Met with Taryn M. Browne a few hours prior to her poetry reading at the Redline Gallery in Denver to discuss her work and what she's been up to since moving to Nebraska. An excerpt from one of the poems she read with the formidable women who shared their work at "Write Your Life Story" last Tuesday night follows, along with our conversation....
Tilt February 2012
I.
This ferriswheel heart
of mine, tilt but does not rock, I'm too shy, too afraid of falling, dangling
upside down from my seat
above the women in funny
hats sitting on the bench below waiting for screaming children to explode
from the gates of the rollercoaster ride.
I am not so brave. My
ferriswheel heart slowly turns and turns, our legs dangle, the plastic
seat is too slippery for comfort
My hands cramp around
the bar when your legs take to swinging but you do not notice. We rock, a
boat in the sky without paddles.
I am afraid with too
much rocking this boat will fall into the water of screams, shot from the
sky, victims of our own naivete.
Dona S: So the choice to live in Nebraska was due to...?
TMB: It was to try and live in the country. I love living in the country, but I've lived outside a city, never been without a big grocery store, I've never been without community. I haven't been without that my entire life and while I love sitting outside the front door, seeing the open sky and the open land, I also need to be closer to more people
Dona S: How did your career as a writer start"
TMB: My sixth grade teacher anointed me a writer. Mrs. Welch, in Littleton. Her husband was a creative writing teacher at the junior high and he took me to his workshop.
Dona S: Do you remember your first poem?
TMB: I think it was a love poem, about a broken rose. I was fourteen when I wrote it. I still have it. Oh, I think it was called "The Promised Rose." Pretty silly.
Dona S: Is it people who really steered you into poetry, those two teachers in particular, or was it an interest that you developed earlier?
TMB: They were story writers. Poetry came along on my own, along in my room with my notebook. I just wrote short sentences that ended up like poems. I think I was seventeen when I was first introduced to Marge Piercy. I found her at the library. My parents didn't read poetry so I chanced upon her book at the library. Thanks God for the library. (Laughing) I still have that library book, I never did return it.
Dona S: Do the feelings that grabbed you at that age when writing poetry still come up today?
TMB: When I was fourteen until about thirty, writing poetry was something I did alone. Now it's colored more by craft and other adults' expectations of what it should look like. I think with poetry you have to be without a facade. Since I've grown up, wanting to be good at things, I struggle with wanting to be good and wanting to be honest. Now that I call myself a poet, and supposed to be better, it's gotten harder.
Dona S: What tips do you have for other poets?
TMB: Remain a child. I've never taken any formal poetry courses. Sometimes that can get in the way of poetry. Poetry is beautiful when it's honest and when we're children we're honest. I'm working on a novel now as well, titled Engine of Light. I wrote one scene about a week ago, but not much this summer.
Dona S: What kind of routine do you set up for yourself?
TMB: I write every morning, journaling. Moving to a small town [in February], well outside of a town of 594 people, I don't have many distractions, just myself and my animals. So I write constantly, reflections. For the first time I've been able to not get distracted.
Dona S: How does your creativity flow between poetry and prose?
TMB: A lot of my poetry is narrative, little stories. Sometimes that prose sounds like poetry. In free writing the novel, I end up writing short sentences in scenes that look like poems.
Dona S: How much does the business of writing take up your time?
TMB: When I did an audio recording of my poems I had to be more detail-oriented. It was a couple of years ago. I did about one or two reading a week then.
Dona S: What kind of process do you go through selecting poems for a collection, or a reading? What catches your eye in a poem?
TMB: What's going on in real life impacts what I choose. Poetry is very emotional and being as honest as possible, is what I want others to hear. Writing is medicine to me. When I'm writing a poem there's this presence that is invoked from an experience I'm having in the moment. When you go into the silence of writing, the solitude of writing, you tend to tap into the conscience of humanity. Everyday details in writing catches my eye. Maybe the way that your grandma wore her dress, the way her hair was and the way her skin smelled. I've come to really, really love and appreciate those kinds of things.
When I was younger, my work was very angry poetry As I've gotten older my poetry tries to capture the everyday. I try to notice what is. After thirty, I've had a greater desire to convey a meaning. I think I have this agenda that is difficult to tease out when I'm writing now. I have this expectation to be good, but also to be persuasive.
Dona S: When you're revising your work do you have different process you go through?
TMB: If I'm feeling optimistic, I might see the poem in a different light. I have to take time with it, maybe a week or so. I have a couple of people I share my work with. One person knows nothing about poetry and he will be very direct. I like when someone can read it and say, that really makes no sense to me. Another friend looks at the technical aspects of a poem--looking at the rhythm, suggesting where to end, where to break.
Dona S: Do you play with form and meter when you're writing?
TMB: Usually, the first time I write something down, I have an emotional resonance in it that's there immediately. I only tinker with it to make meaning clearer, find a better word, but I usually don't change the form.
Dona S: You've mentioned Marge Piercy. Are there other writers, that you feel over time have become your favorites?
TMB: One poet that I love and adore as a human being is Jimmy Santiago Baca. He became a poet in prison, in Florence. He taught himself to read or write. He was publishing poetry from prison in the late 70s and since he's written a memoir. I went to Santa Fe and heard him read his poetry [after he was released] and it was the greatest thing.
Dona S: This might be a curious question. Do you have anything specific that you try to avoid in your writing?
TMB: I probably try to avoid love, like romantic love. And I think I probably avoid it in my life, period.
(Laughing.)
Dona S: Do you think that art resembles life?I think for me it's difficult to write about violence.
TMB: I was just going to say that. A couple of the female characters in my novel carry guns. One carries a gun in her bra, and her husband is shot [anyway]. I haven't gotten into that very deeply, how you defend yourself--or not defend yourself. How do explain that in literature, in a culture of violence, and be realistic?
It's hard to be very judgmental in some situations--to say that it's right or wrong--when I've not been in [my character's] shoes.
Dona S: What surprises have you come across with a character?
TMB: The element of magic has surprised me. It can be confusing, because it feels unpredictable, chaotic, weird--not truthful. Saying things that seem unlikely and writing them anyway, feels right [somehow]. Being introduced to magical realism, as through Isabel Allende's work, and Laura Esquivel's, about a year ago has drawn me closer to Latin American writers. Any indigenous writer, really. I am reading A House Made of Dawn [by N. Scott Momaday] right now. In that book, I'm not able to tell time and my western mind has to put aside the expectation that everything has to make sense and that [as a reader] my hand has to be held. I love it because I'm having an emotional experience. I think of myself as the character and wonder, what am I going to do next? I've also gotten about halfway through A Hundred Years of Solitude.
Dona S: When you and I both finish that we're going to have to get together and talk about it. (Laughing.) Back to talking about surprises, what;s the most surprising thing someone said to you about your own work--and how did you feel about that?
TMB: One man [once] said he needed to take a cold shower. (Laughing.) He emailed me saying my CD collection was like a blast and that he needed to go take a shower. It was surprising. And I'm not sure what he really meant.
Dona S: And you probably don't want to. (Laughing.)
TMB: That collection was very raw, very biographical narrative poetry. Like my mom says, full of angst. If I were to review the selections I made, I don't know that I would go back and make any changes or just let it be because it was what I needed to say at the time, about the world and my experiences at the time.
Dona S: If you had one piece of advice for fellow poets, what would that be?
TMB: If they ask? (Laughing.) To be yourself, regardless of what others say. About nine years old.
