When did you start writing poetry?
The fall semester of my sophomore year I took “Intro to Poetry” with Professor Mark McMorris, who eventually became my advisor for my thesis project. McMorris’s class was the first time I did any serious poetry writing.
Describe your thesis project.
My project utilizes both experimental poetry and hybrid forms. The first semester, I was experimenting with different forms of lineation. I would split lines in new ways. I would write without using any capital letters. One poem might have no punctuation, while another would be over-punctuated.
The goal was to see what principles of generation would lead to a product that says something new. Something that comes from me.
Before, I thought poetry just meant Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. But the contemporary stuff is very different. It did things that I literally did not know you could do with language. I saw new possibilities for what could happen on a page and I got drawn in really quickly. It was fascinating.
There was a point when I hit a brick wall and went to Professor Dinaw Mengestu for help. Professor Mengestu’s background is in fiction rather than poetry, and he started asking me questions about how I distinguished the [six] different characters from each other. These were questions that you would normally ask of a piece of fiction, and I didn’t really have answers.
I decided the best thing to do was to cut out everything that was not important to the poem and in the process, all of the characters were flushed into these two people: Susan and Sam.
Could you walk me through your writing process?
I was working on the piece for over a year. That does not mean that I had anything that resembled one of the pages from my final work until like three weeks before it was due. From August until March, I was simply trying to develop a voice.
Plugging information into a pre-existing form, such as a sonnet, didn’t cut it for me. I needed to develop my own template, which took months and months of work. At times my advisor, Professor McMorris, was pretty concerned with the direction I was taking. For awhile, I even seriously considered switching to a prose project.
The final piece is a series of 32 prose-poems. Each prose-poem is a little paragraph, between 100 and 150 words. Each text in the poem is numbered 1-32.
Talk about your influences.
Last fall [Jorie Graham] spoke at Georgetown, and she said poets should be careful not to get “stuck in their own music.” Some people find a way of writing, get stuck on it, and it haunts them. Generating experimental forms is my way of avoiding that trap of writing inside a comfort zone.
-Excerpts from “One Is Two Is You Is”
Featured image via Girl Holding a Paint Brush
Bryan McTiernan (COL ’14) is known as the original “weirdo with the beard-o.”
