3 questions with chris ransick by luc simonic Chris Ransick's first book, Never Summer, won a Colorado Book Award for poetry in 2003. His second book, a collection of short stories titled A Return To Emptiness, was published in 2005 by Ghost Road Press. He has poems forthcoming or recently published in Pilgrimage, Copper Nickel 3, and The Eleventh Muse. When an everyday “average person” hears the word “poetry": what initial thoughts and feelings do you think come forth in them and why? Wow, this is harder than watching sitcoms. Where’s the remote control? I have the good fortune, in my job as a college teacher of poetry, to meet a regular contingent of people who are open to poetry—and that’s the right way to put it because they may not have a lot of background with it but they don’t resist it. I think they’re average people in the sense that they live lives like you or me—work, family, friends, problems, joys. But the key is they aren’t deadened by addiction to mass media schlock; they’re hungry for knowledge, alive to language and the written/spoken work, engaged by the process of discovery, willing to enter scholarship, and capable of reading deeply—in fact, they find real pleasure in the act of reading. These people are out there, and they’re average in one sense but they’re distinguished by being prepared for and tuned to the possibilities of poetry. It’s true that a lot of people—maybe most people—respond with frustration, apprehension, even fear to the whole idea of poetry, and I usually chalk that up to a lack of substantive reading and exposure to literature, and/or a teacher somewhere who didn’t introduce poems effectively. So my job is to try to get past the huge wall people put up between themselves and this ancient art. If I succeed with only a few of them at a time, or even one person at a time, then I’m OK with that. The rest can go back to their televisions and video games. I think a lot of people perceive the poetry in a book as one thing, and the poetry in their popular music as two different things. Sure, there are differences in form and presentation, but they are coming from the same place: poems and song lyrics are both words intoned by a human voice. Most popular music lyrics are pretty awful stuff—endlessly repetitive whining about unrequited love—but there are artists eeking out a presence in the scene who have something inspiring to say. I walked by my daughter’s room the other day and heard this really great energy coming out of a song she was listening to and I stopped and listened. The lyrics were great. I said, “What band is that?” It was Flogging Molly. So the stuff is there, and people are taking it in, but they don’t usually see it as related to a poem by Billy Collins or Rita Dove or Pablo Neruda. What would be your vision if you could create a 15 second ad spot, for the Superbowl, to promote poetry? OK, you’re asking a guy who thinks television commercials are toxic, and people who submit to them are getting, over time, an electronic lobotomy. Mass media so saturates our waking time with advertisements for crap we absolutely do not need . . . and people become conditioned to advertisements to the point where their brains are trained as receptors to the style, shape, and message of ads—and that blocks out real thought, takes up the space we ought to use for thinking deeply, connecting to the world around us and the people in it. What’s more, there’s one underlying message in all advertisements: you’re not OK, you’re missing something, you’re ugly, smelly, socially alienated, or personally incomplete without (fill in product). You can walk into a room full of people and start humming some pitch song or say half of an ad slogan that’s currently running in a popular ad campaign, and people will just come alive and start humming along or shouting out the rest of the slogan. And let them go for a few moments and they’ll start talking excitedly: “And did you see the one where . . . .” I do this in classes sometimes just to make a point, and although I know what’s going to happen, I still have to fight the impulse to throw up in the waste bin when I see it, it’s so damned pathetic. I hate ads—I mean I really hate them. Poetry is anti-advertising. It’s a message that values human life as you find it. Even the angriest poems and rants are affirmations of the living voice of the poet—real emotion conveyed with conviction in service of touching the audience and moving them—not to reach for their wallets but to reach for their souls. If somebody gave me 15 seconds of air time during the Superbowl, I’d try to assemble 15 of America’s best poets and splice together a montage of each one looking directly into the camera and saying, “Buy nothing!” Or maybe I’d find a child with a lot of stage presence to do a 15-second riff from a great poem while stomping on a pile of remote controls. In either case, the spot might end with something like, “Poetry: feed yourself something deep.” Or maybe there could be a recititation of a poem that says something like, “Turn this insipid box off and go kiss your girl or go outside and lay down in the snow or give a $20 bill to a homeless family or eat a handful of raspberries right now!” If you got 10 minutes on nightline to tackle to subject of poetry what would you say and why? My first comment would probably be whether I could get more than 10 mintues of air time to talk about an art form as ancient as cave drawings. I mean we’ve been sitting around campfires telling stories and songs to one another for maybe 40,000 years. It’s kind of hard to narrow the subject down. But if it was only five minutes, I might bring up that very point, and say that our success as a species, our survival, is linked to the wisdom contained in poetry. Oral culture—folk tales and poems and songs and riddles—are where we store our wisdom, and voicing it to the children—that’s how we teach them to survive and thrive. At present, I’m really energized by this idea of poetry as anti-advertising. Mass media advertising actually threatens human survival by inculcating the human race, from infancy onward, with the idea that consuming more things is fundamentally necessary at every opportunity, and that your worth as a human being is utterly dependent on what you buy, how you buy, and who sees what you’ve bought—and it all starts again tomorrow with what you’re going to buy next. That creates this vicious cycle of gross materialism and it’s driving us to destroy the planet. Mindless consumption, mindless expansion of growth—it’s the mentality of the cancer cell. We can’t sustain this and everybody knows it—but you sure as heck aren’t going to hear that in a commercial. Poetry isn’t the answer, but it is an antidote. It carries forward into each generation all the messages that contradict mindlessness. It’s all about mindfulness. One has, first of all, to slow down to read or listen to a poem. Literally, the body grows still. Poems ask us to peel back the curtains of distractions and look closely at the words and what lies behind the words. There’s some effort involved to concentrate the mind, the same way there’s effort involved in any deep meditation, but it’s the effort of letting go the fierce grip we often have on the overstimulating messages of mass media. People who are avid life-long readers find it easier to do this, but anybody can learn it if they want to. If people will use poetry as an anitdote—literally take it into themselves—it will begin to displace advertising and frantic mindlessness. It spreads comfort and awareness in the person who takes it in. It connects us to the real world, to people present and past, and it gives us a stake in a sustained future. It might not save us all, ultimately, but it certainly seems a brighter path to me.