Brian Henry has published three books of poetry-- Astronaut (2000), American Incident (2002), and Graft (2003). His fourth book, Quarantine, won the 2003 Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America and will be publish by Ahsahta Press in 2006. He has been an editor of Verse since 1995, and he regularly writes poetry criticism for such publications as the TLS, Boston Review, and Jacket. He is working on a collection of critical essays on contemporary American poetry. He lives in Athens, Georgia with his family. Buy his books here and here. See some work here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? Theodore Roethke's "I Knew a Woman." I had to memorize a poem for my 12th grade English class, and I picked that one because it was highly musical and about a subject of great interest to me. I must have unconsciously realized how over-the-top the poem is and liked that, too. And it uses one of my favorite words: "wanton." I don't remember liking or loving any poems before my senior year in high school. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? Video game reviews. I'm something of a video game junkie, so I check in a few times a week on new releases and read the reviews. I harbor a secret desire to get paid for playing video games by reviewing them. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? Philosophy is often of direct importance to my critical writing, but not to my poetry. The difference, for me, lies in the purposes of the language being used. When I write criticism, I have a direct goal in mind--a book or poet or idea that I would like to examine or explore-- and it occasionally makes sense to have another writer's ideas or formulations lingering in the background, as ballast or springboard or foil. When I write poetry, I generally work without a predetermined destination in mind, and I usually work directly from language--a phrase that pops into my head, something I've written down in a notebook, something I've overheard. If I have something that needs to be worked out in writing, I usually do so in prose. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? I read a lot of Australian poetry because of its aesthetic range, its relationship to the English language, and the cultural and historical background of the poetry. I also lived in Melbourne for a year, and was lucky to encounter a lot of poets whose work wasn't (and still isn't) available in the U.S. My favorite Australian poets would include Pam Brown, Kate Fagan, Lionel Fogarty, J.S. (Jan) Harry, Kevin Hart, John Kinsella, the fictional Ern Malley, Peter Minter, Peter Rose, Gig Ryan, John Tranter, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, and the late John Forbes, who's one of my very favorite poets. Reading Forbes is always generative for me. I also read a lot of poetry from Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland (as well as England, but that's outside the scope of the question). The Scottish poet Frank Kuppner has always been a favorite--for his audaciousness--as has the Northern Irish poet Medbh McGuckian. My favorite poets in translation would be Pablo Neruda, Tomas Transtromer, Yves Bonnefoy, Edmond Jabes, Edvard Kocbek, Tomaz Salamun, Eugen Jebeleanu, and Yannis Ritsos. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? I do read a lot of poetry. Editing a poetry magazine for 10 years has meant reading a lot of poems (submissions) and books of poetry (review copies). I read almost every review copy that comes in, and Verse gets, on average, 400 review copies/year. I also read as a critic, whether I'm working on an essay and read everything written by a certain poet, or on a review and need to read one book a few times in order to respond to it. And I read poetry for pleasure. I don't distinguish too much between reading and writing; at their best, both are active processes for me. Strictly speaking, I suppose that reading poetry keeps me from writing poetry, except when the reading is generative, which happens maybe 10% of the time. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? John Ashbery's Flow Chart. I've started it numerous times, but never seem to finish it. The same goes with James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover and Olson's Maximus. Maybe I have a block against 200+ page poems. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? A bunch of words that are fun to put together and to say. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? I think the role for the poet is to write poems, be vigilant about language, and do something concrete (other than writing poems) to benefit poetry and other poets. I think the role of the citizen is to work toward peace, be good to the earth and to animals (and humans), vote, work against intolerance and hatred and bigotry--simple stuff, really, but not always easy to do on a daily basis. The two roles can, but don't need to be, connected. That's obviously up to each individual. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**meringue Chiseled**chin I**sky Of**or Form**PDF 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? It's an evolving relationship. When I wrote most of the poems in Graft, I was interested in exploring the poem as a place where the body and the landscape meet, and in exploring the body as landscape, and in looking at the relationships between erotic desire and sex and violence and at how they affect the body, the poem, and the landscape. Quarantine (a book-length poem) begins with a corpse speaking, so a dead/dying body governs much of the piece, which focuses on decay, physical and spiritual death, disease, etc. Fun stuff!