We love the title of your new collection, A Mountain's Idea of Time, which comes

from the first few lines of your poem "Simple Pleasures": "I would like to live at the pace of stones, / Have a mountain's idea of time."  Can you tell us how you chose that title and how it sets up the collection?

 

Whenever I’m working on a manuscript, I have a working title I file it under.

Eventually, as I get closer to finishing the manuscript, I start thinking about what the real title should be. In this case, I had a very hard time coming up with something that seemed to encapsulate the entire book, but I liked the line and image, “The Folding Chair of Now” from the poem, “And So It Is” and I submitted the manuscript under that title. I felt many of the poems spoke to the idea of the fleeting nature of time and the present moment always escaping our grasp. I even found some cover art I liked and designed a cover myself as a possible option. Once the manuscript had been accepted, my publisher, Chatwin Books, came back to me with a title they preferred, “A Mountain’s Idea of Time.” At first, I balked at it, not seeing how it related to the book as a whole, but their thinking was they wanted something to follow closely on my previous book title, On a Benediction of Wind. It took a little convincing, but in the end, I gave them the go ahead to use it and am happy I did.

 

Putting together a poetry collection involves many choices. Can you tell us about

your process of writing, selecting, and organizing the poems in this collection?

I always have a number of files on my computer of groupings of poems which I’m

working on, for example, “river poems”, or “animal poems”, even one I’ve titled “incredibly short poems,” and others. Often there’s some overlap, but I like to keep them separated thinking that it’s easier for publishers to market (and accept) a book if it circles around one topic. I happened to mention this strategy to the writer, naturalist, and poet Robert Michael Pyle a couple of years ago and he said he never bothered with that and that when he had 60 or 70 poems he thought were ready, he sent them off. For A Mountain’s Idea of Time, I took his advice and pulled what I thought were the strongest poems from a variety of files. These poems span a great deal of time, a few of them going back to ones I published in the 1990’s. After the manuscript was accepted, I even had the temerity to send in a few others I wanted to include and the publishers kindly allowed me. However, as the finishing touches were being put on the manuscript, the publishers felt a few of the poems didn’t belong and didn’t fit with the book as a whole and so pulled them. I tried to fight back on this, especially six poems from my “incredibly short poems” file that were my favorites, but I lost that battle. Other battles I happily won, but as always, it’s a give and take. Overall, after not having read or looked at the book for almost half a year, when I went back to it, I was very happy with how all the poems came together. I still think the ones they took out would have helped, but I’ll save those for the next one.

 We noticed a hopefulness throughout this collection. In "Poems are Little Places," you

write,"Poems are little places, tiny spaces / Where eternity lives." Can you tell us about

the theme of hopefulness in the collection, or another theme you see in the collection?

I find it interesting that you found a theme of hopefulness running through this volume,

I don’t know if I would have come up with that word, but now that you mention it, I can see what you mean. It’s a hopeful book for sure, possibly because I’m a (mostly) hopeful person and I certainly don’t want to express a sense of hopelessness or despair in my poetry. As I mentioned before, the nature of Time is something I think about and write about quite a bit, but there’s also a theme of the holy that creeps in quite often, especially in the small and ordinary things that surround us and we too often ignore. Nearly all the poems in this volume are about small moments, ones where I try to bring out the holiness they hold and how every aspect of our lives and all of nature is imbued with something more than can be explained. I tend to write a lot about the comfort of not knowing and the importance of paying attention to everything. This is probably the most consistent theme in the book. 

 

The first poem in the collection is titled "Driving the Backroads of Montana." How has the landscape of north central Montana inspired or figured into this collection?

Nearly all my life I’ve lived in or near the mountains, so moving to the open spaces of the

northern plains five years ago and spending a great deal of time outdoors naturally had a large impact on my writing and where I draw influences from. It goes without saying poems like “Prairie Wind”, “This Wind”, and “Memory’s Anvil” are directly related to living here, as are the poems “Eight Dead Porcupines” and “At the Bear Paw Battlefield” (and many, many more) and never would have been written if I was living somewhere else. Beyond that, I don’t think it changed my writing, only gave me differ subjects and experiences to write about.

 

What advice would you give to aspiring poets?

If you’re a poet, you’re a poet, I’m sorry there’s nothing I can do to help you, you’ll just have to live with it. It’s a terrible affliction, I know, but one, nevertheless, you should cherish. That said, I believe the best two pieces of writing advice I ever got were 1) never write anything your mother would be embarrassed to read or share with her friends—she is your biggest, best, and most important fan, make her proud—and 2) never drink beer before your reading, instead drink wine or spirits because you don’t want to belch in the middle of your tender love poem. To which I’m happy to say, I’ve adhered to the first religiously and been lucky that when I’ve broken the second there have been no negative results.

Other obvious advise is read and read and read, and not just poetry, but everything, fiction, nonfiction, plays. But when you read poetry, read for your own personal gratification, but also as a student, ask yourself why did the poet break a line here and not there, how does the title serve the poem, is the last line a surprise or does it leave a question lingering in your mind. Ask yourself what could be taken out or added to improve a poem (if possible). Oh yes, this is important, get a copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (the Stephen Mitchell translation is the best), the advice within includes, “No one can advise or help you, no one. There is but the one remedy. Go within. Find the reason that you write; see if its roots lie deep in your heart, confess to yourself you would die if you could not write.” I firmly believe you should take Rilke’s advice, which also includes, “Come close to Nature” and wrap yourself in solitude. In a different volume he said, “Ah poems amount to so little when one writes them early. One should hold off and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, right at the end, one could perhaps write ten good lines.” The key word there being, “perhaps”. Me, I’m still waiting and hoping for those ten good lines. 

And finally, don’t for one fraction of a second care about any rejections (and you will get many). Take them and use them to fire you to write more and better and show the stupid editors what a mistake they made. I mean it.