Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino: I was born in Greenwich Village, New York, at Columbus Hospital (now St. Vincent’s), however I did most of my growing up in New Jersey, in our country home, and it was there that I was educated, at home, by my mother, who was a very kind and gentle person. I learned about the woods and the animals all around our home, and how to read the stars, and I learned about music and how to play the guitar, but most of all I was introduced to poetry, and I wrote songs—lyrics, my first poems were song lyrics—for the guitar (currently I’m favoring my Gibson L1, my style is a mix of Burl Ives, Philip Glass and Richard Wagner). When it was time to go to school, it was decided I should go to Fordham, and I lived on Decatur Avenue, the Rose Hill campus nearby (from my window I could see the spires of Keating Hall). This was the beginning of a terrible time for me—I had a sort of “culture shock” and I never left my apartment except to go to class or to get into the car to take me home. Eventually I would venture to Poe Cottage, nearby, and it was there that I met Cubby, who was, like me, “unlikely,” and something out of Edward Gorey. Cubby was pale and white and black and gray and years ahead of me at Fordham. It was decided we should live together. Then Cubby brought home Geppetta and it was time to leave The Bronx, leaving the hills at St. Ursula’s, the tennis courts and the rose bushes, Poe Cottage, the black trees outside St. Thomas and all our secret hiding places for a cashew in Forest Hills, and that spring there were some terrific thunderstorms, and that winter there was plenty snow. But Forest Hills was too far from Manhattan, so we moved to Brooklyn Heights. Geppetta is an angel now and brings us news from everywhere. Cubby has a corner office in the Flatiron Building. My favorite Beatles songs are “Within You Without You” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.” I am editing the online journal, eratio postmodern poetry. Download his e-books here. Read some here, here, here, here and here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? It’s by E. E. Cummings, “anyone lived in a pretty how town.” I was a little boy, and I discovered with this poem, in this poem, something as unlikely as I was. Growing up, I had this poem, and I had other unlikely things, the whole world seemed unlikely. If there is anyone who knows anything about my work or who has the slightest inclination to understand my work and what informs it, and informs me, read this poem. . . . I wish some day, someone reads my poetry and feels that sort of affinity. I don’t want anything else—I just want that sort of reality to happen for my poetry, to have affinity with another poet, with a child poet. To be a child poet is a wonderful thing, to grow up and to be a poet and to always have that child in your heart—that’s my bliss. . . . This is sort of like what Roy Harvey Pearce refers to as the “Adamic” in his book, The Continuity of American Poetry. (The poet ought to be able to see things as though for the first time, like a child, or like Adam who saw things he didn’t have names for. . . .) 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? The Bible. Why. . . ? It’s the ultimate source (or one of them). With every paragraph I experience the “A-ha! That’s where that’s from!” effect. And I love to read about film: Camille Paglia’s BFI Film Classics book on Hitchcock’s The Birds is a piss. (And so is her audio commentary on Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct.) I’m a life-long fan of English gothic horror movies, and I have probably-too-many books and magazines, and now all the DVDs, on all that. There is some excellent scholarship now on the English gothic horror movies. I mean the Hammers. . . . Gothic horror has always been an absorbing experience for me. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? It’s very important. Probably it’s too important. Sometimes, for instance when I’m re-writing (and I do a lot of re-writing), it seizes the foreground—it becomes too conspicuous—and that’s not always good for me. But it’s important my poetry does not begin in philosophy—yes, philosophy certainly does inform my poetry, to the degree that it informs my poetics, for instance, and my Weltanschauung, obviously. But my poetry does not begin in philosophy—albeit I sometimes think of my poetry as an alternative to philosophy, as an alternative Weltanschauung, even. . . . Poetry, for me, begins in intuition, or in perception—it’s a seeing and a knowing, and a telling of experience. Being a poet is more of a religious thing, a Gnostic thing, for me than a philosophical thing—it’s a calling, it’s both a calling and a beckoning. . . . Having said that, I am indeed interested in philosophy—the linguistic philosophy as developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, for instance. In college my concentration was on the Mediaeval grammarians. (And I took courses and spent hours on Hegel and Kant, which was probably not good for me as a writer—I mean, I’d like to think or cogitate or calculate as well as Kant, but nobody wants to write like Kant, I mean he’s not exactly a prose stylist. I think Descartes was a good writer—if you really want to analyze the architecture of a philosopher’s thesis. . . .) In addition to the poets—Cummings, Dickinson, and I liked Longfellow and Poe, all the mystery and romance of the “story poems”—when I began learning philosophy then philosophy immediately began informing my poetry, and my life. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? Gertrude Stein. . . . Actually, I’m not sure who “non-Anglo-American” refers to. . . ? Some of my favorite non-American, non-English-language writers are Pär Lagerkvist, Rilke, Nietzsche, Hesse, Paul Klee, Fritz Zorn, Dante, Mohammed Mrabet is a piss, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen makes a sort of text-data out of the English language and I find that attractive, I like Baudelaire, Daumal very much and by way of Gurdjieff, Montaigne. . . . Why. . . ? Que sçais-je? 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? I read poetry every day. My home is a library—I’m surrounded by poetry. There’s always some poetry in my pack and I read on the subway and pretty much anywhere I find myself. I know this is not unusual—it’s a good thing! Yes, I read a lot of poetry! If you ask a singer or a songwriter what he knows he’ll tell you he knows songs—he knows the lyrics and the melodies to hundreds of songs. There’s an interview with Mick Jagger somewhere where he talks about all the songs he knows and says, to the effect, that his job is to know the lyrics to songs, ’cause he’s a singer (and he doesn’t mean only his own songs but the songs of other writers, the “standards”). Well, it’s a poet’s job to know the poems! Or just think how cool Michael McClure is to be able to get up there and do Chaucer—in Chaucer’s language! That’s just about as cool as it gets. . . . Reading poetry, I become inspired—like in Plato’s Ion, it’s a chain reaction! It is inconceivable to me how you can be a poet and not read poetry. Reading the poems—reading the poets!—we learn what they have achieved, and how and why. It’s as inconceivable to me as being a composer and never reading the scores, never knowing what Bach did technically and why he is great or what Wagner did technically and why it makes him great. . . . Scansion, anyone? 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? Well in light of the above: Alas, this can make for a very long list! Look at it this way: There are a lot of poets, and poetries, that I’d rather hear tell about, or read about, than tell about myself. There’s a fine book of essays, it’s published by Talisman House, it’s called The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry in Our Time. I’ve been reading these essays. I recommend this book. I suppose what I mean to say is I wish I had a better command of what my contemporaries were up to, although one can never have a complete command of the situation! I spend hours online and in the journals and when I come upon something that strikes me as intelligent and attractive I’ll investigate that writer, and one thing about this is that I “discover” a lot of writers I’d love to publish in eratio! 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? As soon as the child can read, or is a beginning reader, it’s okay for the child to read poetry, providing it’s poetry that’s appropriate for that child (A Child’s Garden of Verses, When We Were Very Young). Seven years is a fine age to begin to understand about poetry—what makes it tick, so to speak. It’s a good age to begin to understand about things like irony and metaphor and figures of speech and ambiguity, especially ambiguity, and things like double-entendres. . . . Some things, like paradox, may be too complicated. . . . I would introduce the “explanation” of “what a poem is” by way of a conversation about language (and speech and writing). That language is both a matter of communication and personal (or artistic) expression. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? If by “role” we mean the laureate, then yes. But it must be considered the role of the poet in the popular imagination, where the poet’s credibility has failed. The Amiri Baraka affair in New Jersey (and how was it not a failure for poets and for poetry?) did not help, certainly not so far as the popular imagination is concerned. With regard to things like “citizenship,” poetry is a subversive, it is transgressive. See the poetry of Emily Dickinson—Dickinson’s is the most subversive poetry ever by an American. (Not only from the perspective of a grammarian, but in terms of the utterance! This utterance—it is transgression—it is not “the role of the citizen,” it is, rather, the germ of culture. “Culture” and “citizen” are antipodes. . . .) With one deep breath, Dickinson is more transgressive, and so more subversive, than Baraka. . . . 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**clove Chiseled**furibundal I**so Of**so Form**so 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? Well, in “my writing,” it’s sort of like the word/flesh being made into flesh/word. I said poetry begins in intuition—well, that intuition produces an utterance (in the body). There are so many ways of misreading this question! To speak of a “relationship” is to speak of something “between,” something “common to.” Common to that intuition and that utterance is my body. My poetry is my body. . . . I don’t know how it can be any other way and still be poetry. . . .