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