Douglas Cole : part five

Why is poetry important?

I don’t know that I would say poetry is important, but it’s certainly primal, in a way. Once we began using language we began creating poetry. I think poetry shows the essence of what language itself can to do. On the one hand, it describes and catalogues our world in a system which is very useful for survival. Poetry contains our most fundamental beliefs: just read any religious text. On the other hand, poetry, like language, is also a means for discovery. I mean, if you go into the writing of poetry with the intention of saying something, you’re only exploring half of what it’s capable of doing. But if you go into writing poetry looking to see what it reveals, letting go of the ego and all the intentions it’s heir to, then you’re on the adventure. Then you’re really going somewhere new. 

Douglas Cole : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I’ve been reading Charles Simic’s new collection Come Closer and Listen. I love his surreal pieces. I like the strangeness of his poem, like you’re in a dream. I also enjoy the humor. He’s been a model for the prose poem, too. I’ve been reading Tess Gallagher’s Dear Ghosts. I very much admire the way she creates the poem on the page, the line breaks. And I love the way she re-orients the point of view in some poems so that you’re seeing something in one way; then, she shifts it so that that same thing becomes something else. It’s really quite beautiful. And I’ve been reading Joy Harjo’s new collection An American Sunrise. I think she’s masterful at blending the natural and the spiritual and the political, and she comes to the music in her language honestly being a saxophone player. 

Douglas Cole : part three

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

Poetry like music is totally free. No one is the authority on it. It’s an absolutely free form. We can invent all the rules for it we want, but someone is going to break those rules and make something beautiful. Poetry is the ultimate edge of creation, the unknown. It’s an adventure. It’s a trip. Its language at play like the rawest elements of reality, becoming in the moment over and over and always new, yet full of everything that went before. It can capture your most fluid thought or dream. It can give you your most fluid thought or dream. It’s a document of an idea and it’s the engine for an idea. It’s the snake biting its own tail. It’s the dark enigma. The minute I say what it is, I’m wrong. That’s what makes it so fun. It’s as old as language itself, and it’s always being born. 

Douglas Cole : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I know when it’s finished if I can read through it and I don’t feel an urge to change it. I’ll take it from its roughest, handwritten form, type it, revise for line-breaks and pay attention to rhythm and the way the sounds play. I don’t want any log-jambs of sound, a clashing of dental fricatives or anything. Then I mess around a bit with the way it looks on the page. I read it. Put it away, come back after giving it a little time to become unfamiliar so that I can see it without my ego. Then, if I feel like I can read it and witness it and just enjoy it without the cringing feeling that something’s just not right here, I feel fairly sure it’s done, or at least that I am done with it. 

Douglas Cole : part one

Douglas Cole has published six collections of poetry and The White Field, winner of the American Fiction Award. His work has appeared in several anthologies as well as journals such as The Chicago Quarterly Review, Poetry International, The Galway Review, Bitter Oleander, Chiron, Louisiana Literature, Slipstream, as well Spanish translations of work (translated by Maria Del Castillo Sucerquia) in La Cabra Montes. He is a regular contributor to Mythaixs, an online journal, where in addition to his fiction and essays, his interviews with notable writers, artists and musicians such as Daniel Wallace (Big Fish), Darcy Steinke (Suicide Blond, Flash Count Diary) and Tim Reynolds (T3 and The Dave Matthews Band) have been popular contributions https://mythaxis.com/?s=douglas+Cole. He has been nominated twice for a Pushcart and Best of the Net, received the Leslie Hunt Memorial Prize in Poetry and recently won the Editors’ Choice Award in Prose from RiverSedge literary journal. He lives and teaches in Seattle, Washington. His website is https://douglastcole.com/.

What are you working on?

I’m working on a collection called The Cabin at the End of the World that is made up of mostly prose poems. It’s a fun way to approach the poem, formally. I’ve always felt that there really is not a big difference between writing poetry and prose. I love them both: the challenge of working with language, the music of language, the play of meanings and the creation of a visual as much as an intellectual experience are essentially the same. Certainly “narrative” poetry has a prose quality in the sense that it has a sort of story in it. And I love the way the line of a poem can be a poem, as Theodore Roethke says. So the fun of working on pieces as prose poems has been a new freedom in terms of the line, but I’ve also been secretly trying to play with the line yet still have the appearance of a paragraph, the prose poem, this block of language.