Interview with Howie Good

1. There’s a painting called Night on Bleak Mountain, was that an inspiration for your piece?


The painting was certainly the source of the title. But that came after the fact. I wrote the poem first and then reached for the title. It caught the mood of the poem. Titles are important to me. A title orients the reader toward a poem. It’s a map of sorts to what the reader is likely to find in the poem itself.


2. You call your writing prose poetry. How is that different from prose or poetry? How does that form influence your writing?


Prose poetry is a bastard form (some people might prefer the phrase “hybrid form”). It combines the staid appearance of prose with the eccentric behavior of poetry. I have been drawn to it ever since I discovered Rimbaud’s prose poems as a teenager. It has obvious advantages for someone like me who has no formal training in writing poetry, but has a poetic sensibility. I don’t have to worry about line breaks, scanning, and so on when I write a prose poem (though, obviously, I pay careful attention to the sound as well as firmness of my sentences). It’s freeing in that regard. A prose poem is able to accommodate whatever you can pour into it.

3. In this piece, like in many of your pieces, you have numbered sections. I found especially here that the numbers give a sense of order to an otherwise chaotic world. Is that your intent?


To be honest, I’m not often sure when I start a poem whether it’ll be self-contained or become one in a numbered series. I can write three or four pieces that I consider distinct, but then realize in the midst of writing a fifth that there’s a pattern, that they’re all interconnected in some way, and that each will be stronger if placed in a sequence with the others. I suppose what I’m trying to convey is how improvisational my writing process is. Sometimes I’m as surprised as anyone by what turns up.

4. With the word “bleak” in the title and considering some of the content, one would tend to have a melancholic take-away. Do you strive for this mood, or what do you hope people will leave with?


They say poets are depressives. That’s different, though, than saying depressives are poets. Being a manic depressive isn’t going to make you a poet. It may be a place to start, though. It marks you, separates you from the normal, gives you a feeling of difference, maybe even “specialness.” When you ally that with a love and feel for language and a compulsion to create (as refuge from melancholy? a kind of compensation for depression?), poetry is probably in the forecast.

5. You say in this piece that you like stories that start in the middle. How do you start writing a piece?


I play around. I’ll rub together phrases that I’ve been collecting in my notebook and see if I can start a fire. But the remark about “liking stories that start in the middle” is literally true. I find I have less and less patience every day with traditional narrative, no so much fiction, but definitely in poetry. Poems that tell stories in neat little packages seem increasingly ridiculous to me. They’re derived from other poems, and not from life as we experience in all its terrible, jagged glory.