Dannye Powell: journalist, poet, philosopher

WRITER'S BLOCK

Dannye Powell is a news columnist for the Charlotte Observer by day and a poet the rest of the time. Her love for writing started early and has matured and grown over her lifetime to become an award-winning talent.

Powell shared her thoughts on writing with Preview.

Q: How do the writing processes between journalism and poetry compare?

A: With a newspaper column, you better darned well have an idea before you begin. And an idea, or a very fixed idea, can be the death of a poem. With a column, it also seems wise to stay conscious while you're gathering facts and, for the most part, while you're writing.

With poetry, it's more fun and more interesting if the unconscious mind is free to roam. But there are indeed similarities between the two. There's the joy of putting words on paper, which has always been a thrill for me, no matter what I'm writing.

Q: Your latest poetry collection, "A Necklace of Bees," was published in 2008 and won the Brockman-Campbell Award. What was the inspiration for this collection?

A: The theme is definitely loss. My mother died just as my previous book came out. I also lost the last of my aunts and uncles while working on these poems. And I have a son who has struggled with alcoholism for many years, and several of the poems deal with the fear of loss.

I think the fear of loss is actually scarier than actual loss. Grief seems more of a healthy thing that runs through you and eventually, for the most part, runs out. But fear of loss gnaws at you all the time, and it doesn't change shape or intensity.

Q: Where did the title come from?

A: It comes from a line in the poem, "Everyone Is Afraid of Someone." The narrator of this poem worries that it will fall to her to tell her granddaughter that her father is dead. She wonders if it wouldn't be easier to make the child a necklace of bees, implying that the pain would be less with the necklace of bees than to hear that her father has died.

Q: If you had to compare yourself to one poet, who would it be?

A: There are lots of fabulous poets I'd like to compare myself to, but the truth is I'm only like me.

There are poets I fall in love with, and I read them obsessively. And I'd like to think some of their genius rubs off on me, but it probably doesn't.

Fred Chappell once said that it's fine to imitate other poets but that the sooner a writer stops going against his or her grain, the sooner that poets finds his/her true voice. I do think it's important to find your particular strengths as a poet or fiction writer, and sometimes, the only way to find those strengths is to recognize them in other writers.

Powell's three poetry collections can be purchased from the University of Arkansas Press at www.uark.edu/~uaprinfo/.