Startled by JOY 2019: Meet Ed Meek

June 30, 2019

Startled by JOY 2019: Meet Ed Meek

Dear Readers...

When I'm not writing, I'm involved in a multitude of other projects, foremost among them

Books and Brews, in which Michael Agnew (Minnesota's first beer cicerone) and I interview local authors as Michael pairs craft brews to their reading and....
editing Gabriel's Horn's annual poetry anthology.

This year was our maiden voyage, with the theme of JOY. Our goal is to provide a paying market for poets writing in traditional and classical forms. I was delighted with the quality of poets who responded, with their impressive credentials and backgrounds and am very proud to feature THOMAS R. SMITH and DAN BLUM, two very accomplished wordsmiths. We have a number of poets from the Twin Cities, but also from around the United States, from Canada, and from the United Kingdom. I look forward to having even more countries represented next year. If you're a poet and would like to submit, please visit our submission page.

OUR FIRST EVENT … will be

July 7, 2017 at
Next Chapter Books, 38 South Snelling, Saint Paul, MN,
2 to 3:30.
Wine, beverages, hors d'ourves and readings from several of our poets!

And so, as we launch Startled by JOY: 2019, I begin a series of interviews with several of the twenty-nine poets. I have enjoyed getting to know more about these people who are part of this wonderful anthology. As a writer and some-time poet myself, it is an inspiration to get to know them better. Today, please welcome:

Ed Meek

Give us a brief background of your life:

I grew up just outside of Boston in an Irish Catholic family with three younger siblings in a single income home. I went to University of Massachusetts from 1969-1973 during the anti-Vietnam protests and hippie years. I majored in English and Creative Writing. I returned to Boston and worked in bars, then went to U of Montana for an MFA, studying with Richard Hugo. I was recruited to teach in an International School in Iran where I witnessed the revolution and left on an evacuation plane. I worked in restaurants for a few years, met my wife, had a son, and taught in colleges and high school. I’ve been writing poetry for about 50 years.

What first drew you to poetry?

I started writing poetry in high school, encouraged by teachers. I liked playing with language and metaphor and was drawn to poetic song lyrics by people like Dylan and Joni Mitchell. I edited the school magazine. I was in an Honors Program at UMass and was able to take small classes with great professors who had me do extra reading and invited me to graduate workshops. I edited the literary magazine at UMass. A couple of my professors suggested I go to an MFA program.

Who are your favorite poets?

Frost, Dickinson, Whitman, Yeats, Heaney. I also like A.E. Stallings, Frederick Seidel, Billy Collins.

Have you studied the craft of poetry?

Good poetry like all good art, must show evidence of skill. There has to be a reason to write in lines. If you can read poetry as a paragraph, it isn’t poetry. The lines should reverberate and every once in a while, be quotable. Poetry involves a mix of sound or song, images and metaphor, and ideas. The emphasis can shift, but all three must be employed. I learned this of course from reading. It turns out that critical reading and critical thinking is just as demanding a skill as creative writing.

Do you make a daily practice of writing poetry?

No. I usually do some type of writing each day. I write poetry, fiction, articles, essays and book reviews. That’s a problem as a writer. I don’t really have a specialty. Even when it comes to writing poetry, I like to write everything from prose poems to lyric poems to narrative poems to poems in forms. If I do get the impulse to write a poem though, I follow up and write it and often, I write poems in groups.

Tell us something about your process of writing poetry.

I often get ideas for poems from other writers. I write a poem in response to the poem they wrote. My own version of the Great Molasses Disaster, for example. I may get an image stuck in my head, a turkey being run over or a caravan of toddlers going by my condo. Or it might be a phrase that comes to me: “He was so old, his bones seemed to swim in his skin.” An idea can also strike me as poetic, like Rumsfeld’s musings: “There are knowns, unknowns and unknown unknowns.” I also will write poems about friends and family, people who have died and poems of praise. I usually write out poetry longhand and then recopy it while eliminating extra words, changing easy language and figuring out what the poem is about, working on the endings. I’ll also change lines years later. Sometimes I don’t get poems published for a few years anyway.

Are there themes that run through your poetry? What draws you to them?

I write about nature partly because it has aesthetic value and is uplifting. There are quite a few mentions of light in my poems as there is in the poem in the anthology. I also like narrative poems. Frost and Heaney were great at those: telling a story in elevated language that sounds natural. Poetry for me can also be a good place to express ideas about ineffable topics. “Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.” I think we look to poetry in times of difficulty, when someone dies or when our country is in turmoil but we also reach for poems at weddings and celebrations.

What are your goals for your poetry and writing life?

I’d like to continue writing and to reach a wider audience. It would be nice if people would buy more poetry. It turns out that poetry, like every other business, is about networking and public relations and performance. Not my strong points. It is good that poetry has gotten more popular lately although a lot of the poetry being celebrated isn’t very good. Critical reading and thinking, as I mentioned, are not easy. Nonetheless, people are reading and writing poetry and that’s a good thing.

Links:

Edmeek.net

@emeek
Ed Meek at National Poetry Month at WBUR.ORG

Ed's Published Works: