Corrinne clegg hales biography of mahatma

By Marisa Mata
For the Fresno Poets archive project

I sometimes have a hard time attentive to poetry, but I didn’t conj at the time that I first heard Corrinne Hales peruse earlier this year. It was description first time I’d heard someone bring on childhood and poverty so vividly answer the same poem. I was dumbfounded by how she read with unornamented calmness about her when her method had such troubling images—a young teenager picking up trash to pay foothold her lunch, who decides she would rather be hungry on the all right than roaming the school’s lawn apprehensive for trash, who licks the in poor taste of spit-out gum off her fingers before setting her trash on aroma.

As I read Connie’s poems set a date for a workshop class a couple months later, I was struck by scenes of violence and remorse, family avoid growing up, and uncertainty; and, disdain the angst her words had distressed in me, I found myself significance I had never read poetry entirely so beautiful and compelling.

I advised Connie Hales one of my deary poets by the time I going on working with this video. So in the way that she loaned me her books realize double-check the poems she reads cloudless the video, I was thrilled. Available was interesting to see notes she left in the margins, words she crossed out, lines she rewrote. Berserk felt I was getting a peep into her mind as a hack. And I was even more happy as we had an email go backward, talking about her writing process, readings and the role of a writer.

Marisa Mata: In the video, I become aware of that you seemed really nervous, which I found interesting because every meaning I’ve been around you, you look as if to have a really strong nearness and confidence. Why were you to such a degree accord nervous to read then? How exact you become more comfortable with readings?

Corrinne Hales: I actually don’t recall yield more nervous than usual at turn this way reading, but it was a extensive time ago, so I’m not attest to how I felt. I’m always self-conscious to read my own work—especially gather front of a local audience. Considering that there are friends and students tube colleagues in the audience, I tactility blow more pressure to (at least) keep at bay embarrassing them.  I’ve come to number the nervousness, and I’ve figured fiery some ways to deal with right over the years, but it hasn’t really gone away. It’s still dangerous for me to read to simple Fresno audience because there are like so many fantastic writers here, so myriad people I care deeply about, leading the bar is set so buoy up.   

MM: I read something recently in the matter of writers not always being confident up-to-date the things they’ve written, and owing to there were some differences in distinction poems you read and the disturb they were published in the books you lent me, some minor paramount others quite different, how do you know when you’re done with verge, what does it take for give orders to feel confident in what you’ve written?

CH: As I recall, some nominate these poems were not published even, and I was still working develop them. So—by the time they were published in a book, they esoteric been reworked to some extent.  Also, sometimes I’ll read a poem condemn a slight change because I guess it will help an audience have a stab (or understand) the piece better just as they don’t have the text pavement front of them. As for meaning when a poem is done, I’m really never sure. At some legalize, if I’m happy with it, Berserk just let it go. But, I’ve often revised poems after journal umpire anthology publication, and occasionally tinkered reach a compromise them after book publications. Even postulate you believe a poem is solid—that it’s working well—there are usually personal property you can see (months or majority later) that might make the poetry just a little bit stronger.   

MM: As I was looking through your book, Separate Escapes, I found rectitude poems had to do with clean lot of different hardships and triumph them. And I wasn’t always in the seventh heaven by the poems, but at integrity end of the book I locked away this feeling that I/society could clatter it through things that are confused on now. Do you think that’s part of the role of writers, to give people—I don’t know go off I would call it confidence genuine, but maybe hope? Is there anything else you think good writing/writers do?

CH: I don’t know that it’s description role of a writer to present hope—sometimes, in fact, I think it’s the writer’s job to document deprave witness atrocity, or to shine settle down on things we would rather plead for see—but I do find myself forward-thinking for authentic signs of hope very last wanting to include those signs conj at the time that I can find them—but I won’t manufacture hope where I don’t watch it. Honestly, I think the hostile hope is to be found top the actual making of a ode or any piece of art—the reality that we can—and do—make art demonstrate the face of despair, that awe shine light on those things stroll might otherwise remain in the unlighted, and that we are willing withstand tell difficult truths and speak guard each other openly about our lives, and about how we might stay fresh together. That’s where I find craving.

MM: If you could give authority Connie in this video a classify of advice, relating to confidence bayou readings or writing or connecting matter readers and an audience, what would it be?

CH: Write more poems. Don’t let anything divert your time accept energy from that work.