How does a poem begin?
A poem begins with an intimation. Now, whether this is the echo of a hint and whisper of some profound intimacy with knowledge up to that moment unknown or thought-words themselves arising as event and deed from the source, I doubt it will ever be for me to know.
How does a poem begin?
Rarely with a specific line or bit of language, as seems to be the case for others. More often, it’s more of a physiological sense that if I try to write, I’ll end up with something worth keeping—there’s a charge there, and I can feel it. I can only rare say where the charge comes from, but once it’s there, I can sit down to write and know with some certainty that I’ll end up with something “good,” by my lights, even if (as is most often the case), I won’t have any idea of what that something will look like.
But I actually think this is a bad way to work for anyone with meaningful time constraints. Waiting around for inspiration works well when you have a lot of free time, but not if you don’t. Luckily, there’s no need to wait. I think feeling “the charge” is a positive indicator, but its absence isn’t a negative indicator; I’ve had plenty of experiences where forcing myself to write has actually turned out very well. I think often about something John Ashbery says in his Paris Review interview: “…on the whole I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream. One can let down one’s bucket and bring the poem back up.” I think this is basically right, at least for me. Sometimes the water is near the surface, and you barely need to lower the bucket at all—whatever you try turns out to be the right thing, or close to it. But other times the water is lower, and it takes a while for the bucket to reach it, and maybe, in a given sitting, it doesn’t touch the water at all. But the water is always there. The trick is that you have to actually go to the well to draw from it, and many of us (me included) could do a better job of that.
How did you first engage with poetry?
As a teenager of the emo persuasion, I had written song lyrics and some rather dark rhymes, but my real poetic catalyst was the English Literature GCSE anthology which featured poetry by Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy. This was my first experience of modern free verse and it certainly served as inspiration for tentative attempts at serious poetry.
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
I think poetry often operates outside of capitalist economies of value and exchange, simply because it’s not deemed valuable by the broader culture. Many people know James Sherry’s old joke (as retold by Charles Bernstein) that “a piece of paper with nothing on it has a definite economic value. If you print a poem on it, that value is lost.” Of course, poetry in the age of social media and the academicization of the literary arts has a cultural capital which increasingly translates into actual capital. So I should say that poetry can operate outside of conventional economies of exchange, perhaps more than other forms.
This is good and bad. It’s bad because poets have trouble making ends meet, and those with independent resources have an easier time of it. It’s good because poetry may be somewhat less beholden to the economic interests of powerful institutions and corporations, especially given all the small press and self-publishing that goes on. To put it in more personal terms, I regularly feel the dismissal of poets and poetry that comes from the American professional elite and even from many sectors within the academic humanities. There’s nominal approval of our supposedly noble endeavor, sure. But deep down the lawyers, doctors, scientists, policymakers and other members of the middle or managerial class think poets are lazy masturbators.
Because of this, many poets are able to write against the status quo, and many become activists in one way or another. Compare the number of formally experimental and/or politically active “successful" poets to the number of successful novelists who fit those characterizations. Whereas in my scholarly work, I’m constantly aware of and influenced by the demands of “professionalization” and the list of things humanities departments are currently looking for from prospective faculty, in my poetry, I tend not to think about these things, for lack of expectation that I will be rewarded if I do. This is probably naïve, because English departments are now virtually the ONLY places in the US where experimental poets can be financially supported for what they do.
What other poetry books have you been reading lately?
I’ve been reading Leaving Holds Me Here: Selected Poems by Glen Sorestad, whose poems about his mother resonate with me right now. Also Time Capsule, a posthumous collection of new and selected poems by Pat Lowther, whose work I am just getting acquainted with. And I just bought David Yerex Williamson’s brand-new first book, Through Disassembled Houses of Perfect Stones.
Why is poetry important?
Poetry is the creation of a space, a vessel, a vacuum, that can hold whatever it is you need held. Besides that, I find myself pretty allergic to statements of what poetry is or is not. For a genre that is so unbelievably varied in its contemporary existence, how can poetry be one or the other thing? All of which to say, poetry is more important or less important depending on the context of the poem, the intent of the poem, the community of the poem, which way the poem allows power to flow. I personally gravitate towards poetry that refracts the gaze of the universe, that catches the glare of our world’s multiple violences and throws it back, that laughs defiantly and off-kilterly at this place we call the now. It’s held as common knowledge, at least for the last number of decades, that poetry (and literature in general) doesn’t do anything, especially in the world at large. I wholeheartedly reject this viewpoint. I know what poetry, what novels, have done to me. They’ve rewired me at the molecular level. If that isn’t important, then what is?
How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?
I seem to wait for two things to occur. First, I get a feeling sense of something. Next, I read or hear a word or phrase that somehow aligns or reminds me of that feeling sense. I may not keep the phrase but the ‘found’ language gets me going.
I’ve always been part of a writers’ group. I currently hang out with two groups of trusted writers. The back and forth, the feedback we exchange with each other, is gold.
How does a poem begin?
I hear the inner voice. It’s my voice but at a different vibration—softer, deeper, and more graceful almost. I hear the first line and know I have to grab a pen or open my app because the rest is coming.
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What are you working on?
Thank you for asking this question. I've recently completed my third chapbook, ''Lament of The Sunken'' which comprises over 30 nautical-themed poems written in a soliloquy-esque manner. Each of these poems expresses and alludes to different phases, trials and moments of my life. Aside from that, I'm working towards my goal to get published in 10,000 journals by the end of 2030.
What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
There’s something about answering these questions that feels intensely personal to me, and private—they feel impossible to answer and also I kind of don’t want to. This is probably part of why I’m more drawn to fiction: a character can be like a telephone pole I’m hiding behind, which is easy because I’m tall and thin.
What’s most difficult about writing poetry for me is that I don’t really ever feel like I’m writing poetry. I don’t think I do, to be honest. When I set out, I’m writing a short story or a novel or a novella, whatever, and I shake loose from that form. I know we’re more flexible on genre these days, and in some way it’s a boring topic, we can use words like “hybrid” and so on, but I do think there’s such a thing as a short story and a poem and that they’re different: they take different shapes, have different ways to go about reading and writing them, and that’s interesting to me and worth holding on to. However, often the texts I write—though I imagine them to be fiction and I work within and through certain fictional constraints—aren’t quite fiction enough, we might say, or someone might say, or a journal might take them in their poetry pile rather than their fiction pile. “Poetry” can be a big bucket where we toss in writing we’re not sure what to call, and that’s generous of poetry, it’s kind of nice! But it also makes me feel a little guilty, or sick to my stomach, like I’m cheating. This feeling will probably change, will probably lighten, tomorrow or a year from now—I admit that it’s and I’m mutable (and so’s art).
What are you working on?
I have multiple manuscripts looking for homes. One I’m particularly excited about is a chapbook entitled “The Adorable Knife: Poems on Frances Glessner Lee’s The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.” I am obsessed with the Nutshells enough to have seen them when they were exhibited at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC.
The poems are named after each “Nutshell,” which are meticulously crafted miniature crime scene dioramas meant to help police officers hone their observation skills. It is my intention to honor Frances Glessner Lee’s own attention to detail in crafting these, as well as to imagine possible “solutions” by giving voice to the stories told in the crime scenes. In some of the poems, the speaker is the victim, and in some, the speaker could be the perpetrator. In still others, it is the poet’s voice speaking.
Another manuscript entitled “What’s the Worst that Could Happen?” explores the anxiety of motherhood.
“Annual” is a chapbook of poems written in response to Sylvia Plath’s poems.
“You’re Never the Same” is my ekphrastic manuscript.
I am generating more poems than I know what to do with these days!
What other poetry books have you been reading lately?
Towards the Primeval Lightning Field, Will Alexander
Dancing in Odessa, Ilya Kaminsky
Yr Skull a Cathedral, Param Anand Singh
Stretched Warp, Maria Damon & Alan Sondheim
Split Series (chapbook), Christophe Casamassima
Share the Wealth, Maureen Thorson
Why is poetry important?
Poetry is important for many different reasons to different people. For me, it is a vehicle or a voice or an outlet for my creative and philosophical ideas. I always wanted to be an artist growing up. I wanted to be a musician or guitarist. I wanted to be a painter. I wanted to be a short story writer. When I discovered contemporary poetry at the library and I saw Octavio Paz, Rosario Castellanos, Francisco X. Alarcon, Lorna Dee Cervantes, I saw that I could do it, too. Folks like me had done it before and done it well. Why couldn’t I do it?
Poetry is like a religion to me. So long as I can write poems and prose poems that I’m proud of, my life will have meaning. Writing poetry fulfils my dreams of becoming an artist. It gives me new dreams of teaching, editing, and leaving doors and possibilities open. Poetry is dreams. Poetry is important because without it the world would lack part of its soul.
When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
Having required a bit of renewal lately, I can answer this directly, although not exhaustively: John Ashbery, Emily Dickinson, Laura Riding Jackson, Clarice Lispector, Nathaniel Mackey, Alice Notley, Lisa Robertson, Jack Spicer, and on and on. A more exhaustive list would probably have 20 or so poets and writers on it, give or take. The test is simply whether reading a given author makes me want to write—not to write like them, exactly, but just to participate in the same activity—to be among them, in however small a way.
I think most writers have a roster like this. I otherwise read broadly, and I enjoy a great deal of what I read. But we all have our little pantheons, and I think it’s good to remind yourself that that source of renewal is there, and not to be shy about returning to it.
What are you working on?
I’m currently dabbling with the drafts of two poems which retell famous stories from a female perspective. One is narrated by Helena, a character from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the other is in the voice of Thetis, nereid and mother of Achilles in Greek mythology, exploring the events which led to the hero’s birth. I am also working on my debut pamphlet of ecopoetry, which features a collection of odes to marine life, and highlights the threats they are facing.
Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
The important shift for me came when I figured out that I think poetry should do more than be clever, or interesting, or beautiful, or weird, or funny. I got tired of readings where the most rewarded work was the kind full of clever one-liners that got laughs, or work that rebelliously disrupted the high-seriousness of the genre through inappropriately jejune or surreal images and tones (I’m certainly guilty of writing like this at times). I’m all for humor, strangeness, linguistic play, youthful freshness etc.. But the ivory tower of poetic self-seriousness was toppled long ago. Poets should set their sights on cultural problems beyond the literary ones, even if academic battles are often proxy wars for larger social conflicts.
People tend not to think of him as a “political” poet, but oddly enough it was probably the time I spent reading and writing about Frank O’Hara that made me most interested in poetry that intervenes in oppressive norms of representation in the public sphere. I wrote an undergraduate thesis on O’Hara and the queer experience and politics underlying what I called his “dialectical sincerity.” I also gravitated toward the experimentalism of the Language writers, though it took me a long time to understand and critically assess the political implications of their work and theoretical writings (there’s plenty I now disagree with there). In general—and I think that many people who didn’t already feel this way have come to do so in the last 10 years—there’s too much at stake for any artform or cultural worker to neglect getting concertedly involved with the fight for social and environmental justice. And I absolutely disagree that there’s a necessary division between politically committed art and art that promotes some liberal ideal of aesthetic freedom from the exigencies of politics or the requirements of self-preservation. Sabotage of an oil pipeline is a very beautiful poem.
How did you first engage with poetry?
I was about twenty-three when I decided to take poetry seriously, but the roots of that decision go back a long way. I read poetry in school, both elementary and high school, and can still recite lines from some of the poems I read then. At home we had a few books of children’s poetry, but we also had my dad’s old poetry anthologies from high school and college, and I read from those as well once I was a bit older. I wrote a handful of poems in my school years, and then gradually began writing more as I entered my twenties. It seemed to be a natural means of expression for me.
What other poetry books have you been reading lately?
Since Shifting Baseline Syndrome came out, I’ve found myself devouring recent Canadian poetry. I thrilled at Bardia Sinaee’s Intruder. I’m currently reading Noor Naga’s Washes, Prays, which is unlike anything I’ve ever read before. A real accomplishment of vision, language, and voice. I am a massive fan—and good friends with—two of Canada’s preeminent visual poets, Eric Schmaltz and Kate Siklosi. Finally, I feel a major rereading of Allen Ginsberg coming on.
Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
Today I understand that I am forever a student of poetry. It’s a relief to arrive at this place. I bring the same attitude to reading other poets. A good poem will always prompt me to ask what I can learn.
What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
Creating space to listen. My poetry has always been a process of quieting and hearing the words come through. I need to consistently create the time and space to be in that flow.
How did you first engage with poetry?
My father, Lee Bartlett, is a critic, poet and professor. I grew up with people my father knew, such as Galway Kinnell. and Michael McClure. William Everson was my father's mentor. The first poet I loved, like many people was Allen Ginsberg. The second poet I loved, strangely, was Jorie Graham.
How important is music to your poetry?
Where do I begin? I currently work for a music label and have been helping with music in one way or another (blogging, curating, interviewing, marketing) for about ten years.
If I'm writing, I'm listening to music. If I'm not writing, I'm listening to music. Music has always been there. Before poetry and certainly after. Music is a large part of my life, arguably larger than my writing, and I don't know where I'd be without it. It calms me, it inspires me, it gives me energy, it makes me feel like I can take on the world. Rather than cover the expansiveness of my love for music, I'll break it down into two categories.
Some favorite artists to listen to while writing poetry:
Jon Hopkins, Ludovico Einaudi, Toumani Diabete, Olafur Arnalds, Molly Drake, Black Taffy, Blockhead, Duendita, Al Bowlly, El Michels Affair.
Some favorite poetic artists (whether that be the lyrics or the world-building)
CocoRosie, R.A.P. Ferreira, King Creosote, billy woods, John Frusciante, Cake, Blind Pilot, Boldy James, Zelooperz, Pink Siifu, Celeste.
What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
Andrea Cohen’s minimal and elegant poetry demonstrates how few words are required to communicate effectively, Valzhyna Mort uncovers unexpected layers of resonance in the state of mind of a character performing a mundane task, Yusuf Saadi invents words and phrases when traditional language fails him.
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
Poetry in its experimental and contemporary freedom – also, on the level of context and genre, with its embrace of hybrid forms – allows us to draw nearest to the present as it is happening, to the actuality of the imagined, and to the flow of thought, of mind, brainstorm; it allows us to approximate each of these phenomena (presence, imagination, thinking) through words. Indeed, even the ancient and traditional forms, through their constraints, provoke a freedom that defines the edges of what arises in the world and in the mind.
Poetry, as it is the literary art working closest with language and syllables and letters themselves (the latter at least since Dada and, later, the Lettrists), has the capacity to break language off from the rest of existence as its own plane or, alternately, to fuse itself with thought and knowing – consciousness itself coming to words and resonance. This is when the poet aligns with the plasticity of the medium: language itself as a self-proliferating, fractal, unfolding, which has the capacity to form and be formed, informed, as or in accordance with thought-as-it arises and, ultimately, reality.
What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
I’d say James Tate and Alberto Ríos. With Tate, I had never read surreal prose poetry. His unique, understated approach to prose poetry spoke to me right away. I was fascinated by his dry sense of humor, sense of alienation, and accessibility. Less was more with Tate. I immediately felt inspired to write some of my own. Mine were shorter pieces, about half a page long (his were about an entire page long), and mine also often had Mexican American imagery. Still, he lit a fire in me that continues to this day.
With Alberto Ríos there was less of an influence in terms of the initial writing process. I read Ríos later in life. However, when I saw that he was writing in couplets and in an understated way about his upbringing as a Mexican American, I felt it made me feel similarly validated in writing couplets with a similar backdrop. I was already writing a similar style as Ríos, however, the fact that his style was so celebrated gave me the stamp of approval that I was on the right track. When someone said I reminded them of Ríos early on, I thought it was just an easy comparison because we are both Mexican American. Later, as I read him more, I started to see what a high compliment it was because I’m trying to do a lot of similar things on the page. If I had to describe my writing style or aspirations to someone, I’d say a mixture of Tate and Ríos would be ideal.
What other poetry books have you been reading lately?
I very recently read (and then reviewed) Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s new book, Aerial Concave without Cloud, which (spoiler alert) is terrific. I’ve also been re-reading a lot of Lisa Robertson, and am looking forward to reading Boat, her new book, which just arrived through the mail.
Why is poetry important?
Poetry invites the writer and reader to determine the expansiveness, the constraints, the air, the textures of a language. Poetry takes none of that for granted. Poetry breaks what could be seen as cemented, permanent, resolute, immobile in language and so points to that possibility throughout language and also throughout our social, political, personal lives and the broader landscape we live within.
What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
To name just two of many—reading Raul Zurita’s Song for His Disappeared Love (translated by Daniel Borzutsky) was for me like remembering poetry’s original task. Then there is Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette—intensely archetypal, moving through naming/healing not as a given but as an experiment.
Photo credit: Anthony Mark Photography
What are you working on?
For quite a while I’ve been working on a series of poems based on letters and diaries written by my grandmother and great-grandmother, and I hope to actually have a manuscript to show for it some day. This year, with prompting from Ariel Gordon’s workshop series, I’ve also been paying particularly close attention to the slow process of winter moving into spring—the snow diminishing, the changing light, the returning birds—and have been writing about that.
What are you working on?
As always, I have a number of projects on the go, both poetical and not. I recently finished a new draft of my novel, Lake Burntshore, which should be on submission soon. The novel is about Jewish summer camp, settler colonialism, love and hatred, making a better world—you know, my usual things. My rewriting mantra while I was finishing the new draft: More Jewish. More Strange. For the first time in a number of years, I have a new batch of poems in the process of coming into the world. I think it has something to do with Shifting Baseline Syndrome finally being published, it cleared the poetry decks for the slop and entrails of making new work. The new poems seem to be concentrated around a number of different nodes: language; settler colonialism; the CIA; grasses, trees, carpets; soft planets; the golden age of malls. You know, the eternal subjects of poetry. I feel like these new poems are the apotheosis of something, whether the particular style and voice I’ve been digging into for more than a decade, my obsession with the possibilities of the prose poem, my growing sense of fear and loathing, what my friends call Kreuternoia. Perhaps these first three books will end up constituting a loose trilogy. Or, perhaps not.
What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
Finding time and mental space to let my mind play is my current challenge. Also, wrangling the form can be daunting, knowing whether the path I’ve taken is the right fit for the ideas I’m trying to convey.
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
Poetry can seep through our defenses. When I write I’m not concerned about how it will come out or if it “makes sense” so I can allow whatever needs to come through to come to the surface. When folks read poetry, they aren’t entering a debate. It doesn’t explain or tell any opinions, it’s something else entirely. So the reader can rest their defenses and just let it in whatever the poet is presenting. When defenses are lowered, new ideas are readily shared and real shifts can happen.
What are you working on?
I actually have not written a poem in about four years. Somehow my experience with the lock down due to Covid in Brooklyn had a huge effect on me. I have learnt that I am a highly social being and this had a huge effect on my mental health. I have been telling people that I have to feel safe to write a poem, and I haven't felt safe in awhile, but I am also beginning to feel like my language, the language of poetry, has been taken from me.
When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
There is a poem by John Maradik called “They Found the Python” that bewilders and flabbergasts and impresses me every single time. It's my favorite poem and I'm going to read it out loud right now and it's one you should read out loud every time you get a chance. It makes me teary-eyed sometimes and always it makes me smile. The ending! John Maradik is my favorite living poet without a debut collection.
It's also the title poem for Maradik's mini-mini chapbook (three poems): http://www.factoryhollowpress.com/scram-press-books/they-found-the-python-john-maradik
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
Poetry compresses the time, thought and emotion of a lived experience so that it is able to resonate beyond its spatial and temporal frame. Poetry, thus, allows its reader to relive and recreate the heightened state of mental and emotional arousal in a distant future.
What are you working on?
My focus into Fall 2022 is to complete the manuscript of The Killing Joke, a poetic hybrid that frolics in poetic forms, philosophy, and cultural criticism. The book is forthcoming from The Mute Canary.
The Killing Joke traces the history and concept of the "Killing Joke" upon three pop cultural nodes: Killing Joke, the band; the Batman/Joker comic by Alan Moore; and the first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus with its lethal joke sketch – “no one can hear it and live.” In so doing, the ancient archetype of the Trickster - in the guise of Jester or Evil Clown – emerges. Laughter isn’t so much an antidote to our increasingly unanchored, deranged, chaotic times as it is a looming, cackling, echoing, funhouse mirror, non sequitur non-answer.
Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
When I first started writing poetry in my 20’s, I tended to write about politics and trying to change the world. As I got older and the world continued to burn, I started to write more odes or homage pieces to the people in my life, like my parents, that I wanted to thank or everyday experiences about growing up first-gen Mexican American as opposed to broader political rants with agendas. Also, as I finished graduate school, I started writing prose poems both surrealist and absurdist. Many of these prose poems were written in the third person which was new to me having only written in first person before that (other than fiction). The third person allowed me to be less personal, to write more in persona or as a mask or sorts, avoiding the confessional of my personal life.
What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
Many have, but I remember in particular having a revelation after reading a lot of Wallace Stevens for the first time. It’s hard to read a lot of Stevens and not come away feeling that a lot of the time he really is just playing—I think I said something to myself along the lines of “He’s just making things up!” And that was incredibly liberating, the idea that you could just make things up, just play. This seems obvious now, but it wasn’t obvious to me when I was 20. I had this very unhelpful idea, which I think I got from misreading Eliot, that to write a really good poem you had to know beforehand what the shape of it was, and what you were aiming at—when you wrote something down, you had to already have a sense of how it fit into an architecture that you had already pre-drafted in your head. I could almost never do this (obviously), so I rarely wrote, and when I did, I found it very stressful, because in order to get anything done I had to (of course) just make things up, which felt like “cheating”—how could the poem “mean” anything, if I wasn’t sure what I was doing when I wrote the words? If anything, I’ve since moved closer to the opposite extreme; if you ask me what one of my poems “mean,” I’ll certainly have things to say, but I’ll come to those conclusions just like anyone else would—by reading the poem and thinking about it. I don’t think much at all (at least not consciously) about what my poems mean as I’m writing them, and certainly not before. Which doesn’t, I hope, prevent them from meaning a great deal (or having the capacity to generate meanings, which amounts to the same thing).
When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
Dionne Brand’s Inventory or The Blue Clerk.
What are you working on?
I usually find myself working on many projects at once. Soonish, I would like to turn my attention to putting together my next manuscript. I have been writing away since the manuscript of Bright Parallel went out, albeit without concerning myself with the shape of how these poems flow together. Assembling a book can be a transfiguring project, and I’m looking forward to seeing what will show up through its frame.
How does a poem begin?
For me, each poem begins differently. A poem could come as a single image or idea that I then carry around for weeks, months, years, before giving it shape. Often enough a poem comes as a title. Images, lines, jokes, insights, questions, conundrums, phrases, rages large and small accrue and accrue until gravity kicks in. Poems come in ones, twos, threes, twenties. Take a poem like “Cousinage,” from Shifting Baseline Syndrome, for example. I had been joking that my partner Steph and I were eighteenth cousins for years, but it wasn’t until I came across the word “cousinage” in a French dictionary that the poem took form and combusted; after that, it more or less spooled out of me. This is opposed to poems such as “Eighteen Ways of Looking at Magneto Destroying Auschwitz in X-Men: Apocalypse,” “Hydrophobia,” or “Off-Screen,” which I had to work on for many months.
How important is music to your poetry?
It’s a critical part of my process. I’m a passionate lover of music, all kinds. Rhythm features prominently in my poems; I love to make words bounce. To me, poetry and music come from the same place, a primal source; they’re connected. Listening to music while I write fuels me, and it can jump-start stalled creativity, which is cool (and very helpful).
How do you know when a poem is finished?
I often get chills when a poem ends. When editing, there’s a feeling I get in my chest like a switch flipped, and a deeper knowing that it’s right.
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
Poetry requires a lot from its readers. For example, for me, at its best, poetry doesn’t provide answers; it asks questions. The reader must mine the poem for meaning and the meaning resides in the reader. Other forms might provide facts or build out fantastic worlds, but I think poetry questions the facts and asks readers to build their own worlds out of the atoms in a poem. That’s hard work, but that’s also why poetry can start revolutions.
What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
To make this list would be a massive undertaking. If a writer is on their A game - if a book is really captivating me - then the lines and paragraphs are steadily changing the way I think about writing. This happens to me every week. Every week I learn a new way to approach a poem or a new technique or a new trick just by reading more than I write. That being said, the one's who made me throw my hands in the air, burn my manuscript, and realize anything was possible on the page?
Eric Baus. He has a poetry collection called The Tranquilized Tongue where every line starts with 'The'.
C. Dylan Bassett. He has a book of one-act plays called The Invention of Monsters where each piece is titled [scene] yet it'd be nearly impossible to adapt a single one of them onto the stage.
Joanna Ruocco. Some may say she only writes prose but oh no, she is a poet. Her lines. Her lines. Every damn line.
CAConrad. Have you read CAConrad? My god.
Fiston Mwanza Mujila. Perhaps the most musical poet I've encountered, where jazz bleeds on the page. Psychedelia and surrealism frequent the page and jazz, jazz, jazz runs rampant. His poetry collection The River in the Belly is the wildest poetry collection you haven't read, and his novella Tram 83 is still rattling in my brain. The late night jazz, the grass, the mines. He has another novel out called The Villain's Dance (2020), I'm just waiting (impatiently) on the English translation to be released.
Zachary Schomburg and Mathias Svalina. I'm going to clump these two together like I would James Tate and Charles Simic, not only because I started reading them at the same time but because it was my first time finding story inside of poetry. A paragraph with captured tale. A prose poem tiptoeing in dreamland. Richard Brautigan introduced this sideways world to me, but Schomburg and Svalina crystallized it, pumped it full of more heart and more darkness and more sorrow and more loneliness and more joy and more beauty. I consider these two my poetry father and mother. You can decide which is which.
How important is music to your poetry?
I can't write even a grocery list while listening to recorded music. Music is too compelling to my ear and distracts me. But while I write, I listen in my head for rhythm, phrasing, emphasis, and sound. When reading poetry, I hear it in my head, and feel cheated if I don't hear music. To me it is a necessary ingredient.
How does your work first enter the world?
I have developed a form of bi-phasic sleep, where no matter what time I go to sleep at night, I am awake after midnight for a few hours during which I read poetry that inspires me. The reverberations that this activity sets off puts me in a certain frame of mind that is conducive to creative writing, a kind of sympathetic resonance from which new ideas materialize, and old ones emerge set in new patterns. Once I have set down the newly emerging pattern of words, I am able to return to sleep; over the subsequent nights and days I am able to polish the evolving work.
How does a poem begin?
It seeds itself. It blossoms or it sings its voice as a whisper or loudly.
It may be a single thought or a stream.
For me it is all of these things, a frequency and I ride it obediently where it asks to fly, swim or dive.
I am an assigned steward and work hard to pull the weeds to retain only the story.
Basically, I hear my poems or sense them. That is how most begin. I can and sometimes do write from a prompt in a workshop. I have a literary skillset I work hard to study and learn over decades so some of that is a strong foundation and allows this intuitive freedom in the beginning. As with all crafts, skill, editing, knowledge, form are foundational necessities.
How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers’ group that you work ideas and poems with?
My first and only reader is my wife Cheryl, a visual artist who, as a teenager, attended readings by Robert Creeley. He was famously generous towards other poets, but she is tough, so I have to pay attention and carry scissors, for excisions.
How do you know when a poem is finished?
When the poem flows as well as it can. When the poem jumps off the page and demands to be read in one sitting. After this reading in one sitting, if there are no hiccups or errors, one knows it is finished and ready to submit. I feel that figuring out when a poem is complete is like when you’re making oatmeal in the morning without instructions. It’s not your first rodeo. You know what it takes to get it just right. Before a poem is ready, you tinker with it. You add spices or specificity (of imagery, for example) to the initial writing. You make sure the punctuation accentuates the pace and tone. You add a little of this; take out a little of that: until it's just right. Sometimes poems require very little editing. Others require a more hands-on approach,
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
I’m not sure it can accomplish anything that other forms can’t, but it certainly accomplishes some things more readily. One is density of meaning. Other forms can achieve it, but it’s hard to compete with poetry in terms of the ratio between the meaning conveyed and the number of words employed. Of course, that’s partly why poetry tends to be “hard”—it’s “hard” because it’s dense; it’s overloaded with meaning, relatively speaking. And insofar as this level of density can be achieved in other forms, it tends not to be sustained (since it’s hard to write, and takes effort to read). And we tend to describe the result, appropriately enough, as “poetic.”
The other thing that I look to poetry for, which may or may not be related to what I’ve written above about density, is its relative freedom from the injunction that writing should “make sense.” Wittgenstein once wrote that “a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.” This of course applies to all genres of literature, to varying degrees. But poetry seems to me the most liberated from the information-provision game (which isn’t to say that a poem can’t convey information, if that’s what the poet wants it to do). There are many ways to mean without at the same time making much in the way of denotative sense, and in fact, jettisoning some amount of denotative sense might be a prerequisite to our being able to clearly perceive these other kinds of meaning. I think these kinds of investigations are important, and I think poetry is the genre in which one can explore these outer dimensions of meaning most freely.
What other poetry books have you been reading lately?
A chance to lift up and appreciate poetry books that I’ve been reading is too good to pass up – so I interpreted “lately” expansively. I’ve been reading, and often returning to re-read, these books over the past year or so.
Jordan Abel’s Un/inhabited
Yassin Alsalaman’s Text Messages
Daniel Borzutzky’s Lake Michigan
Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (not always categorized as poetry, but vastly poetic)
Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony
Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters
Renee Gladman’s Event Factory
Liz Howard’s Letters from a Bruised Cosmos
Kim Hyesoon’s Autobiography of Death
Doyali Islam’s heft
Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas
Sachiko Murakami’s Get Me Out of Here
Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead
Raquel Salas Rivera’s while they sleep (under the bed is another country)
Solmaz Sharif’s Look
Rita Wong’s forage
C.D. Wright’s Rising, Falling, Hovering
Raúl Zurita’s Song for his Disappeared Love
I also recently read Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police and, while not necessarily a poetry book, it has expanded my understanding of poetry.
