1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Whether it was Josh Filan publishing my chap Young American Poets (2000) or Simone Fattal publishing my full length GUSTONBOOK (2011) having somebody you don’t personally know find your work valuable enough to publish it is a humbling experience that also encourages you onward.
City Bird & other poems differs from my previous published books in so far it is not one entire long poem or poem-series, City Lights poetry editor Garrett Caples invited a manuscript of shorter poems grouped with the long poem ‘City Bird’. I gave him a much too long manuscript along with two other short manuscripts of poems from out notebooks I had typed up. He arranged what is City Bird and other poems.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I suspect it was simply shorter lines, fewer words was more appealing. Learning concision, however, was still required.
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’ve written out of pretty much any and every scenario. In the case of City Bird, it began as a tinkering with the idea of a novelette about a character named Hugh eating a sandwich. I wrote it out in ‘prose’ lines I then later went back over and put into the poetic ‘form’ they now appear in. This also involved some editing of words, etc.
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?
As I mentioned, all my previous published books are one long poem or poem-series and in these cases, as with the poem ‘City Bird’, I did indeed understand it was a whole piece being composed. Generally I would fill a notebook. Then type it up.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I have recently been enjoying doing readings and feel as if they’re getting pretty good. Last nite I read without any planning from a collaborative book Three Heads Gone written and published years ago that I hadn’t looked at in years. I just skipped about within the poems at near random yet it felt natural and sounded solid, I believe. I have also often been making little self-made chaps for each solo reading. In other words, reading different poems, usually fairly new ones, every time and arranging them in order with a cover and title, etc.
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 listen to the poem. It more or less writes itself. Generally, and hopefully, it is what I’d like to read. I believe writing and reading are more or less the same thing.
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?
‘The Writer’ is a different thing from ‘The Poet’. I think it is always important to be as aware of as much as possible at all times and always to be learning new things. The writer imposes order. The poet listens in.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Poetry can’t really be edited as such. With book reviews, of which I have written and published hundreds, I have found editors useful at times but probably not essential and I have definitely found them to be at times trying and quite possibly difficult. Editors of poetry magazines/journals are difficult when they reject work, which is the case for me with 99% of my poetry submissions.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
If asked, say yes.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I started writing book reviews many years ago because I found myself always writing in response to reading (still do) but I was having a horrible time publishing individual poems that I sent out (still do) and I wanted to get ‘out there’ and have some skin in ‘the ballgame’. I have at times pretty much merged the two. ‘Twenty-five for Lew Welch’ in City Bird, for instance, originally appeared online as a ‘review’ of the City Lights reissuing of Ring of Bone. I think that’s fun.
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 have no writing routine aside from poems usually going from being handwritten in a notebook to typed on the typewriter to then typed up again and saved as an electronic file. The day starts with bathroom business, radio news, some coffee and a walk through golden gate park, if it's a workaday.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I don’t sweat not writing. I have a nice stack of unpublished manuscripts.
13 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?
Every day’s Halloween.
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?
Reading is Writing.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Friends have really pulled everything along for me and made it all possible.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Not much that I’m yet aware of aside from some trips with my wife Ava. Going to Iran for a bit, for instance.
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’d have most likely been employed in some fashion in the San Francisco skateboarding community if my folks hadn't up and moved from Orange County, CA to New Ipswich, NH when I was fifteen.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’d always been reading everything. Living on a dirt road in New Ipswich I started writing in high school classrooms.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I adore books like Genoa by Paul Metcalf and Hart Crane Voyaging by Hunce Voelcker. We just saw Deadpool and Wolverine in the theater, it was silly and highly amusing. I like films that go over 2 hours.
20 - What are you currently working on?
An expanded edition of The Duncan Era: One Reader’s Cosmology. Joanne Kyger suggested perhaps it could be a larger book. I’ve written further since it’s publication on Duncan, Jess, Spicer, and Blaser, which material I have now added, but also I now have some on Joanne herself, along with what I am hoping will be useful reflections on Thom Gunn and Duncan, having recently gone on a bit of a Gunn kick. Whether or not it finds a publisher, is another story.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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