Janet Holmes is author of Humanophone (U of Notre Dame, 2001), The Green Tuxedo (U of Notre Dame, 1998), and The Physicist at the Mall (Anhinga, 1994). Her work has twice been included in the annual Best American Poetry anthologies, and she has received numerous prizes and honors for her writing, including grants from the Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and The Loft. She is director of Ahsahta Press, an all-poetry publishing house, and director of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at Boise State University, where she has taught since 1999. Buy her books here. See some of her work here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? I really don't know--I started pretty early. Had a lot of Robert Louis Stevenson by heart as a child ("I have a little shadow") and a bunch of Kipling because my father loved him. He gave me a book of poems called "Through Magic Casements" that had a lot of chestnuts in it, so I read "Ozymandias" and "The Raven" and "Abou Ben Adem" and "The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay" and "I'm Nobody! Who Are You?" and "I'm a mean dog, a lean dog, a wild dog and lone" without much discrimination as to good or bad. I think early on I liked rhythms and rhymes and absurdity, Ogden Nash's stuff but also Poe's "The Bells," which seemed funny to me because of all the repetition. I loved puns, the kind kids heard on Bullwinkle and in Mad Magazine. (Come to think of it, Bullwinkle used to recite Wordsworth's "Daffodils," and inflected it such that I wondered about how one could wander as a cloud. Was he flying?) We didn't get much poetry in school until high school. But I guess that's when the love set in: I think it had to have been Hopkins' poem "The Windhover." I didn't even know what it meant, but I liked the sounds of it. It was years before I actually looked up what a "sillion" was. Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, the prose of James Joyce—those were the ones that really intoxicated me. I think Thomas's "Collected Poems" was the first single-author book of poetry I ever bought. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language." A student told me about it in the 80s, and I picked it up--it's an analysis of architecture from a very humanistic perspective. I liked both the spirit in which the book was put together, and the mind that was able to look at architecture as a series of patterns, from "covered walkways" to "places for old people" to "stairs wide enough to sit on." It's very modular, so you can dip into it and still get something useful. The patterns are researched in sociological and psychological literature and illustrated with terrific real-world photographs. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? I've never studied philosophy formally, and my informal readings have been pretty basic. I tend to like better reading what artists, musicians, photographers, and writers have to say about their works and their genres. Works that have meant a lot to me include the writings of John Berger, Harry Partch, Henri Matisse, Gertrude Stein, and Robert Coover. I also like the work of people like Freeman Dyson, Oliver Sacks, Steven Pinker, Douglas Hofsteder, and Barbara Ehrenreich. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? I found all my earliest non-Anglo-American poets in college, where I took every course I could with Wallace Fowlie: Dante, the Provencal poets, Apollinaire, Char, Eluard. I have bunches of Dante translations; it's almost a fetish. When I lived in Santa Fe, Charles Bell, Suzanne and Peter Ruta, and a few others of us would read a canto a week on Sunday mornings, in Italian translating into English, and Charles would discourse about Ptolemaic astronomy and the Church fathers. (I didn't know any Italian, but had had Latin & Spanish, so I faked it.) I'm the only person I know who finds the Purgatorio hilarious, mostly from Charles's imitations of the angel whacking the letters of "PECATOR" off of Dante's head, surely the most slapstick scenes in literature. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? Oy veh. Lots in manuscript form, about 700 books a year. I read quite a bit, but not as much as I'd like, of published work as well. (More when I was reviewing regularly.) I tend to stock up at AWP and order from SPD or Powell's the rest of the year, because we haven't got very good poetry bookstores in Boise. I get recommendations from friends or from something I read in a review or in a blog. Or I'll find a press like Soft Skull or Avec & want to bone up on what they're doing so I'll read a whole bunch of their books. And I have much non-contemporary writing to catch up on. Basically, I think I drew from a very narrow aesthetic when I was in school (and for some years afterwards). Friends like the poet David Mutschlecner pointed me towards poets I hadn't read (Duncan, for example, and Olson) & then I consciously sought out poets whose writing had been disparaged by my teachers, but whose work I knew was influential to others. I could never figure out why it was all right to read Frank O'Hara in my program, but forbidden (or at least derided) to read Ashbery. The Language poets were mentioned pretty much in the same breath with the devil. I have to say I've thought a lot about the reading environment I'd like the Boise State program to have, and it would be far more inclusive than what I experienced. I have to consciously work to free my mind back to my own voice, particularly because of all the manuscripts I read for Ahsahta. I don't think I can gauge how my reading affects my writing, except to say that it has given me new ways to play when I write. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? Wittgenstein. I may read him someday, but not this summer. And my colleagues keep embarrassing me by going on and on about all the 17th century verse they love but I haven't read since I was in college in the 70s. I nod my head sagely. I really love American poetry. Unapologetically! 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? A poem is a bunch of words that sound good together that sometimes means something. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? The role for the poet is different from the role of the citizen, I think, but not from the role of the artist. And that's going to be individual for each creative person. It has to do with transgression, beauty, and as much honesty as one is capable of. Unlike the role of the citizen (which, I think, requires thought and action to the good of the community foremost), the role of the artist has a much more individual focus. An artist benefits the community perhaps less directly, but (I would argue) more lastingly. I don't think I want to try to be more specific. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest) : Lemon**Pledge Chiseled**features I**Claudius Of**the people Form**function 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? As a woman poet, I can't write without being aware of my difference from most of those who made literary history, and aware that "difference" to the vast majority of them means "inferiority." I'm never more female, or more feminist, than when I begin to write, though I rarely have "femaleness" as my subject. At the same time, I have no use for the stance of poets who go out of their way to distance themselves from their women colleagues, as both Elizabeth Bishop and Louise Glück did, apparently as a way to insist that their work is "as strong as men's" and should not be included in all-female collections. Better to be rejected by male poets, as Dickinson was, than to be so hampered by ego. And it's quite clear even in blogland that female poets are not as read or valued as men, whether it's because the cliques that formed in grad school were mostly male or that women just aren't writing anything that young male poets want to read. I don't think there's a conscious discrimination, but possibly a less easily identifiable resistance. I'm thinking now that my current project, "f2f," deals quite a bit with the body, and specifically with the sense of sight. "F2f," you probably know, is internet-speak for "face to face," and the work deals with everything from the bodiless Echo of mythology to anorexia, from the myth of Psyche and Eros to the invisibility of the reader to the writer, from the societal pressures of conforming beauty to the Orphic male gaze that sends Eurydice back to hell. Since my last book dealt more with the sense of hearing, the composition of music, and the artist's creative dilemmas, it was probably natural for me to move on to a different sense.