Carolyn Guinzio is the author of Quarry (Parlor Press), West Pullman (Bordighera) and the chapbook Untitled Wave (Cannibal Books), and because it’s been a little while since her poem “Shack & Creek” was published on Linebreak, you now have one more good reason to read it again in our archives.
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ASHLEY: What were the origins of “Shack & Creek”? Where did the poem begin?
CAROLYN: Shack & Creek began with an image. I remembered hearing a story of a small house being washed down a river in a flood. The very idea seemed to say something about human beings, permanence and power, about the things we have no power over. Even a house can be uprooted.
ASHLEY: “Shack & Creek” seems to exist in the tension between the comfort of isolation and a simultaneous longing to move outside of the self, that struggle to “let it go back” toward a more natural interaction with the world. What does this tension mean to you personally, if anything?
CAROLYN: A shack on an edge of creek makes me think of a hermitage, so yes, the balance between solitude and connection is meant to be evoked as well.
ASHLEY: I noticed a tension between the organic self – the tree roots – against the constructed self – the shack. How do you feel about this opposition – or is it an opposition in your mind?
CAROLYN: The tension you noticed between, as you nicely put it, the organc self and the constructed self, is something that interests me very much. The idea that we make something real just by looking at it, a version of the watched pot that never boils, is an aspect of one of my favorite things to think about: We humans know just so much, just enough for speculation, presumption and hubris. We undestand just enough to scoff at the certainties of the past.
ASHLEY: In our correspondence with you, we mistakenly referenced the poem as “Shack and Creek” instead of including the ampersand. You corrected us right away, but – knowing you – it seems like that was an important choice rather then poetic posturing. What, to you, is the significance of the ampersand?
CAROLYN: The importance of the ampersand has to do with a project I’d been working on for some time. A symbol that fills the space between things, a symbol for connection between things: the perfect center between two, like the bubble in a level. It also resembles a route on a map, with intersecting points, roads and rivers. I liked it as a visual symbol of connection, a wordless “and.”
ASHLEY: What was the first poem that had an effect on you?
CAROLYN: The first poem that had a effect on me? That’s a tough one, but a very early favorite was “The Emperer of Ice Cream”. I’m fond of beauty, and it has such shape and sparkle, while being utterly bleak at the same time. And it’s in the level bubble between sound and sense, my favorite place.
ASHLEY: At a recent poetry reading in Fayetteville, you mentioned that your chapbook from Cannibal Books was a poetic departure from your previous work. What do you see as your usual poetic stance, and how did this book change that course? Why did you see this as necessary?
CAROLYN: Untitled Wave is quite different from the poems in Quarry, it’s true. It’s a sequence of poems with very long lines and it moves forward only very slowly, like a stalled out storm front. It hovers obessively over its ideas; there is a lot of repetition and circling back. The lines are not economic; they unravel. I think it’s a bridge to the project that followed it. I do think it’s possible for any of us to reach a point where we could continue writing pretty well the same way we’d been writing, but I want to try, at least, to move forward and try something new.
ASHLEY: Now for the traditional rock-star question: What’s the most money you’ve made from poetry, and how did you spend it?
CAROLYN: I have not been particularly lucky making money from poetry. I got a state grant in KY, I think it was $5000, which I probably used for health insurance premiums. But who among us is in it for the money?
Previous Interviews:
An Interview with Katrina Vandenberg
An Interview with Sally Molini
An Interview with Joe Wilkins
As you’ve probably already noticed, Carolyn Guinzio is guest blogging here at Unstressed this week, and we couldn’t be happier about it. Carolyn is the author mostly recently of Quarry, a collection of poems that David Shapiro described as “truth-telling, emotional, and fragile with sudden storms within.” A previous book, West Pulman, was released in 2005. She’s contributed two poems to Linebreak — “Counting” and “Shack & Creek” — and other poems are available at 42opus, Blackbird, and The Raleigh Quarterly. Welcome, Carolyn.