Speaking with Roy Sunter, Jr., I was interested in how the Internet has contributed to his artistic process.
How has the internet affected your development as a writer/ artist / photographer?
My introduction to haiku was from a slim volume my (ex)wife had had for bathroom reading. Some time in my 30s I tried my hand at it, carefully counting out 5, 7, then 5 syllables. I discovered a few online poetry boards, & started posting what I thought were my best. I was warmly welcomed into one of these, the Interactive Poetry Pages, which encouraged me to continue. But there were a few poets there who didn’t play by the “rules” – composing in 3-5-3 or 4-6-4 or sometimes not bothering to count at all. Despite publicly declaring myself a traditionalist, I eventually tried my hand at these terser forms – and found it liberating. Now I let the syllables fall where they may, though I usually set my sights first on 353 or 464. If I hit either target, fine. If not, fine.
It seems to me that Artists’ Forums on the net are rarely serving wide audiences, yet they continue to serve a purpose. What do you think?
They’re like the gentlemen’s clubs of Victorian London – gathering places for like-minded outcasts, safe-houses for dyspeptic old farts who dislike the same social conventions. (“Kids these days….”) They provide a sense of community for those who might otherwise find none – and in the process a bit of fine poetry rises above the crowd. And these rare gems get noticed and encouraged. The online forums can be breeding grounds for great writers, though I wonder how many of us really achieve any kind of commercial success – the kind that modern society really recognizes.
Do you see yourself spending more or less time online in the future?
Certainly not less!
Well, I’ve handed a few of my carbon-based acquaintances copies of some of my more problematic works in progress, soliciting their opinions – and rarely hear back. The anonymity of the internet makes it easier, I think, to offer blunt opinions – so I suspect it will continue to be my primary outlet.
Which subjects in life most stir you?
Nature – and Man’s persistent disregard for it…
Do you think writers / artists have the ability to shake things up, socially?
I think so – once they’ve achieved some level of notoriety. I doubt I ever will. Pop music of the late 1960s was instrumental (ahem) in gradually changing public opinion of US involvement in Vietnam.
Do you have favorite pieces of music?
There are a few pieces of music that can still move me to tears – the coda to “Mars, the Bringer of War” from Holst’s “Planets Suite”, in Zubin Mehta’s performance with the LA Philharmonic… the conclusion to a tabla/mridangam duet between Zakir Hussain & TS Vinayakaram on the 1st Shakti album… Lalo Schifrin’s piano solo on “Kush”, from “Musical Safari”, when he was still Dizzy Gillespie’s keyman – how it glides to a gentle stop after reaching cinematic intensity
soothing the savage breast…
Yes, indeed.
Does poetry and other artforms serve as tools for therapy in your own life?
Absolutely. My journals primally screamed me through some rough times ca 1995. I’ve posted of few of the less agonized ones.
Journals as vehicles for screams – I like that.
What would be an ideal way to spend a day (let’s say the weather is not too cold, not too hot, you have no pressing obligations)?
Immersing myself in the woods.
It’s both humbling and comforting to know that the trees I walk among somehow evolved as energy-consuming devices the same way human ancestors did, and that we share the common purpose to live, thrive, and survive – I remember Carl Sagan alluding to “our cousins, the trees” – and it pisses me off that so many of us feel that all of this was somehow put here by some Deity specifically for our exploitation. I have a feeling we’re on the brink of getting schooled, HARD, in the errors of that hubris. …
Anything else you’d like to add?
I’ve always taken interest in the natural world, and that led me to a career involving science & mathematics. I remember how, at the age of 6 or 7, I took a peek at the moon through my dad’s binoculars – and the thrill of discovering that it wasn’t just a flat disk but a World, a place, with mountains that cast shadows, and craters whose rims did, too. It was unbelievable, but there it was. Along with the sci-fi flicks of the time, it roused my curiosity about what might really be out there – and how one might go about finding out.
==More on Mathematics==
I guess I discovered mathematics when I was around 12. We had a 2nd bathroom just off the kitchen that I sort of claimed as my own. Besides a toilet & vanity, it had a little shower stall, lined with those 1” yellow tiles. I was standing under the stream one night, long since soaped & rinsed, & just staring vacantly at the wall. I started running my finger along the grout in the tiles… over one, up one; over one more, up one more; etc. And it seemed my finger trip was more or less tracing out a diagonal line. So I tried over one, up TWO; over one, up TWO – and that looked like a straight line, albeit steeper. So now I got tricky: over one, up one; over one, up two; over one, up three – it didn’t look like a line any more, but I couldn’t quite visualize what my fingertip was tracing out.
So after toweling off & getting into my PJs, I swiped a graph pad from my dad’s desk, and this time put a mark on the pad at every point my finger had stopped – and was blown away by what I saw. What my finger appeared to be tracing out was not a straight line, but a mysterious, strangely symmetrical curve that arced upwards with regular, ever-increasing steepness. What I had discovered, of course, was analytical geometry and the parabola, both of which had been well-known since the 1700s – but I didn’t know that then. All I knew was I had discovered something deeply profound. I’d peeked under the edge of the tent and glimpsed the Universe. It was almost a religious ecstasy.
By the time I was 17, our high school had one or two teletype machines connected via modem to the GE 635 computer at Dartmouth College. (PCs and pocket calculators were still years in the future.) A few of us hard-core nerds had learned the rudiments of the BASIC computer language, and were dabbling in programming. The 1st program I wrote – beyond the usual generation of insulting messages to an unsuspecting pal – was a brute-force search for primitive Pythagorean triplets. This was another revelation – beyond the 3-4-5 that everyone knows, there were 5-12-13… 8-15-17… 20, 21, 29… and a little digging further revealed that there are an infinite number of such triplets – something I’d never suspected! I had fallen under the spell of the magick.
All of this was taking place at the same time that the US manned space program was upshifting into second. Project Gemini had placed our first 2-man spacecraft into orbit, and future flights promised things like long-duration missions, spacewalks, and rendezvous & docking with another vehicle – the latter of which not even the Russians had managed to accomplish. When a friend of mine proposed we write a computer program simulating (as realistically as we could) a manned space mission, I was on board – but without any knowledge of orbital mechanics, the project never got off the pad.
So when I went off to college, I declared my major as Physics, and for my senior project, finally wrote the program. It was little more than a column of numbers representing the distance between a target in a circular orbit above an approaching pursuit vehicle – and the numbers went wildly astray at distances of less than a mile – but otherwise it seemed to match what the NASA tech reports were publishing. My prof even asked to use my thesis as part of a syllabus for an Orbital Mechanics course he was proposing.
I’ve never lost that sense of wonder, that certain numerical patterns suggest that mathematics might be a whole lot more than simple arithmetic, and that the natural world might be infinitely more complex and detailed and beautiful than we’ve ever imagined.
Roy, thanks for sharing with us a glimpse into that huge cosmos that has excited you for most of your life.
Darque 9 by Cecil B. Lee – vocals, Roy Sunter, Jr and Judih, audio engineering, Roy Sunter, Jr, artwork by the artists of Studio Eight
Poet Speaks Out 