Mike Puican : part one

Mike Puican’s debut book of poetry, Central Air, has just been released by Northwestern Press. He has had poems in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, and New England Review among others, and he won the 2004 Tia Chucha Press Chapbook Contest for his chapbook, 30 Seconds. Mike was a member of the 1996 Chicago Slam Team, and is a long-time board member of the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago. Currently, he teaches poetry to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals at the Federal Metropolitan Correctional Center and St. Leonard’s House.

How does your work first enter the world?

Strange as it sounds, I use an Excel spreadsheet. When I begin, I typically write down phrases or sentences that sound interesting or mysterious but have no relationship to each other. After I have about forty or fifty of these, I transfer them to an Excel spreadsheet. This makes it very easy to view a large number of disparate thoughts on one screen and move them around to look for the patterns and associations. Once I find a few thoughts that come together in interesting ways, I have the start of a poem.