(Photo by Natasha Babaian) Rebecca Wolff is the editor of Fence, a journal of poetry, fiction, art, and criticism, and of Fence Books. Her first book of poems, Manderley, was selected by Robert Pinsky for the National Poetry Series and published by the University of Illinois Press in 2001. A native of Chelsea, New York City, she is currently in residential limbo with her husband, the novelist Ira Sher, and their son, Asher Wolff, and is looking for a teaching job and/or patron. Buy her books here. See some work here, here, here, here and here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? Jabberwocky. Because I memorized it, when I was about seven, and this was my first feat. The first poem I was shocked and awed by as an older child (fourteen or so) was Anne Sexton's "The Moss of His Skin," with its terrifying last few lines. . . . . My sisters will never know that I fall out of myself and pretend that Allah will not see how I hold my daddy like an old stone tree. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? I'm not sure it's surprising, but I read People Magazine (and any of its copycat cohorts such as Us, or In Touch) any chance I have thirty minutes to kill, which isn't actually that often. Why? Because I like to stay informed, of course. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? I would hope that philosophical ideas are inherent in my writing, but I can't say that philosophy with a capital P has taken up too much of my adult time. I had an early bonding with Kierkegaard, but mostly in such an undergraduate, angsty way that I feel silly mentioning it. I also had a crush on the Marquis de Sade, and took a long time working out why it wasn't OK to sew up old women's vaginas, etc., and, later, the metaphorical equivalent in poetry (why must one think of one's reader?). But I am always chuffed (British for pleased) when I recognize the presence in one of my poems of an actual idea. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? I guess Vladimir Nabokov wouldn't count. I must confess to being, like fellow citizen Tony Tost, a largely Anglophilic reader. I fell in love with that whole Brit thing way back (Jane Austen to Martin Amis), as a middle-schooler, and still turn there for my deepest pleasures. It's the accent, I guess. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? I read a lot of poetry for Fence, the magazine that I have been editing for seven years. The reading of submissions often tells me more about what I hope not to do than what I hope to do--which makes it all the more significant when I come across something that moves me to hope to achieve or perform something like it or something that would aspire to a similar goodness. Also as an editor I have the excellent opportunity to quickly read about 900 manuscripts a year and to become deeply familiar with four books a year--the ones we publish--and this is always cheering and makes me feel less alone, as a poet. But then I like to feel alone, too. Other than as an editor, I do not read a lot of poetry, and never have. I'm just being honest. I do pick up a lot of the books that are sent to me by other publishers and often look at parts of them. But my aim is to change this bad habit: I've begun to fall in love from afar with the notion that I could, you know, just settle on one book of poems at a time and really read it. Try to educate myself. Forego novels for a while. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? I wasn't an English major, you know, and nor have I had the vigor to become an autodidact (see above) and this is my blanket explanation for why I haven't read most of any canon of great works, be it Western, Eastern, European, Modernist, Futurist, etc. You name it, I haven't read it. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? First I'd read "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" over and over to your seven year old, until he could recite it himself. Then I'd say: You know "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"? That's a poem. (This actually worked for my two-year-old: He asks for "poet-ree." His step-grandmother gave me a copy of Poetry Comics, a book by Dave Morice that illustrates many of the big old chestnut type poems, including the aforementioned and The Tyger, and we've been reading to him out of this.) 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? I believe that the two are indistinguishable from one another, if not identical. The Role of the Poet involves writing poetry, whereas your average Citizen should not be required to. I guess the question is: What should that poetry, written by the Poet, be required to do? I'm inclined to say "nothing," but I sense that that's not acceptable. But I can't with a straight face say that I believe that poetry should be held accountable to the same standards as, say, a truly good Christian. "What would Poetry do?" doesn't have quite the same ring as "What would Jesus do?". At the same time I don't discount the notion that poems have altering qualities--I just don't think that just because they do, or can, every poet must keep this in mind all the time. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**True Chiseled**Rock I**Didn’t Of**For Form**Idea 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? I'm a great subscriber to that whole split thing between the mind and the body: I hardly know my body's there most of the time, and especially not when writing, unless my leg has fallen asleep or gone crazy the way it does. I think this is why my poems stick so resolutely to the left-hand margin of the page. It's kind of like the way I always walk upright, whenever I can help it.

C.D. Wright was born and raised in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. She has published eleven collections of poetry. Wright’s most recent book is collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (Twin Palms Publishers, 2003). It was awarded the Dorothea Langue-Paul Taylor Prize for a work in progress from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Their collaboration goes on exhibit at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City, May 27, 2004. Her selected and new poems, Steal Away was published in 2002 (Copper Canyon). Other titles include the book-length poem Deepstep Come Shining (Copper Canyon, 1998), Tremble (The Ecco Press, 1996), and Just Whistle, another book-length poem (Kelsey Street Press, 1993). String Light (University of Georgia Press, 1991) won the 1992 Poetry Center Book Award given by San Francisco State University. Poems and essays have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Arschile, BRICK, CONJUNCTIONS, sulfur, and numerous other magazines. Her work is much anthologized. Wright has composed and published two state literary maps, one for Arkansas, her native state, and one for Rhode Island, her adopted state. In 1981 she received a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts which prompted a move to Mexico. She was awarded the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1986, and in 1987 Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Bunting Institute. A second NEA was awarded in 1988 as well as a GE Award for literary essay. She was a 1989 recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award. And a 1990 recipient of the Rhode Island Governor’s Award for the Arts. In 1994 she was named State Poet of Rhode Island, a five-year post. On a fellowship from writers from the Wallace Foundation, Wright curated “a walk-in book of Arkansas” a multi-media exhibition that toured her native state for a two-year period. She was Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the fall of 1997. The University of Arkansas presented her with the Citation of Distinguished Alumni in 1998. In 1999 she was awarded a Lannan Literary Award, and an artist award from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. For over twenty years she co-edited Lost Roads Publishers, an independent literary press. Wright is Israel J. Kapstein Professor of English at Brown University. She and her husband, poet and translator Forrest Gander, have a son, Brecht. They live outside of Providence, Rhode Island. Buy some of her books here. See some work here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? The first poem I memorized because I was so struck with it was “buffalo bill’s defunct” by cummings. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? I’ll read anything, but most of the writing that I get through is “literary” whether or not it actually fits one of the designated literary genres. For the past couple of years I was on a fairly steady diet of prison writing by political prisoners such as Gramsci and Wilde and Dostoyevsky, and criminals such as Jean Genet, Malcolm Braley and Jack Abbott, and incarceration studies such as those by Foucault, Rhodes, and Franklin. I am still reading studies of violence. Also works on landscape and on photography and on Mexico, Central and South America. I tend to read around projects; read my way into a project. It’s a pleasure, learning about something. It’s a pleasure how one book tips your hand to another. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? My reading of philosophy is sporadic. I am sometimes blocked by the vocabulary, among the least attractive to me. The ideas can be quite buried; I mis-read, and I get impatient. It’s my loss. I think philosophers should read more poetry. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? I’m teaching a course of poetry in translation this fall including books by Pessoa, Schwitters, Roubaud, Saenz, Jabes, Christensen, Collobert, Negroni, and Mayröcker. Sadly, my own reading skills in another language are very remedial. Inger Christensen was a joy to discover. I looked for texts I had reason to think were well-translated, and works I had enjoyed in translation. I just read two by Marquez, decades after I thought I would not be seeking out his work anew. And am reading Rulfo’s Padre Páramo more attentively than I read it before. I think Gregor Von Rezzori is much under-read here—else his translated books would be in print, no? I read works in translation because I hear about them through someone whose taste I generally share. My husband gets almost all of the New Directions books and they are still committed to translations of prose, likewise Dalkey Archives. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? I read enormous amounts of poetry. I read very little on line; so I couldn’t be more out of it in relation to blogs and e-zines. Recently I read: Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabes by Rosmarie Waldrop, Travelling Library by David Kirby; Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works (as well as three books about her); Danielle Collobert’s Notebooks 1956-1978; I Promise To Be Good, Letters of Rimbaud; new books by former students; new manuscripts in production. And I have been spending time with Forrest Gander’s Science and Steepleflower which of course I read in manuscript and when it first came out, but now, spending real time with—that’s a whole other love affair. I’ve been reading--anew and again--Creeley and “digging” the texts along with his presence now that he has come to Providence, though Forrest keeps taking the books to his office where he hoards the New Directions books. Reading former students and reading for competitions and magazines keeps me in touch with the younger poets. I can’t read everything by everyone, and I have to have poetry-free periods, but I wouldn’t stay in the genre if I did not care enough about it to read it. I can hardly stand listening to people who say there isn’t any good poetry out there. The vitality of the genre stands in total opposition to its paucity of readers, among them people who call themselves poets. It’s so obnoxious that attitude of read just yourself or read just the dead. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? I don’t know the answer to that question. I don’t know why anyone should have any assumptions about my reading habits. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? I don’t think I could currently explain anything adequately to a seven year old. It’s been a long time since I taught Poetry in the Schools. I would have to prepare all over again to face that daunting task. Our son, now seventeen, reads a lot of poetry with tremendous understanding; so at the time he was seven we must have slipped in the right material. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? I think I’ve addressed this too many times to want to reiterate. I have a prose book coming out, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil, I’m sure I circle that question throughout. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Not interested in this question. 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? My writing is very physical, at least by my lights it is.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1975, Noah Eli Gordon is the author of the book-length poem The Frequencies (Tougher Disguises, 2003), a collection of three long poems The Area of Sound Called the Subtone (Ahsahta, forthcoming December of 2004), an e-book notes toward the spectacle and chapbooks from Margin to Margin and Anchorite Press. His poetry has appeared widely, including online at the 2004 DC Poetry Anthology and Can We Have Our Ball Back?, and his reviews have appeared in Boston Review, Rain Taxi, Jacket, Octopus and elsewhere. He publishes the Braincase chapbook series from his current home base in Northampton, Massachusetts. Buy his book here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? “True Story,” by Shel Silverstein. I memorized the poem when I was in 4th grade, so, although it might not be the most literate of bedrocks upon which to build one’s personal pantheon of influence, it has had, now that I think about it, a deep impact on my writing. I mean this with all seriousness. The poem is a playful, near-tumultuous cascade of experience narrated with the breathless energy of a child unable to finish one thought before beginning another. Its engine is basically the run-on sentence, which I happen to harbor a huge liking for. Sometime around junior high I got into Coleridge’s “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” although it was more a case of me being drawn toward it because of the band Iron Maiden than anything the poem actually did. I tried to memorize that one too, but had to stop after a few dozen lines; there were too many words I couldn’t then figure out how to pronounce. In college I read Eliot’s Prufrock & that pretty much did me in. I think it was the whole disillusionment thing. I cashed in my punk points & took up poetry with a fury. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? Hmmm…my inability to immediately answer this makes me think it might be time to recalibrate my reading machine, although it might just be a matter of what one would label as “literary.” I’m pretty sure there’d be nothing surprising on my list. I just finished reading a wonderful book called Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of theCity's Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? I wrote something a few years ago for Word For/ Word that deals with this question, so I’ll just refer ya over there: http://wordforword.info/vol2/gordon_essay.htm 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? Mostly the French, everything from the surrealist and symbolist poets up through the Violence-of-the-White-Page era folks. I like the combination of an ultra-serious engagement with ideas and the way in which such an engagement often manifests itself in the most wacked-out of aesthetics. It’s pretty amazing that one of the sonnets in Emmanuel Hocquard’s A Test of Solitude is a recipe for clams. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? I think I read too much poetry. For a while I was averaging a book or two a day, wanting to know what everyone was doing, and, perhaps more importantly, how they were doing it. There are some books of poetry I’ll read straight through in one sitting, knowing full well I’ll never return to them, while others I’ll read and re-read, noticing something new about the way in which the work is structured, with the hopes that I can take that particular method, however minute it may be, and make it wholly my own, or, at the very least, add it to whatever hybridized writing creature I’ve become. It’s been important for me to have a handle on the folks who’ve come before, on what they’ve already done, so I can figure some way to proceed on my own. Although it’s not just about how the work can serve me. I often feel, and feel sort of silly for feeling, that there’s this ethereal, tangled otherness or outsideness one taps into with poetry, that the tapping is not just a communicative act, rather a communal one. After John Wieners died, there was a huge memorial/celebration reading for him in Boston. It took place in a classroom at MIT, a room packed with poets. Behind the podium, there was a large chalkboard with equations and figures still fresh from some afternoon class. One of the larger & more immediately legible scribblings read: “An infinite plane of current.” The phrase itself seemed to take on a growing importance as I watched poet after poet pay tribute to Wieners. I like to think that’s what we do when we read poetry, tap into that infinite plane of current. I think it fit so well into Spicer’s definition of the tradition: “It means generations of different poets in different countries patiently telling the same story, writing the same poem, gaining and losing something with each transformation—but, of course, never losing anything.” 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? Novels. Plot is boring and better left to the movies. I’m kidding here, but not entirely. In fact, I just read a really amazing novel by Aaron Kunin called The Mandarin. It was so compelling to me because its subtext, and at times not-so-subtext, is pretty much the question of what exactly constitutes a novel. It’s still unpublished, but I hope someone picks it up soon. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? I’d say that a poem is when you use language to bring something new into the world, then I’d get out my stuffed-animal ducks, Gecko & Madisonivich a.k.a. the Rat Scallion, & perform a puppet show in which they recite spontaneous poems between song & dance numbers. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? Let me answer this question with the last few lines from a James Laughlin poem called “Dylan,” which deals with going to recover the body of Dylan Thomas from the Medical Examiner’s Morgue: “What was his profession?” she asked I told her he was a poet; she looked perplexed “What’s a poet?” she asked I told her a poet was a person who wrote poems She put that down, and that’s what it says on the form: Dylan Thomas—a poet (he wrote poems). I don’t particularly think it’s a great poem or anything, but I do like how it addresses the question. Not to mention that I’d only read the poem once, about four years ago, and thought of it immediately after reading this question. That said, I do think there is a holistic connection between the act of simply being a poet and the impact such an act has upon both one’s miniature piece of the planet and the larger idea of the rest of the world. Personally, I’d love it if everyone were governed via small egalitarian collective autonomous communities, as long as one’s role in such a process was fully voluntary. If one were to dedicated one’s life to such a goal there are a lot more effective means out there to attain it, and yet—here’s where I’m torn—I can’t help but wander around all day scribbling in a little pocket notebook, hopeful that the scratches are somehow informed by, rather than an recapitulation of, such a desire. And hopeful that the desire itself is able to be made manifest not in the content of the writing but in the act of the writing, the way in which one must reject something of the endless stream of shrink-wrapped “entertainment” in order to jolt the mind elsewhere. There are poets out there who are have been able to combine both their verse & any sort of leaning toward radical dissent—Dennis Brutus comes immediately to mind—but it seems to be effective only under regimes which are bent on silencing verbal dissent instead of trying to sell sneakers with it. Hell, maybe if Bush is reelected we’ll see poets against the war in prison instead of packed into an anthology. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**Smell Chiseled**Face I**Think Of**Everything Form**From 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? That’s simple: I am destroying the body in order to bring out the text.

Stacy Szymaszek lives in Milwaukee where she works at Woodland Pattern Book Center, a non-profit literary center that was founded in 1980 while she was fighting off Catholics in grade-school. She is the editor of Gam: A Survey of Great Lakes Writing and coeditor of Traverse. Her chapbook -Some Mariners- was just released on EtherDome Press and her full length manuscript -Emptied of All Ships- is forthcoming from Litmus Press. Also forthcoming are the chapbooks -Pasolini Poems- from Cy Press and -Mutual Aid- from gong press. Buy her chapbook here. See some work here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. See some editorial projects here and here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? This question really surprised me. It snapped me right back to the moment. It’s this Emily Dickinson poem: This is my letter to the World That never wrote to Me— The simple News that Nature told— With tender Majesty Her Message is committed To Hands I cannot see— For love of Her—Sweet—countrymen— Judge tenderly—of Me I was a senior in high school, living with all the anguish of not being able to express who I was (sexuality, gender, spiritual beliefs). I loved it because it presented me with an option I didn’t know existed, for how I could experience life and what could be done with language. It was ultimate for me. My English teacher had lent me the anthology I found it in and I didn’t want to give it back. It seems fitting, or telling, that this poem, or any poetry, wasn’t part of the curriculum. It was teaching and learning that was happening in the fringe. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? My reading is always focused on my project. The books might not be literary, but my use of gleaned information is literary. I’m reading a book about Egyptian mummies/burial customs right now to form a knowledge base for my latest sequence. For Some Mariners I read some Rachel Carson and a book on natural disasters called Countdown to Apocalypse. I collect pocket paperbacks of sailor smut, but I just look at the pictures – nooo! there aren’t pictures. I have a love/hate relationship with biographies of poets. None of this is really surprising though. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? Not sure how to interpret this question… but, my work is idea driven. Reading French theory/philosophy - Kristeva, Bataille, Cixous - has been informative. Lacan has been most salient, his ideas about language and lack. The idea that a word does not represent a thing but is a stand-in for a thing that is missing. I’m very conscious of this. All of my work is about the itch of desire that can never be scratched. The characters I create know this and find ways to be graceful in their dissatisfaction. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? Most of my favorite writers are non-Anglo-American. James Baldwin. He wrote about cooking a pork chop in Another Country and it will never leave my mind, but that speaks more to my quirks. I admire that he was able to write profound and humane social criticism as well as fiction, a true public intellectual. One of my other favorite writers is Etel Adnan, but this feels like an understatement. I think she is visionary. Also civic. Political. Experimental. Lyrical. The way she brings it all together, the ethos of her work is stunning to me. She should be much better known in this country. She was born in Lebanon and now lives in Sausalito and Paris. French poetry has been super important to me: Rimbaud, Mallarme, Eluard, Desnos. I’m presently reading and loving Lorenzo Thomas, and also Vine Deloria’s Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? I read a lot of present-day poetry. I work as literary program manager and book buyer at Woodland Pattern Book Center so I’m kept on the ball by a sense of responsibility. I am genuinely interested in and moved by what so many of my peers are writing. It’s a fun and vital process to find my comrades on the bookshelves, to contact them, befriend them. I feel very lucky to be in this seat, with this view, from the middle of the country. This process is important to my writing (and editorial work) in that it keeps some of my latent idleness latent! I feel very motivated to participate in our moment. I have more to say about reading poetry in the following answer. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? I haven’t read the Maximus Poems or much of Olson at all. Yet I feel he is very important to me! Why I haven’t is an interesting question. I’ve identified who I’m in the field with and it seems to come down to how I want to be influenced. I tend to want to know about their lives, their ideas, to be in communion with their poetics, what we know of their being. I feel this somewhat pleasing possibility that I could be subsumed by admiration so I tend to avoid immersion in the work. I consider Susan Howe to be an influence, not that I’ve read more than 3 of her many books; however, reading one page of Singularities profoundly shaped my poetics. Looking at one page of Non-Conformist’s Memorial, same thing - “ah, there it is, I get it, I was waiting for this.” I have a very intense internal relationship to my influences and an intuitive sense of timing – when to bring them into play. Maximus is literally on my desk waiting for me. I have a feeling Olson and Metcalf, and always, always Melville, will be important for a future work of mine. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? I don’t know that I would explain it any different to my poetry befuddled family. I think a poem is one way to share how you see the world. Eva Hess said that she viewed her art as “psychic models” which I would agree with. It’s using words as a medium to portray a tension. There’s always a tension. Is it clear from this answer that I don’t have any children in my life!? 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? Most certainly. The poet, the word worker, is there, for those who choose to notice, to show us how to use language in service of Life. It is especially important these days when we have people in power who have no facility with language. They aren’t articulate, often not humanitarian, and they use it in ugly ways, for propaganda and falsification. Speech, the way we speak to each other is so often preordained. We have to go to the poets and writers to discover or remind ourselves of the treasure of language, and I would argue that we have to go to the more cutting edge poets and writers. I want to be challenged by a person’s expression of their vision. I’d rather watch TV than read a boring book of poetry. Obviously the non-poet citizen isn’t a word worker but the poet is also a citizen. How to be a good poet and a good citizen is something I’m only starting to figure out in my 30’s. I lived my 20’s under the radar, I participated in society in minimal, practical ways - like buying toothpaste and soap. I vote now, I participate in community building in several significant ways, I made myself fight a parking ticket! – I used to feel like the living dead, so whatever I can do to give myself a sense of social agency by engaging in civic life. Being gay, being a poet, and sensing my “difference” early on in an unsupportive environment shot me light-years out of the middle. I think our government counts on people like me being too depressed and fatigued to do anything of consequence. This makes me angry enough to challenge myself to learn how to be what I like to think of as a civic poet. Kenneth Rexroth, Muriel Rukeyser and Pasolini come to mind as people who did this quite exceptionally. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**island Chiseled**features I**was Of**being numerous Form**gate 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? I’m reading this as between my text and my body. Much of my work, probably all of it in the past 5 years, deals with my perception of my gender. I manifest myself in my work as a male being. James in Some Mariners, Pasolini in Pasolini Poems. There is tension there for me that I can manipulate. Also it feels like a process of integration – I am female, and am regarded as such, it is the obvious - but I project myself into my work through male personas. It’s hard for me to abide by dichotomous thinking on this in particular. My masculinity needs some assertion, if I want people to respond to it, because it’s less obvious. I’m also a tattooed individual and my image choices very much relate to the worlds I am creating. I have a sailor and the Chinese character for ocean. It’s another way of concretizing memory.

Christopher Luna is an editor, journalist, and performer with an MFA in Writing and Poetics from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. His articles and criticism have appeared in Rain Taxi Review of Books, the Oregonian, the Willamette Week, Current Biography, and the Boulder Planet. His poetry has appeared in publications including eye-rhyme, Gare du Nord, Exquisite Corpse, the Babylon Review, Many Mountains Moving, the @tached document, For Immediate Release, and Big Scream. Luna has collaborated with musicians including Dystopia One, Pimpcore, Liquid Logic, Piltdown Man, Vole, and Steven Taylor. He is the author of Literal Motion (Bootstrap Press, 2000), which features three interviews with the filmmaker Stan Brakhage, and is currently editing the selected correspondence of Stan Brakhage and Michael McClure. He is a freelance writer and editor who is looking for work. See some of his work here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Read some of his reviews here, here, here, here, here and here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost. Because it provided my teenage self with a glimpse of a possible future in which I chose my path in life rather than it being chosen for me. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? I read "Vibe" magazine because it contains well-written pieces on hip-hop, politics, and culture, and never forgets to give props to rock-and-roll (my first love). 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? Philosophy is not necessarily an element, but since I believe that all that we can perceive through our senses is potential material, individual philosophers or philosophical ideas may enter into the work. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? I love Amiri Baraka for his unrelenting attempts to speak truth to power, and his unwillingness to apologize for being angry. I also believe that he is the best jazz poet of all time. I love Toni Morrison for consistently blowing my mind. I don't believe I will really be able to say that I have read her books until I have re-read each one 2-3 more times. I also enjoy reading Sherman Alexie, Frank Chin, Langston Hughes, Bob Kaufman, Akilah Oliver, Harryette Mullen, and Nikki Giovanni. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? I read poetry as much as possible. It is extremely important to my own poetry, because it inspires me to live, and to write, and because it reminds me of how much more work I have to do. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? I haven't read Dante because I tried on two occasions and just wasn't feeling it. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? I would tell your child that a poem uses words to remind people of people, places, and things that they may have missed because they were too busy or sad to notice. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? I believe that the poet has a role to address all that he/she senses. For some, this includes world events. But I don't believe that a writer has to be explicit about his/her opinions in order for the work to be political. I wish that more poets took their potential to educate and stir the hearts of their readers more seriously. Just because poetry remains a relatively obscure discipline does not mean that our words have no affect on those who read them. And I would hope that all citizens feel sufficiently moved at some point in their lifetime to become more involved in their communities, because every little bit helps. Nearly all of the revolutionary icons whom people admire (and feel frustratingly inferior to) began by attempting to change the reality in their neighborhood. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**Meringue Chiseled**Chin I**and I Of**It Form**follows Content 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? In my case, the relationship between the breath and the line is important. For example, I often write prose poems which are formatted into thin columns like newspaper texts. Much of my writing is an attempt to transcribe the constant chatter of the mind, but in the case of these prose poems, the shape of them indicates that they are to be read aloud as fast as possible. Think Frank Capra or Tom Raworth. For this reason, those poems that allow more space feel freer (more open to improvisation in performance) and sometimes slower to me.

Laura Solomon spent her childhood in Alabama and Georgia. She is the author of Bivouac (Slope Editions, 2002) and the poetry editor for castagraf. Buy her book here. See some work here, here and here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? When I was eight my grandmother gave me an edition of Alice in Wonderland with wonderful illustrations by S. Michelle Wiggins that I would read over and over again. Several of the poems within it fascinated me—the Mouse's Tale for instance in which "Fury" declares himself both judge and jury and eventually condemns the mouse to death. The poem tapers down the page in the shape of a tail or river, and the typeset grows tinier and tinier as the implications grow more and more ominous. Those parts where the book broke into poetry always captivated me. There was something inexplicable about them, how they seemed to exist before and beyond the story’s time, how they were somehow bigger than Alice or her adventure. There was something too so lovely and terrifying about them—The Mock-Turtle’s song of “Beautiful Soooup” made presumably at the cost of his own demise. Later on, in middle school, for some of the same reasons, I fell in love with Poe's "The Highwaymen" but also for its rhythm and William Blake's "Tyger, Tyger" which probably helped spur some of my first serious thoughts and questions about the nature of good and evil. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? I'm not sure if I can come up with anything truly surprising. I subscribe to Scientific American and sometimes enjoy reading books about math and physics despite the fact that I'm totally incapable of digesting them. Why—I guess I feel as though we’re all working on the same project but through different means. Scientific American also has incredible photography. In the current issue there’s an article entitled "The Extraordinary Deaths of Ordinary Stars" with photographs of planetary nebulae. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? If the question refers to reading philosophy, I'd say for me it's pretty important. Since last year I've been particularly absorbed by Simone Weil's essays, and in the past I've been obsessed with Baudrillard, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard among others. I'm interested primarily in philosophy that is more inspired than it is analytical, and I don't read philosophy so much as to find some ultimate format for living and thinking as I do on the contrary to be with another person in the dark. I go to philosophy for many of the reasons I go to poetry, to experience something or someone, and in that sense it’s important to my writing. If the question instead is asking how important is philosophical inquiry in my writing (or of writing) to my writing, I would say that I like poems that think but I'm not interested in poems that attempt to prove. I always feel betrayed by authors who have some point peripheral to the poetry of the poem. Why write a poem then when you could write an essay? I'm sure there are reasons, but to me those reasons would lie outside the province of poetry whose sole aim should be itself—at least, this is how I'm persuaded to think about poetry. It is good to consistently consider and reconsider others' and one's own ideas about the world, but when writing a poem really one must concentrate only on that poem and delve deeper than one's own (or anyone else's) ideas. Hopefully the poem will have ideas of its own, but if my own ideas are too loud I won't be able to hear what the words themselves have to say. To a certain extent, you have to allow the language to think too if you want to discover anything other than yourself. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? Right now I’m re-reading the Jaime Saenz selected that came out a couple of years ago, and I think his love poems are among some of the best ever written. I love Marina Tsvetaeva for her ferocity, vitality and tenderness. I love Dostoevsky for his compassion and insightfulness with regard to humanity, and Gogol for his humor. I love Kafka for his obsessiveness and pursuit of logic to the point of absurdity. I love Pessoa’s imagination. I love Tomaz Salamun for all of the reasons that so many other people admire him but particularly for his generosity of spirit. I love Kamau Brathwaite’s imagery and the incantatory quality of much of his work. I love Basho for his acquiescence to something larger than himself. I love Medbh McGuckian for the same reason. I love Virginia Woolf for her tenacity and syntax. I love Catullus for being frank. I love how W. G. Sebald complicates time, memory, and history in Austerlitz. I love Proust’s lyricism and extreme sensitivity. I love Simone Weil’s capacity for both feeling and thought. I love the lonely intimacy of Robert Walser’s short stories. I love William Blake, as I mentioned before, for his vision. I could really go on and on—I haven’t even mentioned any of my favorite French poets—but I think my uncurbed enthusiasm is making me appear ridiculous. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? Yes, sometimes too much. Whether it helps or not depends upon how on I am. If I’m on, reading feeds me and I put books down in order to write. If I’m off or depressed, reading becomes a way in which to procrastinate until I’m poem-worthy again. How helpful reading is to my writing, I really can’t say, but I also can’t imagine going a day without reading something or a week without reading poetry. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? Many many things I’m sure. I’ve never read Spencer, Virgil or Cervantes, for example because I just haven’t gotten around to them. But there are also plenty of well-established, over-anthologized, mainstream twentieth-century American poets whom I don’t read for fear of corruption. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? One way might be to show him or her a hologram of a person riding a unicycle that goes backwards or forwards depending on how you tilt the picture. Another way might be to compare a poem to something like the interval between seeing lightning and hearing thunder and the surprise the thunder always brings even if you do expect it, but still that really wouldn’t do it, because there are aftershocks that must be accounted for, so you’d have to explain that the thunder may keep coming back at any time even when no lightning precedes it, and even when there aren’t any clouds. The best answer though might be to ask the child what he or she thinks a poem is or to ask him or her to write one or find one. Honestly, I don’t think you can explain to anyone, child or adult, what a poem is anymore than you can explain, if you’ll forgive the analogy, what sex is to a virgin—to be understood one has to experienced those things for oneself. Explanation is inadequate. No matter how complete one’s definition is of poetry (or for that matter art), something else will always come along which refuses to fit that definition but which one still recognizes to be poetry / art. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? The only role I see for "the poet" is to be a poet, which requires paradoxically both a spine and a constant re-evaluation of everything including what being a poet is or should be. I’m not sure what the Role of the Citizen is or if it exists other than as an obligation to do no harm to the world or to anyone in it despite the fact that this itself is an impossibility. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**ice-cube Chiseled**change I**you Of**small stature Form**thought 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? I’m not sure I’ve ever given it much thought, but my poems tend to naturally meditate on the body’s temporality and presence, its fragilities and possibilities. My own body is what I know best and least, a familiar stranger, and I suppose my relationship to my writing is like that too.

Ron Silliman has written and edited 25 books to date, most recently Woundwood. Since 1979, Silliman has been writing a poem entitled The Alphabet. In addition to Woundwood, a part of VOG, volumes published thus far from that project have included ABC, Demo to Ink, Jones, Lit, Manifest, N/O, Paradise, (R), Toner, What and Xing. Silliman was a 2003 Literary fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and was a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council as well as a Pew Fellow in the Arts in 1998. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two sons, and works as a market analyst in the computer industry. Buy some of his books here. There are many links to work online (as well as lots of other info) here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? I keep getting asked this question & the answer’s always the same. William Carlos Williams’ “The Desert Music,” which I first discovered in the Albany Public Library when I was 16. By the time I finished reading the poem at a table in the library’s two rooms – it’s subsequently been replaced by a new facility a block away the size of a hospital – I knew I had to be a poet. The poem mixes direct statement with descriptive narrative and the first instance of sensuous form that I instantly “got.” 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? I’ve been a reader of the Baseball Register literally for decades & a deep reader of baseball statistics since the Giants moved to San Francisco when I was 11 years old. I love baseball rather the way I do comic strips in the newspaper – because I live a reasonably stressful life & it’s valuable to have some interests that patently “mean nothing,” even tho they really do. Both connect me to habits from my childhood – and that in itself is also a worthy justification. Baseball statistics have been a more conservative field even than School o’ Quietude poetics, yet in recent years stats – especially the “major” widely recognized stats – have been undergoing dramatic change. Were he to return to life, my grandfather would be startled to see pitchers being gauged by their WHIP numbers – walks plus hits per innings pitched – or to discover that on-base percentage has become nearly as important as batting average, which it may soon eclipse. Not to mention OPS, which is on-base percentage plus slugging percentage. The new stats for hitters only accentuate how much better a hitter Barry Bonds has become than any other player since at least Ted Williams. These new numbers come out of the sabermetrics, the use of statistics to analyze anything about baseball that might be counted & measured. While sabermetrics has been around for over 20 years, it has only been in the past five years or so that some baseball teams have actually begun to use the new methods to make key decisions as to personnel. Although sabermetricians like Bill James are sometimes treated in the media as supernerds seriously in need of a life, their application of some basic analytic tools to something like baseball strikes me as the sort of thing we ought to be thinking about with many endeavors in contemporary life – and I definitely include poetry. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? By philosophy do you mean the academic profession or the study of what thought & knowledge is possible and how we might think & know this? If your answer is the former, then my answer is not at all. If the latter, then the answer would be quite a lot. Often I think of philosophy as poetry’s evil twin, although once in awhile I think I have those roles reversed. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? Among contemporary poets: Arkadii Dragomoschenko, Alexei Parschikov & Ivan Zhdanov from Russia. Nicole Brossard from francophone Canada. Heriberto Yepez from Mexico. Anne-Marie Albiach from France. The Slovenian Tomaš Šalamun. All are writers I think of as peers who are struggling with many of the same issues in their poetry as I am in my own, positioned differently for age (I’m quite a bit older than Yepez, for example), location and the specifics of their own situation. I learn a great deal from each of them. Historically, the list is too long even to imagine. Lorca, Mayakovsky, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Ponge, Vallejo, Hikmet – who should be read more widely – but also critics such as Benjamin & Shklovsky, to pick very different discourses. Each such writer is a node in a network or web of connections that I am constantly exploring. What I find perhaps most exhilarating about these poets is just how much of the world each reveals that I never could have gotten to in any other way. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? I’ve tried to read some poetry, even if only a couple of lines, every day for the past 40 or so years. I think it’s vital. A poet who doesn’t read poetry is like somebody trying to play baseball who has never tried to hit a curve. You can spot poets who don’t read poetry by how arid their work is, and by how self-satisfied they tend to be, even those (especially those) whose professional stance is one of self-torture. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? It’s impossible for me to know what my peers may assume that I’ve read. I haven’t read Henry James or Thomas Wolfe. Why? Because I haven’t gotten around to it yet. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? It’s something that makes your dad pretty crazy. But beyond that, all art forms are extensions of our senses, how we see, feel, touch, hear or otherwise interact with the world. If dance is the art of your body in time, and music is the art of sound, and painting & photography arts of vision, then poetry is the art of language. Anything that language can do is appropriate as the material of poetry. Poetry’s role, in turn, is to fully explore what its medium can tell us about itself & the world. The role of any art is to explore what its medium can tell us of the world. When a dancer says of the Hokey Pokey, “That’s what it’s all about,” they aren’t necessarily kidding. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? See 7 above. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**meringue Chiseled**abs I**is an other Of**about to within which what Form**wild 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? The simple answer is that, over time, both are getting larger. But that’s not the real answer because the body’s relation to the act of writing is invariably intimate – one cannot write without extending the body in some fashion, whether scribbling by hand, typing away or reciting spontaneously (or not) into a microphone or before a crowd. A poet who composed by cutting words from weekly magazines and pasting together “ransom note” style texts would have the process of cutting & gluing, but also of arranging and of browsing or scanning the magazines for appropriate text in the first place. What is your process? I do a lot of work on my Palm Pilot these days, but I also write by hand into notebooks. If I don’t have the energy to work in my Palm Pilot, whose “handwriting” system, which it calls Graffiti, requires some concentration, then in fact I don’t have the energy to write. I must be some kind of Projectivist because for me writing is not only speech (or thought) but is also always the dance of the hand.

Ray Bianchi, is a native of Suburban Chicago, the child of Italian immigrants, educated at the University of Iowa. Ray Lived and worked for most of the 1990's in Bolivia and Brazil in Bolivia in a men's prison and in Brazil in international business and publishing. He is married the Brazilian artist Waltraud Haas, His work has appeared in Tin Lustre Mobile, Moria, Poesia y Cultura, The Economist, Moria, Antennae, Red River Review, Fiera di Lingue,Ray is also editor of www.chicagopostmodernpoetry.com he is the author of a chapbook, The Suburban Manifesto and his first book Circular Descent is available from Blazevox press. Buy his book here. See some work here, here, here and here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? I would have to say it was Song of Myself by Whitman. I come from an 'ethnic' family my parents are immigrants from Italy and the sense of having a short history in this country is profound for us but when I read Song at age 15 I was moved and I identified with it totally. It made me feel American for the first time. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? I read allot of Political Biographies especially about politically incorrect figures, Hitler, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Daley I find the inner workings of their lives interesting and I love to read about their formation as people. I also read allot of sports books, baseball in particular I love books by Roger Angell and others who bring the game out and make it read for people. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? I guess it is important. I come out of a tradition politically that is strong outside the US an not so much here that is one of the Catholic left best embodied here in the USA by Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and more recently by Michael Moore the filmmaker. These sets of ideas make advocacy for the poor, the developing world, and outcast as central to my poetic project. I do not do this directly my work is never overtly political but I like to challenge the comfortable be they the hypocrites within my Church who oppose Gay Marriage but allow pedophilia or people who say they are for freedom but only a freedom that is comfortable. Regarding pure philosophy, you know Heidegger et cetera this has never moved me too much but it does give some fodder for thinking. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? Wow, what a question I tend to read mostly non American and non English speaking writers here is my list; Eugenio Montale, Italian he is a wonderful lyricist and someone who crafts each letter of each word in the poem his work is like a fine meal. Guiseppe Ungaretti, Italian but he lived in Brazil for a long time his short poems are really great. Pablo Neruda, of course he is the greatest poet in any language from the 20th century. Paulo Leminski, Brazilian, what a wonderful poet his work in Portuguese is infused with wonder and is well written I really love his work. Ana Belen Lopez, Mexican, she was recently anthologized in Sin Puertas Visibles from Jen Hofer, her work is domestic and revolutionary in the same poem. There are many others, Umberto Saba, Cesar Vallejo, Carlos Drummond De Andrade, Anna Akmatova, that I love as well. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? Yes I love poetry as I am a poet but I tend to read through one writer at a time, I just reread Olson and Zukofsky as I am working on a new book and Olson along with Pound are lodestars for me. Reading poetry is essential to my writing my work sits on the shoulders of giants. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? Shakespeare, I have read some but not allot I just find it boring I would rather read Cervantes or Dante or other Renaissance writing I find English writing in general and Shakespeare in particular a bore. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? A poem is like pure lemon juice, without sugar or water, strong and pure Fiction is Seven Up, watered down and added to reducing the flavor. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? To be a public intellectual and to challenge the system prophetically to do more that criticize but to create an intellectual challenge to injustice and oppression and to open up new ways of thinking about life by using words and language. We are all citizens we should all vote and protest but a poet is called to do more. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**Lake Garda Chiseled**Dante I**Fat Of**Beach Form**Cake 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? Very little although of late I have been writing poems on Sexuality which is new for me the fact is that I am not comfortable with the physical this may be a vestigal from my time considering being a priest I find that the body is separate from what I am intellectually and this is bad I think but it is a dichotomy I live with now.

Betsy Andrews is a Brooklyn-based writer and poet. She's the author of She-Devil (Sardines Press, 2003), New Jersey (Furniture Press, 2004) and In Trouble/C-3 (with Bruce Andrews, BoogCity, 2004). She's been the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships and residencies, including a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and the Philadelphia City Paper Prize. Her poems and essays can be found in publications including X-Connect, PomPom, Narrativity and the Yemeni newspaper, Culture. She reviews poetry, theater and experimental prose for Gay City News. Information about buying her chapbooks can be found at: She-Devil (Sardines Press, 2003) New Jersey (Furniture Press, 2004) In Trouble/C-3(flipbook with Bruce Andrews, Boog Press, 2004) See some of her work here and here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? My first-grade teacher, Mrs. Martin, was a crabby ol' thing. Yelling. Screaming. Humiliating. But she did attempt to have us recite poems. About birds. I remember the first poem I memorized and recited to the class was about the Pennsylvania state bird (I'm from just outside Philly) -- the roughed grouse. The other students basically didn't bother with the memorizing and recitation, but I was hooked. I went on to recite a veritable aviary to the class. The roughed grouse has remained close to my heart ever since. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? New York Magazine. Their reactionary politics can be breathtakingly awful. But as far as NY gossip and entertainment, it's such deep garbage, it's delicious. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? I don't consciously riff off any particular philosophers or philosophical stance. I do, though, think that I write against a particular philosophical stance, i.e. my poetry is anti-Cartesian. The soul is located in every cell of every body, in every cell of everything in my work. I remember putting together my MFA manuscript and thinking that the soul in my poems was like Hawthorne's "The Birthmark" -- the deeper you cut, the deeper in the birthmark sinks. The soul is endless. It seems "good work" to take a stand against a philosophy that basically allowed for the gruesome dissection of so many live, unanesthetized dogs in the Renaissance. Post-modernists might think of Descartes as an old chestnut that's already been smashed to bits, but the primacy of biochemistry, biophysics and genetic science shows he's still very much alive and scarfing up the government grants in order to implant chips in our brains and eliminate our brilliant idiosyncrasies. This is why I loved "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" -- it was so anti-Cartesian, i.e. memory and experience exist in the body in places other than the brain. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? First and foremost, Audre Lorde. For me, she represents self-respect, self-empowerment, self-actualization, self-awareness as the basis of activism, as the basis of writing, in order to live correctly and to help change the world for the better. If her work cannot be called precisely "experimental", it's impossible to dismiss her importance. Essex Hemphill, same reason as Audre Lorde. Both African-American and gay, both now dead of pandemics, Hemphill of AIDS, Lourde of breast cancer. Czeslaw Milosz -- his spirituality, the political urgency of his earlier work, his lyricism as well as his dry Eastern European irony, his eyebrows. Bei Dao -- to be that clean and controlled in your writing while living in forced exile. Nina Cassian -- sort of an inverse of Bei Dao, to be so lush and ecstatic in a state of exile. "Temptation" is like the most life-affirming poem ever, so I can even forgive her invocation of the Book of Genesis. Among my "peers", I really dig Thomas Sayers Ellis -- you're totally entertained and laughing and it's off the wall, and you learn something real. Lila Zemborain's work is beautiful and eerie/scary and intellectual while also being so visceral and of the body, like a dissection, yes. I wish I could read it in the original Spanish. Speaking of Spanish, I also found all the work in Jen Hofer's edited volume Sin puertas visibles: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women (2003) really amazing. Gotta give her lots of props for helping to usher that work across the borders of country and language. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? Admittedly, there are times when I haven't read a lot of poetry. Now is not one of those times. In horrible times, poetry is utterly necessary. And the energy I get from the poetry of my peers feeds the energy in my own work. It feels so urgent today. When I'm not reading as much poetry, I'm not writing as much poetry. I think that the relationship could be cyclical, and related to the organic evolution of my craft, of the writing self, so there was a period not too long ago when I really took a break from poetry in order to have a growth in my process and my craft, an opening up (though, at the time, I didn't know what was happening and sort of despaired). I read a lot of prose at that time, wrote prose -- creative non-fiction, started a novel. And then I found that I had busted through to the new poetical dimension, and now I'm immersed in reading and writing poetry again. I mean, for the first time in my life, I'm writing poetry on the subway, probably because I'm reading poetry on the subway. I guess I learned to trust the cycles. With dark irony, it was September 11th and the Bushian (Bushite? Bushological? -- no, let's not give him his own philosophy.) drive toward war that forced me back to poetry. I was in this group of poets called Debunker Mentality (thanks to Kristen Prevallet for our name) that went out and wheat-pasted important anti-war poems and writing up around town after 9/11, poems from poets around the globe who preceded us in their experience of historical disaster and annihilation, and from whom we all could learn. It felt like an answer to the totalitarian rhetoric of the Right and the fumblings on the Left. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? A lot a lot a lot of stuff, I'm sure. There are 119,000,000 items in the Library of Congress. Something always to look forward to. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? On Poetry, An Explanation for Gina It’s like the bird, a common bird, one you see all the time that disappoints you because it’s ordinary. Until a day, one day, you set the tables in the cafe. You are laying down the spoons. And the bird is in the small potted tree between the tables and it calls and you cannot know the meaning of its call. The bird flies away to the lamppost on the corner to the crossbeam which is hollow where, you know now, it’s built a nest. You are laying down the knives, you are topping off the sugar. The ordinary bird, it calls. You are laying down the forks. You are wiping off the chair backs. The ordinary bird, it flies to a branch in the small potted tree between the tables, and the ordinary bird, it calls. You are setting out the water glasses, topping off the salt. At your feet is another plain bird. The ordinary bird flies to the lamppost on the corner. The plain bird at your feet turns around. The ordinary bird in the crossbeam in the hollow is calling. You polish the knives. The ordinary bird flies to the tree between the tables. The plain bird on the ground finds its wings. The ordinary bird from the lamppost on the corner follows its fledgling to the nest. And you top off the pepper, and the day is like no other, and the call of an ordinary bird is like love that by rare odds and resolution guides a chick back home to the most unexpected of places. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? I guess I believe in a role for the artist, to strive for an awakened consciousness, to be the keeper of memory in the face of political annihilation of memory and of peoples, and to be willing to be messy, embarrassing, emotional, angry, deeply deeply loving, to be open to the world. To love it all despite its failings, despite our own failings. I mean love. Lovey-dove. In the most concrete, exacting ways possible. I think of Muriel Rukeyser's "Waking This Morning" and George Oppen's "If It All Went Up In Smoke." Of course, this doesn't mean we have any "answers" -- it's more like what I've gleaned from kari edwards' iduna: we have questions. We need to question the established truths, then question our questions, and question our questions about our questions, and so forth. And then sometimes go on faith that, in the midst of the constant querying, something that feels real and useful can still be communicated, or else we'd lose the ability to write at all. Indeterminacy doesn't mean nothingness. It's like Gertrude Stein on her death bed asking, "What is the answer?" and when there was silence, asking, "Ok, then, what is the question?" This is no different than what I think everyone should do. Artists just allow themselves to do it. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**Aunt Dan Chiseled**face I**spy Of**a moment Form**and function 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? My body, the relation of my body to experience, to sex, to violence, the movement of my body through space, the soul and the mind within my body were for a long time my main subject matter. Body body body body body. I was frustrated to find that a lot of "experimental" poetry for awhile there seemed to erase the body (and I'm glad to see the work shifting quite a lot back to the body). I remember having a discussion with Camille Roy about it. I wondered how women poets could ignore the body. Neither of us saw how it was possible for lesbian poets to ignore the body. Our bodies are the grounds of such political and cultural contention. We can't escape them. But who would want to? They're so utterly delicious and so utterly terrifying at the same time, vulnerable and resilient all at once. They're the fields of pleasure and the fields of pain. Today, given the horrifying political times we find ourselves in, it's been really important and intuitive to have an urgency about the body that isn't so myopic or narcissistic, but which turns the reader's attention upon the bodies that are threatened, damaged, destroyed in the name of "America", both the bodies of people living outside that construct we call the United States and the bodies of people living in and working in/for the United States, particularly people in the military. There is no poetry without the body, as far as I'm concerned. We're living in a material world, to quote the diva.