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Another week (and a little more) has come and gone...it seems that time marches on in spite of the hurdles the world throws at it. There is a song that I love, the anchor song and first single from Clint Black's new CD Spend My Time, which is completely apropos...
Funny thing that time
We're always running out
I'm always losing mine
There's not enough of it about
And though it's always here
It will always come and go
The days become the years
That'll be gone before you know
Like Clint, I am not quite ready to hit the wall yet...but I am so happy I could spend some of my time learning to know you all better...including the guy you came to see....John Libertus
Q: You were a technical writer for years, but I know you are primarily a poet now. I always thought of technical writing as being a product of one brain, and poetry being the product of another...Are the two mutually exclusive...do the two kinds of writing rely on completely different skills?
A: No. At the highest professional levels, technical writing requires clear, precise, accurate description and _expression, just as in poetry. In either, you must have comprehensive insight into what you're talking about; in each, you draw analogies, bringing the unknown into the known by comparing it to what the reader already knows. Poetry is about human experience, not about limited-field, physical matters, and it therefore requires significant, comprehensive insight into that aspect of being human with which the poem deals; we're all a little defensive about what's inside us, so it requires a penetrating concern for honesty.
Many of the analogies we draw in poetry are visual: images in the mind. That's fine, but it, by itself, is not poetry. If you think it is, as I say to the editor in Modern Poetry:
"Suppose I just send you some slides?"
A real poem reveals something that is humanly significant; it moves you, in both your mind and heart. Being based on the spoken word, it is, at its best, meaning wedded to music, a right-brain/left brain experiment in wholeness.
Q: I know you are widely traveled and have lived many different places. How does that wealth of experience contribute to your writing?
A: I was a military brat, my old man, a veteran of WWII and the Korean conflict, and a career military man. I went to 14 different schools, and in my 61 years, have lived, not just visited or stayed overnight, in 65 different places, all over North America and Japan. I don't know how to answer your question, because, to me, my life is normal; it may not be common, but it's my norm. I know nothing else. I buy bus tickets in the Yucatan as casually as you'd buy milk at your Git-n-Go, and half the time, the ticket clerk wouldn't know I wasn't a Mexican.
Q: The Last Thing a Rabbit Wants ...I love this piece too much! What was its catalyst?
A: My natural compassion and friendliness with other people lead me to listen to listen to their expressions of their complaints, opinions, feelings, and through them, subtly, their worldviews. Most people don't think very deeply or carefully, and it takes a while, in privacy, for me to disentangle from the crap part of their input. I've become, like Bugs Bunny, something of a psychic escape-artist; I don't want a point of view, presumptions interfere with my perception. To write from my deepest places requires a lot of privacy, and I'm practically a hermit: I go two or three days at a time without seeing another person.
Q: Some of your most painful writing comes from a place of despair at having lost a life-long spouse...and some of your most beautiful pieces come from the same place of love...is that why you write primarily poetry now...to cope with loss? Has it moved you forward in spite of your grief?
A: You're reading poems I wrote decades ago, and presuming I feel the same way I did then. Since Angelina died, I've lived in 20 different places, from Florida to Seattle, and met and been involved with hundreds of people, worked as a computer programmer, done voice-overs for TV commercials at $100/hr, worked as a fork-lift operator, unloaded trucks, worked as a mechanic, a fiberglass former, a GS4 clerk for the Department of Commerce, at day-labor as a carpenter, a mason; I've been homeless, slept in cars and under bridges, been thrown in jail for "suspicion of overdue parking", been punched, threatened, received awards and bonuses. In all this, I paid attention, and, at the bottom of it all, and in my own core, it's always been love that mattered. The price of love is anguish, but I'll pay.
Q: You said "you are assuming that I still feel the same way (as I did when I wrote some of these things about pain and love) ...do you feel differently now? Has your emotional center and work evolved from that place? ...I still see shades of it in your work (although I have no way to know when things were written)
A: I feel the same things, the same way, but my vision has broadened. All that's happened since has become part of me, of course, but not all of it have I digested. Things like The Visitor, History on Trial, the bridge, As for my style, Take me back, Suspicions of Romeo, The Education of a Magician, Time Enough for Glory, Casting Calls, Crazy Horse Explains Little Big Horn, Reverse Engineering, The Angel with Authority Over Fire, The Man in the Cage, have all been written in the last five years. A much higher percentage of what I'm writing lately seems to be prose, with a pretty fair amount of it humorous. I suppose I should formulate a chronology of my writings, then present them in the order they were written, and let the brickbats fall where they may.
Even I get surprised in this: Googling "John Libertus" on the web a year ago, I found a poem, credited to me, in Angstmonster.org, a text-only ezine. The editor who'd posted it said he'd found the poem on a piece of notepaper, between the pages of an old, used textbook in Austin, Texas, dated 1959. Since I was a 16-year-old freshman at the University of Texas at Austin in 1959, I read it, but didn't recognize it at all. The editor finally sent me a scanned image of the page, and, sure enough, it was my handwriting. Not a bad poem, either, but I don't remember writing it, at all.
Q: First You Die to the World is a cry of memories and waiting...but surely, John has had life after loss...yes?
A: There's something that looks like life, but isn't: worldly ambitions, greed, coveting, lust for social status, pleasure, the heartless pursuit of happiness (!); it's only when you die to these things that you can truly live. And when you die to them, they loose their force with you: the world dies. The sounds of the 'world' become the aching cries of children who have lost their way.
But Love looks in your windows. (ed. note: I sooo love this line...I missed it in John's work, but have since learned that it is from John's "Valentine's Day", posted at lit.org, so I guess I can't steal it.)
Q: Can you share what prompted your writing the historical spoofs? I find them extremely entertaining...(Crazy Horse Explains Little Big Horn, History on Trial, Suspicions of Romeo, et al?
A: I was a history minor in college, and have continued reading history this rest of my life. Like many older people, I've done more reading in history than required for a doctorate.
People are the fascination; my practice as a Christian of putting myself in another's place keeps me wide open to historical characters - they can walk right into my head. And if they want to be funny, they can crack me up.
Q: Ok, you know I do my homework...the flash fiction piece Casting Calls, indicates a significant knowledge of "the business", and... about those porno scripts..a pirate? I Keep Getting These Movie Offers..(:)) Wishful thinking or clever sharing?
A: I'm pretty careful. I refuse sex with a woman who already has a man she's having sex with, or a woman who's 'shopping around;' to me, sex is total, and involves not just the physical, but the uttermost parts of both persons' souls. It comes after you know you love. I do not indulge in wishful thinking. Both the pieces you mention are exact metaphoric expressions of my direct
experience. Hell, for that matter, so is Suspicions of Romeo.
Q: Man in a Cage, is that social commentary on the absurdity of bureaucracy? .
A: The Man in the Cage is a metaphoric commentary on people's tendency to pigeonhole each other. Everybody wants a snappy summary, bureaucrats too. Instead of learning from our best, we tend to canonize them. Hell of a mistake.
Q: Your writing is a real advertisement for the theory of soul mates. In your poem I've Often Thought of How My Old Man Died you talk about a woman "folding up her love like summer clothes..." after the passing of her spouse. Do you believe in fate? Do we just have one true love in our lives, or could there be more than one?
A: I don't know. From the moment Angelina and I met, neither of us ever had a doubt about who we wanted. Same for my mom and dad. It might be different for others; I hesitate to claim limits for love, or second-guess the choices love will make, but I can't help feeling that's the way it should be.
Q: Your wit sneaks into both your poetry and your flash fiction, but it is so cleverly done that it creeps up on the reader...is that crafted or is it how your mind works...?
A: I guess it's just the way my mind works. People don't seem to get half the wisecracks in my everyday conversation.
Q: Write a flash non-fiction piece for me....on John's mark in/on the world, your contribution, what remains after you, the best thing you did.
"John who?
Oh, yeah. That cardboard box over there. It's got a plastic bag in it, that's the ashes. The work order says we're to cut a hole down to the top of his wife's coffin, drop the bag in, and fill the hole. Cut the turf off the top of the hole, and replace it when you're through."
"What about a stone?"
"Let me see. The work order says,
the words will be sung
by the shadow of a little bird
flying west in the twilight
Q: I don't know how you will manage it, but please select your favorite published piece at lit.org and tell me about it...why it is your favorite, what brought about its writing, etc...
A: I really don't have a favorite; I don't tend to think that way at all. Don't take this as a refusal; the question stumps me
Q: I have to ask the back story question since it is one I get the most comments on, and everyone wants to know the "seed" that precipitated a particular work or the circumstances surrounding its writing. Please select anything you have written and give me its creative spark, an anecdote, a revelation, anything you wish to share.
A: OK - We go a long way back, around here:
This gruesome little poem came from something I recognized was going on between two women I knew: one was the cultured, elegant, attractive, 50s-something Librarian in the little town in which I lived, the other, her 19-year-old Assistant Librarian, the "Princess" I mention in the poem "I keep getting these movie offers."
The Librarian was interpersonally imposing the suggestion of her greater education, intelligence and culture to establish her social superiority over her Assistant, and her Assistant's status as a mere peasant. At the same time, her Assistant was using her youth and beauty to impose the suggestion of her superior sexual attractiveness to men.
The Librarian was also the editor of a literary magazine, was publishing a lot of my work, and knew quite a bit about my publishing background; she tried to use her cultural and intellectual accomplishments, and her high standing in the community, to status-borrow from me, wanting me to behave in a courtly way towards her, to establish our mutual, exalted status in the community. I don't permit this sort of thing, and occasionally left her ego in shreds.
They got in a little shoot-out over my attention, and I spotted a similarity between the Librarian's behavior towards her Assistant, and the behavior of the Countess Elizabeth Bathory, of the Carpathian Middle Ages, whose history I was researching at the time. Elizabeth Bathory, when she came into her middle 40s and began losing the 'bloom' of her youth, had her servants kidnap scores of peasant girls, whom they tortured to death so that Elizabeth might bathe in their blood, in an effort to maintain her youthful appearance.
Elizabeth came to me, speaking in the same cultured manner the Librarian used; however, since I was like the Marquis towards her, she came addressing her assistant, instead. Elizabeth's countryman of a few decades before, Draculya, Vlad, the Impaler, got a bad rap from this woman.
Q: You are so widely published that I would be remiss in not asking you to share with young, and/or aspiring publishees :) Can you speak either to technical writers, and/or poets, fiction writers and give them some tips?
A: Make sure what you're saying is clear, that you mean it, and that it matters.
As for publishing, remember what Vincent Van Gogh said: "Do your work, and it will find its friends."
Q: I find that there are nuggets in many writings which strike me and set them apart from the rest...what is it about a particular poem or other written work that sets it apart as a cut above the rest for you as a reader?
A: That it lead to significant insight in a telling way.
Q: What is your favorite poem/poet of all time?
A: I have favorites, but no favorite.
I could mention Shakespeare's Sonnet 116:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
a poem I first read when I was 9 years old. Still love it. Thanks, Will, nice to meet another man.
Favorite poet(s)? Will Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, John Donne, William Blake, T. S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins - I could go on.
Q: What is your favorite non-fiction work/author?
A: works:
Ecclesiastes, the Tao Te Ching, the Dammapada, the Sermon on the Mount, Walden Pond
authors:
Suleman, Li Erhl, Gotama the Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, Henry David Thoreau
Q: Your favorite fiction work/author?
A: works:
King Lear, Cyrano de Bergerac, Gone with the Wind, many of the works of Franz Kafka, the Wendigo (Algernon Blackwood), The Chronicles of Amber (Roger Zelazny)
authors:
Will Shakespeare, Edmond Rostand, Margaret Mitchell, Franz Kafka
Q: If I had one wish, I would wish for....(finish the thought)
A: "Well, I'd wish for World Peace, and that all the little children be happy and fed, and that the Beauty Contest Judges remember what I look like in this red dress."
Q: You and six people (living or dead) can go to a place where the inhabitants are clean slates. Who would you select to take with you to introduce them to the world they do not know.
A:
Jesus of Nazareth
Siddhartha Gotama, the Buddha
the Nagual Juan Matus
Li Erhl (author of the Tao Te Ching)
Abraham Lincoln
Angelina de la Garza Libertus
Or in a pinch, I'd just take Angelina. Between us, we could wake a world.
Q: Pet peeves in other's writing?
Cold-blooded, dishonest attempts to manipulate the feelings of readers
Unbridled self-indulgence
Unbridled self-importance
Unthinking, cheerful platitudes
pretensions of being an artiste
willfully ignoring the truth
Q: Is the world a better or worse place than it was for our predecessors?
We've increased our possibilities for both good and bad. We're still our own worst enemies.
Q: If you had to describe yourself in twenty five words or less...how would you describe John Libertus?
A: Who?
Q: In your writing, you speak about the world, about history, the future, the condition of man, Angelina and a couple of other assorted people... but even in direct questions, you are more reticent about John Libertus. I see him in your writing, I see sensitivity, talent, education, wit...but there is still a sense that as a reader, I am getting what you want me to have...that I still can't quite put my finger on John Libertus the man. Is that by design? What makes the world go around for you...?
A: Sex, Death and Love. What else is there? I'm a buddhist, Claire, I carefully avoid having any idea of myself: it's the ultimate trap. I also work pretty hard to say what I mean and mean what I say, so if you're seeing clearly, you're seeing the truth.
I want to thank John so much for taking his time to be EXPOSED!
I am working on an interview for our fearless leader, Crowe, and Bartleby is working on an interview for me..
Until next time, and Happy Mother's Day!
Claire
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Reader's Question this week:
Q: Do you talk directly to the people you interview before or while you do it?
A: No, I seek them out through their writings, which is why it is necessary to have either enough posted here or somewhere else for me to form questions in my mind. I take notes as I read, formulate questions and then let the interviewee answer at his or her leisure. I figure if I want to know something, there must be someone else who does too :)
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EXPOSED! at lit.org (williamhill)
