Brian Howe is a freelance writer and poet living in Chapel Hill, NC. He is a contributing writer at Pitchforkmedia.com and a contributing editor at Paste Magazine. He blogs at http://www.moistworks.com/ and http://slatherpuss.blogspot.com/. Howe's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Eratio, Octopus, GutCult, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency. He is a member of the Lucifer Poetics Group. See some work here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? Shelley's Ozymandias was included in my high school literature textbook and unlike the other poems, I "got" it intuitively. Plus, I was a Saki fan at the time and it had that punch-liney zinger at the end, which helped. I tend to enjoy works that have a compressed epic quality and drastic shifts in scale and perspective; I now recognize my response to Ozymandias as a foreshadowing of that proclivity, which would inform my own work over time. Most importantly, its imagery and neatly bundled "point" made poetry feel discernible to me in way that, say, The Wasteland did not. And it didn't hurt matters that I was already familiar with the name Ozymandias from Alan Moore's Watchmen comic books. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? I like to keep up with the trendy lit-fic that many poets I know have long since abandoned, but I've been burned by it too many times lately and am growing wary. Too often now, it's either vacantly transgressive, or it builds characters by amassing a variety of quirky detail – "let's see, we'll give this guy a sombrero, a monocle, an extra thumb, an ascot and a vintage pea coat" – instead of creating characters that seem real or evocative. I read a lot of graphic novels, although these are becoming increasingly literary, but I'm not just reading Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore – I like classic superhero comics too (not so much the modern superhero books, which tend to ruin them by trying to be cool, something comics are emphatically not). I like myths and archetypes, so that's no real stretch. I don't know, it seems like the term "literary" has been so denatured by mainstream postmodernism that it's difficult to figure out what is and isn't. I don't read much genre fiction – no DaVinci Code – but I do like Elmore Leonard, maybe he counts? 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? At this point, not that important, since I still haven't read a lot of the philosophy I'd like to read. I've read a lot of existentialism (what ex-teen hasn't?) and deconstruction (what critic hasn't?), some Wittgenstein, some Derrida, etc. I've read a lot more about philosophy and philosophers than I've read the source texts, and I enjoy writers like Brian Evenson and John Gardner, who embody philosophical concepts I've read about and intuitively (if not fully) grasp, in fictional constructs. But for the most part, philosophy is something, like classical music, that I admire, but which I'm holding in my mind's eye at a point a little ways down the road. Being in my mid-20s, I haven't had nearly enough time to read everything I'd like to read! But it's nice to have things to look forward to. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? Borges is one of my favorite writers, and his work (particularly The Library of Babel) is of crucial importance to my current project, F7, which makes use of Microsoft Word's built-in functions, particularly the spellchecker, and of various online programs and databases, to make poems. In the Library of Babel, Borges imagines a library with seemingly infinite stacks containing every possible permutation of every letter in every language known to man. Any reader encountering this story for the first time in the twenty-first century will immediately imagine Borges' library as a massive database, and this concept hit me hard – could a powerful enough computer randomly generating text achieve philosophical and scientific breakthroughs simply by chancing across the correct combination of words? A million tireless monkeys with a million typewriters and an infinite period of time. Think how many words there are on the Internet – if one could put them in the right order, by chance or skill, there would be no discovery that is off limits. Great novels that have yet to be written, great poems, scientific advances, brilliant new philosophies, all of this is buried somewhere in the ones and zeroes. They just haven't been put into the correct order, and the idea that they might be by technological means, independently of human thought, is both magnetic and a little scary. This really got me thinking about all the hidden wonders locked inside our text-related technology, and while I don't expect to stumble across a proof of the existence of God or anything, I am very interested in unearthing the shadow narratives latent in this technology. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? Poetry is very important to my writing; I read it constantly. Even while working on the aforementioned project, I am still returning to the sonnet, the sestina, the pantoum etc. when arranging them on the page, and clearly this whole project has a strong foothold in Lang Po. This is not to say I only read poetry and poetry-related books – I like to read across genres, since I would like my poetry to proceed from a broader sensibility, not just from poetry. In fact, I am not always sure that the things I write are poems – that is the tradition I proceed from, and I identify them as poems because they have to be called something. Poetry offers the most formal legroom, since, in my view, there is nothing you can put into a poem that makes it not a poem. Many would take issue with this, and it might be just another byproduct of postmodernism; nevertheless, I feel it's where we're headed. It seems to me we're at a stage where we still revere genre, even as it becomes obsolete with the opportunities for cultural exchange provided by the Internet and broadcast technologies, and so the "poetry" genre is the closest fit for my little mutants. Whatever poetry is and whatever my texts are, the whole construct has fallen far enough from the mainstream that there is a chance for those of us writing it today to redefine it at its roots. I don't advocate sweeping away what came before; I enjoy and admire many of the classics and their lasting relevance. That said, I do believe in disregarding their strictures when they begin to impede the possibilities inherent in poetry today. It's this living, breathing, rapidly evolving poetry culture, occurring on the dynamic setting of the Internet, which interests me, more than the museum culture of the classics. It is possible that I will grow out of it. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? Depends on how you define peers/colleagues. If you mean people who are around the same age, education and socioeconomic level as me, the thing that pops up with astonishing regularity is people being shocked that I've never read Brave New World. I'm getting to it, I promise. And if you mean other poets, many of whom are highly-educated professors and academics (as opposed to me, an art-school drop-out and autodidact), well – I doubt these learned souls assume that I've read much of anything! And they're right, while I've read a lot, in that context I feel as if I've barely cracked a spine. If I had to pick one thing (they are legion), I guess I'd say Zukofsky's A, since it is a seminal text aligned with my tastes. Again, I'm getting to it – it's really long! 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? If I were in a cynical mood, I'd build an absurdly oversized podium, mount it, and yell "Blah blah blah blah!" in a ponderous voice. Then I'd get and drunk and try to seduce an undergrad, or, if none were available, spend a while Googling my name. No, I'm kidding. Nursery rhymes may be most children's earliest experience with poetry (i.e. words exploited for their musicality, perhaps even subjugating content to sonority), although I take issue with the statement that poetry is necessarily musical. I believe that it is, but this statement usually carries the assumption that music is harmonious, when in fact, it can be abrasive, discordant, atonal, off-kilter, etc. So a nursery rhyme or saying that poetry is just "music made of words" wouldn't suit either, if only because the latter might indicate singing more than text. I suppose that in the end, I would tell the child that a poem happens when words become bored with stasis and come to life, when they grow tired of their literal or ironic (it's becoming difficult to locate the difference) meanings and attempt to mean more. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? No, I don't believe that poet should claim any special status or privilege above or different than the role of the citizen. The role of the poet is to make poems. The role of the poet is to keep the language supple and vibrant. The role of the poet is to constantly question, investigate and revise. The poet has many more roles within the context of the poetic community, but in the greater citizenry, I believe that these are the ones worth noting, and that they're no different, at root, than the role of any craftsman. Tony Tost once wrote that a dog is a poem made of bones, and a machine is a poem made of metal. I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. Just as a carpenter is a poet of wood, a poet is a poet of words, if I can get a little redundant. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**lime Chiseled**jaw line I**accept Of**anathema Form**fluid 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? At a time when I'm attempting to remove my body and the influence it exerts from my work, it's interesting to see how this is impossible. Have you tried typing random nonsense words on a keyboard, truly random? This is something I've run up against repeatedly in working on F7, and it's hard. Familiar patterns are so hardwired into my hands that I had to do all sorts of things to achieve anything approaching random – turning the keyboard upside down, for instance, and devising complex patterns of keystrokes. And for all my bluster about F7 being a creature that I merely usher into the world instead of a song of my experiences and personality, I keep winding up with poems called "Autobiography" and "Self-Portrait with Owls". I can't get myself out of them. More basically, my body moves across the keyboard and the text appears on the page.