1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Punishment Bag changed my life in that it gave me something to do—or to aspire to do—for a long time. Having it growing somewhere in the background allowed me to describe myself as a poet. There’s a persona poem in the book about a first responder who recovers a suicide from a cesspool. I wrote it when I was an academic and had spent almost the whole of my professional life teaching language and literature. Now I’m a structural firefighter. Did the poem change my life?
My most recent work
is green, stolonic—kudzu-like—and my previous work is sectile and cool to the
touch.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as
opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Poems are usually shorter,
so if you waste a lot of time wrestling with yourself and questioning what
writing is or whether it’s even advisable, I think it tends to just kind of win
out over time. I’m not a huge fan of the genre divisions. I think what I write
next will be some big combination of all these things.
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?
Yes!
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?
They almost always begin with the first line, but I can think of at least one exception. This makes me think I ought to start more in the middle. Starting at the end seems like a bad idea, though I know John Irving writes that way. When it comes to writing, I don’t like to do anything too exclusively, even if it works.
I guess the scare quotes around
“book” in the question are supposed to distance the idea of a project that an
author might have starting out from the object that ends up being produced and
distributed in the world, but I kind of prefer to imagine that some ancient
sophist poses the question while doubting the very existence of books. These
so-called “books” your purport to believe in. That’s kind of how it feels to
me, having rarified them so much with my obsession.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to
your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
A few poems I’ve
written came from imagining I had an audience. One called “Edible Arrangement”
in my book and another called “What makes it a poem?” that I wrote after the
book was done. As a reading attendee I’m always waiting for the reading to be
over so I can get to the fun part of talking and making jokes and having a few
drinks. Readings are best as a pretext for hanging out. I enjoy giving them
very much though. If I could chain people to the seats and make them listen to
me all night I would.
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?
Not to be coy, but
these seem like current questions. I think a lot of my poetry is asking what a
poem is, trying to catch some fleeting glimpse of one of poetry’s contours. I
guess there’s some organicism or naturalism behind my writing. I’m very
interested in the question of what word comes next. Or, you know, should that
be the last one.
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?
I think writers
should write things, maybe even just in their heads. Ideally they’ll have some good
intuitions about how it will ramify in “the world that is the world of all of
us,” but that’s not necessary. Writers have to take on a lot that isn’t
writing—teaching, child-rearing. They exercise a lot of judgement. That’s not
really their social role as I see it. Even if a writer were just sitting in
their own private version of a temple typing onto a ream of paper that fed
immediately into a shredder, I think that would be good. I saw a very funny
bogus and potentially even slightly offensive reel recently that features a
Chinese sage with an English AI voiceover. The sage is saying “Is there a woman
in your house who likes to sleep a lot? Don’t call her lazy! She is bringing
good luck and fortune to the house. This is very hard work, so naturally she is
tired and needs her rest.” That’s kind of how I see writers working globally.
8 - Do you find the process of working with
an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Very few editors have seen anything profitable enough in my work to bother with
it. Friends and my wife have done a lot pro bono. I listen very
attentively, and I often change things, but really I just want them to tell me
it’s perfect. I sort of wish I remembered everything I changed so I could get
in there and change it back one day.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've
heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
My therapist told me about a really
great deep tissue guy who lives on top the Sandia Mountains, and she advised me
to get in touch with him. I was very skeptical that it could help, and the work
he was doing was and is very painful, some kind of jujitsu-grip technique. I
don’t really understand it, but it works. Find somebody like that.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move
between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
For me, critical
prose has mostly been a way to secure funds and benefits. The University of
Chicago gave me an amazing fellowship that stipulated, you know, “finish your
dissertation within the space of the year or you’ll be immediately ejected from
the program.” That’s not verbatim, but that made it very easy to focus on
criticism for a while! I like having the big degree too, that’s very appealing.
I put the letters after my name on LinkedIn, and I have all the magazines
address themselves to “Dr. Fournier.” And people at work still call me “doctor”
or “doc” as a kind of joke every now and then. It can be very confusing for the
patients.
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?
If I’m not at work I usually wake up and spend the first few hours of the day staring into my cell phone screen. I had a lot of debt and financial insecurity through my teens, 20s, and early 30s, so I’m basically obsessed with money. Now that I have some retirement savings, sometimes I’ll just go into my E-Trade account and refresh the page over and over watching the market values go up and down however many hundredths of a percentage point. If I’m at work, I make coffee for everyone at the station and then I go out into the bay and wash the trucks. I really like language learning, though I’m miserable at it, so I’ll usually put a Spanish audio lesson on a single Airpod, and I’ll scrub up the engine and the rescue repeating things like, En Argentina, hay una región vinícola muy conocida. Ayer, hice un recorrido por los viñedos.
I read this book
recently called Living on Earth—it jumped out at me from the nonfiction
table at the Strand on the Upper West Side, I think because it was what I was
presently doing. Anyway, the author, Godfrey-Smith, talks a lot about the corpus
callosum—the connection point between the two hemispheres of the brain.
Apparently reading really enlarges this thing. He also talks about some subtle
measurable differences in the brain activity and anatomy of people who read and
write from right to left, and my routine, since I was even a very young child,
has involved writing left to right. I’m thinking it could be good to start
writing right to left. It’s just a matter of choosing the right language.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do
you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
My window and the birds
outside, or sometimes I’ll write about the coffee on my desk. If the birds
outside seem a little too boring, I have an Audubon Society Field Guide with
all the really great birds in it. The boobies and stuff. If that doesn’t get
you out of a funk, I don’t know what will.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Vanilla. My mother
had a very acute sense of smell, and she loved vanilla. If I ever smell Vel
soap again (they stopped making it) I’d be instantly transported to my mother’s
bathroom. Also, Murphy’s Oil Soap.
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?
Leslie Marmon Silko has this great
thing about how the plot of Ceremony is like a spider web, and Paula Gunn Allen has all this awesome stuff about the Lakota sacred hoop and what she
calls a matrifocal worldview. Spiders scare me a little, and there’s black
widows here in New Mexico, and brown recluses. Their bites cause a lot of
damage, but the thing is they hardly ever bite people. I’m a bit embarrassed to
admit this, but I even put out some chemical that’s supposed to kill them. We
had a lot of spiders in our yard, and I like to lift weights out there,
so I was worried I’d accidentally bother one when I was grabbing my BowFlex
adjustable dumbbells, and it would bite me. I’m not going to do that anymore
though. I hope they come back so I can learn more about how to write poems from
them.
15 - What other writers or writings are
important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
This is the opposite
of how this question probably means to be answered. It seems like it’s after some
deep foundational influence, but, before my new Zen Soto practice—just sitting—I’m
reading a few poems a day by Laura Kolbe from her book Little Pharma. I
met Kolbe just before midnight on December 31st, and then she was
the first person I talked to in the new year. She’s a doctor—a medical doctor—
an internist, and her poems are deeply inflected by her being a doctor without
being reducible to that. Since I started firefighting, I’ve become a little
worried that my poems are going to go, like, “Get the Narcan!—.4 migs for IM.”
Her writing feels important to me now because it shows how much deeper and
weirder it can be than that. Justin Cox is another very important writer to my life
and work. He wrote a book, Stock Pond, that might be even better than looking out a
window. I’m also one fourth of a poetry coterie called the Merry Company, also
sometimes called the Gay Science. The other members—important to me in every
way—are Chris Schlegel, Jess Laser, and Dan Poppick. I don’t know how I got in.
They’re sort of like the SEAL Team Six of poetry.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't
yet done?
I’d like to get my
paramedic license. I’m a basic, which just feels pretty lame when it comes to
practicing medicine. I’d also like to run a 50-mile ultra.
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’m thinking about
maybe trying for a masters in linguistics or linguistic anthropology. A lot of
my favorite critical writers are anthropologists by training—people like David Scott and David Graeber. All the Davids. And Ofelia Zepeda, who wrote one of my
favorite poems of all time, is a linguist.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing
something else?
I don’t really see writing as being
opposed to doing something else. Sometimes I wonder if writing is opposed to
writing! I was just thinking how Siddhartha Gautama and Socrates never wrote
anything at all. They were such great writers they didn’t have to.
19 - What was the last great book you read?
What was the last great film?
I really liked Marty Supreme,
but the last really great film I saw was On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,
which was written and directed by Rungano Nyoni. It’s so good my wife was mad
at me afterward just for being a man. I had a shelf with all the books I read
in 2025 on it, but I dismantled it when I moved into my new office. It would
have made answering this question a lot easier. I’ve read other great books
since I read it, but I’m going to give Alvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of
Empires as my answer here. A few years ago my old friend Rowland Yang sent
me a book by Benjamin Labatut called When We Cease to Understand the World. That was a banger. I have an idea for a book I’d like to write that is right in
between the two of them, and all about poetry!
20 - What are you currently working on?
Yesterday I repainted the room that was my office, and I’m busy working on getting it ready for the baby. My wife is due on March 30th. I’ve also been putting a lot of research into what VR headset I want to get and what games I can bring to play while she’s laboring. She’s an ob/gyn and she tells me about all the awful things the FOBs do when their wives are delivering. FOB is “father of the baby.” She tells me all this stuff—people delivering with the TV on, families eating crab claws in the delivery room—and I’m like, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
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