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 they day daze (High Chair, 2012) helped me figure out how I might want to approach the writing of poems, in my case, often intuitively, prosodically, and from a place of not-knowing. It was important to me that the poems I wrote offered not knowledge but experience, because I am suspicious whenever anything I write tries to be wisdom. Often what comes across as wisdom, decontextualized and dehistoricized, is affect. But I am interested in how truth is embodied. These attitudes persist in facture (Broken Sleep Books, 2024). I also describe these approaches in essays -- "Action, Number, Silence, Work" (published in The Operating System's Field Notes) and "Lyric Gesture" (published in Annulet Poetics Journal) both included in my second book as well, in our estrangement (Aklat Ulagad, 2022).
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Language lessons, as I remember them structured in primary school, were diction and syntax. This set me up with an early appreciation of the material qualities of language; and so, poetry.
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?
Writing is one way I deal with the world. The poetry writing projects I undertake usually come from a constellation of life interests. Then each new poem in the project takes shape in relation to the poems around them. My essays are usually occassioned -- by invitations to talk, by the work of friends and other artists, or by the pause required by other life projects.
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 think of my projects as pursuits of particular geometries attuned to the interests and intuitions that comprise the work, for example collage, or the shape of prose vs the shape of a line, or the shape that repetitions might take, or how poems take trajectories away from the center, or how we might move from one periphery to the next, etc.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love working with prosodic elements. Readings allow for prosody to take aural shape (or at least hpw I imagine prosody might take shape) before a public. So there is value in readings in terms of being able to test out those shapes, and finding out what tensions they might produce in the public speaking voice.
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?
Whenever I'm asked to describe my book of poems, facture, I say that it consists of poems that think about art, labor, gesture, persons, and dream.
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?
Some have immediately discernible and do urgent and important work, the journalist for example. Writers shape how we feel and think. From the copywriter to the writer of policies and laws lie both ethical responsibility and potential for subversion albeit in varying degrees. Poets do this work of shaping differently, often impractically, and that might be where their value resides. Many have written about the roles poets might take (some affirmatively, some critically, most over-determined), while most of us will eventually turn out mistaken in our assumptions.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Except for two cases, and sadly, both with university presses, I've been lucky with editors. My poems, essays, and books, published mostly with small presses and independent literary journals, had editors and book artists that gave my work utmost care. I am thankful to them.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Foucault: Do not become enamored of power.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to visual art/collage)? What do you see as the appeal?
I move from poems, to essays, sometimes to visual work for a change of pace, or maybe tp find the necessary pace.
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?
Not exactly a routine, but I tend to work on several projects and read several books at any given period of time. I don't necessarily keep separate notebooks for each of them, and so the notes can get messy. I flip the pages of my current notebook and find notes on the politics of weather data modeling, then on Glissant's play on errantry/errancy, then on the Wertheim's Hyperbolic Coral Reef Crochet project, then on tweaks I made to a chicken adobo recipe I cooked for dinner.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When I know that I'm stalled because I don't really have anything to say, then I don't force it. But if I'm stalled as to how a form or trajectory might proceed, then a break or some physical activity helps -- walking, yoga, weightlifting, etc.
A quiet beach.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
My cat's (Sushi's) coat of fur which smells like (I kid you not) baby powder.
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?
Recently, mostly coastal, intertidal and pelagic forms as I've started learning to surf
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Limiting the response to poetry: the poems of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lyn Hejinian, Fanny Howe, Paul Celan, Inger Christensen, and Barbara Guest
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I started 10 months ago, but I would like to continue to progress my skills in longboard surfing.
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?
Maybe teaching?
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Growing up, I had more access to resources for developing skills in writing than say music or the visual arts.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Lisa Robertson's The Baudelaire Fractal, Adania Shibli's Minor Detail, Donna Haraway's Staying with The Trouble, Neferti Tadiar's Remaindered Life, Allan Popa's Narkotiko at Panganorin, Divya Victor's Kith, Ramon Guillermo's Ang Makina ni Mang Turing, Cid Corman's translation of Basho's Oku no Hosomichi
Drive My Car dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Cleaners dir. Glenn Barit, Monster dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda, Pluto by Urasawa x Tezuka x Kawaguchi, The Beaches of Agnes Varda dir. Agnes Varda
20 - What are you currently working on?
I am working on a new book of poems that explore ideas and intuitions that cluster around and share affinities with the activity of surfing. These include: coastal communities and coastal gentrification; the language of weather, weather data modeling and forecasting; movement and how movement changes sensibility; community, friendship, and the diaristic; lyric forms of (bodily) knowledge and how perception, experience, and knowledge can be variously, non-causally arranged; coastal submersion in relation to lyric subject formation, i.e. the myth of the bounded, individuated lyric "I" and the possibilities that arise when thinking instead of a lyric holoent or a lyric holobiome.
Also, some art writing and essays adjacent to said writing.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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