An Interview with L.Ward Abel

by Lisa Zaran

“I’ve had some poets criticize me for being too “neutral,” and I suppose that may be true, but to me there is nothing more immediate than what is in front of me, the snap shot in my hand.”   ~L. Ward Abel, poet, musician, composer.

Would you say that you were a musician first or better stated, would you say your first attraction to poetry was through music, learning to play the guitar?  
 
I was definitely a musician first, although I had no concept of course as to what “art” was, and still don’t understand it fully.  I suppose anyone who tells you they do is deluded.  I just know that it made me feel really good, for lack of a better word, when I could repeat the notes I heard on that little plastic guitar in my lap.  Others seemed to think it something unusual, being able to parrot the notes, but for me it was as natural as breathing.

Still is. It was much later that I tried to work out my own music, though, around age 13. It was about the same time that I began formulating phrases for the music, the images and the rhythms for the lyrics, and as they fit together it was like “wow, this is cool!”  It also made me feel special about myself, knowing myself a little better.  As I learned more chords on the guitar, I would write more songs with the new chords, and the music would need words, so they came, too.  On the side I began writing words independently of melody, although I feel poetry has a definite melody in my head and when I speak it, though it may not be always obvious to the reader / listener. That began my life as a poet.

My first notion that I had some connection with “art” was when I was a kid and got a plastic guitar for Christmas.

I had no musical knowledge, but I found myself repeating tunes that I’d heard on that plastic guitar, laying it on my lap. After that, it was relatively short time before I had taught myself to play a real (cheap!) guitar, and was writing poetry and songs when I was 13.

Were the words you were writing at the age of 13 more poems or was each intended to be lyrics for a song?

They were lyrics for the songs, but there were other words that I wrote that were songs without music per se.  Now I don’t know where one ends and the other begins, so to speak, but I really don’t think in those terms anymore.  Whatever happens on the page is there for some kind of reason, some message that I am sending myself, or even someone else, I don’t know.  I am a deeply spiritual person, so it may sound as if I have some high-minded purpose in all of this.  But if there is a purpose, I haven’t grasped it yet. That’s the journey, isn’t it?

You spent some time in London where you learned a lot about music, especially the punk scene, even started your own band, PREFACE, which went on to release two singles.  You label your band “operatic” punk.  What do you mean by operatic?

London began as a dream of travel and culture, egged on by the music of the time, the best of which came from the U.K. (on the whole I think of early Genesis all the way to Joe Jackson), with obvious exceptions coming out of the States like some of Springsteen’s work back then, and others.  I visited there in 1979 as a tourist, returned to attend a program through the University of London (by way of the Institute for European Studies) in 1980, and returned yet again to pursue artistic endeavors with my band Preface in 1982.  I called (and still call) my music at that time “operatic punk” in that my singing style was full of opera, three octave range acrobatics, along with imagery that was decidedly “new” and more “artsy.”  My colleagues and I were listening to everything from The Clash and the Pistols to Tony Bennett,  Bartok and Gregg Allman, believe it or not.  It all meshed into story lines that had poetic lyrics and basically “new” rock transitions.  I came back from London downtrodden from “the business” and a bit heavy from the pub action, and enrolled in Graduate School, and later Law School.  But I never ever slowed down writing.  In fact, while in Law School, I couldn’t write the stuff down fast enough.  I was signed by Sky Records in Atlanta to two indie albums while I was a young lawyer, recording as Max Able, and did some of my best music, at least until my recent stuff with Abel, Rawls and Hayes.  I kept my worlds (day job versus art) separate then.  I no longer keep them separate in such an overt / covert way as I once did.

You said:  It’s true that one must read to write, and so I read for years, while still composing music, though not performing as much (I’ve written well over 1000 songs over 30 some odd years).  Then something happened to inspire me to write more poetry.

What happened?

It’s a cliché today to say that the “world has changed” since 9/11.  But it did for me.  I have two daughters.  I knew it had changed.  We sit over here all cushy and fat, playing at our games, while the world is at our door, unnoticed or ignored.  I’m not just a young (!) man anymore, I’m just a man.  But what kind of man?  What do I think?  What do I really think?  And why?  Or better said, where am I in all of this?  I came to the conclusion that to know the big picture, of which I am a long time subscriber, I must capture the moment…each moment, place, everything one element at a time.  Now I write more poetry than music, far more.  Of course the medium lends itself to that, being more convenient, but I feel I have more flexibility with poetry, not tied into a structure or style as much. 
 

In your poem “The Smallness of Now” you write:

Zoom into the smallness
of now, of morning’s half light….

and immediately my mind is taken to that meditative place in common with all virtues;  the early morning light, the breeze, man’s recognition of how little time each of us really have here.  Is this the point you were trying to make with this piece?

Yes, time is the point…the lack of it.  The moment, right now, is totally and unchangeably unique, having just passed, and being here…now…and gone.  Our ability to freeze these instants with film and words and memory is a fascinating thing to me, and ultimately the essence of being human.  Really, when you think about mortality, and the personal understanding of all of this being ultimately coming to an end, it strikes me that we are brave creatures in a way.  We know what’s coming, regardless of our own explanations of the why’s and such, and we soldier on as best we can, depending on our disposition, our makeup, if you will. In the process I paint my little pictures of these small times, the smallness of now, here and gone.  Like you say, the meditative feelings I can receive from these images are quite fulfilling.  A poem like this is just my own retelling of the moment, one that I can return to again, and hopefully the reader feels the same.

You said to me that what you try to do with your poetry is talk about images.  “The empty house, the wide field, the quick look away from another person’s eye, the biblical phrase that comes to mind while driving, the long stretch of pavement, cracked, broken, but somehow permanent….”  You are a very spiritual person, do many if not most of your poems convey this aspect of yourself?  Meaning, your sense of spirituality or your comprehension of it?

I find the spiritual in everything, that it rises above the social / political fabric that is the focus of so much art.  Part of the reason may be that I’ve had a few years to digest what is and isn’t important in the big picture.  Part of it may be my upbringing in the South, where there’s a church on every corner.  But I feel that there are no solutions to the world problems, that the only solutions are big picture ones that occur in each individual.  The infinite exists in each of our minds, dimensions and universes unique in each cranium.  How we deal with all of this is a spiritual choice, for me the seeking of some inner rest, of a place where I can put it all on a window sill, and try to get context.  My belief in God is sure, but I have no judgment for those who think differently because this is the nature of infinity: infinite variations.  All of this is not to say that place, landscape, culture do not enter into my work…quite the contrary.  These details exist in my own context…the empty house, the long ride…they give me clues. 

I discover an ease or a flow when it comes to reading a lot of your work, oftentimes without even knowing it, I gain a certain sensibility.  Among my favorites of yours, this has to be at the top:

Recently published in Hungry River-

Finger-Snap

Blank.  And simply.  Shoes
of mine drag, yet I hover.  Nothing to say,
all has been recounted ad nauseum,  and now
just me.  Cast out of Eden,
I did it myself, diving into jungle like
parted water, like Heston’s Red Sea,
and here, left behind, used, passed around
like cheap liquor.  Tired.  Tired of conflict,
the world is for the young, I am taunted.
The dumpster reeks on an August boil,
baked on pavement and self-absorption,
blank. I’m outta here.  Where the Rubicon,
the point beyond which.
Blank.  Gone. Just me.

Can you elaborate on your emotions in this poem?

I suppose a frustration with my life at the writing of this poem.  There is always more that we feel we could do in life, and sometimes it all hits a brick wall:  creativity, finances, job, family life, you name it.  This poem was a wall for me, tired of the struggle, giving up for a minute or two.  But I’m always back, for better or worse!

Also, one of my favorite poems is this one:
 
Growing Season
 
With the hard freeze tonight
it signals an end to the growing season.
Winter mounts a countryside
weary and bare and strewn
with gently lain bodies of deer,
upward-looking with eyes closed,
now collision skree.  Roadside.
They will harden this evening,
and as dawn approaches
a thaw cannot
until much later,
until another springtide   
releases dreams out of frozen heads
that will by then
be free to rot.
 
It closes out the Jonesing for Byzantium collection of mine, and says many things to me…the passage of time, death and renewal under a different guise…from the violence of birth and death come our dreams, the freedom “to rot” being a vehicle for the idea of transformation into something higher, better…at least that is the hope.

This one, to me, says it all…memory and art…
 
 
The Rainflock Sings
 
There is a ridge
where the rainflock sings.
It’s above
my old house.  A picture
of me was taken there once
before the house was torn down
for a store.  The image
is sepia and my face is
in shadow:  a shadow formed
from one million birds
combined
into one blanket,
a curtain
that sang over me
in curious keys.
Their song remains
dissonant, collective,
always in my ears.
 

I care less about events in my work, though they are always there in some form or fashion.
More about something that lasts, or at least I try to propose that something does indeed last.

~

L. Ward Abel’s books:  Peach Box and Verge (Little Poem Press, 2003);  Jonesing for Byzantium (UK Authors Press, 2006);  The Heat of Blooming (Pudding House, 2008).

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