Behind the Byline with Paul Otremba
An excerpt from the interview, Behind the Byline, with faculty member Paul Otremba, published at NER:
Behind the Byline
Paul Otremba (“Like a Wide River,” 39.3) speaks with NER Poetry Editor Rick Barot about industrial landscapes, the Mississippi in his imagination, and being an artist in the Anthropocene.
Rick Barot: Can you tell us about how “Like a Wide River” came to be?
Paul Otremba: I had to go back and check early drafts of this poem, and it started from a writing exercise I’ve been using for the past five years or more. I choose a line or lines from someone else’s poem, and for each word, I try to come up with an amateur definition or select language from the context in which I may find the word. It’s really an exercise in metonymy, using contiguity and association to generate a draft, or at least some potentially interesting lines. This practice frees me up, so I don’t feel like I need to start with an idea or inspiration. I’m pretty loose with it, letting myself free write and extend off of a word, not worrying if I get to the next word of the instigating poem if I feel like I’m off chasing something.
A paradox of this practice is that while it originates in an arbitrary fashion, by the time I’m into it, I’m drawing on ideas and feelings that are present to me or deep within. I start by writing in a journal until I feel like I’ve exhausted the exercise, and then I type it up, revising as I go. When I first started doing this, I was performing this kind of “metonymic translation” for one single poem, in its entirety, over and over—William Carlos Williams’s “Poem, (‘As the cat…’).” The results were always wildly different.
What I can tell from the first draft is that I started with the self-conscious investigation of metaphor, or perhaps more precisely, conceptual metaphor, the kind that is born out of experience but then becomes its own way of framing how experience is understood or felt thereafter. I grew up along the Mississippi River in the Twin Cities, and it holds a powerful place within the source of images from which I have drawn to make poems. One must have the mind of a river, so to speak, etc.
[…continue reading here]
