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Interview with David Banach
David Banach is the author of “Ode to the Vector,” available in Heathentide Orphans 2022.
Who was the first author or artist to broaden your worldview?
I was deeply changed by reading E.M Forster’s A Room with a View and seeing the film adaptation of it. I still force it upon my students every year. But my first and always poet is Walt Whitman. I’m still assuming what he assumes, and I still long to be undisguised and naked in the woods, mad to be in contact with it. Whenever I build a bit of steam in my poetic voice, as in “Ode to the Vector,” I can feel the spirit of Walt inhabiting me.
When did you first realize you wanted to be an author/artist?
I’m still realizing it and still uncertain about it. I came late to poetry, about 10 years ago, and I’ve learned with Ada Limon that the more you speak your fears and throw them out to the sky, the more freely you can move in the world, and I’ve learned with Audre Lorde that your silences will not save you. I’ve learned the joy and felt love of being in a room where people can share their truth in words. I love the quiet silence of making poetry and the community of sharing. But I think it is important to love the process of making and sharing more than the “having had written” of being an author. So I still have some discomfort in thinking about myself that way.
What word do you feel should be brought back into popular usage?
I like the word groovy, though I am embarrassed to use it, and I realize that much of its usage was silly and adolescent. Maybe it is because my favorite song as a kid was the 59th Street Song by Simon and Garfunkel. I love the way it sounds and I kind of love the whole idea of a groove. I wish I was brave enough to say it more and not mind feeling stupid. I also have grown to like the word “love.” People are afraid to trivialize it, as if it were not a thing that could stand everyday use. Or they worry about being sappy and sentimental, but I have been working on saying it to friends and letting it shape my words to kindness. Simone Weil thought that there were certain words like Love or Justice that connect up with primordial ideas and resonate in a special way in us. I like using the word in my poetry, but perhaps that is because I am sappy and sentimental, and, well, groovy.
How long does it take you to close the gap between the work as you imagine it and the real, finished piece?
I work quickly. I hold an idea in my mind for a day or so in my head trying out phrases and images, and I sit down when a first line or title or volta come to me. I love the “write a poem a day” for 30 days challenges and spend no more than 30 or so minutes letting a draft come out, then a few minutes bending it into shape, removing words, and making the sound and meter flow and replacing tired words or images. I can let it sit a few days and come back to it and see what it feels like with a bit of distance and tinker a bit. I have benefitted from workshops and editors who force me to rework a poem, but it is not natural to me. I’m sure I’m just not as good a poet as those that I hear about working on poems through many many drafts over years. I tend to just write a new poem and forget one that isn’t working.
What’s the last book you didn’t finish reading, and why did you put it down?
I’ll often put down a book and move on to something else, especially in the summer where I am reading for pure joy and distraction. I’m embarrassed to say I stopped reading The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, despite its being beautifully written because the number of characters and time shifts were asking more attention of me than I wanted to give. I’m sure I’ll go back to it when I am more in the mood for it. I’m also embarrassed to say that I browse poetry books rather than reading them cover to cover. I know that poets agonize over the ordering and arrangement of their volumes, but I love opening at random paging and discovering little gems, feeling free to pass some over and get back to them. I usually eventually get to all of them, but I love the adventure of browsing. I have to read so many books systematically and carefully for my work, so the things that bring me joy I like to approach with a bit more Freedom.
Name a book/author/artist that you feel deserves more recognition.
The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevesky is my favorite book. I’ve read it far more times than I can remember and I still find fresh insights. For poets, I think the work of the French Philosopher and mystic, Simone Weil, is a treasure trove of ideas and phrases and ways of seeing the world. Her book Gravity and Grace has ideas for poems on every page in her aphoristic and elliptical style. You may remember Leonard Cohen’s version but “Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters” was the original and is just one of the gems in that book.
Name a favorite film or other visual work that has influenced the way you shape your stories.
Thomas Hardy is a truly great poet, but I think I am more influenced by a trick I see him using often in his novels. He frames a scene the way a cinematographer, seeing it from a distance with an objective eyes, two lone figures holding hands following a thin path through the heather, and then zooms in to their words and then subtle details of their bodies or faces and slowly we see how this scene is part of a bigger drama in the wide world, ready to zoom out again. I’ve always thought of this trick since I write poems about abstract ideas that zoom into the way they live in concrete situations.