Born in 1971, Standard Schaefer grew up in Houston, Texas and often traveled the landscapes of the American West in a bus with elk horns on the hood while his Uncle Bob Meyer drove his summer campers around under the name “Meyer’s Mountain Men.” After leaving Texas for good at the age of 19, he attended college in Los Angeles where he lived in a precarious exile for 13 years while attaining a B.A. in Comparative Literature, and an MFA in writing. During that time, he became acquainted with College of Neglected Science, particularly poets Dennis Phillips, Martha Ronk, Paul Vangelisti and Bob Crosson, the other Uncle Bob to whose memory much of this book is devoted. While in Los Angeles, he co-edited a literary journal called Rhizome with Evan Calbi and later one called Ribot with Paul Vangelisti. Shortly after his first book of poetry Nova was selected for the 1999 National Poetry Series, he learned to fly-fish and began spending more time in the Owens Valley, where the inspiration for Water & Power first seized him and caused him to reflect back on the landscapes of his youth, the anti-Walden implications of life west of the Mississippi, and the culture industry that sustains and undermines it today. He, his wife Paris, and two beagles, Walter and Martha, have recently relocated to San Francisco, CA where he serves occasionally as a teacher, a free lance writer, speculator, whistle-blower, media activist, and student as well as the non-fiction editor of the New Review of Literature. You can find him at the casting pool in Golden Gate Park, treading up and down Bernal Hill with the beagles, hunkered in the Media Lab at the New College of California or lurking through the stacks at Green Apple Books. Otherwise, he can be reached at standardschaefer@sbcglobal.net. Buy his books here. See some work here, here and here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? I can’t remember. I think it was something by Robert Browning. I remember being drawn in by slow, strange, muscular rhythms. I remember coming across Swinburne fairly early on and finding that rhythms evoked in me things the “meaning” could only amplifiy. Then I remember discovering it didn’t have to rhyme. The less frequently the rhymes, the greater the noise. “My Last Duchess” may have been the one that did me in. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? I love crime novels. My favorites are Ross McDonald, Chester Himes, Chandler and Hammett of course, especially Hammett. But I’m also nuts about James Ellroy. This French guy Manchette is good. I find they have fairly philosophical and moral implications that usually exceed those of most so-called literary novels these days. Plus they address social issues from how people actually behave, not from how they’d like to or like to think they were behaving. The best ones share not only with Dostoevsky but also Spinoza, Gramsci, and Machiavelli. And the style is essential to the content just as it is with Spinoza or Machiavelli. You can see through them all kinds of suggestive notions about what democracy could be, what other possible relationships between humans and their possessions are possible. I find them a lot more intellectually stimulating and moving than a lot of poetry. It isn’t at all just genre work and its best innovators are not simply reacting against the genre. There are guys like James Sallis who is unto himself, with no pretences. Sallis, who is white, has a fantastic series of novels with a black protaganist that really allows him to address historical and social concerns much more fully, much more lyrically than most “literary” types, especially the ones who think they’re writing provocatively about politics. Sallis knows many things, one of which is that lyricism itself is a kind of logic, more true than reason often, as it reveals correspondences, cross-connections and doesn’t confuse effects with their causes. He writes novels in which politics is immanence, co-extensive with existence. They’re never finished, exactly, his novels. I don’t mean end abruptly, but the series itself hangs together more as a constellation of meditations ultimately, though with satisfying events and characters that force the meditations to become ever more nuanced. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? Philosophy is crucially important to my life, but perhaps not so much to my writing. I find that standing in an overlit grocery store can cause me to meditate on Parmenides and that without Aristotle, I may never escape aisle nine. We’re so baraged by noise, it’s important to have schemas by which to make deciscions especially when the culture is beating all the emotional information out of you, which seems to happen, curiously, through constant arousal and stimulation of various kinds. Truth is what desire is capable of asserting. The truth of the grocery store is often more assertive than I am. But the art I produce, and the other art that comes to inhabit me (I won’t say that I consume it, just invite it in) give me powers that help me navigate so that I never have to go near the sirens of the big box grocery store. It keeps me feeling desires much greater than myself and much larger than the steroid-laced tomatoes at Safeway. And of course there philosophers like Georgio Agamben, Alain Badiou or even Adorno who can reinvigorate whatever poetic exploration you’re doing. I tend to read more philosophy than anything else, but I suspect that I really only use it to help me think about a large project when I’m getting tangled in the details of it, which is most often where I travel, in the syllables themselves. Only later when I’ve collected enough syllables can philosophy really guide me. In the end, though, it is crucial to remember that art does not need philosophy to justify it, to reduce either to a service or form of therapy or even education. Art delivers us from barren concepts and philosophy more of than not just hollows out concepts. There are, fortunately, a few exceptions but they probably don’t really fall into the category of philosophy themselves anymore. The best of them aren’t even theories, but a set of tools by which one produces new concepts, new incarnations of concepts. The truths that art activates are irreducible to the truths of philosophy or evidence of someone’s theory. Art is about immanence. Philosophy seems largely at best still moving toward immanence. Both seem at their most affirming when they are rigorously co-existensive to the truths each in its own way generates. Both are that their most negative when they become strictly critical exercises, when they foreclose on the imagination. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? Recently I found myself writing an imaginary exchange between James Baldwin and Walter Benjamin because I couldn’t help thinking that while they shared a drive toward exile emotionally and politically, both in their way had something the other lacked. That’s how I tend to read writers from other traditions, as if I know in advance they have something I need. More often than not it seems to me their race or identitiy is only one aspect and that where I cannot identify with them, I refuse to pity. What I find is that what informs me most is writing that defies the logic of capitalism (schizophrenic as that logic often is), the logic of alienation, and that draws from a faith in the irrational, the non-economic. So I love writers like Amos Tutuola who have fierce imaginations, that seem to reach through to other possible worlds and hang there in the intercies. A young African-American poet I really like is Kevin Young, his honking but lush blues rhythms are startling and he’s captured the complexity of that seemingly simple music while dispensing with a lot of the repetitious phrasing. His music makes me feel that there are kinds of desires and capabilities that we have yet to fully imagine and that the ones we have imagined are still worth pursuing. One of my favorite writers is a largely unknown Cuban, Virgilio Piñera, author COLD TALES. There’s a little Inoesco and Beckett in him, but he’s more terrifying. He reminds us that terror is also an obligation to love no master. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? I read a lot of poetry because I co-edit a magazine called The New Review of Literature and even though I don’t edit the poetry section, I feel obligated to read it, compare what others are publishing. And of course, I have my favorites that I simply must read. But I do find that most of the contemporary work I read these days is in magazines. I read them and not the books it seems more and more. It helps me feel like there is more variety out there than I suspect really exists. I know quite a few translators and find that what really grabs me these days is poetry from Italy and Brazil. Occassionally, I try to model a poem on someone else, someone whose work seem totally foreign to me. It always fails as an imitation but often produces something else entirely that is compelling on its own. Otherwise, I can’t say that I’m influenced by it, not anymore. When I was younger, I would absorb what I thought someone’s sensibility might be…never intentially, but I’d find I was duplicating a rhythm or something. Lately I’ve been re-reading one or two poems over and over. Pessoa’s “The Tobacco Shop” and the 17th canto of Paradise where Dante really starts in on heaven as a form of exile. The things that feel most important to me are things I’ve already read. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? Milton. When anyone ever mentions Milton, I think of Rodney Dangerfield’s line: “Milton, you’re killing me with all these angels.” I also can’t get too far into Charles Olson because I sense that the primary material was immensely more compelling and I’m not wild about the music in either Olson or Milton. Dangerfield, obviously, had quite an ear. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? I think I’d rather hear what the seven year old has to say about poetry. Laynie Browne once told me she had this very young student who wrote, “Liberty is an elephant swimming toward Kansas.” It seems to capture the relationship between liberty and poetry pretty well and that’s what I’d hope the child came away with. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? The word “citizen” implies a notion of sovereignty and it may well be the case that Plato understood poets to be incompatible with sovereignty because language does so much more than simply representing. It’s performative, legislative, productive and ruinous. Poetry itself is a realm of immanence, a long communication in which a particular poet may not have anything new to say, only to add. The reason poetry has been called “news that stays new” is that the additions augment not only what has been said, but begin to suggest new ideas, new possibilities, new questions. So I think the poet should attempt to engage the long pre-existing discourse, in whatever way, no matter how oblique as long it adds something, and doesn’t detract. Poets who speak as if they are equally or more interested in citizenship really have nothing to add, only to mimick. I prefer that poets be what Gramsci called “organic intellectuals” or what is sometimes called “vernacular intellectuals.” They may be whatever else they like, but they should have ambitions and traditions in which they attempt to work, even if they attempt to work against it. This at least will increase the odds the work is interesting to someone beyond themselves. A poet who is primarily interested in himself or herself is not likely doing anyone or anything good. But enough with the talk of poets and their politics, so much less interesting than poetry. In real life I’m a bit of an activist, am drawn to activists, so I have a very low tolerance for poets who equate their poems with some kind of activism, especially those who curiously see it as an engagement analagous to voting or canvasing for the Democratic Party. Writing poetry is to be active in this long discourse where the Democratic Party or even Stalin is a minor footnote. It’s just that discourse and citizenship are insufficient forms of living whereas poetry comes very close. If politics becomes more like poetry, that is, if it becomes a form of immanence, the poet’s political potential will increase dramatically. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**Chiffon Chiseled**cream I**Ire. Of**Off Form**Flood 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? Well, every “body” is some kind of “media.” Bodies are interesting since they naturally imply much more to life than representation. So sometimes, the relation is everything. Other times, the body and the text have blissfully nothing to do with one another.I have a chronic pain condition and I find that writing engages me in a way that let’s me forget about my body for long periods, the way some people do with meditation. While writing when I’m in pain, I experience something like an enhanced or enlarged consciousness. I feel full. Not exactly happy, not exactly miserable, just complete, not harried. You’re occupied but not feeling overly busy. The physical pain is there but it doesn’t bother you. I don’t know that this helps the writing, but it is one reason that I like to write even when I’ve recently been made aware of the very few other rewards it produces. But as for the content or form of the things I write, I can only say that I’m drawn to some hard, chiseled language at times and that I hope my work ‘embodies’ ideas at other times. But even that seems like only one possible outcome. Are there other things than ideas to embody? I’m afraid I’m just not very postmodern. Not like some Baudrillard devotees I’ve known. They’re odd group. They invariably confuse me for hours until I realize through their heavy French accents that they are saying “Body” and not “Birdie.” Which is too bad. I’m much more interested in the relationship between texts and birdies. To birdies, it is all birdies. It is not bodies or texts.