Editor, poet, and graphic designer Bryan Roth talked with Fringe’s Rachel Dacus via email about his own work. Roth writes, mainly in free verse, about relationships, pivotal moments in time when everything can change, and regret about the choices we make in those pivotal moments. He’s well-known in Colorado for reading his own and others’ poems from memory.

The first part of this interview covers the purpose of poetry and how to edit a collection.

Let’s look at your poem “What the Gambler Knows.” What gave you the idea for this poem?

What the Gambler Knows
I'm a driver, I'm a winner.
Things are gonna change—I can feel it.
—Beck, "Loser"

One day you'll wake up,
realize what your life has been reduced to—
what, in the end, each day becomes—
is simply one more chance
to roll the dice,
one more quick recalculation
of what you're up against,
what you still have left to lose.

***

It’s been said that poets write about their obsessions. I think, to a large extent, that’s true of most poets, and certainly true of myself. One of my greatest “obsessions” is time, and particularly with how everything hangs in the balance at any given moment—really, how every moment of every day—you have the potential to make an almost unlimited number of choices, and each of these choices has the potential to send you down a completely different path in life, popularly referred to these days as “The Butterfly Effect”. The smallest change can have profound results, down the road somewhere. Usually, we don’t think of these things, and certainly some choices are more dramatic than others, some situations more obviously “game-changers” than others.

So “What the Gambler Knows” is about just that: the gambler being someone who actually does know this thing about life that we mostly don’t think about (because it would obviously be endlessly distracting to think about this every moment of our waking lives!). The point of the poem is that this is true for everyone, whether they consciously consider it or not, and that eventually, something happens in everyone’s life that forces them to realize this aspect of mortal reality.

The poem started out about a page and a half long, with more details—“signs” of random alignments signaling to the speaker these “moments of destiny.” The more I worked on the poem, the less the details seemed to matter, and the shorter the poem got; what’s left is actually the last strophe [in modern free verse, the separate sections of lines in a poem, what would be called stanzas in a rhyming poem], the poem’s original ending. After letting it sit for a bit, I still felt it needed something, and I had the idea of adding the epigraph from the Beck song, which seemed like a fittingly ironic counterpoint, since the name of the song is “Loser” and the speaker of the poem clearly believes he’s a winner—or still has a chance to be. And there you have it.

The poem “Since You Ask” has a repeating visual motif (the curves of waves, legs, a calligraphic letter). Did being a visual artist and a graphic designer affect your work as a poet in this poem? Did you plan this visual motif?

Since You Ask

I like long, quiet walks between midnight
and dawn, alone with the night,
when my thoughts can take up the entire street,
fill up the spaces between buildings and trees,
and make the place my own.

I like to sit on sand barely
lit by the moon at four a.m.,
watch the gentle, relentless waves
wash up almost to my feet;
let myself be mesmerized
by the sound of their sighing
as they endlessly use themselves up.

I like to study the curve above the ankle
of a woman with beautiful legs, as it rises up,
reverses itself, is filled out by her calf muscles, so

tangibly supple and taut as she sits across the room
with her legs crossed just right, unaware
of my fascination.

I like the one letter I think of as perfectly formed
after practicing my calligraphy for three hours,
especially when there’s no one to show it to.

I’d like to write a poem as beautiful as a woman—
the most beautiful woman I could ever know—
who wants only me, even though
she could have anyone.

***

You’re very observant, regarding the “curve” imagery. I suppose this is where a clever person would give some brilliant-sounding answer about “extended metaphors” or “thematic motifs,” but to be honest, it wasn’t deliberate, and in fact, I never really thought much about the repetition of the curves, so thanks for pointing that out—it’s always nice to find out you’re even more talented than you thought you were! (Kidding. It was just my obsessions at work again. Or play.) I think sometimes when you’re writing, your subconscious is actually a step ahead of you, so maybe that’s all there is to it. Actually, this is a very old poem and one I would consider an “early” poem, meaning I was just starting to get a clue about poetry—but I was also consciously trying to put some “real” things in it about myself, and people seem to like it. Having started out as a visual artist, and being a screenwriter, I do tend to think visually, even when not consciously trying to.

This poem is an example of the difference between “occasion” and “event,” the event being the girl asking a simple question, and the occasion being taking advantage of that opportunity for the speaker to reflect later about what is really important to him, which reveals something deeper about him than just telling the girl that he enjoys the proverbial “long walks on the beach.”

As for being an artist and graphic designer, naturally that affected the writing (most overtly the bit about practicing calligraphy, since I am a calligrapher). I think it can’t not affect it. I started out as an artist, and switched to writing, and I carried over a lot of things from the visual arts to my writing, most deliberately the idea that “form follows function.” It never occurred to me not to extrapolate things I learned about creating visual art to writing (“form follows function” becoming, when applied to writing, “content determines form”).

You speak about the poem’s “occasion”—what differentiates a poem’s occasion from its subject or events?

I think some people seem to misunderstand what is meant by a poem’s “occasion.” The “occasion” for a poem is not “X happened” or “I felt such-and-such an emotion” (and I will now write a poem about it For the Edification of All). That’s merely an event, or a feeling—the overt subject of the poem. But poetry isn’t about “expressing your feelings” so much as it’s about making the reader feel what you want them to. It’s not about merely “describing” an event. The occasion for a poem is the opportunity provided by an event, circumstance, or moment—whether “real” or “made up”—to reveal some truth about the human condition. This is similar to the difference between subject and theme. Your subject may be relaxing in a hammock at a friend’s house, and looking at whatever happens to be around you—like in James Wright’s brilliant poem, and one of my all-time favorites, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.” Good title!

So, too, the “occasion” is not that the speaker is lying around in a hammock, waxing poetic on a lazy day. That’s an “event” or “circumstance” which is only the subject of the poem. The real occasion is the opportunity for the poet—through the voice of the speaker in the poem—to reveal some truth about the human condition, about life. In this case, that we all have regrets, we all have things (if we are thinking people, and do not live an “unconsidered life”) we would do differently, if we could do them over again. So this is a truth that is universal, meaning it is something everyone can relate to. That makes the poem rise to the level of metaphor, so that it is relevant for all of us, to any reader, rather than merely being a diary entry about a day spent lounging around at a friend’s farm one afternoon, which is only important to the speaker in, or writer of, the poem.

In the poem, “Hiking Story,” would you describe this poem’s several points of view, layers of meaning, and commentary on sexual politics, as the poem’s “occasion”?

Hiking Story

two lovers once
were walking in the woods
outside Silverthorne it was
just before sunset
when he took her
by surprise telling her to go
down on him right
then and there but
she didn't want to
be seen so he had to make her
understand that there was no one else
around for miles except maybe
a few bears who aren't after
all known to be especially voyeuristic
finally she agreed
but by then the moment spoiled
by the sheer rationality
of the negotiations was gone
so he said to forget it
which is where our story would normally
end except that in real life
he goes home and writes a poem
about it while right about now
she is telling some new guy
her hiking story
and how outrageous it was
for her ex to even ask her
for a blowjob right in front of
god and everyone
as New Guy nods along
making a mental note not to
do anything
like that

***

In “Hiking Story,” the subject is a guy and a girl walking in the woods. He asks her for oral sex. That’s not the “occasion,” though. The real occasion is, again, to reveal some truth about the human experience. In this case, it’s two-fold: the primary occasion is the idea that for any given event, even when the same event is experienced by two or more people, it will seem like completely different events from the perspectives of those people.

So the walk in the woods is remembered one way by the speaker, another way (he imagines) by the ex-girlfriend, and yet a third way by someone else, who only hears about the event second hand (the “new guy”). And, yes, this is another of my obsessions, in case you were wondering: how reality is really not fixed, but depends to a large extent on our perceptions of it. Another “truth” in the poem, running through it as a dark undercurrent, is “sexual politics”—how people in relationships often want, at any given moment, different things that are mutually exclusive; how there is almost always, in any relationship of two people (even a friendship), one person who has more “power” in the relationship.

If you pay close attention to the line breaks, you will see this darker, almost sinister undercurrent: we know, before we get halfway through the poem, that this is a relationship that will not last, because the two people in it are not compatible, and the speaker may, in fact, be somewhat of a jerk! (Disclaimer: always remember, poems are not necessarily autobiographical, or the way things “really happened”!) There is also the “sexual politics” from the point of view of the new guy: he learns some “advance information” on what not to do with the “new girl” he has just started seeing—showing how we learn not only from our own mistakes, but sometimes from the mistakes of those who have gone before us (if we’re paying attention, anyway!).

One can write poems about an event, without having, or noticing, the real occasion for the poem, just as one can write a poem that has a subject, but ignores the real meaning (theme) presented by that subject; those are not likely to be especially interesting poems, though; ones that bear re-reading to discover deeper layers of meaning. They’ll be one-dimensional, forgettable.