Jeffrey McDaniel is the author of Alibi School, The Forgiveness Parade, and most recently The Splinter Factory. His poems have appeared in dozens of periodicals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, New (American) Poets, and The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. He is a recipient of grants from the NEA and the DC Commission for the Arts. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. Buy his books here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? The first poem that grabbed me by the throat was probably The Lost Pilot by James Tate. It was my first month of college and my creative writing professor, Thomas Lux, sent me to the library to read Tate, Bill Knott, and Charles Simic. I felt an immediate connection to their work: the wild, preciseness of their imagery, the subversive accessibility. The Lost Pilot stuck out for its surface of stark, surreal images, layered over an intense emotional subtext. Perhaps I should add that despite the fact that I smoked lots of pot back then, I wasn’t particularly open-minded when it came to poetry. I was extremely dismissive. I also didn’t grow up in a house where people talked about art, and I wasn’t exposed to much poetry in high school, though I scrawled a great deal of it into notebooks. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? The sports section, chess puzzles, travel articles, the world socialist website. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? Part of me wonders if the words “poetry” and “philosophy” should be allowed in the same sentence. Maybe it’s a contradiction in my vocabulary, but I have felt perfectly comfortable identifying as a “poet” since the age of 16, but rarely use the word “philosophy”, especially when preceded by the pronoun “my”. If instead of “philosophy” I substitute the words “approach to life”, I might answer I was born and raised in the realm of immediate gratification, but I am moving away from that, into the realm of delayed gratification. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? Baudelaire (is French anglo?); the surrealists; Cesar Vallejo for his passionate wrestling with God; Borges for his passionate imagination; Manuel Puig; Ibsen, Chekhov, Marina Tsvetaeva; Rilke; Zbigniew Herbert; Pushkin; Dostoevsky; Rilke; Szymborkska. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? I read quite a lot these days. When I was younger, it was easy to be more defiant on this issue, rejecting entire centuries. But the longer I keep stepping in the ring of emptiness known as the blank page, the more necessary it is to read. Also to stay alive. I need friends inside my head. I no longer perceive reading as merely fun. Whether I like or don’t like isn’t the question. It’s something I do. It feeds an inner part of me that is irreversibly connected to the same soil I till for my own work. It feeds me. Reading a great book is like going for a multi-day hike through a national park of language. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? The Romantics. They’re like this hill covered with trees and slick grass. I take a few quick steps up, then I stumble and slide back down. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? Seven year olds are curiosity machines. They are more intuitive than most poets, so perhaps they should be explaining (through lived example) poetry to us, not the craft obviously, but the ability to perceive the world in fresh and original ways. But if I was pressed to define poetry in a sentence at this second I would say: poetry is chiseled breath. The people who might need poetry explained to them are the millions of adults in this country who have nothing to do with poetry. I would explain poetry to them by reading a poem that seemed relevant. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? When I was in my teens and early 20’s, I cherished the notion of the poet as a wild, rugged, debauched, hard drinking free spirit: Dylan Thomas etc. That turned out to be a dead end of sorts. In the past five years or so, I have become increasingly aware of myself as being a product of the United States and have begun to feel an obligation to educate myself in terms of history and current events, both US politics and World politics since the two are so intertwined. Being a citizen of the US is like being a spoiled child of a Colombian drug lord. We live in a big house with a gate. We see our Daddy go off to work each morning in a suit, in a limousine. He brings us back presents. But we don’t really know what he does for a living. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**grass Chiseled**breath I**tarzan, you pronoun Of**course Form**human 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? The question feels like it’s dressed so fancy; I need to put it into a more laid back outfit so I can interact with it. So my body is this thing that I am going through life in, it’s the automobile of my spirit, how I move through the world, and all my experiences get filtered through it, and it’s also what other people encounter when they look at me. And my senses are attached to it. And what I experience, feel, think, taste, see, smell all feeds into my work, whether it’s imagination or memory, whether the piece is autobiographical or invented, it’s still fed or filtered through my reservoir of my experience, which I am dependent on my body for. So there would be no text without this body. And perhaps the texts I produced would be different if I traveled through life in a different body, because my brain and senses might be different. Like, (this is a kind of cheesy comparison), imagine a 75-year road trip, and how it’s different if you are on a motorcycle, or in a tour bus, or an old Volvo, or a sports car with the top down.