David Hadbawnik : part five

How does a poem begin?

A poem doesn’t begin, it just is. I don’t mean that to be flip. I just believe that a poem is always kind of latent in whatever we’re doing as we go about our day, and it’s mostly a matter of being open to it and keeping an eye and ear out and noticing that it’s there. So I suppose you could say it begins in the moment that we notice and pay attention to what’s happening. Very often I’ll have a line occur to me and it goes through my mind and I don’t notice it or barely notice it, and if I have the means and wherewithal to grab a pen and write it down, it begins right there. Otherwise, it’s gone.

David Hadbawnik : part four

Why is poetry important?

Because it’s something people need as badly as food or oxygen, though they may not know it until something happens in their lives to make them feel that need. I was just talking with a poet who writes “poems on demand” in public space and this really struck me: the extreme emotional responses people have when they experience a poem created just for them. Now there may be a lot of ways people are filling that need, or encountering poetry in whatever form (music, art… any kind of genuine experience that speaks to something at the core of one’s being) outside the classroom or anthology. But the need exists, for all of us. 

David Hadbawnik : part three

How important is music to your poetry?

Very important. Much of what I write these days consists of song lyrics for which a melody guides the arrangement of words, and I later get around to hacking together a chord structure on the guitar. Music is my first love and I feel that song, and the songwriting craft, really lies close to the wellspring of creativity for me and it’s what I come back to over and over again for renewal. I love all kinds of music, and most of the time there’s nothing I’d rather be doing than listening to music, thinking about music, and playing music.

David Hadbawnik : part two

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

There are so many other ways of documenting things, thanks to technology, but I still feel that poetry is the best, most portable and universal way of simply telling us “what happened” and capturing the particular language of the tribe, as Lew Welch said. When I say “tribe” I mean one’s immediate group of peers in a particular time and place. Social media has exploded and commodified so much of this process – see, for example, the way local urban dance moves get co-opted and pushed out to the masses via TikTok – but poetry can act as a low-profile, organic means of tracing the way people talk and what happens to them, circulating the findings without flattening them out into something slick and commercial.

David Hadbawnik : part one

David Hadbawnik is a poet and translator whose books include Ovid in Exile (Interbirth Books, 2007), Field Work (BlazeVox Books, 2011), and Holy Sonnets to Orpheus and Other Poems (Delete Press, 2018). His translation of Aeneid books 1-6 was published by Shearsman in 2015, with books 7-12 forthcoming; selections have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, and Blackbox Manifold, among other journals. 

What are you working on?

Right now I’m proofreading books 7-12 of my translation of Aeneid, which is forthcoming from Shearsman Books. This has been a ten-plus year project that began as a homework assignment, essentially, during my graduate studies, and just sort of ballooned from there. When the first half of the Aeneid translation was published in 2015, I received my box of contributor’s copies the week before my wife and I moved overseas for a job. That job – assistant professor at American University of Kuwait – was incredibly demanding, and then we had our son, Elliott, in 2018. So it was tough for me to match the intensity and dedication that had gone into books 1-6, and tough to build up a rhythm with the translation that would carry me through. I have to thank my collaborator, Kuwaiti artist Omar Al-Nakib, for really spurring this project to completion. His illustrations – not to mention his hard work and enthusiasm – were really an inspiration to keep the faith and keep going.