Bruce Weigl Interview

Bruce Weigl will be the poetry instructor for the 2014 Nightsun Writers' Conference. Beginning in December 1967, he served in Vietnam for one year. In his prose memoir, The Circle of Hanh (2000), he states, "The paradox of my life as a writer is that the war ruined my life and in return gave me my voice." Weigl taught at Penn State for many years and returned to Lorain Community College, his alma mater, as its first Distinguished Professor. There, he started a student veterans group. His early work reflects the horrors of war experiences, and his more recent work shows themes of family and childhood. Weigl has published over 12 books of poetry and has won numerous awards -- including the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Poet's Prize from the Academy of American Poetry, and two Pushcart Prizes. Weigl states that his free verse poetry seeks "the beauty of a thing said straight."



You have said that James Wright is a major influence on your writing. What do you find particularly inspiring about him?

James Wright is my father confessor. He was, as you know, an Ohio poet, so we had that in common, and he was someone who came from one tradition (the accentual/syllabic one) to another (the free verse one) in his lifetime. Because of that he was the master of the free verse line. More than anything else, I think I learned from Jim, and still learn, that when you write free verse, you have to spend just as much time thinking about the line as you do when you write a metered poem.



Your more recent work shows themes of childhood and family, in contrast to your former theme of war. What brought on the change?

I think I was making a conscious effort to turn away from Vietnam as a subject and so I turned back to childhood. I was away from home, and had been for some time, and I took pleasure in remembering certain very specific moments from my childhood. I like to think about my poems as exploitations of very small and very specific moments, and that if I can obsessively detail those moments, reveal them in all of their ordinary splendor, then I might have a chance for a poem. My mother and father were not literary people; they were working class people, and although they never really knew much about what I was doing as a writer once I had begun to go to school, etc., what they did give me was unrelenting love and support all of my life. I know a lot of folks who grew up in houses filled with books but absent of that kind of love and care. I would always choose what I had over what they had. 



 Did you find yourself drawn to poetry or writing before or during your time in Vietnam?

If we didn’t write home our parents would complain. You’d get a call one day saying you have to go to your battalion, they need to see your battalion. So after the first couple of times I knew what was up and it was them saying 'Sit down'—they had paper and pencils there—'sit down right now and write a letter to your mom and dad,' because I wasn’t a very prolific letter writer at all. And no, I didn’t write about my experiences while I was there. I wasn’t that person then. If I’d gone now, then I’d start keeping a notebook the moment I arrived, but then it wasn’t my nature to do that. I was 18 years old, I just graduated from high school. I spent most of my high school time playing sports and got away with doing very little academic work because I was pretty good at it, and that was it. So, no literary background at all. No reason to become a poet at all or a writer at all. The paradox, I’ve said before, of my life is that’s what the War gave me. I wouldn’t have been a writer without the War because it forced me to go inward. And for some reason when I did, I found these stories. 



Was poetry a source of therapy for you after you came home from Vietnam?

I wish I could say that. My belief is that writing is too hard to be therapeutic. I think therapy’s a lot easier than writing. I do, really. I’ve done both and my experience is it’s a hard way to go if you’re looking for that out of it. It’s hard enough to do.

What it helps you do is externalize things, give a shape to it. And that’s what Denise Levertov kept telling me is that, Look, you control it now. It doesn’t control you anymore. You own it now. And it does that, yes.



There are several recurring motifs that can be found in your work -- such as animals, wings, alcohol, war, etc. Do these recurrences have any special meaning for you?  

I wish I could say it was all highly conscious and all a part of a scheme or plan I may have had when I wrote the poems, but I can’t. I don’t really know why those images recur, or even what they mean fully. Frankly, this is a very instinctive process for me. I love words and I love the sounds of words and that’s the level on which I typically engage the poem. I think I’m also a bit superstitious about trying too hard to analyze my own imagery. I’m not sure I really want to know what it all means. 


 
If you wish to know more about or register for the 2014 Nightsun Writers' Conference, you can find all the necessary information here: http://mirror.frostburg.edu/cwcenter/workshops/nightsun-writers-conference/

We hope you enjoyed the interviews and that you will consider joining us at the conference!