Eliot Khalil Wilson: Poetry Sings Like That
Eliot Khalil Wilson is the author of The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go, published by Cleveland State Poetry Press as well as This Island of Dogs, published by Margie/Intuit House Press. He has received a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, a Bush Foundation Fellowship, the Hill-Kohn Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Robert Winner Prize from the Poetry Society of America. He currently teaches at the University of Colorado Denver.
Rachel Dacus had the opportunity to ask him about how he became interested in poetry, what it’s like writing as a Southerner and an Arab-American, and how MFA programs have improved poetry.
What is poetry and what is its purpose?
Wow. I’m glad we are starting with the easy questions. Poetry has many purposes—all of them moral. Poetry, after all, is a moral act. What poetry is is a harder question. Certainly it is a way of remembering. No doubt, too, that it is what Frost called it—“a momentary stay against confusion”, but it is more than that. It is more constitutive of sense—“a way of knowing” as Auden called it, and about poetry Auden was never wrong.
On a less figurative level, the only feature poetry has that it doesn’t share with prose is the line break, which is there to provide the energy of surprise and ultimately much of the power.
When and how did you become interested in poetry?
I’m an English professor’s son, so I grew up around books. I loved the Browning and Tennyson monologues, then the Frost poems—though I was mostly ignorant of their darkness. I had a copy of Chief Modern Poets of Britain and America, Vol. 2 and I made much use of it. In college I read Sexton and Plath, but I was not a poet. I was a reader, a student. I wrote my first poem, my first earnest and legitimate poem, when I was thirty. I have no degree in creative writing and I’ve never taken a creative writing course in an official capacity.
Is there one poet who has interested or inspired you more than any other?
No, I wouldn’t say so, though I am a part of a huge chorus of influences. If I write in blank verse, I hear Frost’s raspy voice reading it back to me. If I write a list poem, Whitman’s long shadow falls. If I write something raw and matter-of-fact, the smoke from Sexton’s cigarettes gets in my eyes. There is no end to the anxiety of my influences.
How does your background as a Southerner and an Arab-American enter or influence your poetry?
I love the South and I miss it—the pace of life, the friendliness, the characters. Subjects were easy to find because people still like to talk down there and it is easier to get to know people. My background as an Arab-American has only come out in my poetry in response to the American Empire’s program of vilification and colonalization.
