1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Well, on a purely pragmatic level, the publication of my first book (a critical book on Ezra Pound published by Harvard University Press) got me tenure. I remember shouting for joy somewhere in a parking garage when I got the news that the book had been accepted. As for the question how my work at various stages compares (I’m speaking only about my poetry now), I’d say I couldn’t to speak to the quality of it over the years—that’s about readership, and authors are readers of their own work only in very odd ways, some reliable, some not. I do have my favorites, though, among my books. Some people say they can see, despite the range of approaches and forms, a continuity from the earliest to the latest. But I see changes as well—increasingly fewer words and forms which are at once constraining and magnetizing.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to poetry because I wound up attending a poetry reading in high school, half stoned, by a guy named Morton Marcus (who died recently—and taught for years at Cabrillo College in California). I’d never heard anything like it, I felt like I was dreaming with my eyes open, sitting there in class. At the same time, I was a young actor and went off the following year to Juilliard (the Drama Division) in New York, where I continued to read and write some poetry on the side. Come to think of it, my involvement in theater as a kid certainly must have tuned my ear to poetry as a crucial filament in the imagined space of the theater. I don’t think most people realize that actors (and preachers)--after poets--are the most sensitive and engaged readers of poetry in our society (often more so than other writers), since their training and art requires them to literally embody poetry in the roles they play (at least in productions of texts written prior to the 20th century). And their insights differ significantly from the kinds cultivated by poets. Though I haven’t been involved in theater in any capacity for decades, it has dawned on me from time to time that certain conditions of theater remain deeply embedded in my writing.
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?
My poetry projects take shape pretty slowly, especially the one I’m fiddling with now, which has taken a long time to come into focus conceptually (and this project, more than any prior to it, has a strong conceptual aspect). I do lots of reading, listening, absorbing a gallery of voices—some poetry, some prose or fiction—which supplies the tonal palette for the book to be written. This gleaning period can last a year or more, but the writing, once I’m ready to go, can proceed rather quickly—though it can get hung up at times along the way. And to get into the space that each project requires, it’s crucial that I retreat—a luxury since my kids are grown now—into short periods of absolute privacy (a few days at a time) to settle into my brain and keep my bearings. There’s also lots of revision down the road, right up until the moment of publication.
4 - Where does a poem or work of prose 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?
A new project starts for me with mood, a particular climate of personal and impersonal feelings; and that stage very quickly passes into reading and gathering a constellation of texts, each providing a note, a coloring, a distinct tonality, to be sampled into the whole. My collections of poetry are usually book-length projects, whether broken into poems (sometimes untitled or sharing the same title), or in my latest volume, Cry Baby Mystic, a book-length poem (composed in tiny stanzas).
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Yes, I love to read my poems aloud, though public readings can also sometimes be lonely or quietly turbulent in ways that linger sorely in the memory. What I love best is being inspired and energized by someone reading aloud before I stand up to read, which carries me forward like a wave. But sometimes I don’t quite know how to receive compliments after a reading. They make me worry about whether a poem could stand on its own for the solitary reader!
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?
There are indeed theoretical concerns that put pressure on the poetry I write, but I try to be cautious about drawing direct correspondences between what’s going on in my lives as a poet and a scholar. Also, there’s a lot of my critical writing out there (including the entry on “Lyric Poetry” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Literature), and some readers will search around to draw their own conclusions. Nevertheless, because I developed a reputation as a theorist and scholar before I began publishing books of poetry, critics often felt compelled (in reviews of my early collections) to test out correspondences that they perceived between theory and practice in the volume they were reviewing. In reviews of later collections, however, those references to my scholarship have become sparser (which I’m glad to see), allowing the poems to wriggle free, without caption or credit.
At the same time, there are resonances between my poetry and my theoretical work, which I wouldn’t want to suppress. And I feel grateful whenever someone feels inclined to sound out those correspondences, with some degree of suspicion. People (readers) have noticed resonances between my thinking about vernacular languages, colliding levels of diction—one could even say translingualism—and the profusion of voices in my poetry. In several of my books, for example, I’ve fooled around with collages, or alloys, of archaism and other kinds of patois, starting with The Dandelion Clock in 2010 (Tinfish)—which anticipated Bergvall’s and Brolaski’s experiments with Middle English a bit later—and other more recent poems by Jos Charles and Pattie McCarthy.
Generally, I’d say there’s an abiding concern in all my work with models of expression in poetry, shared language, and community. On the other hand, the current project I’m working on (with BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP), Logophobe, could be described as hovering around the problem of inexpression, of incompetence, and linguistic vulnerability: facing (and cultivating) the stupidity of one’s own language—in part by sounding the stupidity of the idols—and inhabiting feelings of fear and dread about language.
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?
While I don’t seem to have strong views about the writer’s role in society, I do think there are crucial forces today bringing new kinds of writers (and communities of writers) to public prominence, and that “churn” is indispensable to the vitality of the art. One lesson to be taken from this disclosure of new riches from new sources is that one generation, or community, must be prepared to step aside—to drop back into the shadows—in order to support the continuing vigor of verbal arts. This is not a position about politics, per se, but it has powerful political implications. In addition, poets have historically had a special role (in comparison with other sorts of writers) in maintaining a reflexive and sometimes experimental orientation to language. Poets are often the custodians—and interrogators—of language at a granular, and even molecular, level.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
As a poet, one rarely works with an editor who makes substantive suggestions, or even line edits. I wonder what that would be like—and how it might be justified. At the same time, when I read books of poetry, a little thought bubble often pops into my head: “This collection could use a good editor!”
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Take your last book, throw it in the drawer, and forget about it.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
Because I wound up writing both poetry and scholarly, or theoretical, work, I agonized for many years about the corrupting influence of one modality on the other, fearing especially that my scholarly work would paralyze my process as a poet and put language to sleep. Actually, as I’ve gotten older and glimpsed a bird’s-eye view of my work (at moments), I think it may be the scholarly side of my work that has suffered most profoundly from my erratic commitments as a poet. My concerns and priorities as a poet have sometimes skewed the integrity of thinking and argumentation. At the same time, though I still must segregate the two activities--I can’t immerse myself in a poetry project while writing serious criticism—I feel much less fearful of the reciprocal harm one might bring to the other. It is what it is; it’s my history, I can’t help it. Poetry is resilient.
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’m not someone that writes every day—though I may be immersed on a regular basis in activities that a project requires: reading, research, wandering. I do like to hide away for days at a time when the work really gets going. My writing practice tends to follow a gradually intensifying arc: from distraction to speculation, to research and gathering, to increasing daily absorption in the writing process--which can occupy any period of the day or night--to revision (and more revision).
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