Interview with Darrell Bourque Part II by Angie Ledbetter
This is the second installment of Roses & Thorns interview with Louisiana State Poet, Darrell Bourque.
Darrell Bourque is Professor Emeritus in English at University of Louisiana Lafayette. He is the author of five books of poems: Plainsongs, The Doors Between Us, Burnt Water Suite, The Blue Boat, and Call and Reponse: Conversations in Verse (with Jack B. Bedell). He has two books forthcoming: In Ordinary Light: New and Selected Poems (2010) and Holding the Notes, a chapbook commissioned by Chicory Bloom Press (2011). He served as Poet Laureate for a brief time in 2007-08 and then again in 2009-2011.
R&T: What date on your calendar are you most looking forward to? And what are you working on now?
Bourque: One of the dates that I am looking forward to is the date when the LEH will name the new Louisiana Poet Laureate. The nominating process will begin late this year and we have many incredibly talented poets in the state and many poets who deserve the title. I look forward to seeing what they bring to the position.
Right now I am working on a "new and selected" volume which will be published by University of Louisiana Press as well as a chapbook commissioned by Chicory Bloom Press out of Thibodaux.
R&T: What's your favorite poem of someone else's and of your own?
Bourque: I have so many poems that would fall in the favorite category and depending on what day you ask me, you might get one of the following: Robert Frost's "Mending Wall," his "After Apple Picking," and his "Birches." I read and reread Gerard Manly Hopkins. I love Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality." I love Stanley Kunitz's poems. Donne's "Valediction Forbidding Mourning." Nearly everything Sheryl St. Germain has written. I read Mary Oliver and Mark Doty and Li Young Lee regularly.
Of my own poems, I am pleased to have been able to write "The Grammar of Verbenas" and "Inhabiting Separate Bodies" but I don’t know that they are favorites. I am pleased with the two sestinas in The Blue Boat and the movement toward variations on the sonnet in recent works also. Maybe the sonnets please me most right now.
R&T: Could you give us a look at a typical day in your life including writing rituals and preferences?
Bourque: There are no "typical" days in my writing life. Many of my poems first come to me on my morning run but there are many mornings when the poems stay far away. I write lots in workshops and retreats that I direct. I nearly always write the poems in longhand first and then go to the computer for lineation and revision. I don’t think I ever know what the poem will look like until I get it into the computer. "Printed" lineation and form is so much clearer on the computer than they are on the handwritten page.
R&T: Does your wife mind that you have groupies?
Bourque: I don’t think she does but we never talk about that. Our conversations are always about other things. She loves my work and supports every aspect of it, just as I love her work as a glass artist and support her immense creativity and artistry.
R&T: Is there a secret you can share with other poets?
Bourque: I don’t know that this response has anything to do with secrets, but I do know that I cannot write convincingly about anything that I am not passionate about. I have to have a vested interest in the work or it ends up in the trash bin.
R&T: Do you believe there is a connection between dreams and writing poetry?
Bourque: I think the process that governs the two is very similar. I think the imaginative operations are the same. This is not original with me or restricted to poetry; John Dufresne says much the same thing about dreams and fiction; we see the "dream" operation as a method of narrative in much drama and film (Pedro Almodovar, Frederico Fellini, Samuel Beckett, etc). In the new work I have a series of dream poems that attests to the "connection": "The Gypsy's Dream," "The Arum Lilies in My Mother's Dream," "Turtle Dreams," and others.
R&T: What did I forget to ask that you'd like to address, if anything?
Bourque: Something I wish I had done as PL that I did not do: I would like to get more poems on Public Radio. I have a small segment on KRVS (88.7 FM--Lafayette, Lake Charles---KRVS.org) called "From the Poet's Laureate's Bookshelf.” It runs on Thursday afternoons at about 3:20 pm and it is a little five minute or so segment. I wish there was more of this kind of programming on National Public Radio. Little interjections between regular programming so that the community could hear the poets of their region, their state, their nation. Garrison Keillor does some of that kind of thing on his Writer's Almanac and he reads poems sometimes on Prairie Home Companion but it seems to me that Public Radio could be a conduit for getting poems on the airwaves and into the heads of the listeners, who seem to me to be the right audience for poetry.
Angie Ledbetter is Co-Editor/Publisher of Rose & Thorn Journal. You can visit her in the blogsphere at GumboWriter or in Twitterville at Angie Ledbetter .
We really appreciate you doing the interview with Rose & Thorn, Dr. Bourque. I'll be reading your lovely words over and over for inspiration.
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How true, you have to be passiionate about a subject to write about it.
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