The Dan O'Brien Project: Interview With Martin Willitts, Jr.

I am happy to have Martin Willitts, Jr. on the blog to talk about his contributions to Empirical's first poetry anthology, Latitude on 2nd. Let's get started.

Tell us about your current releases in the anthology.

I have two poems in the anthology from a series of alphabet based poems about science. Both poems are about two different men. One is a night watchman who works in semi-dark to dark conditions and his eyes have adjusted to lack of light; the other poem is the kind of nobody that no one notices and he even doesn't notice himself.

Tell us about your future releases.

My forthcoming chapbooks include How to Find Peace (Kattywumpus Press, April, 2012), True Simplicity (Poets Wear Prada, May, 2012), Playing the Pauses in the Absence of Stars (Main Street Rag, July, 2012), and No Special Favors (Green Fuse Press, 2012). I am also in the new issue of Empirical.

What books are you reading now?
How We Became Human by Joy Harjo, and Dream Work by Mary Oliver

What music inspires you to write?
I love the Blues and Jazz. Recently it has been Elvin Bishop’s “Raisin’ Hell Revue,” and Big Joe Turner with Michael Bloomfield in “Shake, Rattle, and Blues.”

Favorite authors?
Anything by Mary Oliver, William Heyen, William Stafford, and many others.

Favorite books?
I like mystical spiritual poetry and I keep re-reading A Course In Miracles which I think anyone interested in spiritual ecstasy should read.

Favorite TV shows?
Believe or it or not, I do not own a TV.

Favorite movies?
Any movie I would list would be old, like Humphrey Bogart, Laurel and Hardy, or Gene Kelly.

At what point in your life did you realize you wanted to be a writer?

Back in 1970 I took a creative writing class because I wanted to write plays and I wanted feedback. The professor said that he would only read poems. I started writing “anti-poem” based on found conversations, just because I had no interest in poems and I could not imagine myself writing poems. Flash-forward and over 17 chapbooks and 2 full-length books of poetry as well as nominated for 5 Pushcart and 2 Best Of The Net awards, appearing in over 15 poetry anthologies, I guess you can say that I became serious along the way about writing and publishing.

Tell us about your writing process.

I write like a jazz musician because I used to be one. I improvise off of themes and I can write 20 or 30 poems in a day or two. Not all of them are good, but it is still writing. Then I revise and sweat over spelling, punctuation, word placement, line breaks, and imagery. Sometimes I write a poem one time, stare at it a while trying to figure out if it can be edited, and sometimes it is junk; sometimes it cannot be changed. I have many first-draft poems that were published. I think about relationships, whether it is love or divorce, or how we ignore other people, or how we ignore nature. I am also an ecstatic poet writing about spiritual based poems, thinking a lot of creation and death, the connection of everything to everything, how to find peace, how to forgive, how to grow in love towards others. I try not to “hit people over the head” with God, but rather share the joy of feeling connected to the universe and being within peace. I have a forthcoming chapbook, How To Find Peace (Kattywompus Press) about war, finding peace, and finding forgiveness based loosely on my own service with the American Friends Service Committee in Vietnam where I served as a medic trying to save the lives of wounded people.

Is the specificity of punctuation and word choice important?

To me, poetry is about word choices. Why this word, and not that word? Where should I break a line? Can it have multiple meanings? How can I break a word in half to give it another emphasis like Lyn Lifshin? Sometimes I hate punctuation and prefer not to use any punctuation. Sometimes I use whatever punctuation I need. My two poems are trying to “tell a story” as well as use science facts in the poems. Both are about light (opaque is the absence of reflection; and infrared-red ray which allows night-vision).

Do you have anything specific that you want to say to your readers?

I hope you enjoy this anthology and find poems or stories that reach the part of you that makes you nod your head “yes, I liked that” or shake your head in sympathy.

More about the poet:

Bio: Martin Willitts, Jr retired as a Senior Librarian in upstate New York. He is currently an AmeriCorps Member for a health center, providing outreach and statistical reports. He is a visual artist of Victorian and Chinese paper cutouts. He will be providing a poetry program at the 2012 Massachusetts Poetry festival.