Here Comes Everybody

2007-12-11T05:52:00.000-05:00

2007-04-07T22:07:00.000-04:00

I regret to inform you that the HCE Anthology has been canceled. I take full responsibility for this. I really had no idea some of the writers interviewed would object to having their interviews included in the anthology. I have tried to let everyone know that this anthology has been in the works for well over a year. Never once did I receive a communication from any of the writers involved expressing their desire not to be included in a print anthology.

I'll admit to being naive with regard to both editorial processes and the workings of literary "communities" but I'll not admit to any alteration in my original intention with this blog (of which this print anthology was meant to have been an extention): the presentation of a wide spectrum of writers responding to some simple questions and in the process perhaps letting readers get to know them a little better.

I do apologize for any distress this may have caused.

2007-01-26T04:56:00.000-05:00

Paul Hoover has published eleven books of poetry, most recently Edge and Fold (Apogee Press, 2006); Poems in Spanish (Omnidawn, 2005), which was nominated for the Bay Area Book Award; Winter (Mirror), published by Flood Editions in 2002; and Rehearsal in Black (Salt Publications, 2001). Fables of Representation: Essays was published in 2004 in the Poets on Poetry series of University of Michigan Press. He is editor of the anthology Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1994) and, with Maxine Chernoff, the annual literary magazine, New American Writing. His translations with Maxine Chernoff of Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin will be published by Omnidawn in 2008. With Nguyen Do, he has edited and translated Hanoi Misses You: An Anthology of Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry, to be published by Milkweed Editions in 2008. He teaches at San Francisco State University.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

“Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream,
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.”

“Life is but a dream” was my first lesson in Platonism, age six. I didn’t read modern poetry until I was a senior in college. Then I admired “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” even though it took me years to understand it, and “The Connoisseur of Chaos.”

2. What is something / someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers / colleagues? Why do you read it / them?

I used to love reading the Lake Michigan fishing report in the Chicago Sun-Times. Its terseness, mystery science (use spoons in high-running water), compression, and exactness were better than even the sports pages, the other section where poetry is occasionally to be found (“can of corn,” “frozen rope”).

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Philosophy is of interest—and perhaps truer--when it is poetic. Deleuze’s The Fold, for instance. Much good poetry has philosophical implications, as in the line of Symborska: “Where is a written deer running through a written forest?” Because it runs the corridor from the actual to the ultimate, poetry is closer to philosophy than it is to fiction. Heidegger: “There lies hidden in nature a rift-design, a measure and a boundary and, tied to it, a capacity for bringing forth—that is, art.” Poetry and philosophy are about getting snagged in the rift and enjoying it.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Vallejo, Neruda, Sabines, Lorca, Pessoa, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade; Celan, Rilke, Grass, and Hölderlin; Mackey, Mullen, Baraka, and Césaire; Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Stein, Arp, Mayakovsky, Kharms, Simic; Basho, Li Po, Tu Fu, Shiki; Dang Ding Hung, Hoàng Hung, Nhat Le, and the ancient Vietnamese poet Nguyen Trai, whose work I’m translating with Nguyen Do.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

I read a lot of poetry, but it often inspires me to start writing instead. I tend to enjoy poems that are about poetry or rather how meaning is constructed: Ashbery, Stevens, Lauterbach, Berssenbrugge, and Welish—the “abstract lyric.” Wallace Stevens’ “The Man on the Dump” is such a poem: “Where is it one first heard of the truth? The the.” Clark Coolidge: “Writing is a prayer for always it starts at the portal lockless to me at last leads to the mystery of everything that has always been written.”

6. What is something which your peers / colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

Except in brief bits, I have never read Proust, likewise my three-volume edition of Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. I know I’m supposed to like them, but I wear out after a few paragraphs.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to a seven year old?

(A) It’s the making, in language, of a fine mess.
(B) It’s what you say into the telephone when no one is listening on the other end.
(C) It is a poem if, when they hear it, they will cut themselves shaving.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

I wish there were more of an official role for poetry, like the babalawo (priests) of West Africa, or the healing services rendered by María Sabina. In Ifa divination, the conjurer judges from the tossing of cowrie shells—how many up, down—which of the Ifa canon of 256 poems to recite to the supplicant. Healing is based on the supplicant’s own interpretation of the poem. It’s less expensive than psychoanalysis, and the poet-priest gets paid for his services.

Poets who assume the Role are at risk of charlatanism. But I admired the poems of Allen Ginsberg, who played the priest with a disarming wink and Buddhist humor. Robert Bly is my negative example.

Unfortunately, the role of consumer has replaced that of citizen. We have to wait for Harold Pinter to denounce U.S. foreign policy from a high place. I recently traveled to a literary conference in China and was told that writers there self-censor in order to avoid trouble. It’s no different in the U.S.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon : Gentlemen

Chiseled : Rilke

I : Spy

Of : Conundrum

Form : Worn

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

When I wrote my novel Saigon, Illinois (1988) in five months, my body was involved because I wasn’t comfortable writing in prose. It felt like I was driving a race car. Writing Poems in Spanish (2005) was more of a “dance.” I wanted quick, smooth lateral movement in language—openness, in a sense—so the writing felt easy, no tension. Roethke was a “body” poet when he marched around his house naked, practicing his cadences out loud.

In poetry, body means voice. Roland Barthes wrote that it was not the “clarity of messages” that counts in voiced poetry but rather “pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.” Voice lends drama, intention, color, ethos, and character. All poetry is performance poetry in this sense.

2006-12-04T21:04:00.000-05:00

(photo by kari edwards)

kari edwards sent this interview on 10/03/2005.

Neither kari nor I had thought of this as being a memorial to her but given her recent death it has become one. She was a very generous person and will be sorely missed.

kari edwards:

I was born...moved somewhere, then was somewhere else, now I am
keyless and countryless, intending to take up residence in India.

kari edwards author of one imagines something supposedly, Pie
Publication, (2004) iduna, O Books (2003), a day in the life of p.,
subpress collective (2002), and a diary of lies - Belladonna #27 by
Belladonna Books (2002). edwards' work can be found in the following
anthologies: Civil Disobedience: Poetics and Politics in Action,
Coffee House Press, (2004), The Best American Poetry, Scribner,
(2004), and Narrativity: Investigations by Writers, Coach House Press,
(2004) .

Buy kari edwards' books here.

Read another interview here.

Read some work here, here, here and here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

Stanzas for Meditation by Gerturde Stein. A third of the way into the
book I was in tears; it was as if I had discovered home.

2. What is something/someone non-"literary" you read which may
surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

what is not literary? where is that demarcation, maybe the
telephone book? the back of a can of beans? Is not most of what is
written literary? and is it not our definition that is limited? Is
Heisenberg literary? Are the Upanishads literary? Is not Hume poetic
in an exploration of cause? Does not Jean-Luc Nancy take the finite
to an epiphany?

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Very, because I look for anything that can deconstruct this
corporal reality. I see little distiniction in the basic intention of
poets and philophers, all seem to want to find a way to break that
which binds us to this illusion and experience the divine.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Between my dyslexia and the elimination of my library I find that the
names escape me. Of late I have been interested in the pulse one
finds in the highly devotional poetry of Asia.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

I do read a fair amount, it is very important, to both read and hear.
In the last year, I took a hiatus from just about everything in
preparation tof moving to India. One of the things I missed the most
was hearing other poets read because after hearing a poet and then
reading their work, I could hear their voice in the work.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you've
read but haven't? Why haven't you?

I am sure there are huge gaps in my reading list, where would I begin?

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

a poem is a way to take words and make new meaning out of the old. a
poem is a way to create a song. a poem is a way to make a drawing with
words. a poem is a way create sounds that feel good to the tongue, a
very special gift that if one practices enough can take both the
reader and the listener to a new place.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ
from the Role of the Citizen?

citizen, poet, carpenter, crack pipe maker. we are all citizens of
this tiny speck in the middle of somewhere, awash in who knows what,
with limited resources. as a member of this planet it is everyone's
responsibility to evolve, so we are no longer doing the kind of harm
that is being done today. The role of anyone in whatever they do is to
take what they do and make it an offering to the universe, without ego
investment.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**kind

Chiseled**bank
I**two
Of**then
Form**from

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

all I have on this earth is this body, everything else is just things
and other bodies doing things. if I do not place myself in the core of
my body I can not even attempt to connect to reality and end up in the
grand illusion. My body is what allows me to feel others and the
universe. if I want to speak of the possible I have to be in touch
with the present present in the body that is in my body.

2006-02-04T18:55:00.000-05:00

Gillian Conoley’s latest collection, Profane Halo, is just out with Verse Press. Her previous collections include Lovers in the Used World, a finalist for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award; Tall Stranger, nominated for the National Book Critics' Circle Award; Beckon; and Some Gangster Pain, co-winner of the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer Award. A chapbook, Fatherless Afternoon, is also just out with Les Ferris Editions. Gillian Conoley is a recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from The American Poetry Review as well as several Pushcart Prizes. Her work has been anthologized widely, most recently in Best American Poetry and The Body Electric, America’s Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review. Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Sonoma State University, she is the founder and editor of Volt. She has taught as a Visiting Poet at the University of Iowa Writers’Workshop, the University of Denver, Vermont College and Tulane University. She makes her home in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Buy her books here and here.

See some work here, here and here.

Hear an interview with Leonard Schwartz here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

“The Cremation of Sam McGee” and “Annabelle Lee” I memorized and recited sometime in elementary school. I loved them because they were dark and mysterious and had a circuitous sense of narrative. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was my first true love. I still love Coleridge.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

Nothing to surprise. I read a lot of newspapers, NY Times, what one would expect. I particularly love small town newspapers, especially for their emphasis on ordinary lives and eccentricity of communities. Cows loose. Purses stolen. Factories set fire. Birthdays celebrated. My mother sends me clippings from the Taylor Daily Press, the newspaper of the small town I grew up in Texas. Horticulture magazines, my daughter’s obsessive collection of Archie and Veronica. I read whatever is in front of me, whatever enters the house. I think I am what psychiatrists term “word hyper,” which means that one feels as though one must read what is before them before they can move on to other visual input. For example, in museums, I always read the text below or about the paintings before I look at the paintings. I hate that I do this, as a painting certainly doesn’t need language, but I can’t seem to stop it. I am capable of forgetting the language, though, once I see the painting.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

I don’t know how important philosophy is to my writing in terms of ideas, but I do love to read philosophy. I like to read it because I find the processes of the writing itself intriguing. I am especially fond of Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno (but really only so far as he’s connected to Benjamin, as he seems to have bossed Benjamin around), Helene Cixious, Roland Barthes, Foucault. I’m much less interested in any sorts of claims these thinkers have than I am in their sentences and processes of thought.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Lorca I loved from very early on--his music, passion, social conscious, extreme imagination. Vallejo. Pessoa for his groundbreaking multiplicity. Bob Kaufman. Calvino. Tsvetayeva as I have never heard music like hers. Mallarme for what he did to the page.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

I used to read a lot more complete books than I do currently. I do read a lot of poetry as I edit a magazine and I teach. I read a lot of magazines because people send them to me. I love reading the magazines, and if someone’s work strikes me I seek it out. There are so many great literary magazines in America right now. Other than that I always go back to Dickinson, O’Hara, Donne, Sappho among the poets. Lately I’ve been loving fiction. I recently read all of Flannery O’Connor, not hard to do as there is so little, but all of it grand. And some of the most intriguing stories are the ones not so often anthologized and canonized, of course. Nathaniel West should have written more. Contemporarily I like Paul Auster, Gail Scott, Cormac McCarthy, James Salter.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

Wordsworth. I find his aesthetic positioning abhorrent, but I still try to read him, sort of like one should take one’s medicine, I suppose, but I can’t get past a few pages.

Also haven’t read all of Proust, though I do dive in often and I have faith that I will succeed. Proust is why life should be long.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

A poem is anything that doesn’t quite make sense but haunts you the rest of your life.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

A poet has a responsibility toward attending to perception, toward challenging and expanding accepted modes of perception. A citizen has a responsibility toward one’s other citizens. Sometimes the twain meet. Sometimes they don’t.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**pie

Chiseled**form

I**you

Of**on

Form**hold

2006-01-09T20:20:00.000-05:00

Clayton A. Couch (claytonacouch AT gmail DOT com) lives in Asheville, NC, where he’s a reference librarian at two community colleges. He has published, or will publish, poems in such places as The Alterran Poetry Assemblage, Big Bridge, Black Spring, call: review, can we have our ball back?, 88, effing magazine, EOAGH, eratio, 5_Trope, hutt, Lost & Found Times, milk magazine, MiPOesias, moria, nth Position, The Pedestal, pettycoat relaxer, Shampoo, Unpleasant Event Schedule, UR*VOX, VeRT, Verse, Wherever We Put Our Hats, Word For/Word, xStream, and Znine. In late 2004, xPress(ed) released a full-length e-book collection of his work, entitled Familiar Bifurcations, which can be downloaded at the press’s website, and in March 2005, Effing Press (Austin, TX) published his print chapbook, Artificial Lure. Clayton maintains a group weblog called As/Is and a personal weblog called Humming to Itself. From 2001-05, he was the creator and managing editor of sidereality, but has decided to leave the journal in order to dream up some new publishing adventures.

Buy his Chapbook here.

Download his PDF E-book for free here.

See some work here, here, here, here, here and here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

As a child, I remember loving Brothers Grimm, Silverstein, Seuss, Carroll, etc., but I didn’t think of The Giving Tree or Alice in Wonderland as poetry per se; rather, I cooed over the sounds and stories, as lots of children do.

I was, it should be said, a “space freak” – it was the 70’s…what can I say – as a kid; I found quite a lot of poetry in the spaces where my imagination would roam with topics like UFOs, sentient life on other planets (I saw just about every episode of Sagan’s Cosmos), alternate universes, and the like. Now, when I say space freak, I mean pre-Star Wars. Yeah, I was the kid who was into 2001 (I saw it at an art museum when I was 8 or 9), Planet of the Apes, and reruns of Outer Limits. Accordingly, my I steered my reading habits into Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, LeGuin, Cordwainer Smith (very underrated writer, by the way), Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Dick, Tolkien, Jack Vance, Herbert terrain, where they settled until I reached high school.

Round about 10th grade or so, I remember becoming interested in poems much in the same way that I was already into SF short stories and novels. The favorites from that time are rather predictable – Beowulf, “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Coleridge, anything by Poe, the pre-Raphaelites, a few of Blake’s (“Tyger, Tyger” was one) – but I do remember an interest in Milton (I read Paradise Lost in its entirety in the 10th grade), Frost (“Design”), Donne, Pound, Eliot, and Ginsberg, as well. Why did I love the aforementioned works at that time? Well, Coleridge and Poe were the closest things to SF poets -- other than Lovecraft and C. A. Smith -- that I had ever seen. It’s as simple as that.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

Popular magazines, for one. And I mean all kinds of popular magazines: Show Circuit, Placebo, ANOKHI VIBE, Natural Home & Garden, Absolute. Why? It’s my job: I review magazines for Library Journal. As for personal material, I do read quite a number of popular science titles, historical tomes (some scholarly, some not so scholarly), biographies, and political essays. I’m a news junkie, and of course, I’m quite familiar with the streets, alleys, and cul-de-sacs of blogville. I’m also a sucker for alternative religion, conspiracy stuff, and “metaphysical” and occult literature.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

It’s somewhat important, although I don’t necessarily make a conscious effort to include my philosophical investigations into the languages, structures, images, etc. that grow up within my writings. I find that I rarely have time to read much philosophy these days, but the works of Merleau-Ponty, Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, Manuel de Landa, William James, Bachelard, Heidegger, and Bataille are relatively recent influences. Oftentimes, I feel that my continued interest in philosophy and speculative philosophy stems from the fact that I have – esp. for a poet – an extremely poor memory (for sensory details, moods, and images – no; but for words, ideas, and names – yes).That is to say, I read philosophy in order to remember what I’ve oftentimes already learned in the past, and because I’m always forgetting things, philosophical texts probably contain more of those “Aha!” moments for me than perhaps they do for other readers.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

It’s tough to sort out the non-Anglo-American from the Anglo-American, mainly because I rarely think about such categories. Where does one start? Here are some names that come to me immediately: Eileen Tabios, Will Alexander, Anyssa Kim, Borges, Cesaire, Kafka, Stanislaw Lem, Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Rilke, Celan, Baudelaire. I could probably go on forever with this list, but I won’t.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

Being the recently-departed managing editor at sidereality (http://www.sidereality.com/), the answer’s an absolute yes. I’m reading new stuff all the time. The books on the table beside my bed will give you an idea of my current interests and tastes: Skinny Eighth Avenue by Stephen Paul Miller, The After-Death History of My Mother by Sandy McIntosh, Red Juice by Hoa Nguyen, Eureka Slough by Joseph Massey, The Displayer 2005 by the Lucifer Poetics Group, The World in Time and Space edited by Edward Foster and Joseph Donahue, Day Poems by Mel Nichols, the Zukofsky issue of Chicago Review, Nova by Standard Schaefer, Heights of the Marvelous edited by Todd Colby, Telepathy by Devin Johnston, Blood and Soap by Linh Dinh, and Boondoggle by Tim Earley.

Anyway, reading the poetry of others is critically important to my own writing. With my aforementioned poor memory, you could say that I have to keep the mulch as fresh as possible.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

If I haven’t read something, chances are that I’d like to…if only to, perhaps, decide ultimately that it’s not for me; but there are lots of things out there that I’ll probably never get to, for various reasons. I’ve read only small chunks of the Bhagavad Gita. I’ve read Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, but haven’t read Goethe’s Faust. I’ve never read Catcher in the Rye. I’ve never read Finnegan’s Wake. I’ve haven’t read very much of Kant’s writings. I haven’t read The Divine Comedy. I’ve read barely half of Gravity’s Rainbow, which is more than I can say for David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Why haven’t I read these things? Sheer laziness, in some cases; in others, boredom, disgust, or fatigue.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

I’d say: “The words that you hear in the air, in dreams, on the radio, on TV, in the forest, in the city, at the farm, at the playground...all are poetry, if you listen carefully enough.”

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

Well, hopefully the poet is a citizen and the citizen a poet (despite what Plato had in mind), but as far as roles are concerned, I’d say that one of the poet’s jobs, perhaps, is to give life to the inner-outer states/spirits/dreams of ordinary citizens. Defining “ordinary” is probably pointless, because – well – it’s a fiction. We live in a technologically-mediated culture, which theoretically means that everyone has a larger, louder platform upon which to say their peace (piece); yet the words of individual citizens are, as we all know, garbled and indistinct. For the poet: give breath to the sub-subtexts of the citizenry’s reality shows. For the citizen: love thy neighbors; burn your capitals.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):
Lemon**Fluke
Chiseled**Enamored
I**Robot
Of**Grammatology
Form**Of

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

Relationship? What relationship? I thought Descartes did away with that whole issue! Just kidding....

Although it’s not ostensibly about the body and its relationship to poetry, allow me to recommend Toy Medium by Daniel Tiffany at this juncture -- good times.

As for poems, if textual conglomerations don’t eat, breathe, piss, or shit, they’re probably not poems. As for my own body, I’m simply happy that it seems to agree with my mind’s poetry habit most of time. But no, I don’t send myself flowers.

2005-12-21T18:29:00.000-05:00

Jonathan Skinner is a poet, translator and critic, as well as editor of the journal ecopoetics. Skinner recently completed his Ph.D. in English at SUNY Buffalo, with a dissertation on ecology and twentieth-century innovative poetry and poetics. His first full-length poetry collection, Political Cactus Poems, appeared this year with Palm Press. He currently is a Fellow with the Center for the Humanities at Temple University.

Buy his book here.

See a review of it here.

See some work here, here, here, here and here.

Some thoughts on eco-publishing here.

Some essays on translation and some translations here, here and here.

See a review of the previous e-book here.

See some comments on Charles Olson and SPACE here.

See an entry on Grace here.

See a correspondence with poet Eleni Stecopoulos, with some work, as part of a "Rust Talks" series here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

Impossible question to answer, as loves (and origins) seem always multiple. The first poetry (in a strictly chronological sense) that I must have loved would have to be what I referred to, at that time, as “Greek Myth and Hero Tales”-- i.e. Homer’s Odyssey and, most likely, Agamemnon, by Aeschylus. My dad probably read passages out loud from the Ancient Greek. The strange brutality as well as the earthy and briny entanglements of the language fascinated me. I was attracted to Athena’s androgyny and, of course, to the monsters, etc. We were traveling in Greece at the time (I was seven) and these works brought the stones to life. Otherwise, the first poem I probably loved enough to memorize was Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

Just last night I was reading Thermodynamics and Ecological Modelling, ed. S.E. Jorgensen. But that wouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with my work. I love to read, and use, science texbooks and field guides. I also read too many newspapers (“daily prose”). And I enjoy rudimentary history texts and timelines, as in Essentials of World History— I like to get the basics, free of embellishment. Not out of belief in an ultimate layer of fact, so much as desire to catch up, from not having paid attention in school. Or maybe it’s that facts are relaxing. Though anything’s literary enough, when read slowly.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

The fight between philosophy—“that old dog barking at her master”—and poetry is critical to the health of either, and keeps language alive. When making verses and asking questions get separated they become pastimes. This isn’t to say that poets must refer ontological and epistemological concerns to philosophy. And the best philosophers probably don’t need a Wallace Stevens to tell them when they are doing poetics. At the same time, wide and deep reading in philosophy saves one from the pipe dream of a unified theory, outside the terms of the poem itself, a “poetics” that would ground poetry. As an editor, I do feel responsibility to test and sharpen concepts: right now I’m reading Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space. (A vastly overlooked work, it seems.) If I had one philosophical aim for poetry, it could be to write space as eloquently as time. Like many of my peers, I probably look to political theory for a frame in which to make sense of one’s responsibilities as a poet of empire. But the relevance works both ways: how important is writing to my philosophy?

For a long time ecology seems to have offered little of interest, philosophically: this has started to change with the ethical, political and ontological debates surrounding animal rights (Peter Singer, Cary Wolfe), with the philosophical reappraisals of cybernetics and systems thinking around technology and post-structural feminism (Donna Haraway, Kathleen Hayles), with anarcho-primitivist critiques of social ecology (David Watson, Murray Bookchin), with explorations of the “posthuman” by phenomenologists and philosophers of science (Alphonso Lingis, Bruno Latour), or with the ongoing assessment of Darwin and what it means to be “biological,” a critical study in our age of biotechnology (Daniel Dennet, Elizabeth Grosz). I sometimes wish I was a science fiction writer, since that’s where much of this philosophy gets explored in a playful way. But I also think the close-up on language experimental writing affords—the kind I try to publish in ecopoetics—has much to contribute to the study. How would philosophers and scientists change their thinking if they read more experimental writing? What gets in the way is the gap between disciplines and a fixed notion of what constitutes “poetry.” Conversely, the writing that reaches me via ecopoetics keeps my philosophical frameworks unfixed.

To return to your original question, however, the importance of philosophy to writing is that it keeps my mind off the poem, as I’m writing it. Philosophy also presents one’s writing with the possibility of its uselessness, and this is galvanizing.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Pablo Neruda, for the folly of Canto General (to “write the Americas”) and the rash lyricism of his Love Songs; Anne-Marie Albiach for her extreme page poetry; Jacques Roubaud for his elegant structural interpretations of Old Occitan poetics; Rimbaud and Mallarmé and Baudelaire for clarity of word and rhyme (amidst emotional tangles); Jacob Nibenegenesabe and Maria Sabina for their metamorphic bravura; Cecilia Vicuña and Julie Patton for their delicate, interdisciplinary cross-weavings; Julio Cortazar for the Paris of Hopscotch and axolotls; Melvyn Tolson for his syllabic fire; Kamau Braithwaite for his fierce dedication to islands of word and place . . . And this isn’t to speak of most of the great writers before the Renaissance, who are neither Anglo nor American!

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

I seem to read less poetry than peers of mine who manage to keep abreast of new writing. There’s so much of it! I discover a new magazine, or a new poet, or a new scene, every other day. I’m not really a compulsive poetry reader (I find science and philosophy easier): perhaps because assimilating a new poet is like learning a new language. It takes time. Plus the conditions for reading poetry seem rarified, a state of grace I can never count on. Once I’m into a poet’s work, s/he never leaves me— I’ll come back on a daily basis to certain poems.

I can’t tell if the contemporary poetry I read—or listen to at readings, which I attend plenty of—gets into my writing. I often work from the lines I write down at poetry readings, but they probably tend to get worked out of poems. When I edit work for ecopoetics I try to keep my own writing out of it, so maybe there’s a habit of writing away from the scene. Reviewing and introducing poets certainly involves getting cozy with others’ words, or distancing oneself from them, and professing one’s relationship in public. In fact, I rarely just read poetry—I have to do something with it. Translating another writer is an ideal way to read the work, and this cannot help but affect the tone and weight of word choice in one’s “own” writing.

Reading the great poets is root work, and helps in cleaving to one’s own sound and vision amidst the wealth of influence and camaraderie: Dickinson or Whitman, Niedecker or Zukofsky, Baraka or Olson . . . One does not always feel accepted by one’s contemporaries, or sure of one’s own sense, nor is one likely to understand one’s contemporaries. (I’ve learned a lot from writers younger as well as older than myself about risk and disrupting expectations.) But we certainly can meet to discuss influences, or perhaps share a living teacher, as has been our good fortune with Robert Creeley, Susan Howe, Dennis Tedlock, Charles Bernstein . . . And just as we write ahead of ourselves, when we are at our best, we need not comprehend one another to collaborate. Whatever be the level of exchange, the company of my contemporaries is vital to the act of writing—it would not, in these barbaric times, continue without them.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

I haven’t read Their Eyes Were Watching God or Great Expectations or Beloved, and a lot of other books one was probably supposed to have read by now. (For example, I just read To Kill A Mockingbird for a course in the novel I was assigned last semester). I haven’t read Schopenhauer, Proust or most of Faulkner (outside As I Lay Dying). The fact that I haven’t read “The Bear” should shock anyone who knows my work.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

I wouldn’t explain; I’d take notes from your seven year old.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

Ultimately, I’d agree with Dante (without subscribing to the eugenic language employed by his modernist followers) that the poet is the shepherd of language(s)— a role fairly distinct from that of “Citizen.” I value the good old work of sound in language, not so much as in Zukofsky’s (or Adorno’s) “upper limit” but as a parallel, ambient practice. Sound that’s able to inform meaning, it seems, only insofar as it keeps its relative autonomy, both supporting and threatening meaning.

In any case, languages are changing so rapidly that the role of the “shepherd” is up for grabs every day. (I’ve gotten a lot out of online debates—between the likes of Brian Kim Stefans, Ron Silliman et al.—regarding visual poetry: is it poetry? what is poetry?) I’d say that, amidst such flux, translation becomes a principal duty of the poet, and I’d put out a special plea for more work with the planet’s fast-disappearing “indigenous” languages.

At the same time, I think the most interesting “Role” for poets nowadays is — to use Robert Kocik’s terms — “outsourcing” poetics and doing work beyond the ever more narrowly circumscribed field of (post)modernist aesthetics. (I like the way Barrett Watten puts this—in his recent book, The Constructivist Moment— as a need to approach postmodern form from the standpoint of modernist content . . . where, sadly, we’re still mired.) There’s plenty of work in this troubled world for the kind of intuitive, boundary-crossing “negative capability” poets seem to have in abundance. (Teaching is one such job, though far from the only one.) Too much poetry seems written for the small circle of self, or the slightly larger one of coterie. Poets could do worse than go undercover, in such times.

My own “role” as a poet seems to involve pushing these contradictory notions to some kind of breaking point.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon** custard

Chiseled** spear

I** dog

Of** or

Form** letter

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

To quote Niedecker quoting Stevens: “I am what is around me.” The body is that gate to what commonly gets referred to as “environment.” How humans ever got to thinking of their skin as a barrier, rather than membrane, beats me.

French poet Anne-Marie Albiach has spoken most clearly about the relationship between “body” and “text”— about the body as “prey” to the grammatical elements, and writing as the effort to “stand up” amidst these elements. This parasitical scenario strikes me as more realistic than the hopeful way American poets have characterized “embodiment,” from “Projectivism” onward. (Such hopefulness, of course, undergirds what may be most glorious about American poetry.)

Most of my writing tries to get down on the (forest or desert) floor: when we don’t acknowledge our nature as worm food, we barely deserve to write against it. Hopefully, texts I write proliferate perspectives, and the senses in which we consider ourselves to “have” bodies.

My poetics have lately developed a co-dependency between writing and walking—a desired constraint. I would rather not presume to explain how this plays out in the text. Texts I produce certainly entertain, I hope, a referential and figurative as well as proprioceptive relationship to walks. If only because they tend to be written in pocket-sized notebooks, when they’re not dictated into a voice recorder. I’d like to steal artist Hamesh Fulton’s motto: “No walk, no work.”

Buffalo, May 31-June 1, revised December 9-10, 2005

2005-12-12T20:17:00.000-05:00

From his birth in 1970 many believed David Baratier was destined to become a Saint because as an infant he was so pious that he refused to suckle on Church prescribed days of abstinence. In 1985, shortly after being inspired by reading Beowulf, he started being published in national journals and magazines. He has appeared in a horror movie, moved furniture for a living, owned a comic book store, taught at various colleges and has never been convicted of a felony. He & his fine lady Rita, a former model, who appeared in films including Traffic, live in the deep south end of Columbus with their daughter, Beatrix. He has given readings for audiences as large as 10,000 people. He does not recommend this. He is founder and editor of Pavement Saw Press.

His poems have appeared in a few hundred publications and are forthcoming in Laurel Review, Slipstream, Skanky Possum, Fulcrum, Controlled Burn and others. His anthology appearances include American Poetry: the Next Generation, from Carnegie Mellon UP, Clockpunchers: Poetry of the American Workplace, and Red White and Blues: Poets on the Promise of America from University of Iowa.

He has an epistolary and prose creative non-fiction novel, In It What’s in It, from Spuyten Duyvil and his seventh collection of poetry after Celan is forthcoming from Furniture Press in 2006.

Buy his books here.

See some work here, here, here, here, here and here.

See some collaborations here and here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

There were a number of things growing up, Dr. Seuss, Longfellow, Service, Randall Jarrell’s Bat poet, other kid’s books from the library. I practically lived in the library, it was warm there. What was first? I keep rotating around different answers. My gut instinct keeps answering with a piece much later tho. When I was 14 I read “Anna Karena & the love sick river” by Kenneth Patchen; it changed my life.

When his father was hurt at the mills, they took the time to drag him through the back door. I lived that house. Our front door wasn’t used by anyone, except royalty, even the paperboy collected money at the back, common people know better.

At that moment I knew the connective power of a poem. I realize now it was also a question of masculinity, I thought poets were wusses, wore flowing clothing and spoke of love in rhyme because they were afraid to tell someone directly in person. But Patchen was this giant linebacker Italian looking dude wearing a lumberjack shirt who took up the whole space of the photo and was not afraid to speak about any subject. It instantly changed my beliefs and expanded the realm of possibilities. Guys like me, real go nowheres, weapon carrying and willing to lose their life for the sake of being right in some skanky bar, don’t write poetry. If they do, they write for life.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

The local newspapers, ones for a small, maybe at most a mile, area of our city. In Columbus there are many of these and I thoroughly enjoy reading our urban weekly tabloid.

The humorous police reports. "Eight residents on the 300 block of (X) Street complained of fecal matter on their front lawn." There is a wealth of extremely petty or weird reports. There was one about a car accident caused by a box of dildos. I have an inane interest in knowing a tire piercing male prosthesis assaulted a nearby neighbor.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Very important.

Philosophy is one of only other forms of writing which captures the mind in a form of suspended animation between thoughts thereby transporting me outside the book to elsewhere. Using philosophy inside poems is unimportant to me, pedantic, academic in the root sense of the word, tedious; however, the accurate description of what language does when applied to a poem’s potential to create a similar result leads me toward it as a self questioning writer further.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Not sure if you mean American or not so: for American, Carroll Arnett-- captures the essence of absence in the line, a sense of lack of sound that many attribute to Creeley, or certain students at Black Mountain, Fielding Dawson, others, that only is nearly matched by someone else from outside Black Mountain, Wm. Bronk. The turn at the end of the line has many of the box like manifestations of early Creeley but the emotion is retained without becoming sentimental.

Often poet innovators of form like Melvin Tolson, Sherman Alexie; poets who stay a moving target not subscribing the hegemonic notion of "voice," avant guarde or post avant like Will Alexander, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Amiri Baraka.

N. Scott Momaday's fiction was extremely liberating, Leslie M. Silko's Almanac of the Dead, that seems a start elsewhere.

Non-American: Vincente Alexandre-- need the right translation, one that is not regularized but stays with a wilder sense of meaning available instead of pigeonholing a line to a sparse possibility of interpretation for the reader. Better yet, read the original poems & translate for now. Always liked Odysseus Elytis, not sure if he would qualify.

Fily Dabo Sissoko is a brilliant political surrealist, I wish there was more available from all the work I've seen. I would be willing to publish a translated collected of his.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

Yes, hundreds of manuscripts each year for the press I run, Pavement Saw Press, plus many hundreds of published books that arrive in the mail for us.

Vital. The reading primes the pump of writing. So does being given an assignment by someone else. There are few poets that I learn something from with longevity, usually things are just monkey tricks, like "Look Ma, shazam, increased vocab." Crappy poems make me giggle. This leads to an increased enjoyment of life which is conducive for being a writing maestro.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

The tags on my many patterned shirts.

I envision myself wearing durable clothing as a testament against the fashionable vestiges of poetry and therefore do not wish to have this image broken by a white square scant with words.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

Poems are a six inch to six foot long piece of bread which is swabbed with natural peanut butter using a one inch thick paintbrush in whatever pattern seems best. Overlay this with grape jelly to start. Give these subs away, why not make them for special occasions. The more you mark the bread, the better you are at understanding each of the elements, selflessly. Then you can move onward to understand what stroke patterns will happen with wheat versus white, what variation occurs between using natural peanut butter with salt or without and all other minute differences. Once all of the ins and outs of these changes are understood you can make one helluva sandwich.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

To write variously, act as a maker, throw most away, only save good poems, publish sparsely. Boxcars or snake eyes.

Not sure, guess each citizen would have their own specialty with its own macabre verity of rules.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**Pledge

Chiseled**my nizzle

I**eyeye

Of**Pediatrics

Form**mystify

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

The only "defense of the form" is in hearing and seeing the poem performed by the articulation of the original author. While, after death, the remaining text does not give up the ghost, the fullest sense of the piece is henceforth unbegotten.

2005-11-30T20:03:00.000-05:00

IMAGE FORTHCOMING.

Max Winter's poems have appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Volt, the Yale Review, Octopus, the Colorado Review, Typo, the Paris Review, Explosive, Boulevard, American Letters and Commentary, and elsewhere. His reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, Bookforum, the Denver Post, and elsewhere. He is a Poetry Editor of Fence and a Development Editor at a leading educational publisher.

See some work here, here, here, here, here and here.

Hear some work here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

The first poem I ever loved was Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha. I was particularly drawn to the phrase “By the shores of Gitchee Gumee,” and to this day I think of those shores as a place of perpetual self-awareness. It was a different place for Hiawatha, of course. I’d imagine it was dangerous by our standards. At a later age, I had a second awakening to poetry with Stein’s “Susie Asado.”

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

I like the Metro section of the New York Times. I enjoy reading about lives resisting being squashed by urban development. I especially enjoy pieces about businesses outside my immediate frame of reference, the way they’re very important to other people for very particular reasons. I tend to be interested in discoveries, un-coverings, unnecessary but still edifying explorations. There was a time when I could take trips like that myself, just pick up at the beginning of the day and find myself somewhere completely alien at the end of the day, but I don’t really feel have time for that now.

On a similar note, I also really enjoy reading travel guides and travel articles. The entries on hotels are especially moving—it’s nice to read about a place I might someday inhabit, or about the conditions that might make biding your time in a place comfortable or uncomfortable. I usually stick with the budget sections, sometimes stray over into moderate. Anything more expensive speaks to an entirely different world than the one I’m interested in. Luxury hotels make for very dull reading.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

It would be difficult to write without philosophy, if we take that word to mean “aesthetic” in this case. It would be hard to imagine someone writing without any sense of what they were doing—in many cases, even not knowing what you’re doing indicates the will not to know what you’re doing, just as writing badly could be seen as the result of a conscious decision not to button up your taste a little bit. Of course, if you’re too aware of your “position” or your “stance,” anything that’s personal or private in the work might be swallowed up—or perhaps overshadowed is the right term.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

One of my favorites when I was younger and then also when I was older (and indeed, someone I continue to think of as a favorite even if the time I spend with his work is less and less) was Borges. I like the deadpan tone, the burrowing-in, the fastidious dementia. I also am a huge fan of Murakami, for his courage and for his hostility to what we in the Western world might call “colorful, animated prose.” Also, a big fan of Marquez: I like anyone who feels so at ease with the dead. I realize it’s a cultural thing, but still. Saramago never ceases to amaze me, pulling off impossible narratives in book after book.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

Well, sure I do. If the reading stops, the writing stops—that’s how important it is. I balance my reading of poetry, though, with the reading of other things. Usually fiction, although occasionally some narrative nonfiction interests me. Not often, though. There’s not so much time in which to read things, if you work as I do, and so you have to choose carefully, be purposeful. I usually have a hunch what poets will be useful or inspiring ahead of time—and yet that circle is continually expanding.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

No one has assumed I have read anything I haven’t in a long time. It must mean my affect is shrinking. In grad school it was assumed I had read a lot of James Tate and Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, although my reading of them was limited at that time to maybe one or two books each, tops. (Albeit more than once—I’m cheap.) I read much more of them, more widely, during grad school than I ever had before, perhaps because I thought I was supposed to catch up. Earlier I read a lot of Wallace Stevens, Yeats, and Williams, as well as Stephen Dobyns, C.K. Williams, Rilke, Lorca—and yet no one ever cited that influence. An editor once suggested that my poems made him think of Deleuze, in some form or other—I promised I’d check my Deleuze, though I don’t own any. And I haven’t read him yet.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

A poem is a piece of writing in which the writer is speaking to you about what is in his or her mind. The writer gets to choose how a poem looks on the page. The lines may be short. The lines may be long. But you must take each one of them seriously. Read it out loud, and see what you think of the poem then.

Sometimes you will understand a poem. Sometimes you will not. But you should always try to enjoy it, even if it is hard to try that much. And even if it doesn’t seem like you are enjoying it. See how the poem changes the way you think about things. Report back to me, and I might just give you another poem to read.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

The Poet prevents the brain from overtaking the mind. The Poet gives an outlet to indescribable acts of the imagination that would be unacceptably odd in other forms of discourse. The Citizen prevents the State—or its opposite, statelessness—from overtaking the People.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**stamp

Chiseled**blue

I**mud

Of**cathode

Form**bother

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

My body doesn’t have much of a relationship with my body, but it also doesn’t have much of a relationship with my writing. This may be more commonly true than we think. Think of it: poets have given and attended readings for centuries. The poet reading simply stands in front of a room full of people. The people listening are simply sitting, Every now and then they might fidget. The same is true of reading silently. In fact, often we read while sitting, lying down, or asleep. I know that, according to legend, we use hundreds of muscles just to sit or stand in one place for a long time. But how hard could that be?

My poems operate independently of my body, in whatever sense you want to take that. I won’t pretend that writing them is any great physical strain for me. Or that I feel it in any profound physical sense. Every now and then, a little writer’s cramp might arise. If that happens, I just stop for a while, and then keep going. I do also get tired after writing, mainly because my body stays in one position without my realizing it—as opposed to staying in one position on purpose, as when at a reading. When you release from that sort of extended state, there’s always a little bit of adjustment dizziness. But really, I don’t see any connection beyond that.

2005-11-15T18:11:00.000-05:00

Heidi Lynn Staples was selected by Brenda Hillman as a recipient of the New Issues Poetry Prize for her debut collection, Guess Can Gallop. Her second book, Dog Girl, was chosen by Carolyn Forche for publication by Ahsahta press. Her poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry 2004, Bird Dog, Denver Quarterly, HOW2, La Petite Zine, LIT, 3rd bed, Salt Hill, Slope, Tarpaulin Sky, Unpleasant Event Schedule and elsewhere. She is a founding and acting editor of the literary magazine Parakeet. A part-time faculty member at Syracuse University, she lives in Syracuse with her husband, co-editor and fellow writer, John Staples--plus, their two dogs, cat and bird.

Buy here book here.

See some work here, here, and here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

The first poetry would include the sound of a cow mooing at dawn or a rooster cock-a-doodle-doing--I felt welcomed into the day and called forth by barnyard friends. Or the taste of a blueberry picked right off the bush. Yum! However, a poem is a thing made of letters, and those experiences offered poetry yet were not poems themselves. I grew up reading biblical verse and singing hymns and folks even talking in tongues and that shore lea bright a love of language, song, nonsense, and ecstatic abandon.

2. What is something/someone non-"literary" you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

Cookbooks. I’m reading an Irish cookbook, Full and Plenty, handed down to me by my mother-in-love who was given it in 1965 by her mother as a wedding gift. Because, as author of Full and Plenty Maura Laverty says, "Cooking is the poetry of housework."

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Reading, a longing with a childhood immersed in the outdoors, has led me to seek experiential knowledge that leads to perceptual shifts, particularly those shifts which help collapse categorical thinking--The best writing is such an experience.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why

Some not sum:
James Joyce because he’s a maze singing.
Helene Cixous because she is la la.
Harryette Mullen because she’s all scat and event mere.
John Forbes because he’d rather be at the beach.
Paul Muldoon because he whinnies at on-coming traffic.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

Yes and verily and could read more as a many await and in a way not dissimilar to mulching a flowerbed, reading feeds this one's consciousness and writing--to a certain degree, ye are what ye read.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you've read but haven't? Why haven't you?

My bank statement. Because it fills me with dread.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

For me, a poem is sing made of letters that I listen to like I wonder at the moon. For me, a poem is a sing made of letters that I read like I laugh at my face in a spoon. For me, a poem is a sing made of letters that I write like I make shadows in my room. (Yes, like you, on the walls at night, when no one else is awake, and it’s quiet as a tomb, I sit up and make the most mysterious critters.) And one thing is almost for certainly sure, a poem is a sing made of letters.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?.

Deepends in the poet the poem the reader.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind, be honest):

Lemon**tree, very pretty
Chiseled**face, GQ, gee, eeeewwww
I**spy an association
Of**course, of commerce, (sigh)
Form**a lime and flock quietly true the launch

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

The two are married and live together in a house high up in the trees. They have lots and lots of babies. You’re holding one now.

2005-11-08T18:27:00.000-05:00

George Kalamaras is Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he has taught since 1990. He is the author of five books of poetry, three of which are full-length, Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair (Quale Press, 2004), Borders My Bent Toward (Pavement Saw Press, 2003), and The Theory and Function of Mangoes (Four Way Books, 2000), which won the Four Way Books Intro Series, chosen by Michael Burkard. He has also published poems in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada, Greece, India, Japan, Thailand, and the United Kingdom, including The Best American Poetry 1997, American Letters & Commentary,The Bitter Oleander, Boulevard, Hambone, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, New Letters, Sulfur, Web Conjunctions, and others. Kalamaras is the recipient of Creative Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1993) and the Indiana Arts Commission (2001), and first prize in the 1998 Abiko Quarterly International Poetry Prize (Japan).

A long-time practitioner of yogic meditation, he is also the author of a 1994 scholarly book on Hindu mysticism and Western rhetorical theory from State University of New York Press, Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension: Symbolic Form in the Rhetoric of Silence, and his articles on rhetoric, Hinduism, and poetics have appeared in The International Journal of Hindu Studies, and elsewhere. During 1994 he spent several months in India on an Indo-U.S. Advanced Research Fellowship from the Fulbright Foundation and the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture. He lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana with his wife, the writer Mary Ann Cain, and their beagle, Barney.

Buy his books here, here, here and here.

See his work here, here, here, here and here.

See another interview here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

I can’t remember a particular first poem but only a poet—the Chinese T’ang Dynasty poet Wang Wei. A teacher in my first year of college asked to see some of my poems after I’d mentioned I wrote and, in reading them, suggested I familiarize myself more with “modern” poetry. During the same conversation, though, she also said that my poetry reminded her some of the Chinese poets of the T’ang, especially Wang Wei. I found an anthology in the university library (I wish, now, that I could remember which anthology), and fell in love with Wang Wei. Interestingly, he and many other poets of the T’ang have remained central to my poetics all these many years, and I still return to them often.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

I adore non-fiction works about Arctic and Antarctic exploration, although anyone who has read my work might not be surprised by that, given some of the common references. One of the great books is Nunaga (which in Inuit means, My Land, My Country) by Duncan Pryde, a Scott, orphaned at a young age, who at 18 left Glascow for the northern reaches of Canada and worked in the arctic for the Hudson’s Bay Company for ten years. He writes beautifully about shamanism, hunting, and dog-sledding, among other things. Unlike some other explorers, he learned the language (rapidly, and—in fact—became a skilled linguist, without formal training, in Inuit languages). He also married an Inuit, knocked around Alaska for a spell after leaving the far northern Canadian territories, and literally “disappeared” for a while. He died in his 60’s, I think, of cancer, after turning up again on the world map, though he never wrote another book besides Nunaga (except for the first volume of what was to be a more comprehensive dictionary of the Inuit languages).

It’s a marvelous book—that I highly recommend—but there are others. For instance, I became enamored with the Manchurian ponies that Shackleton took on his 1914 expedition to the South Pole, described beautifully in a book from the late 1970’s, The South Pole Ponies (Theodore K. Mason). The ponies, transported from Siberia, had been touted as more suited for sledding in the extreme climate of the South Pole than dogs, which proved to be wrong. Their extra weight caused them more easily to sink in snow, and—unlike dogs—they sweated through their coats (and not through panting), which would obviously then freeze, so their frozen hides would need to be “chipped” each day so they wouldn’t overheat. If anyone knows anything about that fated expedition, all the dogs and ponies were eventually shot. I have a poem about these ponies in my second book of poems, Borders My Bent Toward, in which I call eight of them by name, telling part of their story, which felt important to embody them again and give them presence. Though I was greatly saddened by their story, so much so that I almost didn’t buy the book about them (after reading through it on several trips to my local used bookshop), I finally felt inwardly guided to buy it, and I keep it now in the bookcase by our living room fireplace to finally “give the ponies a warm home.”

I’m not sure why I read this stuff, except that it may remind me of the extreme weather we all may need “to weather” in our sometimes tumultuous inner landscapes.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Philosophy, especially of the Eastern wisdom traditions, is central to my writing. First, that’s an area of research and writing for me, in addition to my poetry. My first book (from SUNY Press) is a scholarly work on “the rhetoric of silence,” and it explores the meaningfulness of silence as rendered in Eastern wisdom traditions, particularly in Hindu-yogic meditation. Central to my work as a poet is the exploration of language as a way to conjure “silence,” or moments of discursive interruption and dissolve, in which all seeming oppositions are complementary rather than contradictory. My first book of poetry, The Theory and Function of Mangoes, chronicles my months in India in 1994, where I journeyed to research the sadhus (Hindu holy men) of India. I visited numerous ashrams, as well as private dwellings of wandering sadhus (some of which amounted to grass huts or sometimes nothing more than a mound of dirt), spent much time on the banks of Mother Ganga (the Ganges River), and interviewed many sadhus about their philosophies and practices (i.e. “the theory and function”).

A most remarkable book on Indian philosophy is Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda, himself a yogic adept. Part travelogue, autobiography, and work of Hindu philosophy, it is one of the classics of Hindu philosophy and—quite simply—the most important book (of any book) I have ever read. Period.

But I also read other kinds of philosophy. Primary here is the philosophy (and practice) of Surrealism, in which I teach a course at my university. I also adore philosophies of language—folks as diverse as Bakhtin and Bachelard—as well as philosophies of pedagogy.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Most of the poetry I read is that of non-Anglo writers. They are great poets, many of whom understood what it meant to be a poet in the broader global community. My largest quandary is to keep this answer brief. So, I’m going to talk in broad strokes here. Let me start with the Greeks, many of whom embraced Surrealism at one time in their lives: Andreas Embiricos, Odysseus Elytis, Nikos Gatsos, Yannis Ritsos, George Seferis, Takis Sinopoulos, and others. Then there are the poets of Spain and Latin America, who have been perhaps some of the most vital poets in my development as a writer: Ceasar Vallejo, Miguel Hernandez, Federico Garcia Lorca, Vicente Aleixandre, Pablo Neruda, Luis Cernuda, and Octavio Paz, among others. I’ve also a strong interest in Japanese Modernism, particularly Dada and Surrealism of the 1920’s and 1930’s: Takahashi Shinkichi, Takiguchi Shuzo, Yoshioka Minoru, Nishiwaki Junzaburo, and Miyazawa Kenji are some of my favorites. Of course there are the poets of the Chinese T’ang Dynasty to whom I referred earlier, especially Wang Wei, Tu Fu, Li Po, Li Ho, and Meng Chiao. Of the French, I mostly read Robert Desnos, Andre Breton, and Rene Daumal.

These are the first poets who come to mind. But I read many poets from many cultures: from Nazim Hikmet (Turkey) to Edith Sodergran (Finland). I read these all in translation. I think I’ve gravitated more toward international writers for the past twenty-five years because—put simply—many of them have more heart. But in addition to this, I find that many of these writers have gone much further than American poets in exploring the depths of imaginative consciousness, particularly aspects of Surrealism.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

Yes, I read tons of poetry—every day. It’s vital. I cannot imagine being a writer in this culture and not reading and entering conversation, on an imaginative level, with other poets. Of the American poets, I’m most drawn to the work of Gene Frumkin, Robert Kelly, Thomas McGrath, Kenneth Rexroth, and James Wright. I also can’t imagine my poetry without having entered deep conversation with the poetry of several friends, Eric Baus, John Bradley, Ray Gonzalez, Jim Grabill, and Patrick Lawler, to name just a few of my many friends whose voices and support have shaped me in significant ways.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

I’m not sure I’d know what those folks would assume. I haven’t gotten to these particular books because I don’t yet know what they are.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

I would say that a poem is a group of words that, when put together in a certain way, say something more than the individual words themselves could ever say—sort of like a magic formula or an incantation (but then again I’d say this to college students as well!). And because of that, these magical words can tap into parts of a person he or she did not even know existed. Then I’d recite to your seven year old this poem, “Magic Words,” from a Netsilik shaman, Nalungiaq (as recorded in Jerome Rothenberg’s Shaking the Pumpkin and in Robert Bly’s News of the Universe), reproduced here from Bly’s anthology:

In the very earliest time,
when both people and animals lived on earth,
a person could become an animal if he wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language.
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance
might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen could happen—
all you had to do was say it.
Nobody can explain this:
That’s the way it was.

Then I’d try to engage your seven year old in a lengthy discourse about the ontological significance of the socio-epistemic function of theories of hermeneutics as representative of both expressivit and objectivist renderings of the nature of reality as less than or equal to the linguistic function of algebraic formulae as depicted in dialogical hope. Nothing like a good “good-night” story, right?

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

I do believe in a role for poet(s). First, there are many roles. I think that individual poets should seek out and engage that relationship with language that best enables their spiritual development (and I do not mean “spirit” here as divorced from citizenship). In the yogic paradigm, for instance—and certainly in that model handed to us even from the T’ang Dynasty—there is a transparency between the world of spirit and matter, and both “private” and “public” expression are reciprocal, interactive. Bakhtin would call this “inter-animate.” However, for my personal practice, I find Gary Snyder’s words, as expressed in The Real Work: Interviews and Talks 1964-1979, the most meaningful: “[The poet] hold[s] the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.”

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**Greek

Chiseled**Features

I**And Thou

Of**** (poor line-break—two words—sorry!)

Form**Content

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

I try to dissolve them both.

2005-11-01T18:16:00.000-05:00

Photo: Star Black

Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona in 1951. After receiving her B.A. at Pomona College, she attended the University of Iowa, where she received her M.F.A. in 1976. She serves on the faculty of Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California, where she teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs; she is also a member of the permanent faculties of Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and of Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Her seven collections of poetry--White Dress (1985), Fortress (1989), Death Tractates (1992), Bright Existence (1993), Loose Sugar (1997) and Cascadia (2001), Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005)--are from Wesleyan University Press; she has also written three chapbooks, Coffee, 3 A.M. (Penumbra Press, 1982 ), Autumn Sojourn (Em Press, 1995), and The Firecage (a+bend press, 2000). Hillman has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson’s poetry for Shambhala Publications, and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, has co-edited The Grand Permisson: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (2003). Among the awards Hillman has received are Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She resides in the San Francisco Bay Area; she is married and has a daughter.

Buy her books here and here.

See an interview here.

Find links to some work here and here.

Forms of Activism for Overwhelmed People

(Presented at the Gandhian Conference on Non-violence
Memphis, Tennessee October 18, 2005)

At the First Conference on Gandhian Non-Violence in 2004, hundreds of activists of all stripes--including priests, lawyers, peace workers, writers, domestic workers, retired business people, educators and many others--came together with a strong degree of commitment to exchange ideas and methodologies. The number of ideas presented here in Memphis gave us all renewed energy to continue our work. At that conference, I gave a talk on "Poetry and the Spirit of Non-violence" to remind people not only that the imagination and the life of metaphor are important in non-violent resistance, but also that poets write of what is most mysterious in the human heart--including the troubling notion that imagination is fundamentally lawless. This year I wanted to report on some forms of non-violent activism I undertook in as a result of last year's conference, in hopes of opening up some possibilities.

It is impressive that many activists are so active. They are not ''passive''-ists. People do the work of non-violence in their communities not just by making inroads into the power structures but by finding new paths. After visiting last year with sensible people who had done a considerable amounts of jail time for resistance--including regular people incarcerated during demonstrations for obstruction, members of the Memphis community who had done civil disobedience in the Civil Rights Movement, and people with a lifetime commitment to activism--I came to understand that grassroots efforts involve both a controlled burn of existing foliage and slow new growth. Yet, activists in many fields find it hard to give themselves credit; one young woman, doing social services advocacy in her community in South Carolina, mentioned feeling helpless about the measures she had taken and about how much there is still to do.

This year in particular, it has been hard to remain hopeful. In November 2004, a month after the last year's conference, many of us experienced a sense of hopelessness in the face of George Bush's re-election. In my office at school, students were crying and saying they wanted to move to Canada. Some who had never done anything in the way of activism and who had worked to get the country on a different path, even conservative Christian kids, were horrified by the war and by the policies of revenge, hate, and imperialism of the present administration. A sense of dazed impotence is common. It's hard to sort out the difference between neurotic guilt and an appropriate sense of responsibility. It's hard not to feel guilty if our efforts cannot effect immediate change. But this is no time for perfectionism.

I confess I've been a little dismayed by some of the responses in the Bay Area. In my region--one of the most historically vibrant places for political resistance--many people have been doing little but complain and consume more of everything. Some say only a violent revolution to defeat global capitalism will do, and if that revolution isn't imminent, there's little point in doing anything. Some have engaged only in fatigued finger-pointing. Others take blogging and forwarding anti-war emails to be their primary forms of activism. Email is fine, as long as it doesn’t become like a morphine drip, keeping us strangely calm and less engaged outside our screens. After all, most of our email reaches those with whom we already agree. Recalling every day the good Germans in 1933, we must find multiple ways of working outside the immediate interests of own social groups and families. Last year's conference inspired me to clear a few hours of my week to do a little more despite the discouraging situation and a serious time deficit.

I want to recommend being uncomfortable. All but #1 and #6 below have been activities that have made me uncomfortable--at times, extremely uncomfortable. They have taken only a few hours a week. I know that the sick, the elderly and those with small children will be able to undertake very little; in the years I was raising children (and working fulltime and trying to write) I found I had less than an hour a week, but even small children can do things to help. Here are some things to pass along:

(1) The first is the same as the last, and I'll go into it more in a minute: attend to an imaginative spiritual practice that gives strength for everything else. A commitment to poetry is the basis of my activism but for others, it will be different for others.

(2) Actively seek out at least one conversation per week with someone who might not have voted the way you did, especially those outside your community of friends. Often there are family members with whom we can re-open conversations if we take a compassionate approach. Many intellectuals and artists I know are busily dismissing Christian communities rather than trying to discuss Jesus’ teachings with them. Where and how does Christianity allow for killing in a Just War? Recent conversations with an elderly Catholic friend of mine have also left me still wondering whether I can be so sure of my own positions. This woman, working in the Resistance in WWII, shot a Nazi soldier when he approached the woman beside her. And as a fierce defender of humans, she still has dreams of the horror of killing a man. She says about my commitment to non-violence: "You never know what you would do under stress."

This year, I decided to visit some conservative Christian churches to try to determine how these communities are thinking about the War and about Jesus’ non-violence. Because many anti-war and environmental activists feel strong antipathy toward conservative Christian communities, dialogue has become impossible. The groups have demonized each other since the election. Yet I felt repeatedly welcomed into these communities when I visited, and could understand why people so value their churches. A connection between Home, Democracy and God has been formed. The idea of a Just War is of great importance to many people, especially those with family in the military. It is important to understand the basis of this. There are profound similarities between people who support our President, our Flag, and the War and those who oppose the War and are angry about it. Both conservative Christians and non-violent resisters have a concept of personal submission for a greater good, especially the notion that giving up on one's personal will might be useful. For the Christian, this involves submitting to God's will, and for the non-violent activist like Gandhi or King, it involves actively seeking opportunities to put oneself in harm's way in order not to fight back and to have the opponent register his harmful actions. Jesus himself, probably a member of an Essene sect of Judaisim, radically re-thought the notions of brotherhood; when Jesus asks his followers not to fight back with violence, it may be because the Essenes did not even permit weapons in their community.

Having been raised as an independent thinker in a Baptist household, I feel impatient with the vocabularies of obedience, and balk when frightened people talk about following God's will. My own poetry, rooted in hermetic and mystically inward ideas of the antinomian "rebel" traditions, is based on the free conduct of a soul instructed from within to follow her path of conscience and best nature. The break-away outsider branches of Protestantism of my forebears--including Ranters, Quakers, Muggletonians and Baptists--were founded in part on the premise that doing God's will might go against the rules of the State. I honestly don't know what happened to the Baptists in the last few decades.

(3) A third idea: take as part of your practice the idea of giving up on a trivial fight. Last year, a talk by Maureen Holland, a lawyer in Memphis, allowed me to take a different tack on an incendiary disagreement with neighbors over a specific issue of the rights to property. I have made the decision not to pursue the disagreement. I do not want to spend many years of my life in an angry lawsuit. It is better to live at peace, knowing that nothing is to be gained by a victory if my neighbors will not understand their unfairness in the matter. Unless it means your family cannot eat or live, your property is not a sufficient reason for pursuing an argument. In deciding not to pursue the matter of what is best for my property, and feel at peace with the decision. I've saved years of energy for writing and for further social work. This is something I recommend to everyone. Give up on a fight about a specific issue of ownership or property, even if you think you can win, and even if you feel economically entitled to do otherwise, so that you can save your energy for other matters that really count for saving health and lives.

(4)Conversely: On a matter of universal importance, take a principled stand that makes you uncomfortable. It is very easy to choose an issue that makes you feel uncomfortable. Only you know what your limits are. I decided to do a limited war tax resistance on my Federal Income Tax in April. I had attended some meetings of the National War Tax Resisters in the Bay Area, and after finding the range of possibilities, I decided have my accountant prepare my Federal Taxes and to submit what I owed, but to withhold one-sixth the taxes owed, based on the fact that one-sixth of every tax dollar is now going to the Pentagon. I attached a letter to the I.R.S. saying exactly why I was doing this.

I have received a lot of advice not to pursue this particular path, the main thing being its impracticality. I have to date received three pieces of correspondence from the I.R.S., one of which resulted in an illuminating conversation with an investigating team in Utah. Many are quite afraid of going outside the law when it comes to taxation, even if their taxes have been committed to a wrongful war. I have been amazed at the number of people who have asked, "Are you working with anyone on this?" and mostly I have said, "Yes, Henry David Thoreau." If anyone is interested, she should visit the National War Tax Resisters' website.

I have not at this point finished a whole cycle of this process, and the I.R.S. is about to contact my employer to begin collection procedures. I do not know how I will proceed in the future; I am in favor of paying more, not fewer, taxes for schools, roads and social services and this symbolic action takes a lot of energy. No matter what, I am not cowed by folks at the I.R.S., who, despite their scolding, have always been polite to me. They have pictures of their families on their desks, some of whom are in the military. I feel encouraged that this action opened the door for contacting my congressional representatives, and opened the door in myself for further activism, which leads to my point #5:

(5) Pursue very specifically, in a slow and steady manner, some form of grassroots activism or organizing that you can do locally, but that might have national consequences. It will be slow at first, and it may be easier than you think. Choose a grassroots organization that you can participate in actively and give one or two hours a week--or more, when you have more time. This year, I became involved with CodePink. I have admired the organization for its guerrilla theater, and for the fearless forms of resistance the members have undertaken, so I signed up for their email list. I saw that the Bay Area Chapter was going to be doing a campaign to bring home the California National Guard. They were going to Sacramento. I thought: "This will take one day; I'll dress up in pink and go along."

When I had to make a phone call to my State Assemblyperson, I was frightened. First of all, I didn't know exactly who my Assemblyperson was. Then, calling up to try to get an appointment was frightening. What if she says No and hangs up? But I managed to make several appointments.

A group of us, dressed in Pink and carrying signs, went to Sacramento in mid-August (a good time for me as I am a teacher)to lobby to bring home the National Guard; we were able to visit the offices of 19 State Assembly Members on the morning of August 15. We spoke to many staff members at the State Capitol. We were also able to speak to TV and radio reporters about the importance of bringing home our Guard. Our district assemblywoman, Loni Hancock, has agreed to co-author a resolution, AJR 36, to bring home the National Guard. I am gratified by how helpful our State Assembly Staff people are. We called, pleaded and harassed many other state Assemblypersons to convince them to co-author the Resolution. Once my fear had passed, I got very adept at calling, and made over forty follow-up phone calls in a few hours.

The State Assembly Resolution to bring home the National Guard--AJR 36--still needs more Democratic co-authors but it has quite a few at the time of this writing. If you are in California, you can do a lot on this issue: find out who your state assembly person is; ask if he or she has decided to co-author the Resolution. (You can begin by asking to speak to a staff person about the matter.) Writing and calling is much better than emailing on any of this. Visits are best. You don't have to be a powerful or articulate speaker. Local city council members and state assemblypersons usually have appointment times available for local lobbying, and all you have to do is find out whom to make the appointment with, and bring your talking points (you can access talking points on CodePink websites. If you are interested, visit the websites to get ideas of your first step: info@bayareacodepink.org and www.codepinkalert.org. Outside California: start your own campaign in your state.)

In addition to the State Assembly Resolution, CodePink has gotten 4 city councils to pass resolutions--Berkeley, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, and Oakland--to bring home the Guard. In Oakland, we showed up before the City Council in bright pink and they handed us a copy of the Resolution, passed by consensus. There are more progressive city council members everywhere, and many more cities could now follow the lead of these cities and ask to bring home the National Guards that have been deployed.

The actions of our Working Group have been inspiring in light of how urgent it is to end the use of National Guard troops. Over 50 percent of our California National Guard has been deployed to Iraq, and are serving in this backdoor draft. After realizing how abused these soldiers are, having to buy their own equipment, killing people when they signed up to put out forest fires, my zeal for this work has increased. The CodePink women are tireless and fierce. I urge you to get involved in some way to end this war by going to your representatives.

(6) The sixth point is the same as the first: attend to your spiritual practice to keep healthy and sane. The Gandhi Institute is the very embodiment of mixing activism with spiritual practice. Your strength derives from staying engaged with the power in yourself during stressful times. My parents taught me to take care of the body and mind.

Lyric experimental poetry has always been my main activism: connecting the mind with that of the environment, with the world of non-human world of animals and plants, with other arts and cultures, with the qualities of the invisible world. The paradoxes inherent in poetry often have to do with what Keats calls "negative capability," with being open when sense-impressions and mental life don't mesh. In the life of language, in the complexity of words and in the nature of communication, there is a mystery of otherness the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas writes about in Ethics and Infinity; this allows us to be many at once. Surely knowing ourselves through our language is one of the keys to loving the world, for all the terrors and dismaying realities of our official governments.

Gandhi said we must never underestimate the value of empty protest. When we invaded Iraq, many took to the streets; it seemed the individual in a crowd is rather like a wheel. I wrote a twenty-four line poem that uses Gandhi's phrase as the title. Thank you for your attention today, have courage, and do what you can. Here's the poem:

THE VALUE OF EMPTY PROTEST

Longing declined;
whatever had been charged with it,

what curls, what
octave flowers
angered the voice ramp

which for a while called
from their gray-rim signs
Come back to the stamped
lawn as people cheered,

wearing an abyss
in the whorled
capitol, threads dangling

from their placards,
from misery of capital, known

as a crowd
in the crowd--and
they would lose again,

but as a
a wheel loses,
taste, past,
skies reptilian and vast,

nothing to sell but being
sold, mute hands clapping at the
why of whys--

Brenda Hillman, Saint Mary's College of California

(website for Gandhi Institute: www.gandhiinstitute.org)

2005-10-25T18:21:00.000-04:00

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?

2005-10-18T18:23:00.000-04:00

Kristin Prevallet was born in Denver and has lived in New York (City and State) for the past 15 years. She attended the University of Colorado and the University at Buffalo. She was an editor of the magazine apex of the M and has edited several books, including Fire Brackled Bones: A Helen Adam Source-book (forthcoming, National Poetry Foundation, Spring '06). Along with Bob Holman, Anne Waldman, and Alan Gilbert she founded Study Abroad on the Bowery: A Certificate Program in Applied Poetics at the Bowery Poetry Club. She is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Perturbation, My Sister (First Intensity, 1998) and Scratch Sides: Poetry, Documentation and Image-Text Projects (Skanky Possum, 2003). She teaches at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Bard College, and The New School and has given lectures and readings throughout the United States and Europe.

Buy her books here.

See links to some work here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

The origins of poetry are in word play: Duck Duck Goose because of the excitement of never knowing when I would be "it."

After that, Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" because I didn't understand a word of it. I thought learning to play it on the piano would reveal its hidden meaning... but it didn't. But the search got me hooked on language.

After that, Dorothy Parker because I found a slim copy of her Selected Poems heavily marked up by my mother, with lots of exclamation marks and smiley faces.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

I am a faithful reader of Rob Brezny's horoscopes in the Village Voice because they are really well written and always full of terrific insights into my deepest desires.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

If philosophy is, as Ortega y Gasset writes, about "revealing the latent world poised behind the manifest world and discovering the relations between them" then my writing is all about philosophy. I'm really interested in trying to articulate deep links.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

I try and do translation as a literary practice, and find myself very absorbed by a lot of French and Francophone writers, too many to mention here, but at the moment I admire the work of Sony Labou Tansi, Jaques Roubaud, Sophie Calle, and Leslie Kaplan.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

Poetry is important to my writing as an art of correspondence... in other words, I read the work of my friends and people who send me their poems in the mail. I'm really slow at reading though, so I don't devour books like I used to. Of late, I haven't been buying poetry because my house is too small and the poetry books I do have already take up an enormous amount of space.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

I haven't read The Anti-Capitalist Reader or Dude: Where’s My Country or other political books because they make me feel guilty that I am not writing enough books and essays about politics and that therefore I am one with the war mongers.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

What is a spoonrocket?
What is a spool?
How many words can you think of that rhyme with ug?
Who lives down under?

Complete this sentence: A penny saved is ________.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

I believe in a role for myself, and I am a poet. The role I believe in for myself is that I maintain awareness, integrity, sweetness (when deserved) and an eye for injustice. And try to articulate / speak out / keep the faith.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**mist

Chiseled**snow

I**love milk

Of**froth

Form**morgue

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

My body is disconnected from my mind -- I can't seem to reconcile the two except in performance... the poem's rhythm hits me, and I’ll start moving.

2005-10-15T17:57:00.000-04:00

Eleni Sikelianos has two new books out this fall: The California Poem, a book-length exploration of growing up in her home state, from Coffee House Press; and The Book of Jon, a media-rich meditation on the nature of drug addiction, daughterhood, and death, from City Lights. Eleni’s previous books are The Monster Lives of Boys & Girls, Earliest Worlds, The Book of Tendons, The Lover's Numbers, and To Speak While Dreaming. She is the recipient of a number of awards, including the National Poetry Series (for The Monster Lives), residencies at Princeton University as a Seeger Fellow and at Yaddo and the Maison des écrivains étrangers in Brittany, a Fulbright Writer's Fellowship in Greece, a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Nonfiction Literature, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing, a New York Council for the Arts Translation Award, and the James D. Phelan Award for Blue Guide. Her work has appeared in many magazines and journals, including Grand Street, Sulfur, Chicago Review, and Fence.

Eleni has spent a fair amount of her life traveling by foot, thumb, train, boat and plane (including sixteen or so months hitchhiking across Europe and Africa: London to Istanbul, Cairo to Nairobi; trips to Mexico City, Oaxaca, the Yucatan, Borneo, Hong Kong, and Kuala Lumpur; many trips to Greece; and a few years in France).

She currently lives in Colorado with her husband, the fiction writer Laird Hunt, and teaches in the MFA program at Naropa in Boulder, and in the Creative Ph.D. program at the University of Denver.

Buy her books here.

See some work here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

The first text by a poet: Carl Sandburg’s The Wedding Procession of the Rag Doll and the Broom Handle and Who Was In It:

The music was furnished mostly by the Musical Soup Eaters. They marched with big bowls of soup in front of them and big spoons for eating the soup. They whistled and chuzzled and snozzled the soup and the noise they made could be heard far up at the head of the procession where the Spoon Lickers were marching. So they dipped their soup and looked around and dipped their soup again.

In this book was fabulous language like “slimpsing” and “chubbed their chubbs,” and there were great drawings. I was three or four and it didn’t occur to me that there was an “author” who had created that language.

Next: poems in Modern Greek Poetry, edited and translated by Kimon Friar, which I picked up in Xania, Crete, when I was 20 years old. I bought it because it contained poems by my great grandfather. It was probably my first exposure to Surrealism (via Elytis, Ritsos and Embirikos), and it was definitely the first book of poetry I ever bought. Because I hardly ever went to school during my high school years, I’d had almost no exposure to poetry (besides our household’s requisite Walt Whitman in the bathroom). This anthology spawned some really bad imitations as I continued my travels around Greece, Turkey, and through Africa. I suppose I was inspired by the overblown (some might say fruity) language and flights the mind could take, the ephemerality of it.

The first poem I memorized: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” circa age 23. The melodrama and rhythms / sound were perfect for a young aspiring poet, and the “difficulty,” the veils (which seem so obvious now), were intriguing.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

Currently, pregnancy magazines. I steal them from the doctor’s office. I suppose I hope to glean tips on how not to kill my baby in the first few months (which I have, like don’t cover your baby’s face with a blanket, which might suffocate her when you’re not in the room).

As a pre- and early teen, I devoured sci-fi and fantasy novels.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

There are other kinds of formalized thought that have been far more important to my writing thus far. Science — zoology, biology, astronomy, physics (in my extremely elementary understanding of it), geology — has always been a fascination, in its contemporary and antiquated forms. (I’m currently, slowly, reading D’Arcy Thompson’s 1917 On Growth and Form.)

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

I’m not sure if those adjectives are to be understood as one package, or can be dismantled. A shorthand list might include:

The Peruvian César Vallejo for pure exuberance and energy of language; early Salamun for the same reason; lots of Frenchies (Apollinaire, Lautréamont, Roubaud) for invention; I used to love Tsvetaeyeva’s emotional intensity, Sappho ditto, and still; Homer for spinning a good yarn; Celan for his strange wedding of secret clarity.

Jen Hofer’s anthology, sin puertas visibles, recently exposed me to some fabulously intriguing young Mexican women poets.

If we are thinking of non-Anglo Americans, I’d think of Henry Dumas for his playfulness, Gwendolyn Brooks for her bizarre elliptical syntax, both still yoked to the political… Baraka as agent provacateur… but this could go on forever.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

For a decade or so, I read poetry almost exclusively. I now find that I read poetry in much smaller doses, and am more interested in reading poetry by the very dead, or non-poetry texts. I must admit that I feel overwhelmed by the tide of poetry books put out each month, and feel diluted, diffuse, and defeated when I try to wade through that tide. So many of these poems seem to resemble each other. Yet I’m sure my interest will shift again.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

All of The Cantos. Help.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

It doesn’t have to make sense!

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

I do believe in a kind of moral duty and field of generosity in which poets could or should engage. And yet, so many of the poets I admire are or were jerks, so, there goes that rule. There’s a kind of Negative Capability always at play within the work and between the life and the work. However, I do personally feel a duty to live as responsibly and thoughtfully as possible, and being a poet heightens that sense. But “responsibly” could mean a lot of different things. “Grace to be born and live as variously as possible” is another duty of the poet as I see it — and in some ways the professionalization of poetry has interfered with that.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**Lorca

Chiseled**chickweed

I**declare

Of**fal

Form** flamboyant / framboise

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

I always feel like an imposter when I answer these questions, because, first, these things are constantly shifting, and second, there’s the discrepancy between what I think I’m doing and what I’m actually doing. That said:

I’m fascinated by the symmetries and asymmetries of the body, and between the body and language, the body and thought, inside and outside the body. I’m a fan of those poets who engage in a kind of lush abstraction (e.g., Barbara Guest, Mei-mei Berssebrugge, Frank O’Hara), where both body and not are present. What I’d like in a poem: a world where the hand and the hip have their own ontological approach to thinking and language.

2005-10-11T18:24:00.000-04:00

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.

2005-10-08T18:21:00.000-04:00

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.

2005-10-01T18:04:00.000-04:00

Anny Ballardini says:

I was born on July 24, 1956, and live in Bolzano, Italy. Cosmopolitan (that makes trendy? I guess so) I lived in New York (in the Village till the age of 10), New Orleans, Buenos Aires, Florence, Bolzano, and bits and pieces here and there (Heidelberg, Tour sur la Loire ...). I pay my bills by teaching and translating, sometimes writing for the local newspaper.

I am the curator/editor of the Poets’ Corner, and here is my Blog, Narcissus’ Works, come and see me sometimes.

See her work here, here, here, here, here and here.

Among her translations are:
In_Ri by Henry Gould; On the trail of words by Larry Jaffe; Smokestacks Allegro by Rita Cominolli; Metaphysical Reference by Kenneth Hirst; from English into Italian \–/ and from Italian into English: The Renaissance of the Self; and the Notebook of Positano by Arturo Onofri.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

My mother made me learn by heart Leopardi’s poems, full with sadness, and death; I still remember XXXV – Imitation: “Poor frail leaf... I go where all things go, where, of nature, goes the flower of the rose, and the flower of the laurel” and I always imagined a gutter (we were in New York at the time), and the dissolving of things. That is why I loved The Mother Goose Rhymes, all that nonsense and they were such cheerful, playful words in my mouth that made laugh and want more.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

I recently quoted Rimbaud on my blog:
“J'aimais les peintures idiotes, dessus des portes, décors, toiles de saltimbanques, enseignes, enluminures populaires; la littérature démodée, latin d'église, livres érotiques sans orthographe, romans de nos aïeules, contes de fées, petits livres de l'enfance, opéras vieux, refrains niais, rhythmes naïfs.”
This could be me. Just give me something to read, some movies to watch (I decided not to switch on television any more about ten years ago, and I have since then stuck to it –it was eating down my days), any magazine: technical, on medicine, science, microbiology, finance, anything, and you make me happy. I have this incredibly dilated vision of things, associations abound, universes are continuously created and re-created. To say that I love to live is little.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Thank you for this question on philosophy so that I can mention Friedrich Nietzsche. I first met him when I was eighteen, and since then I have found no one able reach my self better than him. Philosophy is the backbone of any creative invention.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

There are too many, my list of favorites is about a mile long. But I usually prefer American authors.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

I do, but I have my difficulties in starting and finishing the collected works of an author at once. That is why my reading is fragmented. I always remember my friend artist who said that to be able to paint you have to make tabula rasa of all what you have been taught, the more you have read, the more you have to clean out before writing.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

I have cracks and hollows everywhere, worse than the surface of the moon. You mention an author, and I haven’t read some particular book. Not because, but because. And I can fill pages with explanations.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

I think childhood, be it happy or sad, is a poem by itself. I would just go ahead with stories and stories and let your child complete or reinvent them.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

It is interesting to notice that you use capital letters, which requires a capital answer. John Tranter gave a great answer.

A Poet is a Citizen, does he have to be a better citizen, I think so. What is usually understood by “better” by the Poet does not necessarily comply with what his/her society judges as being “better”, as history has clearly shown.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**shrill

Chiseled**Gothic

I**my

Of**loft

Form**norm

(honest!)

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

I was very pleased to discover that I could write as I wished by moving words and lines, and this was given to me by the pc, and on another level by my trips. What might be interesting here is my involvement with the text, and I would like to quote Karl Kraus who said (I am paraphrasing): “Nothing will ever happen to me when I am writing, if Death came I would tell her to wait”.

2005-09-27T19:51:00.000-04:00

Christophe Casamassima is the editor of Ambit : Journal of Poetry & Poetics, and the proprietor of Furniture Press in Baltimore. He is co-curator of the Portable reading series with Michael Ball. Some of his books include 'mov/ements (Furniture Press), 'qui-etude' (a project with his wife, Sarah) and 'psstcards' (Xpress[ed]). Forthcoming is 'The Sarah Quatrains' (King of Mice Press) and "Dozen" (Gone To Texas). "I feel that to demarcate writing into categories puts the writer at the risk of be categorized him/herself. Rather, one should write writing."

See some work here, here, here and here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

It wasn't love, I think, but something more, like intrigue - that is to say, I was intrigued by and with (if that's possible) the poem, the poem that first caught my attention, held it, and then obliterated it. It was 'Noon' by Cole Swensen - the book 'Noon' (I read [present and future tense] as a long poem, a poem of folds and returns, remembering and forgetting and deja vu). I was never in love with a poem merely for the fact that I cannot see a poem as an object, or an object of affection.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

Surprise. It's difficult to answer this question when my peers and colleagues and I never discuss what we read! We're closer to the act of sharing what we write, but that isn't even always the truth. My colleagues and I are never surprised at what we're reading because I've come to meet people who are informed by all kinds of literature. Tarkovsky's films, perhaps, must be read, but not in that sense, and I think what intrigues my friends is the idea that I'm more interested in talking about his films as films and not as books.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Philosophy, what a dirty word. If we're talking about established philosophies (Western, Eastern, etc. is there a Southern?) then I don't have the patience (even though there may be a chance I'm missing something). I find that philosophy is a dirty word because it, most of the time, defends my colleagues' arguments rather than informs it. I see sometimes, and this is what hurts, that a discussion cannot be continued because its logical end is seated or rests upon some theory of knowledge. It is very important to my writing in that I'm always trying to escape it - logic - so I'm not caught in the name game. Shame on philosophy for being so naughty!

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Anglo, what does Anglo mean? Non-English? In the sense of ancestry or blood or perhaps a culture of Anglos? I want to say I read mostly American poetries/poets. Is that Anglo? I’m Italian, not Anglo, so I’ll say anyone who’s not from England. In the Library of Congress cataloguing system, those literatures from the ‘Anglo’ side are marked as PR (PR6023.E43F44 would be an example). I see in my library I have books with a PS call number, that’s American literatures. Besides, it's not my cause to track down those of mirror faiths and cultures and to delve into their psyches. Poetry is words, and that's something I'll have to defend to just about everyone.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

Read, yes, but misread mostly. The importance of a misreading can, usually does, spark my tenure within the writing of a particular poem. A good example would be to read bad fiction and totally miss the point. A bad example would be to read Ulysses and get it. Oh my, did I call Ulysses poetry?

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

The Bible. I'm not a devout Catholic, but everyone should read the Bible. There's too much there that cannot be (missed to) misread. Besides, isn't all of the history of religion a misreading of the Bible? That is something I've yet to be conquered by.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

I wouldn't. They probably know more about it than I do. If I try to describe it to them they may run the risk of becoming too entwined in the idea of its description. I'd let your child discover poetry the same way s/he's going to discover masturbation.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

Roles, role models, yes and no and I wouldn't know how to defend both cases. I believe it's the role of every human to have a role, that is, to teach fairness (I don’t believe in equality – some of us are actually better than others, in some sense, but no one is more right than another – see the paradox of a power struggle? Everyone gets it wrong). The poet really puts into perspective the problem of roles and citizenship, problematizes what roles do and what citizenship does to a person. It's all our role to be fair, and if one is more fluent in fairness, it's their RIGHT or OBLIGATION to teach it.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**grape

Chiseled**dissolute

I**bee

Of**am

Form**distinction

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

Nothing really. I'm more interested in the body of the text than of a corpus. I did write vows to my wife that is rooted in the body, but of the body's relationship to the text it was only in that instant (and that's because I think she's totally gorgeous). Please refrain from the shouting: she's my wife and I can say she's hot 'cause she has a great bod. The body is too wrapped up to be tested in a text, at least for me.

2005-09-20T18:12:00.000-04:00

Kerri Sonnenberg lives in Chicago where she directs the Discrete Reading Series that she founded with Jesse Seldess. She is the author of The Mudra (Litmus Press, 2004) and Practical Art Criticism, a chapbook (Bronze Skull, 2004).

Buy her book here.

See some work here and here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll. As a child I loved it because it was silly and could be read in a Monty Python voice—if anyone knows of a recording of John Cleese reading this poem, please give me a nudge. The initial attraction was no doubt the nonsense language and dated, artificial-sounding diction, but I think my appreciation for language deepened upon encountering this poem every year in grammar and middle school English classes and grew into a value for the malleability of language.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

Over the past year I’ve been reading a lot about architecture: talks Le Corbusier gave his students, the biography of Jens Jensen, one of the first landscape designers to advocate “naturalness,” the work of Gaston Bachelard. Being from Chicago, and still living there at the moment, birthplace of the skyscraper, much of the local history is connected to architecture: even the old stockyards have an architecturally significant entry gate. I love being inside buildings and thinking of them as poems—because the idea of space, for me, is a concern that recurs in my writing. Touring the Farnsworth House (Mies Van der Rohe’s glass house in Plano, IL) was a big charge in this direction. It’s a space so highly aestheticized a toaster would ruin everything.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

I think philosophy and poetry are in the same business: asking questions, registering perception, taking the temperature of what is humane. My feeling is that poetry can get to these questions/experiences a little more directly. Saying that sounds like I dislike or don’t read philosophy which is certainly not true.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa for handling a poetics of place and the personal with compassion and clarity that is intimately political and spiritually wise. Harryette Mullen’s seemingly playful poems that expose and subvert the language of oppressive forces. And my favorite narrative form is the Renee Gladman short story.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

I read a good bit, but I wish I had time to read more. Not like when I was a student—
to have that clip again... Reading poetry has always been a crucial parallel to my writing process…it prompts, clarifies, renews my own questions about language and the creative act of making “meaning” as a reader is cheek to cheek with a writer’s concerns (my concerns anyway) when working with so-called “open texts.”

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

So many things. I have a long way to go, fill my gaps slowly, where pre-modern literature is concerned. Getting past the first dozen pages of the Odyssey is a goal of mine. In general I’m suspicious of the motivations of a Canon and I approach “the classics” slowly and tentatively. I have a grounding in tradition, but most of my reading is contemporary work since I often find myself in conversation with those writers who are, conveniently, not dead.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

It’s like drawing a picture: it might look like a house or it might not look like a house. Either way it can be an interesting picture.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

Specifically, I think every poet should reface the poetry section of big chain bookstores to more accurately reflect what is vibrant and innovative in the genre. I also leave recommended reading on tables in the café section with this intention.

More generally, I think/hope the role of the poet and that of the citizen are similar: to practice the art of attention and wonder. Like a fellow who made paper hats for everyone on the subway the other day—we need more random acts like that.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**knot

Chiseled**abs

I**ego

Of**all

Form**ulae

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

With my book The Mudra I was interested in the language of the body, specifically the hand gestures of Buddhist practice and imagery. How one mudra in Buddhist art may not mean the same things every time, but depends on origin, who is depicted and other attendant/environmental images. I wanted to write a sequence (and then two, three) of poems that explored a use of language that was gestural, bodily, and to internalize these ideas of “depends on.”

2005-09-17T13:56:00.000-04:00

Kate Greenstreet paints and writes. She lives in New Jersey, she works as a graphic designer. EtherDome Press is publishing her chapbook, Learning the Language, this summer (2005). Her first full-length collection will be out from Ahsahta Press in 2006.

Buy her chapbook here.

See some work here, here, here, here, and here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

Growing up, I was always reading, and I collected lines: sentences and phrases stayed in my head, or I wrote them down. Sometimes I'd group them, as if they were speaking to each other. I can't remember reading poetry until I started high school, then it was pretty much the same thing. I loved lines of Tennyson, and later Dylan Thomas, cummings, Eliot. The first poem I remember loving in its entirety was Frank O'Hara's "Why I Am Not A Painter." I liked its style, and its humor. It showed me a whole new way a poem could be: like talking (really), with rhythm. And it seemed to be describing a new world that I might someday enter.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

I tend to be reading whatever I need to read to learn what I'm trying to do next (Understanding Electricity, or Trees of North America). I read a lot of software manuals. At the moment (early May), seed catalogs. I also read on subjects that have shown up unbidden in my writing, to find out more--most recently Bridges by Judith Dupre.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Well, certain philosophers were formative--in particular, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Buber. Also Emerson and Thoreau. Buddhist philosophy has been an influence on the way I look at things (like, there might not be a God but just grow up).

I'm not intellectual but I'm attracted to thinking. Writing is a way I can engage with the basic questions "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" (to quote that old philosopher Gauguin).

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Rilke, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus, Transtromer, Sonnevi, and Baraka have each been crucial. For the past year or so, I've been especially moved by Jaime Saenz and Erin Moure. When I ask myself why these (or other) writers are favorites, I think of something C.D. Wright said, that some of us read and write "to be changed, healed, charged."

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

Depends on how you'd define a lot. I read poetry every day, certainly. Right now mostly contemporary poetry. I think of art as a conversation, and of reading as the vital other side of writing--what allows it to be an exchange.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

There are so many I haven't read yet, or haven't read thoroughly. On my current list: Hannah Arendt, Jackson Mac Low, Hannah Weiner, Nicole Brossard.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

I'd say that making up a poem is a way to share a secret without telling it.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

In my experience, poetry seems to be in the air between us. I think our task as humans--not obligation but natural desire--is to find ways to connect with and support one another, bridging what separates us. I see poetry, regardless of style, as having that capability.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):
Lemon**ice
Chiseled**fleeced
I**confess
Of**the people
Form**aggregate

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

My writing process is a combination of listening and speaking while moving text around until I hear what I'm listening for. Since breath is, for me, a poem's primary vehicle, text and body are inseparable.

I read an essay today by R. Bruce Elder. He said this: "The thinking that makes art belongs to the flesh. That is what spares art from being self-expression... The poetic principle is prior to all reflection, including self-reflection... The flesh is one; all flesh is the same flesh..."

2005-09-13T18:55:00.000-04:00

Tim Earley’s first collection of poems, Boondoggle, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag in the near future. Twice a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, his poems have appeared in Hotel Amerika, Typo, DIAGRAM, La Petite Zine, jubilat, Apocryphal Text, and Chicago Review, among other journals. He lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina, which is apparently the former site of something called a geodesic (???) dome.

Buy his books here.

See some work here, here, here, here and here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

John Berryman’s “The Ball Poem.” I loved it because it loved me. The part at the end where the speaker transcends his mortal coil and ephemerally courses around the bottom of the harbor as a formless mass of despair right after he gives this kid an imagined, fucked-up, schoolmarmish lecture about loss, man, when I was sixteen—that was my definition of HOT. The poem was in a high school lit anthology and had this great picture of Berryman beside it. He didn’t look like anybody that I’d ever seen walking around in broad daylight. I’ve been useless since.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

I read lots of message boards for MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) that haven’t been released. The anticipatory zeal and wild speculation that build in the community months before the game launches—will Paladins get horses, will Wizards have the ability to instantaneously port themselves and their friends to any location on the map, will this be the most uberest game ever?—lead to endless aesthetic and ideological debates about the imaginary world’s social structures, battle systems, and heroic possibilities. When the game goes live, and I could play it, I tend to lose interest (I don’t actually want to touch it!!), and return to my other guilty pleasure, reading the behind-the-scene Forecast Discussions on the National Weather Service’s web site. Those guys wield words like “cyclogenesis” and “deformation” with absolute abandon.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

I read philosophy because it makes me feel as though I have a rich, inner life. It induces a pleasurable kind of pre-creative hypnosis for me—the combination of finely tuned, ultimately tautologic semantic distinction and unremitting dolor really gets me into the “writing poems” mood. Many primitive cultures attempted to “represent” this mood in their earliest cave markings—something about passive reception and autotelic frontogenesis, circle, circle, dead deer, circle. In those days, your cave markings had to be phallogocentric, or else. This is my favorite sentence from Heidegger: “Truth occurs precisely as itself in that the concealing denial, as refusal, provides its constant source to all clearing, and yet, as dissembling, it metes out to all clearing the indefeasible severity of error.” Why? Because it gives me hope.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

I like anyone who is not white, and anyone else who is white and somewhat poor. And several others as well.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

There’s lots of contemporary writing that I admire, and a lot that I hate with an almost ridiculous intensity. I really like Catherine Wagner, Josh Bell, Christine Hume, Maurice Manning, Sabrina Mark, Terrance Hayes, and anyone who is cute, really. I would like to arm wrestle Tony Hoagland and perhaps hurt him in some non-permanent way. I really hate poems that include the scientific names of weeds or mold spores. And poems with lots of land in them. My tastes are strictly seafaring. I hate poems that go “exactly and exacting” or that end real sudden-like. Facile rhyming, however, is the bomb, and projective verse interspersed with facile rhyming & palpitations is the bomb-diggity. Neologisms are a necromantic indulgence, while misspellings are terrific.

Like a lot of people, I usually read before I write, so synapses that are sleeping or dead or immobilized by fear might do something. Effusive poetry works well in this regard. The more words, the better. Quiet poetry makes me quiet. Sometimes the effusive poetry is so full-bodied and effusive that it, too, gelds me into quietness.

In 2003, Alan Dugan and Johnny Cash died within days of each other, and most everything has gone downhill after that.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

I could give a hang about that whole Faerie Queen (sic?) mess.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

You know that kid in your class you like to pick on? The one you call “Booger” or “Cot-Wetter”? The one who has no grasp of the fundamentals of dodge ball?
The one who stares? The one who talks constantly of the birdness of birds and the greenness of grass? The one who knows what “fey” means? That kid has a rich, inner life. He/she sees shit. He/she hears shit. Even now that kid is endeavoring to master the verbs and adjectives that you so wantonly cast aside for jacks and rope skipping; he/she is gathering up all the beauty locked deep inside him/her, beauty that may seem unbeautiful and ludicrous to you, kid, but trust me, beauty it is. And one day, not too long from now, he/she is going to unleash that beauty, unbridled and bright, onto the pages of obscure literary journals and into the ears of frequently dispassionate listeners all across this wide land of ours. He/she may even unleash a blog. That unleashing is called poetry, or a poem, or a blog. A poem is an essential function of humanity. A poem is the saving grace of our loveless culture. A poem is what keeps the Divine Right of Kings from being true. So, don’t be too hard on that kid. There are perfect flowers waving behind his/her vacant eyes. A well-placed knock to the head could ruin all that.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

For the former, to believe any kind of noise is good noise. For the latter, to stay awake. For both, to dream only of tee shirts.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**syringe

Chiseled**matterack

I**iodine

Of**oven

Form**pretty

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

The text is a text and the body is a body and the body is a . . . one might peruse the other if given aptitude or adenoids. Or special permissions. It fit real tight. It stay real close. All the time. All the day long.

2005-09-10T19:31:00.000-04:00

photo credit Tina Chang

Ravi Shankar is poet-in-residence at Central Connecticut State University and the founding editor of the internationally acclaimed online journal of the arts, Drunken Boat. His first book Instrumentality, was published by Cherry Grove in May 2004. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in such places as The Paris Review, Poets &Writers, The Fishouse, Time Out New York, The New Hampshire Review,
Blackbird, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Descant, LIT, Crowd, The Cortland Review, Catamaran, Caketrain, Fourth River, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Ecopoetics, The Indiana Review, The Electronic Book Review, Western Humanities Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace, and the AWP Writer's Chronicle, among other publications, including two anthologies of contemporary poetry. He has taught at Queens College, University of New Haven, and Columbia University, where he received his MFA in Poetry. He has read at such venues as The National Arts Club, Columbia University, KGB, the Asia Society, Artspace, University of Virginia, the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and the Cornelia Street Café, has held residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, has served on panels at UCLA, Poet¹s House, South-by-Southwest Interactive/Film Festival, and the AWP Conference in Baltimore and Vancouver, been a commentator for NPR, KKUP and Wesleyan radio and been featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education , The Hartford Courant, The Journal Messenger and in the Shoreline Press, reviews poetry for the Contemporary Poetry Review and is currently editing an anthology of South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern poetry. You can read an interview with him at Jacket. As a youth, he was once forced to conjure silken scarves from an empty hat as his father's, Sam the Super's, magician's apprentice.

Buy his books here.

See some work here (see above).

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

I grew up listening to Sanskrit slokas at the Hindu temples I visited as a youth, and the music of those foreign syllables, which I did not understand, charged my bloodstream with electricity nonetheless. I read portions of the Bhagavad Gita in comic book form and was swept away by the pantheon of mythical figures. But probably the first poem I ever loved was Randall Jarrell's "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner", which I remember reading in high school with an especially precocious English teacher (thank you Dr. Jacobs). I remember being fascinated by the ways in which something so succinct could have such magnitude and force behind it. Probably my own proclivity for criticism was initiated with this poem as well, as I remember well the explication of the text. That something could exist simultaneously on both a literal and figurative level was news to me, and that imagery that evoked a primordial, animal state ('wet fur froze') also could have a material referent (the pile of a flight jacket saturated with mist) was another revelation. I appreciated how devices of sound, like the consonance of 'black flak' could be metonymic of what was being described, and I also felt keenly the horror and unfairness of war. I remember saying, tentatively, that the hose was perhaps like an umbilical cord and being applauded for making such a connection. That the meaning of a poem might not inhere exclusively in a poem but also in its reader was something that buoyed me considerably. Years later, I discovered Hart Crane's lyric "A Name for All" and it forged an incipient sense of poetic purpose that I had felt subconsciously all along.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

I read the sports page because I find its clichés and recitations of performance somehow comforting, like submerging myself in a warm bath. I read journals of physics and biology because I'm an inveterate word and concept hunter and love to discover something like Ampere's law and consider how the fact that an electrical field in space is proportional to the charge which serves as its source might be useful in structuring a poem or understanding the universe. I used to be an editor for the magazines Circuits Assembly and Embedded Systems Programming, and am fascinated by the jargon that passes as vernacular in those fields. Perhaps I'm also feeling guilty about not going into the field of engineering as my father so desperately wanted.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Absolutely crucial. I'm inherently a philosophical poet because I believe that what we do with poems is construct a bridge between the known and the unknown, or alternately between the edible and the indelible. I feel like poems are distilled communications from the ether that allow us to better understand the nature of ourselves and the reality in which our lives play out.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Rilke whom I love for his perceptions which seem to verge on the arrogant but are in fact a few degrees more confidant; Milosz who shows me how to be incorporate genuine spirituality into poetry; Szymborska whose profundity is commensurate with simplicity, a necessary corrective to my own tendencies (I was called an "over-empurpler" in graduate school); Lucretius whose De Rerum Natura remains a paradigm of fusing science and philosophy; contemporary Indian poets, like Keki Daruwalla and Rukimini Bhaya Nair, who are doing some of the most interesting work in poetry that I know of right now.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

I read a fair amount of poetry in my capacity as the editor of Drunken Boat and as a reviewer for the Contemporary Poetry Review. I also try to read work of my contemporaries, particularly the poets I've met and get to know in the flesh prior to in the sentence. I actually find that reading too much poetry when I'm trying to write is stultifying. I'd rather read field guides and bridal magazines, so that my consciousness is not stuffed full of the many voices that resonate alongside my own. When I consider how much poetry is being written, I begin to wonder if there's still time to enroll in that computer class my father keeps sending me clippings for. Of course, I will sometimes go back to Dickinson or Coleridge or Kalidasa to be humbled before hunching again at my pad.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

Haven't read Ulysses or Remembrance of Things Past. Haven't read much of Byron and Shelley. Haven't read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance though I've attempted to twice. Really the lacunae in my reading are so profligate that it's not worth trying to catalogue. Sometimes I'll calculate my life expectancy and divide it by amount of time it takes me to read, to really read, a work of literature, and get so despondent that I have no recourse but to channel surf away the pain.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

A poem is a poem is a plum that you sing, nothing besides the pleasure it brings, or if something more, not a chore, but before, the way the sound of the rain on the roof can restore the wings to the bird that you can't buy in a store, but draw in your mind with colors and sounds.

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 capitalizations for humans because it's one small step away from Doctor or Esquire or Admiral or Commandant. A poet, is by necessity relegated to the fringes of society and rather than gripe about that place, I think we might try to return the conscious mind back to the things and people of the world, to view with renewal and act in compassion. If as Mallarmé wrote, “the poet’s task is to purify the language of the tribe," then I would also say that the poet's task is to sully the language of the bribe, and articulate the language of the crib.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**planetarium

Chiseled**spongy

I**chariot of inscrutable figment

Of**without

Form**intrinsic

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

I could read this question a number of different ways - the shape of my poems contains or constrains or releases or distills the communiqué; my physical body is present in the making of the poem, in that I'm sometimes trying to recapture the feeling of my skin on another's skin, or the deficiency in my eyes, or the sounds that emanate from a construction site when I walk by eating some honey-roasted peanuts. The suppleness of the form I use in a particular poem is commensurate with the perception, at least ideally, and I'm obsessed with the visual look of the poem on the page, have had to train myself not to desire geometrical regularity. Let's just say that what spins out is consciously sculpted so that it might sit in the palm of the hand like a carved inlayed brass box.

2005-09-06T18:16:00.000-04:00

Photo credit: Heather Pepper

Jason Camlot is a Montreal poet, songwriter and critic. His first collection of poems, The Animal Library (DC Books, 2000) was nominated for the QWF A.M. Klein Prize for poetry. A second collection entitled, Attention All Typewriters will be out this summer (2005). In the 1990s he released three compilations of songs in quick succession, O Glee (1994), Mr. Fedora (1995) and Letterbomb (1996). Then, he got a job teaching Victorian literature at Concordia University. He still keeps it real, though, playing bass with the Montreal based Rawk! outfit Puggy Hammer, which released its debut record Rock Like Idiots in 2004. And, O Glee is slated for re-issue in 2006 with Urban Myth Records. His scholarly articles and reviews, some on poetry and poetics, can be found in journals such as Postmodern Culture, The Journal of Canadian Poetry, Atenea, Semiotic Research, English Literary History, Book History, Victorian Studies, etc. His poems can be found in numerous literary journals and anthologies including online at nthposition.com, and on the page in Poetry Nation, Short Fuse, Career Suicide, 100 Poets Against the War, In The Criminal’s Cabinet, Queen Street Quarterly, Rampike, Matrix, Postmodern Culture, and many other such places.

Buy his books here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

I loved song lyrics long before I ever loved poems. If you’re counting song lyrics in your ‘first poem’ question, some of the earliest songs I learned to sing (from age three/four) were among the first poems I ever loved. These included, “Those Were the Days My Friends” as sung by Mary Hopkins, “Bei Mir Bist Du Shein” as sung by the Andrew Sisters and “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” as sung by my older sisters. I loved these songs because I sang them with people I loved, and it was fun. I probably came to loving poems (the way I loved those songs) quite late in life, in my late teens—and it was a more solitary kind of experience. The first poem I ever loved like a song was Elizabeth Bishop’s “Crusoe in England.” I think I loved it because the voice in which it is delivered is so friendly and inviting, and interesting—it’s like the voice of an interesting stranger. I think I loved it because it is (apparently) a narrative, and this was a pleasant surprise, it being a poem and all. Because it created a wonderfully strange and estranged little world out of another fictional world that I thought I knew pretty well (Robinson Crusoe). Because it was a long poem that I enjoyed from beginning to end, and I was proud of myself for reading such a long poem and liking it all the way through. And, initially, I loved Bishop’s “Crusoe in England” because of the lines:

One day I dyed a baby goat bright red
with my red berries, just to see
something a little different.
And then his mother wouldn't recognize him.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

I read the cartoon Dilbert by Scott Adams pretty religiously, but then, what’s more literary than Dilbert? I have a few ‘non-literary’ books that I return to pretty regularly, for no obvious reason. They are: Photofact Guide to TV Troubles by Howard W. Sams, Electronic Organs by Robert L. Eby, and The Puppet Book edited by L.V. Wall. All three of these books are on subjects I know very little about, and I continue to be in ignorance of these subjects even after I spend hours studying reading about them. I suppose that is a primary reason that I read these books. So, there are two possible reasons that I read them. Either I hope that at some point I will learn something from them, or, I take pleasure in knowing that I can read these books again and again without learning from them in any calculable sense. They move me, somehow, but they sure don’t make me smarter. Further, they are all “Profusely Illustrated” as the cover of Electronic Organs boasts, and I’m sure that’s another reason I like to read them.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

I have been influenced by the discipline of thought called philosophy insofar as it is a discourse demanding a kind of discursive and conceptual mastery that I know I will never achieve. That knowledge hasn’t deterred me, and I do enjoy reading the work of philosophers (aesthetic philosophers in particular), sometimes because I am able to grasp the ideas being communicated, and sometimes because I simply enjoy riding the big wave of conceptual abstraction. The stylistic elements of philosophical discourse interest me. Berel Lang has written about the rhetoric of this discipline. I’m not so interested in what he has to say about the rhetoric of philosophy, as I am in reading philosophical writing for the effects of the discursive forms he is interested in analyzing. I love reading Adorno (especially Robert Hullot-Kentor's translation of Aesthetic Theory), Benjamin (any Benjamin), Spinoza, Levinas, Bakhtin, Arendt, Austin, for this kind of pleasure.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Zbigniew Herbert, Horace, Tu Fu, Yehuda Amichai. I read Herbert and Tu Fu in Translation, although I own many of Herbert’s books in Polish. I don’t understand any Polish. When I was in Poland I bought a bunch of his books just because I was so excited to see so many different Herbert books on the shelves. Horace and Amichai I read in parallel translation. My Hebrew is much better than my Latin, and my Hebrew is not very good.

The short answer to why these are my favorites: They communicate an immediate humanity that is familiar to me in a cultural iconography that is foreign to me. I like that mix of very familiar and rather foreign, a lot.

I read lots of poetry in French, and love reading Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Valéry, Mallarmé, and especially Verlaine. I love the songs of George Brassens very much. I have gone on Brassens-listening binges that have lasted at least as long as some of my Dylan, Cohen or Morrisey-listening binges.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

I’m in the business (I’m an English literature professor) so I read poetry all the time. That said, I don’t only read for work, I also read a lot of poetry for pleasure/purely inspirational purposes. I’d say I read at least ten poems every day. I had never thought about it before your question was posed to me. But, now that I have thought about it, I wonder if it is healthy to read so much poetry.

Poetry is very important to my writing. I am inspired, primarily, I’d say, by the poetry (and other things) that I read.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

Given that I am a literature professor at a Canadian university, it might surprising to some of my colleagues that I have never read a Margaret Atwood novel from cover to cover. There is no particular reason that I haven’t read Atwood’s fiction. It’s just that there has always been something else I’ve wanted to read first.

Of course, now that I have said this, I will read a couple of her novels so that if any of my colleagues see this, and say, “I can’t believe you have never read an Margaret Atwood novel from cover to cover,” I can say, “Well, actually, I’ve read a few since that interview.”

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

I’m not convinced it’s useful for a seven year old to be taught such a conceptual category as “poem.” It’s quite an institutionally defined generic/aesthetic category, and while I’m pretty sure I could communicate to a seven year old a sense of what powerful works in this category mean to me, I just don’t think I’d want him or her to use that word, or to attach it to anything in particular (like words lineated on a page). On the other hand, once your seven year old turns seventeen, I’d like him or her to start calling all kinds of things poems.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

Poets are the unacknowledged, to truncate a famous line from Shelley’s Defense. I think that’s a good thing, and I’m most comfortable with the role of the poet as an unacknowledged something or other.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**Sprite

Chiseled**Chisler

I**Fu

Of**Above

Form**Fromm

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

I love bodies. And I love texts. I don’t feel I’m trying to write the body in any particular sense. I do feel that many textual experiences can feel very corporeal and a corporeal textuality is something that I aspire to in some of my poems. Allen Ginsberg was working for a while with some of his students on a project he called “Graphic Winces,” which were arrangements of words that might trigger a wince response the way an actual sensory experience could. I sometimes keep a log of small clusters of words that I put down in my notebook in three-line ‘vertebra’ stanzas. I write them down the center of each page so that each page, once filled up has a small spinal column of little word vertebrae on it. The rule is, no more than three words per line, no more than three lines per vertebra. The goal is to capture something visceral in each of these vertebra stanzas. Something nerve-pinching. Many of these vertebrae have been integrated as image clusters (re-rationalized, re-habilitated) into my poems.

2005-09-03T19:17:00.000-04:00

Please forward this post to everyone you can.
Thanks,

Lance Phillips

The American Red Cross

The Salvation Amry

Americorp

The Department of Health and Human Services

Contact The White House

Contact your Representative

Contact your Senator

Laura Mullen, Baton Rouge

The extent of the catastrophe--and the lack of aid, the slowness & smallness of the response—is unimaginable. Friends have been bicycling medical supplies form the local drugstores to the refugee shelters! New Orleans is a war zone in a disaster area...and Bush is anxious to save money for Iraq. At every contact you have w/ people please try to make them understand the extent of the betrayal--and ask them to donate to the Red Cross, please. This is bad beyond belief....

Please write to your representatives, call the White House, push for recognition and relief. Hope this brings Bush down--but people are dying everyday here & change is a distant hope. Start now making sure that you & everyone you know expresses their dismay and disbelief--and say that this will be remembered for a long, long time!

Please Forward

Notes From Inside New Orleans
by Jordan Flaherty
Friday, September 2, 2005

I just left New Orleans a couple hours ago. I traveled from the apartment
I was staying in by boat to a helicopter to a refugee camp. If anyone wants to examine the attitude of federal and state officials towards the victims of hurricane Katrina, I advise you to visit one of the refugee camps.

In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway, thousands of people (at least 90% black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would come through, it would stop at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the barricades, and people would rush for the bus, with no information given about where the bus was going. Once inside (we were told) evacuees would be told where the bus was taking them - Baton Rouge, Houston, Arkansas, Dallas, or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas (for example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge would not be allowed to get out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge. You had no choice but to go to the shelter in Arkansas. If you had people willing to come to New Orleans to pick you up, they could not come within 17 miles of the camp.

I traveled throughout the camp and spoke to Red Cross workers, Salvation Army workers, National Guard, and state police, and although they were friendly, no one could give me any details on when buses would arrive, how many, where they would go to, or any other information. I spoke to the several teams of journalists nearby, and asked if any of them had been able to get any information from any federal or state officials on any of these questions, and all of them, from Australian TV to local Fox affiliates complained of an unorganized, non-communicative, mess. One cameraman
Told me "as someone who's been here in this camp for two days, the only information I can give you is this: get out by nightfall. You don't want to be here at night."

There was also no visible attempt by any of those running the camp to setup any sort of transparent and consistent system, for instance a line to get on buses, a way to register contact information or find family members, special needs services for children and infirm, phone services, treatment for possible disease exposure, nor even a single trash can.

To understand this tragedy, it’s important to look at New Orleans itself.

For those who have not lived in New Orleans, you have missed an incredible, glorious, vital, city. A place with a culture and energy unlike anywhere else in the world. A 70% African-American city where resistance to white supremacy has supported a generous, subversive and unique culture of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues and hip-hop, to second lines, Mardi Gras Indians, Parades, Beads, Jazz Funerals, and red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music and dance and sexuality and liberation unlike anywhere else in the world.

It is a city of kindness and hospitality, where walking down the block can take two hours because you stop and talk to someone on every porch, and where a community pulls together when someone is in need. It is a city of extended families and social networks filling the gaps left by city, state and federal governments that have abdicated their responsibility for the public welfare. It is a city where someone you walk past on the street not only asks how you are, they wait for an answer.

It is also a city of exploitation and segregation and fear. The city of New Orleans has a population of just over 500,000 and was expecting 300 murders this year, most of them centered on just a few, overwhelmingly black, neighborhoods. Police have been quoted as saying that they don't need to search out the perpetrators, because usually a few days after a shooting, the attacker is shot in revenge.

There is an atmosphere of intense hostility and distrust between much of Black New Orleans and the N.O. Police Department. In recent months, officers have been accused of everything from drug running to corruption to theft. In separate incidents, two New Orleans police officers were recently charged with rape (while in uniform), and there have been several high profile police killings of unarmed youth, including the murder of Jenard Thomas, which has inspired ongoing weekly protests for several months.

The city has a 40% illiteracy rate, and over 50% of black ninth graders will not graduate in four years. Louisiana spends on average $4,724 per child's education and ranks 48th in the country for lowest teacher salaries. The equivalent of more than two classrooms of young people dropout of Louisiana schools every day and about 50,000 students are absent from school on any given day. Far too many young black men from New Orleans end up enslaved in Angola Prison, a former slave plantation where inmates still do manual farm labor, and over 90% of inmates eventually die in the prison. It is a city where industry has left, and most remaining jobs are low-paying, transient, insecure jobs in the service economy.

Race has always been the undercurrent of Louisiana politics. This disaster is one that was constructed out of racism, neglect and incompetence. Hurricane Katrina was the inevitable spark igniting the gasoline of cruelty and corruption. From the neighborhoods left most at risk, to the treatment of the refugees to the media portrayal of the victims, this disaster is shaped by race.

Louisiana politics is famously corrupt, but with the tragedies of this week our political leaders have defined a new level of incompetence. As hurricane Katrina approached, our Governor urged us to "Pray the hurricane down" to a level two. Trapped in a building two days after the hurricane, we tuned our battery-operated radio into local radio and TV stations, hoping for vital news, and were told that our governor had called for a day of prayer. As rumors and panic began to rule, there was no source of solid dependable information. Tuesday night, politicians and reporters said the water level would rise another 12 feet - instead it stabilized. Rumors spread like wildfire, and the politicians and media only made it worse.

While the rich escaped New Orleans, those with nowhere to go and no way to get there were left behind. Adding salt to the wound, the local and national media have spent the last week demonizing those left behind. As someone that loves New Orleans and the people in it, this is the part of this tragedy that hurts me the most, and it hurts me deeply.

No sane person should classify someone who takes food from indefinitely closed stores in a desperate, starving city as a "looter," but that’s just what the media did over and over again. Sheriffs and politicians talked of having troops protect stores instead of perform rescue operations.

Images of New Orleans' hurricane-ravaged population were transformed into black, out-of-control, and criminals. As if taking a stereo from a store that will clearly be insured against loss is a greater crime than the governmental neglect and incompetence that did billions of dollars of damage and destroyed a city. This media focus is a tactic, just as the eighties focus on "welfare queens" and "super-predators" obscured the simultaneous and much larger crimes of the Savings and Loan scams and masslayoffs, the hyper-exploited people of New Orleans are being used as a scapegoat to cover up much larger crimes.

City, state and national politicians are the real criminals here. Since at least the mid-1800s, it’s been widely known the danger faced by flooding to New Orleans. The flood of 1927, which, like this week's events, was more about politics and racism than any kind of natural disaster, illustrated exactly the danger faced. Yet government officials have consistently refused to spend the money to protect this poor, overwhelmingly black, city. While FEMA and others warned of the urgent impending danger to New Orleans and put forward proposals for funding to reinforce and protect the city, the Bush administration, in every year since 2001, has cut or refused to fund New Orleans flood control, and ignored scientists warnings of increased hurricanes as a result of global warming. And, as the dangers rose with the flood lines, the lack of coordinated response dramatized vividly the callous disregard of our elected leaders.

The aftermath from the 1927 flood helped shape the elections of both a US
President and a Governor, and ushered in the southern populist politics of Huey Long.

In the coming months, billions of dollars will likely flood into New Orleans. This money can either be spent to usher in a "New Deal" for the city, with public investment, creation of stable union jobs, new schools, cultural programs and housing restoration, or the city can be "rebuilt and revitalized" to a shell of its former self, with newer hotels, more casinos, and with chain stores and theme parks replacing the former neighborhoods, cultural centers and corner jazz clubs.

Long before Katrina, New Orleans was hit by a hurricane of poverty, racism, disinvestment, de-industrialization and corruption. Simply the damage from this pre-Katrina hurricane will take billions to repair.

Now that the money is flowing in, and the world's eyes are focused on Katrina, its vital that progressive-minded people take this opportunity to fight for a rebuilding with justice. New Orleans is a special place, and we need to fight for its rebirth.

-----------------------------------------------
Jordan Flaherty is an editor of Left Turn Magazine (www.leftturn.org).

The American Red Cross

The Salvation Army

Americorp

The Department of Health and Human Services

Contact The White House

Contact your Representative

Contact you Senator

MONETARY DONATIONS
Monetary donations can be sent to these outlets, which we have confirmed are REALLY delivering services to folks in need...

BlackAmericaWeb.com Relief Fund
PO Box 803209
Dallas, TX 75240
OR you can make an online donation by going to www.blackamericaweb.com/relief
(This fund has been set up by nationally syndicated radio personality TOM JOYNER)

NAACP Disaster Relief Efforts
The NAACP is setting up command centers in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama as part of its disaster relief efforts. NAACP units across the nation have begun collecting resources that will be placed on trucks and sent directly into the disaster areas. Also, the NAACP has established a disaster relief fund to accept monetary donations to aid in the relief effort.

Checks can be sent to the NAACP payable to:
NAACP Hurricane Katrina Relief Fund
4805 Mt. Hope Drive
Baltimore, MD 21215

Donations can also be made online at www.naacp.org/disaster/contribute.php

FYI: the NAACP, founded in 1909, is America's oldest civil rights organization

www.teamrescueone.com
Set up by native New Orleans rapper Master P and his wife Sonya Miller.

WHERE TO MAIL NON-PERISHABLE ITEMS
You can mail or ship non-perishable items to these following locations, which we have confirmed are REALLY delivering services to folks in need:

Center for LIFE Outreach Center
121 Saint Landry Street
Lafayette, LA 70506
atten.: Minister Pamela Robinson
337-504-5374
*******************************
Mohammad Mosque 65
2600 Plank Road
Baton Rouge, LA 70805
atten.: Minister Andrew Muhammad
225-923-1400
225-357-3079
*******************************
Lewis Temple CME Church
272 Medgar Evers Street
Grambling, LA 71245
atten.: Rev. Dr. Ricky Helton
318-247-3793
*******************************
St. Luke Community United Methodist Church
c/o Hurricane Katrina Victims
5710 East R.L. Thornton Freeway
Dallas, TX 75223
atten.: Pastor Tom Waitschies
214-821-2970
*******************************
S.H.A.P.E. Community Center
3815 Live Oak
Houston, Texas 77004
atten.: Deloyd Parker
713-521-0641

ALTERNATIVE MEDIA OUTLETS
Alternative media outlets where you can get a more accurate and balanced presentation of the New Orleans catastrophe.

www.diversityinc.com
www.alternet.org
www.blackelectorate.com
www.npr.org
www.daveyd.com
www.slate.com
www.bet.com
www.allhiphop.com
www.democracynow.org
www.blackamericaweb.com

PLEASE VISIT all these websites.

5 THINGS YOU CAN DO TO HELP IMMEDIATELY
1. Duplicate what we are doing elsewhere in New York City, in your city or town, on your college campus, at your church, synagogue, mosque, or other religious institution, via your fraternity or sorority, or via your local civic or social organization.

2. Cut and paste the information in this eblast about:

- Items needed by survivors of the New Orleans catastrophe
- Monetary donations
- Where you can ship non perishable items
- Alternative media outlets
- Five things you can do to help immediately

...and share this information as a ONE SHEET with folks near and far, via email, or as a hand out at your event, religious institution, and with your civic or social organization.

3. Voice your opinion to local and national media, and to elected officials, via letter, email, op ed article, or phone call, regarding the coverage of the New Orleans catastrophe, as well as to the federal government's on going handling of the situation.

4. Ask the hotel you frequent, such as the Marriott or Holiday Inn, to give your hotel points to an individual or family in need of a stay for a night, a few nights, or longer, depending on how many points you have. Be sure to get confirmation that your points have been applied in that way. Encourage others to do the same. Also inquire if your airline frequent flyer mileage can be used for hotel stays as well. Finally, either offer to pay for hotel rooms, or encourage others to do so, including your place of employment or worship or your organization.

5. Dare to care about other human beings, no matter their race, gender, class, sexual orientation, religion, geography, culture, clothing, hairstyle, or accent or language. Like September 11th, the New Orleans catastrophe is a harsh reminder that all life is precious, as is each day we have on this earth.

AND REMEMBER that our attention and response to the New Orleans catastrophe needs to happen in three stages...DISASTER, RECOVERY, and REBUILDING. We need you for all three stages.

Media inquiries for "BENEFIT for New Orleans" are directed to:
April R. Silver
AKILA WORKSONGS
718.756.8501
pr.media@akilaworksongs.com

2005-08-30T18:26:00.000-04:00

Reb Livingston is the editor of No Tell Motel. She's working on (along with No Tell's contributing editor, Molly Arden) an anthology titled _The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel_. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in MiPOesias, SOFTBLOW, Ducky, Unpleasant Event Schedule, Drunken Boat, Good Foot and LIT. A native of Pittsburgh, PA, she lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.

See some work here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

I came to poetry rather late in the game. Although I was a voracious reader as a child, I read virtually no poetry. Our house was full of books; classics, contemporary novels, historical accounts, scientific and instructional manuals, three sets of encyclopedias, but I can’t remember coming across a single poetry collection or anthology. Aside from a handful of required poems in high school English courses, I didn’t read poems until college. The first poem that ever struck me was Cornelius Eady's "Sherbet" because it painted injustice and what was "wrong with the world." That was something I believed I could feel, relate to and understand at 18. It's one of the few poems I read as an undergraduate that I still remember vividly. So I guess that's love since love is what you don't forget.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

This probably wouldn't surprise anyone who knows me well, but I read a fair amount of new age-ish texts, things on astrology, tarot, numerology, souls, auras, etc. Any type of "how-to-live-your-life" guides. In middle school I read Dale Carnegie's _How to Win Friends and Influence People_ and ever since have been hooked on those kinds of books. I (heart) Dr. Phil. Right now I'm reading how-to books both on nutrition after pregnancy and developing a fantastic wardrobe. I also enjoy the celebrity gossip columns, although not to the extent my sister and mother do.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

You'd think a girl who spent 2 years as an office assistant in a university Philosophy department would have a good answer to this question. I was really good at fixing paper jam's in the department's copy machine. The philosophers could never figure it out. They were always calling for my help. They were brilliant, but I was powerful. My writing is probably helpless without philosophy, but I have yet to figure out how or why. During fits of arrogance I'll claim no importance whatsoever.

The other thing that comes to mind is the campaign slogan of a failed Pittsburgh mayoral candidate in the early '90's. It was "I'll Kick Your Ass Philosophically." That phrase has almost become my mantra. Almost.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Favorite writers of any type change with the seasons for me. My favorite non-Anglo-American writers that I've been reading and re-reading lately are Antonio Machado and Nichita Danilov because lately I've been drawn to poems of forbidden love and angels. Especially drunken angels.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

Of course I do and I get irked when other poets say that they don't. I suppose I shouldn't care one way or the other, but I do. At the very least, I'm reading poems published in online journals on a daily basis. It's just so convenient. I read a handful of print journals on a regular basis and I have an embarrassing growing stack of books that I add to faster than I can keep up with. Especially now that my son is here. Since my time is more limited than ever, I read to him in the wee hours when I'm trying to get him to sleep. It's one of my goofy attempts to multi-task.

On a weekly basis, I read No Tell submissions and that's probably the most obvious instructional of what to do and what not to do in my own poetry.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

There's lots of stuff I haven't read, but I'm reasonably young and still have quite a few reading years left in me. I haven't read much of Pound. Years ago I purchased the Cantos, probably a ridiculous place to start, got intimidated and put it on my shelf. Someday I’ll go to back to it.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

I'd tell her that poetry is for adults and she's much too young and she should stick to Nancy Drew or the Babysitter's Club or whatever kids are supposed to be reading these days. If only somebody told me that when I was a kid, I'd have been reading the Cantos when I was 7 instead of smoking and drinking and being obsessed with acquiring a bra for myself.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

There's no single role for anything. It depends on where you're at, what's needed and what you're capable of doing. We all have our roles, the only thing that unites poets across the board is writing poems.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):
Lemon**Pledge
Chiseled**Venus
I**C.U.P.
Of**Course
Form**Spasm

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

They often reflect each other. When one is weak or soft or sickly, so is the other. When one is strong or vibrant or engaged, SHAZAM!

2005-08-27T20:33:00.000-04:00

Larry Sawyer is a poet who edits www.milkmag.org with his wife Lina ramona Vitkauskas. He's published poetry and critical reviews in magazines such as
Exquisite Corpse, Moria, Tabacaria (Portugal), Hunger, Paper Tiger (Australia), The Prague Literary Review, Big Bridge, Skanky Possum, Cipher Journal, Unpleasant Event Schedule, 5_Trope, WORD/for Word, Versal (Holland), Van Gogh's Ear (France), Jacket (Australia), Rain Taxi, The East Village, and elsewhere.

Chapbooks include Poems for Peace (anthology, Structum Press) and A Chaise Lounge in Hell (aboveground press, Ontario, Canada)

See some work here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

I had a high school English teacher who led a discussion about “The Windhover” by Hopkins that really produced a sort of revelation about the possibilities of poetry opening up before me, because after that particular description and discussion of the poem I felt I could literally “see” what was being described in a poem for nearly the first time, i.e., words enacting an event rather than simply describing an event. I wouldn’t say I love that poem, but it served a valuable purpose. To a lesser extent, consider Ginsberg’s phrase “boxcars, boxcars, boxcars” from “Howl” or Aram Saroyan’s one-word poem “lightght”. There’s brilliance all around us. Words became objects in themselves. It was a pivotal moment for me, but I’d also had an ongoing infatuation with the work (and even the persona) of Arthur Rimbaud and felt like “Une Saison en Enfer” had opened up another world to me, although one could make the case that this particular “poem” is actually incendiary prose.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

Everything I read ends up in some repository of the psyche and comes to the fore when I write, so I guess I consider it all to be “literary” in a sense. I obsess over the news media like many others I suppose and pour over all the trash tabloids when standing in the check-out lane at the grocery store, which makes me feel like I’m amiable alien for a few minutes. I doubt if anyone I know cares what I read literary or otherwise. I do think mining nonliterary sources for gems is important--at least I find it necessary. Sometimes you have to get your head out of the water and check to see if the people on the beach are still there.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

I should mention my short attention span for anything that seems incredibly obtuse. Philosophy has been important to me but not so important to the writing of my poetry. I remember reading Nietzsche early on and being attracted to some of his ideas and then sort of becoming repelled by them later. I’d say that I work through my own personal, idiosyncratic philosophical “problems” in my writing, but I don’t have some conscious modus operandi to which I adhere. All philosophies seem valid from my standpoint, as do all religions.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

That list would be very long and would have to include Paul Celan, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Jorge Luis Borges, Andre Breton. Certainly also Homer, Li Po, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, Lorca, Huidobro, Vallejo-- there must be a million others. Senghor and Cesaire are huge stalagmites in the cave of poetry.

These are just some of the poets whose works really detonated in my consciousness. That’s a tough question to answer. It seemed to me early on that these poets have a breadth and depth of imagination that is astounding. I haven’t read enough Chinese and Japanese poets. I admire Yamamoto Kansuke immensely. Look him up. I read all the aforementioned in translation and because of that there’s the distinct possibility that I therefore missed the “poetry” of those works entirely! I do think the rushed foreplay of the best available translation is rather better than stark nothing.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

I edit a literary magazine with my wife and end up reading at least some poetry everyday. Some of what I receive in the mail is bad writing of course but a lot is good. I tend to reread quite a bit to try to reduce the interference that my own particular mood may produce. In other words I trust myself, but I still make instinctual decisions.

Beyond what I receive as submissions for www.milkmag.org, my online poetry magazine, I’m always caught reading whatever poet has inflamed my imagination at any given moment. I’m usually reading a few different books nearly simultaneously--depending on my interest level. Reading poetry keeps me here among the living!

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

I never read Pound’s Cantos. I never read Zukofsky’s “A,” although I read a very interesting book about the writing of “A.” I can’t stand Auden. There, I said it. I simply haven’t gotten around to reading those works. Also, it’s somewhat of a turn-off to need a skeleton key to enter a work and really “get it.” That’s not to say that something needs to be “gotten” at first reading, however. I’m currently reading Hebdomeros, by De Chirico and that’s not something that has any real, or literal, meaning. I guess one has to consider the artist’s intent; then reconsider, and reconsider, and reconsider …

I don’t know if anyone would make any assumptions about anything I have or haven’t read. I guess I become interested in some key player and then end up reading about the whole crew eventually. For instance, someone turned me on to Frank O’Hara a long time ago, which led to my “discovery” of Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, then Berrigan, Padgett, Joe Brainard, Jim Carroll, etc.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

I’d simply point to the sky.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

No, nope, never.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**heads

Chiseled**torso

I**Ching

Of**course

Form**less

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

I want my poetry to have a physical presence.

2005-08-23T11:03:00.000-04:00

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.

2005-08-16T18:41:00.000-04:00

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker, Pavement Saw and elsewhere. Readers interested in learning more about him are invited to read the interview by David Baratier and the essay Magic, Illusion and Other Realities at www.geocities.com/simonthepoet which site lists a complete bibliography.

Buy his books here.

See some work here, here, here and here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

Baudelaire. I liked the directness and the power. He allowed me to use the vernacular, which wasn’t acceptable till then.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

Mad Magazine It was funny and cut through the bullshit of everyday life. Suddenly it seemed OK to be honest and irreverent.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Not important at all. I try to write poems not essays. Worse yet, my poems make their living in the subconscious and (Freud notwithstanding) have nothing to “say”. They have just enough reality in them to give the appearance they can be explicated (like dreams) but what I try to do is inform the reader of what cannot be articulated. Something like music.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Glad you asked. Neruda, Alexandrie, Celan and Roberto Helder.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

Yes. And it’s very important. I get to know the territory, see what others are up to. But mostly I steal from the musicians. My opening lines are stolen shamelessly from Beethoven, and then I settle down to Mahler.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

I don’t know that many poets and the few I know already are aware I read very little. I do read biographies when I want to take a break from writing. I get my ideas not from other writers but from confronting a photograph with an idea from science or biology or myth and try to reconcile the disparate, conflicting ideas. I go into this in quite detail in the essay Magic, Illusion and Other Realities at www.geocities.com/simonthepoet.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

First I’d make him/her aware that a poem is not an essay or a lecture and so it doesn’t have to, it shouldn’t “tell” the reader anything. It’s “the use of words that can heal”. Having said that I really believe your seven year old, any seven year old, is more interested in other forms of magic. When life becomes intolerable he/she will find that poetry has the power to heal, to give solace. I honestly believe poetry is not a tool for every day use by everyone. It’s just for those who need it. When they need it.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

Great question. Yes, the poet has a duty. He/She has the duty to use his/her skill, talent, gift to give solace to others. That’s why at a funeral we listen to Donne. Not Dostoyevsky.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**Juice

Chiseled**Honed

I**Me

Of**From

Form**Shape

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

Not aware of any.

2005-08-13T19:45:00.000-04:00

F.J. Bergmann is living in Wisconsin for the 4th or 5th time. A previous life was spent working with horses. She considers herself primarily a failed visual artist, which helps to prevent writer’s block. She claims to have an MFA from the School of the Americas, and is to blame for madpoetry.org, a local poetry website, as well as her own site, fibitz.com. Publication credits include the Beloit Poetry Journal, Margie, the North American Review, Wind, words & images, Blue Fifth Review, Tattoo Highway, Rosebud, Southern Poetry Review, as well as asininepoetry.com (under the pseudonym Easter Cathay). Her Flash translation, “Lace,” was selected for the 2002 Electronic Literature Symposium. In 2003, she received the Rinehart National Poetry Award and her chapbook Sauce Robert was a co-winner in the Pavement Saw Press competition. She was also a finalist for the 2003 Joy Bale Boone and James Hearst poetry prizes. In 2004 she was a finalist for the Violet Reed Haas Book Prize and the Winnow Press Open Book Award, runner-up for the Stephen Dunn Poetry Award and the winner of the Pauline Ellis Prose Poem Prize with “Wall”. Her hairstyle is deceptive. One of her pseudopodia can reach all the way from the bedroom to the refrigerator. Her favorite authors all write science fiction.

Buy her book here.

See some work here, here and here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

"The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens"

Romantic plot, doomed protagonist, an "I'll do what they told me to, and then they'll be sorry" mentality so appealing to preadolescents.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

Anything by Terry Pratchett.

The most entertaining writer in English today.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Not something I think about.
My subconscious handles all that sort of thing.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Jorge Luis Borges, Alain Bosquet, Samuel Delany, Louise Clifton, Nalo Hopkinson, Sherman Alexie, Walter Mosely.

Rich, vivid, imaginative, accessible (well, everybody but Bosquet) narratives.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

Yes.

Very. I enjoy a lot of poetry. I like to see what other poets are doing. I frequently use others' work as a jumping-off point for my own writing. I do a lot of my own writing at spoken-word venues while other people are reading because that's when I get Inspired.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

Anything by Dostoevsky.

Other stuff looks funner.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

Compared to a story or a novel, it's usually shorter and seems less complete. And more about a feeling than what happens or what it appears to be about.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

The Role of the Poet is to assassinate George W. Bush and his evil cohorts with words. The Role of the Citizen is to kill them with kindness. Or something.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon** Squash (Period British mystery novels and P.G. Wodehouse. What can I say?)

Chiseled** Features (Very likely Barbara Cartland, but I'll never admit to it. See Question 2.)

I** Spy (Part of the Cultural Lexicon.)
Of** Mice (This too.)

Form** Vaporous (Probably H.P. Lovecraft. I'm a big fan of his.)

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

The text substitutes nicely for the body, and has better taste in gauzy, silken lingerie. It's a sort of fantasy, in the sense of being another dimension to inhabit. I see the poem as another physical world; an alternative to this one, which is unsatisfactory in many respects (see Question 8).

2005-08-09T18:16:00.000-04:00

Sofia M. Starnes is a writer of Philippine-Spanish heritage. An American citizen since 1989, she was born in Manila and received an advanced degree in English Philology from the University of Madrid. A recipient of a Poetry Fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, she has won several other awards for her poetry. Her chapbook, The Soul's Landscape (January 2002), was selected by Billy Collins as one of two co-winners of the 2001 Aldrich Poetry Competition; her full-length poetry book, A Commerce of Moments, won Editor's Prize in the 2001 Transcontinental Poetry Award competition (Pavement Saw Press, August 2003), and it was subsequently named Honor Book in the 2004 Virginia Literary Awards Competition. Other recognitions include the 1997 Rainer Maria Rilke Poetry Prize, Editor's Prize in the 2002 Marlboro Prize in Poetry competition, the 2004 Conference on Christianity and Literature Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart nomination. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, among them The Southern Poetry Review, The Notre Dame Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Laurel Review, Hubbub, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, The Madison Review, Hotel Amerika, The Hawaii Pacific Review, The Marlboro Review, and Green Hills Literary Lantern (Pushcart Prize nominee). Sofia Starnes lives in Williamsburg, Virginia, with her husband, Bill. She offers writing tutorials and comprehensive editing services to writers of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry, through Creative Writing Critiques.

Buy her book here.

See some work here

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

Emily Dickinson's poem #1142, which is short enough to quote fully below and to memorize easily. It was the first poem to entice me into the world of poetry—as a hope-to-be poet—a long time ago. I found it to be essentialist, bare-boned, spiritual, and I loved the use of the house as a simple human metaphor. Even now, when a poem threatens to build itself upon empirical clutter, I am reminded of the verses "A past of Plank and Nail/ And slowness—", and Dickinson keeps me focused on what matters.

The Props assist the House
Until the House is built
And then the Props withdraw
And adequate, erect,
The House support itself
And cease to recollect
The Auger and the Carpenter—
Just such a retrospect
Hath the perfected Life—
A past of Plank and Nail
And slowness—then the Scaffolds drop
Affirming it a Soul.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

I am not sure I will be responding adequately to this question, since most of what I read falls—to some extent—under the "literary" category, even when the material is not considered such and is often excluded from the canon. In any case, I will share some of my reading preferences, those books I consume for pure pleasure, and which I am not compelled to read as a writer. My esteem for the authors I mention, however, is no less than it is for many other "literary" creators. Substance comes in many shapes—some of them deceptively unponderous.

I enjoy fantasy stories, in particular those of Ray Bradbury, because the author creates totally imaginary yet equally verisimilar landscapes and populates them with ordinary characters who must then react in extraordinary ways to their fates. These stories have the quality of great tragedies: what is best and worst of humanity is exposed, through the story's characters, in their edge-of-life (though not life-on-the-edge) situations.

I also enjoy good, sometimes ghostly, mysteries—especially those in the style of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes—which unfold in gas-lamp and fog-night Victorian settings. I am attracted to the well-conceived plot and its cogent resolution, and to characters who, while having to remain tethered to their societal roles, believe themselves to be untethered in their intellectual pursuits and deductions. And they act accordingly, out of that assumed freedom. I find the same satisfaction when I read the work of Ruth Rendell, a writer who achieves all of the above, using contemporary plots, with exceptional mastery. Her psychological thrillers, especially those in short-story form, are among my personal and perennial favorites.

Then, of course, if one means really non-literary, there are things like Gourmet magazine, baseball play-by-play accounts… and where would I include catalogues for writing implements and stationery supplies, travel brochures, or Bas Bleu and the Common Reader?

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Extremely important. Someone once said (I wish I knew who): experiences without ideas are mere anecdotes. So, a philosophy—that is, a worldview based on a consistent attempt to synchronize the reality of our minds with the reality around us, by means of a unifying idea—is essential. It bestows on us, on our observations, perceptions, etc., and on our writing, a life we/it/they would not possess otherwise. I also believe that, though not necessarily explicit in the poem, its philosophy comes to us unfailingly through the mood of the poem—i. e., through its mode of being.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Dante, above all—because of the way the poet assumes history, faith and cosmology in a single masterpiece. And I find special pleasure in the musicality of the Italian terza rima.

I am also attracted to the works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, authors of faith and drama; to Rainer Maria Rilke, because of the strength and lyricism of his verses; and to Spanish poets, such as Antonio Machado and Juan Ramón Jimenez, for reasons of personal heritage. My cultural roots draw me as well toward José Rizal, Philippine patriot and poet, and to the poem he composed on the eve of his execution, "Ultimo Adios"—a poem I often heard my father recite.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

"A lot" is a relative term here—perhaps it is, or is not—depending on the parameters used. I could not say for sure. I do read "a lot"—as much as time allows—but I am zealous of my writing time, as well. Plus, I like to read fiction, articles on the classics, and essays on religion and philosophy, among other things.

Although I am anxious to know what my fellow poets are writing and enjoy the discovery of new work, I do not spend time reading work that does not appeal to me emotionally and intellectually, or that does not address fundamental issues. However, when I find a poet whose mood (i. e., mode of being) connects in essence to mine, I am eager to read as much of his/her work as possible and to view the world through his/her eyes. However, I must confess that reading poetry is not always an easy task for me, because whenever I do so I find myself questioning my own role as a poet constantly against the way other poets fulfill their roles. (Excessive self-analysis is not always healthy.) Thus, I am compelled to read poetry in small doses, with emphasis on reflection, savoring, transcending.

I know that everything I read will affect what I write, one way or another, for good or ill, which means that the impact that reading has on one's writing can never be overestimated. Thus, reading—with the realization that a degree of osmosis is likely to occur—cannot be taken lightly. On the other hand, the elevated price for a degree of selectivity is the sad realization that, no matter how hard we try, we will miss someone's work, work that could actually transform us.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

I doubt that anyone would spend much time thinking about what I have or have not read, but—if this is confession time—I confess to not having read Don Quixote in its entirety. Yet. This extraordinary work seemed to have been analyzed so thoroughly by people I knew, even in sobremesas—after-dinner conversations—at home, that I found little incentive for personal discovery after that. However, I confess, as well, to a sense of deprivation—and I add "leer el Quixote" to my New Year's resolution list every year.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

I would prefer not to. Instead, I would read her some favorite poem—something that is both musical and strong, like William Blake's: Tyger, Tyger burning Bright in the forests of the Night… And then I'd explain—if I had to—that a poem is a way of expressing what is in the heart of things and of people and of places, with words that sound like music to our ears but that pound inside our heart. And with silences—the pauses between phrases, between pictures, between things happening—so that we, too, can stop and imagine and feel something new, something that was not there when the poem started.

Of course, a far simpler route might be to replace the explanation with the following simile: a poem is like the last, crunchy mouthful of ice cream and sugar cone, when you discover all that rocky-road flavor tucked inside the tip—exploding!

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

I am very wary of self-aggrandizement or of elitism, of thinking that I, as a poet, have a role that is somehow more significant than that of any other writer or citizen. I don’t believe this to be the case. On the other hand, I do think that poets have a specific role (everyone does!). In the poet's case, that role is one of bearing witness, through language, to the possibilities of the human heart. In other words, we are, to some extent, responsible for revealing, through the words we use, the interconnectedness of lives, because through this interweave, we are made larger than ourselves—hence, wiser, better, kinder, more fully human. Fortunately (for me, at least), I am naïve enough to believe that poetry can and should give us glimpses into that reality.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**bitter

Chiseled**fine

I**you

Of**with

Form**body

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

I would like to respond to this question as if it were: of your writing, rather than in your writing. Hence, I would say that the relationship between the text and the body of a poem is the same as what I perceive to be the relationship between the soul and the body. The text—the word—is the soul of the poem, but without the poem's body—the contours, the open spaces, the caesurae, the silhouette on the page—this text/soul could not survive. It could not be Itself or anything else for that matter.

One of my poems, The Soul's Landscape, likens the relationship between the soul and the body to that of a marriage, with the soul pursuing the body, to create a self. The poem's metaphor applies with equal force to poetry, to the relationship between the text and the body of the poem. Therefore, I'd like to complete my answer to the final question of this interview with this poem, which appears below. I would also like to thank Lance Phillips for the opportunity to express these thoughts and share this work with you.

The Soul’s Landscape

Ah, what the soul gives for shape –
to be handled head-first

at the temple, to be cumbered
with cotton, white puffs

from plantations in heat; what it gives,
for the flick, flick elastic

on wrists, loose-leaf palms it befriends,
at its youngest – for the sake

of all this, and this place.
Love me now with your

hands (says the soul, half-exploring its
landscape), better me

with embodiment; come, angle the ribs
where they beach into

longing; come, finger the oval description
of death, smallest hope

for cessation. When the room is redundant
of space, and its walls

wish for closure, thumb my corners
up, inward, wade your lips

through the ridge where they meet,
to allow recollection.

I must love with the tissue and the gloss
that embody: cellule, elegy,

ghost, danger, languish... all those words
out of context for souls,

god-forsaken, whiplash of the neck –
Interim

is the word I would use the most cautiously;
how precarious its hum,

ear to earth, plumbing earth, earthwise.

From: A Commerce of Moments
Pavement Saw Press, Ohio, 2003
First published in Pavement Saw Magazine

2005-08-06T18:24:00.000-04:00

Heather Nagami’s first book, Hostile, will be published by Chax Press in 2005. Her poems have appeared in Antennae, Rattle, and Xcp (Cross-Cultural Poetics). Heather received a B.A. in Literature/Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an M.F.A. at University of Arizona, where she also taught poetry and edited Sonora Review. Currently, Heather is a board member for Chax Press, as well as the website designer. She resides in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her fiancé, Bryan, and their two rabbits.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

“Eternity,” by William Blake. I think I liked the thought of this poem, though I didn’t believe it. I was 15 years old at the time, and I’m sure I’d forgotten the meaning of joy.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

Sometimes, after opening up Netscape on my computer, some horrible news title about a celebrity break-up or mishap will catch my eye, and I will click on it and read the entire article.
Why do you read it/them?
Ummm… I’m just going to go on to the next question.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Philosophy is important to my writing in the sense that I live it. I especially relate to the writings of Frantz Fanon, Donna Haraway, Marx, Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida. Their writings comfort me; they make me feel like, hey, someone else sees what I see—I’m not crazy. The only problem is that I read really really slowly, so it can take me an hour to read just a few paragraphs by some of these people. Still, they help me to better understand my own frustrations and fears concerning my racial and sexual identities, my place in American society, and the state of the world today.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Some of my all-time favorites are Kimiko Hahn, Harryette Mullen, Wang Ping, Timothy Liu, and Beau Sia. These poets do all of the following for me: captivate me, make me cry, teach me, challenge my definitions of poetry, and help me understand myself and the world around me.

Some poets I just started reading and enjoying recently are Barbara Jane Reyes, Shin Yu Pai, and Cathy Park Hong. All three of these poets explore language in such new and exciting ways. I especially admire the sensuous and daring quality of Barbara Jane Reyes’s work; Shin Yu Pai’s versatility in her uses of space, punctuation, and music; and Cathy Park Hong’s observations of aspects of both the English and Korean languages and their implications.

As far as novelists go, I love Haruki Murakami and Virginia Woolf. I tend to like the Kafka-esque qualities of Murakami, as well as his humor. (Oh, and I guess I like Kafka, too.) He is one of the few writers I read for the shear pleasure of it. I’ve learned a lot about writing from Virginia Woolf: her novels, stories, essays. I love “Kew Gardens” and her essay, “Modern Fiction.”

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

I try to read as much as possible, but, like I said before, I read slowly. Some people can read a book of poetry in one afternoon or on a long plane flight. I’ve often wished I could do that; at the same time, however, I enjoy sitting with a book for a few weeks or a few months.

Reading poetry has been a major learning source for me as a writer. My first poetry teacher, Peter Gizzi, impressed upon me the idea that, as a poet, I am part of a larger community and a larger history. I’m not interested in writing the same poem that people have been writing for centuries. I try to read a diverse array of poetry and integrate those lessons into my work. As an Asian American poet, I tend to think of my poetry as part of a long cultural learning experience; I would like to contribute to that as positively as possible.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

I suspect my peers may think I’ve read much of the Objectivists’ work, since a lot of my work seems reminiscent of theirs. But I haven’t. No particular reason, except that there is so much to read, it’s difficult to read it all. I think the poets I read have read the Objectivists though.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

I think I’d have to meet your seven year old first. I believe that the meaning of poetry is different for every individual. It’s personal and subjective.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

Over the years, I’ve defined my own role as a poet, which is strongly related to my role as a responsible American citizen. However, I don’t think that every poet needs to share a common goal or play a common role. With that said, some poets have disappointed me by using the poem to spread hatred. That’s the kind of thing that makes me cry.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**lime, Sprite

Chiseled**biceps, curls

I**you

Of**love

Form**drop-down menu, jump box

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

Which body? My body, women’s bodies, a political or social body? I’m going to answer this question as if it is about the physical body in which I live. The relationship between my poems and my body are as convoluted, contradictory, and confounded as my mind’s relationship with my body. I can’t do any justice to it by writing a few sentences or even a few paragraphs about it here. I think some of it is in my book, though. And more of it will be in my next book.

2005-08-02T18:44:00.000-04:00

Stephen Burt is assistant professor of English at Macalester College. He is the author of Randall Jarrell and His Age and Popular Music, a collection of poems. His reviews and essays on poetry have appeared in several journals, including the Boston Review, London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement.

Buy his books here, here and here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

Probably "Lycidas." I had to do a report on Milton for library class in third or fourth grade, and I remember copying out "Lycidas," or at least the first lines of it, in a kind of over elaborate fourth-grade italic script and turning that in as part of my report. I have often felt less American than my contemporaries, and perhaps my encounter with 17th-c pentameter at such an impressionable age did the damage.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

I'm a pretty serious follower of women's basketball, at the pro (WNBA) and college (DI) levels (so is my wife), and read everything about the sport that's available-- we even subscribe to Women's Basketball magazine (which is pretty terrible; we won't renew) and to Full Court Press magazine (definitely recommended; www.fullcourt.com), and we read Sara and Ted's women's hoops blog every morning-- womenshoops.blogspot.com; Jessie and I have even been known to contribute. I really liked a novel called The Necessary Hunger, by Nina Revoyr, which is a long realist novel about high school girls’ basketball in the 80s in L.A.

On the other hand that probably wouldn't surprise my colleagues at all, since there are pictures in my office of Katie Smith and Lindsay Whalen playing basketball. (If you don't know who Katie Smith is, you can go to www.wnba.com/lynx, poke around and find out.) I'm not sure what would surprise them, though. (I read less rock criticism than I used to, probably because I don't write it any more. I'm hoping to read Douglas Wolk's book about James Brown very soon, though more because I'm a fan of Douglas' writing than because I'm excited about JB's singing.)

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Depends what you mean by philosophy. This week I've fallen hard for the aphorisms of G. C. Lichtenberg, whom some people file under philosophy (I'd call it "wisdom"). I admire and often think about the American pragmatist tradition, from Emerson to some of Richard Rorty; also much of Hannah Arendt; also the Wittgenstein of the Investigations, whom everybody seems to love; also late Barthes, which isn't usually called "philosophy" but is called "theory." I had a big crush on Austin's How to Do Things with Words in college. I have no training in analytic philosophy but have been known to enjoy reading it. Philosophy as a discipline has probably done less for my writing than rock criticism, descriptive sociology, American political history, geography, urban planning, psychoanalysis or child psychology.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

This question could mean three different things. Some of the people you've interviewed seem to think it means "non-Anglo American" writers, i.e. writers of color, including Americans, in which case the list would be very long. My favorite Afro-American poets are probably Thylias Moss, Hughes and Brooks. I like recent books by Terrance Hayes and Thomas Sayers Ellis. At the moment the more Nathaniel Mackey I read, the more of his verse I like (I made a big mistake by starting with his prose epistolary jazz novels).

You could also mean "writers who are neither English nor American," in which case I'll happily give you a list of my favorite writers from other English-speaking countries, including Anne Carson, Muldoon, Heaney, Lisa Robertson, Elizabeth Smart, A. L. Kennedy, Janet Frame, James K. Baxter and John Tranter. Technically Wales isn't Anglo-American either and I really liked Robert Minhinnick's last book.

I'm afraid, though, that you mean "writers in languages other than English." The only other language I can read tolerably in the original is Spanish-- some poets I've enjoyed reading in Spanish are Jaime Gil de Biedma (whom I've translated), Jorge Guillen, Lorca of course (everybody loves Lorca), some of Neruda, Vallejo, and various handfuls of 17th-century sonnets, including Gongora. Someday I'm going to spend six months or so reading nothing but poetry in Spanish.

Other writers I admire and enjoy who don't write in English: Clarice Lispector, Proust, Camus as an essayist, Rilke, Goethe, Chekhov, Montaigne, some of Apollinaire, Ponge. Predictable answers, I'm afraid. Proust has been really important.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

Tons, as you know. Hugh Kenner cracks that you can always tell what Arthur Symons has been reading (because his own poetry imitates it) and I sometimes wonder if I'm a poet like that-- tolerable imitations of eight or nine or more different contemporary styles, nothing of my own to speak of. On the other hand, when I read yet another first or second collection by another not-at-all-dumb young poet who's pretty much written the same poem, followed the same model, thirty times in a row and called it a book, I think that trying to assimilate and imitate many different models, some really old and some apparently new, is still what I want to do.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

This is the game of humiliation, made famous by David Lodge's academic novels.

Goethe's Elective Affinities. Alcott's Little Women.

I expect to like them both when I actually read them.

My choice of what novels to read is always partially dictated by what I'm teaching next; I have read more American novels than British novels over the past few years partly because I've been asked to teach twentieth-century American literature several times, and twentieth-century British (other than poetry) not yet.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

A poem is a set of words people like me enjoy saying and thinking about over and over, even after we already know what they mean.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

No. Poets in our society have exactly the same civic obligations as non-poets, and semi-famous poets have exactly the same civic obligations as people who become semi-famous for anything else. (In another society where many, many people accorded exceptional ethical weight to poets and poetry, my answer might be different.)

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**Esrog (Mediterranean lemon-like fruit used in ritual for the Jewish holiday Sukkot, also the last name of the narrator in Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, which I am teaching this week). Bad car. Bad post-rock group (Lemon Jelly). Tasty additive.

Chiseled** Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo." The indie-mod band Chisel, which turned into Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, I think. People working out to get muscle tone. The very muscular basketball player Vanessa Hayden.

I** Center of lyric. Void. Mouth. Speech. Recursion.

Of**"De" in Spanish. Apostrophe-s in English. O'Hara's bizarre disquisition about preposition-meaning in "Personism." "Nostalgia of the infinite." Tool which in poems connects anything to anything else.

Form** Expectation. Containment. Propriety. Closed vs. open. No real poem is without one.

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

I hope that relationship varies from poem to poem! In the criticism I don't think there is one-- that is, I'm not conscious of there being one. In the poems, some are meant as visceral, coming from inside the body, from below or beyond obvious rhetoric and logic; some are meant more as performances, with the body and voice of the poet giving a more clearly conscious performance, showing more unity and control. I have a poem called "The Paraphilia Odes" which is all about sexual experience and whose sections try to flip back and forth between the first and the second. (It will be in an anthology from Soft Skull edited by Daphne Gottlieb, called Homewrecker! or Homewreckers! or something like that; depending on when the anthology comes out, it may or may not get into Parallel Play.)

2005-07-30T18:19:00.000-04:00

Alan Catlin's most recent poetry books are Drunk and Disorderly a selected poems from Pavement Saw Press and The Schenectady Chainsaw Massacre from Staplegun. He expects another book shortly from March Street Press, Playing Tennis with Antonioni.

Buy his books here and here.

See some work here and here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

First poem I ever loved -Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stood-------give me a break I was a kid.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

Non-literary reading--definitely a sucker for anything remotely noir. Just read a Mickey Spillane novel. Will read some more of his soon. He isn't half bad. I have maintained and continue to maintain that Raymond Chandler is a much more interesting writer than Hemingway and so his Dashiell Hammett. Must be where the fascination for the noir comes from though I'm a big sucker for movies with a noir theme as well.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

If you mean philosophy as in say Spengler, very little. I do have a personal set of ideals and philosophical preferences as to how one should approach your life and that spills over into the writing. An example might be, I believe it is better not to kill than to kill or to invade countries for purely selfish reasons while claiming it is for moral and the political good than it is to leave them alone. That certainly turns up in my writing. I could fill up a blue book full of examples so one will have to do for the purposes of your questions.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

I could fill up several blue books on non-anglo writers. Neruda probably the greatest poet of the 20th century for a million reasons, Yannis Ritsos- he can do more in a four line poem than most poets can in a two hundred page poem, Garcia Lorca amazing lyrical poet, theRussians: Amkahtova, Mandelstam et al the wisdom and the power of the oppressed, Rilke, Celan-----there are so many it is difficult to narrow them down. Does this include novelists also? The list would even be longer Borges, Cortazar, Puig, Kafka, Berberova---------

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

I read as much poetry as I can get my hands on. Reading is the life blood of a writer.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

W.H. Auden. Some day.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

Very carefully.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

The role of the poet and citizen are so intermixed that they are close to being one and the same. As poets are deliberately marginalized in our society, the poet might as well express his unpopular beliefs as no one among the powers-that-be are paying attention. Well, they might be paying attention, making a list and checking it twice for when the police state is finalized, but they aren't listening. We will all find out how close the two roles are, when they kick down the doors under the Patriot Act and cart all the poets away. Right around 2008, especially if it looks bad for the anointed carrier of the republican fascist flame. Remember Homeland Security is watching!

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**Sky

Chiseled**Face

I**Death

Of**Spacious

Form**Shadow

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

I don't think it is nearly as involved as Barthes' and the semioticians, though it isn't nearly as simple as a Picasso line drawing. Is that simple, though? I'm not an artist.

2005-07-26T18:10:00.000-04:00

Tracie Morris is a multidisciplinary poet and performing artist. She is a writer, educator, scholar and actor who has worked in theater, dance, music, sculpture and film. She has toured extensively throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa and Asia as a writer and bandleader. Her poetry and essays have been extensively anthologized. Tracie has participated in over a dozen recording projects to date. Her sound poetry is at the Whitney Museum and the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning.

Buy her book here.

Hear some work here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

After the poems that socialized me as a child (Dr. Seuss, Mother Goose and other classical European children's poem and the 23rd psalm and other biblical poems as well as African American song lyrics -- an important racially socializing phenomenon) I think it was "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe. It taught me to feel satisfied with poems that *don't* have "happy endings." This was a very important element in teaching me to love all types of poetry.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

I've read a lot of classic sci/fi fantasy and still read the bible, especially Psalms and Numbers. I like literature that complements/compels the imagination. Unfortunately as a prepubescent teen this also meant *lots* of Harlequin romances. I've moved on from those, mercifully. I don't like overly transparent plots in any genre.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Crucial. Conceptual frameworks always determine the scope and form of my poems. Particularly the improvised ones.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Most of my favorite poems are non-Anglo-Americans, so it's hard to narrow it down. The list is too long. Why? They/we tend to be more comprehensive in terms of my varied tastes. In other words, I can find more poetry among poets of color that touch on most or all of my interests, whereas it is harder for me to find that type of variety of subject, theme and form in Anglo or Anglo-American based work. While this is not always the case, as my references in the previous questions show, I see this more as the case for myself probably because of the more panoramic vision often required to manage oneself in Anglo-American controlled environments.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

I read lots of poetry -- but in spurts. I'll read a bunch of poetry books, then a ton of prose, usually multi-genre prose simultaneously (i.e.: a biography and a philosophy book and a science fiction book). Reading and hearing poetry is essential to my writing. I always write extensively as/after I read a poetry book.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

All of my friend Charles Bernstein's work. I tend to be a fast reader and I try not to do that with his books. He's also a little intimidating and, it's weird, I feel uncomfortable reading my friend's books. If they become my friends *after* I've read their books, it's better! Of course that would presume that my friends would never write again after I've met them...I didn't say my system made sense!

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

The first form of communicating. It's fun but it's also so deep that there are many ways to understand one thing. It usually has a great sound in it somewhere.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

I think the United States is the only country where one can even ask these questions. *That* is sad. We are very much out of the cosmic poetry loop here. The role of the poet is to utter. The role of the citizen is to participate. That participation can be passive or active.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**lemonade

Chiseled**stone

I**you

Of**by

Form**being

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

The text is the body. The body tests text.

2005-07-23T20:15:00.000-04:00

Matthew Thorburn’s first book, Subject to Change (New Issues, 2004), was selected by Brenda Hillman for the New Issues Poetry Prize. His other honors include a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Mississippi Review Prize. His poems have also appeared in places like American Poetry Review, Poetry, Indiana Review, Pool and Poetry Daily. He lives and works in New York City.

Buy his book here.

See some work here, here and here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

The first poem I really loved was Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Fortune” (“Fortune / has its cookies to hand out / which is a good thing….”). When I say “loved,” I mean not only as a reader, but as a would-be writer. That poem made me want to write a poem. What better praise is there? And what a day. I was in ninth grade. We were supposed to be reading aloud from Antigone – this was Ms. Sullivan’s “Great Books” class – but I hadn’t been assigned a role, so I was flipping through our text book looking for anything more interesting than crazy old Creon and that whole crowd.

In retrospect, it amazes me that Ferlinghetti was even in that text. He definitely didn’t make it onto the syllabus. (What poetry did? Only Shakespeare, that I can remember.) And on the facing page was Allen Ginsberg, no less: “First Party at Ken Kesey’s with Hell’s Angels,” the second poem I ever loved, just moments later. Why I, a shy middle-class kid from the suburbs of mid-Michigan, should have felt such a kinship with the hard-partying Hell’s Angels is one of those things only poetry can explain.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

Some people might argue that these are literary – but my escape hatches, when I’ve OD’d on too much poetry and “literature,” are spy novels. Especially John LeCarre’s Smiley novels, which I reread pretty regularly. Someone told me that Auden has a poem in the form of a spy novel, though I’ve never tracked it down. I’d like to try that too.

The other very non-literary thing I read, on account of my day job, is legal writing. Tons of it. I work as a business development writer for a big law firm, so I read (and then write) all kinds of attorney-ish prose. For instance, I recently spent an afternoon working my way through a handbook on “intellectual property law for corporate executives.”

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Not at all, frankly. I’ve never been even an amateur reader, let alone a student, of philosophy. This is no boast – just one of several large blind spots in my reading. Possibly someone reading my poems might suss out some connection to a certain philosophy or other, but it would be news to me.

What is very important to my writing, if you want to know, is painting and music. An emphasis on the visual (details of color, light) and the aural (one word ringing against another) is vital to me. I could and probably will live a happy writer’s life not knowing a thing about Heidegger. But I wouldn’t be the writer I am if I didn’t know about Pierre Bonnard and Thelonious Monk.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Surprisingly to me, I see now, they’re mostly prose writers. W.G. Sebald. Haruki Murakami. Ha Jin. Umberto Eco. Wang Ping. Peter Hoeg. Nabokov, if he belongs in this list. (He belongs in every list.) But also those three wise men, Basho, Buson and especially Issa. There must be other poets, but they’re embarassingly absent from my shelves. (Some that I definitely don’t like are there, but that’s an answer to a different question.) Also I recently enjoyed rereading Rexroth’s 100 Poems from the Japanese and 100 Poems from the Chinese anthologies.

For the most part, as a reader I don’t distinguish between A-A and non-A-A writers, except to feel a pang of guilt that I ought to be reading more of the latter whenever I’m not – particularly when it comes to poetry. Those listed here I enjoy for their different angle on things, their voices (though I hear them through translation’s filter) and idiosyncrasies. But these are reasons to like writers of any ethnicity.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

Yes, yes. And whenever I’m hit with that “I should be writing” feeling, or feel like my writing just isn’t clicking, it’s almost always the case that I haven’t been reading any poetry lately. There’s a definite connection there for me. When I’m reading someone else’s poems – or, better yet, hearing someone read their work – some line or phrase or even just a word I read/hear will trigger a word or phrase in my head, and I’m off. There’s that thing about other people’s best work that acts as a kind of sparkplug for my own.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

This could easily be a long and embarrassing list. And while I’d like to say it’s the result of an overly electives-based undergrad curriculum, I think at this late date I had better just shoulder the blame. I have a lot of Shakespeare (going beyond the greatest hits) that I need to read, though who doesn’t? I would like to know Keats better than I do. And John Donne. In the 20th century department, I’m starting to plug the gaps (just read Roethke’s Collected Poems, now working on Berryman’s Dream Songs), but I haven’t read much Lowell or Pound. Of course, people like Donald Hall are always advising younger poets to read more widely in previous centuries’ poetry, but like a lot of people I know I don’t do a very good job of taking that advice.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

A poem is like a song you make up as you sing it. Almost anything can be a part of your song if it sounds good. You can sing it over and over, if you want, changing the words till it sounds just right. Mostly you sing this song just for you. But although many people won’t give a hoot about what you’re singing, there will be a few who love your song and want to sing it with you.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

I’m reluctant to outline any lofty or honorable role for The Poet, since I’d almost certainly be guilty of not living up to it. But I think that one thing we poets should do is to help make poetry (and poem-writing opportunities) available to kids and students who might really love writing poetry once they see and hear what it is. Many poets I know want to teach college-level creative writing, which is great, but there are also a lot of after-school and alternative learning programs out there for middle and high school students that could use our help. I was a senior in high school when I joined a school club called the International Poetry Guild – an online writing program for students around the world, run by the University of Michigan – which was the crucial experience (and the encouragement and “safe space” in which to write) I needed to realize that what I really love doing most is writing poems.

One other role I think every poet should try filling at some point – and sooner, rather than later – is to take on some editorial post at a literary magazine. Maybe don’t start your own magazine, but put in a good stretch of time on the staff of a poetry journal, reading through the slush pile, or helping stuff the replies in all those SASEs. In my own experience as an editor of the journal Good Foot for several years, being on the receiving end of all those submissions helped me to understand the hard work that editors do, what they’re up against – the submissions pile that just never stops growing, the high out-of-pocket costs of producing a print journal, and the fact that many editors are unpaid volunteers – and the honest effort most of them put into reading, considering and replying to submissions nonetheless.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**Lime

Chiseled**Rock

I**Spy

Of**Course

Form**Function

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

I’ve always liked best (and consequently usually write) poems with people in them. So in a very literal sense, there are lots of bodies – bony elbows, sun-burnt shoulders, brown eyes – in my poems. It has always seemed strange to me to read poems with nothing human in them, or only some unnamed “you.” I used to get a real kick out of putting my friends in my poems (naming them there, that particularity), though more often now the people in my poems are imagined, not real. But they still have names and bodies. And they have plenty to say.

2005-07-19T18:36:00.000-04:00

Connie Deanovich is the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award and a GE Award for Younger Writers. She is the author of Zombie Jet (Zoland Books), Watusi Titanic (Timken), and has work in several anthologies. Formerly of Chicago, she now lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Buy her books here and here.

See some work here, here and here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

The first poem I ever loved was Ted Berrigan’s “Red Shift” because of its quotidian details—time, dates, numbers—and its magnificent end line—“The world’s furious song flows through my costume.” When I was a young woman I loved Ted Berrigan (still do). I loved groupie-ing him when he came to Chicago, loved taking the Greyhound Bus to New York City just to see the Gem Spa, loved reading his books/carrying them around/studying them. The partial-line “its ironing board, by moonlight” from “Farewell Address,” has been going through my head since I first read it in the early 1980s. Ron Padgett’s sonnet parody “Nothing In That Drawer” does the same. Before Ted Berrigan I had only known Babel and Witt by Patti Smith. I saw something in her as a teenager that I aspired too as well, a toughness and a freedom. She is humorless, however; and Ted Berrigan, of course, is extremely funny, profoundly honest, a poet of love.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

Besides reading sewer grates and lamp posts for the names, dates, and places where they were made, I read mysteries, the cozier the better. I also like to read cookbooks and articles in women’s magazines that give tips—100 surprising things to do with an onion. Mysteries and tips relax me, and cookbooks energize me.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Philosophy is completely unimportant to my writing because I don’t know anything about it outside of what I learned academically in grad school.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

I like to learn from the following poets: Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, Etheridge Knight, Nathaniel Mackey, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many more.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

I read a lot of poetry because I like to read poetry. I don’t understand how a poet can write poetry without reading any. It’s very important to my writing. I like to buy poetry books and chapbooks too. I like also to give them away.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

I have not read a lot of things. I have not read Milton or Sappho, or most ancient texts. I am completely ignorant of most Asian poetry. I do not read in any language besides English and have not made time to search out, say, the three most wonderful poets in all the countries of the world available in translation. I haven’t done any of this yet. Just the thought of how much work I have yet to do as a reader makes me nervous. Milton, however, may remain the last on my list because I developed a prejudice against the pedantics and boredom of “Paradise Lost” as a fun-loving undergrad that has yet to be replaced by an informed understanding of the text, if that’s possible.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

I would say words have secrets and special powers. I would smile and wait for the child to smile back or to smirk. Then I’d say it is a poet’s job to discover these secrets and powers. I’d say a poet is like a honeybee except instead of going from flower to flower the poet goes from word to word to get what she needs. The bee makes honey and the poet makes poems. Both are workers, explorers, and participants in the world of beauty. A poet puts words together so the secrets and powers can be revealed to anyone who reads the poems.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

I do not believe in a public role for the poet, say as a shaman or political leader. I believe in good citizenship very strongly, such as the kind Martin Luther King evinced—moral, nonviolent, and socially intelligent. The person and the poet are indivisible and should be a part of society not one of its leaders through poems.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**Pledge

Chiseled**chisels

I**Robot

Of**Mice & Men

Form**& function

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

The relationship between the text and the body in my writing is profound. I cannot write if I’m sick, too bored, or too excited. I must do things to my body to get my writing going. I must eat if I’m hungry. I must sit comfortably when I’m writing, sometimes in bed where dreams produced by my brain become part of the poem. Sometimes I have to walk an idea around, or sleep on it. When I give readings if I don’t feel good and calm my breathing is horrible and I see stars. If all is well, I feel the excitement connection with an audience gives. Often, after writing I must exercise to take the edge off.

2005-07-12T18:23:00.000-04:00

Rodrigo Toscano is the author of To Leveling Swerve (Krupskaya Books, 2004) Platform (Atelos, 2003), The Disparities (Green Integer, 2002) and Partisans (O Books, 1999). His work has recently appeared in Best American Poetry 2004 (Scribner’s), and War and Peace (O Books, 2004) and In the Criminal’s Cabinet: An Anthology of Poetry and Fiction (nth Position). His poetry has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. Toscano is originally from California and lives in New York City.

Buy his books here, here, here and here.

Rodrigo Toscano audio files here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

In terms of a poet-of-the-page, if I think about it, Catullus (trans. Peter Whigham) is a poet I was quite taken by at an early age. But I can’t remember which one of the To Lesbia poems I liked over any other. Come to think of it, it must have been Whigham’s own poetic sensibility that appealed to me. I hadn’t read Pound as yet, but Whigham was Pound Cake for sure. He’d add in lots of words and phrases from other languages, giving Catullus a kind of Pan-European sensibility. He also slid in and out of colloquial language with great zest, mixing “high” and “low” speech forms.

But simultaneous to my early explorations of page-poetry, I also came upon “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash. Or rather, that monstrously momentous poem found a couple million of my generation. That rap/poem, with its panoramic imagery (all causally linked), its non-vatic stone-to-the-bone diction, its sense of urgency, its playfulness with words, its economically punctuated phrasing, its fully mature massified perspective, its sly contexualist meanderings, all that was a much needed slap in the face message for me.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

Bathroom graffiti. The best scrawls are in bars. I used to go in and “sweep” them with a mini-tape recorder, and later transcribe those sweeps onto text documents. I’d then move it all around to see what fragments of what social-psyche were at play.

Some of the single-word tags are the most interesting because they aim, by way of a single word to latch onto a particular array of other tags (tags, best understood as proto-ideologemes). So that tagging is a kind of density-talk, like poetry, where the social is expressed through momentary-concrete revelations of the dynamics of an emergent signing system. Tags are also territorial markings of substance dealers—like poetry.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

It would be great if poets in my environs could ferret out Platonist thinking without sleepwalking into it. It would be great if they could readily detect Lockean “doctrine,” and could discriminate between rank reaction and hopeful (naïve) adaptation.

It would be great if I could shoot the gaps in Kierkegaard’s thinking so as to be able to take on grand notions of Faith. But I can’t because I haven’t read his writings in 20 years, and even back then, I read it wearing a Bertie Russell nightgown.

It would be great if more poets understood Marx in MULTIPLE DIMENSIONS, which, that not being the case, makes for some gruesomely insular poetry reviews.

Voloshinov & Bakhtin were very important writers for me. Their thinking on all things linguistic, especially the notion of the speech-act, that ideology is made through semantic exchange, that it doesn’t just “exist,” without its jump-start properties…well…that was major.

When I was young I read tons of Heidegger, literally everything available in English translation, and thereby, indirectly learning something about the Hegelian differentials of Becoming & Being. But man, what a “world-historic” caper, that Heidegger! Once I woke up from the authoritarian spectacle of denken and all its Main Street wannabes—the neurasthenic pulling up and pulling down of shades (which is the pre-requisite for contemporary neo-metaphysic vomitron poetics) I got down to what’s still the core of my poetics: the study and dramatization of the dynamics of the ideologeme as itself.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Heriberto Yépez, from Tijuana, Mexico, is a whirlwind of a literary figure. His super-tweaked essays on Culture in general, from films to novels, to philosophy, to politics, have a lot to offer the reader, “casual” or “expert” alike. And that’s really his strength—breaking down those divisions. He can be so wickedly irreverent, and often quite brilliant! Sometimes he plain drives me up the wall! (and I him...without a doubt!) but sometimes he hits the nail right on the head.

Cecilia Vicuña, originally form Chile, but living in NYC for many years now, is a tremendous performer of wordwind (what I’ll call it)…in both Spanish and English. If you haven’t seen Vicuña perform her art live, then perhaps you don’t know what the polar opposite of The Statue Speaks style of poetry sounds like. And I do mean the polar opposite!

Oswaldo Lamborghini (1940-1985), an Argentine poet, who doubles as a cult figure for young experimentally-inclined poets in the Spanish-speaking world, has been one of my greatest finds (thanks to Urayoan Noel). I would count myself as being one of those culties. His collected poems just came out a few years ago, very little of it having been published in his lifetime. I can’t go into it here and now about all the qualities of this writer, but I will say that once his oeuvre gets translated into English, it’s certain to cause a stir.

I am also totally devoted to Mayakofsky and Brecht, though I don’t read them that often, the glare being too bright to look straight into. Artaud too I read as practically a purgative.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

I try to. It’s as important as writing it. It’s a wonderful morning or evening when you find yourself tugged equally between those two jealous activities, reading & writing. Take Leslie Scalapino’s writing for instance, or Rachel Blau Du Plessis’, an intense session with their writing can be as good “writing” itself.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

I haven’t read one single sentence of Kafka. I’ve meant to. No, that’s not true, I haven’t “meant to” at all. Yet if someone I respect came up to me and said, “god damn it, Rodrigo, I really want you to read Kafka!” I might then. But as for now, as how it stands in the queue of what to read (a Samir Amin article “The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World” on my lap as I type this) it might be a little while longer till I get to Kafka. Then again, by writing this, I might have already caught the Kafka Virus.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

I would ask your seven year old what she/he thought a poem was. And if your kid said something like “a poem is a cloud” I’d then say, “who told you that?” And if the child attributed the definition to anything whatsoever, be it organic, non-organic, living or dead, I’d ask again “who told you ‘the sky?’” “mommy” “who told your ‘mommy’?” The kind of game poets tend to play.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

What if I said, “shiftiness is the true mark of the poet!” Would a true citizen believe me?

“I think not” says the Role of the Riddler

to a Roll of the Dice.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

manacled

Not a commonly used word, but it might be making a comeback.
So here’s little poem for your seven year-old.

“Manacled”

When are Mannequins, McMullen’s?
and McMullicans, Mendendez-Weisskopfs?

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

There’s invisible cabling (sometimes called “hand”) between my bootay and your bootay.

There’s texts [look above] as well as images that act, or “want” to act as brokers for that cabling infrastructure.

The Body is the ideological terrain where the relationship between those two things takes place.

So that, between my bootay (which I jealously and rightly try to govern myself) and “text” (something I have to contend with in the world) there’s an animal somethingness, another region altogether, that flickers of a sudden, and disappears just as fast, but not without leaving behind a trace of new knowledge. I realize what I just said is somewhat Gnostic in outlook, but that’s because regular prose grammar is inclined to stack words that way. Poetry, at its fittest, would inhabit an intermundia just long enough to net in a flicker of animal somethingness. That means that poetry should be scary as hell! You’ll notice loud and blustery poets that aren’t scary in the least, and then there are those quiet poets that make people tremble inside.

2005-07-09T20:43:00.000-04:00

Matthew Shenoda is Coptic poet, educator, and activist devoted to using art for education and social change and to build community amongst people of color. His poems and writings have appeared in a variety of journals, newspapers and anthologies. He is currently editing an anthology entitled To This Revolution We Will Rise: A Global Anthology of Poetry forthcoming from Third World Press, his debut collection of poems, Somewhere Else (Introduction by Sonia Sanchez), will be available from Coffee House Press in April 2005. He is a faculty member in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University and lives in South Berkeley, California.

Buy his book here.

See some work here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

I fell in love with words through music before I was ever really conscious of poems as written text. Recitations of the Book of Psalms and roots reggae lyrics were the first poetry I fell in love with, tracks like Third World's
"96 degrees in the shade" and Marley's "Ambush in the Night".
They taught me that spirit and struggle were greater than self and apathy, things I still believe.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

I'm not sure my colleagues would be surprised by anything I read. Outside of the strict definition of literature, I read a great deal of cultural studies, post-colonial theory and pretty much any text on contemporary race issues. I'll read anything well written!

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

I think philosophy is crucial to all writing, we all work from some kind of philosophical foundation. Now, I'm not talking about that stuff they teach in school, those guys from Europe who people claim had the answers. I'm talking about real philosophy, the kind you get at your grandmother's kitchen table and on street corners...communal philosophy, ancestral philosophy the kind of philosophy that lets you know your history, your reality, that shapes your visions, makes you understand that you're part of a trajectory.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

I'd say 95% or more of my favorite writers are non-Anglo...remember we are the global majority... so maybe the question should be flipped for some. All the crew from BAM (Black Arts Movement) and its predecessors. They changed the world and the way literature was to be understood in this country. They brought art back to its communal roots and re-defined the way English was to be understood, took it back from the elite, they used language that meant something to a great many living people and wrote about reality, not the figment of a white man's imagination. Also, writers like Mahmoud Darwish,
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Nawal Al Saadawi, Nizar Qabbani, and Saadi Yousef are a few that come immediately to mind. I think they are some of the most human and powerful writers in the world right now, they are keeping the fire lit.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

I read an enormous amount of poetry, its crucial! I think names and thehistory of names are important and so if I am going to call myself by the name "poet" I'd better know my artistic and intellectual lineage... and my future.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

I don't know what they'd assume I've read or why they would make such an assumption. Most of them are social scientists, qualitative research types, so maybe I should make some assumptions... HA! There's a lot of things I haven't read that I probably should and a lot of things my colleagues haven't read which they probably should. So many great books...Time...

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

Next time you are on the playground pick up some dirt and rub it in between your hands, feel the friction, feel the way it heats up. Now, listen to the laughing, screaming and playing of the other children around you. Put the two together...you've made a poem.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

The role of the citizen and the poet/artist is to build community... but I think the poet/artist has many other roles... a major responsibility is for the poet/artist to tell the truth to talk about the things that people feel and see and hear but often times don't want to or can't talk about. The poet/artist is driven to find the music in everything, the poet/artist should refuse citizenship under the banner of nation states.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**Lime

Chiseled**Flow

I**I doubt it

Of**Course

Form**River

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

The body is fused with senses as should be the text, I see them as interrelated although often in my writing the body is floating, the body exists between oceans, between centuries... but so does the text, maybe they are the same.

2005-07-05T18:52:00.000-04:00

Mairéad Byrne's book of poetry Nelson & The Huruburu Bird was published by Randolph Healy’s Wild Honey Press in 2003. Wild Honey also published her poem The Pillar as a chapbook in 2000. China Dogs, an ebook, was published by Poetic Inhalation in 2004; a chapbook, An Educated Heart, is forthcoming from Palm Press.

Mairéad is the author of two plays, The Golden Hair and Safe Home, a short book about James Joyce, Joyce—a Clew, two books of interviews with Irish artists, Eithne Jordan and Michael Mulcahy, and a great deal of journalism in Ireland and the United States.

Mairéad teaches poetry at Rhode Island School of Design.

Buy her books here and here.

See some work here and here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

Maybe “The Listeners” by Walter De La Mare. I knew it by heart. I felt I was there too, in the poem, very aware of the texture of the grass, the sounds of the horse, the stance of the Traveler.

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller.
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor.
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.”

Remember how in children’s books the wind was sometimes depicted by sprays of dotted lines? The ghosts which listened to the Traveler were like that, significant but not very visible to the eye.

But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:

The Traveler’s voice sounded stalwart and anguished to me:

'Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,' he said.

But still no response can be afforded: everyone holds their breath:

Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

I loved the time travel aspect of books. I loved Roger Lancelyn Green’s Robin Hood, and old Irish stories about Setanta, Finn McCool, Queen Maeve, and most of all Cuchulainn, about whom I wrote a long poem once.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

Obituaries. In Ireland, before I emigrated in 1994, I always read the Births, Marriages, and Deaths in Saturday’s Irish Times. Now I read the Marriage announcements in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times. I read the Obituaries in the Providence Journal: through them I can construct a shadowy history of Rhode Island over the last 60 or 70 years. The Providence Journal doesn’t announce Births; I used to enjoy the Lafayette Journal and Courier in this respect when I lived in Indiana.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

It’s important. I try to think and write about metaphor. The work of George Lakoff on metaphor and categories stimulates my thinking and writing. Lakoff is a cognitive scientist but tends to draw maximum applicability from his theories. The logical conclusion of PHILOSOPHY IN THE FLESH is the revision of Western philosophy. I would like to read some Paul Ricouer over the summer. I enjoy mavericks. I used to think literary criticism was just very slow thinking. Philosophy is even slower. I.A. Richards said that analyzing metaphor with the terms then available to him was “like extracting cube-roots in the head.” That’s how I feel now, and cube-roots are not something I can work with, even on paper.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

I’m not sure what you mean by non-Anglo-American. Do you mean not English or American? Or not white American of Anglo background? I have stars in my eyes about American literature. It still puts jazz in my step. African-American literary traditions are very important to me. I was just at a fantastic Frederick Douglass-Herman Melville conference in New Bedford. Both writers are unsurpassable but I have active research and writing interests in Douglass.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

Well, I read all the publications I have work in! It’s elating when I find many poems to like. I read books published by my publishers! I teach a lot of poetry. I read the poems of my students. Sometimes it feels like the whole day is a big loaf of poetry. I teach a course called Visual Poetry and that has brought a whole new understanding of “read.” I love to do readings too. One of the next courses I hope to develop is a course in Sound Poetry.

Reading other people’s poetry helps me think about audience. I am the audience when I read other people’s poetry. I know when I have a good time.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

I haven’t read Finnegans Wake and I’m not so sure I read all Ulysses. This surprises even me because I wrote a book about Joyce. The reason I haven’t is that I found Joyce too greedy. I have my own life to live.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

I might say it’s one of the things which make life bearable. Like parties.
Poetry is my kind of parties. I might say: “Would you like to write one with me now?”

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

I think the role of the poet is to write poetry. The role of the citizen is to exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. It’s more than possible that a poet may also be a good leader, a good organizer, a good builder of communities. It’s more than possible that a person may be both poet and politician; Michael D. Higgins in Ireland is an example. A lot of poets don’t seem too impressive in the public arena though. It’s even hard for other poets to listen to them. In obvious ways, there is much more at stake in being a citizen. To be an American citizen, for example, is something many people may want but are excluded from; it costs a significant amount of money in fees to become a citizen; the right to work can be tied to citizenship; the right to maintain a home in this country likewise. The role of the poet is of interest to fewer people; there are no fees; no forms, no tests, no oaths, no passports, no stigma either way. Someone who is not a citizen lives in unease; the same is not true of someone who is not a poet. In a romantic sense, it is the poet sometimes who’s uneasy, the poet who feels stigmatized. But poetry is the most fantastic privilege. To be a citizen in the world of poetry is heaven and earth.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**Head

Chiseled**Chip

I**know

Of**what

Form=Content/Content=Form

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

Text is all body. Poetry on the page is very physical. All the elements * shape, line length, spacing, white space, font style and size, paper * are articulate images. Also, when the time comes to read, you have to stand by your poem, be fully there for it. The human voice is very alive. I am aware too of how dependent I am on my own body, particularly my hands and my eyes, and how they are deteriorating. Like Lakoff, I’m not a great believer in the mind-body split. When this wonderful teacher, my body, retires, well--I’m a great believer in possibility, and making something from very little.

2005-07-02T20:48:00.000-04:00

Lance Phillips was born in Stuttgart, (then, 1970, West) Germany and raised in Las Vegas, NV, Del Rio, TX, New Castle, PA and Charlotte, NC where he currently resides with his wife, son and daughter. He holds degrees from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has published two books: Corpus Socius (2002) and Cur aliquid vidi (2004) both with Ahsahta Press and he is the editor of this blog.

Buy his books here and here.

See some work here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

You know, I came to writing, what to my mind is, very quickly and somewhat ex nihilo. In the space of about a year I went from dabbling to cramming summer school credit hours in so as to make it to the graduate writing workshop which had accepted me, to my great surprise. I guess what I was reading in that space of time drew me in, made the idea of writing palpable, attractive and seem important. I wasn’t much of a reader, aside from a brief infatuation with Chaucer in 12th grade English, until I became something of a writer and then I read everything I could. But, what sticks in my mind from that 14 to 16 months are the following: Emily Dickinson, some Whitman, Emily and Branwell Bronte, T. S. Eliot (The Waste Land in particular) and Jon Anderson. Also a couple of anthologies that a great teacher I had used: The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry and the 1990 edition of The Best American Poetry (editor Jorie Graham) which introduced me to writers like Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Brenda Hillman, Fanny Howe, Laura Moriarty, Alice Notley, Michael Palmer, Joan Retallack, Donald Revell and Gustaf Sobin. Finally an experience with the same teacher put the icing on the cake. Our class met at his house for an end of the semester class/party, we were sitting on the floor passing around a box of Capt’n Crunch while he read to us from the new (this would have been I guess winter 1991) APR, it was a section from Susan Howe’s _Singularities_. I was 21 and utterly hooked.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

Allure, Dwell, Southern Living, Consumer Report, Budget Living, Gourmet (three of these are passed on to us from my mother-in-law) and just about any how-to book I can find.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

--The easy answer is: yes, philosophy is of great import to my writing and by extension to my life because I find it both pleasurable and instructive to read other people’s thoughts.

--Some of my favorite writers are philosophers: Nietzsche, Deleuze, Levinas, Caroline Walker Bynum, Weil, Thoreau, “St. Thomas”.

--The complicated answer, the more honest answer would go something like this: philosophy is one of those words, like Poetry or Fiction, which is so absurdly broad as to have little meaning, except in terms of its ability to exclude. When you’re handed a book of “philosophy” or “poetry” or “fiction” those names go a long way toward telling you very little about the text at hand, except to tell you what it’s supposed to NOT be. When it comes down to it thinking is aggressive, which of course it can be without being violent. Thinking, when the ink is on the page, is aggressive and only pacified later when it’s categorized. Thinking is aggressive and persists as what it is via Sincerity and Will.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Those mentioned above and Holderlin, Celan, Duras, Artaud, Roger Giroux, Henri Corbin, Lars Gustefsson, Beckett, Marcel Duchamp, Martin Buber, Ovid, Homer.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

A fair amount, most days a little; but honestly I’m an incredibly selfish reader and tend to read what is feeding into the project at hand. As much as I may admire those who know what’s going on in “Poetry” at any given time I’ve never been able to do that, nor, really, have I wanted to.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

Probably just about anything you can think of. I’ve never read in any real way the English Romantics nor the French or Spanish Surrealists.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

It’s a kind of game you play with words in which you may not mind cheating in order to come to a draw.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

--The role of the Citizen, I suppose, differs according to what System you live under; that said, my instinct gravitates toward the role of the Citizen being that of a Contrarian to that System.

--It seems to me that the idea of any Role for the Poet is part of those dregs of patriarchal hero worship which advanced, wielding delineation, in what Frobenius calls the “West-East Pendulation”. The hierarchical implication of this is a Priest-like status for “Poets” in many instances, which is both dishonest and destructive.

--A man may write in a way suggestive of Vedic structures and pass this writing out on the streets of New York then spend time among the sick and dying soldiers of the Civil War. A woman may write in way which is both suggestive of and subversive to protestant hymns, then stitch the writing into pamphlets which she stows in a chest. A person may choose to cope molding at a 90 degree joint or to miter it, to use fast grown pine or reclaimed heart of pine. I think the political and personal implications of each of these, and many others, are basically equal.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**ice

Chiseled**magnet

I**am

Of**the

Form**fellow

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

--I suppose I have something of a schizoid notion of the body. Basically, the idea of its being liminal strikes me a false. I think of it as being contextual and transformational.

--When a body appears in a text of mine I assume it has occurred in that moment. If a text draws on a body that doesn’t occur thus then it is drawing on memory only.

2005-06-28T18:08:00.000-04:00

CATHERINE WAGNER was born to military parents in Burma and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. Wagner is a graduate of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and the University of Utah’s Ph.D in Literature program. She lives with her husband, the poet Martin Corless-Smith, and their young son Ambrose, in Boise, Idaho and Cornwall, England.

Buy her books here.

See some work here, here, here and here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

I loved Christina Rossetti's

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads
The wind is passing by.

I liked words and it's about words. I think it's about how we name things. Things don't often seem to exist separately from anything else till or as we name them; that is amazing. I also liked this poem for reasons of personal power as you will see from my answer to the final question.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

I read Vogue and other fashion magazines because I want to know how rich people cut their hair, etc. Actually I used to read it for those reasons, and these days I read it with a kind of abstract wonder because I don't seem to have time to get my hair cut much less get dressed in any interesting outfits. I read O magazine in the grocery store line because it promises to help me and maybe it will. I hate and love these magazines. I can't stand tv, so I get my fill of ads through these mags and refresh my woman-body panic (I too want to be de-flawed, I am tempted to feel bad, I do feel bad or else I sigh and put it in the recycling where I belong happily getting older).

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

I used to read it a lot (Hegel, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, various poststructuralists, Plato, various theological books, etc.-- stuff I imagine poets read, not philosophers) and now rarely read it, and I'm not sure what effect it has on my writing.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Hmm, this is what I am recalling right now: Cesar Vallejo because he forces something new, Arthur Rimbaud because his images are better than drugs; Edmond Jabes because he is so earnest, Ece Ayhan because of his love poems; the authors of the Bible because some of them were brilliant and some of them were crazy; Catullus for making the everyday amusing and shiny; Martial for keeping it nasty. I think you mean people in translation and nonwhite writers? not sure how to take the question -- but also Edmund Spenser and Philip and Mary Sidney, and Lord Byron and Robert Browning. Some current Americans I try to keep up on include Will Alexander because he is insane; Hoa Nguyen because she is honest; Harryette Mullen because she jostles the lang while questioning it and she's having fun; Bhanu Khapil Rider's strange body-morphings; C.S. Giscombe's beautiful sound-work.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

I skim a fair amount of new poetry and dig into older poetry books (and the occasional new book) hard. A lot of my poems are revisions or imitations of sounds/syntaxes I have read.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

I haven't read Finnegan's Wake because it was too much work and I couldn't see the benefit. Piers Plowman (sorry Martin). Any of Dante besides Inferno. Have not read (or only bits) HD or Ponge or Pessoa or Anne Waldman. Libraries full, I suppose because I was reading other stuff. I was feeling sort of proud at the beginning of this list and now I feel crappy. I will try harder! Or I rebel; what do I assume Gertrude Stein read? Whatever she felt like; I bet she didn't worry about it. Anyway I probably haven't read your poems and I will feel guilty if I meet you, they might be great.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

I wouldn't try to explain it; I would use examples like "The Owl and the Pussycat" and "Jabberwocky" and backwards road signs and the games "A my name is . . . " and "Inky Pinky."

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

The poet is a speaking singing citizen and in a perfect world all citizens would be speaking and singing.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

I have read too many of these interviews now and I'm corrupted. Also, I can't be impromptu in front of people.

Le mon chiseled I off orm.

This is a poem you should read aloud in a Jamaican accent; it's about my body like a grotesque Alhambra made of skin growing on the mon's arm until he had to chisel it off. I can't think what it means; maybe it is a sad poem about dating or marriage, but I hope not about my marriage. Maybe it's about an ex-boyfriend.

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

I was a child with a messed-up body, nothing at all serious, but noticeable to anyone who met me: I had flaking blistering eczema on hands and arms and feet, poor eyesight, pigeon-toes (I wore special shoes), and incredibly disgusting constant farts. My wind was finally cured in my twenties when I gave up milk products, so those of you who knew me before that need no longer live in fear of my return. I am slightly more comfortable in my skin than I was, but I always am aware of my body and bodies in general. I think that poems are bodies; they have their own consciousness and have to sometimes be zipped up or unzipped out of their clothing and helped to breathe. At any rate my poems are infected with my body through sound, through self-consciousness, and through cousinship because the poem proposes itself to the world in an open envelope and so do I.

2005-06-25T18:37:00.000-04:00

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.

2005-06-21T18:22:00.000-04:00

Ray Hsu is the author of a book of poems, Anthropy, which won the 2005
Gerald Lampert award for best first book of poetry in Canada. He has
published or forthcoming poems in literary journals including Fence,
New American Writing, The Fiddlehead (Canada), and nthposition (UK). He
is completing his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Buy his book here.

See some work here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

Keats’ La Belle Dame Sans Merci because it had funky rhythm.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

How to Be a Great Boss, a self-help book that uses alliteration to convince you that what it says is true.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Incredibly important. Philosophy is the best way I've found to keep writing, tearing open what you've done, and writing.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Walter Benjamin and Fernando Pessoa, perhaps because you don't read them so much as put them back together until the next time you read them.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

Yes, I read a lot of poetry because it's the only way I can compose.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

I haven't read Moby Dick. Nor quite a few other canonical American Lit things. People forget that I'm Canadian.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

A poem sometimes uses words that make you go, "Wow."

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

I doubt there's a specific role for the Poet so much as the role leads you to say things in the same way that a camera in your hands lets you notice the corners of buildings and tables. The role of the citizen keeps you from being locked out of places the same way that not having a library card keeps you from resources that everyone else has access to.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**Chisel

Chiseled**Damage

I**Ingrain

Of**Dove and amble

Form**Cram

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

When reading books, habits change in ways the mind doesn't notice. The body takes these things seriously but keeps some of them hidden from the mind. The body and mind go together to the library and read more books together; every now and then the mind eyes the body suspiciously and wonders what it's missing.

2005-06-18T18:32:00.000-04:00

Gabriel Gudding is an assistant professor of creative writing at Illinois State University and is the author of A Defense of Poetry and Rhode Island Notebook.

Buy his book here.

See some work here, here and here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

I don’t recall that I ever loved, as a kid, an entire poem. I remember loving as a boy some phrases of “The Song of Hiawatha” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, mostly because my mom would recite them to me and tickle me whenever she said “Gitche Gumee,” with emphasis on the “git” as in “I’ll git you,” when she would tickle me, and then she’d continue the rhyme:

“On the shores of Gitche Gumee,/
Of the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood Nokomis, the old woman,
Pointing with her finger westward,
O'er the water pointing westward,
To the purple clouds of sunset.”

It was a poem about the early peoples around Lake Superior. I grew up among the lakes of Minnesota and felt that here was a poem about the land around me. And I found the rhythm noble and it made me want to dance and listen. I recall how happy I was to see these driving epic rhythms and rhymes were taken up and slightly altered by the Hamms Beer radio and TV commercials. (The writer of this jingle, Ernie Garven, who grew up in the same town as I did, died a short while ago):

"From the land of sky blue waters (waters),

"From the land of pines, lofty balsams,

"Comes the beer refreshing,

"Hamm's, the beer refreshing."

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

I am currently reading a 19th Century Burmese book called “Vipassana Dipani,” or “Manual of Insight” by a famous teacher of vipassana meditation called Ledi Sayadaw, a very learned scholar and monk and a master of vipassana meditation who lived in Burma and died in the early part of the last century. The book is basically a manual of theory meant to supplement the serious practice of vipassana meditation. Vipassana, which means in Pali, “to see things as they really are,” is the principle method of meditation taught by the historical Buddha. He said that vipassana bhavana (or the cultivation of insight) was the only way he found to completely purify his own heart and mind. He went so far as to say that it is the only way ANYONE can do so.

I am also reading a 5th Century A.D. book concerning Buddhist Abhidhamma mental and ethical cultivation called the “Visuddhimagga,” which is a Pali word that means “path of purification.” Pali is the now dead middle Indic language spoken by the Buddha. It is related to Sanskrit as Italian is related to Latin. The Visuddhimagga is basically a huge manual of meditation. It lists and discusses in an outline format all the various methods of mental cultivation taught by the historical Buddha.

I am reading these books because I practice vipassana meditation two hours each day and have done so with strict discipline since December 2003. I was taught vipassana by the foremost living lay teacher of our day, S. N. Goenka, a Burmese man of Indian descent now residing in Bombay. Mr. Goenka oversees FREE OF CHARGE silent ten day courses in vipassana meditation taught by videotape and audiotape all over the world. Anybody can go take these courses. My last such course was Dec 26 to Jan 6, 2005, which I sat with 40 other people. I took it at the recently opened Illinois Vipassana Meditation Center 140 miles north of where I live in Normal, Illinois. There are courses taught in camps and centers in this tradition all over the US and the world. The courses are all free of charge, all volunteer run: you get your own room, they put you up for eleven nights, they feed you, and you obey a strict schedule, up at 4am each day. One undertakes a strict code of discipline and undergoes a very methodical and rigorous course in three kinds of meditation: observation of respiration (anapana); observation of all mind-body phenomena (vipassana); and, on the last day, the cultivation of loving-kindness. For the first three and a half days one learns anapana, during which time the mind becomes very sharp, calm, clear, and one-pointed. On the fourth day one is given instruction in vipassana, a very powerful and no-nonsense method of observing all mind-body phenomena. The final method one learns, on the last day, is how to cultivate an attitude of loving-kindness. There is no catch: all courses are offered on a donation-only basis. Some people don’t donate anything -- and that’s okay. Despite this -- or perhaps because of this -- refusal to charge any money these courses have grown radically since Goenka began teaching them in India in 1969. The first permanent center in North America opened up in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts in the late 80s. There are now 7 permanent centers in North America. You can find books related to vipassana in this tradition at www.pariyatti.com.

Though I have only in the last year become a serious daily practicioner of vipassana, I first sat one of these courses at a rented camp in British Columbia in 1991. I just completed my sixth course and plan to take another one in June 2005. You can find more information at www.dhamma.org. Dhamma is just the Pali version of the Sanksrit “Dharma.”

Before finding vipassana as taught in this tradition (by Goenka) I studied Zen meditation, mantra based meditations, and other forms of vipassana. But for me NOTHING compares to vipassana for efficacy and immediate pragmatic benefits, some of which include:
• Increased energy and efficiency
• Improved concentration and mental clarity
• Decrease in stress, anxiety, fear
• Strengthening of ethical foundation
• Increase in creativity and enjoyment of all aspects of life
• Improved relations with colleagues, family, friends
• Deepened sense of purpose
• Greater balance when facing challenges
• Progressive elimination of anger, animosity and ill-will.
The next books I’m going to read are THE COLLECTED WORKS OF ST JOHN OF THE CROSS, trans Otilio Rodriquez, and JOHN MUIR: NATURE WRITINGS, the latter given to me by my dear friend and fellow vipassana meditator Maria Schmeeckle.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Profoundly. Because theory and practice must go together. One must understand what one is doing. One must understand how one lives. Not to do so leads to suffering. My favorite philosophers are all pragmatists. I am in love with the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus. He and Siddhatta Gotama begin it for me. Recent philosophers of great import to me are Thérèse of Liseaux, William James, John Dewey, Emerson, Rorty, Levinas, and Ivan Illich, who died two years ago.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

At the moment, Bhadantacariya Buddhaghosa, because he’s the dude who wrote the _Visuddhimagga_.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

These days I don’t read a lot of poetry. I go in cycles. I just finished guest editing a magazine and because of that got to read a lot of really great new poetry. In the next few weeks I'll begin guest editing for Mipoesias.com.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

Not much of the old WCW. Just keep forgetting to do so. But also I’ve always found his poem about the wheelbarrow utterly blah. I think it’s that poem more than any other has turned kids off to poetry. If that’s a poem, why not just go for a bikeride instead.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

I have a seven year old too. I told her a poem is a like a song that you can stick anything into. But that you don’t have to sing it.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

Haki R. Madhubuti said recently in his most recent book, RUN TOWARD FEAR, that a poet’s job is to find peace. I feel that, at base, at heart, what we do is either find peace or make misery. Those are basically the only two roles one can play. Whether a person is a poet or a citizen, we all want to find peace and to be happy. The problem is we don’t know how to do that. I feel strongly that my job as a poet is to help people find to peace and to be happy.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon** Eye. (Lemons are shaped like eyes)

Chiseled** Roy. (Because last week I saw a guy named Roy using a chisel)

I** Anatta. (One of the three marks of existence, according to the Buddha)

Of** Warm. (The word “of” I think connotes “warm” for me because “oven” starts with “of”)

Form** Dorm.

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

I don’t understand the question. It’s too broad for me to answer. Like what? If I didn’t have a body I wouldn’t be able to write? I don’t know what you mean. I wrote an article on the body’s history in genetics that showed up in The Journal of the History of Ideas once.

Or do you mean something like what use do I make of the body in my own poetry? Lots I suppose. The body in my work is transformed into an instrument that is elastic rather than brittle, mutable rather than fixed, and just as subject to decay as it is liable to explode. It is a thing dripping with feces and tipped with lips. The body in my work is in many ways simply the unlit basement of the mind. I want to show the necessity of its becoming illuminated and understood as something subject to death and pain but not to suffering. That is to say, I want to drive a wedge between the fact of pain and the apparent inevitability of suffering -- and to show that in fact though we must feel pain we don’t have to suffer it. In fact, this is the insight that vipassana has brought me over the years. And too, this has been, for me, the principle gift of Comedy to world literature: that suffering (misery) is not necessary; that we can accept and laugh at the great amount of pain we experience without having to be miserable in the face of it. The body, then, in my work, has I think been a rather elastic thing: eyeballs on a strabismic face clubbing each other, feces changing into babies, and a vulva flying up a nose. Thérèse of Liseaux, who died of tuberculosis at 24, said, ""I have reached the point of not being able to suffer any more because all suffering is sweet to me." You can see that in Beckett's _Molloy_ -- and in so many other places where the body is ridden hard in literature.

2005-06-14T18:45:00.000-04:00

Hank Lazer has published 12 books of poetry, most recently The New
Spirit (Singing Horse, 2005), Elegies & Vacations (Salt, 2004), and
Days (Lavender Ink, 2002). He edits the Modern and Contemporary
Poetics Series for the University of Alabama Press. Author of Opposing
Poetries (Northwestern, criticism), his poems & essays appear in
American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review
(which awarded him the Balch Prize in poetry). New poems from his
current poetry project, Portions, appear in current and forthcoming
issues of Canary, 1913, and Golden Handcuffs (where Rachel Back and
Donald Revell will also have essay-reviews on The New Spirit).

Buy his books here, here and here.

See a list of work online here.

For an essay (that appeared last spring in the Boston Review) on the
state of contemporary poetry go here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

I don’t think it really happened in the way that the question(er) assumes. There isn’t, as best I recall, a singular poem or moment. Until I finished high school, I was definitely more involved in and more interested in mathematics than poetry. I always read, but not much poetry. I recall my next-door-neighbor cousin Ben introducing me to Allen Ginsberg’s poetry. This would have been late high school. I remember finding that poetry (Howl, America) much more engaging than anything I’d read before. I remember finding T. S. Eliot’s poetry to be of interest. Like many people my age (b. 1950), I was engrossed in the lyrics of the many fine singer-songwriters of the time, especially Bob Dylan, but also Leonard Cohen, Pete Seeger, Joni Mitchell, Lennon & McCartney.

I do remember the first poetry reading I ever attended – fall of 1968, as a sophomore in college, I heard Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov read. That I remember… An amazing experience hearing Duncan read “Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar.”

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

I read some sci fi; I read the sports page every day. I don’t think that what I read would really surprise my peers.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

Quite important. I am more inclined to read philosophy and essays than fiction. I continue to read and enjoy Derrida, Emerson, Bataille, Shunryu Suzuki, Nishitani, Heidegger, Arakawa & Madeline Gins, among others. Why? For pleasure, for a sense of what is possible, to help in determining what is worth thinking about, to learn more about being.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

Edmond Jabès, Paul Celan, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida. Earlier, I spent a good deal of time reading Lorca, Neruda, Vallejo, Rilke, Trakl, Rozewicz, Milosz, Herbert, Transtromer, Bei Dao, Mallarmé, and others…

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

Yes, I do. Long ago – nearly thirty-five years ago – I learned to consider reading and writing as virtually inseparable activities. I can’t imagine the one without the other.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

There are certainly plenty of such holes in my reading, plenty of such embarrassments (or books saved for later), but the reading/writing life is not some sort of pop quiz, so I doubt that there are these imagined colleagues who would care or wonder about what I haven’t read.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

A poem is where language goes for recess.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

Perhaps as Oppen suggested in his apt revision, poets are the legislators of the unacknowledged world. As a poet, as one writes and reads and engages in the social world of poetry, one is already engaged in being a citizen. What role? To be honest, and thoughtful.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**Jefferson

Chiseled**Yosemite

I**Thou

Of**Thee

Form**Forum

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

Well, there’s not one text and there’s not one body. I do think of words on the page as a kind of choreography – words as bodies deployed on the page. The poem itself constitutes a kind of body. The book as well is another physical, body-like being. The rhythm, sound, appearance on the page all constitute a bodily experience for the reader as well as for the writer in the moment of composition.

2005-05-31T21:00:00.000-04:00

John Latta lives in Ann Arbor and writes about poetry and poetics at Hotel Point.

Buy his book here.

See some work here, here, here and here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

I suppose it keeps changing up to some point. I certainly recall being completely “took” by A. A. Milne’s “Disobedience”:

James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother,
Though he was only three.
James James
Said to his Mother,
“Mother,” he said, said he:
“You must never go down to the end of the town,
if you don’t go down with me”

And possibly later, “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” which my father melodramatick’d up a little, I think, when, at the end, the two’ve supped on and finish’d off the little band of oysters they’d pick’d up and gone traipsing along the littoral with: “they’d eaten every one.” (It is my father’s voice and rhythms I hear behind all of the classic poems for children now, when I read them to my son. I first noticed it in rereading Huckleberry Finn in my mid-thirties, a book I’d only had read to me, and that when I was about six or so.) Later, the loved ones change: in the era when I first start’d writing with some degree of seriousness, it’d probably be something like Frank O’Hara’s “For James Dean”:

Welcome me, if you will,
as the ambassador of a hatred
who knows its cause
and does not envy you your whim
of ending him.

Or the ones some small band of bibulous cohorts used to recite separately or together in the Royal Palm Tavern in Ithaca, New York—Tom Clark’s “Poem”:

Like musical instruments
Abandoned in a field
The parts of your feelings

Are starting to know a quiet
The pure conversion of your
Life into art seems destined

Never to occur
You don’t mind
You feel spiritual and alert

As the air must feel
Turning into the sky aloft and blue
You feel like

You’ll never feel like touching anything or anyone
Again
And then you do

Or John Berryman’s fourteenth “Dream Song”:

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored . . .

The answer to “Why?” Inextricably part of the giddiness of being nineteen and intoning “I am heavy bored” or of being five and spitting out “You must never go down to the end of the town” quicker ’n Tina Turner. It spun th’applicable neurons up into a candy one cotton’d to.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

Everything readable is literary. Everything’s got a place where it can be put, is of use. That said, I’m not sure I got any bombs tuck’d in my clothing-folds. I do like to read natural history—things like Thomas Eisner’s recent bug book, For Love of Insects. Or, going back some years, Konrad Lorenz, or Niko Tinbergen. The Curious Naturalist. Truth is, though, I don’t read enough of it, or not as much as I’d like—there’s inevitably something more conventionally “literary” at hand I make a priority of. There are rather casual things I mostly avoid however: I don’t read sports, or watch sports. I find television unwatchable, nervous-making. I no longer’ve got the foggiest notion of popular music, or of cinema, popular or not.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

I dabble in philosophy, and occasionally think it informs some of my writing. In the early ’seventies I attended a class with Sydney Shoemaker, who punctuated, in lecture, every phrase with a monstrous uuuhhhh, so that shortly one heard nothing but the uuuhhhh’s. Mostly he present’d conundrums of no material heft—a man dreaming that he’s dreaming, etc. I don’t like puzzles, and soon decided philosophy weren’t for me. I’d actually sign’d up for the course thinking philosophy study’d political expediency or something. I was a political youngster, a draft-dodger, and thought I’d pick up some tools useful in the struggle to end the war in Vietnam. And in retrospect, incredibly naïve. There follow’d—later—an onslaught of theory. I found Roland Barthes’s writings of immediate and lasting use, the way he fudges it with the template he’s in the midst of remaking. Or tossing off. Derrida, less so, too “crabbid.” Walter Benjamin. Poor dead Susan Sontag wrote remarkably I think. The aphorists’re always fun: Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Schlegel, and Lichtenberg.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

A friend who was in Prague recently point’d me toward Bohumil Hrabal, particularly Too Loud a Solitude, which I found extraordinary. Camus, Flaubert, Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, Georges Perec, Jean Echenoz, and Michel Tournier among the French. Max Frisch and Blaise Cendrars among the Swiss. Basho, Akiyuki. Yuri Olesha. Witold Gombrowicz. Josef Skvorecky. Cabrera Infante. The two Italos—Svevo and Calvino. Manuel Puig. I used to think Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum unbeatable. W. G. Sebald. I’m sure another day would mean another—somewhat different—list. The pre-Anglo Nabokov anglicized by the post-Anglo Nabokov. Adriaan Floris van Hovendaal! Reasons for each vary, “would be tremendously daunting to delineate.”

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

Working in a library, I “literally”—as Ron Silliman likes to say—“check out” a lot of poetry. Meaning either contemptuously or flirtingly (“recklessly”) eyeballing it, or dragging it home to meet the dog. I don’t know that I do read a lot of poetry. Like everybody else, I probably read less of it than I imagine: poetry’s constituted rather like a fine Moroccan cous-cous—it swells big in the stomachs of us who’re willing to sup on it regularly. Truth is—the reading of it is probably less important to my own writing than other sorts of reading that I do. When I settle in for a bout of reading-nourishment, late nights after the dog’s walk’d and the house-occupants asleep, it’s rarely a poetry book that I nod over. (That “nod” can be affirmative, or soporific . . .) The important ones—Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Tate of a certain “era,” maybe Louis Zukofsky, and a slug of unnamed contemporaries (and, if I were a just man, I’d name, too, a gob of singular poems by helter’s own skelter of poets—one leans to the beast-keeper, but gets the learning off the beast)—are the ones who’ve permitted me to flail off in directions I wouldn’t of flail’d off in without th’example.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

Oh, the usual suspects: Suetonius, Xenophon, Chateaubriand, Hugh Walpole, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Edward Gibbon, Euell Gibbons. And: Michelet, Carlyle, Francis Parkman. Sologub’s Little Demon. I’ve barely scratched Fabre’s Souvenirs entomologiques. Saintsbury still eludes me. I’m stuck at the beginning of Sinclair’s Paradise volume of Dante, though I dogged my way through hellish and purgatorial predecessors years ago. Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Andrew Lytle’s The Velvet Horn, and Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling remain my three most preferred imaginary novels that I have not read. There’re entire worlds of reading I lack. Anna Karenin. Manzoni, Milton! (I recall writing a paper about how Milton “cushion’d” nouns between two adjectives—an idea a friend loan’d me. He wrote the same paper, but used the word “bracket’d” in the argument.) Why my reading paucity? Sloth, a misspent twenty or so years with a bottle of bourbon for company, being a wage-slave and a father. And intangibles like ignorance, timing, a predilection for the contemporary (and the oddball) that consumed my youth. No one need apologize for what one hasn’t read—there’s too much of it. With luck and a ready curiosity and openness (and that’s something one sees frightfully little of in some corners of the poetry world), one finds what one needs. And makes space for it.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

Tough question. I suppose I’d want to say it’s something like goofing around with words just to see what they can do. How they sound together, how they look together, what pictures they make in our heads. What the E. M. Forster line? “How do I know what I mean before I see what I say?” For inexplicable reasons I keep coming back, too, to some Cheech and Chong (I think) sketch of the mid-’seventies, where a rough and raspy-throat’d Hells Angel is talking to Mr. Rogers (of “Neighborhood” fame) and Mr. Rogers, snobbily precise, with that unmistakable touch of “sissy”-inflect, says: “Can you say wimpy? I bet you can.” (He’s hinting that the biker isn’t everything the overblown bluster portends.) And the biker responds: “Yeah, I can say wimpy. I can say wimpy, wompy, wampy. Wumpy.” Which makes “something deep and mysterious inside of me that cannot be explained” jump up happily. Jimp. Jomp. Chump. The point being to suggest that whatever a poem is, writing poetry’s fun, funny, possibly subversive.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

I suspect most poets of being simply poor slobs who cannot help themselves: one writes because one cannot not write. Such a situation probably breeds all kinds of—not guilt exactly, even if, by needing to be so constantly pinning those devilish moths words to paper, one manages to provoke mild furies and antagonisms amongst family and friends, or make enemies up and down the hierarchickal ladders, to say nothing of those foolish enough to take “one” “seriously.” Sure, part of the poet’s chore is to badger the state, or mock the dangerous mediocrities that suffer it to exist. Th’extent of my nihilism in such matters knows no credo, so, in a sort of self-defence, I resort to a kind of brute laughter. Ineffectual. The citizen in me tends toward a calmer expediency.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**Peel, Emma Peel

Chiseled**Jism

I**Yi-Yi

Of**Idiot

Form**Morph

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

A friend of my stormy youth, Lou Robinson, might’ve said it best in her prose collection, Napoleon’s Mare. Something like: “Why does everybody talk about the body? All the best states leave it behind. It is a launching pad, a jetty.” Or Laura Riding, who in 1933 announced that “bodies have had their day.” Or William Matthews, who posit’d a direct relation between the body’s diminishing as the “body of work” mounts. I used, inebriated, to fling myself into the frenzy’d mayhem of dance, imagining that I made my body move not just to the available rhythms, but, too, to the melody itself. There is a detritus of that belief—an echo of an impulse—I suppose, in the way I hear the poems I write: rhythmic constructs that howl and shimmy and chitter, and aren’t so high-mind’d or bashful as to rule out an “artful” and delirious solitary humping (all dance is sexual mime) of any handily mute and immutable object—a chair, a support beam, a microphone stand. All part of the dance. (An alternate view: the body’s only borrow’d the way the words are only borrow’d. I’ve long entertain’d the notion that, in fact, I am no more than a reincarnation of Maxwell Bodenheim, “public Bohemian number one,” who used to sell’s poems in Washington Square. The proof: he was murder’d the day I was born.)

2005-05-28T18:52:00.000-04:00

Benjamin Friedlander lives and works in Maine. His most recent books are Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism (University of Alabama Press, 2004) and A Knot Is Not a Tangle (Krupskaya Press, 2000).

Buy his books here, here, here, here and here.

See some work here and here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

At the onset of adolescence I seem to have had a hankering for melodramatic narratives in rhyme: "You're So Vain," "A Horse with No Name," "Alone Again, Naturally." I discovered E. E. Cummings at about the same time, drawn by the same affections that led me to the top forty. It was puppy love, I guess, but love all the same.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

Surprise is hard to come by these days, but I do keep a Bible by my bed. I read it for the same reasons most people do: comfort, covenant, inspiration. Maybe that will raise a few eyebrows.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

I came to philosophy late, when I was 28 or 29. I was seeking out books by Holocaust survivors who worked in fields other than poetry or fiction: historians, anthropologists, mathematicians. Someone told me to read Emmanuel Levinas (who was not a survivor, by the way, but a prisoner of war). Reading him put me onto an entirely new track, awakening a latent dissatisfaction with poetry understood in purely literary terms. The impact on my writing was largely a matter of attitude. Levinas says somewhere that philosophy is concerned with "the intelligibility of the intelligible," and that suffices, for me at least, for poetry, where a different idea of intelligibility necessarily obtains.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

My least mediated encounters have been in German, which I studied for a few years in college; I have a fondness for translation too--it frees me to read with an amateur's abandon. In German, Celan is the poet to whom I feel closest. There's something about his psychology, the way he exposes himself in the act of hiding, that feels familiar and keeps me reading. In translation, my current fling is with Mark Musa's Petrarch. He's the Euclid of our art: his conceits are axioms; his poems, elegant proofs.

I took it you were asking about poets from around the world. But in case I was wrong, let me cite Frances Chung. Most poets seek out their reality or simply assume it; Chung's poems maintain it, a raised map or scale model inhabited by ghosts. I cry when I read her, sometimes, for all we've lost with her premature death.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

A fair amount, yeah. I do it to preserve the overall intensity of my interest. Of course, I also ignore a lot for the same reason.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

I've never read Dubliners, Ulysses, or Finnegans Wake. No particular reason. I haven't read Chaucer, Mallarme, or Akhmatova either. I got through Hell and Purgatory but never made it to Heaven. Life is like that.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

Well, to start with, a poem is words with the power to surprise.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

Poet are jackasses, sages, camp followers, professors, salesmen, populists, lackeys, fascists--I can think of writers I love who played each one of those roles. The multiplicity is intrinsic to the art.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**Sicily

Chiseled**rock

I**do

Of**thee I sing

Form**ula

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

I'm physically inhibited, but I like to maintain eye contact--and I think the same is pretty much true for my poems.

2005-05-24T20:34:00.000-04:00

Shara McCallum is the author of two books of poems, Song of Thieves, published in February 2003, and The Water Between Us, winner of the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and published in 1999, both by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

She has been the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant, and a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. McCallum’s poems and personal essays have appeared in several journals, including The Antioch Review, Callaloo, Creative Nonfiction, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Witness. Her work also appears in a number of anthologies, including The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology and Beyond the Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-first Century.

McCallum has given readings throughout the United States and in the Caribbean. Venues include the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C., the Academy of American Poets in New York, the Miami Book Fair International, Bumbershoot Literary and Arts Festival in Seattle, Washington, Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and the Conference on Caribbean Women Writers in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico.

Originally from Jamaica, McCallum teaches and directs the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. She is also on the faculty of the Stonecoast Low Residency MFA program. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and daughter.

Buy her books here.

See some work here.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

"Turtle Soup" by Lewis Carrol. I memorized it when I was a young child. I still remember much of it; it's short so I hope it's okay for me to quote what I recall here to better answer the "why" part of your question:

Beautiful soup so rich and green,
waiting in a hot tureen.
Who for such dainties would not stoop
for soup of the evening, beautiful soup?
Be-u-ti-ful soup. Be-u-ti-ful soup.
Soup of the evening.
Beautiful, beautiful soup.

I'm not sure that I got the line breaks or punctuation right but this is how the poem sounds in my mind. As a child, I loved this poem because of its repetition of words and sounds. I especially loved saying "be-u-ti-ful soup, be-u-ti-ful soup" in the fifth line and drawing out the word, "beautiful," like that. It felt good in my mouth. I also loved saying words like "tureen" and the whole line, "who for such dainties would not stoop?" precisely because I didn't know what the word and phrase really meant. What first drew me to this poem is what continues to attract me to poetry: sound and mystery.

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

I read sports editorials -- particularly those on baseball. Mostly these are articles my husband sends me that he finds from various newspapers on-line. I'm a huge baseball fan; so that's partly why I read the editorials. I think it's also that I like the way, as my husband points out, many political and ethical issues get played out through the drama of sports. Sports is one of the best metaphors for contemporary culture and life.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

This is difficult to answer. I don't see my writing as coming from a place of idea (which is what I associate with philosophy) but more so as stemming from voice and image. Still, what poetry isn't at its core philosophical in terms of its questions and questioning?

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

My favourite writers by and large are non-Anglo-American writers, probably because I am non-Anglo-American myself and in their works I find a history, voice, and point-of-view with which I connect. To name just a sprinkling: Thylias Moss, Agha Shahid Ali, Lucille Clifton, Li-Young Lee, Yehuda Amichai, Eavan Boland, Kwame Dawes.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

Yes, I read lots of poetry. For the past 10 years, I've mainly read contemporary poets. This began largely due to my complete ignorance of contemporary poetry up to the point I discovered it a decade ago -- primarily at the insistence of workshop teachers who told me (as I myself now tell my students) that I needed to read and be aware of contemporary poetry. This trend in my reading has persisted in part because of what I teach (and the administrative work I do) and because it's easy to feel that I'm never caught up or well enough read in the field of "contemporary poetry" as there are more new books appearing each year than I can find the time to read.

I have thought recently, though, that I'd like to seriously reread work by older generations of poets, like those I read when I was in college (Romantics, Modernists, etc.) and work by poets from other eras and countries that I've stumbled across in my reading but not approached in any kind of systematic fashion. This seems especially important to me right now for my development as a writer since I seem to have hit a kind of wall when reading contemporary books of poetry and looking for models. Reading poetry has long been fundamentally linked to my education of myself as a poet. I get inspiration for ideas to try (as trite as that sounds) when I read other writers. I am beginning to feel a sense of claustrophobia now when I pick up many books of contemporary American poetry (that seem to fall easily into any of the various "camps") and am longing to read more widely and with more depth outside of that box.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

Omeros by Derek Walcott. I've read parts of it but haven't read through the entire poem. I think the density of the poem is daunting to me. Perhaps I should try reading it aloud, in tandem with someone -- then, I'd probably hear it and find the thread to keep me moving forward.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

This is again a difficult question. I'll answer from what I've observed of my 14 month old daughter's interest in language. She loves repetition. Let me repeat: she loves repetition. She also takes great pleasure in the tactile nature of sounds as well as in the "surprise" element of new words and, conversely, in the comfort of familiar ones. I think she knows what a poem is.

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

To say, "Role of the Poet", seems proscriptive and singular. I don't object to saying that poets have a place and function in modern life; but I'm not that interested in endlessly theorizing about that place and I hesitate to name just one role because that shuts down the possibilities for poetry. As a reader, I value all kinds of poems (poems that are intensely private and show little regard for public and political lives as well as those that are just the opposite).

I do think, though, that a poet should ask herself what the ethics of her own poems are in order to write from a place that's genuine. I feel frustrated by poems that seem only to be about word play and that appear to have nothing greater at stake (emotionally, psychologically, politically, etc.) than a show of the poet's intellect, cleverness, or ironic wit.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**guitar

Chiseled**stone

I**you

Of**parent

Form**absence

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

They are ideally one and the same.