Poet | Ruth Towne
Q&A
A2: Many poets have different experiences with time and creativity. Do you find deadlines to be more of a hindrance or a help in producing your best work?
RT: Whether I have a deadline or not, I find that time itself is a great hindrance in my creative process. Or, maybe a lack of time is the hinderance. There's so much in the essential nature of poetry and writing poetry that competes with so-called "everyday life." Poetry is slow. Poetry requires sustained attention. Poetry needs me to follow one thought through no matter how long that following takes, the singular thread that makes an entire skein. But the everyday is fast-paced. The everyday demands something new every second in bits and clips. Instead of a continuous thread, the everyday gives me a pile of scraps to sift through.
So what's difficult for me is setting aside time for poetry. My writing practice often begins with reading poetry or copying out poems I like onto scrap paper. After this, I often am ready to begin free writing in my poetry notebook. Eventually, my ideas mature into images and lines, and somewhere in there I find I am writing. After I've spent enough time with a draft, I move to the computer to "lock in" my work behind the screen. And if it isn't obvious from the vagueness in my descriptions of my process, my way of getting to a poem takes a lot of time. I've learned to block a minimum of four hours for this writing ritual, and that only gets me a rough draft about one-page in length, if I'm quick.
Since it feels like everyday everybody demands me and thus my time, I find myself fighting for that---more time to be creative. So deadlines do help me. They help me help other people understand that I need time to write.
A2: You utilize aesthetic language to create a portrait of emotional depth in your poetry. What is your process for formulating such engaging poetic parlance?
RT: Lately in a lot of my poems, sound drives a line. For "Observatory Time, The Lovers," this is certainly the case. Sometimes, I kind of seize on a certain sound, like the long i sound woven through the second stanza or the short i sound linking "lips," "eclipse," "apocalypse." I try to follow a sound as long as I can, seeing what images can accumulate made of words featuring that sound. This method of working can lead to some strange images, which for a poem like this was a goal of mine. Since the piece is in conversation with artwork made by surrealist artist Man Ray, the images of the poetry needed their own certain sense of surrealism.
In addition to sound, color is the other defining feature of this poem and of the lore of the piece(s) by Man Ray. I say piece(s) because there really are two. First is Man Ray's "The Lovers 1933," an eight-foot-long and three-feet-high painting of bright red lips in a sky he obsessively painted over the course of two years. As the Tate Museum explains:
Man Ray originally created The Lovers 1933 in the aftermath of his passionate and sometimes volatile relationship with the beautiful American photographer and model Lee Miller. The lips painted onto the lead piece are said to be those of Lee, and the artwork is considered evidence of his continued longing for Lee after they parted. (Tateshots, 12 February 2015)
The second piece, "Observatory Time, The Lovers" (1936), is a black and white photograph that includes the original painting in the top-half of the shot. In the bottom half, there is a chess board at the feet of a reclining nude, who is back-to-camera. Obviously, there's a lot here to consider--the obsessive nature of the painter making the lips, the separate life of the person who inspired the shape in the sky, what is lost from the painting when the photograph is taken, what is added to the painting when the photograph is made. But the color of the original lips Man Ray painted in contrast with their colorless shape in the photograph captivated me. And the language of color and color variations followed automatically. Throughout the poem, variations of red lend to the idea of longing and obsession, as though if the speaker could just get the right red then she could get to the person she's addressing. While red dominates the sky, the color blue at the opposite end of the visible light spectrum recedes, fading though not entirely. Again, the tension in the poem relates to desire, to yearning, which is desire with no reply. (So says the speaker in the poem, "I rely on this–the lack.")
So that's a long way to say that although I have heard that Sylvia Path said something like "Please, just let your reds be reds," and usually she's right, for this poem, the language of color followed naturally from the original image(s)
A2: Many poets write as a way of understanding and processing their reality. How do you use poetry to communicate your understanding of an experience or emotion, and what helps you transform that experience or emotion into poetry?
RT: In the case of "Observatory Time, The Lovers," I am using poetry to communicate emotions I have experienced, only I am getting to that emotional truth by borrowing or fabricating experiences. Said differently, the feelings of desire and longing in this piece are true and mine because I have experienced them, but the images are only mine because I collected or fabricated them. But then, all this becomes the poem, which is mine and not mine at once. That blurry line between what's "mine" in a poem and what "isn't mine" is something I'm often trying to clarify in my work. I want to say what I mean. I want to state what I feel. But sometimes I find I'm off chasing images instead of saying just the thing? Other times, I know exactly what I feel but choose restraint, to obfuscate or change. So part of transforming an experience or emotion into poetry is finding the right balance, or sometimes, the right blur.
Observatory Time, The Lovers
The women that are sketched backwards are the only ones that have never been seen
From “The Enchanted Well” by André Breton
That fracture cracked into a pale fish-scale sky, your mouth
is starlet-scarlet, cadmium, crimson, carmine–a red ravine.
How halcyon, the view in my mind’s eye.
Blue sky, I mine what it might mean,
I mine red. Day by day, I bleed
your lips across a canvas wide and white,
three feet high and eight feet from side to side.
I have to draw you.
I have to draw you forth, the reservoir
of memory is my sole source,
the wellspring that weeps, that open sore.
To make you, I have torn a score
of metal ores across the blade
of my palette knife, the clay and rib
from which I form your lips.
Your lips, they eclipse the sky, that vast overcast vault,
pillow light, smoke white, and laced with cruel cerulean.
Mine is a horizon with no sun.
Of course, once there was a sun, a red dwarf one,
until I lined the sky with ladders,
then I climbed and climbed.
That scarlet star was ripe,
an open fracture, a cracked bone
I brought up to my mouth, to my blood-plump lips.
Imagine, if you can, what it’s like to consume a star–
crumbling sponge cake in red velvet,
burning current of currant jam,
strawberries carved into playing card hearts,
and a handful of cherries each complete with its pit.
Bite by bite, I consumed the sun.
And after I peeled that orb apart,
what remained pooled
in a rough red rind, all dust and dew.
So I took a plastic straw, striped white and blue,
and I sucked those million vermilion filaments
out of the very husk of dusk.
I devoured the blush of the sun,
I exsanguinated the sky
while the observatory tower cowered
in the blank atmosphere.
It was a sight to behold.
If only you had been there.
Somewhere, elsewhere, you bled, you bleed.
I search for you in the widening sky of time.
And so I lay here bare in a black bed of velvet.
There is a chess board at my feet,
a feminine bend to my knees,
and my taut torso forms a cupid’s bow.
Your mouth hangs over me.
And unless I close my eyes,
my gaze remains on your lips in my sky.
I face away,
a muse, I bare nothing,
I bare everything.
I lay naked yet take the photograph.
And my rouge ruse, how amusing,
this photograph is black and white.
Mind you, there’s something here
in how still I manage to hold back,
in how I rely on this–the lack.
In harsh-charcoal, platinum, ash, and stone,
your lips are my apocalypse,
a last crevasse of scaled-back black.
How bleak, a flash, a reverie.
Gray sky, I mine iron.
I mind where you might be. I have to–
I have to draw. I have to draw you forth,
my soul, my open sore.
This piece is a photograph of you and me.
It’s me as much as you,
the clot that blots the maroon and oozing wound,
the checked board on which rests
a chess set of geometric forms,
the light-bending lenses and recessed refracting glass
the observatory telescope possesses.
It’s true. Some objects come into view
only with others in the way.
It’s you, it’s me.
I consumed the sun.
It’s me, let me exhume you from the crush.
Your lips drift over me.
It’s me, my dear departed.
I am art and artist.
The sky is an azure tide,
your mouth a red cyclamen scythe.
The night is wide. It spreads,
a tender bruise in midnight blue.
A bloodshot comet with no predictable return,
you recur in my dreams.
Some nights, your lips shed petals,
you shower me with incarnate carnations,
gargantuan chrysanthemums,
and cotton-soft cosmos flowers.
Darling, I hasten the hour of your return,
the minute at the limit of your endurance,
the moment when the word you’ve wanted long
is on the tip of my tongue.
Darling, I’m so close, it’s on my lips–
And for the rest? I’ll not speak of it.
Cadmium and crimson fade
to charcoal, ash, and stone.
I lie alone, poised to bring you back,
posed to withhold.
Who can know
if I keep my eyes open or closed? You,
I picture you, I picture I look up at you–
–if only you were here.
I am the sight to behold.
You are red lips in my sky, the blood-sly smile
I lie beneath bare, at once aware
the color carmine contains two drops of blue,
at once a dream, my lips colored a sapphire hue.
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