Talkin’ about Stompin’ at the Grand Terrace

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When I write and when it’s going good, I can think clearly and sort things out. That’s what I’m aiming for: clarity. And maybe truth, I don’t know. But clarity for sure . .

DS: Emotional clarity?

PB: Yeah. It’s intellectual, too. I decided early on that there were writers better equipped to tackle race head-on. I’m at the home front, you know. I know I’m making an analogy to war, but yeah, I’ll make it. I’m writing about what’s going on on the home front. In this country, you have African American writers like Richard Wright who are out on the front lines. [Ralph] Ellison was trying to escape that—he didn’t want to be there. Langston Hughes, Gwen Brooks, they were on the front lines. They were writing about this war that had been going on since they brought my ancestors over here.

I wasn’t necessarily going to run away from that; I was just going to take a different tack on it—and it took me a long time to figure out what that was. That’s why I had to get out of Chicago in order to write my first book [Sermon on a Perfect Spring Day]. All the Chicago poems in that book were written in Stearns County, Minnesota, among the Stearns County Germans.

That book [New Rivers, 1998] ties into Stompin’ at the Grand Terrace. The poem “Stella by Starlight” is the first poem where Preston and my dad appear. It’s one of the last poems I wrote for Sermon, and I included it in there and didn’t think anything of it. I thought it was a nice poem.

DS: What was it about that time in your life that opened you up to this stuff?

PB: It was such a transition. I was finally out of Chicago and I could finally think about what that meant to me. I could think about it in ways I never had thought about before.

DS: Was the decision to write about Preston and your father a conscious one?

PB: I don’t think you decide about these things. You’re able and willing. That’s what the muse . . . I’m here at the ready line: What do you want me to do?

I tell students: “Don’t try to direct the work that you’re working on. Let the work direct you. Trust it.” It’s extremely hard. You want that control but you can’t have it because then you’re going to take things in some direction where you shouldn’t really go.

DS: What’s your writing practice?

PB: I write every morning, early in the morning, for as long as I can. I picked that up from meeting [poet] William Stafford back in the ’90s. It was about a year before he died [on August 28, 1993], and Stafford gave this great talk.

He said, “I get up every morning, write out a poem.” And I thought, “Aw, you’re bullshitting.” Then later I saw that somebody asked him in an interview, “Well, how do you do it?” And he said, “Easy. I lower my standards.”

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