1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book was sort of a reckoning…of years of chronic alcoholism, homelessness, drifting, fear. Not that there wasn’t any love or light rising…I was able to look back with clear eyes and see the present breaking free of it. As I described it to a friend, it was my punch, after I had taken a good few. I wanted it to stand strong, and I think it did. Having Wait published by Guernica gave stolidity to the time capsule, and to the line I had crossed in righting my course. I’d published a chapbook with Luciano Iacobelli’s Lyricalmyrical press, but it was adolescent, this was my first real book, and it freed me, as I walked, of the tentacles I’d lopped off in creating it.
Cage of Light is a different animal. I didn’t work any less hard on it, but it didn’t come as smoothly. In Wait, I was looking back on a span of time from a position of privilege (having stopped drinking and flailing 3 years previous), and it emerged under the light of renewed consciousness. The new book, though it still contains poems about addiction and recovery, abuse and seeking, is ‘all about’ me now. Like surrounding me. And it’s more dispersed. If you know what parts of southern California are like, it rolls, it sprawls, has little nuclei all around, is less in a major key. Writing like that demands more of the reader. Asking more of the reader is not something I’m proud of, it just sort of turned out that way. It’s both more and less sober. Like a fog, if you walk around in it long enough, you’ll get wet, and I hope that is a pleasing if somewhat less crystalline experience.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
In fact, I didn’t come to poetry first, at least not officially. I was in a short-fiction writing class in S.E.E.D. high school, and wrote a few short stories during that time. I’d get high at home and write surrealist poems, but it wasn’t till I got into a creative writing class taught by a poet (again, Luciano Iacobelli) that I was steered toward reading and writing poetry. Once I made the shift, felt the freedom and potential, it was for good.
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?
The main body of any poem usually comes quickly, in one sitting, and sometimes appears looking close to its final shape, but usually undergoes copious edits. Getting the first draft on the screen is the first gate, and a kind of seal reopened by editing. Then it either floats and becomes more efficient and streamlined or falls away.
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?
I don’t really know where a poem usually begins, maybe an impression, a feeling, a word with something unknown behind it, something, as Eliot wrote, to be exorcised. I’m never really working on a book. I write poems. I then try to find siblings. Sometimes just appearing during the same time under the same concern is enough to group them together. This is a question of affinity and not laziness, I hope.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love doing public readings. The poem isn’t finally birthed until I’ve read it out loud to an audience. I’m with Mandelstam on that. That said, they live on after ectopic birth on the page.
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?
I think poetry as any art can address fundamental questions about being alive…what it is like, where it comes from and how it can change. So I think ‘where did it come from?’, ‘where is it going?’ and ‘what is it like along the way (and what can be done to REALIZE it)?’ are the perennial questions. I’m speaking of a relationship to others and the universe.
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?
If you look at history, it’s a bit of a death cult. Some writers and artists receive recognition in their lifetime, but others are shrouded in obscurity. I think especially now, when identity politics dominates what is curated by mainstream culture, much that is good will be seen as such only later, at least canonically. There’s that very neat phrasing about recognition…which I will butcher, but goes something along the lines of ‘first it is mocked, then it is murdered, then some time later it is considered self-evidently true. ‘ (I think that was about prophetic words and prophets, but it goes for art as well.) I think the role of the writer today is to remind us to be good by sedulous or apocryphal means, and that might be true for other times as well.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I think it’s essential. The editor needs to match the writer in dedication, even push them along.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
In Zen we go slowly.
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?
I don’t really have a writing routine, I bear the marks of the outdated romantic notion that it’s ‘just as the spirit takes you’. My days begin with Chinese herbs, Clif bars and an AA meeting, unless I’m on retreat, in which case only the Chinese herbs survive, and meditation takes the place of meeting.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When I don’t feel like writing I just don’t write. I do other things. It is all a continuum anyway.
It all comes home.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Rainwater on a rose. Reminds me of here, which is home. And the smell of a pillow that needs washing.
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?
All of the above influence my work. To some degree I practice ‘found art’ or collage, even though my poems are usually narrative, some of them consist of things found here and there bound together by my own zeitgeist.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Zen literature. Ikkyu, hence the epigraphs in my new book. Rinzai, Dogen, Hakuin, Bassui, Ta Hui, Lao Tzu. The Heart Sutra. Cold Mountain. The Diamond Sutra. Joko Beck. And in poetry, Rumi. Kahlil Gibran. T.S. Eliot. Eugenio Montale. Nanao Sakaki. Bukowski. Al Purdy.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Surf.
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?
A monk.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Besides writing and doing zazen, the only other thing I know how to do is wash dishes. Actually, I’m usually on the look-out for a good dishwashing job. It goes well with writing. I have a BA, and had things turned out differently with my state of mental health, I might have gone into teaching creative writing or language or Asian Studies. The monk thing still stands, and it is, unlike the other things listed, still probable.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book I read was Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish, though I couldn’t finish it because of the sexual violence. So for one that I finished, Convenience Store Woman, by Suyaka Murata. As for film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus or the 2010 film Alice in Wonderland starring Mia Wasikowska.
19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m editing a few long poems. They are about the reckoning of failed love. I want there to be more short pieces that are easily digestible to accompany these long poems, and I want to do the lion’s share of the work, so that the reader or listener just has to take it in without too much parsing. So maybe it’s not entirely true that I never have a book in mind. I guess I write and ride the waves until there’s some kind of consistency.
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