Tyler Truman Julian : part five

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

I feel like one of the most difficult parts of writing poetry is revising. As I’ve mentioned in some of the other questions, to me, poetry feels so carnal and immediate, which is a little bit like a double-edged sword. Once I get through those first few drafts and I put so much energy into them, I want that to be the end of it! That’s why having that solid group of readers there to support you and help you envision a potentially different end goal than what you initially thought is so important. Without them, many of my poems would remain half-baked notes in my phone that nobody else would see or let alone understand. Finding that balance between the personal and universal seems to be another challenge, but once you find it in a poem and are able to share it, you can really see the power of poetry.

Tyler Truman Julian : part four

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

Recently, I’ve spent most of my time working on fiction, so when I require renewal, I often return to the writers and books that impacted me deeply as a child first: Jack London, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. Then the more recent: The Prince of Tides, A Farewell to Arms, anything by Lauren Groff, Nina McConigley, Jeffrey Eugenides, Annie Proulx, Mariana Enríquez, or Diane Cook. When it comes to poetry though, I look first to some of the poets I’ve already mentioned, Sarah Suzor, Jill Mceldowney, Caroline Chavatel, Brooke Sahni, then to some old mainstays T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein (when I need something to drive me a little nuts), John Donne. I am in love with the Psalms as well. I think they are inspirational in their scope of heavy emotion, artistry, and imagery. Some new work I’ve deeply enjoyed though is Whereas by Layli Longsoldier, The Sublimation of Frederick Eckert by Travis Cebula, anything by Chelsea Dingman, and Druids by Tomaž Šalamun (Translated by Sonja Kravanja). I feel like this may have been more than what you bargained for, but reading has proved to be the most important part of my writing; it is at once informative and restorative: necessary.

Tyler Truman Julian : part three

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

As I mentioned in the first question of this series, I turned to poetry out of necessity and part of that necessity was to capture the present moment quickly and effectively. As a result, most of my poems enter the world via an image that strummed a chord somewhere deep inside me. I may not know exactly what that chord is in the moment I jot down what I am experiencing, but that’s what revision is for I suppose. In this way, a poem can stem from something as loaded as seeing a dead bald eagle beside the highway or something as simple as coming back home and seeing a book I was reading had fallen onto the floor while I was gone. I love giving meaning to the commonplace, and poetry lets me do that. I don’t usually share my earliest ideas; they seem too raw, and I worry about losing some of that rawness too soon when people start chiming in with their ideas or interpretations. But once I have a draft that I feel good about, I definitely have a group of readers I turn to for feedback before going back to revise. These tireless supporters are my mother, Sarah Suzor, Nina Welch, the recently interviewed Jill Mceldowney, Caroline Chavatel, Brooke Sahni, and Richard Greenfield, and I really don’t know what I would do without them. They know how to tell me something is not working in the nicest way possible (well, most of them!), and that means the world to me. 

Tyler Truman Julian : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

When I was working on my forthcoming book, Wyoming, “finished” largely depended on if the new work was meaningfully adding to the work I had already drafted and was helping complete the “story” I was trying to tell. All the poems in that book are linked and build off one another, so the story of the collection felt equally as important as the poetics. In general though, I believe a poem is finished if it is emotionally, structurally, symbolically “true” to the moment in which it was written, and if I can still see that truth down the road. As a result, maybe strangely (naively?), I try not to look back at poems I have written once I have gone through many drafts and begin sending them out.

Tyler Truman Julian : part one

Tyler Truman Julian is originally from Wyoming, though he currently resides in Mesilla, NM, with his wife. He is an MFA Candidate in New Mexico State University's fiction program and is an Assistant Poetry Editor for Puerto Del Sol. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Burnt Pine Magazine, Oasis, Wyoming Magazine, and Cigar City Poetry Journal, and his full-length poetry debut, Wyoming: The Next Question to Ask (to Answer), is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

Photo credit: Kelli Campbell.

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

For me, I turned to poetry out of necessity. I knew I wanted to write and felt like I had stories to tell but felt pressed for time (when I first started writing seriously, I was working on my family’s sheep ranch and going to school), and poet Sarah Suzor suggested I try writing poetry to capture quickly and dramatically the things I saw or did day to day. As a result, I began jotting down images I saw or short vignettes in the “Notes” section of my phone while out with the sheep or on horseback or in a tractor cutting hay and come back to them later. Most of the poems in my book, Wyoming: The Next Question to Ask (to Answer), grew this way. And, to me, that is the power of poetry. It is so distilled, so immediate, so timeless. Someone once said, if a story is a cruise ship, then a poem is the boiler room. I stand by that. Poetry allows for a powerful, immediate catharsis that can then stay with a reader for a long time. As a poet and fiction writer, I am always courting longer work, but there seems to be something in poetry that is so personal and relatable because you are able to get to the crux of the matter in just a few lines, continue on with your day, and return again and again and again in the future. There’s a freedom in this to engage with emotions that may not fare so well in a longer work that people are nonetheless looking for, and I like that. I like being able to write about riding a horse under powerlines and reflect on the anachronism of that moment, the static electricity, the way your horse dances uncomfortably, I can see that as part of a longer piece, sure, but in the immediacy, the brevity of a poem each one of those images takes on profound and lasting meaning.