George Bilgere has taken poetry's silence off the page and onto the radio waves; this award winning poet is taking his experimental style blending monologue, sound and poetry into his radio show Wordplay every Wednesday at 12:30PM, where George hosts a strangely surreal and arresting spoken word show on WJCU’s 88.7 FM. His recent accomplishments include winning the Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature, and his book The Good Kiss garnered the University of Akron prize, judged by 1997-2000 Poet Laureate Billy Collins. George has participated in readings at the legendary 92nd Street Y in New York City and at John Carroll University where he's a professor of English. Cool Cleveland finds out why living in Cleveland made his career take off, Cleveland's hunger for art, how our community is impassioned with poetry, and why it's popular in our city.

Cool Cleveland: How did the idea to bring poetry to the airwaves start out for you?
George Bilgere: There’s no spoken word program in Cleveland; I did one in Japan when I lived and worked there doing tevision and radio, so when I arrived in Northeast Ohio, I saw a real need for it as a way to promote poetry in Cleveland and our local poets. My show opens with a strange monologue with my radio partner, we then talk about poetry we like and have a guest poet who reads. The idea was to raise the profile of poetry in our city and put local voices to the radio. There is little diversity in radio these days, so this show offers a new approach; it's also about pleasure in listening to the human voice.

I heard one of your shows recently, it was a contrast of spoken word and American pop culture, and seemed on the verge of cultural criticism.
The monologue is separate from poetry, with strange background music and a persona to create an illusion that I’m talking with you [the listener] on the phone. The monologues set to music give it a creative dimension. The monologue is poetic though, it’s poetry and pop culture merged with music as a new art form – it’s unique and the two forms branch out and nourish each other. Almost always my monologue is pop culture criticism in which a person within our culture is ill at ease in it and struggles to understand American culture. For me, it’s a different way of writing poetry.

What experience brought you to explore poetry?
There was no formative moment, I really only have a prosaic explanation. When I was younger, I consumed novels and then much later I took a writing class. I didn't know anything about it, and had no idea that poetry was Bukowski - I thought, "you can't do that!" I had no idea that writers had permission to write that way, and that’s when I became interested in poetry.

It's like the poetic connection hits with your first poetry experience, which has the most impact; I was hit hard with Tennyson first, but then moved on to John Ashbery. As a writer, I think different poetic styles are great to explore.
I don’t come across people who read both Tennyson and Ashbery! And I don't meet many people who can relate to Ashbery's poetry; he's a poet most readers struggle with because there's so much to figure out. When I talk to my students about his poetry, they don't know what was going on and have no idea what the poem was about, because with Ashbery, you never know where you're going.

With Ashbery, you're going through a journey of trap doors and hidden staircases, he's verbally tricking you to get the attention off himself, to divert the reader away from the writer. Past the obscurity are moments born from the mundane; he elevates common perceptions and experiences while keeping the integrity of its simplicity.
He is extremely challenging to read and challenging to teach...

How do you effectively teach and deliver the poetic experience to your students?
I try to teach by example, and I show lots of modern and contemporary poems. I've found that academia tends to teach poetry the wrong way; we start out using examples of Shakespeare, and it's not easily accessible. But if you show them a Billy Collins poem, poetry is fun and easy. I have my students read contemporary and modern poets, and then we move back in time a little bit with earlier authors. I like to present material that students can get into and I do this by not presenting intimidating examples of poetry.

Tell me more about how you landed in Cleveland.
I received my PhD in contemporary British and American Poetry at the University of Denver, I taught there for a while and then went on to teach at the University of Oklahoma. After I completed a year on the Fulbright in Spain, I was looking for schools to work at. John Carroll University was building a creative writing program, I saw it as a chance to get in early and develop the department; since then it has grown into a sensational program with excellent faculty and staff. We have a business man who anonymously donated a significant amount of money to John Carroll's Visiting Writers Series to bring in major poets from around the world: Rita Dove, Billy Collins and our next will be Robert Pinsky. It definitely puts Cleveland on the map. John Carroll's Creative Writing Department offers a creative writing minor with prominent writers that are establishing a national reputation: Canadian novelist Steve Hayward, local fiction writer Maureen McHugh, poet Phil Metres and myself.

Matthew Arnold said that poetry is "at bottom a criticism of life." Is it?
I'll cop-out and respond with a Yeats quote to answer this, "Poetry is the argument we make with ourselves." Good art has to have an element of being pissed off or having dissatisfactions with the world. My last book was cathartic in a sense, with anger, bitterness and depression. Although I am a private person, I have the need to communicate to others, to let them know I’m here. And when that comes across, the poem works - my poetry is really me pulled together into meaning and language. I think Arnold is right, but Yeats' approach is more close to me; there's something that's struggling within and out of that comes the poem.

The internal struggle almost always finds its way into a poem, and yet I've come across really strong local poets who struggle to write, rather than utilizing their inner workings of struggle to lead and facilitate the process of writing. Instead, there is a careerism mentality about the outcome of the poem: whether it gets recognized, published, praised, etc. and poets lose sight of the essentialness within the activity of writing.
I don't understand the careerism either. I write because I really enjoy the making of the poem. When I'm in the act of writing poetry, I agree with Harold Bloom who said, “poems are written about other poems.”

Bloom wrote The Anxiety of Influence about poets who get overwhelmed by their hugely famous predecessors to the point where they can't write. That book was kicking my ass, and I was loving it...
Poets these days don’t deal with that level of anxiety, they have moved away from the giant, scary literary figures. But we do have very good poets, however, it’s not an age of literary greatness, but of penetrating moments. When I write, I want to give the reader something accessible, understandable and enjoyable.

While you’re in the process of making a poem, is the poem a way to see back into the self?
For me, it's a way to see back into myself in relation to time: my youth, my growth, my relationships. It's a way to see, and I write about the past to see into my present, to see more deeply into things. When a poem works, it's because it surprises you and shows you something you didn't know about yourself or your surroundings. It should always show you something new. Poetry, if it is planned out, usually doesn't accomplish this. In writing, as in most things, if it all goes according to the plan, it's probably the wrong plan.

You’ve lived around the U.S. and also abroad. What are your observations about the status of art and creativity in Cleveland compared to other cities?
There is a real hunger in Cleveland for the arts, and Clevelanders are looking for an artistic center in our community. It’s easier for this city to focus on the negative, however, you don’t have to look hard to find out what’s cool that is going on; here you can experience major writers – poet laureates – reading, and Cleveland has a mix of academics reading all over the place: cafés, bars, slams, etc. They are breaking the mold of poet-confined-to-the-university; there’s a fruitful exchange between the university culture and café culture in our city. I’ve never seen a city where it has happened to this extent, this interchange between two worlds. There’s a vitality here in the arts world; Cleveland has so much going on.

Such as?
Any day of the week, you’ll see literary events and workshops at The Poets' and Writers' League of Greater Cleveland. Cleveland has a grass roots community of artists who are working really hard. The Poetry in the Woods reading program is an example of a monthly event where poets are invited to read at different venues, so you can find all sorts of cool stuff about writing in this city. The other thing I notice is the high quality of writers in Cleveland: Dan Chaon [author and professor at Oberlin College], Sarah Willis, Neal Chandler [of Cleveland State University] and his Imagination Series, which is a Cleveland writers’ workshop with a national presence.

So far, what’s been the highlight of your career?
A bunch of things have just happened – two months ago I was invited to read at probably the best place in the United States to read: the 92nd Street Y[MCA] in New York City. My book The Good Kiss was chosen by Billy Collins as the winner of the University of Akron Poetry Prize. And Billy Collins invited me to read at the Library of Congress which is a cool place [upon receiving the Witter Bynner Fellowship]. These gigs have transformed my career into another dimension; I used to be an obscure poet, so this has been a great ride. My career really took off when I came to Cleveland, and good things are happening to me here. And I just received The Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature, that was a big deal, to be on the same platform as [former winner and native Ohioan] Toni Morrison. It means a lot to me to get this kind of response from our city. Cleveland has been good to me, it has certainly been a career highlight just living in Cleveland.

What is your creative process? Do you go at it with a single-minded intensity, or do you struggle with it?
I go at it with a single minded intensity. It’s really hard to write and teach so I spend one month secluded, writing poems – I go to Santa Cruz, California and write. I do nothing else. I’ll write 1-2 drafts of a poem each day. My process is methodical, it has to be organized, and at the end of that time you just hope to have good things come of it. I find it very relaxing; I’ll go to cafés and work. I used to write in libraries, but now I find that I don’t need the silences, I need a buzz. It can introduce ideas that I may not have thought of, and writing in public increases the chances of happy accidents occurring. You just never know – something triggers something and serendipity intrudes.

What other creative projects are you working on? How much collaborating do you do in your writing projects?
The next big one is my new manuscript which should be finished by the end of summer. I revise alone, although I do have friends I exchange poems with, but it’s mostly a private collaboration. I’m not part of a writers’ group although I support our local writers’ community.

Next up in our Visiting Writers Series at John Carroll is [1997 United States Poet Laureate and professor at Boston University] Robert Pinsky; we’re working to spread the word about poetry and bring people into the literary community, not just onto the campus, but to expose them to the cultural institutions we live next door to and create an awareness. Cleveland has a need and desire for quality literature and art, we don’t want junk; when we had Billy Collins read at John Carroll, 750 people came out - the crowd was so packed it looked something like an athletic event. It shows how much we support poetry in this city. Right now I’m working to promote my radio show, and WKSU is interested in picking it up, so I'm hopeful. I want to take this project as far as it can go. The radio show is a pleasant sideline from teaching; I don’t know if I’ll always want to be a university professor. Even though I love teaching, if I never did it again I wouldn’t mind. I'm looking at branching out.

Interview by Tisha Nemeth
Photo by Michael J. Quinn, John Carroll University (:divend:)