Benjamin C. Krause

My first chapbook, Classifieds and Other Poems, is now available from erbacce-press. You can find it here. This puts forth a great opportunity for me to do my first entry in my Poetry Aloud feature, in which I will be reading the poetry of other writers and posting them on my blog, as an outgrowth of my advocacy of oral poetry and as a way to introduce my readers to poetry I love.

You will understand why I chose this poem after hearing it. It has always been very special to me, and especially so now.

Dream Song 75 by John Berryman
Buy John Berryman’s complete Dream Songs here.

Writing about love and sex can be two of the hardest things to do without sounding cliche or otherwise boring. For this reason, I rarely write about these subjects, but on occasion have managed to pull them off.

Successful love poems have to show love in a new light, in a way that’s original, specific, and free of cliche. A writer should generally avoid phrases that could conjure up any and every meaning a person has, and should instead show what love means to him. My poem “If Antony Had Won,” one of the first poems I ever had published, takes the unusual approach of relating love to the Battle of Actium, a fight between the generals Agrippa and Marc Antony that brought the adopted son of Julius Caesar, Octavian, to power as Emperor Augustus. Its basic message is that if Antony had won, our relationship may never have happened, so I wish he had. It’s not based on any true relationship (most of my poems are not literally “about” my life), but it’s generally one of my most successful poems. You can read it here.

Another poem with which I recently enjoyed success (in the form of publication) is about raw sexual desire and how it appears even when uninvited. “Lust-Painted Lips,” which will also be in my chapbook, was published at Ophelia Street last week as “Lace and Lust-Painted Lips” and you can read it here. Audio of it is also now available on the Readings page.

And while I’m bragging, I might as well mention that my poem “Tuddle Park” was accepted by the journal The Stray Branch. Yay!

I often look for new ways of getting my creative juices flowing, and have found that one good way of doing so is to confine myself to a particular set of constraints.

The novice writer might say to this, “Why put a limit on your expression?” But the advanced writer knows that we do this all the time, even (and sometimes especially) when writing freeverse. Blind, naked expression is generally not worth reading. We all have our methods for shaping our expression, which is another way of saying we have our constraints.

Sometimes, though, it can be useful to change our constraints. I recently tried my hand at writing “small stones,” little pieces of verse or prose that waste no words in capturing exact moments in time. The writer Fiona Robyn, if not the inventor of this form of writing, has certainly done the most to popularize it. Her guide to writing small stones can be found here.

At any rate, I wrote four or five small stones and submitted them, and one of them, “Winter,” was picked for Fiona Robyn’s blog a handful of stones. Today it was published, and can be found here. Writing stones certainly helped me look at things differently, and I suggest that all of you try it yourselves.

Small stones, of course, are just one type of potential constraint you can place on yourself in order to think differently about writing. My Classifieds series was written entirely with that idea in mind, and boasts some of my most successful poems to date. Having thought about this a lot today, I’m proud to announce a new page for the Classifieds series, as well as another page for my other series and collections. These are part of a broader site-wide re-design I’ve undertaken, which is more or less finished. I hope these pages will do more than just toot my horn, and that they might also show you how you can look at writing in different ways in order to achieve greater creativity.

Some quick notes. I have been busy with my MFA application lately, and thus have not been able to get as much done on other matters as I had hoped. So while I said to expect the first Poet Panel by the end of the month, it likely won’t be until some time in February.

I have, however, come up with the second of the many Features I hope to have on this blog. It will be called Poetry Aloud, and will be an extension of my desire to bring oral poetry onto the Internet. Look for the first installment by the end of the month (I mean it this time).

And finally, my poem “Aphrodite Waltz” was accepted by Houston Literary Review today. That makes it my third poem written in 2010 to be accepted (after “Rain Dance” and “Pulling Inward”). I’m not sure of the exact issue/date yet, but will update this post with that information (or make a new post) when I am. For the record, you can find out about all my forthcoming poetry at my index of writings–if you happen to be curious.

A casual acquaintance recently asked me, “Why do you mention on your site that you have schizoaffective disorder? You’re making people see you as that crazy guy.” And for a moment, I agreed with him, and took all mention of it off my website.

But the more I’ve thought about it, the more important I feel it is to mention it. For one, as a writer, I’m entering dangerous territory when I start censoring myself and closing avenues of expression. But more importantly, I have an obligation to do as much as I can to erase the stigma of mental illness. As a sufferer, if I don’t work against the stigma, then I’m implicitly supporting it. To hide my condition would be as if saying that no mentally ill person could possibly be a good writer–and if that were true, there would be no reason for me to write to begin with.

Instead, I have decided to be “openly crazy.” So now when my writing is accepted to literary journals on its merits, everyone will know that “that crazy guy” wrote it–and it’s damn good.