What’s the word?
From carnival rides to Beatles tunes, Pacific University Professor Doyle Walls distills life into poetry
Doyle Walls
courtesy photo
Growing up in Texas, Doyle Walls says his days were filled with “years filled with sports and girls and not doing my homework or reading anything,”
In college, however, he discovered the power of the written word.
“I began to understand and appreciate the connections among language, works of the imagination, thought, freedom, maturity, and action,” he recalls. “The world, and a life I wanted to be an active part of, opened for me in art, philosophy, history, politics, and literature.
That discovery prodded Doyle into an education career that led him to Pacific University, where he now teaches writing.
Pudding House Publications recently published a collection of Walls’ poems, Doyle Wesley Walls: Greatest Hits, 1979-2008.
Last week, he answered some questions for us via e-mail. Here are excerpts from that exchange:
Q: Why do you think you were drawn to writing?
A: Writing is not an escape for me. When Richard Wright read Mencken as a boy, he learned that words were a weapon. One piece of writing attacks timidity and stupidity. Another attacks prejudice and laziness. Words take us to the heart of the problem, not away from it. Unfettered words (with the requisite freedom and courage) can take us to bloodless solutions.
Q: But what to write?
A: There are those who are kissed by a poem, novel, play, or essay - and they want to write an analysis of that experience. Others experience the ecstasy of such a literary kiss and want to kiss back; they write creative works. I feel both impulses.
Q: And poetry?
A: William Stafford said it well: poetry is conversation, but at the highest level. People who enjoy quality conversation over mere chit-chat, who enjoy the well-crafted joke from a comedian instead of the easy, predictable late-night-TV groaner, who smile at a well-turned phrase in the midst of a boring meeting, who enjoy and must share a good song lyric … all these people are close to poetry whether they know it or not.
Q: What moved you into academia?
A: In a world that seemed too often filled with the philistine and the phony and the mendacious and the censorious, on the Bland Planet, I found another world where the appreciation of the beautiful was lifted to ecstatic new highs (and celebrated), where the knife of critical scrutiny was sharpened and used, even with colleagues and friends (and if they didn’t appreciate that, then they had revealed themselves to be neither colleagues nor friends). Academe was the best training camp I had found for my mind and spirit.
Q: When people ask “What do you do?” what’s your answer?
A: When I hear this question, it usually means, “How do you make your money?” When I believe that to be the question, I say, “I teach literature and writing at a university.”
Q: And when you tell them you write poetry, what’s a typical reaction?
A: Many adults who do not know poetry (or have only read or heard some of the worst of it) think of poetry as something weird and incomprehensible, something a weakling or someone hiding in his or her room would write.
I am always delighted to have the opportunity to change those minds. People with those perspectives on poetry might find pleasure in the poems in this chapbook concerning my working with my father on the farm or hanging from a busted Octopus ride at a carnival, upside down, with my mother for half an hour.
Q: What are some other topics you address?
A: One poem concerns hearing “Hey Jude” for the first time ... while on vacation in New Orleans as an adolescent. And the poems about being a father, about being an adult, are “stories,” if you like, that can resonate with many people, whether they think they like poetry or not.
Q: What’s your hope for this book?
A: I hope the kind of poetry I write will bring more people to this genre of literature. If it does so, considering the vast numbers of quality poets there to be read, I will have accomplished something important beyond whatever positives my poems may have.