Patrick Herron recently completed work on his fifth book, How To Make Poems Like Me. Ron Silliman recently wrote of Patrick's, er, Lester's Be Somebody (forthcoming in 2005 from New Vaudeville Press), "Like somebody who understands that what makes _Moby Dick_ great is all that stuff about whales, _Be Somebody_ is difficult in the way the very best books are," adding, "it is one of the great rumors of contemporary poetry." Patrick is the author of the newly-released The American Godwar Complex and the chapbooks, Man Eating Rice (Blaze VOX), and Three Poems (Gateway Songbooks). Over eighty of his poems and essays have recently appeared in journals such as Exquisite Corpse, Jacket, Fulcrum, in the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, and in the anthology 100 Days (Barque Press). Patrick is also helping his pal Lester launch a new web journal in the Fall of 2004 called Close Quarterly , a journal that contains the work of one unnamed poet per issue. Patrick is the creator of proximate , a site that has been featured in the electronic collection of the New Museum of Contemporary Art and in university hypertext and design curricula around the globe. Current projects include thisisnot.info (a sequel to proximate.org), two works of translation/traduction, a collection of essays and criticism, and a book of poetry about the number 137. Patrick is the organizer of an annual poetry festival in his town of Carrboro, North Carolina, where he also serves as Poet Laureate. He studies text mining and knowledge discovery in the School of Library and Information and Library Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? Where the Wild Things Are might qualify. But I only recall that book now as fatherhood is upon me, as I read to my child. I recall hearing some cummings in a high school classroom and I am fairly certain I felt drawn to it. I also remember doing explications of Kubla Khan and The Waste Land in high school. Kubla Khan and The Waste Land were for me at the time massive intellectual playground, mental jungle gyms that also gave me chills in my spine, not unlike, say, a stirring song. The two poems had music and mystery and surprise. I also began writing poetry during high school, namely because it provided an outlet for my increasing morbid preoccupation with suicide. I was unwittingly suffering from the first signs of bipolar disorder and poetry was the perfect place for me to rest my mind. I was bored and under-challenged scholastically as a high school student. Poetry approached me only as I could approach it and thereby provided some challenge. At the time poetry was for me something akin to playing chess against yourself but without knowing your opponent is yourself. Besides, Kubla Khan was rather adamantly sexual, and The Waste Land was at once melancholy, mad, and musical. The poems were entertaining. By them I was absolutely stirred. My mind immediately wanders to the idea of the lyric. Music was a childhood obsession of mine. Two aspects of the poetic role of music in my childhood stand out. When I was 11 I purchased R.E.M.’s ep “Chronic Town” and became hooked on Michael Stipe’s odd gothic renderings. Songs like “Swan Swan H” still get to me: Night wings, her hair chains, Here's your wooden greenback, sing Wooden beams and dovetail sweep I struck that picture ninety times, I walked that path a hundred ninety, Long, low time ago, people talk to me A pistol hot cup of rhyme The whiskey is water the water is wine Marching feet, Johnny Reb, What's the price of heroes? Six in one, half dozen the other, Tell that to the captain's mother, Hey captain don't you want to buy, Some bone chains and toothpicks? Writing like this convinced me, a Philly-based teenager, I should live in the South. Here I am, fifteen years since leaving Philly, still living in the South. Obviously I stay here for very different reasons than some pop lyrics, but those beautiful mysterious words drew me here every bit as much as going to school. Language is a landscape. What made those lyrics interesting to me...this leads me to that second aspect of my childhood: getting the lyrics of songs wrong deliberately. Early R.E.M. was produced with the vocals way down in the mix. So I’d had to strain to actually hear what Stipe was singing. Add to that a brand of lyricism in R.E.M.’s much more lush than, well, everything else at that time in popular music. This isn’t your everyday “you might be my lucky star” shit. So here’s a 15 year old trying to negotiate lyrics like the ones above, complex even if perfectly audible. What did I do? I had to sing along. Well, I made up words to fill in the blanks. Sometimes I’d try in earnest to figure out the words. Sometimes I knew I didn’t know and just filled in the blanks for fun or for effect. Sometimes I didn’t know but I thought I did. Then later I’d find out how wrong I was. It took years for me to identify all of the words. Making up lyrics wasn’t an expedient. It was a sort of game for me and my brother. We’d just make up lyrics all of the time. It didn’t matter if it were nonsense, how I was filling in the blanks. I still do it all of the time, aloud. It can drive people crazy. For example, this evening I was singing to Sofia, so she wouldn’t cry when she wet herself: Happiness is a wet bun Happiness is a wet bun, Sofia-girl When I hold you in my arms I can feel you pee in your diaper I know it’s time to change your drawers Because Happiness is a wet bun Sofia yes it is Bu-uu-un (etc.) Errors are essential to poetry. Specifically, getting words & phrases wrong. Essential to me, at least. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? People who know me would not be surprised by anything I might read. One poet-friend said recently that I read “everything.” By that he meant that I read across many disciplines, which is quite true. I stretch myself thin perhaps. I write poetry, yes, but I have also written fiction and screenplays. I have also written a goodly amount of literary criticism and some of it bleeds into political science. I also have been working on an extended piece of research into The Carlyle Group for cooperativeresearch.org. Reading and writing for me are intimately tied together: if I read it, I’m likely to attempt to write it as well. Writing (and transitively, reading) is something I refuse to place pressure upon in order to put food on the table. Poetry does not pay. I maintain a day job. Maybe one day I will teach, because I think I could properly mess up kids, but until that day, I’ll stick to the day job. What might explain a range of reading is my meanderings through several careers in a short period of time. I’ve worked as a genetics researcher, a technical writer, a web designer. I’ve worked as an editor for TV Guide and have edited articles for the Journal of Clinical Investigations. I’ve worked as a programmer for a number of years and continue to work in that capacity. Perhaps also explaining the manic range of reading is my academic meandering. I’ve amassed approximately 200 undergraduate credit hours. It’s ridiculously stupid to spend so much time as an undergraduate, I know. Only so many undergraduate degrees are valuable. What a loss of forward propulsion, but, then, I was never much for specialization. My first foray into undergraduate education: a degree in philosophy plus a minor in linguistics, all with a focus on mathematical logic and cognitive science. A couple of years later I returned to school and ended up three credits shy of a BS in biochemistry followed by a last minute decision not to go to medical school. I was intensely interested neuroimmunology and its relationship to the formation of cancer. This was at a time when a systems approach to medicine was out of vogue, when the government seemed only interested in a bottom-up, genetics-based, in vitro approach to cancer. I was more interested in what triggers genetic expression than what genes parameterize. I figured I would go somewhere prestigious, get a PhD, and begin a paradigm shift. But it wasn’t for me—seven years of nothing but school would interfere with my addiction to writing. Next trip to undergraduate heaven was for computer science, just after a few years of immersion in the telecom industry boom and subsequent bust. I am now in my second year of grad school pursuing a masters in information science at UNC Chapel Hill in the School of Library and Information Science. I will also receive a graduate minor in computer science upon graduation. My study is centered upon medical decision support systems and text mining. Government regulation, economics, and management theory are as relevant to the field as is artificial intelligence, text processing, mathematical logic, and statistics. So I read game theory, information retrieval, data mining, biostatistics, machine learning, calculus, natural language processing, sexy stuff like that. I love studio art, video art, performance art, photography. Right next to me are monographs on Vito Acconci, Adolf Wölfli, Diane Arbus, Jack Beal, Takashi Murakami. I love dictionaries of all sorts. Next to me are a couple of dictionaries of poetry, a dictionary of philosophy, a dictionary of allusion, a dictionary of phrase & fable, a dictionary of espionage, a dictionary of “modern war”, and even an unabridged OED. I don’t read “everything,” of course. I neglect most fiction coming out today. I haven’t read much science fiction though there are not enough kind words for that genre—Dune and Ender’s Game are both fine, fine novels. Dick writes some very interesting stuff. But that’s all somewhat bubblegum to me, and I’m usually not one for an easy read. I have recently limited my reading in the realm of fiction to Nabokov, Vonnegut, and Haruki Murakami. I’ve tried to avoid the work of Continentalist “philosophers” as much as possible though they do have fascinating and informative things to say from time to time. I think people assume I’ve extensively read Derrida but I haven’t. From time to time I return to the writing of philosopher Paul Feyerabend. I don’t know if this is surprising but it is certainly unusual for a poet to care about philosophy of science, namely because I can’t find poets with whom I might discuss his work. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? Philosophy is of central importance to my writing. Why? “True wisdom is in knowing you know nothing” (Socrates). As an undergraduate I studied with philosopher Simon Blackburn at a time when the undergraduate program I was in was quite possibly the envy of the country. I abandoned physics for philosophy as an undergraduate freshman because I felt I needed a greater challenge—I wanted to analyze and solve problems instead of memorizing solutions. I had a peculiar combination of analytical and mathematical gifts along with a desire to learn to write as clearly as possible. None better to learn it from than Blackburn—he writes philosophy with a clarity unparalleled today; reminiscent of Gilbert Ryle. Ultimately I turned down pursuing a doctorate in Philosophy—after a trip to visit a school during a seminar I realized it wasn’t for me. Studying philosophy was perfect for me, however, as it provided me with a fantastic tool kit for analytical thinking and writing. My early experience with poetry resembled that of a puzzle solver—I was putting my analytical proclivities to work. I suspect I then read poetry at least in part in such a problem-solver fashion because in some sense I learned poetry from reading or rather misreading The Waste Land—like many before me I too fell victim to what I consider Eliot’s great annotated manipulation. (The poem wasn’t originally a con when published in the early 1920’s, but Eliot’s annotated edition in the 40’s was definitely an exercise in myth-building. He learned from perhaps the best confidence poet & poet-myth-builder: Pound.) Three elements of my undergraduate education in philosophy figure greatly in, perhaps dominate even, my writing. An almost relentless intellectual skepticism; a fascination with paradox and with questions of self, personal identity and other minds; and a realization that knowing seemed only to consist in not really being so certain after all. I believe that not knowing whether we know anything at all, as opposed to knowing we don’t know, is the quintessence of literature. So to Socrates I reply, wisdom is in the realization that we do not know whether we know anything at all. Plato, Hume, Kant, Hobbes, Descartes, Feyerabend, Quine, Ryle, Wittgenstein, Searle, and Goodman all figure into my writing somewhere or another. Perhaps everywhere. So too does Zen Buddhist philosophy, but then it’s Zen, so it doesn’t really amount to a philosophy or to Zen for that matter—if we are to get right down to it. (“Zen” has all but lost its meaning in American culture, which makes it difficult for me to discuss my experience with Buddhism. Knowledge to me seems a gesture, a sort of rhetorical paint job for the purpose of decorating the well-worn belief. Poetry is likewise a gesture, but a gesture with the potential for great beauty through a semblance of pain and joy. For Plato, poetry and philosophy meet through love and music. In my poetry you might find games involving logical analysis, or reference and semantic multiplicities, doubts about selfhood and identity, all charged with perhaps what may seem an almost inappropriate urgency. These are emotional subjects for me. When I was an undergraduate philosophical questions had only marginal exigency for me, but after years of practice and rejection of Zen Buddhism and suffering through the deaths of three of my four best friends, those questions suddenly added emphasis to a great crisis in my life, one that only could be tackled through emotionally-charged poetic paradox and music, sweet heartbreak contorted music. Music, like paint, like fragrance, like skin against skin, has neither question nor answer. The funny thing (ha ha funny) is that the philosophy in poetry seems to be missed even by my most astute readers. For some reason we assume in our culture that the philosophical is anything but urgent, and so any urgency must not be intellectual in any fashion. Emotion is assumed to be distinct from the intellect. What a terrible cultural assumption. The very presence of urgency seems to obscure philosophy from readers because it does not fit their expectations. Maybe it would freak people out to know I’ve Wilhelm Reich’s The Cancer Biopathy on my desk. Some of it seems plain nuts (“the appearance of metastases at the fifth cervical vertebra I now knew was attributable to a decades-old spasm of the deep throat musculature”, but then, one of the phenomena I witnessed while doing cancer research makes this not so strange after all) while other parts seem nothing short of visionary (“Is cancer essentially represented only by the tumor and its metastases or is it already present in the organism before the emergence of a tumor?”) Anyone who has a decent understanding of what a gene is knows that genes, strictly speaking, do not cause cancer. Why? Genes are passive—they are sets of parameters that merely provide boundaries for what other things are doing. What is doing the doing, the cancer-ing? What starts the runaway growth pattern? Reich’s question is stunningly simple and insightful. Cancer, like philosophy, is important to my writing. I grew up in a Superfund town (Cinnaminson, New Jersey). When I was growing up I knew many people who eventually died from cancer. During the Carter Administration our elected representatives started a fund to clean up America’s worst toxic waste sites. Then Ronnie Raygun came along and everyone started waving flags and the cynical corporatized spite that America is drowning in began to flood our land. Superfund was gutted during the Reagan years; the waste site leaking chlorides into our town’s aquifer, a site scheduled to be dug out and fully sealed underneath, was instead merely covered up with a plastic tarpaulin. They just put a damn plastic tarp over it. That site probably continues to leak into the water supply to this day for all I know—I’m certain the cancer rates in Cinnaminson and the neighboring towns of Palmyra and Riverton are still very high. Well: the day is a poem: but too much Like one of Jeffers’s, crusted with blood and barbaric omens, Painful to excess, inhuman as a hawk’s cry. Jeffers, “The Day is a Poem” And so it all comes together: philosophy, the anguish of a day, and poetry. We have philosophy in poetry, but we must also have context. Poetry is in some sense the very embodiment of contextualized philosophy. To quote Paul Feyerabend quoting Brecht: Ordnung is heutzutage meistens dort, Wo nichts ist. Es is eine Mangelerscheinung. Order is these days mostly there, where nothing is. It is a symptom of withdrawal. (my translation) 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? I am quite a frank person. So in the spirit of my own personality, I will be frank: this question runs contrary to the operation of my poetics. Earlier I made mention of philosophical skepticism and personal identity. Here’s where the very rubber meets the very road. I suspect that the present question emphasizes identity over poetry, and thereby slights & insults minority writers, whether intended or not. All poets want to be recognized for being good at what they do, and it stings to have conditions put upon that recognition. I would rather be remembered as a tolerable poet than as a great Irish-American poet. Ugh. Such a conditional attribution would be insulting to me and to the very notion of being Irish-American, and it ultimately leads to mis-readings and stereotypes. It lowers expectations. It ghettoizes poetry and implies some unnamed superior set. Ever hear someone say “English American poets”? “German American poets”? “European American poets”? No, because the “European American” set are the dominant set, so they aren’t labeled, they aren’t ghettoized. They remain the implied center. Fuck that. OK, grumpy me. I know I’m being sassy, but I must make what I consider an important point. But before I make that point, I’ll play along for a moment. With my aforementioned caveats in mind, let me see which of my favorite poets who might not be anglo-American, uh, I think: Wole Soyinka, Nate Mackey, Amiri Baraka, Linh Dinh, Mandelstam, Hoa Nguyen, Louis Zukofsky, Pessoa, Heine, Brecht, Iskender, Nishiwaki Junzaburo, Schwerner, Nabokov, Basho, Haruki Murakami, John Edgar Wideman, Rachel Loden, Philip Nikolayev, and Borges, yes, Jorge Luis Borges most of all. Borges is my favorite. Is O’Hara considered “anglo-American”? Looks like an Irish name. Barry MacSweeney is anglo but not American, also true of William Empson, another favorite of mine. There are a lot of great contemporary poets in Britain, Scotland, and Ireland few people in America read. Billy Mills, Randolph Healy, Andrew Duncan. People read Mairead Byrne, who is here in the US. (Her blog has consistently had some amazingly powerful poetry as of late.) The “scene” over there seems very different from ours: there aren’t writing academies there, so their writing tends to have more murky & mixed aesthetic leanings, which is a huge advantage in my estimation. “Lyric” isn’t a dirty word there. OK, who else. Rimbaud and Baudelaire. William Blake and Shakespeare aren’t American. Allen Ginsberg. I try to keep up with the political writing of Michel Chossudovsky. Eliot Weinberger is a fine essay writer. I’m not much for blogs, but I did keep up with Heriberto Yepez’s blog while it was going. Catullus, Homer, Plato. Was George Oppen anglo-American? Over the course of 18 months while an undergraduate I read approximately 40 Chomsky texts, both political and linguistic works. And what about Araki Yasusada or Lester? Araki doesn’t exist and Lester is a ventriloquist doll. Time for me to stop playing. I want to get right down to the bottom of this supposedly harmless question. What makes someone qualify as anglo-American? One anglo-American parent? Both parents must be anglo-American? Merely one Anglo-American great-great-great-grandparent? How many generations back to we go before we decide there’s no English blood in an author? Not British but English, specifically? I know this might sound harsh, but bear with me, because I cannot express enough the importance of this issue. If we are to truly and honestly look at the implications of the present question, well, it starts to sound like Nazi discussions about defining who qualifies as a Jew , or like discussions of being “colored” in Jim Crow America; in some states you were considered “colored” if your blood was somehow miraculously determined to carry 1/32nd of a percent of “African blood” or 1/16th or 1/8th. In still other places, people were considered “colored” if they were “dark” to the Authentically White Eye. How does having a great-grandparent of African descent make a person “colored”? Why great-grandparent instead of great-great-grandparent? What “looks” “colored”? What in the hell is African blood, Jewish blood, white blood? It all runs red. Questions of how to define a race expose the dangerous absurdities of such innocent-seeming questions. I’m not so certain identity is a good way to approach capital-L Literature. Throughout the history of Literature, writers have worked in every sort of way that might confound an identity-centered approach to literary analysis. There are numerous ways in which writers have foiled such an approach. Writers have written collaboratively. Writers have “borrowed” lines and plot lines from one another without permission or even without conscious awareness. Writers have created imagined personae. Some writers write rather unconsciously, as if under some form of possession. Some write on drugs or alcohol, a state John Locke might consider as one without any self present. The oracle in mephitic vapors raving upon her tripod. (This sort of writing is perhaps one of the most crucial surviving vestiges of a pre-rationalist, pre-patriarchal society, where a world was run by the auguries of woman speaking from her belly, as an engastrimuthoi, or Gaia ventriloquist.) There are numerous approaches to the generation of a text that simply flog the very notion of identity. Literature has been dominated historically foremost by rhetoric rather than any sort of truth-correspondent sensibility. The dominance of the rhetorical in literature, writing without regard or concern for truth, has gradually dwindled in the last 400 years under the weight of commercial and legal considerations stemming from the rise of intellectual property and the development of publishing as a commercial enterprise. Such relatively recent cultural and economic factors have helped forge a new language of literary criticism, a language that prioritizes “originality,” “authenticity,” and the primacy of the author’s role, of identity, in the production of literature. This new language remains a rhetorical language, but it is a language relatively new to literary criticism. It is a rhetorical language that benefits, perhaps ironically, from its inherent ability to obfuscate its own subjectivity. It is a rhetorical language that is disingenuous about its rhetorical nature. Copyright has cast a rather unfortunate shadow upon the traditional classical practices of literary appropriation, recapitulation, collaboration, possession, and imagination. Appropriation these days comes with the risk of being labeled a “plagiarist,” surely a scarlet letter among contemporary writers and academicians. Works produced using means nowadays considered spurious, even means that are ultimately traditional, classical even, make it difficult for publishers to secure sole rights of ownership to published material or award literary prizes to individual authors. Traditional classical practices confound the business of literature. (When poetry and business mate-- what unfortunate and embarrassing offspring.) by excluding such “spurious” practices, the publishing industry can operate with minimal conflict over authorship and property rights. Predictably, then, traditional classical values, practices, and works have been generally disregarded, relabeled, discredited, and discarded by many literary critics and literary journalists. The business climate of contemporary poetry drives that exclusion. We live in a culture that accepts rather eerie notions of authorship and race, and poetry suffers from the synthesis of these creepy ideas more than any other form of literature. Many suppose poetry should be authentic, and authorial identity is used as the measure of authenticity (for reasons that seem to be stoked ultimately by greed). Such foolish notions lend themselves not to reading but to misreading. Writers like Philip Roth and Woody Allen have, I think, illustrated well the barriers between what appears to be at least partly autobiographical fiction writing and the writer himself. After all, using authorial identity, and transitively, authenticity, for analyzing a text doesn’t pass the “duh” rule: it’s hard if not impossible to know when you’re right but it’s easy to figure out when you’re wrong. I leave this question with the wise words of Jorge Luis Borges: Around 1938 Paul Valery wrote that the history of literature should not be the history of the authors and the accidents of their careers or of the career of their works, but rather the history of the Spirit as the producer or consumer of literature. He added that such a history could be written without the mention of a single writer. It was not the first time that the Spirit had made such an observation. [...] the pantheist who declares that the plurality of authors is illusory finds unexpected support in the classicist, to whom the plurality means but little. For classical minds the literature is the essential thing, not the individuals. George Moore and James Joyce have incorporated in their works the pages and sentences of others; Oscar Wilde used to give plots away for others to develop; both procedures, although they appear to be contradictory, may reveal an identical artistic perception — an ecumenical, impersonal perception. Another witness of the profound unity of the Word, another who denied the limitations of the individual, was the renowned Ben Jonson, who, when writing his literary testament and the favorable or adverse opinions he held of his contemporaries, was obliged to combine fragments from Seneca, Quintilian, Justus Lipsius, Vives, Erasmus, Machiavelli, Bacon, and the two Scaligers. One last observation. Those who carefully copy a writer do it impersonally, do it because they confuse the writer with literature, do it because they suspect that to leave him at any one point is to deviate from reason and orthodoxy. For many years I thought that the almost infinite world of literature was in one man. That man was Carlyle, he was Johannes Becher, he was Whitman, he was Rafael Cansinos-Assens, he was De Quincey. from “The Flower of Coleridge,” from Other Inquisitions, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1993, pp. 10-13. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? Yes. Well, at least up until I became a father. Several books a week maybe? Manuscripts too. Such a reading schedule can become tiresome for me as I dislike most of the poetry I read. I do enjoy the hunt, however, the hope of finding something that knowcks my socks off. Finding great poetry is my version of shooting smack. I’ll keep waiting and waiting until my man shows, know what I mean? Poetry is my string. I have a very sensitive chill meter; if a work chills my spine it passes the test and makes me high. If I am to rationally analyze the process, it would seem to me that my chill test to some extent is the intuitive measure of the “so what?” factor. When I think of how to describe the “so what?” factor, I think of the following statements: “just because it happened to you doesn’t make it interesting,” along with its corollaries, “just because you wrote it doesn’t make it interesting,” “just because it’s called ‘poetry’ doesn’t make it poetry” and “just because it is written doesn’t make it interesting.” Sometimes I pick up a book and after three pages or less I can be turned off completely. I regularly revisit the poetry that amazes me, the stuff that passes the chill test, that makes me high, however. And I sometimes go back to the stuff I didn’t like before and find myself enjoying it, and go back to the stuff I previously liked, and find I no longer enjoy it, etc. If so, how important is [reading poetry] to your writing? Reading poetry is of the very essence. Poetasters love writing poetry but loathe reading it. Reading poetry is very much a love-hate experience for me, and writing it is some sort of compulsion that has been refined in some way by reading it. A lot of poetry refuses to engage poetry itself, which may be explained by the proliferation of poets who don’t read poetry, who only find it interesting to find themselves interesting. Ultimately such a proliferation contributes to the growing pool of society’s illiteracy. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? I had no idea the first time I read this question. So I asked some of them. Anthony Robinson, poetry editor of The Canary, assumes I’ve read The Bhagavad Gita, but I haven’t. I’ve only read brief parts of it, not enough to qualify as a reading. He was correct in assuming I’ve read The Joy of Cooking, Collected Lorine Niedecker, Pale Fire, and A People’s History of the United States. Alan Sondheim was correct in assuming I have read The Bible, my birth certificate, and the letters on a STOP sign. Linh Dinh thinks I have read Leaves of Grass, Howl, On The Road, and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. All true, with the sole exception of the latter title. I have not in fact read Kesey’s novel, but I have seen the Milos Forman film based on the novel and have read The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test. However, I understand neither of the latter works shed much light on the Kesey novel. Ken Rumble assumes quite generously that I’ve read some Georg Trakl, all of the poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, all of the novels of Philip K. Dick, and the Boy Scout Handbook. I’ve only read perhaps three or four Dick novels. Wyatt is simply too painful for me to read; I prefer trips to the dentist. Trakl, sheesh, yeah, I should be able to say I’ve read it all, but no, not even close. I feel poorly about neglecting Trakl’s work. I spent a summer in Vienna studying the Fin de Siecle and no Trakl? For shame! Gabe Gudding wouldn’t be surprised if I have read The Godey's Ladies' Book, Pierre Bourdieu, Louis Althusser, “swaths of the Tripitika, a book or two by Mark Crispin Miller, and, with admiration, at least some of the works of Michael McClure.” I don’t know, however, if he would be surprised if I hadn’t read any of them. I haven’t. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? I’d have to know your seven year old first. No such thing as a normal kid; every kid is different, and every kid requires a different explanation. I might be reluctant, however, to make any attempt to do so regardless of how well I know your child. I think poetry hopelessly begs explanation. A seven year old should be young and enjoy youth without impediment; poetry is in many ways for impeded old souls. I might opt instead to sing a song or read a poem if there were some necessity for delving into poetry. “Lord Randall” might sound peculiar, musical, and sadly sweet enough for a starting point; it’s painfully poetic. I’m enjoying playing Woodie Guthrie songs to my child. The point of poetry, if there is indeed a point, and I don’t think there is a point, is to figure it out as it comes and as it can be figured out. Poetry is at least partly oracular. Eventually a reader of poetry might figure out that poetry cannot be figured out. Most 37 year old poets haven’t figured that one out. Why go there with a seven year old? Play a game, go to a museum, enjoy a swim, play an instrument, find some other kids & run around. Yeah, the child should be out playing with friends. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? “Vee belief in nossing, Lebowski! NOSSING!!!” If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? I have a role as a poet, a community role: I am currently the Poet Laureate of Carrboro, North Carolina. Do I believe in it? Only pragmatically speaking—I believe more people should read poetry and I believe in advocating literacy. Literacy is not an on-off thing but a phenomenon of degree, and I think one can always push his or her literacy, and I think the way to do that is through poetry. I have faith in the marginal importance of my community role in some ways, namely as an advocate of the role of the arts in my community through establishing an annual poetry festival . My faith was bolstered by the large turnout at the festival. Honestly I think the title of “Poet Laureate” is silly and I don’t think a community dog park opening should feature the community’s poet laureate reading a dedication poem. Yeah, that’s right, I wrote a poem for a dog park opening. Such activities further rather than deflate misconceptions about poetry. Some people believe more than I in a special role for a poet, and by my title it may appear that I concur. But I don’t. Such a title has a sort of “normalizing” effect on poetry in some sense. Just as there’s no such thing as a normal child, there’s no such thing as a normal poet or a normal citizen; there’s no such thing as a normal poetry. Here’s a role: be a poet! That is to say, write great books, but only if you can’t help it. If you’re writing merely because you want to be an artist, if you want the cultural trappings of being part of the logosphere, forget it. Do something else. There are so many amazing things to do out there. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**wedge Chiseled**flounder I**zero Of**oven Form**formula 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? Two-way. Cozy. Sexual. Social. When writing I do not experience text as something inside my body per se but instead something with which my body interacts. “Body and text” indeed, as opposed to “language and mind.” However, I mediate speech as written text, as a mental representation. That is to say, I have this apparently odd proclivity to “see” text when I hear a person talking. “See,” as in the very strange sense of feeling as if I’m manipulating blocks of words in my mind. (Oh, wait, that’s “language and mind.” Oh dear, what a difficult question.) Always reading and parsing makes conversation difficult; I might be dwelling on a textual representation of a statement you may have uttered six sentences ago. In order to maintain a conversation I might have to write things down. Or I have to engage you sentence by sentence in an analytical fashion. I just can’t help it. Many times I just keep my mouth shut. Suffice it to say there are both huge advantages and terrible deficits to the peculiar wiring of my brain with respect to language. I’m not so sure this writing attributed to me is mine, however. I mean that in the most literal of ways. I am not certain who is writing or—if there is a “who” at all. I am certain there is writing going on—no, wait, I’m not even certain of that, either. What body? What text? If any of it is happening it doesn’t do a good job of proving itself. I also regularly indulge in the aforementioned spurious means of production—theft, collaboration, possession. So I’m not ultimately sure of the relationship, if there really is a relationship at all. Poetry in my experience ultimately seems to be some sort of drug, an addiction, some sort of possession of my body. Maybe this is the counterpunching radio. When I’m reading it and ESPECIALLY when I’m writing it this is “true” in some intuitive sense. The experience is difficult to explain, as it is in a big way either removed from my consciousness or from my long-term memory, or both, but when poetry happens, the text sort of “takes over” and “I” seem to become irrelevant to the exchange between my body and the text. It’s not something I desire. The nice thing about it is that it gives me something new to read. Which is my big desire for planning a writing project: coming up with poetry that I’d like to read but haven’t found elsewhere.