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Abalone Moon
Carmine Giordano: an interview
by Velene Campbell
What creates your need to write?
There are moments in my life that are so wonderful or so terrifying I need to sketch them, and then sketch-words and phrases occur to me. Like the four Sandhill Cranes that came to my feeder and looked at me with their marvelous orange eyes, and I thought quickly, “Kneel down here, before the Sandhill Crane, and bless this majesty, bless him whose voice was still.” Like that early morning of the first days of marriage when daffodils scattered across my wife in the shining window light where she had brought me and I heard an aubade song. Words at those moments communicate themselves to me even before I understand them. And when I respect them and continue to listen, the rest of the poem usually makes its appearance.
What are some recurring themes in your writing?
The thought that all life began in a star burst and continues from then in a fierce unraveling momentum that creates us all from the same fabric, makes me stop--when I am not thick and stupid and unconscious --and stand mute and in awe of all being, or the particular being that I am in the presence of: I, myself in crisis or in joy; a water bug; a stem torn from a plant; a babbling sub-way car vagrant; a great statue or painting; an apple tree blooming. We are all in the same equation, but occasionally we get somewhat puffed up and taken with ourselves: our supposed missions, our names, our silver coins. And then we mistreat and hurt. The absurdity of a sanctity beyond this life bowls me over particularly when I spent years caught up in that illusion and wanted to skip all the joy of earth for a harp and a hosanna on that day when my skin left my bones behind. I relish the impiety of turning the sacred inside out to show its uneven seams and badly cut hems.
Which writers have had the greatest influence on your writing, and how has it manifested itself in your work? What is the common thread that connects you?
The Beowulf author and the muscularity of Anglo-Saxon poetry, James Joyce’s stream of consciousness in Molly Bloom’s long affirming soliloquy, and the echoing plosives of Gerard Manley Hopkins verse which seeks to capture the unique pattern or inscape of a being or experience—all these have made me want to speak similarly but in my own voice.
The similarity is in the confessional spirit of much of what I write, often a stream of consciousness assemblage of past and present moments, and in whatever sounds or images come up to express those experiences. I find myself borrowing from past poetic encounters Hopkins speaking to a young girl’s crying over goldengrove unleaving, “You with your fresh thoughts care for, can you,” becomes my wonder that a Palmetto can care so tremendously for its own existence and continued survival, “You with your bug-brain care for, can you, Palmetto?”
For me--like Joyce, who has influenced my writing--it is always a matter of epiphanies, bolts and jolts of the basic truths of the human condition realized suddenly. The long string from these authors is tied to me in that we share the universals: ambitions, hopes, joys, pains and all the howling rest. The link is in the human particulars of my experience--my autumn grieving for my father, tied down to the hospital bed and calling for me to release him; my awe of the moths coming to the light outside our Vermont cottage; my dog whimpering with tumors, his tail wagging and confronting my whining.
The link is in the reach I make to confess or share these moments as though they would mean something to someone else, a sharing that validates that we are more than breathing automatons, that with all who have come before us for real--or in prose, or in the beauty of poetry--we have known and felt the world and spoken our knowledge of it into the endless void of time and space, and that somehow, it has mattered.
Copyright (c) Abalone Moon 2005. All rights reserved.
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