An Interview with Norman Minnick

Norman Minnick was kind enough to answer some interview questions for my Poetry Writing class a while back.  I thought I'd repost his responses, in case you're interested.  
 

1. What made you want to become a poet and is there a topic that you most prefer to write about?

It’s funny, when I was in my teens and twenties I wrote poems and songs and gave a couple poetry readings and performed in a band but never thought of myself as a poet. I wrote poems. How does that make me a poet? I wanted to be a novelist. I didn’t choose this.

2. Why did you decide to write some of your poems as just one long stanza, such as “The Problem of the Puer Aeternus” and “Stones”?

Is there a topic I most like to write about...? No, except that I find myself writing about human beings, especially human beings in situations that when viewed from a certain angle are rather odd. Ted Hughes has a wonderful essay about writing about people in his book Poetry Is. In it he writes about the art of choosing the right details about a person that will capture his or her entire life. He says, "The whole art of writing is to make your reader's imagination go into action." This is more difficult than it sounds, but I feel like my reader's imagination can conjure up a larger "story" of the woman climbing into the Peterbilt or the girl with freckles carrying a flat of azaleas in "A Week without Poetry", for example. Mine does, at least.

When I write poems I pay very close attention to way line- and stanza-breaks work with the saying of the poem. (I have an essay about this that I wrote for the poetry month issue of Teachers & Writers Magazine that I’ll share with you later.) The one-stanza poems feel as if they do not need a pause, as if they are one thought.

3. What’s the inspiration behind your poem, “A Week Without Poetry?”

The irony is in the title. What most people would not consider poetry is all around us, in the trash heap, on the side of the street, the things people say at a Little League game, and so on. I sort of realized that after a frustrating week of not reading or writing poetry (I read at least a poem a day) that I had gathered these little nuggets that resembled poems (poem-blips!) just by looking around and listening. Maybe it’s not poetry, but it’s my world.

4. Are you the narrator in the “Angel Mounds State Historic Site” and “Oconaluftee Indian Village, A Cherokee Living History Museum” poems?

Yes. But I wouldn’t place too much trust in me as a narrator.

5. Were you able to visit Angel Mounds to research it?

Yes. It wasn’t research, though. I was just there.

6. Can you talk about the need to be willing to take risks in poetry, especially in a poem like “In the Parking Lot of the Dry Cleaners”?


If you aren’t taking risks in your poems then why are you writing? There are eight million poets writing today and only about five or six of them are really any good. Those are the ones who take risks. I probably don’t risk enough. (Thank you, especially, for this question. It really has me thinking.)

7. Did your family background influence your writing style? If so, how? 

Growing up, I was surrounded by books. Books on shelves! They were my father’s books. Not just any books––they were books of great literature: mostly novels and poetry. A little history, philosophy, drama, humor. They seemed somehow sacred to me. I would look at them a lot. See my dad reading them. As I got older I would sometimes take one down (carefully!) and open it. Ah, the smell! I marveled at their bindings. The design of the pages. The typefaces (not fonts!). I would read the colophons. The novels I didn’t read. I felt that I somehow had to EARN them. I did sneak in a few of the poems from time to time. Rilke. Yeats. Ted Hughes. Berryman. Robert Lowell. Kinnell. Bly. Judith Minty! I knew that there were vast worlds––universes––in those books. More wisdom. More mind-expanding erudition than any drug could provide. Even without reading them at an early age, they were physically and tangibly within my reach. And I eventually did. Am still reading them. No academic or institution could have led me into such rich terrain. No. I was surrounded by books. My father read them.

8. Do you prefer writing in the day or at night? 

I prefer writing whenever I can. If I am driving and a good line comes to me I need to write it down immediately. This is a dangerous practice and I don’t recommend it to anyone. Poems, or ideas for poems, do not come easily. I snatch them up greedily whenever they appear.

9. What’s your favorite poem in Folly? 

That’s like asking which of your children is your favorite. I enjoy the response I get when I read “In the Parking Lot of the Dry Cleaners” or “Never-Never Land” or “Etc. Etc.”

10. What was your inspiration for the poem, “The Young Girl”?

“The Young Girl”, along with other poems like “Never-Never Land”, “Toes”, “Country Mark,” “Auto Repair Shop”, etc. are simply anecdotal. They are accounts of what I have witnessed by being in a certain place at a certain time and paying attention to the intricacies of the moment. This is my favorite kind of poem––one that doesn’t try to theorize or pontificate.