Tony Tost lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with his fiancée Leigh Plunkett. He co-edits Octopus with Zachary Schomburg and is a member of the Lucifer Poetics Group, a loose collective of mostly North Carolina-based writers. His first book, Invisible Bride, was selected for the 2003 Walt Whitman Award and is available now from LSU Press. Buy his book here. See some work here and here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? Different degrees of love, of course. Early classroom infatuation was with e.e. cummings, then Blake, Stevens and Yeats. W.S. Merwin was my man for a while. I was recently lending out Ashbery’s Houseboat Days to a friend and was flipping through it when I realized that I’d spent about four years writing and re-writing “Wet Casements”, which is the first poem I completely internalized to a degree that I see myself reflected in all its turns & twists. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? I’m addicted to baseball writing, and especially the writings of Bill James. Baseball was my earliest love and the more I know about it—in terms of its statistics, anecdotes and personalities—the more I grow to love it. I’m actually planning a book of baseball essays. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? The language of philosophy is hugely important to my writing, but I have sort of an imbecile’s knowledge of philosophy (I couldn’t hold a conversation about any philosopher, really). But the sentences of Nietzsche, Deleuze, Wittgenstein and Spinoza influence me to a great deal, though their systems and tenets I find pretty mysterious. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? I suppose I’m a bit of an Anglophile. Even a lot of non-Anglo favorites I accessed through some famous American. Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred and Shaking the Pumpkin anthologies are some of the greatest things I've ever read. I also really love Pound’s The Classic Anthology as Defined by Confucius, aka The Confucian Odes. I love so much of what I’ve found by OuLiPo writers. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? I think I do read a lot of poetry. Co-editing Octopus necessitates a daily interaction with contemporary poetry. I’m still a relative green hand when it comes to the art, so I’m still reading to find out what poetry actually is, how it has manifested itself. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? There are many poets who I have a superficial sense of that I want to explore. Gertrude Stein and Jack Spicer are two. I haven’t read Olson’s Maximus yet, though I’ve been obsessed with him for the last six months or so. I want to walk into that poem fully armed so I’m trying to read everything else first (almost there), then tackle the big ugly beast. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? I don’t know. I’d defer to you. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? I don’t know if I do. Maybe that’ll change if I get an academic job. Right now I’m just working in a coffee-shop and my role is to make yummy lattes and cappuccinos, though my bosses let me put on a monthly reading series where we have a couple local writers and then afterwards everyone comes out to the house in the woods my fiancee and I share and we have a party. Poetry is a great excuse for building a community, I think. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**Lime Chiseled**Leo I**O Of**Being Form**Ark 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? There’s very little of the body in Invisible Bride, my first book, which is one reason why it made sense to make it in prose, because for whatever reason I correlate the essay/prose form with mostly the mind, but the line with the body. The things I’m doing now, though, I think are recognizably the product of an actual lived-in body.