Tell us about your book The trinity

The Trinity came on the tail end of me working on my 200 page poem The
Jazz Symphonic Glass Ear which is a stream of consciousness prose poem.
When I had finished it I got word that Turkey Buzzard Press which is the
poet co-opt that I am a member of wanted to publish a small book of my
work. I envisioned the book as having my say on some of the core issues
that concern me , as Gods, war, American violence, death and some things
that we overlook in our every day lives. Some people believe that poetry
should be about the great issues of life and death or love and longing, but I
wanted to touch on some of the common things as a news paper man
standing on the corner selling news paper and the way that birds are shy of
human, the cat that is let out at night and the common act of doing jury duty.
I am one who believes that even the smallest thing is subject for poetry, that
poetry has been brought down from its ivory tower and ivy leagued high
mindedness. I love spoken word poetry, not only because it is a voice of a
new generation but because it does not shy away from the common life of
the everyday world.

Why do you write? Do you have any particular goals to your writing?

I believe very strongly that poets are in the service of the people, that we are
to write for those who can not are will not write for themselves. Poetry is a
teaching and affirmation tool. The public tend to turn to poetry in times of
stress, be it good stress as is caused by being in love or the stress of dealing
with lost. As I have gotten into the tail end of my life I am conceded enough
to think that I have something to say about what it means to be human in the
world. While no one have all the answers and there are as many truths as
there are people in the world I see myself as just one voice among many.
The goal of my poetry is to be true to myself and there-by be true to the
public. I am a teacher and a preacher at heart and I want to share what I have
learned over the years with others. It was F Scott Fitzgerald that said that he
would rather preach to Americus then entertains her and the same is true of
me.

What dose being an underground poet means? Do you consider yourself

underground?

I haven’t heard the term Underground poet in quite a while. If you take it to
mean under the radar of the consciousness of the general public then I am an
underground poet. If you take it to mean outside of the main stream of the
publishing world as if one is a lone voice crying out in the wilderness then
this is also so. I tend to think that an underground poet is one who deals with
subject matters that in some sense tends to distress the reading public, this
can be the subject of things that the public do not want to deal with, and they
would rather sweep it under the rug of our consciousness. There is a duality
within me; on one hand I want to a poet’s poet in the like of Ezra Pound and
Gertrude Stein and on the other hand I want to be the poet of the common
people in the like of Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes.

What’s on your recommended reading list?

There are so many books out there that it is hard to pick and choose. It
depend on the person that I am recommending to, where they are in their life
and what I have read that I think will be of some use to them. Off the top of
my head I will say that The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins and
Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poet in New York and The Norton Anthology
African American Literature. I make a point of reading books that have
nothing to do with poetry. I am also a big reader of essays.

Where does your voice comes from? Influences

As a kid I stammered all the time. It seems to run in my family as my aunt

and great granddad stammer also. My great granddad was a preacher and
doing the summer all the kids was sent to grand mama’s farm outside of
Brookville Mississippi. I was fascinated that my great granddad never
stemmed while at the pulpit and that my aunt didn’t stemmed when she sung
in the choir so I started to preach and sing as a kid and everyone thought that
I was going to grow up to preach for the church. For me it was never about
the church but about being able to speak smoothly like everyone else. My
oldest incident of self awareness is that when I was six years old I discover
that I didn’t stammer when I thought or sang or changed the tone of my
voice and so I would hold these variety shows in the bathroom mirror where
I played all of the guests. All of this came to inform my voice. As a teenager
I discovered the plays of Tennessee Williams some of which was set in St.
Louis and I learned a sense of place. Allen Ginsburg taught me that the
subject of being gay was worthy of poetry. Within this year I have
summated poetry to fifty magazines and the rejection are coming in but
some of the comments that I have receive about my poetry is that it is raw.
This rawness is the source of my strength

How do you approach a write? Believe in Writer’s block?

I write everyday. I start with a cup of coffee and just began to move my hand
to see what will come. Then I work with what I get. I don’t believe so much
in writer’s block as I have my artwork to lead me when I don’t feel like
writing or there is nothing on my mind that I want to write about. The good
thing about having the artwork to fall back on is that it presents me with a
whole new set of rules to deal with by way of using paints instead of the
pen. I write long hand first then type it into the computer to work on it.

Listen to music while you write? Who?

Sometimes I listen to music or have the T V on as background noise. I listen

to jazz or news radio as KGNU out of Boulder CO. Once when I was a
student at Naropa Univ. The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetic
started by Ann Waldman and Allen Ginsburg Allen came by my room as I
was listening to classical music as we talked he asked me if I listen to that
kind of music all the time? Then he went on to tell me that the kind of music
that we listen to while writing seep into what we are writing. As of late I
have been listening to Nina Somone and Nancy Wilson

Have you won any awards? How much do such accolades matter to
you?

I have won just one award the Mad Blood Literary Award in 2005 or 06
which netted me $1,000. It can be rewarding to have your pears judge your
work. Even as I enter competition from time to time and I have in the past
sponsored a few awards I do not place much stock by them because I see it
as a shot in the dark. Poetry can be very personal and what you may like the
judge of a competition may and more likely not care for it and it can bruise
your ego to get a rejection.

Do you have an ideal reader?

Earlier I mention the conversation that I had with Allen; well he once asked
me who I was writing to? Up till that time I had no one in mind other the
dead English poets that I was taught in the St. Louis public school system. I
came to realize that I wanted to please my family, to have my being a poet
justified in their eyes and I am still trying to convince them that the art of
poetry is a worthwhile endeavor.

How many poem have you written?

I have just a little over 1,300 poems but by no means are they all good or
worthy of print. I am always surprised when someone tells me that they like
this or that poem. In poetry I am trying to reach as many people as I can
which puts my poetry all over the place jumping from one subject matter to
the other and it may seems that I have no core style by being all over the
place. When I told myself that I was a poet and it was what I wanted to be
for the remaining of my life I also told myself that I was going to write from
as many points of view as people that I meet. At the time I didn’t take into
account that I will run across people that I didn’t like such as people with
views that I found hurtful, so I have not been able to live up to that. Still
something of that lives on in me.

Are you a full time writer/editor? If not, are you working in that
direction?

Yes I am a full time writer. On the side I create business cards, write
wedding vows, and create flyers and the like. What I really want to do is to
teach without letting the teaching takes over.

What other careers have you had? What is the worst job you’ve ever
had?

I have been an antiques dealer, buying selling and repairing furniture as a

matter of fact it was the first job that I had as kid my uncle owned a repair
shop and as a seven years old kid I worked there and was paid. I was also on
the career path as a cook at the V A hospital but it took to much time from
my writing. Such poets as William Carlo Williams and Wallace Stevenson
was able to hold down a job outside of writing poetry but I find it a hard
thing to do. The worst job that I had was working at a door hinge factory.
My job was to dip the rejected hinges into a vat of acid to strip then down to
the metal. The job that I had that I like, was working as a printer at a plastic
bag factory. I loved working with the color of inks and would take some of it
home to paint with.

How did you become so prolific?

I don’t think of myself as prolific. During those periods of a run in poetry I

tend to write about four poems a day. The thing is that one new poem
informs the other or one style informs the other so I have these little runs of
a few poems that are mined from the same vain. There are always some
other way of saying something.

What advice do you have for other writer whether new or seasoned?

The advice that I give to poets more so then to writers in general is to be

true to yourself fore most because if the truth doesn’t start with you then
how are you going to recognize it when it does comes around? We all know
a little of the truth if such a thing exist, I suppose that it depends on your
relationship within the world. There are many truths to be found in the world
and what is true today may not be so tomorrow so some of them are not set
in stone Second is to know that you are in the service of the people. Put
yourself in their shoes and write from some other point of view. Lastly I
advise poets to tell all of their secrets. By doing so you let others know that
they are not alone in what they feel or think. I can tell you that one of the
hardest things that I have tried to do was to tell all of my secrets and I am
still working on it. Poets can not afford to keep secrets. This gets back to my
thought that we are in the service of the people and while we can not fight
all of the battles that need our attention, this is to say that we should not
spread ourselves to thin, still we must choose one that is for some reason
near and dear to our heart.

How do you feel about spirituality?

Spirituality is something that has always been close to me from my earlier

days as a kid till now. I am not a Christian I’ll state that up front but still I
am spiritual. I write a great deal about the Christian God because many
people believe in him so he will not be denied. For me Nature is God
enough, something that I interact with each day of my life, something that I
breathe in and take my discarded breath and put it to good use, something
that is greater then I and all the people of the world put together. As a God
Nature produces no waste that can not be used by something else and if that
is not God like then I don’t know what is. Nature as God feed and is fed
upon. She has given us everything that we need to live a righteous life and if
we but put more faith in her and come to see that all living things are in
someway kin to us because we are all linked by life. The earth is a living
creature. Human are born to look for a God, this is evident that we do not
have all of the answers and we long to have them all. Our search for God is a
search for some part of immortality and a validation of our life. We want to
do right by our God. Some will argue that a material biological organism
such as the earth does not have a spirit but we are unable to prove that man
has a spirit. This is where faith comes into play. Faith relieves you of the
burden of having to prove that God exist and it is the faith of trust that helps
to sustains us in a world that have proven that it does not consider man as
any more special then any other creature that lives. In the sixties and
seventies there was a saying, back to nature, the fact of the matter is that we
can not leave nature, we can not separate from her no more then we can step
outside of our skin.

Tell us about your artwork and sculpting?

My artwork is a kind of meditation; it has given me an out let to express

myself long before I picked up the pen. Art is a way of seeing the world, of
perceiving what is around and/or within us and art is not just the depiction of
a thing as it is but the creation of a new thing born out of the inspiration of
the thing that we are painting. The difference between painting and sculpting
is that with one you are adding to while with the other you are taking away.
There is something poetic about painting while sculpting is more logical
more hard something that you can move around while painting exist on a flat
surface. The computer artwork that I have been doing as of late leave me
wanting the dirtiness of getting paint between my finger nails. Man has the
ability to make art of the inventions that we have made so I am a fan of
found art and I take a close look at things that people throw away because
there is beauty there; beauty of form and color. To create art I take things
apart to see the form of their insides. I never tire of my amazement at the
invention of form that man comes up with. We are hardwired into making
something functional while selected in making something beauty. It is where
the two are merged into one where art raises to its greatest order.

http://www.davidepatton.blogspot.com/

http://graphicandwords2008.blogspot.com/

David E. Patton 08-14-09