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| Damon Marbut, Author LITTLE HUMAN ACCIDENTS Photo by: Larry Graham |
Southern Poet and
Novelist Damon Marbut created a book of poems, LITTLE HUMAN ACCIDENTS, driven
by events from a period in his life when he and friends deliberately lived to
experience “conflict and struggle in order to best learn from it.” You may
remember him from a previous guest post (“The ‘Me’ in Our Work” )
when we learned about his novel AWAKE IN THE MAD WORLD. Reviewers praise the
qualities of candidness and redemption in LITTLE HUMAN ACCIDENTS. Mr. Marbut claims that candidness is
vital, and redemption a reflection of his evolving “personally, creatively and
professionally.”
In the following
interview, Mr. Marbut explains why he writes both poetry and prose, and how
each supports his writing. We also learn that he lives in New Orleans, where he
enjoys the cuisine.
Don’t miss an excerpt from one of his poems, following the interview.
Don’t miss an excerpt from one of his poems, following the interview.
Q: Can you explain
the title of your new book of poetry LITTLE HUMAN ACCIDENTS: CHAOS POEMS FROM THE BRINK? What are little human accidents and how do they bring us to chaos?
Damon Marbut: The
title speaks to decisions and judgment calls I made in my mid-twenties that led
to a more solid foundation of being at ease with my life as a developing and evolving
writer. I didn’t want to admit to myself then that to stretch out into a
professional career as a writer required as much sacrifice, focus and thick
skin as it has proven to involve.
During the years these works were written, I was spending
very intimate and intense moments with friends and colleagues (poets,
novelists, literature scholars, philosophers) where we pushed ourselves and
each other to live just enough in the margins of our obligations and
responsibilities to be able to create and grow at all costs. It’s a daring
notion, was reckless quite often and very emotional because we knew our time
together was limited and that we were given the gift of that space in our lives
to not have to care about money or major bills or much else beyond writing. We
saw our group as a collective resource for growth and inspiration. But we
really expanded to the edges of how far we could reach, with destructive
drinking for some, excessive drug use for others, sex for others still.
So the book is a documentation of that time in our lives
where we knowingly created conflict and struggle in order to best learn from
it.
Q: You’ve also
written a novel, AWAKE IN THE MAD WORLD. What can you say in poetry better than
in prose? Do you prefer one over the other?
Damon Marbut: Poetry
allows me to focus on seemingly tiny and/or minor snippets of an experience or
moment and write solely about it in a reduced space, which in turn lends itself
to a universality of its own that ultimately gives it more size. In prose, at
least as far as I see it, I take a huge chunk of existence and character and
take bigger license with a story as a more prolonged expression of message. I
love them both equally, as they inform one another and my approach to how and
when I write either.
Q: A reviewer sites “redemption” as key to
your poetry. Do you agree? Why?
Damon Marbut: I
saw that, and I agree. I was very grateful this was stated in a review, because
even though the poems have occasional heavy tones of self-deprecation and alcoholic
behaviors, I knew as we were living them and writing them that it was all
fleeting. We simply knew we couldn’t and wouldn’t live like that indefinitely.
I felt compelled to tell the story truthfully through poems regardless of what
they might say of me when read by someone who never lived so torrentially like
I did in my mid-twenties. I suppose the redemption discovered in the poems
could come from the fact that I’ve continued to evolve personally, creatively
and professionally, but at the same time there is evident affection and longing
in the book that hopefully leads more readers to seeing that the lifestyle of
that era was recognized as more educational than immutable.
Q: Your reviewers
praise your candidness. How important is honesty to successful poetry?
Damon Marbut: I
think it’s vital. In a smaller collection I’m hoping to have published next
year, the display of honesty is written a little more indirectly due to different
language choices (and poetry style) I use in them, but the honesty is still
there. What strikes me most about poems I dislike is that they’re trying too
hard to be poems, if that makes sense. It’s the same notion as being truthful
and honest in your personal life. If you don’t lie, although you might have to
defend your beliefs and perspectives you’ll nonetheless never have to worry
about being called on a fabrication.
I think the candidness people picked up on in LITTLE HUMAN ACCIDENTS comes from, in part, my willingness to be vulnerable enough to come
across as self-absorbed in some pieces, crude in others, and loving and
inspired by others in different poems. If I wrote all of the same thing I
suspect the character delivering the poems would be less believable.
Q: How do you define
“successful” poetry? What do you consider the key elements?
Damon Marbut: It
depends on what the poet is going for. I’ve written form poems,
performance/slam pieces, confessional, narrative, etc. Whenever I committed to
a certain style, whether it was for experimentation to determine what I like
best for my poems or if it was just to “get out of my head” to grease the
wheels a bit, I tried to do it with laser focus. And I guess that ties back in
with honesty, too. Even if it’s out of your comfort zone, write it for what you
think it is and learn from it. Don’t write “Daddy” as your own. Plath did that
already.
Poetry can be successful if it finds its market no matter
how tiny it is, as there’s no broad audience that likes all kinds. Some people
are going to hate me and the voice of my poems and the poems themselves. Some
will love them. Anything I write that helps even a minimal amount of people
feel better equipped to express an emotion or write their own works due to
having read me, that’s my success. I’m not foolish to look at this as a money
game. That would have killed my work at the very beginning.
Q: Why do you write—either poetry or prose? What started you to write? Do you
remember your first story or poem?
Damon Marbut: I
was always an imaginative kid and had great encouragement from my librarian
godmother, as well as many teachers. Sometimes the encouragement came from them
just so I’d sit still in class and quit being a nuisance. “Here, Damon. You can
do the lesson later. Why don’t you write me a poem about the zoo?”
The first story I recall writing was about a pair of birds
who were competing in an Olympics-style event, and one was cheating and got
caught and the good bird won. Maybe it was a fable. I was into having
“Moral:…..” at the end of my stories when I was young. So yeah, probably a
fable.
Q: From where do you
draw your ideas for your writing?
Damon Marbut: It
all usually starts with a voice, mine or a created one. Sometimes it’s a line,
and that applies to either poetry or fiction (or even nonfiction, like the new collection
of memoir/personal essays I’m working on currently). I don’t get in the way of
it too often like I once did. Often I’ll write down a line of imagined dialogue
or a description and let it alone for weeks or months. When I come back across
it there’s a chance it can become anything, especially if my thoughts have
stayed wrapped around it. For example, this nonfiction book started as a story
I conceived of 6-8 months ago. 30,000 words later and I haven’t written that
particular story yet.
Q: What’s next? Will
you be writing more poetry or another novel?
Damon Marbut: I’m
focusing on the nonfiction book for now. I’ll occasionally take a break from it
and write a few poems, but with everything else I’ve got going on, including
book reviews for major publishers, I should stick with one thing for a few
months. Plus, I’ve a novel I finished 9 months ago that’s under review with a
publisher now. And that small collection I mentioned earlier is a project. And
I’m editing a coffee table book of photography right now, too. And I’ve been
asked to work on an oral biography of a famous bartender in the French Quarter.
Q: Tell us something
about Damon Marbut. What do you like to do when you’re not writing? Who are
your favorite authors?
Damon Marbut: I
live in New Orleans, so I love food. I work part-time in a busy café on
Magazine Street and love the people I work with. My social life more or less
comes from there, otherwise I stick pretty close to home.
My favorite authors are still some of the big names like
Salinger, Baldwin, Morrison, Kerouac in smaller doses than when I was younger.
But I like modern poets like Dorianne Laux and Sharon Olds and a new talent who
I think is going to do very well for himself, a Canadian poet named Andrew
Faulkner, whose collection I just reviewed recently. I may be able to meet him,
which would be terrific, as the publisher of LITTLE HUMAN ACCIDENTS is Bareback
Press in Canada and we’re going to a few book festivals in the fall once we
release on September 1st.
About Damon Marbut
Damon Ferrell Marbut is a Southern novelist and poet who
lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is author of the novel AWAKE IN THE MAD WORLD and the collection of poems, LITTLE HUMAN ACCIDENTS.
About LITTLE HUMAN ACCIDENTS
Damon Ferrell Marbut devastates the notion of apology in
poetry with a tender recklessness in LITTLE HUMAN ACCIDENTS, poems that examine
a personal evolution of sexuality and identity while treating the unavoidable
step towards adulthood like a punching bag, especially in his free flowing self
reflexive poems like Mornings Like This and So What.
Excerpt
Little Human Accidents
Excerpt
Little Human Accidents
The nightmare keeps you up tonight,
again, one you have each time it storms.
My poetry scatters the floor
all the way to the kitchen,
like a free-spirit sex train blew through—
you leave them there for décor,
love the way my poems smell in the house,
but you can’t sleep.
On guard for me,
are you? Since you found me
beneath the furniture in the hall,
screaming, comatose, not knowing you
were there? Defending me from that?
Don’t.
I can turn the lamplight brighter
and read you Billy Collins,
you’re so gentle,
leave the battling of nightmares to me.
Links
Twitter: @dfmnola
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