At qarrtsiluni, Beth and I are really excited by this year’s winner of our poetry chapbook contest: Watermark by Clayton T. Michaels, which we just launched on Monday in dual print and online versions. As part of the latter, we put together a audiobook podcast of the author reading his poems, for which he also composed and performed an original guitar theme, but I thought it would be fun in addition to record a conversation with Clayton and find out where all this great poetry is coming from. So I called him up last Saturday, and peppered him with questions about writing poetry and music, teaching, heavy metal, comic books, and more.
Links
- Clayton’s blog
- Watermark online
- Two essays by Richard Hugo from The Triggering Town: Essays and Lectures on Poetry and Writing
- “A Story About the Body” by Robert Hass (in Robert Pinsky’s “Poet’s choice” column)
- Stan Brakhage (Wikipedia)
- Brakhage’s Mothlight on YouTube
- Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey
- David Dodd Lee’s blog
Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence)
You two kept me company during my painting session this afternoon – great interview, and I love that I know not one but TWO poet-metal-heads now!
It might be more common than we think — I just remembered an old poet-friend of mind, Gabriel Welsch (we’ve published him in qarrtsiluni) who used to listen to Slayer and such. I’m not sure he’d own up to that now or not.
And I’ve probably been a Neil Young fan longer than Clayton’s been alive.
I would own up to that. Head banging, fist of horns, the whole bit.
Ah, there you are! Dude, it’s been too long. I need to get you on the podcast, too — maybe after your new chapbook comes out? (Should be any day, if I’m not mistaken.)
Now I really have to read Clayton, to learn how a song lyricist springs into surrealism, how Dorothy Fields becomes Mark Strand. BTW the mandolin player for TUSB kicks serious ass. I was last in South Bend (it sounds like dancing) to interview witnesses at a green-sand casting client, a sand-pit on a long single-lane road to nowhere. But I’d return in a second for TUSB.