Interviews

Interview with Gary Lemons: Every Child is Born a Poet in Waiting 

TSP: Congratulations on your newest poetry collection Book of Spells(2025), your eighth book with Red Hen Press and your ninth poetry book total. The artist and writer Shabnam Mirchandani has said these poems "inhabit a gaping cultural wound in the soft flesh of today’s language. Their subliminal salve is a brew of unsaid prayers, transparent whispers of waiting echoes, smiles curling on a dream’s edge, and the dawn of a morning that can’t help but happen." Can you speak to your process building and maintaining a relationship with poetry and language? 

GL: Hmmmm. . .I suspect the process of learning a language, which essentially begins at birth, is where poetry begins—that foundling child–innocence—lies on the entrance to our willingness to utter and innovate sounds that—along the way—we learn are connected to feelings—disappointments–joys–grief–anger–love–loneliness—which become thoughts that become words to describe feeling in the body, words that others speak which we emulate are as much music as they are the tail attached to the kite of clarity—in other words every child is born a poet in waiting. 

These first relationships between meaning and speech—self-awareness and art begins so early that by the time we see this—if we ever do—it’s akin to a paleontologist digging fossils out of a canyon wall—these early artifacts which become speech–art–poetry are embedded in our pre-linguistic experience and a poet—an author—an artist in any genre be it dance/movement—music–painting–sculpture–etc.—will inevitably, perhaps initially unconsciously, go back to this source again and again to rekindle the fire smuggled across the years into their evolving work. 

And it is this transformation I attempt to work with in the Books of Spells—the magic if you will that can happen when we speak to one another—or write down our words—draw out of ourselves as artist—often puzzled or surprised—the words that catch the feelings that evoke them—when/if this happens I’m always amazed and filled with gratitude. 

TSP: Book of Spells opens with a preface that states it is a "time for magic." And indeed, this book is infused with magic and spirituality. I understand that you are a practitioner of yoga. Do you believe yoga has influenced the way you approach the page? 

GL: Oh yes! So in Sanskrit yoga means “yoke” which implies the practice of yoga is an act of joining with if you will–the all–the source or—if you prefer—god or goddess or both—yoga is intended to evoke in the practitioner a feeling sense of union or connectivity with all living things—Erich Schiffman expresses this beautifully when he says–“it takes the entire ocean to make a single wave.” 

So as a poet if I take this practice into my work as part of the inquiry I mentioned above then the poem offers the possibilities of real and deep connection to friends–family–strangers–and even enemies—many rivers flow into the poem so that this one—the yoga practice—for me is a part of the tributary system that forms the sandbars on the empty page. 

What’s really interesting to me is just as in yoga the poem benefits from waiting, from patience, from a disciplined stillness—one really shouldn’t impose a movement on the body but honor the direction it wants to go. The poem gets excited by this as well. I don’t impose on the poem—oh I used to start with an idea and make the poem follow it—but a long time ago in my writing I learned to wait—to let that process described above—the trusting of early pre-lingual energy—choose the content and then express the body’s feelings into words. 

Science is beginning to study the polyvagal system which is sometimes called the “second brain” and it consists of the major organs and how they actually influence choice and thought without using the neurology the brain relies on but through other more subtle and mysterious circuitry—my poems listen for this guidance and are written in accordance with what they hear—I let the brain back into the process when I start editing.      

Book description:

“I started this book by following the tracks of a mythical creature composed of language and blood across an unblemished field of silence. I never catch this creature who perhaps is made real by my pursuit of it. There are glimpses–shadows–made into poems in a poor attempt to construct the whole from the parts. This book is a brush dipped in flowers–corpses–schoolyards–the smell of ocean and tears attempting to paint over without erasing the world as it is.” Best links to get Book of Spells: Red Hen / B&N / Amazon / Facebook / Red Hen Press: The Biggest Little Indie Nonprofit Literary Publisher

Gary Lemons attended Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1971 and 1972 and graduated from the Undergraduate Poetry Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1975. He studied with some of the great poets of his and any generation including Norman Dubie, Maxine Kumin, William Stafford, John Berryman, Diane Wakowski, Marvin Bell and Donald Justice. None of whom are to blame for what he made of their guidance. He published eight books of poetry, including the Snake Quartet. His ninth book, Book of Spells, is scheduled for release in June of 2025 with Red Hen Press. He lives in Port Townsend, WA between the sea and the mountains with his life partner Nöle Giulini to whom this and all his books are dedicated. 

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KSER Seattle Interview with Gary Lemons

Interview with Gary Lemons about his book Snake published by Red Hen Press with J. Glenn Evans host of Poets West on Seattle Radio Station KSER.

Raves for Dia de los Muertos

"There is an odd equator of madness and song in this shadow decahedron where the fresh ideal of what constitutes solid form is taken up with mapping the other side of the river—here, by the way, the river is on fire and its song is one in which we become ecstatic and must drown. There is concealed in this work a flight from headlines and the sovereign silica. Such edgy and memorable new work by Gary Lemons."

- Norman Dubie

Anticipation for The Weight of Light - Arriving April of 2017

"Gary Lemons has reinvented a personal method from a collective mystique for creating poetry; he has written a work of deep insights that could very well reinvent how the world views poetry as an art form."

 

Read Gary's Interview on the Huffington Post

"With Snake, Gary reinvented his personal method for creating poetry, he has created a work of deep insights that could very well reinvent how the world may now view poetry as an art form."

Russell Smith and Michael Foster asked Gary few question about the book Snake and the two upcoming sequels in the works.

Click here to read PART ONE of the interview...
Click here to read PART TWO of the interview...

 

An Evening With Gary Lemons on The Haberdasher

The Butte College Reading Series welcomed poet Gary Lemons, who is touring California promoting his new collection of poetry titled Snake. "This was by far one of the best readings I have been to; Gary is amazing man, and it was a honor to hear him read his work. I highly recommend purchasing one of his books of poetry, and if you ever have the chance to hear him read do not let his words pass you up." Click here to read more...

 

Rattle Interview

The book feature focuses on frequent Rattle contributor Gary Lemons’ Bristol Bay and Other Poems, with an interview about his eclectic life in poetry and his years fishing off the Alaskan coast. Click here to read...