How I Discovered Poetry: Charles Jensen

How I Discovered Poetry ~ Charles Jensen



I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin for almost my entire life, hanging out, with few exceptions, with the same kinds who’d been in my kindergarten and preschool classes. When I was 13, my parents sold our house and started building a new one; during the twelve months it was going to take to complete, we moved to a small island in Lake Michigan, off the tip of the peninsula separating Green Bay from the Great Lake. My 8th grade class had just 11 students in it, most of them related to each other—cousins, cousins by marriage, or the kind of cousins who called each other’s parents “aunt” and “uncle” but weren’t actually related at all.

It was during that year I had my first earnest encounter with poetry. Through Wisconsin’s Artists-in-Education program, we spent part of our year enjoying residences with working artists. One, a visual artist specializing in collage and painting, encouraged us to work up frenzied diorama-like wooden panels that somehow said something about our lives. I struggled to do this. I glued things to my board. I drew stick people. I might have tried to draw a deer. This was not my strongsuit. I almost always nearly failed art class, though only partly through a lack of trying.

The other artist was a poet named David Steingass. He seemed enormously tall, with dark hair and a thick mustache. I think he had a mustache. He does in my memory, at least. He worked with us on short poems, and the advice he gave me on one of my pieces—“Don’t break lines with weak words like ‘and’ and ‘the;’ hold out for the strong words”—has always stuck with me.

My school was so small we had one teacher for almost every subject, and we sat in desks like elementary school kids, even though we also had lockers out in the hall by the high schoolers. One of our daily tasks was to write something—anything—in a journal our teacher was forcing us to keep in order to make us write something each day. Although I see the value now, back then I resented it, and probably as some kind of “I’m hipper than this” statement, I started using my notebook to play around with poems rather than straightforward introspective writing. They were deeply influenced by the schlock fiction I loved to read—Sue Grafton, Stephen King—and often featured a strangely furious presence called “IT” that was in pursuit of an ill-fated speaker. (I know, it’s so derivative—gimme a break; I was 13.)

It was after that year, when I was back in my old home town, attending the high school my brothers attended, that my English teacher pulled me aside after class and said I should keep writing poems. So I did. I wrote and I wrote, and I showed them to her, and she’d nod her head and say, “Awesome!” Or worse, she’d shake her head, hand it back to me, and say, “You can do better than that.” I always tried harder. I started to think of poetry as I thing I could do. I never thought of it as a life. It just kind of became a part of me. It suddenly became more than just a thing I could do.

Quarrel & Not In My Georgia Updated!

Revision ~ "The Instruction Aubade" ~ Charles

House Reps Who Didn't Respond: 11/20/08 Letter

WHY DO I WRITE ~ Charles Jensen

WHY DO I WRITE ~ Charles Jensen


Let’s get to the bottom of this:

1. What do I write?
I tend to write poems, although what is and isn’t a poem is often a source of rich inner monologue for me. I don’t consider most writing to be poetry, and I don’t even consider all of what I write to be poetry. In some ways, I continue writing in search of a definition of what exactly it is I’m writing. Is it prose? Is it nonfiction? Is it subjective? Is it genre? Does a line break make it a poem?


2. Who do I write?
I once admitted that although my work tends to be about other people (real or imagined), it is often also as much about my life or my experience as it is theirs. Or, to be glib, poetry is a kind of drag. I wear the clothes, hair, and make up of various voices and I mouth their lines as if they were my own. And sometimes, we’re saying the same things.


3. Where do I write?
I write mostly hunched over at my desk. When my desk had its own room, I wrote often. When my desk had its own loft in a light-filled apartment, I wrote constantly. When my desk shares room with a Nintendo (aka “Nofriendo”), a television, a cable box, and an internet connection, it feels neglected. I am only human.

I have also written an entire sequence of poems in bed. They were about a murder. These things are unrelated. For that reason, where I write rarely influences what I write or who it’s about.

In my college years, I filled about seven blank notebooks with notes and poems while sitting in a coffee shop smoking cigarette after cigarette, drinking mochas—I truly was that guy.


4. When do I write?
Not often enough! My current circumstances should allow for some forgiveness, however. For instance, I am writing right now. This counts for something. I attempt to blog every day. Creative work, though, is more fleeting of late, although I do tend to write in spurts rather than an even smattering of work over time. Once an obsession, a voice, an imagining captures me (or, as I like to suggest, chooses me), I’ll write poem upon poem until I’ve exhausted all the fuel. And then the quiet time returns, when I’m doing the other work of the writer: living. And sometimes reading.


5. How do I write?
I like to take Aaron Shurin’s advice: “Get out of the way.” I try to let the poem do its business without much interference or anticipation from me. Later, I’ll come in with my delete key and my nimble fingers and I’ll begin shaping the poem into where I think it should be headed. I edit primarily by subtraction.


6. Why do I write?
In other lives and careers, I learned that forming a question with the word “Why” puts the receiver on the defensive because it demands justification. For that reason, when you argue with your lover, you should phrase things with “How come” instead; it’s less confrontational. Dustin, if you’re seeking my justification for writing, I simply don’t have one. If you are asking a variation of this: what prompts me to write, what is my writing goal, who am I trying to please? Those questions are answerable. If there’s a hope for why I write, it’s simply this: I believe I have the potential to write something in a unique way that will, ultimately, transform my reader somehow. It doesn’t happen every time. And I’ll feel good if it even happens once. I keep writing.

"The Instruction Aubade"

"The Instruction Aubade" by Charles Jensen.

Quarrel Begins!

QUARREL

"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." ~ Yeats

What's it about? I'm not telling-- click and find out for yourself.

Variety-- Limpwrist to Work to .....

~ MM is the greatest; he's got some mad skills. Chick here to check out this page he created to pimp out Limpwrist.

~ Today, I had my first disappointment with the new job. When I interviewed for the new job I was told that I would have 2 weeks vacation. Now the person I interviewed with, who is also my supervisor, told me she is sorry for the miscommunication. In book it isn't miscommunication when you flat out tell me something then basically say you didn't. The lack of vacation time poses a big problem for me since I'm going to the Key West Literary Festival in January, which will have be off Wednesday to Wednesday. Another supervisor told me I could work longer shifts on Monday/Tuesday and Thursday/Friday to help with the time loss-- it is a nice gesture but when you depend on 40 hours a week it isn't enough.

~ Check Charles Jensen's blog today and scroll to his entry 11/20/07. He has a new chapbook with a fabulous cover titled The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon.

~ Paul and I watched the Hairspray remake last night. I prefer the 1988 version-- even if that means I lose some gay points. Michelle Pfieffer did an amazing job playing the bitch. Evidence below: