A few places have been kind enough to interview me about my work.
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Although not an interview per se, I have a brief essay about the process of writing of one of my sonnets from State Sonnets as part of an Encyclopedia of Wisconsin Forms and Formalists, edited by Michael Kriesel for Verse Wisconsin #104.
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In August 2010, I was interviewed by Mark Metcalf for a podcast put out by Third Coast Digest, Milwaukee's premier arts and culture webzine. We talked about State Sonnets, Birds of Wisconsin, Drag: Twenty Short Poems about Smoking, and exactly how an actuary becomes a poet, among other things. Check it out!
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On September 14th, 2009, Marilyn Taylor (Wisconsin's Poet Laureate) and I were interviewed about our work with sonnets on "Lake Effect," a local show on Milwaukee's NPR affiliate WUWM 89.7 FM. You can listen to or download it here by scrolling down to "The Modern Sonnet." The interview was in anticipation of our all-sonnet reading at Boswell Book Company and my book of sonnets that travel across the U.S. and beyond, State Sonnets from sunnyoutside.
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Charles Nevsimal, editor and publisher of Centennial Press, asked me some questions about Mead Lake, This and beyond upon its release in November of 2007. You can read the interview here.
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In 2006, Phong Nguyen, then editor-in-chief for Cream City Review, interviewed me as the inaugural Local Feature for the magazine. The feature included an interview, an artist's statement, and six selections from my manuscript of prose poetry about videogames, But Our Princess Is in Another Castle. You can read two of those poems, "Perfect Dark" and "Rad Racer," on the Poems page. I've pasted the interview below. Thanks to Phong for agreeing to reprint the interview here and current editor-in-chief Jay Johnson for sending me the file.
B.J. Best grew up in a rural area outside of West Bend, Wisconsin, a small city located about forty-five miles northwest of Milwaukee, on the shores of Big Cedar Lake, absorbing the lake and its environs, “squalls curtaining the lake, black wind that drove the sailboats, the timetable for the migration of seagulls, how to argue with neighbors about which exact day the ice went out.”
Best went to school at Drake University in Des Moines and majored in actuarial science. After graduation, he “floundered” at a health insurance company in Milwaukee for six months, followed by floundering for six months at a life insurance company in Freeport, Illinois (official motto: “Pretzel City, USA”). Best attended the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied with Carl Phillips and Mary Jo Bang.
Other than his education in Des Moines, St. Louis, and Pretzel City, Best has always lived in Wisconsin. He bought the Depression-era cottage-cum-house on the lake from his parents, and where he lives with his wife Erin, and cats Simon and Garfunkel, and the menagerie of insects that wriggle into their home in the summer.
CCR: Birds, Video games. Is there any connecting thread there?
BJB: [laughing] Not really. I’m a sucker for themes. And I find it a lot easier when I have a theme to work with, because it helps me generate the material. I find it harder to write a poem about one thing, and then move onto the next thing. I also like the concept of themes in terms of a book: to be able to say, “here’s a unified presentation of work that coheres in some way,” rather than “here’s a poem, and here’s a poem, and here’s a poem.” The arc of books like that doesn’t necessarily add up to something greater than the poems themselves.
CCR: Tell me about the first long-poem you published, Crap.
BJB: Crap was a unique experience. I am a member of a writing group; it’s called Mead Lake’s Most Wanted. There are four of us and we are all from the West Bend area. We were meeting at a friend of a friend’s cottage on Lake Tichigan, which is in the middle of nowhere in Racine County. We all have typewriters, and we sit together and we bang out poems.
Our theme for that weekend was tarot cards. We wrote about tarot cards, and it was nice to have something to look at, and to write about. It started out as an exercise: the exercise was to write a poem in a response to a poem by someone else. The poem I chose was Garbage by A. R. Ammons. I chose it because I never really got it. And I thought that writing in response to it would help me understand it. Crap is all in couplets just like Garbage is, and, obviously, you know, Crap and Garbage.
I wrote this typewritten and it was 13 pages, in the course of 48 hours, and it was probably the closest I’ve ever felt to being “in the zone” for an extended period of time. I’m in favor of revision, but the way it came out was pretty much like that. It is pretty much a record of what was going on. Strangely, the theme of Crap is ultimately God and holiness. It is the tension between the base and the divine. It began intended as a joke, but it turned into something very different, and in some ways holy, in kind of an irreverent sort of way.
CCR: There is the same tension in The Birds of Wisconsin, and in some ways in But Our Princess Is in Another Castle, too, between the holy and the senseless. Is that a source of your poetic inspiration?
BJB: It is the tension between the two. I think it is hard to find grace and hard to find holiness. My own personal relationship with God is very tortured. I don’t subscribe to any particular organized religion, but I would like to believe in spirituality and holiness. With all the trouble, the pain, the difficulty in the world, I think an honest person needs to question how it works, and what it means to be holy, and how one is spiritual. So it is that tension which drives me. I find it fascinating, because I find traditional religions somewhat dissatisfying, but I’d like to be satisfied with something. And I think that the best poetry does approach the holy, or the beautiful. After all, what is the divine if not the beautiful and true?
CCR: You mentioned A. R. Ammons and the difficulty of accessing some of his poetry. There’s a lot written in the public discourse about the tension between the accessible and inaccessible. What are your thoughts on that?
BJB: It’s challenging. Personally, I feel that I’ve gone through both ends of the spectrum. I went through the MFA program in Washington University, and the encouragement there was to be on the academic, densely packed side of things. There are poems that I call Faberge egg poems. If you look at them the wrong way, they break. They are pretty to look at, but they don’t do anything.
So I have sympathies more on the accessible side of things, but I think you can be both accessible and very artful about it. Accessible doesn’t always mean plain language and lack of imagery, or just “telling it how it is.” I think you can have both, and that is one of the things that attracts me to the prose poem format. It is more accessible. People are not intimidated by reading paragraphs. And it crafts more of a logical narrative that people can follow. A lot of these Faberge egg poems are lyrics and fleeting sensations.
CCR: You said that one reason to write prose poetry is accessibility. What are other reasons for writing prose poetry?
BJB: A lot of the poems in Your Princess is in Another Castle are narrative, and some of them are longer, like “Super Mario Brothers.” If I were to lineate that, it would be a very long poem, and the form doesn’t demand it. So in telling these stories, it makes sense to tell them in paragraph format.
The other things that I like—which are usually reserved for lineated poetry— are the imaginative leaps that happen in a prose poem, which are that much more powerful, because you expect prose to follow a very logical sense of direction, so sometimes when sentences make a big leap, or don’t directly refer to something, it creates a disconnect. It’s more powerful because it’s unexpected.
CCR: How long has your poetry group been meeting?
BJB: We will celebrate three years in February. Every six months we go away and have a retreat, usually in a cottage on the lake in northern Wisconsin. We are there for a week, and it amazes me how hard we work. I mean, we write for ten hours a day, as opposed to men going up north and drinking beer. Sometimes our wives think that’s what we’re doing. It’s an inspiration to do it. Especially since, for some of the other gentlemen, it’s just not a part of their life. They enjoy doing it, but it is the only time they would be doing it.
Our group was featured on the cover of the West Bend Daily News recently: “Poets keep beatnik spirit alive.” That’s what I like best about being a writer in small-town Wisconsin—that it’s interesting enough to be news, that we aren’t written off as dreamy weirdoes or pretentious blowhards.
CCR: What is the role of memorization for poetry is for you. You memorize your own poetry, obviously. Do you also memorize poetry you like?
BJB: It comes from repeated exposure to them. I like revisiting them, and reading them. The reason I like memorizing poems, or parts of poems, is that… well, one, they say cool things, and you can quote them at the right time… but I’m very attuned to the language and the pacing and the sound, and not on a technical level, like “oh, this is in iambic pentameter, so I’m going to write in iambic pentameter,” but rather, “how does this sound in my head”? I can hear it in my head without reading it aloud.
By doing that, and by ingraining that in my memory, you get those patterns. Like, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.” You get that feeling, that sound. I really care about the rhythm and the sound. It helps me. Though, as I said, it’s a very intuitive way of going about it.
CCR: You said that you do ekphrastic poetry. What is the role of the visual in poetry?
BJB: In many ways these video game poems are ekphrastic poetry. Ekphrastic poetry for the 21st century, but ekphrastic poetry nonetheless.
In my mind, all poetry needs to contain strong images. You need to be able to see what’s going on one way or another . The stronger the images—the more specific the images—the better. For paintings, it’s all there: it’s all imagery, and we interpret the story behind it. It works really well, the painting provides the imagery, and the inventive part is to provide the story behind it, keying off of details from the painting, or, in this case, the video game.
There’s a pretty strong tradition of ekphrastic poetry. Also, part of the reason is that sometimes poets get charged with, “I don’t get it; I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Whereas, if you read Anne Sexton’s “Starry Night,” everbody has seen Starry Night, and if you haven’t, you can go look at Starry Night. Or “Musee des Beaux Arts,” you can go look Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Sometimes it’s nice to have an illustration to go along with the poem.
Video games work the same way. Everybody knows who Mario is, and Luigi, and my sense is that everybody can picture something from the Super Mario Brothers video game.
It’s a shared experience, as opposed to “it’s me talking about my fleeting problems and emotions.” There’s something common there, which is very useful.
CCR: Now, your series of poems “The Prayer of Birds” was featured in Porcupine, and now you have this feature in Cream City Review. This emphasis on local literature: is it by design?
BJB: It’s not by design. I certainly respect and admire the journals that are in Wisconsin, because if you can’t support them, who can you support?
My ultimate goal is to become a national poet with national recognition. But it makes me happy to be recognized here because I’m Wisconsin through and through. As I said, I live in the house I grew up in.
The bird book is titled Birds of Wisconsin, and is all about the birds of Wisconsin. And about Owen Gromme, who is Wisconsin through and through, as well. He painted a book called Birds of Wisconsin, so that is clearly very Wisconsin-based. The video game stuff is totally opposite, because video games utterly lack a locale. Except, maybe, Japan, kind of. They’re intentionally locale-less. They are fictional kingdoms, or fictional warzones, or fictional cities. But only recently have video games become specific about where they are. Vice City, for example, takes place in Miami, circa 1980.
CCR: Do you read Wisconsin poetry?
BJB: I keep current with the journals. Along with Porcupine and Cream City Review, I subscribe to Free Verse, which is kind of the clearinghouse for Wisconsin poetry. She focuses intently on Wisconsin poetry.
It’s only been very recently I’ve become active in the state poetry scene. I’m a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets know, and I went to my first convention in Wisconsin in April, and I’m coming to know more of the players there. I enjoy the work of Karl Elder, for example. He does themes, as well. “Here’s a series of poems about the alphabet; here’s a series of poems about the states and what the states look like.”
CCR: What was your entry-point into poetry?
BJB: Like most people, I wanted to write poetry well before I wanted to read poetry. I spent a lot of my freshman year from college, separated from the high school girlfriend, writing this sappy, crappy rhyming poetry, and it was just awful. But I didn’t know any better. And when I think about it, outside of graduate school, that was probably the most seriously I ever wrote. I wrote a lot.
I took my first Intro to Poetry course and all of a sudden I was introduced to real poetry and real poets. But the person who really told me that perhaps I should take it seriously was my senior year workshop teacher, whose name is David Wolf. He teaches at Simpson College now.
We had a nice, reasonably thick anthology with contemporary American poets, White, Bishop, and Plath, Soto, whomever else. I was having a good time, and doing some good stuff, and he kind of pulled me aside one day and said, “You know what, you should do this.” It had never occurred to me. I was in actuarial science, and I was going to be an actuary and make all the money that actuaries do. I was an actuary for a year, and I more or less hated it, then I called him up, and we met to talk about where I was going to study. He was the one who really made me take my poetry seriously, rather than as a hobby.
CCR: Going back to the Wisconsin thing, how would you characterize the state of poetry in Wisconsin? The way poetry is written in Wisconsin—is it any different from the national
BJB: I think, comparatively, there is a lot of nature poetry, which isn’t terribly surprising. There’s a lot of local poetry—poems about Lake Michigan and Northern Wisconsin in general, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Wisconsin is a supportive area for poetry. Especially Milwaukee, there are some good reading opportunities. I get weekly emails from the WFOP, and there’s always something going on, every week, that has to do with poetry. There are small things in small towns that I might not get to, but there’s definitely a committed group of individuals, who are committed to listening to, reading, and writing poetry in Wisconsin. Looking at it from that viewpoint, I think that poetry in Wisconsin is pretty strong.
The Midwestern work ethic and political conservatism flow strongly in our part of the state, but the general reception I get is that writing is work as good and honest as even the most traditional vocations here (farm or factory). When I told my parents I was leaving the fairly lucrative actuarial profession to study poetry, they didn’t protest or counsel against the idea. Wisconsinites remain progressive enough to believe that those who struggle with grandiose ideas of Truth and Beauty should be taken seriously.