1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I’m not sure it did. I imagined it for so long that when it happened it seemed an inevitable extension of who I’ve always been. A second book has not been imagined as much, so when that happens…
2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
My first poem was typed into the glowing blue screen of MS-DOS when I was five or six, and since then I've never stopped. The poem went:
There’s an alligator3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
in the refrigerator
he isn’t very nice
he’s eating all the ice
I've never kept a notebook but I do keep drafts. Etymologies emerged, like all of my writing, from play. I had stacked three words on top of each other merely because I found it visually appealing and therefore a poem:
ahuakatlSeveral years later I was looking through old drafts and realized these three words were telling a story. The story was not being told through the meanings of the words, which all mean avocado, but through how Nahuatl, Spanish, and English relate to each other, a relation that is always changing and that comes from outside of language.
aguacate
avocado
I knew this would be the opening poem. From there I had a conceptual framework and tried to write two or three poems a month. After two years the book was complete.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
One friend said I write in “systems” and another that my poems are “engineered.” What I think is meant by this is that my poems are very short but usually part of a larger conceptual apparatus. I take an idea and then think it through, all the way until my thought pokes out the other end.
This approach is especially true of Etymologies. For a book so influenced by linguistics, I wanted a quasi-structuralist feel in which the poems, some as short as two words, become meaningful through their relation to the poems around them, which may or may not add up to “a moiré pattern with associations emerging” as John Yau wrote in his illuminating introduction to my book. Language creates sense also in this way but ironically etymology does not.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
After my book came out, I had to remind myself why I write poetry and why I publish, because there is a lot of expectation to do readings, sit on a panel, lead a workshop, be social. Those are fine; sometimes I enjoy them. But they come a distant second to creation itself.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Many of the poems in Etymologies are ideas from philosophy of language. Naturally many of them are about origin. And some are about words that live on long after the mouth that shaped them has gone silent.
My background is in linguistics and for several years I worked for the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research under the late Robert Rieber, an expert on Vygotsky. One question psycholinguistics asks is how exactly we process language. There are no clear answers, which makes it great for poetry.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
It’s for non-writers to decide. Ask a poet and he will place himself on the highest pedestal.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
My best editor is the person my book is dedicated to. He is also my best reader. He is many other things to me but that will take another book to express.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Rien n’est joué; nous pouvons tout reprendre.”
10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
No routine and usually no writing!
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I let the problem bore a hole in my brain until what are sometimes called “creative juices” splash out.
12 - What was your most recent Hallowe'en costume?
The last time I dressed up was in 2019. I went as a gay Hezbollah member.
13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
As I mentioned in another interview, the soundtrack to Donkey Kong Country 2 for its lush minimalism. Similarly, Another Green World.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Anything the Library of Arabic Literature publishes. What a mesmerizing, offensive, befuddling, mischievous, stereotype-smashing selection of texts! Included among these is Ahmed Faris al-Shidyaq’s As-saq ‘ala l-saq (usually translated as Leg over Leg), a sexually explicit dictionary-travelog that was important in writing Etymologies.
The Peterson Field Guide to Mushrooms for its precise color descriptions (“grayish brown to yellowish brown, sometimes flushed with olive in age”); The New Yorker’s insistence on diereses, which make bland words look like jungle insects (“coördinate”); the Wikipedia page on nuclear semiotics, which reads like the script to a Tarkovsky film; and the cute grocer boy who misspelled many words on the menu at the local deli, inspiring this.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
To leave my apartment one day and walk. Then to keep walking, city to city, town to town, land to land, on “man’s unending pilgrimage towards himself.”
16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I hope to never consider poetry as an occupation. In another world, I'm an architect.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Because all it takes to write is imagination. It is the cheapest way to bring yourself into the world.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
This year I resolved to read more science fiction—a big gap in my literary knowledge. Stanislaw Lem seemed to have a nice prose style no matter his translator, so I bought a few of his books—His Master’s Voice, The Cyberiad, and Imaginary Magnitude—and finished all three in a week. It had been years since I was so enraptured by anything.
I don’t watch many movies. I’ve not for instance seen Solaris.
19 - What are you currently working on?
Many books, mostly in my mind. I will write them down when they are ready.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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