Christine Hume is the author of Musca Domestica (Beacon Press 2000 and Alaskaphrenia (New Issues 2004). Her reviews and critical essays have appeared or are forthcoming in American Women Poets in the 21st Century, Under the Influence, and Poets in the 21st Century (Wesleyan 2002, 2005, 2006) as well as many journals. She lives in Ann Arbor, MI with her partner, Jeff Clark, and their daughter, Juna Hume Clark. She teaches at Eastern Michigan University. Buy her books here and here. See some work here and here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? I loved pnemonic devices like Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge, Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally, My Very Educated Mother Just Served Up Nine Pizzas, and jump rope songs (or spells against missing)—all kinds of incantations and condensations of language. This is probably unfathomable to many well-educated poets, but I don’t recall ever reading a poem until I was in 11th grade when I fell for Blake’s “The Tyger.” Its stalking, insistant rhythm seemed closer to the music I was listening to at the time than any language I had ever heard; and that the poem gave truculence to questions (rather than imperatives) was perfectly in tune with my teenage fears, dreads, tears. Also the syncopated verbo-visual narrative mined terrible contraries I felt in dialogue with. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? Nothing surprising. I have sections of my bookshelf devoted to literature about plagues, parasites, old medical text books, travelogues. And 19th century science writing: I haven’t found any other genre that better delivers speculative wanderings in hypotactic sentences. It’s a pleasingly outdated lyric style, capable of transformations and absurdly imposing narrartives that give the illusion of simply peeling back surfaces or using supersensory perception sharpened on awe. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? If you mean the systematic academic discipline: not very. Otherwise, I would hardly be alive if I weren’t half in love with inquiry into “reality” and “wisdom.” That said, I stick to a nomadic, “delicious indolence” of reading and thinking. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? The ecstatic emphasis on sensation appeals to me in Vallejo, where style is a revolving door between a traditional past and an audaciaous future. Césaire’s kinetic unhinging of French (writing in an unFrench) amazes me past the point of panic. Generally, I gravitate toward work that sounds translated, that foregrounds almost unmanageable dictions and syntaxes, that risks awkwardness, misrecognition, dislocation, and feels like it’s creating itself as it goes. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? Lately I listen to a lot of poetry—sound poetry like Tracie Morris, Cris Cheek, Christian Bök, but also cross-over artists like Janet Cardiff, DJ Spooky, and Vito Acconci. David Grubbs has made several stunning sound poems from Susan Howe’s work, coming out very soon. It’s an addictive pleasure, to keep awake to the acoustic carnality of sound and it’s rhythmic potencies, and one that gives me hope for the future of “the poetry reading.” 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? Ulysses—though I have read—or “read”—Finnegan’s Wake. After it, Ulysses seems like a let down and I’ve never gotten past the first chapter or two. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? I’d read your seven year old some poetry and let the child explain what it is to me. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? I don’t believe in any prescribed role, but hopefully, there are describable tendencies. As a poet you do what you can to derail your habitualized trains of thought, and to awaken others to the discoveries that explore language as a reciprocal mechanism that permeates our relationships to the world. Poetry itself exists at a linguistic crisis point, evolving, as Stevens says, from a series of conflicts between the denotative and the connotative forces in words; poets exploit that half-latent unreason endemic to all ordinary language. Poetry especially encourages us to pay attention at the local level; reading and writing can contribute to and confront how we engage with community. This might seem an evasive or ephemeral response, but I think being an artist is a necessary political act that is easily ridden with guilt by product-happy people. The feeling of inauthenticity under much lyric activity, and a pervasive anxiety at the supposed halo of narcissistic leisure involved in “creative writing” turns on the idea of quantitative mastery and capital production. So much of the task of writing poetry means dwelling in dilemma and crisis, grappling with a trial-and-error method (Beckett’s “Fail again. Fail better.”) that it may not seem like the most efficient way to live one’s life; those are attitudes that are recalcitrant in our culture and difficult not to absorb or internalize at some level. Poetry’s attention to language and structure provides an exemplary model for local political participation and active speculation. Everyone got her leftist badge on after 9/11, but what kinds of local activities/activisms might she have been involved in prior to this cataclysm? There’s something terrifying in the compassion and commitment (one not necessarily fueled by outrage) it takes to help on a local level—to volunteer at a food bank or a literacy program or a Big Sister program. Here’s a way we might escape the bitterness of a crippling realization of political limits that require deeply ironic detachment or frustration. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**Luna Chiseled**Beckett I**Not Of**on Form**Morph 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? Words give me routes back to bodies, to the somatics of sublimated bodies. Being seven months pregnant, I find it impossible to forget the body for long; it figures into (though does not fit into) almost every thought. A nine month sentence. The literalness of being haunted heightens the feeling of being trapped in language as one is trapped in a body. Not: I am not myself, rather: I am much more than myself, which is an ideal state for writing that wants to act like a nervous system and to perform erotic experiences.