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)