MPR’s Nancy Fushan Interviews Minneapolis poet Keith Gunderson, who talks about his work “3142 Lyndale Ave. So. Apt. 24: Prose Poems,” and writing poetry. Segment also includes Gunderson reading his poetry.

Gunderson was one of five Minnesotans that won $10,000 grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board for annual fellowships.

Transcript:

(00:00:00) I resolved to get the day off to a fast start tripping over the cat. Not tripping over the cat and tripping over my own feet. I hear my toes meow. It's raining cats and dogs afterward I go out and try to walk from dog to dog we go on vacation and board the cat at the Vets. I miss tripping over the cat tripping over a tackle box tripping over a friend's dog. I say, I'm sorry, there must be some mistake my small son tripping over a kitten illustrates the rest of his
(00:00:32) life. That's poet Keith Gunderson. Eating some short verses from a collection tripping over the cat. He also writes about the daily life of a child growing up in South Minneapolis and of life's progressions on the sea coasts when he's not putting down thoughts in poetry Gunderson can likely be found writing treatises on philosophy in his other role as a professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota and when he's not writing you can find him enjoying the Simple Pleasures of fishing at Lake Calhoun. It is obvious that the movement from Simplicity to come Alexa tea in his lifestyle carries over to his artistic creativity. I like I like to use
(00:01:12) many different kinds of of imagery. I love imagery but I like to invent new kinds. I like to use old kinds and I don't like to confine myself to any particular mode of imagery or for that matter to any particular compositional style at the moment. I'm Really working on a continuation of little prose poems which are very non imagistic poems about my childhood growing up in an old apartment building over in 3142 Lyndale Avenue South. These are all kind of little true story poems about just growing up and they're the mode of composition is just one sort of continuous line as a reviewer of the little book 3142 put it at the long continuous line works. Well because it's just like a little boy's day where he doesn't have many periods or rest stops or capital capital letters in his life. He just keeps going on until the end and so each poem is one long sentence and just looks square on the page like a piece of prose but on the other hand, I'm also interested in working with it much different kind of poem say a nature poem and in the work in progress, which I have called a continual interest in the Sun and And I'm trying to bring a number of the themes I started in the first volume more Inland so that they're Jermaine to Minnesota Waters to the lakes to the fishing here into the light to the
(00:02:50) landscape. The prose poems were those I mean are those difficult to write as an adult trying to write as a
(00:02:56) child? They're a little bit difficult. I have to watch myself because I need in the poems of vocabulary, which is true, too. To my own perspectives as I was growing up. I mean the poems range over from roughly the ages of about three two. Oh, I suppose 14:15, maybe if I went any further probably get scandalous. So I think I'll probably cut them off at the end of junior high school. And what I what I have to be careful of is wrongly importing a kind of perspective or vocabulary into the little blighter I was I wouldn't have had it that time and I have to watch for nuances in language so that I can capture the four-year-olds kind of idiolect and dialect as distinct from the six-year-old. It's distinct from the seven-year-old. I guess. I'm lucky. I have three sons and watching them grow up. I get refreshed again, except they're more sophisticated than I was when I was a little kid. I have to come keep remembering how kind of
(00:03:59) primitive I was. Okay, and because of that could you be accused of being cute in
(00:04:03) those? Oh, yes. I Yes, I have been that's always a danger. In fact, I you know, I've Dropped a number of poems from from the ongoing manuscript because it's acuteness is always a kind of problem. I think in fact, most of them aren't aren't that cute also, they're not poems written explicitly for children rather. They're written for children and adults because their poems about adults and children seeing each other from these different points of view sibling points of view parent points of view in the silliness and humor and love. Involved in all the different perspectives. So, you know, I'm not surprised that children should cotton to them somewhat because their primary subjects in the
(00:04:48) poem will adults read into it a rite of passage of
(00:04:51) sorts. I hope not the most ponderous interpretation. I think that's been given to any of my poems was a Freudian one having to do with this poem about sweaters that go on over your head and I thought that was so marvelous that it was a Freudian interpretation that seem to be like of oh birth trauma and all sorts of
(00:05:12) things. Well in that case how should your poems be treated by critics and by readers alike
(00:05:19) just as they are. I mean, I'm working on some some poems know which you haven't seen the light of day. I'm in fact working on a long philosophical piece, which is going to be partly poetic and partly philosophical Pros. It's going to be a hybrid of styles those would demand some kind of interpretation. They might demand Clarification by by a Critic whereas I think most of the poems I published so far have insofar as they have any qualities, which I trust it's the quality of clarity. I aim at that. I like that I Revel in that I don't Revel in writing in some way that can be taken as nine ways.
(00:05:59) Ambiguous. You've come to poetry through a root of philosophy and I'm wondering what ties there are between the philosophy and the Poetry in your
(00:06:08) life. Well for a long time, I wasn't I had a simultaneous love of both philosophy and poetry and for a long time. I wrote very very bad poems. I think I started writing some poems which I still like think I pretty good poems about 1961-62 but for a long time there wasn't any connection between the philosophy of the Poetry. They were two things. I like to do and the more I did poetry alongside of My Philosophy the more I began to get interested in what the connections are. I guess the first connections I found was that working at poetry provided me with a range of useful examples in lecturing on Aesthetics aesthetic Theory and and the Poetry is highly on philosophical for the most part though, I guess in some of the poems in Inland missing the see some philosophical themes begin to emerge and I expect to see much more of that in the
(00:07:08) future is that it's a simple matter of personal
(00:07:11) growth. It's a matter of certain kinds of intellectual change. At least it's a matter of just accidentally trying to say certain things which didn't fit my old ways of saying them one of the the additions to the C sequence the Sun and sea poem sequence is currently called Baja journal and it's based on a trip. I took fishing along the Baja for about six or seven days and there we were sort of 22 randomly gotten together fisherman with all the psychodynamics that that involves with the Through and with different people with different kinds of personalities from radically different walks of life. They're confined with each other night and day for for seven days and I started that as a kind of diary. I'd never kept a journal or a diary before and I so I took notes on the trip and I was going to work it into more free verse poetry rather like the first two volumes and and then I couldn't do it. It didn't work and then at Same time. I was really looking at Summa Kierkegaard and reading some of his journals and I thought look don't write in free verse right in a kind of Journal form and I started to develop a more prosy approach to it. And then I read a book by Peter mathiason called far Tortuga and with iessons find novelist, but in this novel, he was almost breaking out of the bounds of Novel composition and getting into free verse and I saw what I was doing was just the opposite in Baja journal and I was moving outside of free verse back. Into a kind of prose form and so writing in that way has enabled me to say things about themes that would not be fit easily into the kind of free verse tactics that I've been employing earlier. And so there's just kind of a lot of happenstance and different intellectual projects changing your perspectives on what you think you can do and what kinds of new modes of composition you're going to have to use two to bring those things about
(00:09:22) will you be using some of the At money for that kind of
(00:09:25) work. I don't know primarily. I want to get big inroads into a completion of the 3142 Lyndale Avenue South poems. Those are in a way not exciting for me poetically to do anymore. But I have a lot of draft and a lot of donkey work and it's good to stretches of time to do that donkey work. That's where you're not making discoveries or inventing things in my opinion. This is what I call donkey word, but The problems are well defined. So there's not an excitement about solving them their well-defined, you know how to solve them. What you have to do is just the donkey work in making these small detailed decisions for example going through this prose poem say and deciding how many witches should be there as opposed to that sand and deciding whether I've repeated myself or this theme occurred in some other poems. I didn't this weeding and winnowing I want to write a little book which I have a fair amount of ground. RAF called saltwater freshwater same Sun Shines on and that's going to be extending the theme from a continued interest in the Sun and sea into Minnesota more and into the bodies of water. I love here the places I fish including some of the links right outside the window Calhoun Isles Cedar Harriet D.
(00:10:48) Is that the the force for a lot of poetry
(00:10:52) it will be Lakes are important to me. I grew up spending many hours of the first say 16 17 years of my life fishing these Lakes Lake of the Isles and Calhoun and so on but I'm a better Fisher person now than I was before and I know how to catch him caught an 8-pound Northern right off that dock last year
(00:11:14) Keith Gunderson fishing enthusiasts philosopher and poet who leaves us with a poem. He wrote about some time spent in England among Turner watercolors and in images of life
(00:11:24) for his amazing watercolors Turner used son on his palate soft white yellows shading to Yellow maybe a Fleck of red hint of a sunset or Lobster catch apricots tinting in the June are in the ashmolean a man gets these out for you. If you asked him in ordinary man, his the key to the drawer in which the sun glows like an apricot between the light in my living room wall fingers sculpting with Those repeat the rabbit The Fox and the Elephant the elves applaud but the pattern Slough It Off by this tree is all changed because of a leaf In Absentia the elves are unknowing unrepeatable the patterns of a day uninsurable the aesthetic loss only the BD persistent son maintains itself, like an axiom the Shadows drift out of existence like tenuous theorems victim Stein preferred the question when it's five o'clock. A clock on the earth. What time is it on the Sun? The source of Shadows is without Shadow the leaves leave gold and in the elves grow up into Margaret like the coming of age in Samoa liftback the leaf of this tree to see discreetly concealed a fig the size of a little boy's penis late Magnolia sudden with Blossom work has son has its work cut out for it so much to do if only we could afford someone just to come in say two days a week look after the grass. Escrow put tint on the apricots.