On Sunday, April 26, we met up with Ryan Clark at the Trident Cafe in Boulder, Colorado, to discuss his recent chapbook and his ideas on Panda Bear Pedagogy, the pun, homophonic translation, curveballs, and fake mustaches. Clark is the author of And Bring My Developing Hands, available from Con/Crescent Press (formerly Polter Press). A graduate of Naropa University’s MFA Writing & Poetics program, he will be attending Illinois State University to begin his studies for his PhD in English this fall.
Brendan Hamilton: So, we’re going to talk a little bit about Ryan’s chapbook, And Bring My Developing Hands, available through Polter Press, which is now Con/Crescent Press.
Ryan Clark: The artwork is from Christopher Edwards, who’s very good.
BH: Yeah, I saw that. Is he a friend of yours?
RC: Yeah, he was my roommate for a while and then he moved to Albuquerque earlier this year.
BH: And was the decision to put pictures in here…did he draw these from your poems?
RC: Yeah. He pretty much…I said, you know, here’s the chapbook…he’s an artist, so I said, here’s the chapbook, you can make whatever pictures you want, and so that’s what he did. It’s his visual conception of my poetry.
BH: So, reading your chapbook, I went back to a lot of stuff…you were in Reed Bye’s Radical Prosody class with me, actually…
RC: Yeah.
BH: And one thing that came to mind, which I thought was really interesting in your writing style, was a word that I had to go back and look up, was “anacoluthon.” Which sounds like a prehistoric snake of some sort.
RC: Yeah, or a sea creature.
BH: Yeah. Which is appropriate enough. But it’s that moment in writing, in poetry, or also in rhetoric, where you break the syntax, the sentence structure, to create whatever effect you’re going for. And I notice that you use anacoluthon a lot and you’re very conscious about it, too. In fact, you have, in the poem “Things You Do Under the Table,” this great stanza, “switch the switch as though the / syntax of our irony can exist.” And I was wondering about your writing process, is this a “first thought best thought,” do things flow the way they do because you’re just writing it as it is? Or is revision a heavy part of your process?
RC: Revision is sometimes a heavy part. I mean, I kind of revise as I go in my head. You know, I’ll think of a line, and then as I write the line, I might go back and change the line until it’s at least good enough to go on. I don’t spend a whole lot of time with it, but I don’t write a line just from stream of consciousness. I think about it first. That poem in particular was a found language poem. I just grasped…wrote down overheard phrases and halves of phrases from a lecture during the Summer Writing Program. A lot of those poems in there are like that, actually, from that kind of method of construction. And what I would do was—because I don’t want to steal people’s lines or anything—so I’ll cut a line in half, or like a phrase in half, and use just like three or four words and connect it to other ones that make interesting patterns or say more interesting things. I think “switch the switch” was just like a stutter, like someone said “switch the…switch,” you know, whatever. But I liked it, I liked switching a switch, you know, with that poem…
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