Philip Brunetti On The Five Things You Need To Write Powerful And Evocative Poetry

An Interview With Heidi Sander

… Love of language. If your poetry isn’t language-based, language-brazen, anarchic and fierce, in some way, it’s probably not poetry or not very good poetry . . . And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? An overdone Yeats example but, really, ‘rough beast’ and ‘slouches’ are, language-wise, impossible to improve upon, I’d say.

Poetry is growing in popularity and millions of people spanning the globe have a renewed passion for embracing the creativity, beauty, and art of poetry. Poetry has the power to heal and we make sense of the world through the human expression of writing and reading. Are you wondering: What does it take to become a successful poet? What is the best medium and venue to release your poetry? What are some techniques to improve or sharpen your skills? In this interview series about how to write powerful and evocative poetry, we are interviewing people who have a love for poetry and want to share their insights, and we will speak with emerging poets who want to learn more about poetry either to improve their own skills or learn how to read and interpret better. Here, we will also meet rising and successful poets who want to share their work or broaden their audience, as well as poetry and literature instructors.

As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Philip Brunetti.

Fiction writer, poet, antipoet, gentle quasi-misanthrope, librarian, Philip has been writing fiction and poetry since his early 20s. His innovative work has been published in various online or paper literary journals including Cobalt Weekly, Swamp Ape Review, The Boiler, and Identity Theory. His debut novel, Newer Testaments (Atmosphere Press, 2020) is described in the Independent Book Review as ‘an innovative existential novel told through hallucinatory poetics.’ Via his librarianship at the Brooklyn Public Library, Brunetti also runs the Gravesend Writers Group, a monthly writers discussion group. Find out more about Philip at philipbrunetti.com and bookshop.org/shop/PhilipBrunetti

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share a story about what first drew you to poetry?

Not really. But I’ll try…Poetry was in the air in the late 80s in New York. Or it was in my air, with a couple of friends. We went to some of the first ever Poetry Slams at the Nuyorican Poets Café downtown. They used to judge recited poems with numbers from 1–10 like the Olympics or something. Maybe they still do. I read there at age twenty-one, probably some really poor stuff. I think I got a 6 or 7, not so bad. It was exciting in its way. Bob Holman as the host was like a young Jack Nicholson. He wore a green bowler hat . . . maybe it wasn’t green . . . But anyway, there was a venue right away. With campy-style competition to pull out the solemnity rug. That seemed to help things . . . invigorate them.

Can you tell us a bit about the interesting or exciting projects you are working on or wish to create? What are your goals for these projects?

I’m working on a short experimental novel called [DEAD REALITY]. And the written title is like that, casketed, in brackets. It’s another 200-page prose poem I’m writing that’s masquerading as a novel. I did that with my earlier book too — Newer Testaments. This is the second book in The Nada Trilogy. The Nada Trilogy has its roots in the Hemingway short story ‘A Clean, Well-lighted Place.’ There’s something about the last paragraphs of that story, when he substitutes the word God with the word nada . . . I can’t — or couldn’t — get past ‘…it all was nada…’ and so I made it holy. Or attempt to. Maybe it’s more absurdly holy than straightforwardly so. But that counts too.

Another thing I’m always working on, and I may finally have finished because they’ve slowed to a snail’s pace as far as coming forth (after five years), is the ANTIPOEMS. A collection of poems dubbed antipoems because they attempt to undermine poetry in their style and poetic effect. But they are still on the side of poetry. They are supposed to save poetry, at least for me. Not that it needs saving necessarily . . .

Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Let’s begin with a basic definition so that all of us are on the same page. What is your definition of poetry? Can you please share with us what poetry means to you?

What poetry means to me and what its definition is might be two different things . . . but no matter. Anyway I hate to give it a definition. Maybe I’ll look one up. Here’s a favorite definition I remember that is also a paradox — one of my favorite literary devices. ‘Poetry expresses in words that which cannot be expressed.’ The in words part is important. You can’t ignore that. That’s everything almost, along with structure, style, sound, rhythm, imagery, etc. Now it expresses, but it doesn’t necessarily express what you may think it does. Poetry overtakes the poet, seizes her, even if quietly and subtly. There’s a roar in the quiet. That’s poetry. But poetry is also the quiet part and the spaces between the roar and quiet part. All of it, done just right. Poetry is always exact — an art of exactitude, language exactitude, evoking and intimating something more, something other . . . Here’s another definition from the great Godard movie Alphaville: ‘Poetry turns darkness into light.’ Of course the dark never goes away completely but that’s part of poetry too.

What can writing poetry teach us about ourselves?

That we know almost nothing. Or that we’re aware of so little that we know — until we go underbelly. Until we dig beneath the crust and layer of superficial self. Poetry can teach us to see — a Buddha-like seeing — and it engages all the senses. It comes out of the senses. But it’s also beyond the domain of the senses and the rational. Poetry taps into otherworldly parts of ourselves and existence. It teaches us the grandeur, the micro, and the in between — and the fact that there are more things in heaven and earth than are in your philosophy, Horatio, or whatever the precise Shakespeare quote. It teaches us that having a great name — like Shakespeare, works. The right name is the right word. Poetry teaches us words. It bets on making the incomprehensible comprehensible, with words, and it does so when just right.

Who are your favorite poets? Is it their style, the content or something else that resonates with you?

I hate to name names. But if you insist, I’ll name some names. Some, many, aren’t even poets but songwriters or fiction writers, or something other still, but they’re poets to me. Hmm, Henry Miller, how’s that? Go alphabetical, Akutagawa, Baudelaire, Bukowski, diarist Cheever, Degas (maybe I just like the name DAY-GAH), Duras, Dylan, Eliot TS, etc. Un-alphabetical: Jeanette Winterson, Kazuko Shiraishi, Sappho, Frank Stanford, Lucinda Williams, Saul Williams, Tom Waits, Fernando Pessoa, Jackson Pollack, Rumi, Hafez, Fellini, Whitman, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Natalie Diaz, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, Jean Genet, Godard, Yeats, Dickinson, Johnny Thunders . . . Strike thru the mask. That’s Melville, right? Another alter-poet. The great poets strike thru the mask, are penetrative even when oblique. I like writing that’s direct and indirect at the same time almost. It’s another paradox — and probably one that doesn’t actually exist, but I sense it. It’s in the writing I favor. There’s a coded quality too, with everything compressed and coming out the side more than straightforwardly — transferred and transformed. Not everyone on this list is like that, but they all have a quality of it. There are a couple hundred names I left off here. And these are certainly not all my fav poets — I can’t name them. Others: Clarice Lispector, Lorca, Basilia Papastamatiu, Norman O. Brown in Love’s Body. That’s another book-length poem, weirdly so.

If you could ask your favorite poet a question, what would it be?

Not sure. I’d probably only ask questions about punctuation, not even that maybe. Any poet doing it right will be like, ‘The poem says what I was trying to say and that’s why I used those exact words in that exact order, structure, and style. All your questions after the fact, ask the poem, not the poet.’ Probably I’d ask a question about process. Nowadays I might ask, Do you text your poems to friends (and enemies)? I do that often, partly to annoy them, maybe. And it takes the pressure off because they’re not such holy things like that. They’re texts impersonating poems (&or the opposite).

Poetry can be transformational. Is there a particular poem that spoke to you and changed your life or altered a perspective you held in some way? Can you share the story?

I hate to be so old-school cliché, but I guess Eliot’s Prufrock — ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ is the first poem I remember seizing me to the point where I was like, I need to write something like this. I need to write. Anyway I was in college, taking a summer poetry class with a good professor. We had to keep a free-flowing poetry journal on the poems assigned. I remember I drew sketches of scenes from Prufrock in the journal. It was a way I had of understanding that complex poem, even though I can’t draw well. The poem’s language was so good, I didn’t want to write about it, though I did anyway. But I drew Prufrock with his pants rolled, thinning hair, and the foamy sirens at the poem’s end . . . Yeah, sketched Prufrock pics in the margins, I remember . . . By the way, another poem I recall from that summer was Jean Toomer’s ‘Reapers’ in which some poor rat gets the scythe in a harvesting field. More importantly, that poem comes from Toomer’s experimental book Cane, probably my favorite work from the Harlem Renaissance. If unfamiliar, it’s a collection of short stories, poems, and a drama, set up as an experimental, amalgam-esque novel but, I’d say, it’s another 200-page prose poem, ultimately.

Today’s world needs so much healing. Can you help articulate how poetry can help us heal?

Poetry can help us heal because poetry goes into the vulnerable areas of life and the self. It exposes who and what we really are — our beauty and ugliness, our heights and limitations. And poetry asks that you pay attention to something else, something other. It warrants care and concentration. It’s quiet, it’s under the radar . . . Poetry heals because it’s edifying — when done well, without an agenda of edification. Edification happens because a poem happens. When the poem happens, when it’s right, then all the best — or truest — parts of being alive and human follow suit. We are healed from turning the vulnerable and ugly into the truth, as we are.

We’d like to learn more about your poetry and writing. How would you describe yourself as a poet? Can you please share a specific passage that you think exemplifies your style or main message?

I am a poet of the underground. I won’t even acknowledge myself as a poet mostly. I’m a writer who writes some things that happen to come out like poetry. Poe-try, you know? Right now, to acknowledge myself as a poet, I should include an ANTIPOEM because that’s where my poetry’s been for a long time. There are also DAIKUs, another odd form of mine, explained as a newly invented type of haiku — with looser syllabic rules but generally 3 lines (or longer deluxe versions) and evoking &or suggesting a dark — or thru a glass darkly, thru a Tao darkly — theme vision-image or humor, often combined inchoately and beyond the parameters of ordinary logic.

Sometimes DAIKUS, and my poetry in general, have pop-culture references, usually not. You want to make it more universal but sometimes that makes it more universal. Often there are mystical elements too. For me, the mystical is where poetry lives . . . Anyway here’s a DAIKU (deluxe):

Write (something)

on

Tarantino

frozen

/

Jesus (frozen)

and the

hero,

to what

point?

[A Lesser Kierkegaard] (If watching/making movies).

That’s a texted poem. Another thing I do when I text someone a poem, often, is classify it. This one actually wasn’t classified as DAIKU, but it is DAIKU deluxe and the added bait is the Speaker of the poem is ‘A Lesser Kierkegaard’ as in the POV is from that mindset-stance and the situation (if watching/making movies) is also given, in which a lesser Kierkegaard would say such a thing. One thing about poetry, and all good writing, is you need to be entertained, or at least engaged, when writing it. And so, this is the kind of stuff that keeps me entertained and engaged, strangely.

What do you hope to achieve with your poetry?

A breakthrough. Or, that’s what I used to hope to achieve. Now I’m not so sure. A breakthrough, for me, meant accessing a deeper, truer aspect of self through your own expressive power. I guess I care about that still but, really, it’s more elemental than that. Maybe it’s more hierarchical too, which I should apologize for, maybe. But I want to achieve a level of excellence. I think poetry must achieve a level of excellence — to be poetry. Then you’ll ask, who determines the excellence? It used to be a community of knowledgeable readers, critics, and other poets and writers. That’s probably there still. I don’t know, I’m out of the loop mostly. I purposefully stay out of the loop to have creative space. But then, if you get too far out, too remote, you can’t comment on the current. So, it’s a balance. And excellence is a tall order. It’s like Tom Seaver as a pitcher once upon a time. Lawrence Taylor as a linebacker. Childhood heroes. Excellence lasts. You want to write something that lasts.

In your opinion and from your experience, what are 3 things everyone can learn from poetry?

Language, tone, and subtlety . . . Writing (and reading) poetry improves your language skills because each word has so much weight, each word counts for so much. One must be fanatically selective and keenly aware, not just of a word’s meaning but also its connotations and allusive possibilities . . . The second thing I stated, tone — that’s probably the wrong term, or it’s tone combined with mood and atmosphere. Tone is (the poem’s) Speaker’s attitude toward the material expressed, mood is what is evoked in the reader, and atmosphere houses the tandem, and lingers . . . Subtlety demands the surgical precision of language, the nuance of language, combined with a skillful and curious reader. If the reader doesn’t pick up on the subtleties, it may be the poet’s fault or the reader’s fault or a combination. For a poet, who is enmeshed in his material, it’s easiest to blame the reader. Of course, often there are no readers and so there’s no one to blame, just the poem alone. But, getting back to the question, and interpreting it as I have, I’d say these are things that poetry trains you well for — things that make you a better reader and writer yourself.

Based on your own experience and success, what are the “five things a poet needs to know to create beautiful and evocative poetry?” If you can, please share a story or example for each.

Probably, you need a lot more than five things. You might need a million or billion things, brain cells included, but I suppose it can be broken down to five.

One thing is love of language. If your poetry isn’t language-based, language-brazen, anarchic and fierce, in some way, it’s probably not poetry or not very good poetry . . . And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? An overdone Yeats example but, really, ‘rough beast’ and ‘slouches’ are, language-wise, impossible to improve upon, I’d say.

A second thing is a sense of adventure. The poem is a journey, within and without, into the world and the unknown inner limits of yourself. Via a dream language — the inner couples with the outer. An inner-outer dynamic, a fused entanglement, with the inexpressible expressed in that junction . . . Lorca’s Poet in New York works as an example, with the poet physically venturing to New York and his poems following suit with surrealistic daring. Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, another exceptional poem of adventurous spirit.

Three: A sense of mystery. This is part of the adventure and what makes it more unknowable and excavative (a non-word?). Poetry houses the mystery of existence in the medium of words. Words create, and reveal, the mystery, never one or the other exclusively. The Japanese poetess Kazuko Shiraishi’s Seasons of Sacred Lust possesses a great sense of mystery, especially the long title poem and almost equally long ‘Dedicated to the Late John Coltrane’ from the same collection. Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You is another sense of mystery masterpiece.

Fourth, a natural drive. An impetus. With urgency, at times, at least. Poetry must come forth from you. It’s part of your expressive self, how you interact with the beautiful, disastrous, and banal bearing down on you. The Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, had a poetic urgency in multiple directions at once, so much so he created different, what he termed, heteronyms which were varied speaker points of view and identities — to keep up with the forking flood of diverse poetic styles coming forth from him.

Fifth — silence. Poetry is born of silence. Run away to the caves and underground, to the barely-audible below. The crackle of nothingness. Poetry starts there and ends there too. If the poem works, it rides that wavelength, vibrating it — silencing into substance, somehow . . . Li Po is good for this, as are many masters of haiku.

If you were to encourage others to write poetry, what would you tell them?

I’d tell them not to think too much about it as poetry. I’d tell them to just do it — just write what comes. The moment we define it as poetry, in our minds, the more we think it has to live up to some standard. And in a way, it does. But that’s for after the fact. And plenty of bad poems get published too, I’d imagine. But the publication part makes no difference . . . Getting back to the question, I’d tell them to write when the urge comes to them and follow the line of language coming forth from their pen. They should probably write longhand too — though I text poems all the time, type them into my phone, obviously. But regardless, trust the line of language, follow it, don’t write the poem; let the poem be written through you. It takes a long time to get to that point for some. For others, it’s probably so natural they don’t even realize that’s how they’re doing it. I’d tell them to trust the urgency and rhythm of the language and not worry about poetry as such.

How would you finish these three sentences:

Poetry teaches… one how to care about the world. The minutiae and the grandeur and every gradation in-between as covered by the endless fount of poetry forever flowing for millennia.

Poetry heals by… allowing you to explore your own depths and the depths of existential reality. Poetry is a way of meeting and making friends with reality as well as inventing new realities. All of this is a basis for creativity and creativity heals because it encourages a sense of purpose and meaning, two balms for being.

To be a poet, you need to… Write poems. It sounds obvious and, really, you can even cut the word ‘poems’ and just put the word write. It all starts and ends with writing regularly and discovering your form. I don’t write much poetry in the conventional sense and am more of an experimental, lyrical fiction writer. But I’m secretly always writing poetry, too, both in my fiction and separate from it. The key: Write it.

Is there a person (living) in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why?

I used to think Bob Dylan. But I’ve heard Dylan doesn’t talk much in person, and I don’t either, so maybe that wouldn’t work so well. We’d just kind of sit there, sip coffee, and eat our eggs, Ha. Maybe Jean-Luc Godard of French New Wave film fame. I probably would’ve said Anna Karina, his once wife and muse, but she passed a few years ago . . . Godard is still alive, as far as I know. I don’t even know if he speaks English — but I think he does. With a heavy French accent, I’m sure, all the better. I’d like to talk to him about some of his movies — especially Pierrot le Fou, which has some of my favorite voice-over poetry in it. I doubt Godard would want to talk about any of this. But I’d like to find out what was in the air, his air, at the time he spearheaded the French New Wave (which became the French New Wave after the fact). There’s something so fresh, daring and exhilarating about those movies, and from that film movement, which in a way was also a literary movement . . . I don’t think any movies before, or since especially, have really broken the kind of ground those movies did. I’d just want to tell Godard thank you for being a lifelong inspiration. Thank you for such audacity and excellence. I will always judge my writing by that meter — what was accomplished there and then. The French New Wave. It’s a high standard, and I often fail but then — fail better, like Mr Beckett said, of course.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

They can visit my Authors Guild sponsored website: https://www.philipbrunetti.com/

Unfortunately I greatly neglect my website but have advised myself, very recently, that I will correct this and update it at least monthly — with some new bit of writing or writing news . . . I’m a terrible self-promoter but it seems more and more necessary, to do so, with the glut of writing that’s out there. I imagine readers want to see you keep your own stuff current. So, yes, hopefully I will follow through!

Thank you for these excellent insights, and we greatly appreciate the time you spent. We wish you continued success.