Chapter 1: What experiences influenced Brian Turner's poetry?
Nearby, an old woman cradles her grandson, whispering, rocking him on her knees as though singing him to sleep, her hands wet with their blood, her black dress soaked in it as her legs give out and she buckles with him to the ground.
If you'd asked her 40 years earlier if she could see herself, an old woman, begging by the roadside for money, here, with a bomb exploding at the market among all these people, she'd have said, to have your heart broken one last time before dying, to kiss a child given sight of a life you could never live, it's impossible. This isn't the way we die.
You're listening to a Scottish Poetry Library podcast.
Hello, this is Jennifer Williams, program manager at the Scottish Poetry Library, and I'm really pleased to be sitting across from the American poet Brian Turner. Brian is here in particular at the Stanza Poetry Festival, which is just coming up in a few days, and
actually by the time you hear this it probably will have happened already but we're so delighted that we're getting to talk to Brian and would like to say that this is recorded in association with Stanza Scotland's International Poetry Festival and would have been recorded at Stanza 2014 but due to some scheduling issues and the lucky coincidence that Brian happened to be in the poetry library today we're just going to go ahead and do it today so that's fabulous Brian is a poet and essayist and a professor
He won the 2005 Beatrice Holley Award for his debut collection, Here, Bullet. And that was the first of many awards and honors for that collection, which got quite a lot of attention, I think, in the press. And his honors since include a Lennon Literary Fellowship, an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowe Poetry Traveling Scholarship, all sorts of wonderful awards.
His second collection, shortlisted for the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize, is Phantom Noise. And These books were published by Alice James Books in the States and by Blood X Books in the UK so actually I was delighted because I could pull them right off the shelf here in the Poetry Library and I did just want to mention as well that
Brian has a memoir coming out with Jonathan Cape this year, and so we're very pleased that he's going to be back in Edinburgh in August at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, so we will make sure this is out before then, so hopefully if you haven't caught him at Stanza, you'll definitely be able to see him at the book festival this year.
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Chapter 2: How does Brian Turner describe the writing process for his poems?
But anyway, Brian, I just read Here Bullet a couple weeks ago, and I was so blown away... I was very moved by it, and I literally did laugh and cry while reading it. I thought it was such a powerful and really both heart-rending and exquisitely beautiful collection, and it had a wonderful kind of shape and wholeness to it.
So we're going to get to hear, I think, some poems from that collection and maybe from Phantom Note as well, and talk a little bit about them. But I'll let you read a poem first, and then we can talk about it.
This is called Here Bullet. If a body is what you want, then here is bone and gristle and flesh. Here is the clavicle-snapped wish, the aorta's open valves, the leap thought makes at the synaptic gap. Here is the adrenaline rush you crave, that inexorable flight, that insane puncture into heat and blood.
And I dare you to finish what you've started, because here, bullet, here is where I complete the word you bring, hissing through the air. Here is where I moan the barrel's cold esophagus, triggering my tongue's explosives for the rifling I have inside of me. Each twist of the round spun deeper, because here, bullet, here's where the world ends every time.
It's great to hear it in your voice.
It's a bizarre poem. I still struggle with it.
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Chapter 3: What themes are explored in Brian Turner's collection 'Here, Bullet'?
I guess what I mean by that is I'm still learning from my own poem, because I guess that echoes Frost's maxim to, no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader, no surprise in the writer, and so on. But this poem, the beginning of it, I wrote this poem listening to Queens of the Stone Age, and I was in Mosul in northern Iraq. It was 2004, and we were back at the base, and I wrote it.
It's one of the quickest poems I've ever written, about 10 or 15 minutes. And I've told this story many times, but I folded it up, put it in a Ziploc bag, and carried it in my chest pocket the rest of the time that I was in country. But it's actually one of the longest poems it's ever taken me to write.
And I didn't realize this because I told that first part of the story for several years or a couple years. And then I realized that Queens of the Stone Age was throwing me off. That I assumed that because I was listening to that music in my headphones, that that's the rhythm, sort of the pulse in the poem. But really it was more like wallpaper music to block out the noise of the world around me.
And... If I sort of rewound myself to years before when I was at Fresno State in California, I was a machinist going to college, and I was in a band, and I was taking a couple of poetry classes, and I heard about this guy Phil Levine. He had national book awards and became the poet laureate of the United States.
He taught on the campus, and I knew there was some famous poet guy, Phil Levine, but I had never read a single poem by him, didn't know he was...
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Chapter 4: How does music influence Brian Turner's poetry?
I just knew he was some famous poet. And another poet, a colleague of mine, a peer, a student, he stopped me as I was walking across campus when Andres Montoya, who has since passed away, but he handed me a poem of Phil's, which was They Feed Their Lion, which starts...
Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter, out of black bean and wet slate bread, out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar, out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies, they lie and grow. And then if you listen to my poem. If a body is what you want, then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish, the aorta's open valves, the leap thought makes at the synaptic gap. Here is the adrenaline rush you crave. So there's definitely a beat pulse that's similar.
And that list, that sense of a kind of list that's pushing you forward, driving you forward through the poem.
Definitely the list, and there's a beat pulse inside it that's not quite exact, but it's pretty close. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it's definitely the branch growing from the tree, you know, definitely in conversation with this poem.
It's interesting, isn't it? And these things, you know, they're like little... they can be sort of wonderful.
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Chapter 5: What role does memory play in Brian Turner's writing?
I'm thinking of like the word worm, but that sounds horrible. But you know those little bits of songs that go into your head and circle around and around and around, and you don't even know. And sometimes I worry about that with poetry, that you write a line, and you think, oh, that's a great line, and then you wonder, I hope that's not something I write all the time.
Well, I mean, it goes right to like Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influences. I don't really have that anxiety, because I think if I'm, in a sense, if we end up, um, mimicking, um, the music that's handed down to us, then it's good practice.
Yes.
You know? Um, but still working towards our own poems. And at some point, hopefully, like, I, I don't, I feel this is my poem, Hear Bullet.
Mm-hmm.
But I can see where it comes from. Yeah. I can, well, I can't see, I can hear where it comes from. And, and that's very much when you said song and the wheels inside, that kind of, these gears and levers and our bodies are the instrument of the music.
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Chapter 6: How does Brian Turner view the relationship between poetry and war?
Mm-hmm.
So we carry the music inside and if we carry wonderful pieces from other people in time, I think we can find ways that they can become rooted in our own lives. And when we need to lean on that music, hopefully the best outcome might be that the music will be transmuted through us and find its own way into a space that we need for ourselves and maybe someone else will be able to share.
You know what I mean? It's part of the that's a really convoluted sentence but I'm just saying there's an inheritance we have hopefully we can take it and take it another step further and then share it with those beyond us and they'll do the work they need to do I studied Louis Glick's poetry when I was an undergraduate and
I think I became so in love with it that I... I remember crying once reading one of her books because I just thought, this is so beautiful to me and I'll never be able to do this. And then I think I found, not realizing it, that I went through a phase of... I could see myself writing in a manner, you know, a kind of echo of her... It's the sound of it, really, you know.
I could hear myself breaking lines almost in a Glyckian way or something. And then it was... I think then you, if you can sort of work through that and keep working with that, you can then hopefully still, yeah, it's like you've taken the best of that into yourself, but also combined it with your own voice to make it something new. Yeah. Yeah, that's so joyful, I think.
I mean, I've talked to poets a lot about this funny feeling when a poem comes very quickly. that sometimes they seem to fall out almost whole, especially when they have those quick ones, you know, and it can feel almost like, have I done that?
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Chapter 7: What insights does Brian Turner share about the power of language?
You know, what it was telling me. But I think the way you describe that seems very accurate to me, that it's actually, it seems very quick, but it's the accumulation of an enormous amount of thinking and feeling that then suddenly, you know, pops out. Pops out of the toaster.
And it's hard because we have, you know, we've been, we carry, we are the vehicle of the music, we're the instrument our entire lives. So, you know, from the first sort of, first time we hear language and start to produce it ourselves up until now, whatever that might be for us, the cab driver talking, yelling at the car on the street,
the English professor quote in Shakespeare, all of them mash together in each of us in their own ways. And so we have to, where is our voice in that? And so it could be a struggle to figure out what have I written? I think I've created one word myself. I've made it from one word. And I've yet to get it into a poem. Can you tell us what it is? Chal. I have something called Chal to the Grit.
Chapter 8: What future projects are on the horizon for Brian Turner?
Chaw, C-H-A-W-L. I used to be a machinist, and it just seems like the right word for when metal and a tool bit comes up against metal, but it sort of stutters across it. Yes. Like Chaw's at the bit. Great. But I tried to use that in a poem, and the editor said, you can't just have a made-up word. Why not? There needs to be a word for that. Yes, yes.
They were all made up once upon a time.
Right.
Nobody had to make one.
So I'd like to add one to the dictionary, just one.
Yes.
The Scottish word makar or maker, the idea of making. Yeah. Yeah, we should be involved in that process.
Yes. I think it's a poet's... I would say it's a poet's right. If the word doesn't exist for the thing you're trying to talk about, go ahead and make it up.
Right.
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