​Poetry as Re-creation: an Interview with Bruce Boston, by Matthew Sorrento

​Poetry as Recreation: an Interview with Bruce Boston 
 
In a career spanning more than five decades, Bruce Boston has published speculative poetry that, while rooted in vivid images, reflects constant energy and recreation. Many of his poems and stories, from his debut 1969 collection, XXO, to the more recent Brief Encounters with My Third Eye: Selected Short Poems 1975-2016 (Crystal Lake Publishing, 2016) and Spacers Snarled in the Hair of Comets (Mind's Eye Publications, 2022) have worked off previous concepts and ideas, leading towards ekphrastic elements. 
 
Boston caught up with The Ekphrastic Review for a short interview to discuss his work and provide some samples of his poetry. 
 
Matthew Sorrento: Your interests as a poet and fiction writer seem very broad. I assume you are interested in all types of poetry. Did you try any specific approaches at the beginning of your career? 
 
Bruce Boston: I think like most beginning writers I tried to emulate the writers I enjoyed and admired most. And yes, my interests were broad. In poetry ranging from Pound and Dylan Thomas to Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson. I would often transpose such influences into a speculative context.  
 
For example, my poem "In the Short Seasons of a Long Year without You" was inspired by Pound's "The River-Merchant's Wife." My poem "Riders of the Night" by Stevenson's "Windy Night": 
 
In the Short Seasons of a Long Year Without You
 
A sudden summer
of greenhouse density,
watching five satellites
and a captured score
of jagged meteors
jostle for position
in the syrupy night.
An instantaneous fall
that flashes spun gold
for the barest moment,
then withers a planet
overnight and leaves
the landscape spare
and barren as my limbs
abed without you.
A fast frame winter
of frozen lakes
and ice strewn seas,
with cold so sharp
it hammers out
a dwelling place
within my bones.
When you stepped
through the shifting
portals of the star gate,
you flickered and
vanished more quickly
than the changing seasons.
You promised to return
before the red pods burst
and the winds of spring
ochred the dawn skies
 
with their pollination.
Yet already the days
burn blue again,
the thickening nights
are dense with moisture,
and I feel the rush
of autumn’s gold death
soon swift and sure
upon the land.
In the short seasons
of a long year without you,
your image and promise
falter within my mind.
Perhaps it is time
to try on a new life,
some different clime,
a time to cede the lies
and reasons of our love
as you have let them lie.
In the short seasons
of a long year without you,
the maw of the star gate waits,
a thousand worlds beyond,
another passion spent behind,
this sheet of broken lines
I leave for you to find.
 
Spirits of the Night
 
When the night is dark and stars fill the sky,
And the air is cold, the moon full and high,
Riders pass on by who move like the wind,
Carrying the soul of all that has been,
And they keep riding to the dawn.
When we are asleep and warm in our beds,
Spirits of the night move through our heads,
Images and forms the unconscious breeds,
Fashioned from the depth of unholy needs,
And we keep dreaming until dawn.
When the sun is high and light fills the air,
Shadows of the night are lost in the glare.
Deep in our minds there still run those streams,
Currents dark and swift just like in our dreams,
And they keep flowing past the dawn.
Spirits of the night, keep our trail bright,
Guide us from the darkness, light our way.
We are children now, and forever more,
Cast down in the rush of history’s play,
Living as we can from dark to dawn.
 
However, there were also many fiction writers who use a poetic voice in their prose that influenced my poetry. To name just a few: Lawrence Durrell, Nabokov, Thomas Wolfe, Angela Carter, Robert E. Howard.
 
Matthew Sorrento: I assume that some of your ideas would not work best in poetry, and ended up as fiction, and vice versa. Has this been common in your career, and do you recall any early works of yours that came about this way? 
 
Bruce Boston: One can look at the range of expressions available to creative writers in two ways. As distinct categories with clear divisions: poem, prose poem, flash fiction, short story, novelette, novella, novel. Or as a continuum in which length and depth are extrapolations and evolutions from shorter expressions. A musical analogy would be Listz’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, which takes on symphonic proportions and evolved from simple gypsy folk melodies. 

In my own work, I tend to view creative writing most often as a continuum. I’ve had poems evolve into flash fictions or short stories. My fantasy “Tales of the Dead Wizard” exists as both a poem and a short story, and has been published in both forms. The prime example from my own work regards the poem “In the Garden of the State,” which was published in the 1980s. The poem depicts a state in which the powers-that-be attempt to shape its citizens as bonsai gardeners shape their trees, in this case “pruning” their personalities by means of “the surgical implantation of biochips/injection of neurochemical inhibitors/the traditionally proven application/of stimulus-response indoctrination.” This poem, more than two decades later, eventually evolved into my dystopian sf novel The Guardener’s Tale (Sam’s Dot, 2007), which tells the story of a state psychologist-guardian who attempts to reprogram three interrelated criminals into citizens who will fit into society’s laws and norms.
 
Thus the question of which form works best for a particular idea depends on the nature and depth of the ideas you are trying to express.         
 
Matthew Sorrento: Your work is very image-based. Do you see yourself as this type of writer?
 
Bruce Boston: I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “this type of writer.” If you are talking strictly in terms of craft, i.e., using images to draw a reader into a poem and hold their interest, my answer is yes. The clear and smooth flow of language, along with vivid and appropriate imagery, are two tools of craft that can help accomplish this.
 
However, if you are referring to Imagism, the school of poetic thought founded by Ezra Pound and others, shortly before World War I, I’d have to say “only sometimes.” I’m wary of schools of thought and manifestos that attempt to define artistic forms and lay down rules for their practice. My own reading and influences, and consequently my writing, are too eclectic to embrace any signal method. 
 
That said, I would agree that many of my poems adhere to the basic principles of Imagism as stated in Poetry (March, 1913): 
 
1. Direct treatment of the "thing." whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.
 
Yet many of them do not. Though I generally write in free verse, employing what I consider the musical phrases in language, I’ve also written and published my share of rhymed and metered poems, including a few sonnets. (the metronome). I generally use economy of language (no word that does not contribute), but I’ve also written poems that are spontaneous explosions of language and image, stream of consciousness, that no doubt contain many extraneous words, as in this poem. And though I have some sense of it, I’m not completely sure what direct treatment of the "thing” means. In the poem just mentioned, as well as most of my surreal poems, I think that readers would be hard pressed to actually say what the “thing” is, so I must not be treating it very directly.
 
Matthew Sorrento: You have worked in ekphrasis occasionally. Would you say that the approach shows up naturally, or do you make it a deliberate exercise? 
 
Bruce Boston: I only tried it as an exercise once. The poem was published, but it was not a very good poem. One might learn something about craft by doing an exercise, but the best poems are a product of both craft and inspiration. 
 
When Rod Serling was asked: “Where do you get your ideas (inspiration)?” he responded: “Ideas are everywhere. They’re in the air.”  I agree with Serling. One can find inspiration anywhere. An overheard conversation. A walk in the park. An encounter with an old friend. The way sunlight strikes a particular object.

Ekphrastic poetry differs from this kind of inspiration in that it is a second-level inspiration. You are being inspired by someone else’s inspiration rather than something in the everyday world around you. The problem with the term as it is generally applied today is that it is too narrow and only seems to apply to visual art. There are all kinds of second-level inspirations. What if I am listening to a piece of music or reading a novel and I am inspired to write a poem? These would be second-level inspirations and there is no terms for them that I’m aware of. Also, ekphrastic seems to generally apply only to a description of a painting. I wrote a poem “Two Nightstands Attacking a Cello” that was inspired by Dali’s A Bed and Two Bedside Tables Ferociously Attacking a Cello. However, this does not describe the painting in anyway but extrapolates from part of the situation it portrays. So I’m not sure whether the following can be dubbed ekphrastic or not.
 
Two Nightstands Attacking a Cello

It doesn't stand a chance.
Their solid wood panels

and sharp edges beating
its delicately formed

and hand polished shell.
Their vicious drawers 

with brass handles
gouging at its neck,

striking and raking 
its tender strings, 

forcing it to cry out
in a discordant roar.

Afterward the nefarious
pair return to their

stations by the sides
of the bed, once again 

motionless, seemingly
innocent as any object 

of inanimate furniture,
marred by little more

than a scratch or two 
as evidence of their

abandon, their brutal
and unprovoked assault.

Aching in every fiber
of its fragile being,

the cello retreats to
the corner of the room,

suffering in silence,
nursing its many wounds.

Yet when it summons
the courage to speak,

it discovers that the 
resonance of its voice

has been transformed
through this ordeal

of pain and humiliation.
The true dulcet tones

and melancholy overtones 
too long hidden in the

hollow of its chest
have emerged unbidden.

Astounded by the depth
of this doleful epiphany,

mute and wooden as
the day they were made,

the nightstands listen 
with strained indifference

and all the pent fury
of rectilinear forms.

Further, my collection Surrealities was inspired by surrealism as a whole (its paintings, writings, and philosophy). All the poems therein are definitely second-level inspirations, inspired by the creations of others, but I’m not sure whether this could be called an ekphrastic collection or not.  

**
 
Bruce Boston’s dystopian novel The Guardener's Tale, a Bram Stoker Award finalist, is now available in a Kindle edition. Visit bruceboston.com / Facebook. 

Matthew Sorrento is co-editor of Film International and teaches film studies at Rutgers University in Camden, NJ, United States. He is co-editor of Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon, and his collection David Fincher’s Zodiac: Cinema of Investigation and (Mis)Interpretation (co-edited with David Ryan) was published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in December 2021.

A Bed and Two Bedside Tables Ferociously Attacking a Cello, by Salvador Dali (Spain) 1983