photograph: Jules Boykoff (back right) in Bay Area park with poet David Buuck. Jules Boykoff was born in Madison, Wisconsin on 11 September 1970. He is a member of the editorial collective for The Tangent, a zine of politics and the arts,and he co-hosts a weekly radio program with Kaia Sand called TangentRadio: Poetry & Politics . Boykoff’s first full-length collection of poems—Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge—is forthcoming from Edge Books. He is the author of the multi-media poetry chapbook Philosophical Investigations Inna Neo-Con Roots-Dub Styley (Interrupting Cow Press, 2004) and Exit, a collaborative chapbook with Kaia Sand (The Tangent Press 2002). He lives in Portland, Oregon where he teaches political science at Pacific University. See some work here, here and here. See some non-fiction here and here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? Great question! In a more traditional vein, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” a poem that struck me as both beautiful and properly ‘wanderful’ for my then-(literally)-itinerant self. Over the course of weeks, I committed this poem to memory, mostly as I sat on a bench above Portland, Oregon’s Swan Island Industrial Park. Since then, I have met others who have committed this poem to memory. Incidentally, these poem-memorizers—of both Wordsworth as well as the work of other poets— are usually a little older than me. Such rote learning/memorization has fallen out of favor in recent pedagogical theory & practice, and, as a result, we have deprived generations of the satisfaction derived from etching a text into one’s mind, I say! (Not that I advocate the revival of full-fledged rote learning, but perhaps we could re-inject a little memorization, at least with poetry). My dad, who is not an avid reader of poetry, can recite Lorca at length. Larry, a Korean War vet slash fix-it man in I knew in Southern Maryland can recite Donne with great pleasure. Betty, the administrative assistant where I work, has Wordsworth’s work memorized to a truly admirable degree. Another early poem that really affected me was Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Sonny’s Lettah.” This poem, and the Forces of Victory album more generally, showed me what innovative, politically charged poetry could be. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? First of all, I should say that I read a lot of ‘non-literary’ writing, taking quite seriously James C. Scott’s maxim that if half your reading is not outside your area of expertise, you are risking intellectual extinction. Recently I have been trying to understand right-wing power in the United States from both historical and contemporary vantages. Therefore, I have read popular texts like Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. (New York: A Metropolitan / Owl Book, 2004) as well as influential Christian-Right novels such as Left Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1995) (I have only read the first book in this fascinating—& quite massive—series). Among more scholarly treatments of the subject, I have recently read two books by Sara Diamond: Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995) and Not by Politics Alone: The Enduring Influence of the Christian Right (New York: The Guilford Press, 1998). I am also reading selections from The Neoconservative Reader edited by Irwin Steltzer (New York: Grove Press, 2004). Whether any of this would surprise my peers/colleagues, I’m not sure. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? Social theory is very important to my writing. It helps me abstract outward, shifting registers in ways that help me re-think my writing: how and why I am doing it? More specifically, some theorists that have helped me in this way include David Harvey, Jeff Derksen, Édouard Glissant, Karl Marx, Catharine MacKinnon, Pierre Bourdieu, Guy Debord & many others. DC poet Rod Smith: Let us pause a moment to consider the relation of theory to poetry. Poets who do not have an interest in theory tend to be boring because their works are uninformed. Poets who have too much interest in theory tend to be boring because their works are not alive. This is what is known as a dichotomy. Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin: “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? I already mentioned the importance of Linton Kwesi Johnson. Others whose work I regularly consult include: Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Aime Cesaire, Kamau Brathwaite, Arturo Escobar, Angela Davis, Arundhati Roy, Federico García Lorca, Claude McKay, Renee Gladman, Ward Churchill, Linh Dinh, and Rodrigo Toscano. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? Yes, I read a fair bit of poetry, I think, although I do not read it for a living (which is to say I don’t teach English literature or writing—although I used to). It is important to my writing, too, I believe. I enjoy reading the new work of my contemporaries, and so I subscribe to a number of small-press journals (e.g. Tripwire, Pom2, Chain, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, FoArm, Ixnay, The Poker, Magazine Cypress, Combo, Skanky Possum, etc.) and consistently buy up the offerings from a number of small presses (e.g. Krupskaya, Edge Books, Palm Press, O Books, Atelos etc). The conversations & correspondence that ensue reading these journals & small-press books most assuredly factor into my writing, whether such post-reading dialogue (or trialogue, quadralogue, as the case may be) are with the writers of these poems or with others who have also read the work. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? I would like to propose instituting a weekly daylight savings time of an hour. During this hour, it would be mandatory that people read something (anything!). That would give us 52 more hours a year in which to read—yeow! 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? The first thing I would do is ask your seven year old to explain poetry to me. The second thing I would do is ask her/him why she/he said that. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? I see the role of the poet and the citizen as tightly intertwined. Poets who are intensely involved in the real world—exerting their citizenship through poetry and their poetry through citizenship—are the ones whose work I am usually most interested in, from Charles Olson to Ed Sanders to Kristin Prevallet to Heriberto Yepez. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**drop Chiseled**diction I**& I Of**if Form**worm 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? “We can surely accept the general proposition that, in our societies, the systems of texts are to be situated in a certain ‘political economy’ of the body…it is always the body that is at issue…The political investment of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labor power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection…the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body…This subjection is [obtained through the] knowledge and…mastery [of] what might be called the political technology of the body.” Or, at least that’s what Michel Foucault wrote about the relationship between punishment and the body in Discipline and Punish—I substituted the word ‘texts’ for ‘punishment,’ & I think it still makes some sense.