Author: Marvin Richard Montney
Title: The Seeker is the Sought
Publisher: Outskirts Press
ISBN: 978-1-4327-0226-7
Pages: 82, Paperback/Kindle
Genre: Poetry
Author Interview with Marvin Richard Montney
Interviewed by: Brandon Nolta, Pacific Book Review
PBR: What do you see as the major influences on your work, from a writing perspective? Intellectual perspective?
On my poetry work writing perspective, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Auden, on a girdle’s Edmund Waller, Ginsberg, Longinus, Bly. On an intellectual perspective these same, plus maybe the philosophers Plato, Socrates, Berkeley, Bradley, Kant, Krisnachandra Bhattacharyya, Shankara, Eliot Deutsch, Edgar Sheffield Brightman.
PBR: If you could define the ideal reader reaction from reading this book, what would that be?
My ideal reader reaction I suppose would be, I’ll take this Montney fellow at his challenge, read his first poem through last in sequence, and emerge an initiate who truly feels she’s or he’s been spiritually transformed. Or not. If not, it’s not from not having accepted his challenge and having tried the cycle in sequence.
PBR: Did you have a set concept in mind when you started writing these poems, or did the theme evolve over time?
The theme evolved over time. Every poem seemed a poem in some form about love and loving.
PBR: How did your thinking on the book change over the course of writing and assembling these poems?
“Self -/, dying” was always my initiating, initial poem. Groupings into The Seeker, and The Sought, came gradually; then The Found seemed required. And then a final poem that summed up the entire collection, with its title poem, “The Seeker Is The Sought,” influenced by Robert Bly’s example.
PBR: What do you hope readers take away from your book, if anything?
A feeling that attitudes matter, values count. Life and love are splendorous, mysterious things that must be taken seriously. Each has kaleidoscopic implications for the philosopher, lover, idealist liver.
PBR: Are you working on anything now that you can comment on?
Yes, I’m working on a novel that I eventually in the not too distant future hope to become unencumbered from, or with.
PBR: What haven’t you been asked that you wish had been?
That among the kaleidoscopic implications is a tie-in to spiritual mysticism. I wrote a separate online article, “Love As Transformative Empowerment,” that tries to encapsulate and be more definitive on a matter that would take books to exhaust.
