Philip Brady is a poet, professor, and editor whom I've had the good fortune to know in all three of these capacities, and he is someone I always learn from, whether by reading his works or by listening to him talk. In the last two years, while dealing with a very ill son, spending weeks in hospitals, I found myself falling out of love with poetry. But there were a few important exceptions. Philip Brady is one of them--his work is both personal and mysterious, lyrical and beautiful crafted. And his poems speak to me. So, when I began chatting and emailing with the poet and Etruscan intern, Amanda Rabaduex, and discovered we share an admiration for Dr. Brady's work and a curiosity about his practice and process, I decided to put together this two-part interview.
Carmel
by Philip Brady
Why do we turn away from the eternal?
Robinson Jeffers asked. The Pacific surf,
crashing against the inscape of his skull,
washed off brine and starfish, and left,
turn from the eternal. Frail vowels
spiral into the cerulean sky
so vast it seems almost believable
there is no other we. No turning away.
I am in thrall to the inhuman voice
chanting the mantra beyond silence:
turn eternal. Drown your secret loss.
Let every moment achieve utterance.
Even the stones of Tor House mark the seconds
between the rasping slant rhymes of the ocean.
AR: Why poetry?
We could talk about the only art that has no native means of apprehension (reading is breathless; listening cannot scan). We could talk about the yaw between lines inviting the unutterable. We could cite political and cultural revolution or say that poetry is the only art where what’s inside gets said, unmediated. We could talk about transgressing against capitalist values: so much genius and effort lavished on artifacts which have so little commerce.
But I want to share something H.L Hix has written—not about what poetry expresses but how it emerges from a source which warms and illumines.
To live by poetry. Which of course I want to read in more than one sense; live robustly and fully by means of poetry; order one’s life according to values derived from poetry; live in proximity to poetry.
AR: Is there a form you feel most comfortable writing? Do you like to experiment?
Writing is not, for me, a comfortable activity. It’s based on a paradox. A. Writing is hard. B. It’s supposed to look easy. As Yeats says, “A line will take us hours maybe / But if it does not seem a moment’s thought / Our stitching and unstitching have been nought.” For this paradoxical state of affairs (A & B) I blame Homer. Before he started to “articulate sweet sounds together” on the page, bards rocked and chanted, feeding the voice, and the voice fed the utterance. Or that’s the way I dream it. But I write crouched over a screen with my eyes watering and sudden beeps from Facebook and my right foot going numb, and everything has to be constructed and verified and revised down to the nub.
As for experimentation, often we think of modes of writing as expressive of a belief system: movements such as post-modernist vs. neo-formalist. They harden into postures, emerging, we assume, from conviction or temperament. But in my life prosody has shifted with age. The young man I was yearned to break out of his body, off the page. Lines jumped and high-stepped and enjambed. Now I am old, I want to hold things together, not “withering into the truth” but gyrating inward, with crazed balance, like a slinky on the fritz.
AR: What was the best advice you were ever given about writing?
I love what Jerome Rothenberg says about writing, “I write those poems which I have not found elsewhere, and for whose existence I feel a deep need.” Rothenberg connects his composition and reading, which makes him a great writer and a great editor.
NA: Did you have any idea what you were getting into when you became an editor?
Before I became an editor, I was a teacher and a reader. But reading manuscripts as an editor is very different from receiving them as a teacher, where your job is to nurture and instruct, or as a reader, where you can appreciate and be instructed. Readers can screen. We peruse the codex: the colophon, the pedigree, the blurbs that confirm value with words like “luminous” and “sublime,” the mysterious or catchy titles: Return to a Room Lit By a Glass of Milk, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, Autonecrophilia, The Book of Orgasms, or What Narcissism Means to Me. By the time we open the book and scan the creamy page with its noble Garamond, we are prepared to give each poem what William Stafford called “a certain kind of attention.”
These conditions do not prevail in the editor’s office. Editors receive only a brief cover and we must address the draft of the internationally unknown poet without the benefit of context. No book, no reviews, and certainly no rarity. There are thousands. They have no reticence. They come, as Philip Dacey says, “so encumbered.”
Reading unsolicited manuscripts mars editors. Print is limitless. If you are not an editor, you may have no idea of how many serviceable poems are making their doleful rounds. At conferences or bars or beaches or subway platforms, we editors pass one another and nod in silence, recognizing the vampiric gaze and slow shamble of the endless scroll.
NA: What are you working on now? Could we see a short poem or an excerpt of your new or recent work?
I have two on-going projects. The first is an anthology, co-edited with Shanta Lee Gander. It’s called Sign & Breath: Voice & the Literary Tradition and will be published by Etruscan in 2023, and I’m delighted that you are contributing, Nin.
Here’s a description:
What is Poetry? If the question brings a sigh or cringe, it may be because myriad attempts at definition all have one thing in common: they divide. If poetry is one thing, it is not another. If it is formal, it is not free; if prophetic, not quotidian; if lineated, not sentenced. And so on.
This new critical anthology, Sign & Breath, takes a different approach. Rather than define poetry as a genre with conventions, traditions, codes, and modalities, this book regards poetry as a faculty that thrums in all written and spoken art. That faculty precedes any genre, as utterance precedes the alphabet. It striates all verbal and literary art. It is sound beneath text; its rhythms curve time and striate narrative. Its signature is that undefinable quality we call “voice.”
Sign & Breath is an anthology of artists giving voice. 50 contemporary artists each offer one page that sings in any genre. Contributors represent diverse traditions, from Page and Spoken Word Poetry, to Rap, to prose fiction and memoir, to song lyrics. Following each entry is a discussion by the author about the role of voice in composition and presentation. In addition, the text will link to a virtual platform featuring performance videos and author interviews, to be hosted here.
This book will contribute to a dialogue among genres which will reframe understanding of poetry as an aesthetic experience of language. With one page that sings in any genre, Sign & Breath presents a new, inclusive perspective: poetry as voice.
My other project in progress is a sequence of poems, called Jamb, which uses seven syllable lines to play with the notion that enjambment is a central technique in modern poetry—resisting connection, syntax, and narrative, and opening a place “where lines quaver to appear/ less incomplete and fracture/ assures nothing happens—not/that no thing takes place but that/ Nothing is actually/enacted…”
And here’s a link to recent work.
Philip Brady’s newest book is The Elsewhere: Poems & Poetics (Broadstone, 2021). He is the author of two essay collections, Phantom Signs and By Heart from the University of Tennessee Press; a book-length poem, To Banquet with the Ethiopians, a memoir, To Prove My Blood, and three previous books of poetry. He has edited a critical book on James Joyce and an anthology of contemporary poetry.
Brady’s work has received the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press; a ForeWord Magazine Gold Medal; an Ohioana Poetry Award; the Ohio Governor’s Award; six Individual Artist Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council; and Thayer and Newhouse Fellowships from New York State.
Brady has taught at University College Cork, on Semester at Sea, at the University of Ibadan, and as a Peace Corps Volunteer at the National University of Zaire (DRC). Currently, he is a Distinguished Professor at Youngstown State University and Executive Director of Etruscan Press. He also serves on the MFA faculty of Wilkes University. For more information please visit www.philipbrady.com
Amanda Rabaduex is a poet, writer, educator, and Air Force veteran. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She is a graduate assistant for Etruscan Press, and the current poetry editor of River and South Review. Originally from Ohio, she now lives in the Smoky Mountains.
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