English Department News

clamor

Professor Spotlight: Elyse Fenton

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Elyse FentonLast November, Elyse Fenton came to University of Portland to read from her wildly acclaimed poetry book Clamor. Her collection caught literary fire after she was not only the first American author to win the University of Wales’ Dylan Thomas Prize, but also the first poet. She’s been interviewed on NPR and BBC. After her reading at the University of Portland Bookstore, she was offered an adjunct position for Fall 2016 teaching the poetry workshop class offered every other year.

Sitting down next to me at the Pilot House, Professor Fenton smiled and explained she was going to go running after our interview, hence her jogging attire. I asked how her Halloween went. “Great,” she replied, “I went as ‘bigly,’ a play on how Donald Trump says ‘big league.’”

Her experience teaching here has been unique, she said. “UP students are the most enthusiastic group of students I’ve taught. They’re willing to try new things and get out of their comfort zones.” As one of these students, I take that as a great compliment.

After living in Massachusetts, Texas, and even Mongolia, Fenton chose Portland to settle down with her family. But just because she’s a transplant doesn’t mean that she isn’t familiar with West Coast antics; she got her B.A. from Reed College and her M.F.A. from the University of Oregon.

Fenton is not only a writer, mother, and professor, but also a high school career counselor. All these identities make for one great resource for students pursuing a writing career but don’t know where to start. I picked her brain for advice and she said what every other teacher has been saying since I can remember: read and write. “Writing is a spectrum, not a vacuum. Be influenced!” She also said that writing only ever gets done when you schedule it. “Prioritize your writing life. Call yourself a writer. Believe in your work enough to put it out there.” Fenton says she balances seasons of writing with periods of PR work, an important aspect if you want to be published. “I accept that I won’t get as much writing done in the summer and use that time to edit and publish.”

 Fenton’s second book of poetry, Sweet Insurgent, is scheduled to come out early next year, so keep your eyes peeled. And after gaining significant recognition in the poetry world, Fenton is now moving on to a new project: her first novel. Fenton said that switching genres can give an author perspective about their past, present, and future work. It also allows her to access different languages and ways of writing. Because she received help with Clamor from critics and peers, she categorizes this first work as a “typical” writing process. She decided to go about her second literary work differently, working on her new novel alone. But she doesn’t forget the help she’s received, saying, “I still keep those voices in my head.”

Professor Fenton is invaluable to the University of Portland community, and we’re extremely lucky that she shares her insights and experience. Her current poetry workshop class, ENG 306, is dynamic, fun, and creative. Her laid-back persona encourages a comfortable environment for deep conversations and writing workshops, a difficult task that seems natural to her.

Check out Fenton’s website for more information about her and her work.

An Interview with Elyse Fenton

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by Jackie Ott

Elyse

In a short poem entitled “Endurance,” Elyse Fenton writes: “I used to stand in doorways and know / there was no human way to go on or through” (46). This poem, along with so many others reverently bound in Clamor, captures a deep human emotion not easily put into words. Fenton’s poetry engages with something intrinsically human, deeply emotional, easy to connect to but not easy to articulate. Because Clamor was written during her husband’s deployment in Iraq, Fenton describes it as something that just happened:

I say “it happened” because that’s how the writing felt. It was happening, whether I liked it or not (and often, admittedly, I did not). It was happening on the blank computer screen when I wrote in the mornings before teaching or running or dithering around in my garden or going to class. And it was happening in the occasional phone calls I had with my husband, in the instant messages, in all the communication we had or failed to have across that year.

Like life, like emotion, this was a book of poetry that seemed to demand to be written, and for the reader, it just as importantly demands to be felt.

I was given the chance to interview Fenton before her upcoming talk on the 17th of this month. Reading from Clamor, a winner of the University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize, Fenton gives students and others the golden opportunity to hear the poems through the poet’s voice. I asked Fenton for a description of her book, and her response, full of beauty, captured the book in the way only the author could:

“Clamor” is one of those words that means its own opposite. It means both noise and silence, and it means protest. I was the wife of a soldier living in the most homogeneously liberal pacifist echo chamber I’ve ever lived in (and that’s saying something). It was a fraught and anxious and squirmy and sometimes terrible and highly productive time. The book that came of it, I think, enacts that tension: there’s a speaker bashing up against the limits of language, and finding some kind of solace in that failure. Which might be another way of saying, the book’s full of elegies.

As a reader, I saw this tension most prominently in the ever changing of format of the poems in the book. Separated into three sections, the first and third sections follow a more traditional poem format, while section two is full of prose poems. When asked about this changing format, Fenton responded:

As the poet, as the one instigating the bashing I tried a lot of different approaches. The prose poems in the middle, the more exploded lyrics, the couplets, the tercets, there’s a broken sonnet or two in there… When I first put the book together, I wasn’t sure what to do with all that variety, but then I understood it for what it was: clamor, all of it.

And clamor it is, protesting the traditional while giving voice to the unspoken, giving the reader a chance for the peaceful silence that comes in the wake of the articulation of pure feeling. This book of poetry has depth and beauty and so many layers that with each new layer you un-earth, the greater your appreciation for Fenton and her poetry grows. She makes music with the noise of emotion. She describes the writing of this book as throwing

[A] lot at the page to see what would stick, what would wound, what would edge me closer to or farther away from…I want to say ‘understanding’ here, but it was more like relief. What would edge me closer to relief, to the discovery that what was music was also just noise. And of course, the other way around.

Simultaneously a wound and a bandage, relief and distraction, hope and despair, music and noise, Clamor offers a look into the life of a wife of a soldier, but also a look into emotions that each human, regardless of station and location, struggles to find the words for. If you have the opportunity, take an hour out of your day and come listen to Fenton on November17th: the evening’s reading offers more than just the chance to listen to wonderful poetry.