Competitor Profile: Bill Moran
"I’m coming to realize that we aren’t actually the builders. Or rather, writing a poem isn’t exactly an act of building per se. If we poets do anything at all, we fashion the tools that the builders work with. All I’ve ever done is this: write the poems that happen to me, give them to an audience, and watch what they do with them."
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“polyester” was a famous greek philosopher.
Lafayette Holiday Inn,
Olympus, 1984:
Zeus knocks back a fifth of honey whiskey nectar
and blacks out on a pull-out couch
(his head, too, is polyester,
wet, spring-loaded, queen-sized.)
His daughter, gray-eyed Athena,
famously erupts from his skull
hungover battle-weary.
She removes her glimmering, bronze helmet and
vomits on the hotel carpet raises four kids in Houston
howls with glory.
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Teams You’ve Been a Member of:
Member of Austin Poetry Slam 2011, 2012, & 2013; coached Mic Check in 2012 & 2013.
Place from which you are traveling to get to TGS:
Spanish Town, Baton Rouge, LA
Saul Williams, Anis Mojgani, Eduardo Galeano (I’m considering him a poet, given the poetic
influence he’s had on my writing), and I have to give the last two slots over to the handful of
amazing writers I’m blessed to call my friends.
Have you been to TGS before, & if so, what are you hoping is the same/different from your
I have indeed been to TGS! Year #4 coming up here soon. Over the past couple years, I’ve been
involved as a festival co-director rather than a competitor, so I’m most looking forward to being
back home in the great nation of Bryan, Texas, being super lazy, and just surrounding myself
with good poetry, good company, and good food (my diet will be 100% taco, 100% pizza, 100%
brisket, 800% delicious. Can’t wait.)
How would you describe your writing style?
“Post-baroque tex-mex jazzercise.” Or, high-concept writing that explores and muddles the
boundary of internal and external, using lofty imagery that can get surreal but still keep its feet
on the ground. I talk about eating a lot.
Do you consider yourself more of a writer or a performer?
A perfwritormer. But for real, have you seen how my arms flail like crazy on stage? I’ll go with
Who are you looking forward to/nervous as hell to compete against?
Hmm, I hear those Mic Check kiddos have a thing or two to tell us...
What is your goal for this competition?
My goal is to: eat tacos, see my friends again, not embarrass myself, and beat Madi Parker at
dominoes approximately one thousand times.
What is going through your head before you get on stage?
“I’m hungry.” In a figurative sense... but also for, like, cheeseburgers.
How long does it take you, normally, to craft a poem of yours? I know how detailed and careful you are with your images and word choice, so I'm wondering what is your writing process?
It used to take me months to finish a poem. When I began writing, I’d start a poem with a laundry list of bits from my imagination. They usually bordered on surreal or fantastical, and I wouldn’t really know what they meant until I put them on page and could identify a common thread. There’s always a common thread - if these images and lines are surfacing in my consciousness one after another for a week or two at a time, they are most likely belied by point of importance to me, to which I am slowly approaching one line at a time. I’d usually identify the meaning of the poem about halfway through writing it and have that “aha!” moment. Then I’d rearrange and chip away at my 1,000+ words of raw material to more clearly serve my point. It’s at this point in editing that I would marry aesthetic and rhetoric, form and function, so that my poem entertains the reader’s imagination while keeping its feet clearly on the ground in real-world affairs, trying to say something real in very surreal terms.
While I still largely adhere to this model, I have widened the scope of my writing which has necessitated a widening of my process. Sometimes, my jumping-off point is not in the imagistic material itself but in the main metaphorical conceit. In a recent piece, I connected the murder of Julius Caesar with metal/hardcore concert most pits, and all of the imagery fell in to place from there: “Let the fury glide quiet into our spine like a surprising knife. / Let us spit up blood ‘n poems, blood ‘n poems.” Other times, form is the vehicle that carries the piece into being. For example, another new piece of mine is loosely modeled after Propp’s “Morphology Of The Folktale”, in which he outlines the 30+ general plot points of traditional folktales. Other times, it’s theme. Lately I’ve been exploring the relationship between internal and external reality, and blurring the line between. Food/eating imagery really comes in handy here, and I find myself writing pieces that start with “1. Boy wakes up in wall, / has to eat his way out.”
In short - to use the tired metaphor for the craft of poetry as a house once again - I’ve been finding new doors through which to enter a poem. It’s exciting.
What's it like to approach poetry all the different ways that you do (former administrator at a poetry org, an MFA student, a member of a slam team, and as one person in a slam? Is it all the same thing that you love, or do you have a specific plan of action for each one?
Great question - it’s one I struggle with on a daily basis. I could write a thesis about this, but I’ll keep it short. In a certain sense, what we do as poets is grapple with the vastness of experience in our lives, and arrange very unlike things in to some coherent narrative, argument, or impression. It’s like the toddler of everyday life turned over its bowl of spaghetti, and we’re trying to arrange the noodles into some sort of picture (dumb metaphor, but seems somehow fitting at the moment, probably because I’m hungry.) In the world of poetry, that’s all I’m trying to do - arrange my MFA noodles, teacher noodles, non-profit noodles, and slam noodles into a nice and neat spaghetti painting of my writing career. Everything is its learnable qualities, and it’s my job to dig out what I can take from each realm of poetry, in its endlessly vast arrays, and to apply it in a way so that I continue to appreciate and progress in my craft.
Allow me to oversimplify things in fairly vague terms: in slam I fell in love with poetry, non-profit/outreach work saved me from falling out of love with it and strengthened my commitment to it, touring and teaching is how I carve out wonderful new space in a world I almost grew bored of, and this MFA program is way to challenge my craft, to toss it into some sort of rigorous fire and beat it into a stronger shape.
What was it like to travel to Australia and perform your poetry there, in comparison to the Texas, and more specifically Austin and Bryan/College Station scenes? And now what's it like for you to perform/participate in Louisiana?
Australia was a dream. It was a perfect consummation of all my efforts in poetry in the years leading up to it. I tell my students all the time that their words and voice is important, that their words/voice can do wonderful things if only they use them. Australia was my way of proving that to myself, that I’m not just spouting off sweet-sounding soundbites you’d find on an inspirational cat poster. On the contrary, my words actually brought me across the world to a country I never would have seen if I hadn’t started writing all these insane rants I call poems. Everyday for the month I was there I simply took in my surroundings, and was just grateful for the craft and for the role its played in my life. When I say the “craft”, I’m including the people who work tirelessly to promote it in their communities, engage young people in the world of poetry, and show traveling the love and hospitality that they would to their own family. The poets and poetry communities in Sydney, Canberra, Wollongong, Melbourne, and Brisbane showed me so much love, I can’t say how thankful I am for it.
If there’s one connection I can make between Australia and Texas/Louisiana’s poetry scenes, it’s just that: reciprocity and community. While I was traveling overseas, this level of support wasn’t a new experience for me. It simply drew in sharper focus and made me take stock of the kind of support I’ve already received back home. It made me happy to be a part of similar communities in the States that strive to promote poetry and give it to others who need it most. That goes for Texas and Louisiana - just last night, I was invited to a poetry showcase at a huge, amazing theatre here in Baton Rouge, and the incredible Donney Rose carved out a spot in his headlining set for me to come on stage and perform at the end of the night. He sacrificed time on stage to welcome up this newcomer to his poetry community, without blinking an eye. I mean, if that isn’t the definition of support, I don’t know what is. These are the things that kick my butt into improving as a poet and person.
How do you know when a poem you have written is urgent? How does the writing itself and the process differ?
I’ve never really understood terms like “urgency” or “necessary” in regards to the writing process. In conversations about poetry in which these terms come up, the discourse is usually framed in the assumption that poetry is firstly meant to address some problem on a larger scale - that a poem is the hammer which drives in the nail. This is a wonderful idea, and there’s an elegant beauty in saying “This is a problem that urgently needs addressing, and I can fix it with my words.” I wish I could say that I do this, to say that the pragmatic, experiential aspects/effects of my poetry are intentional and first priority... but it just isn’t true.
That’s not to say that my poems don’t approach real-life problems and attempt to reframe attitudes and discussions regarding important issues. I think pieces like “Handshakes” and “Good Kill” are obvious examples of that. But utility has never been the starting point for me. I just can’t go into a poem with an agenda, and not for lack of trying. So many times I’ve sat down and said to myself, “Ok, I HAVE to write a poem about x, y, and z...” and then come up with absolutely nothing. It’s not that I come up with bad material - I literally can’t come up with anything. Beating my head against this wall again and again necessitated an honest look at my own process, and I realized that poetry is something that happens to me far more than it is something that I do. If I write a poem that is meant to be unpacked in its larger social context, and seeks to affect some real change in its social circumstance, it is usually a surprise to me. I was surprised by “Handshakes”, and even by intensely confessional pieces such as “I Said, He Said” (the “Guilt” poem.) So in short, I can’t really answer to the “urgency” of pieces because they never do feel urgent to me. If they are urgent or necessary or important, I don’t realize until after the fact.
It’s such an important distinction that you bring up - to approach poetry as an instrument to change one’s circumstance, or as a symptom of that circumstance - and one I encourage new and old writers alike to consider regarding their own work. To restate, I feel that my approach to writing falls more closely towards the latter, in that it is more of a phenomenon that I experience than it is an artifice that I create. A poem happens when it bubbles up from inside me, and most of my “writing” process consists of simply getting the hell out of its way and letting it fall onto the page however it chooses (i.e. “I Said, He Said”, which is a hugely importantly piece to me, was so necessary for me to write, and its one that I wrote so casually and accidentally.) From that point, if it has a pragmatic, measurable effect on its audience or myself, on our conception of the the world, or on the world itself - then it is a welcome and grateful gift that I can’t really take credit for. More often than not, the impact a piece has owes largely to what my audience did with that poem - how they they received it and what it inspired them to say or do - rather than any sort of agenda I brought to the paper.
If y’all take anything from this rant, I hope it’s that the phenomenon of poetry is what’s important. The writing itself is what is urgent. I’m coming to realize that we aren’t actually the builders. Or rather, writing a poem isn’t exactly an act of building per se. If we poets do anything at all, we fashion the tools that the builders work with. All I’ve ever done is this: write the poems that happen to me, give them to an audience, and watch what they do with them.
What is your all-time favorite line of poetry? (I'll take a few, because I doubt you can just have one).
Ah, you have just stumbled into the majestically-gaudy palace of the King of Indecision; gaze upon the fine, mismatched ornamentation and ten thrones which I couldn’t choose between.
Ha. Ok, I’m being dumb. But yeah, there’s no hope for me answering this question rightly. Instead, I’ll give you the first line that popped into my head, one by my bff Zachary Caballero which has been knocking around in my brain for a good while now. I am more than ok with claiming this as my current favorite:
"Listen, 'cause I won't say this again:
if there is a God of trying, I still believe in him."
