

                   - uncertainty disguised as rage, rage                          disguised as hope

                   - catharsis.

DV: How long have you been writing poetry?

JS:  I started young. Been doing it for 35+ years now. First published work was in '88, but unfortunately I didn't actually write anything that was worth publishing for another 5 years or so.

DV: In your view, what was wrong with your early work?

JS: I was still pretty young when I made the switch from “song lyrics” to “serious poetry”, so there still wasn’t a whole lot of life experience there. Additionally, I had no real idea about style, or at least my style. What to say, and how to say it? I hadn’t discovered the small/alternative press yet but, luckily, I had been exposed to the classics and the academic press, so I knew what I didn’t want to write like. From the beginning, my writing tended to be a reaction against the things I had no use for. I liked modern art and I liked oddball music, so those became my points of reference. Things gradually started falling into place.

DV: Is it possible to demonstrate that change by showing us one of those early poems you are dissatisfied with along with perhaps the one that marked your transition?

JS: My main water pipe let go about 13 years ago (it was 70 years old or so), my basement was filled with 3 feet of water, I lost everything from about 2004 or so back. My notebooks, zines, journals, posters, flyers, chapbooks, stacks of typed poems – it all got tuned to pulp. Very annoying, but kind of liberating at the same time. I’m sure copies of various things are floating around out there and pieces can be found online, but all my records of what was published where are gone. But this one probably dates from around 2004/2005. It feels pretty rough to me, maybe a little more awkward than how I write now, or at least a little more unintentionally awkward. Much choppier stanzas and lines, I was accused more than once of being a minimalist.

scraping the womb

somewhere

the man who

would have been

my father

if

or only if

his smile like

cold glass scraping

the womb

and on sundays

my ghost and i visit

the graves of

strangers

learn the birthdays

of forgotten sons

and daughters

and once

in a state without

hills or rain

my own name reflected

back at me from

pitted stone

my own name

and what to do

after that

but live

And then this is just a couple years later. I still wasn’t interested in narrative flow, but I think things move forward more smoothly here, and everything congeals into a more complete whole.  It was like I had finally learned how to use the clutch and could shift gears without everything lurching and jerking around.

this mortal light

But he gets it wrong. Says the

poems are supposed to mean

something, are supposed to have

weight and depth, when all they

really are is another form of

bleeding. The fist you fear isn’t

the fist of God. The names of

your children sound hollow when

you speak them out loud, like the

bones of birds, like bottomless

wells. Jump in. Look upwards,

back to where you began. Let

the prayer come naturally.

JS: I decided early on to be a non-confessional poet, or at least a poet who buried all of his confessions deep inside labyrinths. A lot of times, my first person poems aren't about me at all and, conversely, I sometimes discuss myself in the 2nd or 3rd person. Whatever works best for the poem. I've noticed that while I do use women's names (although not always their real ones), men are almost always "you" or "he." In this instance, "he" was a poetry editor who sent me a lengthy rejection letter explaining that poetry was supposed to be universal, and that personal pain was pretty meaningless if it couldn't be translated by the reader into a bigger form of ETERNAL EXISTENTIAL WOE FOR ALL OF MANKIND. I wrote him back, said "cool" and "I see" and whatever else it is I write to people who I will never see eye to eye with, and I figured that was it, but he sent me quite a few more letters over the next couple of months explaining why my poems were failures, until he (I assume) finally found someone else to educate. And then he left me alone. What I like about this poem is that, not knowing the backstory, you were able to take my little personal grievance and translate it into a bigger picture, and that bigger picture is just a s valid as my little sketch. So, I guess the poem works on a level that would please the person it was written about.  

DV: Indeed. I hope he reads it. By the way, I don't disagree with his central argument; one of the poetic functions, and a key to its continuing vitality, is its grand universality. But I also think he misses the point in that not all poetry should be forced into that pattern. Poetry has many mansions, but not every tenant wants to live in a mansion, and not every architect wants to design mansions. I was discussing this site with a poet and mentioned that I rarely reject a submission, even though it does not personally impress my esthetic sensibility. He asked why I wasn't more selective: shouldn't I want to promote the best poetry? Basically my response was that I wanted to host an electronic open mic as a democratic opportunity for artistic expression and that I had no interest in imposing my own preferences. I am drawn, however, to your evaluation of your poems as confessions buried in labyrinths. Can you explain what you mean?

JS: I was never comfortable just spilling my guts on paper, and I was getting a little tired of every poem being “me” “we” “I”, so I decided to start playing with points of view. When I finally had things to say that came from having lived my own life, I’d also reached a point where I had girlfriends and ex-girlfriends who would sneak peeks at my notebooks or flip through the journals I’d been published in, looking for references to themselves, or to others. What I found out is that people who don’t create art don’t understand the concept of capturing the moment. People felt that whatever I said was eternal, and was therefore something to be outraged or offended about. It got tiring, as did the fact that simple observation on my part was seen by others as trash-talking or, even worse, declarations of undying love. So, instead of hiding my notebooks, I blurred my meanings. I changed names, locations, tenses and points of view. It gave me plausible deniability when I was accused of being a heartless asshole (asshole, yes, but not heartless). It set up more possibilities for each poem, and more challenges, and so I kept doing it. If I decide to write a poem about visiting a deserted church, but the whole poem is actually about having sex with a specific person, that’s a labyrinth. I’m speaking in metaphors in the poem, but the metaphors are presented as concrete events, and then if I shift “I” to “he” or “you” additional layers are added. And, just to keep it interesting, some of my first person poems are about me and some of my third person poems are about people I know. My life is a lot calmer now than it was when I started writing this way but, for me, it’s still the best way to express myself. I think your democratic approach to publishing is the best one. All art is personal. Good and bad are subjective. Math has absolute right and wrong answers; art, not so much. Variety is always the best way to go. I agree that poetry needs to have a meaning. I’ve read the “language poets” who prefer sound and structure over meaning, and they do nothing for me. I think, though, that meaning is ultimately a personal thing. If someone writes a poem with a specific meaning in mind, and I read it and enjoy it but get something different out of it than what the author intended, that’s not necessarily a failure on either of our parts. It sets up new dialogues where various interpretations can be discussed. My writing, to me, is like abstract painting. There’s meaning behind what I write, but I don’t necessarily try to make that meaning transparent. Jackson Pollock said about his painting that chose to “veil the image,” and I’m a big fan of that approach. Again, if someone enjoys what I’ve written but doesn’t fully grasp what I meant to say, or even finds something that I said without meaning to, that’s still a success.

DV:  How did you get started as a writer?

JS:  I started by writing my own lyrics for Floyd, Zeppelin and Doors songs. It's good to have a pre-fab rhythm to work with. I had an excellent creative writing teacher in high school who encouraged me to move beyond those humble beginnings. It was a long, slow crawl from there to free verse. I remember my first submissions were handwritten on lined notebook paper. Very sad. My first typewriter was an ancient manual thing that came in its own hard clamshell carrying case. I'm pretty sure my first accepted pieces were typed out on it. You'd keep sending the same rejected sheets out over and over until they got too ratty, and then you'd retype them and send them out again.....

DV: I had a Royal manual that was already old when I got it. It was all metal and weighed a ton, and the keys were too widely spaced for easy typing. But the typewriter ribbon was black on top and red beneath so I could press the shift for a different color. No italics or anything like that, though. I’ve often wondered why guys like us ever went to all that trouble to get rejected; there certainly wasn’t any money in it. And yet, before us, poets (and novelists!) had to go through the whole process with quills on parchment. And before that in cuneiform. Why did you keep at it?

JS: Now that sounds like an awesome typewriter! Mine was fairly small, but you really had to whale on the keys. Had the old reel-to-reel ribbon that you could keep flipping over to get more life out of it. Writing for me is catharsis. It's alchemy. A way to get the crap of everyday life, the highs, the lows and the mundane stuff, out of me and into a malleable medium. After writing for a while, I started getting curious about the publishing process - how he hell did someone go from spilling their guts onto paper to getting someone else to see something in it and want to publish it? Honestly, though, I'd be writing even if no one wanted to publish the stuff. It keeps me on an even keel. I paint and dabble in photography, too, as sort of a complement to the writing, but the poems are the meat of it.

DV: I never planned on writing just for myself; it just turned out that way. Writing (or any of the arts) is a connection to the reset of humanity. It's the web that holds us together, even though poetry haters or opera haters may not realize it. For me and you it's a matter of creating-and-consuming, but the consumers-only (and non-consumers, and "failed" creators) are all a necessary part of the process. As far as you can judge, who is your audience? Isn't that someone writers are supposed to bear in mind as part of the writing process?

JS: It seems like other writers, mostly. They have more of an instinctual understanding of the whole poetic process. They understand the need. I used to get a lot of letters from students, but they seem to have tapered off. I actually got more mail back in the paper mail days. Kids who wanted to do reports on me for school (most of them were shot down by their teachers because I wasn't famous), people sending cash and asking for books, or just for some words to read. It's nice reaching non-writers, or aspiring writers, but the support group has always definitely been other writers, and the publishers who go out of their way to solicit work from specific authors. The internet has been great for spreading poems far and wide, but it seems to have done some serious damage to the paper zine scene and to the mystique of printed books, which is a bummer. Now that vinyl is coming back, maybe ink on paper will, too. I’ve never really written with an audience in mind. It’s there for whoever wants it, I suppose. I think that's one of the more beautiful things about working in a field where wealth is never really a consideration - you get a whole lot of creative freedom.

DV: It’s nice to travel with a whole library on an e-reader, but otherwise I like reading on paper much better. I like to be able to turn right to the page I want or thumb forwards or backwards without waiting for the gadget to warm up or reprocess. It’s easier to relate to the material. This tactile feel is akin to the warmer sound that vinyl provides, hisses and pops and all. When I write (or type) on paper it’s much easier for me to spot typos than if I use a word processor – for some reason it just doesn’t process correctly in my brain. I don’t think this is just an example of nostalgia or oldfartedness – when I had my students proofread on paper rather than on a terminal, they usually did a much better job of it. Which is a long way of getting to my question – do you have a writing system? A daily schedule? Some particular environment?

JS: I think people tend to glaze over when they stare at a screen. Paper is definitely a better medium. Computers seem to encourage minimal attention spans. I used to have a bunch of comfort zones I needed to be in when I wrote (location, time of day, weather), but I loosened up the older I got. My only necessity now is that I have to write on paper. In my futile efforts to cheat death, I walk and ride my bike a lot when I go places, so I always have a backpack with my notebook in it. I bring it to work, to parks, wherever. I keep an additional notebook in my car, and one up by my bed. I used to lose a lot of good ideas at work, not writing them down on break (which I take outside, walking). Now, whenever an idea or a fragment of an idea pops into my head, I write it down so I can develop it later. My final editing is done on the computer, but I keep tweaking poems even after they're "finished", mostly when I'm flipping through pieces looking for work to submit. I try to write at least every day or two, but if I have a dry spell I don't sweat it.  If it goes on for a couple of weeks, I'll force myself to get something down on paper, mostly so I don't forget that I'm a writer. Revisiting and rewriting older pieces is a good way to keep creating during fallow periods.

DV: Poets often rely on traditional poetic patterns (rhyme, rhythm, form) as a sort of support tool. But you write free verse, presumably “without rules.” And you hinted that it took you a long time and a lot of effort to be able to write it. So, what’s the secret behind writing free verse? Why is it poetry?

JS: You know, I have no clue. A lot of editors have told me that what I write isn’t poetry, so who’s to say? I’m a firm believer in the evolution of art, though. Sonnets may have been the bomb 600 years ago, but I’d hate to be writing within those constraints now. William Shakespeare’s sentiments and themes are eternal, sure, but his language and form are archaic. Emily Dickinson is a great way to get younger kids into simple rhyming poetry, but when I see 40 year olds writing that way in 2017, I cringe. Art usually tends to be a reaction to both the current times and to previous artistic movements, so evolution is inevitable. For me, personally, I had a vague idea of where I wanted to take my writing, so it was mainly just a lot of trial and error getting there. I knew I wanted contemporary ideas, and I knew I wanted what I was writing to not sound stiff or formal. To not sound like poetry, I suppose. I wanted it to be a dialogue, and to read like a dialogue. A lot of that involved trimming fat. Less exposition, less “flowery”, “poetic” language, more concise descriptions, and a lot of emotion/description/conclusion that was implied but ultimately unspoken. The big trick was to get all this working simultaneously but still have life and momentum in the work, to not have it read like a vacuum repair manual. And I still like to think that what I do is evolving in some way, and not settling into a comfortable, formulaic rut. After a certain amount of time spent writing, that seems to be the biggest challenge.

DV: The way you describe poetry sounds a lot like the way Ernest Hemingway wrote prose. He wanted to produce an iceberg effect, with the invisible, unwritten part of it being accessible to the reader’s rational imagination and unnecessary for explication. (He wrote some poetry too, which was popular in England for a time, but it never impressed me.) Who do you regard as your “influences?” Or, who do you "write against,"' stylistically?

JS: Yeah, I like that metaphysical approach to writing, the whole friction of what is meant vs. what is said, and then all of the space in between. In that respect, my influences were the surrealist painters. I always wanted to do with words what they were doing in visual mediums. I was a big fan of the post-punk bands at a young age, too, their lyrical concerns, their attempts at finding new ways of expressing themselves. I've always rebelled against the mundane and the commonplace, I think. The gasbag poets and the pretentious ones, and the ones who put their own personal image before their art. In that respect, Hemingway would be someone to rebel against. His whole macho posturing bullshit. He wrote some great fiction, but a lot of it was a tedious slog. My favorite writer is probably Margaret Atwood. Her fiction is great, and her poems are very clean, very precise, but they cut incredibly deep. Plus she writes a lot of stuff that isn't quite fiction and isn't quite poetry. She pushes the boundaries, but she doesn't preen. It was fashionable back in my print journal days to always talk about the small press vs. the academic press, which usually meant a blood & guts approach to writing vs. a dryer, more formal "steeped in the history of poetry" approach. Although both sides produced a lot of bad writing, I always favored the small press people. They were more honest in their ugliness and awkwardness. What they might have lacked in technical chops, they made up for in earnestness and intensity. At least the really good ones did. Like I said, I get quite a few critical letters from editors telling me my faults and my weaknesses. I take them at face value, don't hold grudges or shout "To hell with all of you. I'll make you pay!!" but I also refuse to apologize for what I write. It's taken me over 30 years to get here, and I'm pretty happy with things from a writing viewpoint.

DV: You've certainly given me a lot of food for thought. Now satiated, our repast time is past. (How's that for pretentious preening?) I thank you for your pointed responses.

JS: Excellent preening! It's always fun to indulge in highfalutin' artspeak (possibly like Mike Myers on the old "Sprockets" skit on SNL), until the person you're talking to starts to give it right back unironically. And then it's time to run away. Thanks for the excellent questions.