(Pictured left to right) Beth Ann Fennelly, James Kimbrell, Gene Edwards, and T.R. Hummer

“There is a pleasure in the creation of rhythm and the creation of music,” says poet Beth Ann Fennelly, the Oxford author of three books of poetry.

 

T. R. Hummer agrees. “The music of speech is always close to what we do.” This Mississippi-born poet claims, “Obsession is the key.” He says he writes poetry because he must.

 

James Kimbrell adds that “what really constitutes talent is that sort of drive, that will to do it.” Also a Mississippi native, Kimbrell initially discovered poetry as a teenager when he was introduced to Edgar Allan Poe. Although young Kimbrell “wrote a lot of poems” and wanted to become a writer, he didn’t opt for poetry until his mother challenged him. “She was in some ways the ultimate poet’s mom.” In this episode of Writers, he reads one of his poems about her.

 

Hummer was in junior high when he was first read Poe. “It was for me an eye-opening experience,” he remembers. “We were assigned to read a couple of them in this one class and them I went off on my own and found others.” Hummer grew up outside of Macon, Mississippi, in the 1950s, and says that poetry “contstituted a secret realm that belonged to me only.” He reads a poem about his youth.

 

As an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame, Fennelly took a poetry workshop. “And when I was in that class, I remember thinking it was like my whole life I wanted to swim and I didn’t know it until someone threw me off the pier.”

 

Fennelly, who is married to novelist Tom Franklin and has two young children, found that she “wanted to write poems that captured the complexity instead of being sentimental about the act of motherhood.”

 

“Each poem comes on its own schedule,” she continues. “Sometimes I’ve gotten lucky and drafted something in a day, something that was pretty close to its finished stage. And other times, I’ve struggled with things. There’s a perplexing time frame.”

 

Kimbrell adds that “eight hours of work does not necessarily equal eight hours of product.” He jokingly likens writing to farming. “You’ve got your turnips over here and your cosw over here and some days you need to take care of the cows and some days you need to take care of the turnips. They’re all growing in your absence,” he laughs. “But at any given day, you turn to the thing you feel the most passionate about, or the thing you’re most afraid of, or whatever it is where the energy is, and that’s what you work on.”

 

Poems sometimes teach themselves to T. R. Hummer. The author of 10 collections of poetry, some up to “40 pages in print,” is now writing much shorter verse. “I started doing that when I was editing magazines and just didn’t have the time, and I found suddenly that I liked short poems.”

 

Head of the Creative Writing Program at Arizona State University, Hummer says that the poetry writing process cannot be taught. Fennelly, who teaches at the University of Mississippi, adds that “You can lead a student to be reading the right things.” And Kimbrell, who is on leave from Florida State, tries “to instill a passion for poetry.”

 

Fennelly calls teaching a moral act and says that poetry can enrich lives. “I think that reading poetry carefully teaches you to see clearly and only when you see clearly, can you think clearly, and only when you think clearly can you speak clearly, and only when you speak clearly can you effect political change.”