Last semester, I took a Poetry Workshop led by English Professor Betsy Bolton. We met on Mondays for three hours, and I always dreaded the feedback sessions, unless I was reading my classmates’ work.
Of the twelve-or-so students, Foster Hudson’s ’26 work was always enigmatic to me. In fact, Foster himself was mysterious. During our breaks, he’d stand outside under a lamppost, smoking a cigarette.
Needless to say, everyone in our class thought he was an experienced artist. While my work nearly filled the whole page, his poems were always two to three lines of voyeuristic imagery. Take, for example, his poem “Love Story:”
The girl dragged me down a staircase with velvet steps. She never kissed me, not even at the end. I loved it.
After a semester of promoting Artist of the Week, Foster finally agreed to an interview. I immediately jumped on the opportunity to ask how he creates an evocative atmosphere with so few lines.
“In general, my approach is to start with one or two lines that come from somewhere. It helps to write every day, because then there’s a pressure of [a finished product] being put together at the end of the day. Usually, at some point I’ll come up with something, but from there it’s mostly associative,” he replied.
Foster revealed that he’s been writing poetry since fourth grade. While he took a hiatus to write fiction in middle and high school, he ultimately returned to poetry. His process, however, drastically changed as he started to develop a personal style.
“I started writing poorly intentionally, in the sense that I started doing everything that I thought was wrong. I would intentionally not make any sense and break lines in the middle of words. I figured if I go into it thinking that it’s bad, then I can’t look at it later and call it bad. Doing that became the start of something interesting, because even though those poems weren’t amazing they did sound more like me. That was kind of the beginning of finding a way forward,” Foster replied.
He continued, “At the poetry workshop, I started solidifying the process of writing regularly. In the first week Betsy told us to start writing in prose, which turned out to be invaluable. It’s much easier to start with prose because I’m just moving forward instead of trying to put everything in a box, and I can continue to figure out what I’m writing about. I find that less intimidating.”
Given that the workshop facilitated feedback, I was curious how he felt about the comments he received. Depending on attendance, these sessions would last five to ten minutes, and our classmates would be encouraged to hand the poet their edited drafts.
Foster responded, “There are some readings that I just didn’t find particularly helpful. In fact, I never really used most of the feedback I got, but it was still useful to receive. That’s also just a habit of not revising. Some of my poems go through close to 100 drafts, but once I’ve gotten to the end, I kind of just don’t ever want to touch it again. Sometimes this means that if it doesn’t end up good, I just throw it in the garbage.”
Given his poetry’s short and abstract nature, I wondered if Foster dislikes interpretation. Interestingly, I recently read a piece by Susan Sontag arguing that interpretation often soils aesthetic appreciation of art. She claims that sometimes close readings negatively place meaning onto a work that isn’t present.
Almost immediately, he disagreed, “I think the process of giving a reader a pile of images and asking them to draw red lines is the point [of poetry] to me. The point isn’t to be obscure and difficult and have that be the end. It’s more a means of having the reader put things together on their own.”
My immediate reaction was to ask: why make your poems so short if you desire interpretation? Would your readers not have more to interpret with added lines?
He provided a different perspective, “If I laid out everything, then it wouldn’t be anything. There’s almost no point in reading it because then it’s all there for you.”
"Untitled" What is poetry but empty space? A flash of circumstance, filtered through a dirty window.
Foster recognized that some readers might give up on his poetry because of its style. Nonetheless, he finds the reaction to his work compelling. I wondered how different audiences might react.
“I don’t think the sentiment that there’s a secret language to poetry has ever been true. I think people are scared of poetry, especially difficult poetry, because they have this assumption that there’s a five-page close reading paper at the other end of it. That attitude is definitely bred by academia, and there’s value in looking at poetry that way, but it’s certainly not necessary. In a way, you get a more fruitful reading from someone who has never read a poem in their life,” he responded.
Foster continued, “Everything starts with basic questions about a poem. I think everybody, to a certain extent, comes up with a somewhat different answer to the poem’s question, and then you’ll have a bevy of different interpretations.”
"Love, Big Dearie" After all that, the skirt wouldn’t be worn. Only cavernous pink and dreadful auburn. The conclusion is terrible. The phone rings with the translation. It is Love, Big Dearie. It is not yours.
Despite spending an entire semester with Foster’s poetry, it remains as fascinatingly enigmatic to me as it did in our first feedback session. Despite my inability to fully understand his poems, I find his writing endlessly compelling. Why is the pink cavernous? What makes Dearie Big? Nevertheless, Foster reminds us to ask ourselves why we are asking if the pink is cavernous. Perhaps the poem is not within the lines on the page but within your interpretation.
