“I’ve resolved to call a set of words a piece”: talking to Parker Tettleton

I first became aware of Parker’s work late last year, when his poems appeared in >kill author ten, and mine in the next issue. Since then, we’ve been oddly intertwined online—popping up together in Sixth Finch recently, and finding his prose-poem ‘What I Want & How I Live’ in the most recent Mudluscious Quarterly I reviewed over at Sabotage. So it seemed natural to ask the always friendly Parker to drop in on FLOTSAM and interrogate him a little.

CC: How does prose become a poem become prose or backwards?

PT: I think by avoiding those terms altogether. Every line, sentence, phrasing is a blend & when they’re put together it seems more like marketing & less like the recognition of an individual’s vision to suggest they fit into a concrete definable form. One of my favorite collections, Kim Chinquee’s Pretty, is a part of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series yet she is often categorized as a writer of flash fiction. I’m only sure that I love the words as they are arranged. Writing poetry or prose went away several years ago. I’ve resolved to call a set of words a piece.

CC: How much resolve is in your process? I mean, are they willed?

PT: Writing is something I feel & have felt very strongly about for going on ten or so years. I don’t view it as a commitment so much as something necessary, something I do when I’m not expecting to. If anything, I set very broad deadlines because I have always abhorred them, & I do not have any fixed writing schedule whatsoever. I’ve written/worked on eighteen pieces so far in July — some days I’ve written as many as ten pieces, & sometimes I go about half a week without working on anything. I tend to generate sentences, sometimes paragraphs in my head first, usually when I’m reading something new that produces a strong influence, or when I’m at the gym or in bed. Any sort of pressure I could put on myself I’m fairly certain would turn me off of the task at hand, if past experiences are useful indications. I guess organic would be one way of describing my process, but I prefer to use “raw” & “aggressive,” which derive from past guidelines on Mud Luscious’ website.

CC: So how is a strong influence produced?

PT: It’s produced by people exceptional at their craft whether they know it or not. New influences (for me) are more often than not immediately engaging, seem familiar & simultaneously impossible to have experienced before. Recently that’s Gary Lutz via his collection Stories in the Worst Way. A true doctor of the sentence.

CC: I tend to get unexpected lines of influence, not from poetry or fiction, that I can only trace after some time. Similarly I get obsessed with certain sets of words, and they become totems of a sort. Do you have any totems?

PT: I feel like everything is an influence one way or another. I watch films on a near daily basis, & revisit the words of my favorite authors as often as I can. I guess if I have any totems the main one would be the concise expression of emotions too difficult to necessarily ever fully grasp. I want something poignant, true as far as I can reach, with more rooms to explore than I’ll ever realize.

CC: I like the idea of ‘truth as far as I can reach’. Is there any piece you feel has reached further than others?

PT: I look at all of my pieces as works in progress. I don’t usually kill my darlings. I’m very proud of work appearing in many journals; submitting is a pleasure but I feel like I’ve learned over the last several years to share the most meticulously examined version available with eyes other than my own.

Parker blogs at August Light, and you can find more of his recent work at elimae.