Poet of the Week: Allyson Whipple
Allyson Whipple grew up in
Ohio, earning her B.A. in English from Kenyon College, and her M.A. in English
from Case Western Reserve University. She came to Austin in 2008, and has spent
the past four years being inspired by the landscape. Her poems have most
recently appeared in
Southern Women's Review and
TRIVIA: Voices
of Feminism, and is forthcoming in the 2013
Texas Poetry Calendar. Allyson
also is the founder and primary author of
literaryaustin.com,
a blog she started to help promote local authors, publishers, and booksellers.
You can read more about her work at
http://allysonmwhipple.wordpress.com
Questions for Allyson
1.
What inspires you as a poet?
Motion. While I identify myself as a poet of place, my work
primarily involves moving through the settings of my work. In particular, I
write a lot of poems about driving; few things get me thinking about poems like
driving down a country highway on a beautiful day. Even if I'm not writing
about travel, various locations around Texas make their way into my work. And
my favorite poets all drive me to work harder: Paul Allen, Carrie Fountain,
Barbara Hamby, Audre Lorde, Naomi Shihab Nye, Abe Louise Young, Mary Oliver,
and Walt Whitman.
2.
What advice do you have for other poets?
1) Write every day, but also know when you need some time
off. The regular habit is very important, but it's also vital to know when
you're burned out and need to direct your energies elsewhere. Don't beat
yourself up if you need to take a break. You'll be better off for it.
2) You can fit poetry into your daily life. Even if you only
get a 30-minute lunch break at your day job, that's enough to draft a short
poem. You really will be surprised what you can fit even into fifteen minutes a
day.
3) When revising, read your work aloud. That is the best
advice a teacher has given me. Few people enjoy doing it, but it's
essential.
3.
What prompted you to start writing poetry?
When I was twelve, I one day had the urge to write a poem,
and the rest is history. No, I don't know where that urge came from. It just
happened. Of course, that first poem wasn't any good, but it was the start of a
very fruitful life.
4.
Where do you see yourself going in the future as a poet?
I'll probably be working on poems of place for a while yet,
especially because I have two projects in place that revolve around that theme.
But I've also begun to probe the fields of physics and mathematics for fresh
inspiration. I'd also like to start branching out into more political poetry in
the future. My goals are to write, revise, and publish as much as possible, and
to always keep growing artistically.
5.
What are your favorite poetry journals?
I'm a devoted subscriber to The Kenyon Review. I also
have an affinity for Front Porch, Bat City Review, and Gulf
Coast. What I love more than journals, though, is investing in chapbooks.
They're usually cheaper than books and journals, and it's a great way to get
exposure to poets you might not otherwise encounter. I have found some amazing
treasures by going to a bookstore and getting an assortment of chapbooks.
6.
Can you tell us a little
about the poems your chose to present today? What inspired them maybe, or
anything else you’d like to say about them.
"Goldfinch" is a poem of ambivalence. Many of my
poems are. This one is a love poem, but it's not. The emotions in it are not
straightforward. Nature is not straightforward. That's a theme I love to
explore in poetry: ambivalence, and the fact that emotions like love or anger
get complicated, because a situation is so rarely black and white.
"Traversing Houston by Bus" is dedicated to my
dance partner, because without him, the poem wouldn't have been written. He
found out about a west coast swing event happening in Houston in October of
2010, and encouraged me to join him. Part of the festivities involved getting
on a party bus with a bunch of other dancers, and doing a west coast swing
flash mob around town. You wouldn't know it from the poem, though. That weekend
was more than just dancing, and that's where the poem comes in. That was the
weekend when I really began to feel as though I belonged in Texas. I fit in
here, to the point where a city I'd despised for two years (Houston) was
starting to feel like home -- or, at the very least, the kind of place for
which I could find a begrudging respect.
"You Can See The Silence" is one of my favorite
pieces of my career up to this point, and certainly my favorite of all my Texas
poems. It came out of one of the exercises in Wingbeats: Exercises and
Practice in Poetry, written on a hot summer night when it was too stuffy to
go outside, but being cooped up in the air conditioning had me restless. It was
one of those rare poems that was close to finished on the first draft. The
whole thing just coalesced.
Allyson Whipple Poetry
Goldfinch
The female goldfinch
is dull, brown, paltry-colored, the
males are summer-yellow
and she resents the
built-in protection
nature has arranged without her
consent,
frumpy
next to the other half
of her species
(They might all
look the same on the outside but
beneath their feathers
they are individually
fascinating.)
Yes she
might need to blend in
but she would rather have had a
choice in her body,
who cares if she is
unfit, who cares if she
does not pass on her DNA?
This goldfinch
does not
fly yet -
though she has
taken time to
develop wings,
build muscles,
grow feathers -
all she needs now is
confidence to
lift her in the air
but in her mind she
does not have the
instinct
Your goldfinch
is
defective, she does not
nest, she builds in July
and by August
she destroys her work,
starts anew
in a fit of boredom.
Just as she
molts
twice a year, drops bland
feathers in clumps and patches,
she needs
to shed everything
she has done before -
needs the potential
of new beginnings.
Your goldfinch
loves -
if birds can love -
Romantic, to
think that
birds might have
emotions,
but especially passion for
their partners,
these mates with whom they
develop identical calls
(humans look alike as they
age together, but finches
develop one voice)
What do we know
about birds,
what do we know
about the couple next door?
Traversing Houston By Bus for John Burroughs
Squares are the only geometry
that make sense to me,
graph paper the only part of
math class I liked, wasting
time filling in the
spaces with pencil, going
darker and darker, making welts
on the other side of the page,
creating designs
rather than correct answers.
Maybe if I hadn't been so intent
on filling in the blanks, if I had paid attention
to circles and ovals,
to circumference,
I wouldn't get so
disoriented here, wouldn't be so dizzy.
Maybe if I had been receptive
to soft lines and curves
I wouldn't be dependent on right
angles for navigation.
Maybe I'd
be able to make sense of the pulse, the unstructured sky,
the arterial overpasses.
This city loops
around a spoke
of veined highways,
overlapping asphalt,
and a cracking concrete center which
I pass over, under, around, through
again and again
unable to find the heart.
You can see the silence
It's still too hot
for the neighbors
to walk their dogs.
It's just late enough
for the children
to have gone to bed.
And on Sunday
nobody becomes
a raucous
poolside drunk.
I can't take much more
than the air
conditioner hum.
I've been driven from
the bedroom of my
musician, who never
stops playing or
listening. Raw
notes emanate
all night long.
I'm tempted
to step outside.
But this is Texas
where the stars
won't cool you down.
This is Texas, where summer
heat makes gossip
rise like dough.
This is Texas
where neighbors read
your business
from your shadow.
