Rachel Loden is the author of Hotel Imperium (Georgia), winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series Competition. Loden has also published four chapbooks, including The Richard Nixon Snow Globe (just out from Wild Honey Press) and The Last Campaign (prizewinner, Hudson Valley Writers’ Center). Her work is forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2005 (Scribner) and has appeared in The Pushcart Prize XXVI, The Hat, The Iowa Review, and Jacket, the latter two also publishing interviews. In 2002 she won a Fellowship in Poetry from the California Arts Council. She lives in Palo Alto where she is completing her second full-length manuscript. Buy her books here, here, here and here. See some poems here, here, here, and here. See another interview with her here. See a review here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? The absolute first poem was probably a song, “Balm in Gilead” as sung by Paul Robeson. “There is a balm in Gilead / To make the wounded whole.” It just killed me—the suffering was so intense and the promise of release so sweet. A little later I loved all the poems in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, especially “You are old, Father William” and “Jabberwocky.” I loved the sense of furious comic argument in the book. I loved the fact that Alice would try to recite poems like “How doth the little busy bee,” and they would come out all wrong. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? Not sure how to calibrate degrees of surprise—but as a child I read movie magazines and later the music press from Downbeat to Cheetah, Rolling Stone, Trouser Press, Rock and Roll Confidential and Musician. Now I’m much likelier to read Sasha Frere-Jones, Jane Dark, Ange Mlinko, and Jordan Davis. But wait—you wanted something non-literary! Is any reading matter really free from the nefarious clutches of literature? I picked up Marianne Faithfull’s autobiography when it came out, but then I wrote my first poem about Marianne Faithfull when I was about sixteen. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? I was raised by people who had a rather thoroughgoing political philosophy, one that didn’t seem to me to be serving them particularly well as people. Brecht talks about this in “To Posterity”: Even the hatred of squalor Makes the brow grow stern. Even anger against injustice Makes the voice grow harsh. Alas, we Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness Could not ourselves be kind. (translated by H. R. Hays) So I was the small spy in the house, living with such parents, but not entirely of them, and when I was out in the schoolyard, espionage was even more necessary. I had to disappear somehow among the children of people who had already deprived my father of his livelihood and might be capable of much worse. I wasn’t sure which philosophy I hated more. So my whole project was to throw all this over and live by my wits. There were limits to this approach—but it kept me nimble, and that was good training for poetry. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? I never think about writing this way. I just want something that takes off the top of my head and recently Robert Desnos is doing that. Kafka. Celan. Sappho, Li Po, Catullus, Lorca, Hikmet, Pessoa, Haavikko, Mayakovsky, the poet of “The Song of Songs,” and too many others to mention. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? Yes I do. It’s important enough that the first time I stood in the poetry stacks at Stanford, I got all verklempt. And that was without the luxury of borrowing books in my own name. As a person without much entrée to such places before marriage, I was just amazed that I got to be there at all. Almost always, the books I wanted were right on the shelf. And almost always—you can tell this at Stanford—they had never been taken out by anybody else. That part was sad. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? I doubt that anybody sits around wondering (or assuming) what I’ve read! But I haven’t read Proust. Actually that’s not true—I read “Against Sainte-Beuve” and found it thrilling, but I haven’t been to the mountaintop. I don’t know why. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? I wouldn’t. I’d read him or her some Richard Brautigan (or some Alice in Wonderland) and s/he’d know. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? Not in a capitalized sort of way. I don’t think we’re here to “purify the dialect of the tribe,” if that’s what you mean, and hand back some perfect, untainted thing. Language is unclean. It can’t be scourged. It can be examined, tweaked, teased, turned. Poets can do this and so can citizens, in jokes and songs and parodies and even poems. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**grass Chiseled**widows I**spy Of**cabbages Form**folderol 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? Mysterious. For instance, sometimes I’m blonde in my poems, or I channel blondeness as a spiritual state, à la Mae West or Beyoncé. I like the way they flaunt it and at the same time set it on its ear. But if somebody pulled a blonde wig over my head and made me look in the mirror, I’d probably faint. Who says poetry makes nothing happen?