A Continuation of Work: an Interview with Ian Randall Wilson (poetry ’02, fiction ’16)
Victoria DiMartino interviews Ian Randall Wilson (poetry ’02, fiction ’16) for The Rupture.
A Continuation of Work
Ian Randall Wilson‘s work has appeared in Forklift, Spinning Jenny, The Alaska Quarterly Review and Puerto del Sol. A chapbook, Theme of the Parabola, was published by Hollyridge Press.
His poem, “Nights Below,” appeared in Issue Eighty-Five of The Rupture.
Here, he speaks with interviewer Victoria DiMartino about engagement with the world, getting political with your work, and how eliminating part of the view always requires effort.
Nature is abundant is this piece, both in the imagery and the subject. Did your inspiration for this piece come from the current treatment of the environment by you or by others, or from an experience that you may have had in nature?
This piece is a kind of continuation of a movement in my work that tries to move from the inside to the outside. While there are still concerns with the “I” of the piece, there is at least an attempt at engagement with the world. At the same time, I’m preoccupied with my own mortality. I recently got the memo that gets distributed to all writers when they hit my age, the one that says: You’re going to die soon. Start writing about it. I would say that in more recent work—the poem we’re talking of is over 3 years old—I have begun to engage with more political concerns, be it the idiot that purports to be running our country or the accelerating degradation of our environment. This poem is an early start in that direction. I have to say also, that the end of the poem is an acknowledgment of something that has run through my work. In the past, I have derided certain lyric poets who wrote about “dead grandmothers and trees.” But you know something, sometimes you have to look for a spot of beauty in the world and the majesty of trees might just provide it.
[…continue reading this interview at The Rupture.]
