(photo: Kent Johnson, Hoa Nguyen and Dale Smith) Dale Smith edits Skanky Possum with Hoa Nguyen. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The Poker, House Organ, Chicago Review and New American Writing. Selections from his book American Rambler (2000) appeared in the Best American Poetry 2002. The Flood and the Garden: A Daybook (2002) was released by First Intensity and his election year contribution to both parties, My Vote Counts (effing), was recently published to the scorn of Republicans and Democrats everywhere. He lives in Austin, Texas, and was born on the Day of the Dead, 1967. Buy his books here. See some work here, here and here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? I don't know if this counts as a poem. Every year as a child at Christmas and Easter I'd read the accounts of the Nativity and Passion in each of the Gospels. Those scriptures left a profound impression on me, in that I absorbed quite unconsciously a dramatic relation that continues to surface. As far as an actual poem, in 8th grade English we were instructed to make a poetry book. It was to be a study of forms, a kind of poetics notebook. I was a poor student, not given to profound study in any sense, and botched a lot of the formal requirements. I hated metrics and rhyme schemes. But I got an 'A' because I wrote a poem straight from the heart, as they say. Frost's "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening," and Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" left big impressions. I was more frequently a reader of novels though, Dostoevsky and Lawrence and Hemingway were without doubt my first loves. But that was later. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? I watch a lot of trash TV-"Extra," "Entertainment Tonight," and those horrible dating shows. I like watching reality TV too. I also read "Time Magazine" because my mother buys our family a subscription each year for Christmas and I look at pictures of famous people in "Vanity Fair" and "GQ." Here in Austin I listen to "redneck radio," local radio shows fuelled by fundamentalist Christianity and Constitutional Republic-inspired political commentary. I used to listen to Howard Stern and G. Gordon Liddy before they were taken off the air in Austin. I even interviewed Liddy once for the local paper. Why do I read / watch / listen to this stuff? Because it's there as part of the environment, I suppose. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? It's something to pay attention to, particularly as an enabler to get to the outside. External-not the inward "me" narrative navel gazing business. History for many years now, with mythology, anthropology and religion, has also been useful. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? Pier Paolo Pasolini. Mamoud Darwish. Jose Lezama Lima, Apollinaire. Basho. Vallejo. Saenz. Why? Because they're astonishing. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? Of course! I edit a magazine. I read a lot of it. I try to limit what I do read. My personal study is concerned with older and more obscure writing. It's all poetry at a certain point anyway. I soak up what works. Pass over the rest of it. I have very little tolerance for things that waste my time. But I'm generous with my attention once it's there. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? Gaps in my reading are too embarrassing to mention. You use what you use and don't worry a lot about what you've missed. All of Shakespeare, for instance. I've maybe hit half of that. Blake ditto. Coleridge-there's more there than a lifetime can really handle. Here's something juicy though. I only read Spicer in the last few months. No reason why to any of this. There's always too much of everything. When will there be time to finish reading Proust? Or The Tale of Genji, for that matter! 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? A poem is a tool made of language used to reveal something hidden inside you. If it's boring, don't read it. If it keeps you wondering, go with it. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? The role of the poet is to be a pain in the citizen's ass. I believe in that role and in that difference. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**shit Chiseled**fuck I**cunt Of**dick Form**come 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? Just get the words down. I don't want to explain a whole lot here. Morphology interests me. That's the way I work, by a kind of morphological consideration of divers bodies, to keep it in the abstract. It interests me tremendously, for instance, how numen is captured by nomen, energy trapped by the name in an ongoing ritual of magical incantation from the stone-age to NASA. Morphology can be applied to diverse occasions of life and many environments, in language and out. The poem is a means of releasing latent forms. Language is the revelator, I suppose. But I don't think about this too frequently. If it's a nice day, like right now, I just write about the leaves or trash blowing around or whatever. If it's a fucked up day I find words to voice my outrage. The more impersonal I can be, the better I am able to listen. I mean, I take this all seriously, very personally. But it's the impersonal weight of the poem's form, it's delicate and complex demands, that permit "me" into its nexus of nature and history.