1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I published a chapbook in 2005, and then my first full-length collection—Only the Senses Sleep—in 2006. At the time, I had mostly been hired into my academic job because of my work as an editor, but I was also teaching creative writing—so in the most basic way those first publications helped to justify my job. They also allowed me to start giving readings and meeting other poets and—as Margaret Atwood says—they cleared my desk so I could get to other things.
After my second book, my conception of audience shifted somewhat. In my first two books I think I was mostly imagining an audience of my contemporaries. But in my third book I started to envision, too, a future audience—an audience to whom I would need to explain things about the experience of living in our contemporary moment. That’s when my poems began to consider history and historical context more overtly. I had, in fact, been a history major in college, but it was only in my third book, The City, Our City, that I figured out how to allow my interest in history to enter my creative work.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I wrote not-very-good poems in high school on fairly typical high school themes. My family life at the time was complicated. I was raised as an only child in Cincinnati, Ohio, by a single mother who nearly died when I was 16; she spent much of the rest of my high school years recovering. My father, then, lived in Alaska with his fourth wife who was only eight years older than me. I had an active teenage social life, but beneath the surface was a lot of loneliness and uncertainty. Writing poems helped. And I had a terrific high school English teacher—Cindy Briggs—who offered encouragement by giving me contemporary poems to read.
When I went to college, I knew that I wanted to study, among other things, poetry, though I wasn’t sure in what capacity or to what end. I was lucky to have excellent professors—Stuart Friebert, David Walker, David Young, and Martha Collins—who not only helped me learn to read and write poems, but who also consistently put American poetry in a larger, international context.
After college I worked as a paralegal in the New York City prosecutor’s office. Despite a steady work schedule and plenty of distractions, I was writing poems more than ever. That’s when I knew I was truly serious about poetry, so I applied to graduate school in Houston, Texas—where I moved the next year to study with Mark Doty, Adam Zagajewski, and Edward Hirsch.
Along the way I sometimes tried to write a bit of fiction. But that basic skill that good fiction writers have of manipulating time—compressing two weeks into a sentence and expanding two minutes into four pages—there’s nothing natural or intuitive about that for me. Which is to say: I learned quickly that I’m a bad fiction writer. I do occasionally write essays, though.
3 - 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?
I take regular notes in pocket-sized notebooks. Sometimes, when I can see a quick, clear direction, a poem emerges right away. But, generally, I let the notes collect, and when I’ve finished filling my notebook I type everything into a Word doc. As I’m typing I start grouping images and ideas that seem to be thematically connected. I generally get maybe 2–4 poems out of each notebook.
I can often see the arc of a poem before I can see its details or connective tissue. And a lot of my writing process involves figuring out how—or why—my mind leapt from one place to another. I’m also an obsessive tinkerer; it usually takes me a while to arrive at a draft I think might be finished. When I have one, I almost always share it with the poet Kevin Prufer, with whom I’ve been swapping poems for more than 15 years now, and who invariably gives me good advice on what’s working and what’s not.
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?
My poems usually begin in images, or in bits of language that cohere a bit mysteriously, or else in an associative leap that doesn’t entirely make sense (i.e., that I need to make sense of).
When I have maybe 30 pages of new, finished poems—most of which have generally appeared in magazines by then—I print them all out to see what sorts of thematic connections they might hold between them. It’s at that point I start “writing into” a future book, trying to add poems that draw connections and fill in gaps, with the goal of making a book that’s (hopefully!) larger than its parts.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I like giving readings. I care about how my poems sound, and performing them is, for me, pleasurable (if also anxiety inducing). But I wouldn’t say that public readings are really part of my creative process.
I do, however, record myself reading my poems so I can play them back hours or days later and really hear them. I tend to do that when I think the poems are done, and it’s often through listening to those recordings that I learn that they’re not.
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?
All poetic practice has theoretical and philosophical underpinnings, whether poets consciously think about them or just receive them through the aesthetics of their models and mentors. I haven’t read theory in an engaged way in a little while, but I definitely am interested in theoretical questions.
I think the most important theorist/philosopher for me is the Cold War rhetorician Kenneth Burke, whose emphasis on paradox I find essential. For Burke, oppositions often mirror or collapse into each other, and each positive or ethical aspect of human activity has a dark equivalent rooted in the same core human impulse. (For example, in Burke’s formulation, the same hierarchizing impulse that gives us great art also gave us the Holocaust.)
So then how do we proceed? With suspicion of absolutes, with rhetorical courtship, and with careful attention to the paradoxes that pin us inside the world. And poetry, because it’s an artistic medium that so often attends to paradox, can be a powerful ethical tool—not because it offers clear answers or solutions, but because it helps individuals get better at navigating our fundamental unresolvability.
Anyway, there are other theorists who have helped me with more nuts-and-bolts formal questions about poetry, but Burke has been helping me think about the world around me since I was in my mid 20s.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
21st century literature is so fragmented and multi-niched that it’s very difficult for any one writer to speak to a really large audience. But there are certainly writers who are able to gather multiple smaller audiences into a large enough group that that those writers start to do public intellectual work, however limitedly.
But other writers connect very deeply with only a very small number of readers. That’s also valuable. Some of the writers who have most deeply affected me are read by only a few people.
At the end of the day, I think the core role of the writer is simply to communicate complex and compelling ideas to another person across the medium of the page.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I generally have a people-pleaser personality, and, if I didn’t know that about myself, working with an editor might be hard. But particularly as I’ve gotten older I’ve been able to watch myself try to accommodate edits that aren’t right for me and quickly correct for that. And I’m someone for whom it takes a very long time for my work to come fully into focus—so, for me, a good editor can improve my work significantly, and can help me to see more clearly what I’m doing.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I’ve heard a lot of good advice over the years. But maybe the most useful advice for me both as a poet and as an editor came from Salman Rushdie when he talked about the idea that jealousy is an excellent tool for identifying what you consider to be excellence. When I’m reading something and I find myself working hard to figure out how not to like it—and then I realize that I’m doing that because I’m envious of what the write has accomplished—that’s when I really need to pay attention.
I also generally love William Stafford’s idea that a poet is someone who has arrived at a process that allows her to say things she couldn’t have said without that process. That emphasis on process over intent—and on the idea that we generally say more in our poems than we say in our regular lives—is very helpful to me.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?
I love translating. I’m certainly not the first to say it, but translating is the closest form of reading, and the puzzle of making a piece of writing work in English is incredibly fun for me. And I really love Moikom Zeqo’s strange, wild, utterly not-American work, so spending time inside his mind and language is also really fun. (Zeqo is the Albanian writer I’ve been co-translating on and off since I was an undergraduate.)
With translation, someone else gives me a bunch of good, complete ideas, and all I have to do is get the execution right—which is way cleaner and more satisfying than mucking around in my own messy ideas (which at any one moment might not be very good).
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I had a regular writing routine in grad school: get up, make coffee, walk to the convenience store to buy cigarettes, write from 9-12. When I got a teaching job and moved to Missouri, I continued to write in those mornings I wasn’t teaching (though I cut way back on the cigarettes).
But now I have two kids, and any sort of regularity to my writing routine has disappeared. Mostly I write at night, after the rest of the family is asleep. But that might change again once both my kids are in school full time (which was supposed to happen this year, but then Covid hit) and I start to have a couple mornings a week with the house to myself again . . .
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When my writing is stalled, I go back to some of the poetry books I loved when I was first learning to write. Hearing the voices of those poets who first got me interested in poetry taps into something elemental and usually helps get me back on track.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I grew up in Cincinnati, but I haven’t lived there consistently since I was 18.
Since leaving, I’ve learned to make from scratch Cincinnati chili (an unusual chili spiced with allspice, cloves, and cinnamon and served over spaghetti, invented by Greek immigrants to Cincinnati in the early 20th century), and my kids love it. It requires about four hours of simmering, and those evenings our house is filled with that smell connects me to Cincinnati and my childhood.
14 - 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?
My poems often center on images, and visual art is really important to my work. I love to go to art museums and galleries to browse. Every couple years I encounter someone who blows me away in a really personal, visceral way, and when I do I visit his/her work as often as I can.
Four years ago, a small show at the Denver Art Museum by Canadian photographer Danny Singer really struck me, and I’m lucky to have a piece by him on the cover of We the Jury. The other artist I’ve encountered in Denver that I can’t let go of is Native American pop art painter Fritz Scholder.
When I was in grad school I fell in love with Bill Viola’s work, and I ended up reading his collected writings. I also remember seeing an extraordinary installation by Mineko Grimmer at the Menil Collection titled Remembering Plato; I was struck by how simultaneously simple and complex the piece was, and it haunted me for some time. And since I first discovered their work, I’ve loved the photographers Jeff Wall and Abelardo Morell. There are many other artists I’m interested in, but those are a few who have really stuck with me.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
In the fall I finished reading Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet novels, and I think she might be writing about the sociopolitical complexities of our contemporary moment better than anyone. I also recently loved Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and I’m excited about Yuri Herrera’s super-compressed mini-novels (trans. Lisa Dillman).
I’m always reading poetry, so I’m a little wary of singling out any one poet and then neglecting others I admire. Right now I’m revisiting Reginald Shepherd’s poetry collections, which are so extraordinary—as is his nonfiction book, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry. And since I’m happy to cheerlead for an Albanian poet, I’ll say that I really loved Luljeta Lleshanaku’s recent collection Negative Space, translated by Ani Gjika.
Some 20th and 21st century poets who were important to me early on include Rilke, Antonio Machado, Stevens, Milosz, Szymborska, Tamura Ryuichi, Elizabeth Bishop, James Wright, Charles Simic, William Matthews, Larry Levis, Marianne Boruch, and Franz Wright.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like to live by the ocean for an extended period of time.
17 - 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 would be a lawyer. But one who doesn’t make much money.
I really love the law and find it utterly fascinating. One of the lawyers I worked for in the DAs office once told me that really loving the law means you’re unlikely to make any money at it.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
My dad was an English Professor, and, though I grew up mostly with my mom, books were always part of my world. As Saul Bellow says, writers are “readers moved to emulation.”
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just finished Edward P. Jones’ 2003 novel The Known World, which is about slavery—and, in part, Black slaveowners—in Virginia. It might be THE contemporary book about the core complexities of US history and culture—I was absolutely blown away by it, and I’m a little shocked it isn’t talked about regularly as the next “Great American Novel.”
I really enjoyed The Dig a couple weeks ago. But I haven’t been watching many films lately. Kids + Covid isolation has propelled me mostly toward sitcoms and murder mysteries. My wife and I have been re-watching Arrested Development and the British late 90s show Spaced. And we’re both addicted to Vera and Shetland.
20 - What are you currently working on?
Right now I’m on sabbatical and trying to write new poems. I’m not sure what direction they’re going in yet, though I seem to be thinking a lot about children and violence (though not, generally, in the same poem).
I’m also taking notes for a couple of essays.
And I’m co-translating short stories by Moikom Zeqo from his book Sellers of Chaos.
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