Ellaraine Lockie
By Robert Lucke
One thing for sure, when Ellaraine Lockie comes to Big Sandy, there is a treasure trove of things she shares in "The Mountaineer" the rest of the year. Today is no exception when we publish a great unpublished interview of Ellaraine which should be very interesting to Big Sandy in general and in particular, budding poets and writers.
Toward the end of the interview Ellaraine describes a poetry club she once formed in Big Sandy and offered to start another if there is some interest. It would be a great thing for our town to get that going. If you are interested, contact us at "The Mountaineer" and we will pass the information on to Ellaraine.
What was your inspiration for becoming a poet, and what kind of background did you have in poetry?
I discovered poetry in a rather dramatic way when I was in my mid-fifties shortly after my first two nonfiction books were published. I also had been studying children's picture book writing for five years and had written fifteen manuscripts that were in the submission process when I got a letter from an old high school friend from Havre. He sent some of his poems and asked my opinion of them.
Well, I didn't know a thing about poetry except that I didn't like it. That decision had been made in high school after reading one Shakespeare poem, and I hadn't read another poem since. But I did read my friend's poems and was surprised to find that I liked them. However, I was perplexed because they didn't rhyme. So I called my children's picture book mentors, who were well-versed in all genres and presented the dilemma. They laughed and said that poetry didn't have to rhyme--that my friend's poems were in the most common form nowadays called free verse.
I decided then and there that I would try writing free verse poetry and that I would apply the same "rules" to my poems as I did to children's stories. Based on my friend's poems, it seemed to me that the genres had much in common. They both had to be very condensed. They both required language that instilled images in the reader. They were both meant to be read out loud as well as silently. And each resonated a kind of musicality.
I quickly fell in love with poetry and became addicted to writing it, but I also wanted to get the poems published. I knew from dealing with the nonfiction book publishing world, that I would need some poetry qualifications in my cover letter to interest an editor in even reading my poems. So I decided to enter them in poetry contests and try for some credits. At the end of that first year, I had received sixty-three poetry awards, and a collection of women's midlife poems had won the Poetry Forum Chapbook Contest. Then I had what I needed to get my work read and fairly often published. And I haven't stopped.
What about your educational background? Did it prepare you for a writing career?
Yes, absolutely it did but not in the traditional way of most writers. My college courses at what was then Montana State College in Bozeman were mainly the social sciences, and my degree was in General Studies with a major emphasis in sociology and minor in psychology. I did take a few English literature classes as electives but only because I liked them. Where I learned writing skills was from my high school English teacher, Lawrence Green, who was the best teacher I've ever had. He also planted the seed in me to write for an audience. It was in my junior year that he read to the class a humorous essay I wrote about my cat, and the class laughed in all the right places. It worked like a drug on me, that laughter. I didn't realize then that seed would germinate and start growing several decades later.
What was it that made you zero-in on poetry, as opposed to other genres, especially considering your success with nonfiction?
Poetry feels to me like the most powerful way to deliver a story or a message because it's so compact, and readers don't have to invest a lot of time to be moved by a well-written poem. Also, poetry is very unique in the freedom it gives a writer. A lot of people don't realize that poetry is creative writing . . . that it is not in the same category as memoir, biography or essay. Since poetry doesn't have to stick to facts only, changes can be made, or things can be left out or added in order to strengthen the poem. An example: we can change the color of a dress in a poem from red to blue, if the word blue makes the poem more musical or pleasing to read. Taking these kinds of liberties gives poets power to tell our truths as we see them in so many different ways. We can combine several persons' experiences into a composite poem that has exponential power because of it. We can tell them in first person when we're really writing someone else's story.
On a personal writing level, I often do first-person writing in other people's voices. The following is one example. My first job out of college was as the Gallatin County Child Welfare Worker. One of the main areas I covered was Protective Services for Children, and I handled many cases involving physical and sexual abuse of them. I'm still haunted by some of those cases, and it wasn't until I wrote poetry that I could do something constructive about it. I write the poems that the victims emotionally or intellectually can't, and I write them in first person because they wouldn't be believable otherwise. Anything but first person simply wouldn't be hard hitting enough because it would lack the authenticity and intimacy that the first-person voice communicates.
Poets also have freedom to break the rules of prose if we feel it enhances our message or delivery in some way. After all, poetry from the very beginning has not shared prose rules--the longstanding capitalization of
the first word in each line and the shorter lines themselves are examples.
Poetry suits my impatient personality better than the other writing genres do. I haven't completely stopped writing non-fiction books or essays though and in fact have a nonfiction book coming out in 2017, which is a kitchen companion/cookbook for the lactose intolerant.
Your own poems don't follow some of the prose rules you mention above, such as your lack of end-of-line punctuation. How did that come about?
Because I hadn't read other poetry except for those few poems from my friend when I began to write it myself, I wrote in a way that felt natural to me and didn't inhibit what I was trying to say. From the very first poem, most punctuation felt unnecessary and intrusive. I felt periods, commas, dashes, quotes and question marks cluttered not only the poem but my thinking process. So I used line breaks to indicate a slight pause, and for a longer pause I capitalized the first word of the following line.
I still use basically the same method, although I do occasionally put a comma in the middle of a line if it's necessary for comprehension.
I've found that my method works on a sort of unconscious level with editors and readers. Still, there's the occasional person who objects, and I probably lose some readers and/or publishers because of it. Once in the early days when I was hungry for acceptances, I gave in to an editor and punctuated my poem in the standard way because she wouldn't accept it otherwise. When the journal came, I hated that poem and felt as though I had prostituted myself as a writer. I've not done it again, except in the writing of a prose poem, which is a different poetry form.
I don't recommend lack of punctuation to other poets though unless it feels overwhelmingly right to them. My method is actually more difficult to write in some ways than using standard punctuation. It requires perfect syntax, and that just adds one more requirement to the writing of a good poem.
Do you have any kind of system for getting your poems published?
Yes, I treat that part of being a poet as though it were a business, and in a way it is. I don't send poems out for publication submission until they rest for a few weeks, and I usually run them through another poet whose work I respect. Proofing my own work is difficult because I read what I think I wrote rather than what I did write. This is very common, and it's one of the reasons that editors are instrumental.
Once I consider a poem finished and if I think it's good enough, I submit it to contests for maybe a six-month period. If the poem doesn't get published that way or if it's not contest quality, I do a regular submission to journals that publish similar material to what I've written. I try to get a poem published several times and then put it in a collection, which I then submit to chapbook contests. Eventually, I'll put together full collections of poetry. (A chapbook is a small collection of usually 25-45 pages often handbound or stapled, and a full collection is perfect bound and much longer.) I have twelve published chapbooks and will probably put together a full collection within the next year or two.
What is your advice to young people or any prospective writers about becoming a professional poet?
The following is what I tell my writing workshop students who want to write for publication: to learn basic grammar rules and learn them well (deviation can come later if they want); to learn as much as possible about both the human condition and nature; to observe everything around them and take notes on anything that might be writing material. (I have a small notebook and pen with me at all times; even when I sleep they are on a bedside stand), to buy a copy of the current POET'S MARKET and read it like a textbook, listing every publishing outlet that seems right for his/her work. I used the latter like a bible the first couple of years after becoming a poet.
Then anyone who wants to write poetry professionally should go out and get life experiences, the more the better. I see and hear of too many students who get college degrees, sometimes graduate degrees, and then realize they don't really have anything to say because all they've done is study.
Another suggestion is to get rid of any fears you might have for whatever reason about what other people will think of your poems. If you can't manage that and want to publish, you can still write what you want/need to write by using third-person point of view (he/she) or using a pen name. I use three poetry pen names, mostly because they are great fun, and each pen name seems to have developed her own kind of subject matter.
I'd like to say here that anyone at any age will benefit from learning to write poetry--whether it's for publication, for personal expression, for healing or therapy, for their friends and family or just to be a better and more concise writer of letters. Poetry is the best teacher for learning to say something effectively in the fewest words, and that can solve a myriad of communication problems both personally and professionally--no matter what your profession is.
Several years ago, I taught a poetry workshop for adults here in Big Sandy, and I was blown away when twenty-some people took it, many of whom wrote poetry already and some who wanted to learn. For a couple of years after that, we had what we dubbed The Bear Paw Poetry Society, and when I came during the summers, we met once a week at a coffee shop to read poems we'd written and to comment on one another's poems. Then we had a poetry reading one evening to which the public was invited. The Society required someone local to organize and advertise it ahead of time. The Lutheran minister at the time was ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬Jeff Stoops, and he was a poet who encouraged the group until he moved out of Big Sandy. Roberta Edwards did a great job with most of the organizing. If there is anyone who would like to do something like this again, I'd be happy to lead meetings when I'm here in the summers.
It would be wonderful to see the kind of interest and enthusiasm for poetry in the adult community here that has evolved in the high school and junior high students. They continue to amaze me with what they write and how they improve each year.
