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Among the numerous authors and poets participating in the first Missouri Literary Festival (Oct.2-4 at Hammons Field and the Creamery Arts Center in Springfield) is award-winning poet Kevin Prufer from University of Central Missouri-Warrensburg. KSMU's Randy Stewart spoke recently with Prufer by phone.
In his poetry collection National Anthem, Prufer refers to "poetry" as if it were someone locked in the trunk of a car, fighting for its life. I asked him if he felt the creative arts might end being OUR salvation as a culture. He feels it can be "an individual sort of salvation for what ails us as people--but I'd like to think it could be more than that." Prufer says good poems exist, first of all, "to communicate--usually a very complicated idea or a series of conflicting, and even mutually exclusive, complicated ideas--in as simple and clear a way as possible." Poetry can be a sort of "salvation" in much the same way that talking to each other can be, says Prufer.
Prufer's collection even includes a poem called "There's No Audience for Poetry"(!). Prufer laughs and notes that it's actually "one of the most popular poems in the book! There's irony for you!" "When I wrote it, I didn't actually realize what I was writing about until I got to the end. I really thought I was just writing about a boy in a (car) trunk for 4 or 5 drafts; then it occurred to me something more might be going on. So I went back and re-wrote it a few more times, thinking about what that might mean--and that the people driving the car, who eventually abandon it by the side of the road--might be the audience for poetry, while Poetry's in the trunk, banging and trying to be heard. And nobody pays attention and just keeps on driving on the same stupid road!"
Aside from other poets, who he "reads pretty exhaustively and carefully," Prufer says he's "very interested in history, particularly classical history--the Greek and Roman history." In fact, Prufer's book "Fallen from a Chariot" draws strong parallels between our culture and the Roman Empire. But one of the things he says he discovered while researching and writing that book was that the parallels are often "superficial, but interesting nevertheless. In that book I was writing about different kinds of empires that just keep on expanding and expanding. And as they expand, their definitions for themselves about what those empires mean"--the sort of "who are we?" questions--"become vaguer and vaguer, and more difficult and complicated." But as Prufer wrote, he discovered something more interesting: "the enormous DIFFERENCES between the Roman Empire and our own (society), and the enormous 'foreignness' of the Roman conception of what it meant to be 'a Roman,'compared to the American conception of what it means to be 'an American.'"As for those other poets Prufer reads, he says his tastes tend to be very "conservative"--he loves Keats, t.s.eliot, Emily Dickenson, Elizabeth Bishop. Among living poets he's most interested in Frederick Seidel and G.A. Powell, neither of whom get a lot of press. He also mentioned fellow Missouri poet Carl Philips, who Prufer considers "one of the most important writers in the country right now--maybe the most important, at least in poetry."
Given his admitted "conservative" tastes, where does Prufer stand on the subject of experimentation in poetry, as opposed to sticking to traditional forms? Actually, he says he's "all for experimentation!" His own tastes in reading poetry may be conservative, but he doesn't think his own writing "looks like that." But he insists a poet "ought be able to write convincingly... in the traditional forms. Being able to write in meter and rhyme is an important part of that. I don't think one can just wake up one morning and call himself an 'experimentalist' and throw out 300 years of poetic history! But still, I'm all for experimentation. I feel like poetry is a kind of communication--I think it's maybe our most complex, subtle and ambiguous kind of communication that we have in our lives."
At the Missouri Literary Festival Kevin Prufer will do a reading, as well as participate in a panel discussion of publishing. Prufer edits and publishes an award-winning journal called Plaeiades, A Journal of New Writing, that publishes a lot of poetry as well as serious discussion about contemporary poetry. It comes out twice a year.
