David Baker is the author of eight books of poems: Midwest Eclogue is forthcoming in fall 2005 from W. W. Norton, Starlight: Selected Poems is forthcoming in early 2005 from Arc Publications (UK), Changeable Thunder (2001), The Truth about Small Towns (1998), After the Reunion (1994), Sweet Home, Saturday Night (1991), Haunts (1985), and Laws of the Land (1981). His two books of criticism are Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry (2000) and Meter in English: A Critical Engagement (1996). Among his awards are fellowships and prizes from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, Poetry Society of America, Society of Midland Authors, and the Pushcart Foundation. His poems and essays appear in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, DoubleTake, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and many others. Baker was raised in Missouri and currently resides in Granville, Ohio, where he serves as poetry editor of The Kenyon Review. He teaches at Denison University and in the M.F.A. program for writers at Warren Wilson College. He is married to the poet Ann Townsend, and they have one daughter, Katherine Baker. Buy his books here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? The first poem I can remember loving was “The Raggedy Man” by James Whitcomb Riley. Probably I loved Dr. Seuss before that, and any number of nursery rhymes. But I vividly remember this long, silly narrative by Riley. The only poetry book we had in the house was a brown-jacketed collection of his, with his name and the title embossed in leafy faux-gold. I loved the long story, the playful rhymes, and especially the dialect-language of Riley’s. After that, my favorite in high school was “The Canterbury Tales”—in part for some of the same reasons. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? Each month I read Downbeat magazine. I play guitar, mainly jazz, and like to read the articles and interviews with contemporary jazz players. I also read Wine Spectator, and our weekly newspaper, The Granville Sentinel, which is highly nonliterary but full of police reports, yard sales, local sports, lost pets. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? It’s hard to unpack and weigh how important something is to my writing. I read a lot of philosophy, so I’m sure it percolates into my poetry and criticism. Mostly these days I read less analytic philosophy than aesthetics (Longinus to Adorno and beyond), poetics (is that philosophy?), and theology. Lately I’ve been reading Lyotard’s Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (for an essay on the poetic sublime I am writing) as well as Kant and Burke on the sublime; Levinas’ God, Death, and Time; Derrida’s On the Name. I read philosophy because, well, the language is splendid, sometimes. I think poetry and philosophy are—in addition to mathematics and music—our finest forms of language, representing human behavior and experience. They are very different, if philosophy intends to synthesize and to argue, and if poetry intends to particularize and to dramatize; and yet they seem more intense, more richly packed, than other forms of language. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? My favorite non-Anglo-American writers are, at this sitting, Longinus, Su Tung-Po, Sappho, Paul Celan, Keats, Shakespeare, Emily Bronte, Carl Phillips, Horace, Homer, Donne, Mahmud Darwish. This list will change in five minutes. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? I read a lot of poems. That is an understatement. I am the poetry editor of The Kenyon Review, and simply in that capacity I read thousands upon thousands of poems, good and bad and worse. But poetry sustains me like no other form of language; I read old poems, new ones, individual ones, books. I read poetry all the time. On my bedside table right now, Area Code 212 by Frederick Seidel, Keats’ collected poems (for the sonnets, just now), and Stanley Plumly’s Giraffe (I am currently writing about his work). On my desk are a stack of 15 first-book manuscripts of poetry, for a contest I am judging. On my other desk: 15-20 books of contemporary poetry, as well as Whitman’s and Dickinson’s poems for a seminar (“Whitman and Dickinson”) I am currently teaching. I am a poet. I read poetry all the time. If I were a pianist, I would listen to music all the time, right? I read poetry for the music, for the intensity, for the reminder, for the company, for the solace. It keeps me alive. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? Why would my colleagues assume anything I’ve read, or not? Why would they care? I have not read all of Shakespeare’s plays. It’s probably shameful. There are two or three of his comedies I haven’t read (“Love’s Labor’s Lost” among them), perhaps three of the history plays, and “Pericles” and “Cymbeline,” too. I have not read them because life is short. I regret that life is short but, alas, it is. Life is short and Shakespeare is long. I intend to read them all, no doubt, though I keep rereading Lear. Rereading is more important than reading, just as rewriting is more important than writing. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? I have a 12 year old. She loves poems, especially those that feature her. To your 7 year old: A poem is a kind of language that sings, and tells a fun story, and gives you pleasure and wisdom. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? I simply do not believe in a Role for the Poet, any more than I believe in a Role for Anyone. That seems creepy. I do not believe in a Role of the Citizen, for that matter. To each poet and to each citizen, I say, his or her own. Of course art has a significant, even life-sustaining public function. But the poet’s job is to write poems, one at a time, one line at a time. What we do the rest of the time is up to us, activist or not, parent-lover-voter-consumer-neighbor-whatever or not. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**car Chiseled**stone I**eye Of**Cummings (I don’t understand that one!) Form**Morf 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? This is an incredibly big question. So, an incredible incomplete answer: The text is a body. The text—the language, the texture, the visual and/or aural artifact—is a physical embodiment of an interior impulse to sing, to narrate, to make sense, to defy sense, to be liked, to be erased, to be remembered. The text comes out of the body into the world, like a birth.