Brian Turner’s eyes turned toward the audience, he pointed to members of the crowd asking them questions: “What are you doing about ‘the howling?’” “What did you think when you read this poem?”

He turned a standard poetry reading into a conversation. He forced kids to confront the atrocities of war and life both in the reading of his work and in his dialogue with the students. His answers were thoughtful and forceful despite his insistence that he was rambling.

Turner read Wednesday night as the third speaker in this spring’s Raymond Carver Reading Series. In a sit down interview with The Daily Orange before the reading, he discussed his writing process, his biggest influences and his time overseas as an infantryman in the United States Army during the Iraq War.

The Daily Orange: Who are some of your favorite poets or most influential people on your work?

Brian Turner: I think when a lot of writers are asked that question they lean on the known, but for me I think there are a lot of folks that won’t be known in a literary sense.  The person that comes to mind, we were blood brothers, and he died of stomach cancer in 2012. His name was Brian Voight, and I knew him since I was about seven and our arguments and conversations about movies, stories, art, sculpture, painting, music, all of this combined in a sense to create an aesthetic foundation for me. Whether I agreed with him or disagreed with him — that’s the biggest influence in my life is that friendship and his intense engagement with art and aesthetics and ideas. It influences everything that I write.

The D.O.:  A lot of people label you as a “war poet” based on your two published poetry books. Do you see yourself that way?

B.T.: I can see why people would say that, but there are a lot of nuances that I see in that. I could get irked by it, because I view myself as a writer. There are new challenges ahead of me that I need to write to and through and around. The part of me that would be irked by it in any way is kind of bullsh*t, because for people to kind of place me in a category or have a sense of what my work is trying to do means that someone actually sat down to read it. The vast majority of the work that I had written for a couple decades or so, nobody cared to read, really. I voiced it off to friends and family, and they would begrudgingly read it or enjoy it. But to be able to have other writers in the craft and lovers of literature be able to sit down and take time out of a very short life to read my work is an honor. I guess I hope that the borders that are perceived for me as a poet stretch out into a much larger landscape as I continue to work.

The D.O.:  What do you think of your work being taught at Syracuse University?

B.T.: It’s bizarre, man. It is sort of like poems have a life of their own. Like yesterday, I was planting an orange tree in my backyard, so I am very distant from the idea somebody is thinking about something that I have written at some point, it’s hard to imagine that is really true. It’s an honor, but I am not really sure how to take it in.

The D.O.: What was your writing process like when you were serving overseas?

B.T.: I didn’t write when I was what we call “outside the wire.” My writing took place on the bases.
I wrote two lines of one poem that came to me when I was outside the wire. We were driving south of Baghdad and I remember seeing some women in the salt flats walking, and they were walking to the water, harvesting salt. There was a little bit of water just off the highway, the shoulder of the freeway sometimes dips down and comes back up and that kind of natural indentation of the earth collected pools of water and they could harvest salt from that as the water evaporated. So a couple of lines came from that, and I didn’t want to forget them. So I was up in the air guard hatch, we were in a convoy going down the road and I grabbed a piece of paper from my pocket, quickly wrote it up in the top of the hatch and put it back in my pocket.

Oh, and there was one time that I remember that I wrote the entire poem while on guard duty — which is probably a misuse of tax payer money — but trust me, I was looking at a desert and the most interesting thing I saw was there were several hundred sheep moving across the desert. I am not sure if you have seen sheep move, but they’re not real quick so there was time to think.

The D.O.:  How do your poems educate beyond how the media reports on the war or what we get from a history or current affairs class?

B.T.: I actually can’t answer that question, because I am not on that end of the equation to be able to speak on what they do for other people. But one thing I will say is the poems on the surface and on every cover of my books, there are war images. That is the landscape, but that is not the subject. The subject is not the Iraq War — it is set there, and that’s its setting. But like many stories or plays or novels, that’s not what it’s about. It’s really about love and loss — those are the subjects. It’s about beauty, it’s about tragedy. It’s one of those things that’s hard to tell, because there are explosions, people’s arms being blown off, it’s easy to make it political, which I think is necessary, which is one of the reason I travel around the country to be a part of that conversation. But I hope when people sit down with the poems they find deeper things within them.

Published on March 9, 2016 at 10:31 pm

Contact Jacob: jagedets@syr.edu