Scott Owens Poetry

Interviews

  • Eye of the Beholder Available for Pre-Order

    My new book of poems, Eye of the Beholder, is now available for pre-order through Main Street Rag’s new online bookstore. Here is a link that will take you to their listing for the book where you can see the cover art (by Valerie MacEwan), read a few poems from the book and place your order at a $5 discount off the cover price: Eye of the Beholder.

    These are poems mostly about love. I wouldn’t call them all love poems, but they are about love in some fashion or another. The book is slated for release in January. Of course I have to sell enough pre-publication copies by then for MSR to move forward, and if I sell enough sooner, then it will get pushed up in the publication queue. So, help me out by ordering a copy now. I will be doing a number of readings starting in February and will be glad to sign previously bought copies then.

    Mostly, I hope you’ll take a look at the website, read the sample poems, and enjoy them enough that you want to read more.

    Cover

  • NC Poetry Society Fall Meeting

    Saturday, September 21, 2013
    Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities, Southern Pines, NC

    Readings by Joseph Bathanti, current Poet Laureate of North Carolina, and 2013 Brockman-Campbell Book Award winners Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Katherine Sonial.

    Recognition of the winners of the NCWN Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition, Joseph Mills, Ross White, and Katherine Soniat; and the Brockman-Campbell Book Award read: Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Katherine Soniat.

    Tentative Schedule:
    9:15 Registration; lunch orders ($10, cash or check payable to 195) until 10:15 am—or bring your own lunch; coffee, tea, and snacks
    10:00 Business meeting with Carolyn York, president, presiding
    10:20 Readings by winners of the Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition
    Intro by Charles Fiore
    Katherine Soniat
    Ross White
    Joseph Mills
    10:40 Readings by winners of the Brockman-Campbell Award
    Katherine Soniat
    Kathryn Kirkpatrick
    11:15 Open mic
    12:00 Lunch, socializing, walking in the gardens, and perusing the book room
    1:00 Announcements
    1:15 Reading by Joseph Bathanti, Poet Laureate of North Carolina
    2:00 Socializing and book signing

  • Battered Suitcase Interview

    Transcript of Fawn Neun’s Interview for Battered Suitcase, 2010

    In order to help promote your work and The Battered Suitcase, we’d like to feature a brief interview with our contributors on our blog to share with readers.

    If you’d like to participate, please answer the following questions as fully and completely as you’d like and we’ll post them to our blog with your author photo (if you provided one). If you’d like to take a more in-depth approach, or would like to have it appear on a particular date to coincide with a book release or gallery show, please let us know.

    Interview Questions

    When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
    It may sound like splitting hairs, but I’m not sure I ever wanted to be a writer. I did realize early on that I enjoyed writing. Even before that I knew that enjoyed language and then reading. In what was a pretty bad childhood, language became a means of self-defense, exploration, and creation of alternative “realities,” place where the world made more sense than my own did.

    Why do you write?
    Writing feels good. Not always in the way chocolate feels good. Sometimes in the way a good cry or a long run or hitting three dozen baseballs at the batting cage feels good. But when I’m writing, whether it’s positive stuff or angry stuff, I feel better, more complete, more competent, more involved with stuff that matters. I also think I have important observations and ideas to share. I think writing can make a difference, and it’s the way that seems most natural for me to make a difference.

    Is being a writer/poet anything like you imagined it would be?
    I don’t really have any idea what being a writer is supposed to be like. I know that as much as I enjoy doing it, it remains exceedingly frustrating. Writing requires “getting into a zone” that needs to last hours at a time, and the world just doesn’t make that easy to achieve. There is so little compensation for writing what I want to write, that I can’t afford to give my family the lifestyle they deserve and dedicate the time needed to get where I want to get with my writing.

    What do you think makes a good story?
    Heroic endeavor. It doesn’t matter if the hero wins or loses, only that he or she keeps trying. And relevance. And freshness of imagery, breaking new ground or presenting old ground in such a way that the reader is transported to that place.

    What’s your favorite genre to read?
    Poetry

    Who is your favorite author or poet?
    Galway Kinnell

    What books or stories have most influenced you the most as a writer?
    At the risk of sounding like Sarah Palin, all of them, but none perhaps more than Kinnell’s Book of Nightmares, the anthologies Contemporary American Poetry and Another Republic, Leaves of Grass, Walden, Selected Works of Pablo Neruda, Nazim Hikmet and Yannis Ritsos, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

    What books or stories have most influenced you as a person?
    When I was 9 or 10 I found and read a lot of Arthurian Romances, and they saved my life in a sense by showing me that a world built on reason and respect was possible. A bit later Emerson’s essays helped me realize that my philosophical and religious thoughts were not as “unheard of” as I was beginning to think they were

    Where/how do you find the most inspiration?
    Everywhere. When I manage to not have a million things running through my head at the same time, I notice things everywhere. Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day” compares paying attention to prayer, and I think that is where most of it comes from. Certainly being away from home and work helps me pay attention to more things, especially if I’m in the mountains of southwestern NC.

    What does your family think of your writing?
    They are encouraging, but they find it annoying having to share time with it

    What is your work schedule like when you’re writing?
    Schedule? I wish I could manage such a thing. My primary duty in the world today is taking care of my 5-year-old daughter. That makes any sort of regular schedule impossible. Truthfully, I squeeze in writing whenever and wherever I can. I write a lot when driving to readings or workshops. And I write early in the morning and late at night.

    Do you have any writing quirks or rituals?
    None I’m aware of

    Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing?
    If this means in my writing process, then simply finding the uninterrupted time to follow a train of thought all the way through. If this means in the things I write about, then writing straightforwardly about my childhood still escapes me. Many people have told me I could make a fortune writing a memoir, but I remain unable to write about my childhood in prose. If this means in the things I write, I try to be pretty accessible.

    What are your current projects?
    Something Knows the Moment, a book of poems exploring religious faith and doubt, is due out mid-August 2011. I also have five other manuscripts “completed” and waiting for lightning to strike in one of the major contests or for my publisher to say, “Okay, you’ve waited long enough between books now.”

    What are you planning for future projects?
    I have one collection in which all of the poems use Stevens’ “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” as a model; I have another that focuses on the last vestiges of the rural South; a third collection consists of poems about writing; a fourth consists of poems observing the interactions of the human and natural worlds; and the fifth is a long sequence of dream poems. Additionally, Pris Campbell and I have been working on a full-length version of the Sara and Norman poems collected in The Nature of Attraction.

    Do you have any advice for other writers?
    Persist and read.

    Where can we find your work?
    You can order them from me (just write to [email protected]) or from my publisher: www.mainstreetrag.com. I am on facebook and post new publications there as well as on my webpage at www.scottowenspoet.com. I post most of my essays and reviews in my blog at www.scottowensmusings.blogspot.com.

  • Jessie Carty Reviews Paternity for Poets Quarterly

    Paternity by Scott Owens
    Reviewed by Jessie Carty

    On my most recent trip to the drug store, I found myself waiting in a short, bunched line with only a wall of condoms to peruse. As I scanned them, I noted a break in the soldier-like lines of prophylactics. On a shelf was a boxy reminder of what can happen if said items were to fail: paternity tests. I couldn’t help but appreciate the irony, but I also thought of the old TV PSA which said, roughly, “any boy can make a child but it takes a man to be a father.” Scott Owens explores fatherhood in his newest poetry book Paternity as a son, step-father and biological parent.

    Paternity is separated into four active sections. Owens opens the book with a section and poem titled “Foundings.” The father in “Foundings” rushes to comfort his step-son for the first time without the child’s mother present. Owens writes, “he leaned into me, / and my whole body changed / into something I had not know.” I am not a parent, yet I felt an ache of empathy for that father and son. The father in this poem never expected to be a parent and is almost overwhelmed by his response. This is an understandable reaction given that the speaker of these poems came from an abusive childhood. We glimpse this awful paternity in poems such as “Days I am Not My Father” and “Norman Sucked.”

    How does one parent when they were not parented well? The father in this collection, has to find a way to define the word paternity for himself. As he moves into the second section of the book, Owens begins “Naming” the world of paternity for himself. The speaker of these poems is trying to name and earn the title of father and protector. There are quite a few strong poems in this section but I would like to particularly highlight “Memorial.” In this poem, the speaker is taking his young daughter to a graveyard. In this piece we catch a glimpse of the speaker’s concerns for the life of his child, including the life that he will inevitably miss because of his own mortality. This is an individual who is trying to balance being a husband, a father and a writer. The last stanza speaks well to these issues, “I, who know you best, realize / how little I know, your half-formed words, / your deeply decaying path, / the unimaginable loss that lies ahead.”

    The third section of Paternity, “Creating Small Occasions,” moves into the daily life and moments that the speaker wishes to capture. Using the word creating is a wonderful choice here because we are watching a child create a world around herself as she plays in “Hiding Places”, vacations and deals with her first loss – the death of her grandmother. There is a definite progression of time and space as these poems develop but none perhaps as pointed as “The Hours” which is a well- constructed poem. The speaker moves through different hours of the day hashing out moments, trying to fulfill all the roles he has taken on. I love the section he titles “4pm” where Owens writes, “Transitions they say / are always more difficult / and the most important.” There is something of an ars poetica to this poem and particularly those lines.

    The final section of the book is titled “The Good Listener.” How often do we forget to be good listeners? I like that this is the verb that ends the book because listening is a way of learning and being engaged instead of always being self-focused. There were two poems that stood out for me in this section. In “Falling is Learning” the speaker does something so simple yet so wonderful for his child. He writes, “When my daughter fell / and cried, I fell too / to show her how it’s done.” This father understands pain and the need to find a way to live through it. He wants to help his child in all aspects of life, but most of all, as he writes in “Images of Childhood”, he wants, “to make a monument to childhood / while it still exists. Not mine, of course.” This father wants his child to have memories not always marked “for tragedy and loss” but to instead be in a world “constantly moving and changing colors.”

    Overall, this is a very hopeful book, despite the represented father’s own dysfunctional childhood. The issue of abuse is no surprise in Scott Owens’ work. His previous collection “The Fractured World” delved deeply into the abusive role a father can play in a son’s life. There is less violence in Paternity as the formerly abused son becomes a nurturing father who proactively seeks to break the cycle of failed parenting. The topic of parenting and straightforward diction make Paternity a very accessible book. Too many people connote accessible with poetry that is somehow lesser but that is not the case here. This is a collection that will hold the attention of poets because it is well-crafted but this is a also a book which is definitely open to the non-poetry reader. It is not pedestrian to write about fatherhood when you do so with such skill and attention. Paternity is the kind of book you can share with a wide audience and I hope many of you will settle in with these poems very soon.

    Reviewed by Jessie Carty.
    Poets’ Quarterly | January 2010.