Visiting with Rochelle Hurt
by Claire Guyton
My mother, Beth Dunn, took this photo in our yard in Youngstown, Ohio.
What inspired your poem “Third Surgery”?
The poem came out of two experiences that met when I moved to a new state for graduate school. During my undergraduate years in Ohio, I had been undergoing treatments for thyroid cancer that included two surgeries. Just after moving to North Carolina, I received news that the cancer was not entirely gone, as previously thought, and that a third surgery might be necessary. As I was processing this information, I was also mourning the loss of the Midwestern autumn, with all of its dramatic oranges and reds. In Southeastern North Carolina, the summer is quite dramatic, but things stay mostly green through the fall. So the poem was a result of my nostalgic longing for a more dramatic seasonal landscape, reflective of my current state of mind. However, in creating that for myself through the poem, I discovered an unexpected sense of strength and survival to replace self-pity. I hope that is the voice that comes through most clearly in the poem.
Tell us about your writing process.
*Autumn - Naked & Well Dressed, by David Paul Ohmer
My writing process is mysterious even to me. I tend to be inconsistent in my methods, but poems usually start with an image or a phrase for me, rather than a concept or narrative. I build on that initial image or phrase until I’ve got something that I never expected, and then I tear it open for revisions. “Third Surgery” came to me more whole than most, but it went through many tedious revisions before I found its final form. It’s usually the form (stanza structure, lineation tweaks, indents, etc.) that comes last, after the imagery and the language have settled.
Amy Souza, acrylic on paper (detail)
If you painted this poem, what colors would you use?
Reds, of course. I’d need lots of warm autumnal shades of rust, and one swath of bright blue.
What books have had the most impact on your writing?
In some way, every book I read changes my writing a little. The most important ones may be some of the first books that hooked me on poetry in college, like Sylvia Plath’s and Anne Sexton’s. Berryman’s Dream Songs also meant a lot to me at that time, and it still does. My tastes have changed quite a bit, but without that initial interest, I may never have started writing poems. Recently, I’ve been putting my own writing style through a wringer, and trying more experimental and cross-genre work. The books that prompted that change are pretty important to me—books like Julio Cortazar’s Cronopios and Famas, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s Madeleine Is Sleeping, Sabrina Orah Mark’s The Babies, and Charles Simic’s The World Doesn’t End. While I was working on this poem, I was reading Cynthia Huntington’s The Radiant, which is partly about the experiences of illness and the body’s pain and resilience. I expect that my taste and style will continue to evolve, and that perhaps the most important books in my life are the ones that I have yet to read—maybe even the ones that have yet to be written.
*Ohmer’s photo taken at Spring Grove Cemetery & Arboretum in Cincinnati 11/28/2010.
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I ove you Shelley.