IF SF Conversations: Hannon:Part Two: the breakdown of beloved forms

The conclusion of the conversation between the poet Michael Hannon and the IF SF editorial staff:

Q: There are those who would choose not to call the Lyrica poems poems at all, are there not?

A: The Lyrica poems may be thought of as "poems" in the conventional sense, in so far as they obey the rules of prosody, tension, and tone. There are anti-poems in that they put seeing before saying. Lyrica poems are both inside out and outside in. Seeing is believing, or, what you see is what you get.

Q: Is not part of their job to call into question some of the more fundamental notions of what constitutes a poem?

A: For fifty years now, I have been making and publishing poems. My medium was the short as well as the longer lyrical poem, with the occasional tour de force. Beginning in 2003, I began to question the obvious success of these poems. What was there about the lyrical poem that allowed my audience to receive material which should have called everything into question, yet left them, and me, with a nagging sense of satisfaction?

Q: So the success of poems you had been writing became in some way less than happifying?

A: Of course, poetry is attractive, one of the world's glories, but also the very mirror of unknowing and impermanence, which may give us pause, but not much satisfaction...

Q: You abandoned the lyric impulse?

A: I concluded that my poems, as I had been making them, were creating a conterfeit sense of closure, that this was their attraction: closure in a universe that has none--no bottom, no consolation but in things as they seem to be.

Q: Hence, the lyrica poems? As big cup says in the preface to the book, 'more koan than haiku, the poems work that thin vein where words are mistaken as things?

A: I think the Lyrica poems were written by the words themselves, dreadful and humorous. They are the breakdown of beloved forms, face to face with oblivion.