What:
Years ago, when I first started writing for publication, I thought I wanted to be a novelist, a fictioneer, as one of my teachers, Chuck Kinder, used to say. My wife and I had a place on Walloon Lake near Petoskey, MI and I noticed, one day, while browsing in a bookstore, that a writers’ retreat was going to be held on our lake. I talked Judy into going. When Judy and I first got together, 50 some years ago, she showed me three poems she’d written in medical school. They were so good, so beautifully formed, that I stopped writing poetry for twenty some years after reading them. I was just a little intimidated! Anyway, I talked Judy into this writers’ retreat and we enrolled. Turned out that no one really liked the short stories I wrote, but they all loved Judy’s poetry (Judy has published four wonderful poetry collections).
During a lull in my part of the program, I joined a poetry workshop Judy was attending with the poet Maria Mazziotti Gillan. Maria told us to write a poem that included a song. I was, again, intimidated. I hadn’t written a poem for years, but Judy egged me on and I wrote a poem called, “The Game,” about attending a minor league baseball game with our son. It incorporated the song, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” On a lark, I submitted it and it was accepted three weeks later! (It’s in my first book, Flashcuts Out of Chaos, WordTech Editions, 2016). I began to write more poetry and was amazed at how many of them were accepted for publication. Eventually, I stopped writing fiction completely so to concentrate solely on poetry. In a way, poetry found me, and not the reverse.
Probably because I began as a fictioneer, my poems are mostly narrative poems. I like to tell a story with my verse. I hear that narrative poetry is out of style now, but I don’t care. It’s what I like to write. I sometimes write other types of poems, but always seem to return to narrative work.
Why:
I’m always flummoxed by the question, Why do you write poetry. I feel like it’s asking me why I have a thumb, or why do I breathe air. When I was a teenager, my mother bought me a portable typewriter. I sat down and began chopping out poems on that old Royal machine. I don’t know why, it just happened. Now I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t write poems. I really feel that if I stop writing poetry it will be because I have to concentrate heavily on dying. I write or edit or submit something every day. I don’t know what I’d do without it now.
How:
I start the day by reading, not just poems, but anything I can get my hands on. Usually I read something out of the New Yorker or the New York Review Of Books. I love those two publications, and try to read something from one of them every day (but, in general, I’m not a fan of the poetry in either publication). Just today I read an article about Dionne Brand, a Canadienne poet who was born in Trinidad. I loved reading about her life and reading some of her poems in the New York Review of Books. I also read today poems by Pushkin, Jim Harrison, Seamus Heaney, and Charles Simic. Usually, reading poets such as these gets me to write my own poems. I always feel I write just a little better after I’ve read a great poet like Richard Tillinghast, Thomas Lynch, or Maria Gillan. I look at reading as the beginning my daily creative process.
After lunch I move into my third floor study where I might write a rough draft of a poem (I always do that in my notebook—I never compose on my lap top), or I edit a poem (usually on my lap top). I edit and revise my poems extensively. I love Ginsberg’s idea that first thought is best thought, but it’s not true for me. Some of my poems go through more than thirty revisions. I love revision, I feel it’s like sculpting: I keep trimming until what I want to say get through all the verbiage. I’m a big believer in the “less is more” code. If I’m not writing something new or revising something I’m submitting work. I consider submission a part of the creative process. So many colleagues feel that submitting is a drudge. I love it!
Finding the right place for my work is lots of fun. I have a system: usually I can submit a package of poems in under 10 minutes. I also consider marketing my work to be part of my creative process. I’ve written six full-length poetry collections, a chapbook, and a hybrid work of poems and photos, The Old Wood Shop, with photographer Jim Hutt. Once those books appear, I aggressively market them through readings, email, and Facebook. So far, I’ve sold out the initial mailings of all my books. In the most recent case, I just sold 80 copies of my new collection, Pinnacles of Hope (Impspired Books, 2022). Again, so many colleagues feel that marketing their work is too much trouble or somehow divorced from their creative process. For me, it’s been a joy to get creative about marketing my work. A big part of that joy is coming into contact with a wonderful group of poets on Facebook. I love exchanging books with other poets and reading their work.
By the way, should anyone want an inscribed copy of one of my books, they can email me at charlie.brice@gmail.com.
Bio:
Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry Magazine Poetry Contest and placed third in the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize. His sixth full-length poetry collection is Pinnacles of Hope (Impspired Books, 2022). His poetry has been nominated three times for both the Best of Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, The Paterson Literary Review, Impspired Magazine, Salamander Ink Magazine, and elsewhere.
Links:
Two Poems by Charlie Brice on Across the Margin
“Blue Mind” by Charlie Brice on Flashes of Brilliance
Pinnacles of Hope on Impspired Books
Pinnacles of Hope on Amazon
Facebook
“Pinnacles of Hope is a chronicle of life experience ranging from the joys of hippie culture to the challenges of illness and mortality. Whether he’s giving a craft talk on poetry or imagining himself as Charles the Bald, Brice covers all the bases. With this clever wit and word play, he discovers ‘…the curious quiet that makes birds sing.’ And in his unique way, Brice shares his truth: ‘…the palpable sense/that we…broken ones are still here.’”
– Linda Nemec Foster, author of Bone Country, The Blue Divide, and Talking Diamonds
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Linda K. Sienkiewicz is a writer, poet, and artist.
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