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10 Questions for Brandon Lewis


 

My cityborn friend snaps limbs from trees for the bonfire
and hands me their greenness.    Why refuse

this gift of smoke and hissing years of rain?
Every tree is difficult. Take this oak and its burl—such handsome infection

to climb. I am sorry but without Violence it's too late to catch up with them…
Was a societal leg up ever real?

-- from "That Difficulty Increases Desire" which appears in the Spring 2016 issue (Volume 57, Issue 1).

 

Tell us about one of the first pieces you’ve written

It’s very cliché— the first poem I wrote was for a girl in high school, one who thought of me as just a friend. So, so bad! I was also painting a lot at the time, and after learning about William Blake, I started painting poems into the canvas beside images.

What writer(s) or works have influenced your own?

Jack Gilbert, Anne Carson, Larry Levis are poets I have returned to. I’ve read Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires so many times that it should be part of me somehow, though I have no proof.

The manuscript that I just finished is inspired by Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. I take his titles as my titles, and I use his habit of referencing other texts in his work. So my manuscript begins at the origins of the essay, but goes in a lyrical direction to become something entirely different, focused on things that interest me.

What other professions have you worked in?

Now I teach English at a high school in New York and bike along the Hudson River every morning to work. Teaching comes up often in my manuscript— mostly the four years I spend in the South Bronx.

But I’ve been a house painter, a van driver, an intern at the NEA, a guard at an art museum, and worse of all by far: data‐entry.

What did you want to be when you were young?

I thought I would be a photo‐journalist. I still write, obviously, but have taken photography and reporting much less seriously.

What drew you to write this piece?

The piece has layers of stories. I was thinking about difficulty. And I was also following the idea of receiving a comeuppance— what that means, and what that might looks like, whether or on a racial level or an artistic level. One moment I build on is a night during a blizzard, hold‐up in a DC bar with writer friends, where I complained, half‐drunk, that they all had time to write while I had to work overtime. It’s as if I was asking for someone to put me in my place, tell me my excuses were bullshit. There are several registers in the poem. And with the quoted material, I wanted to bring a bit of the historical and mythical together with the present. These are the only Facebook quotes I plan to ever use in a poem, by the way!

Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your work?

New York. I’m interested between the tension between the cosmopolitan and more rural or provincial places. Every summer of my life I’ve gone to a family cabin in northern Wisconsin. International travel—Iceland, Central America—also helps, refilling me with new questions, perspectives, and images to bring into poems.

Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?

When poeming I listen only to instrumental music, like Keith Jarrett or Yo‐yo Ma. That or something so foreign—like Sigur Ros—that I’m not attempting to catch the words. And you know, right after writing the last poem in my recently finished manuscript, to celebrate I bought a ticket to see Sigur Ros play in New York.

Who typically gets the first read of your work?

Always my wife, Tara. She’s an amazing reader. She studied literature and can get to the heart of the matter, seeing not just whether it’s technically sound, but more importantly perhaps, whether it has a strong and honest emotional core. I’m not looking for niceties, and she knows it.

If you could work in another art form what would it be?

I play guitar— but I wish I knew how to play the piano. It feels like something you were either lucky to grow up with in the house or not. So I want a piano for my daughter, and for me. I can also see myself getting back to photography or oil painting at some point.

What are you reading right now?

I just finished reading Sally Keith’s River House, which I deeply loved, and I’m rereading Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds, figuring out ways to teach it this year.


Brandon Lewis lives and teaches in New York City. He received an MFA in poetry from George Mason University, and his writing has appeared in journals such as Missouri Review, Salamander, Water-Stone Review, and Spork. This year he won Sundog Lit’s first poetry contest.

 


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