Diane Furtney

DIANE FURTNEY, ON:

THE BACKGROUND OF "SCIENCE AND," "THE BLUE MAN: POEMS OF THE ORDINARY," AND "RIDDLE":

Probably I was a poet, though not fully aware of it, from the "Ode"-writing age of 10 (I'm in the retirement-age cohort now). I didn't commit to its practice as a career until my late 20s, after publication in a small journal out of U. Mass. A chapbook, DESTINATION ROOMS, comes from the decade of my 30s, when nothing seemed more beautifully compelling than surrealism, especially when packaged in conceits. IT WAS A GAME, a later chapbook, lays out a variety of forms of the prose-poem genre, with surrealist contributions. Both chapbooks, to my continuing surprise, won the competitions they entered.

But the goal for me, then and later, was somehow to introduce the Muse, so punitively fickle, to new subject matters and new extent...maybe via a new method of poetic narrative? Maybe a raffish new lyric form? Using what idioms?

Poetic experiments were re- and re-performed. They yielded so little, I detoured in the late 1980s to author, under the pseudonym D.J.H. Jones, two comic mystery novels (MURDER AT THE MLA and MURDER IN THE NEW AGE). The fun of their modest success (Chapter Three of NEW AGE was first-finalist for The Southern Anthology's fiction prize in 1995, and MLA sold out its first edition) did not provoke more prose other than a few paragraphs featuring the law firm of Smith, Smith, Smythe and Gruntgroyn.

Since then, it's been a radically enjambed, slant-rhymed, non-metrical, mixed-diction couplet (largely of my own devising), that I've used in four full-length collections (including one of French translations). That couplet's flexibility can sometimes resolve the conflicts between free and formal verse even as it promotes, now and then, a fresh tension between those old antagonists.

Meanwhile, like all poets, I'd been embarrassed and irked by the challenge thrown down in a footnote in one of Richard Feynman's LECTURES ON PHYSICS (Vol. I, section 3). It's been justifiably quoted uncountable times: "...far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"

All scientists, of course, know the universe is located inside the instrument with which you choose to observe it. The same, I think, obtains in the fine arts, where the instrument is the form. When in the mid-1990s I began to amalgamate into lyric poems some of the provocative findings of empirical science, it was that hybrid couplet that became an instrument for me to answer (in my way) great Feynman's great question. SCIENCE AND is the eventual result, with THE BLUE MAN: POEMS OF THE ORDINARY a follow-up.

(As for whether I'm still a Singularitarian, a futurist, and a proponent of the outlook that flourished in the Garden of Epicurus: Well, given what's now available for everyone to know about our cosmic origin and our cosmic opportunities and what may turn out to be our cosmic responsibilities, is there any other outlook that finds itself increasingly confirmed and increasingly light-hearted?)

RECENT OR FORTHCOMING POEMS & TRANSLATIONS:

"The Poem," reprinted from DESTINATION ROOMS, will appear in the WAVES anthology (sponsored by the AROHO Foundation) of poetry and prose relating to the work of Virginia Woolf.

"Sometimes in One's Twenties," Verse Daily, 11/24/17. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

RIDDLE (2017, Headmistress Press). 13 poems about love and its common-to-everyone dilemmas. Semifinalist in the 2017 Charlotte Mew Chapbook Contest. Two of its poems ("Sometimes in One's Twenties" and "Sailing to Mytilene") were separately nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Exuberantly reviewed in The Adirondack Review, Summer 2018 issue: http://www.theadirondackreview.com/escue_furtney.html

THE BLUE MAN: POEMS OF THE ORDINARY (2017, FutureCycle Press). 23 poems that look at 23 experiences usually thought of as commonplace. Winner of the FutureCycle Press 2017 Book Prize for the "best collection of the FCP calendar year." See goo.gl/2FKGMF

THE ADIRONDACK REVIEW, Summer 2017: translations of three lyrics by Paul Verlaine.

THE ADIRONDACK REVIEW, Fall 2015: featured poet in “Women in Translation” issue, including four lyrics by Ronsard, du Bellay, and de Coucy.

Fictionalized memoir in progress: GENEALOGIES: A MEMOIR OF SEVERAL CHILDHOODS, set in postwar Oklahoma. 3 volumes: LYNELLA, ARNOLD, and THE NEXT 10 YEARS

SEE ALSO:

Jeff Sypeck, medieval historian, translator, and author of BECOMING CHARLEMAGNE, has posted a detailed review of SCIENCE AND at http://www.quidplura.com/?p=792

SEE ALSO:

For a reading (in English and French) by poet Lisa Huffaker of my translation of Paul Verlaine’s "A Woman and Her Cat" (read at Malvern Books in Austin, TX on 01/25/15), see YouTube or see http://goo.gl/8nLo3G

Available for discussion groups, readings, conferences? Yes

Contact: dianefurtney@earthlink.net