Rick Bursky: I should mention that I do figure drawing as a hobby. One day, I’m going to ask a model to pose for a poem.

I am, first and foremost, a poet. Love to read it. Love to write it. I don’t want to take time away from that; everything else is simply a distraction. Before I became a poet, I was a photographer and thought of myself as a poet who never wrote. Instead of writing poems, I photographed them. When I started writing poetry, I just about stopped taking photos. But I began to think of myself as a photographer too lazy to go out and photograph things, so instead I wrote my photographs as poems.

Nothing is too unbelievable.

People are too caught up with truth. We’re not writing non-fiction, we’re not writing memoirs, or even fiction; we’re writing poetry. It exists in a gray area. I like the fact that people expect poems to be true. It gives poets tremendous power.

But since we’re on the subject, let me say, for the record, that everything in my poems is true. There are two types of truth. The first deals with the facts of a situation, what happened, etc. The second truth is the emotional truth. Why did it happen? What did it feel like? The emotional truth is the more honest truth. There are three sides to every story: what you said happened, what I said happened, and what really happened.  Language is honest, even when it lies.

I’m glad we settled the truth issue.

Someone once said there are only two things to write about: love and death—and love is simply the way we negotiate with death. I don’t choose my subject matter; it chooses me. When I try to control my subject matter too much, it turns into something else; what you would call creative nonfiction, or a play. Writing is the journey the poem takes the poet on. “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” 

The toughest specific thing about teaching poetry is that poetry is the art of language. Telling a story is the art of fiction. The two are different. If you have stories to tell, you should be writing fiction.

With that said, yes, you can tell stories in poetry. Homer did a pretty good job of that. But the story isn’t the point. Of course, we have to do something with the language in our poems. Words mean something, so a narrative often emerges in a poem.

When Monet started painting haystacks, I suspect it wasn’t out of a newly found love for haystacks. He was using them as a shill for exploring light, weather, atmosphere and perspective—painting. So in my poems, things like love, shoelaces, clouds, etc., are shills for language. I don’t start with a subject. I just start to write. How’s the old cliché go? God gives us the first line and we sweat for the rest.

I guess I write surrealist love poems. But the truth is, I’m an Eastern European Duendest. So I’m obligated to have death and strange stuff in my poems. The poet can’t escape who he or she is; something of us is going to manifest itself in the language. For the sake of conversation, let’s call that narrative. But that’s not the point. I write my poems one line at a time. I write one line, and try to think of something interesting that might follow that line. If I can’t think of anything, I sometimes go to the dictionary and find a word that I haven’t used in a while, or ever, and make that the star of the next line—and the poem gets built, written, step by step, line by line.

Rick Bursky quotes from interview

https://pinehillsreview.com/2016/03/16/rickburskyqa/