The Mexico Interview (Part One)
This is part one of an extensive interview conducted by expatriate American poet, Charles Hasty, in conversation with Billy Marshall Stoneking, during the latter’s sojourn in Mexico. The two poets met at Hasty’s home in the village of San Miguel de Allende, where Charles resides with his wife.
San Miguel's connection with performance poetry is unusual, even bizarre. As well as being home to several expatriate poets and writers, including W.D. Snodgrass and Alice Denham, it hosts an annual poetry festival which has attracted the likes of Robert Haas and Yusef Komunyakaa. It was also where Kerouac's hero, Neal Cassidy, was run over and killed by a train.
At the time of this interview, Charles was editor of the well-known publication, The San Miguel Writer, and Billy was in the midst of researching his play, Eisenstein in Mexico. Hasty is the author of the much acclaimed, Poems of the Long Man, a bi-lingual (English/Spanish) collection of his poetry published by the University of Sinaloa Press.
We join the interview after introductions have been made and the Bloody Marys have been poured...
Charles Hasty: So, how would you describe your primary approach to poetry?
Billy Marshall Stoneking: Listening. Listening to what's going on around me. What others are saying and what I'm saying to them, both verbally and non-verbally. It's amazing what you hear when no one's mouth is open. I am fascinated with the way sounds and silences rub up against one another. If I'm gonna make notes for a poem, this is invariably the source.
CH: And what sort of poetry do these notes produce?
BMS: All sorts. Poetry is the world. Whenever a young or beginning writer asks me, "what can I write about?", I always say: listen to your world... what's going on around you? The so-called everyday and ordinary world that is taken for granted might be very remarkable, even miraculous, to one whose ears are tuned to it. Imagine... poems by mothers writing down what their children say; poems by people who write down what their work-mates complain about on a Monday morning. I know a poet in Melbourne - Grant Caldwell - who’s written a whole group of poems about riding city buses - the interactions between the driver and passengers, between himself and the passengers, between the passengers and one another. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? One just climbs onto a bus or goes to one’s office or workplace and tape records everything that's said, then goes home and transcribes it. But that’s not how it happens. One has to know how to shape the material. If you don’t know WHAT you’re listening to, I mean, if you don’t know HOW to edit it, which means understanding the WHAT and the WHY of it, then you don’t have anything but a whole bunch of tapes with gabbling on them. It’s the editing that stamps it with your own, unique perspective, your own point of view. It's the editing that makes it your own, taking a bit of this, throwing out a bit of that, and here and there your own voice starts coming into it, your own way of breaking up the syntax and making the images resonate. You shape it to your ear, as Pi O, the Melbourne poet, does. As any poet, who really is a poet, does. A poet catches the voices that are all around him and in him.
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