“Signs of the Times,” “Pathos in the Persistence of Hedonism,” and “What Can’t Hold Up” by George Looney appeared in Issue 32 and can be read here.
We’d love to hear more about this set of poetry.
These three poems are all from a collection titled Talking to the Dead and Other Distractions which is comprised of poems concerned with the dead and their relationships with the living. In many of the poems the speaker is talking to a friend who has died. These poems arise from my having to deal with the death of my best friend of 36 years, a fellow poet, who died unexpectedly in his sleep a few years ago. Other poems in the collection are concerned more generally with the dead, and others with the current pandemic. “Pathos in the Persistence of Hedonism” is a poem that thinks about a kind of patina of lust the dead might carry for the lures of the flesh. “Signs of the Times” began with me seeing a scene on the news of a group of men in a coffee shop waiting for their order with their assualt weapons as if that were a perfectly natural thing to do; seeing that caused me to think about the absurdity of our culture. Where the poem ended up going was not anything I had in mind when I wrote the first lines. Like Robert Frost said, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” And “What Can’t Hold Up” thinks about the sense of incompleteness that inevitably comes with any death, any ending.
What was the most difficult part in writing this set?
What is always the most difficult part of the process, for me. The revising which is necessary after the initial discovery part of writing, that starting off with a line or image without knowing what the poem is going to insist on, where the language will take me. This is the most pleasurable aspect of writing for me. Maybe not the least difficult, but the pleasure of being surprised by learning what I have to say makes the difficulty more bearable. The revising, which is necessary to try to ensure that the text can do for the reader what it did for me in the process of composing it, is also difficult, but without that pleasure.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems by Larry Levis (2016). Though the first posthumous collection Elegy might be a better collection, it wasn’t within the last decade.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Until just a little while ago, I would have said Stephen Dunn, because he was such a brilliant writer and such a kind man. But since he’s now dead, I’ll say my colleagues here at Penn State Erie, Tom Noyes and Aimee Pogson, both wonderful fiction writers and good friends.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’m working on a series of ekphrastic poems based on the paintings of Caravaggio, who has long been one of my favorite artists ever since my days in art school. Each poem is ten lines long with each line having exactly ten syllables. I call them my decadent poems. So far I have been writing five of these poems on each painting. I have so far completed six paintings for a current total of thirty poems.
Our thanks to George for taking the time to answer a few questions and share these poems. Read “”Signs of the Times,” “Pathos in the Persistence of Hedonism,” and “What Can’t Hold Up” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/poetry-of-george-looney.
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Looney’s books include a collection of stories, The Worst May Be Over, which won the Elixir Press Fiction Award and was just published, The Itinerate Circus: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020 which was also just published, the Red Mountain Press Poetry Award-winning What Light Becomes: The Turner Variations, the novel Report from a Place of Burning which was co-winner of The Leapfrog Press Fiction Award and was published in September 2018, Hermits in Our Own Flesh: The Epistles of an Anonymous Monk (Oloris Publishing, 2016), Meditations Before the Windows Fail (Lost Horse Press, 2015), the book-length poem Structures the Wind Sings Through (Full/Crescent Press, 2014), Monks Beginning to Waltz (Truman State University Press, 2012),A Short Bestiary of Love and Madness (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2011),Open Between Us (Turning Point, 2010), The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels (2005 White Pine Press Poetry Prize), Attendant Ghosts (Cleveland State University Press, 2000), Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh (1995 Bluestem Award), and the 2008 Hymn of Ash (the 2007 Elixir Press Fiction Chapbook Award). George is the founder of the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Erie, editor-in-chief of the international literary journal Lake Effect, translation editor of Mid-American Review, and co-founder of the original Chautauqua Writers’ Festival.