Photo by Jules Boykoff (in the Denver Airport). I’m wearing a coat that poet Susana Gardner gave me to warm me for a snowy Washington DC protest against the current war in Iraq. BORN IN FAIRBANKS, ALASKA, IN 1972, KAIA SAND was raised in Oregon. In 1997, she created the Tangent—a zine of politics and the arts—with Jules Boykoff and their brothers, Neal Sand and Max Boykoff. They have expanded the Tangent into a press that publishes chapbooks and pamphlets. She was active in a Washington, DC, poetry scene from 1998-2004, where she edited So to Speak: a feminist journal of language and art, curated the In Your Ear poetry reading series at the District of Columbia Arts Center with Jules Boykoff and Tom Orange, and taught at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Living in Walla Walla, Washington last year, she and Jules Boykoff hosted tangentradio on poetry & politics, broadcasting poetry readings from Tokyo, Japan, to Brighton, England, to Schaffhausen, Switzerland. Sand is the author of the poetry collection interval (Edge Books 2004), and collaborative chapbooks Exit with Jules Boykoff and Aquifer (with Mark Wallace’s A Monstrous Failure of Contemplation). Printer/bookmaker Ruth Lingen typeset Sand’s poetry in a handmade book limited edition called 2005. Sand currently teaches at Willamette University and lives in Portland, Oregon, with Jules Boykoff. See some work here, here, here and here. See a conversation with Carol Mirakove here. See a prose photo essay co-written with Jules Boykoff on here. Buy her book here or here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? As a kid, William Stafford was significant, because he was such a big presence in Oregon. When I was in college, William Carlos Williams’s Paterson really opened things up for me, and I spent a lot of time engaged with his search for a new measure. I didn’t know until later, but the same poem had affected my brother when he was in college, so we both have beloved copies of Paterson. I found Mina Loy through Williams (partially because I saw a picture of one of her fabulous hats), and I chased down Insel around that time. Another poet who mattered a lot early was Sonia Sanchez—I remember a love poem that went “welcome home, my prince/into my white season of no you/welcome home/to my songs/that touch yo/head.” I loved the sounds. And a little later, Carolyn Forché’s work became very important to me. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? Gossipy tabloidy stuff—I love the images, and I don’t have a television, so I try to catch up! Right now, too, books on meditation. Because I’ve been paring down, self-help-y books on clearing clutter. Generally, aside from poetry, non-fiction books and journalism—for instance, Daniel Kevles’s book on eugenics, but I don’t think that’d be surprising, because that makes it into poems. But it all does. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? I’m always chipping away. Ideas take eventual shape in the poems. I’m grateful for a historical relationship between poetry and philosophy, and I try not to take that for granted. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? I read a number of poets in translation that mattered a great deal to my own poetic development—Nazim Hikmet, Anna Akhmatova, Yannis Ritsos, Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Otto René Castillo, Federico García Lorca, Nicolás Guillén. Especially, especially Vallejo. If I look around now, at poets writing in the United States who are important to me—Amiri Baraka, Lucille Clifton, Linh Dinh, Mytili Jagannathan, Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Tracie Morris, Harryette Mullen, Deborah Richards (well, she’s in England now, but she’s mostly published in the US), Sonia Sanchez, Edwin Torres, Rodrigo Toscano. The late Lorenzo Thomas. This list keeps going, so I think I’ll stop and chalk up omissions to a rapid response. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? It’s always a conversation. Lovely to get poetry by mail: Buck Downs’s postcards, or self-publish or perish chapbooks like Jane Sprague’s Port of Los Angeles, or poems that DC poet Cathy Eisenhower writes and staples together in one weekend. Right now, I am reading Eleni Sikelianos’s The California Poem and Jonathan Skinner’s Political Cactus Poems. Also Wordsworth. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? I’m trying to bolster my patchwork reading of the Romantics. Wordsworth right now. Shelley on the horizon. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? We are always making things with language—we do this through conversations every day—we make something out of nothing. With poetry, we’re more aware of what we’ve created with language. Poetry is like a window built of stained glass, rather than clear glass—a bird will notice it, rather than try to fly through it and bonk its head! 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? Interesting for me to have these two roles contrasted, because I think of poet as citizen. I don’t lose my citizen responsibilities when I begin to write. I read recently (in a book called Summer in the City by Mary Cole) a quote by Monsignor Fox who said that “through creativity you can get people a little off balance” (he was talking about his program that worked for urban social justice through art in the 1960s), and I really love this. That’s the hope, yes? Skewing, slanting, shoving—how do we disrupt insidious “progress”? Because the goosestep is harder to do when you are a little off balance. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**Latitude Chiseled**Mouth I**Out Of**Oppen Form**Rice 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? This is a really interesting question for me, in a two-fold way. First of all, I’m working on a manuscript called why this body decided to be left-handed, and from eugenics to bloodtypes, it’s bodily! I lived a quieter year last year than I had in a long time (I was living in Walla Walla, Washington, biking by one-speed), and in this process, I could listen to my body more, be aware of my relationship to it, which is urgent, since a woman’s body is claimed by so many interests, and I must always re-learn how to stake my own interest. One area that comes up lately in my writing is a tension between glamour and objectification. Loving a little glamour, I’m seeking reconciliation! Secondly, writing itself is very, very physical to me. I like to call my writing space a studio, and to feel the material presence of language—both in terms of my own body with the abstractions of words, but also, with the process of writing. I collage my own words—right now, I’m often drafting by gluing words over old words. I seem to remember that George Oppen sometimes nailed drafts on top of drafts, with a wood backing. I mostly compose on a manual typewriter, because it’s so physical, and because the speed is just about right for me when I’m working on poetry. Then, I layout poems on a computer, to really place words on the page that way. The text forms a field, yes, but with physicality---so, maybe it’s more of a body for me.