„Poetry is, most basically, the openness toward Being that makes a world possible...“

James Owens was born in 1963 in Virginia. A descendant of coal miners and farmers, he felt an attraction to the transformative power of the written word from an early age and went on to earn a degree in English and French literature in 1986. He spent years working as a journalist - as a reporter then an editor for newspapers - because that seemed a logical way of combining a love of language with the necessity of earning a living. During these years, he was also writing poetry, almost in secret and in seeming separation from the exterior demands of life, and his poems began appearing in literary journals in the early 1990s, including a small chapbook of poems published by a small regional press in 1998. In 1999, unable to resist the call of language, he entered a graduate program in creative writing at the University of Alabama, where in time he earned the degree of Master of Arts in Creative Writing. Since then, he has taught university classes in rhetoric and writing poetry. For three years, from 2000 to 2003, he edited the literary journal The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and his own work, poetry and the occasional piece of short fiction, has been published widely, in the U.S. and abroad, including recent appearances in Birmingham Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Mimesis (UK), Third Muse (Australia), Newleaf (Germany), Umbrella, Boxcar Poetry Review, and others. He gives two or three public readings of his work each year at universities and arts organizations. Owens lives in La Porte, Indiana, with his wife, Fonda, a librarian, and their three children. Always drawn to the natural world as much as to the world(s) of culture, he spends much of his time walking the dunes along the south shore of Lake Michigan and in the forests of northern Indiana.

 

 

James, given that this is my first interview, and that it is my task today to talk to you, a poet, I find myself a little intimidated, and also a little unsure about what I am supposed to ask you. Wanting to know everything about you, and confronted from the very beginning with this impossibility, I cannot help thinking about the act of asking questions itself, about what it is that makes a question so important or what determines the fate of a question (its failure, most of the time). I do not want to remember Percival (at least I have the chance of not being limited to just one, the only right question), but I want to remember Heidegger asking: was ist Denken, and that people used to ask this essential question all the time: what is truth? what is love? what is philosophy? And even if it does not help asking the question this way, and we live in a time when people have grown tired of asking such big, important questions and have given them up, I still think that it is important to ask them. Because even the closure at which we arrive inevitably when trying to grope for an answer teaches us something about ourselves, with a bit of luck, even something precious. This said, I should like to have the courage to ask you: what is poetry? And then, of course, what is it for James Owens to be a poet?

 

I’m afraid this is going to sound impossibly Romantic and abstract. Poetry starts in the pre- or ultra-linguistic act of opening up the possibility of meaning in the world, perhaps even in “opening up the possibilty of meaning” as world. It may be too late for us to read the logos in its religious sense, but I am still persuaded by a continuity between the Word that “shines in the darkness” and the fact that, for Heidegger, it is poetry that creates the Lichtung in the darkness of the forgetting of Being. Thank you for mentioning Heidegger. Always close at hand are his saying, borrowed from Holderlin, “Dichterish wohnet der Mensch,” which I don’t think can be translated into English, and “Only where there is language is there world.” So poetry is, most basically, the openness toward Being that makes a world possible, a sort of placental conduit that allows our communication with the Earth and with each other. Everything else fails, if there is no poetry.

 

Of course, one can’t always live in the rarified ether, and for me to be a poet in everyday life is many other things as well. More practical matters. Sometimes it is only the habit of sitting each day before the blank piece of paper and wondering how to fill it, but that waiting, too, gives shape to the days. Sometimes it is the long, troubled search for just the right word to fit a line - a search which is the necessary prelude to the flash of insight which will deliver the right word unasked, but only after I have despaired of finding it and have given up. Sometimes it is the pleasure of finding that a few friends have understood a poem (which is really better than publication and never even being sure if anyone has read one’s work) - but even then I don’t forget that the clearing where that understanding can happen is warmed and illuminated by the Heideggerian logos.

 

 

A reader of your poems cannot help but notice your permanent concern with the “flesh and bones” of words (as Mallarmé would put it), their origins, their material heaviness, and, at the same time, the painful tension opposing this “melting of the words into their objects” to their abstractness, the death of life they carry within. Is silence the only way to escape this “brokenness”? Pondering the essential part that silence seems to play in your poems I would be inclined to say “yes”, silence is this, and much, much more. And then I think of Michaux: The more you succeed at writing (if you write), the further you ’ll be from fulfilling the pure, strong, original desire - the fundamental thing - to leave no sign. What satisfaction would be worth that? Writer, you do just the opposite, laboriously opposite. Et alors, James?

 

This is a penetrating question. In one way, it is another aspect of the first question above, but it also gets very close to a tension which I am aware lives deep down in my work and in my practice as a poet. Have you noticed how often the word “silence” comes up in our conversations? Somehow, you sense the importance of this tension, I think.

 

I do have a great pleasure in the materiality of language, the sounds of words and their shape and texture in the mouth, and rhythm and rhyme - everything that Seamus Heaney calls “the shaping energies of the poem” - and the history of words and their relationships across time and across languages. I love the traditional forms of poetry with their origin in song, sonnets and villanelles, etc., though I think that might not be obvious to a reader, since I often start with a poem in traditional form that gets broken up and rearragned into something new as I revise.

 

At the same time, I am attracted to the empty page. To speak is a failure of equilibrium, a flaw in purity. Silence is not absence, but speech is absence, desire infinitely deferred onto other words, unless one can imagine the poem as a locus where this deferement finds closure and returns once more to silence. I think of Yves Bonnefoy, who describes poetry as Aimer ouvrir / L’amande de l’absence dans la parole, and then of Wallace Stevens, because I cannot decide which I prefer, The blackbird whistling / Or just after.

 

It is hard to find the right words for this, but I think a poet has to love both the words of the poem and the knowledge that everything in the words might have been better expressed by keeping quiet.

 

You keep a blog, actually that is how we have met. How did you decide to start a blog? Do you keep a diary beside the blog?

 

I do not keep a diary, though I’m sure that I should. I admire people who have big stacks of notebooks, and who can tell you exactly what they were thinking, for example, in May of 1998. But I am too easily distracted for that. Keeping a blog is easier, and it performs some of the functions of a diary. It keeps a record of writing and thinking and contacts with people....

 

As you say, we met through the blog, and that is what it is really for. This is one of the good effects of the Internet and online culture. I know and communicate with people all over the world, people whom otherwise I would never have known existed. We exchange poems and photos and news, and it is really a small, personal community, even though many of the people I’m in contact with live on other continents. The dialogue you and I have been having through blog posts and email and now this interview is very important to me, and it would not have been possible - or at least would have been very different - just a few years ago.

 

Not all the effects of online culture are good, though. I’ve been reading the letters of Chekov and really enjoying him as a personality, so sane and sensible and clear-headed, but it occurs to me now that writers today are not going to leave behind books like Chekov’s letters. Probably academics will find ways of mining databases for writers’ or artists’ or politicians’ emails, but that isn’t going to be anything like the long, thoughtful, literary letters people used to write.

 

The name of your blog is inspired by Rilke var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));