AUTHOR PROFILE
Richard Hedderman lives in the Milwaukee area, a transplant from the northeastern U.S. He is a poet, writer, educator, and the author of three books of poetry, including his latest Choosing a Stone (Finishing Line Press.) A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has been published in dozens of journals in the U.S. and abroad including Rattle, The Stockholm Review of Literature, American Journal of Poetry, Santa Fe Literary Review, Kestrel, Chicago Quarterly Review, Pinyon, and the anthology In a Fine Frenzy—Poets Respond to Shakespeare (University of Iowa Press), among others. He has been a guest poet at the Library of Congress, a U.S. State Department cultural liaison, a Fine Arts adjudicator with the National Endowment for the Arts and has performed his writing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Formerly senior educator and writer-in-residence at the Milwaukee Public Museum, his poetry has been published in 60 countries and is featured in Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt’s K-12 global literacy curricula and textbook. He holds a Masters in Poetry from the University of New Hampshire and teaches creative writing at Mount Mary University. https://richardheddermanpoetry.com
|
Richard's work appeared in Pond 86
|
Why do you write?
I’ll be honest, I got into poetry for the money. I wanted to swim in cash. But by the time I’d abandoned the cash-swimming notion, I’d nonetheless put so much time into poetry that returning were as tedious as go o’er, so to speak. Too, there seems to be a nerve in my brain, a poetry nerve, and certain things just ping that nerve, and writing a poem is how I respond to the ping. I don’t write because it’s easy or fun. But as much as I struggle with it, I love poetry. I love its immediacy, its promise of infinite surprise, its threat of immanent combustion. I like the compression—how physical it is. It’s compact and powerful like the short, sharp jabs of a boxer. And yet it commonly bears an astonishing fluidity: a poem can swim like a trout, plunge like a cataract, heave and spill like an ocean wave. And it’s curative. Poetry can calm, console, correct and cauterize most ills and complaints of the soul. A poem’s power can be breathtaking. A poem can kill two birds with one stone, breathe life into the dead, bite like salt or bind and soothe like a skein of silk. It can break horses. I write it because I don’t know what else to do to connect with something beyond myself so I’m more complete as a human. In writing a poem, I indelibly yoke myself to the world around me so that, as Van Gogh put it, I no longer stand helpless before nature.
What other creative activities are you involved in?
Stage combat. As an undergrad I double majored, earning degrees in both English Literature and Theater and went on to work as an actor (as well as a waiter, a housepainter, and a museum educator.) I acted with a Shakespeare company for many years, and one season played Laertes in Hamlet where I was trained for the climactic swordfight by a professional fight choreographer (something I’d never heard of.) I loved the work and from that moment wanted to fight with swords. And sticks, barstools, trash can lids, beer bottles, etc. I found out you could get formally trained and certified in stage combat, and did, ultimately earning Certified Advanced Actor/Combatant status. Since that time, I’ve taught stage combat and choreographed theatrical violence in colleges, universities, and professional theaters around the country.
Who is your favorite author and why?
Favorite author can mean a lot of things: the one I read most for fun? The one whose work I most admire, the one who inspires me most and hope to emulate? Generally, I’m uncomfortable identifying a favorite author as the omissions are what wind up getting hung around one’s neck like a dead seabird. With trepidation, however, I’ll cop to Melville, Arthur Conan Doyle, Shakespeare, and the Beowulf poet. (Beowulf changed my life. Seriously.) Favorite poets are Gary Snyder, Charles Simic (a grad school mentor), Ron Koertge and Philip Whalen never fail to make me laugh, Lucille Clifton for her fearless leaps of cognition, David Shumate (A master of the prose poem—every one is a gem), Sylvia Plath for blinding ferocity, Linda Pastan for her stunning, impeccable line breaks. I’m leaving out an awful lot of writers here.
Tell us about the mechanics of how you write.
This is the hardest thing to talk about, in part because I’m never going to have a dramatic or romantic answer. It’s not very exciting. It invariable starts small, with a few words or a phrase, an image. It rarely starts with anything longer than a line, but it’s always something that pings the poetry nerve. I’ll jot it in one of my notebooks or on a scrap of paper. As additional words or phrases attach to it, I’ll start word-processing what I’ve got so I get the sense that I’m building something substantial, which grants me a little momentum. In oceanography, there’s a phenomenon called a “cat’s paw,” which is the starting place for a wave. Let’s say you’ve got a perfectly smooth patch of ocean, nothing going on, not a single ripple. Eventually, a puff of wind will rough the surface just a bit in one spot. That’s the cat’s paw—as if a cat had dipped its paw in the water and created a few tiny ripples. Those ripples bump into smooth water, which ripples in turn and so on. Sooner or later, you’ve got a wave. That’s my theory of writing poetry. My poems commonly go through at least 30-40 drafts before I grudgingly declare them finished. More or less. I absolutely can’t imagine how anybody can get a poem right in less than 20 drafts.
Finally, what do you think about Carp, the fish, not our website?
The Asian species, the koi—the gold/orange mottled shimmery ones—are not what a lot of us imagine when we think of carp. In the States, wild carp have a reputation as muck-skimming, inedible mud feeders—an awfully ugly image for something as noble as a fish. And let’s consider that carp also means to complain. Perhaps the fish deserves a more distinguished moniker, though maybe not. Some of my students once asked if I had any work out in journals. When I told them I had a poem in the current issue of Spank the Carp, one student asked, “How do you spank a carp?” Another student replied, “With your hand,” effortlessly minting a post-modern koan that I like to think would stump the shrewdest of Zen masters. I can’t get that one out of my head.