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Interviewed
By: John Amen
JA: I want to start off by saying that I am very excited to be featuring you in our anniversary issue. Let me ask you, first, if you could speak a little about your educational background? Also, when did you start writing? And when did it become clear to you that writing was your passion; your life’s work, so to speak?
FC: I attended Canton High School in the western part of our state and then Duke University in the piedmont. There I made friends with the celebrated writing teacher, Dr. William Blackburn, and with such other interested writers as George Keithley, Anne Tyler, Reynolds Price, and James Applewhite. I went to Duke University to find literary friends because by age thirteen, I knew writing ought to be my fate.
JA: Could you tell me a little about your writing methods? I mean, do you write everyday? Do you have set times when you write?
FC: I try to write everyday, but often schoolwork prevents this. I rise at five, go to the kitchen and write or get other work out of the way. We breakfast at seven and afterward I go to my study and write until other duties call me away.
JA: You are a teacher as well as a writer. I’m wondering, do you feel that teaching, in some way, facilitates your own writing? In other words, is teaching a process of discovery or self-learning for you as well as a means by which you pass on knowledge and/or experience to your students?
FC: Of course, teaching is the most intense of all learning experiences in which one’s life is not endangered. I am sure that teaching influences my writing but cannot say how or how much. I think of teaching as my proper business; it is the way I make my living, it occupies my faculties more often than any other activity.
JA: In a letter you wrote to me, you said (regarding the poems published in this issue of The Pedestal Magazine), “In my capacity as North Carolina Poet Laureate for the past four years, I have had to think about the idea, or the problem, of public poetry.” Could you speak a little more about that? What, in your view, is “public poetry?” And what do you see as “the problem” of public poetry? Finally, what are your ideas regarding the “solution,” so to speak, to this problem?
FC: As the current Poet Laureate, I am asked to write poems for various occasions--for the biennial meeting of the NC Library Association, for example, or for the proclamation of October as Arts & Humanities Month by Governor Easley, or on the occasion of the Walter Clinton Jackson’s acquisition of its 1,000,000th volume. These poems cannot be about my private passions or secret concerns. They must be addressed to an audience that will not be reading them in the quiet and solitary midnight. Most of our poetry now stems from private experience and addresses private materials. One has to readjust his whole way of composing. But I studied eighteenth century literature as a grad student and had thought about this problem before, admiring especially the strengths of John Dryden in this area.
JA: In the poems published in this issue of The Pedestal Magazine, you utilize several “traditional” forms, including the sonnet and the sestina. I am always excited when I see these forms utilized in a dynamic way. If you would, speak a little about what draws you to use these more forms, especially when, as you (also) mentioned in your letter, “Ours is the age of the inward, intensely personal lyric,” a time when “the public poem is regarded with suspicion.”
FC: A traditional form does not necessarily denote a public poem. Some of the most private and intensely experimental poems are sonnets. I try to feel out the internal contours of a poem before composition; if it tells me that it is considering being a sestina, I listen; if it insists on free verse I am happy to oblige. I do not take up a sheet of paper and say, Well, I feel like doing a ballade with double refrain today. Thought and feeling and words come first: choice of form later.
JA: Some of these poems (I’m thinking especially of “The Persistence of Origin”) deal with very “Pre-Socratic” philosophic issues such as Beginning, Oneness, and Plurality. How do you feel that the ideas of the Pre-Socratics relate to our time? I mean, by dealing with these traditional (ancient) philosophic concerns, you are, as I see it, presenting them as being relevant to contemporary times. Am I accurate in saying that? And if so, could you speak about that a little, about how these ideas and concepts are indeed pertinent to our times?
FC: The problems of ancient philosophy have not disappeared--or very few of them have. For all our scientific advancement--which is real and extremely important--we have not answered such questions as whether the universe is One or Many, what the ultimate origin of things are, whether there is an afterlife or not, and so forth. Every year these questions become more pressing. Since neither religion nor philosophy can agree on a definition of human life, we leave it to politicians to tell us when and how we can die or be born or not. That is like tendering one’s personal finances into the care of autistic persons. The problems persist--only now each has to think through them alone.
JA: You are someone who has published widely and embraced numerous styles and approaches. I’m wondering, have you ever experienced a “block” or gone through a time when you couldn’t write? If so, what do you think caused that?
FC: So far as I can remember, I have never suffered from “writer’s block.” I have encountered stymying difficulties with certain projects. So then I work on other stuff till the problem solves itself. Main thing is not to stew about it.
JA: Let me shift directions for a moment. I want to ask you a little about the relationship between the writer and writing. Many (probably most) artists in general end up having what I would call a somewhat “monogamous” relationship with their art; or, at least, the creation of their art (and all that that entails) ends up being, essentially, the most important thing in their lives. There are, obviously, sacrifices that go along with such a commitment. Could you, if you are comfortable doing so, speak a little about some of the sacrifices you feel you have, directly or indirectly, made as a result of your commitment to the artistic process; some of the ways this commitment has impacted or affected your personal life?
FC: There are for a young writer, trying to get started, inevitable family frictions. Most of us come from nice bourgeois families in which writing has never occurred to anyone as a choice of profession or vocation. That can be dismaying at times.
The other “sacrifice” that is talked about is loss of immediacy of experience-that what happens to you is filtered through the “writing mode” so that your experience is not as vivid or genuine as that of a non-writer. Who knows? To me it seems a silly notion. I trust my perceptions to be as good as anyone else’s--much better than those of people with whom I disagree.
JA: What advice can you offer to aspiring writers?
FC: I am reluctant to give advice. If pressed, I might say to a young writer, Either do or don’t. If you desire to write, write; if you think you just might kind of like to someday, forget it.
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