|
|
|
|
Joneve McCormick
|
|
- 1. How and when did it dawn
upon you that you have a poet in you? Could
you remember your first ever poem?
-
- When I was around 3 years old,
I “said” my first poem. I remember this well,
because my father, a poet, turned and stared
at me – “recognizing” me!
-
- 2. What makes you write poetry?
Life or beauty of life?
-
- A love of beauty, and a need
to speak. But then beauty and life cannot be
separated can they?
-
- 3. What is your perspective
of beauty?
-
- Keats said it best for me (and
for the world): beauty is truth, truth beauty...
I find that my only real task is to care enough
to look and then to tell the truth as well as
I can. One writer defined art as “the quality
of communication”. The breadth and depth of
truth in the communication makes the quality.
-
- 4. Does any incident provoke
you to poetry?
-
- When I feel strongly about
something – an incident, a virtue or vice, a
person - I am “provoked” as you put it. Anything
that provokes feeling can trigger the action
of writing, including feeling building up to
the point it needs release. When I just want
to write a poem, though, I make verse; to distinguish,
it doesn’t have the intensity of poetry. When
I am speaking to someone who grants me a lot
of freedom of expression, I tend to feel more
and speak in poetry. When I listen to poetry
(whether I’m reading or hearing it read) I can
be provoked to write it.
-
- 5. How do you treat the things
happening around us? War, terror, colonization,
genocide, homicide and what not!
-
- There is a wonderful book,
by one of your countrymen, Deepak Chopra. It
is titled “How to Know God”. I find his paradigm
valid (ingenious). He describes man’s “responses”
to the world in a paradigm, and the level he
calls “the intuitive response” doesn’t recognize
the drama in the world in the same way someone
on “the reactive level” would see it. The events
you mention, as specific incidents from them
can be violations or expressions of love, can
provoke poetry for me, but in and of themselves
these things don’t excite me as a poet. To put
it another way, I don’t look for “victims” and
“oppressors” – but for the way things work.
-
- 6. What will happen to your
poetry if the concept of love would be lost
once and for all?
-
- The concept isn’t important
to me, but the reality is, and I cannot imagine
its loss and still having a world. Love is the
motion of this world, of everything in it.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
