When Didi Menendez opened the possibility of
interviewing writers from the Mipo’s Cafe’ Cafe’ group
on Facebook, the first person that I thought of was Pris
Campbell. I “met” Pris on MySpace through blogs and was
struck by her ability to approach heavy, perhaps even
disturbing topics with a light step. Her poetry is just
as likely to make you chuckle at yourself as to cry (or
maybe even both) within the span of just a few lines
before setting you down lightly at the end, possibly
with a new definition of long unquestioned concepts. One
poem in particular that took a concept and turned it
upside down for me was the poem that Pris recently read
on S.A. Griffin’s Onword entitled “Innocence”:
It's kind of like learning
to slip your bra off under
your sweater so he can touch
you--those little tricks you learn
over the years in some dark Chevy
or maybe if you're lucky, a sofa.
He learns to come with his jeans on
begging for more and maybe you
come too if he slips his hand down
your panties and touches you just
right. You learn how to find
that safe line between teasing and pleasing
because once you cross to the other
side you can't ever go back and you
learn later that innocence is an aphrodisiac
and no boy will ever again quite love you
like he did that night with one hand on your
breast, the other down your pants, 'your' song
on the radio and the moon writing
its name on every heartbeat.
(published Poems
Niederngasse)
How do you take teenage sex in a car and turn it into
“innocence”? How can sex and sexuality be treated so
innocently and naturally in a poem? I’ll be honest –
I’ve been dying for an excuse to ask this woman some
questions. Her responses reveal the enigmatic,
understanding and candid individual also apparent in the
depth of her poetry.
C.J.: Your MySpace profile states that you didn't
start writing poetry until 1999; yet, your writing is so
well-developed that one would think that you had honed
your skills for a lifetime. What inspired you to start
writing? Or, what held you back from writing in the
first place?
Pris: About two years ago I reconnected with an old
hometown friend who now teaches creative writing at the
University of Colorado. When he saw my first chapbook,
Abrasions, he had the same reaction regarding the level
of my poetry relative to years doing it. While I may not
have been writing poetry, I'd wanted to be a writer
since I was a child, beginning with writing two plays in
sixth grade that actually hit the stage there in grammar
school. I started a novel when I was 14, but abandoned
it. After many years involved with my career, in the
eighties I came back to writing again and wrote several
(unpublished) novels. I loved poetry, but it never
occurred to me to write it.
CFIDS literally brought me to my knees when it hit me on
September 23, 1990 (yes, I remember the exact day...it
forever changed my life) and kept me pinned down with
mind boggling, terrifying neurological symptoms that
prevented me from reading, writing, functioning in
general until I finally found a good doctor in 1998.
With him, I began to improve enough to have a partial
life again. During those years I simply survived by
pretending that I was a POW. My short term memory is
still shot and I no longer have the concentration to
write lengthy things ... my mind turns to mud pie.
Trying to follow a person's words after about an hour is
akin to chasing butterflies using a net filled with
holes.
In 1999 I was able to sign onto a computer for the first
time. I ached to be creative again. By happenstance, I
ran across a 'write a haiku a day' site. Well, I know
now that what I wrote was by no means haiku, but I liked
it, could do it and so moved from there into short
poems. At first it was simply a fall-back position, a
way to write something short enough for me to handle
cognitively, but I discovered I loved doing it. I could
read for brief periods again at this point, so started
honing my writing. Two years into it, I submitted and,
after multiple rejections, finally began to publish and
to write better poems.
I'm grateful. Poetry gave me a great gift. It returned
something to me that for so many years I thought I would
never be able to do again. It brought me back to the
creative life. Poetry became my lemonade squeezed from
all those earlier lemons.
C.J.: You mentioned CFIDS. Could you explain a bit
what this illness is and how it changed your life? I
remember reading a narrative where you explained the
effect that CFIDS had on your social life and on your
career and found it very moving, not only in what is
suffered, but also in the strength of human spirit that
is shown through making that lemonade that you mention.
Also, how did this illness change your perspective on
life, goals or priorities? How do you think that this is
shown in your writing?
Pris: I describe CFIDS and its impact on my life on the
'about me' page of my website (www.poeticinspire.com/aboutme.html).
I hope readers will take time to go to that page because
I don't think most people know much or anything about
CFIDS or have any idea of how debilitating it is. While
it can hit people in different ways and some CFIDS
friends can do more than others, I'm approximately 95
percent housebound, dizzy to some degree all of the
time, and have had a very limited voice for 15 years. I
lost my voice completely for three excruciating years
and had to communicate strictly by writing notes or by
fax. This was before I was able to use a computer.
Needless to say, I've been unable to work since the day
this illness hit. CFIDS is now known to be a
neurologically based illness but what triggers it is
still very much unknown. Most people think CFIDS means
just being tired. Not so. It means 'losing' your mind in
a very concrete sense of the word. I always thought I
could count on my brains since I didn't have much brawn.
Losing a large portion of my cognitive abilities has
been very difficult to deal with (an understatement).
CFIDS is very much an illness of isolation and the
friends who have stayed in my life or entered my life
are very special people. They've chosen to be friends
with me on whatever terms are possible and sometimes
those terms are very limited. Most people I thought were
friends left not long after I became ill. I don't blame
them for that. It was hard for me. It was hard for them.
I was no longer that person they became friends with.
Despite the losses, I've come to uneasy terms with the
'monster' I live with, but I don't like to talk about it
much and rarely focus my poetry on that subject. It's
just too painful.
Quite honestly, while CFIDS brought me to poetry, I
don't think it's affected my poetry as much as the roads
I traveled before I became ill or the non-CFIDS related
roads since. I've dealt with being molested. The first
man I loved as an adult died suddenly. My closest friend
in my mid-twenties succombed to his recurring bouts of
depression and killed himself. I've been divorced twice.
Most of my family is dead and I have no sibs or
children. Now I'm dealing with the aging process and
watching friends I grew up with or have become close to
over the years die. My husband has grown away from
me--I'm sure for his own self-preservation, too. I've
also had many wonderful life experiences. I traveled six
months between Boston and Florida, out into the Vineyard
and through the Chesapeake Bay, in a 22 foot sailboat. I
had a career I was happy with, running treatment units
for people with chronic mental illnesses. I've been
loved well by a number of wonderful people. I had a good
family. I still have good friends. All of these life
experiences have become fodder for my poems, either
directly or indirectly.
Much of my poetry comes, too, from my past work with
people who became lost in the cracks in our society.
People we never notice or ignore. I enjoy bringing them
to life and showing their struggles and humanity. Being
an older poet has its advantages. We have more behind us
to write about, a larger perspective on life, so to
speak.
As far as that perspective on life goes, CFIDS has
taught me much about the meaning of true friendship and
how to deal with being alone and sick without becoming
angry or bitter. Those emotions are a waste of energy as
far as I'm concerned. I've known from the get-go that
life isn't an 'equal opportunity employer' and so I'm
glad I had the years I did before illness limited me.
Many people don't have that much. I'm also glad that
I've always believed that I needed to do the things that
were really important to me 'now' and not put them off.
I left a secure lucrative paying job to travel on that
sailboat. Everyone said, 'Wait until you retire'. My
answer was 'What if I can't do it when I retire?'. I
always wanted to live in Manhattan so headed up there
the summer before graduate school to live with a study
group I heard about, but had to have a job to pay my
keep. I had no skills then, but found one. I wanted to
see what Menningers was like after two years in graduate
school, so I wrote them. Based on my letter, they
created a summer extern program and I was one of the two
people accepted. A research assistanceship there earned
me a small stipend, enough to live in an honest to god
Kansas boarding house and experience Menningers. One of
my favorite poems grows out of that summer experience. I
still have that same philosophy about life. When I have
one of my better days, I grab the opportunity to do
whatever I can and friends get excited emails saying 'I
DROVE today and didn't mangle the Lake Worth citizens in
the process'.
Bottom line: My poetry comes from all of the above
places and spaces. To liberally paraphrase S.A. Griffin,
'It's all part of the process'.
C.J.: Who are the poets that have influenced you or
your writing?
Pris: Poetry books were in my home growing up so I was
familiar with many of the older classic poets before I
ever read them in school. I had my first experience
reading assigned poetry in the two college lit courses I
took. Those classes turned me completely off of poetry
for a while. One teacher made poems feel dry and boring.
The other insisted that every poem we studied had an
underlying sexual meaning, most often masturbation. I
think the poets he analyzed would've gotten a good laugh
if they'd sat in on that class.
The summer I lived in Manhattan after college, the Beats
had already had their day, but when somebody put a copy
of Howl into my hands I felt as if
lightning had struck. Suddenly a poet was writing a poem
that affected me again, was relevant to me. I devoured
every poetry book I could find that summer. A Coney
Island of the Mind is one ... so many more and so long
ago I can't remember them now.
Graduate school in psychology entered my life that fall,
requiring every spare second to go to classes, eat,
study, sleep, go to classes, etc. From there I went
directly into University teaching and, as a new prof, my
evenings and weekends were still full. No time for
poetry. The next year I moved to Hawaii and took a
clinical job while I waited for my husband-to-be's ship
to return to Pearl Harbor from Vietnam.
Those were intense times. The country was in turmoil.
Jack Kennedy had already been shot. Martin Luther King
was next, then Bobby Kennedy. Kent State and Chicago
became battlegrounds. Hair was transforming the stage
into an arena of protest. Our men were coming back in
body bags from Vietnam daily and as I angrily protested
the war following my husband's discharge, at the same
time I was furious with protesters for how they treated
men I cared about, men who were sent to Vietnam or face
Canada or a jail sentence. Yes, the draft versus
enlistment made a huge difference. Looking back, while I
know now that poets were protesting the war, no poem
rose in stature like Howl had so much earlier, to speak
as our national anthem. Instead we turned to our singing
poets... Dylan, Baez, Peter Paul and Mary, Phil Ochs.
Life went on without poetry until I began writing it in
1999. A couple of years later I met two good poets
online. Both became friends. One was Jon Bohrn and the
other was Charlie Whitley. Both apparently saw promise
in my writing. Jon spent time helping me work through
poems and get past stumbling blocks. Charlie made it his
personal mission to send me book after book of poets he
thought I would like or learn for. In a very real sense,
both were my first poetry teachers.
I discovered other poets on my own, as well as through
Charlie's books. I fell in love with the work of
Li-Young Lee, William Carlos Williams, Anne Sexton,
Bukowski (who doesn't go through a Bukowski period??),
Jack Spicer, Elizabeth Bishop, Diane DiPrima, Sharon
Olds, Rebecca McClanahan ... I could go on. I discovered
the 'North Carolina poets', a group of not yet
well-known but gifted poets, such as Carter Monroe, Tim
Peeler, D.B. Cox, Jim Chandler. Mark Hartenbach became
another early favorite as did the aforementioned
California poet, Jon Bohrn. I met S.A. Griffin and A.D.
Winans on MySpace. Both became good friends as well as
poets I admired deeply. I'm not going to attempt to name
other good poets I discovered online later for fear of
leaving out someone really special or hurting feelings
inadvertently. I'll just say that I haven't yet read
someone I consider a good poet I haven't learned
something from, even if I didn't especially like his or
her poetry.
C.J.: Would you consider yourself a "feminist poet"?
Pris: Despite being an advocate of women's rights as far
back as I can remember, I've never applied the word
'feminist' to myself. The word carries connotations with
it that just don't work for me. I prefer to think of
myself as a humanist.
C.J.: One thing that I really admire about your
poetry is that you incorporate themes of sex, sexuality
or intimacy in ways that seem empowering and natural. I
think that these themes are difficult for many women to
deal with in poetry - we either go over the edge or skip
over it altogether. First, what importance do you see in
addressing these issues in poetry, and second, what
advice would you give on doing so?
Pris: When I first started writing poetry, I felt
uncomfortable writing about those themes. I later
realized two things. First of all, I felt too vulnerable
revealing my sexual self that much in a poem and
secondly, by avoiding those subjects I was eliminating a
big chunk of important stuff. I was still stuck in the
mode of 'if a man is openly sexual, it's perfectly
natural', but women are still , even today, given a
jaded eye or considered 'sluts' if they cross certain
lines, especially in small towns or in certain areas of
the south where I was raised. Since sex/sensuality have
been important parts of my life and the lives of so many
of my female friends, beginning with the 'free love' era
of the late sixties and seventies, on through to the
waning of our sexual attractiveness as we age, to omit
writing about this was absurd.
By giving voice to these subjects for myself, I hope
I've also given more women the feeling they're not alone
in the many faces sexuality/intimacy can take. I've had
a few male poet friends admit to me that my more
forthright poems embarrass them, but that's okay. After
perhaps a hundred or so more, they'll get past it :-)
Sex is only one part of who we are as human beings and
as women, but it's an important part. I don't think a
strictly erotic poem covers quite the same ground as a
poem that ties sensuality into a relationship, even if
it's a lost relationship or one only wished for.
My advice? Get past what people might think about you
when they read your poetry. Write what works for you.
C.J.: Where can we find some of your work to read
online?
Pris: Unfortunately, a number on online journals where
my poems were published didn't archive or have gone
under over the years. That's one reason I'm submitting
more and more to print journals. Right now, my poems can
be found archived in Boxcar Poetry Review, MiPo, The
Dead Mule: An Anthology of Southern Literature, Passage
Through August, Thunder Sandwich, In The Fray,
Empowerment4Women, Verse Libre, Poems Niederngasse
and on my
website Poetic Inspirations (www.poeticinspire.com). My
haiga can be found in Simply Haiku, HaigaOnline, The
Oregon Review, and Fireweed.
I just googled four other online journals I was in a few
years ago and no archives are left up. It's frustrating.
Another reason that when I do submit online I try to
pick a journal with some history of stability.
I would like to mention a few print journals I've been
in since I would recommend subscriptions to those or
purchases, if they don't offer subscriptions. The
Cliffs: Soundings, Tears In The Fence, MEAT (S.A.
Griffin. publisher), OCHO, Remark, among
others.
~~
Courtney J. Campbell is
a graduate of the University of Michigan-Flint and was a
Peace Corps volunteer in the Paraguayan Chaco. She has
lived in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil since 2003, where
she is currently an English teacher and a graduate
student in the Master´s program in Theory and History of
Education at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco. Her
poetry will be in the upcoming book anthology "Zygote
Abstract" by Red Pulp Fiction and several of her poems
were recently featured in "From East to West". "The
Iodine Poetry Journal", "Socialist Women", "The Michigan
Socialist", "The Uncommon Sense", "PoetryBay", "Juice
Magazine", "Kill Poet", "The Smoking Poet", "Empowerment
4 Women" and "Language and Culture" have also published
her poetry and/or essays. Another of her essays will be
published in the next issue of "The Guide to Ecstatic
Living" and she recently had the honor of co-editing the
International Women's Day edition of "The Socialist",
the national publication of the Socialist Party USA.
MIPOesias Magazine
A Menendez Publication
Bloomington, IL
Publisher &
Founding Editor
Didi Menendez
Editor-in-Chief Amy King
MIPO-Print Designer April Carter-Grant
Resident Photographer April Carter-Grant
Resident Artist
Dan Grant
Jeremy Baum
Managing Poetry Editor Meghan Punschke
Chapbook
Editor/Interviewer Jenni Russell
Contributors Michael Parker
Cheryl Townsend
Jim Knowles
Talia Reed
Francisco Aragon
