2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to poetry through an ear for music and a mind for analysis. I’ve committed poems to paper since I was ten, but I found myself drawn to the philosophical and atomistic effects that different word combinations might elicit. Coupled with some formative years in garage bands scribbling lyrics and testing out the embodied stage presence of live performance and readings, a surge toward poetry seemed rather inevitable. In short, I was and am a big reader and have a broad appreciation for narrative and world-building, but I have more of a tinkerer’s fascination with disparate linguistic parts and a performer’s reliance on channeling voice and emotion to a desired but unpredictable end. All of that led to my first book, A Bundle of Careful Compromises, which emerged as a creative outlet for a master’s thesis on contemporary elegy. I wrote that during my time in the University at Buffalo’s Poetics Program under the direction of Steve McCaffery. It’s been poetry, poetry, poetry ever since.
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?
A poem begins as a cerebral pool of an idea that I let coagulate and spread out. I’m not a “go out into nature” and “recollect my thoughts in tranquility” Wordsworthian poet. I write frenetically and neurotically while that pool gathers. I try to coast on that energy as intensely as I can until the work feels as initially “complete” as possible–sometimes that happens within a two-week span up to two months. At the very least, I note and sketch out the gist of the idea so that I can build it out with more precision and care afterwards. Regardless, those first drops in the pool are the most crucial times for a creative project so I wait for them with fervent anticipation and respond accordingly when they come. As a result, I’m most definitely in the “book” camp rather than the “collection” camp. I’m an adherent to Jack Spicer’s preference for the serial poem after his After Lorca and find his description of a single, disconnected poem as a “one night stand” to be quite apt. That’s not knocking anyone who does write single poems bound together in a carefully arranged collection, it’s just not been my creative experience nor my personal aesthetic preference.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I adore poetry readings of all sizes, intimate house parties to large lecture halls. I am, however, a rather infrequent public reader. I wish I could do more of them, so when an opportunity comes along, I do jump at the chance. I don an anxious and highly expressive affect for in-person readings. There’s a zaniness I aspire to in my public readings and readily incorporate musicality and theatricality amid the poems–be that as crooning Elvis’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight” to a slideshow of Pet Rocks or singing John Denver with my banjo and a prop arrow through my head à la Steve Martin. I thoroughly enjoy bringing that as a multi-modal dimension to my writing which, on the page alone, can come across as abstract, even aloof, and syntactically dense.
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 have virtually only theoretical concerns behind my writing. I’ve stated earlier I have a rather analytical mind, but I don’t have a systematic one; I’d make a lousy philosopher, but I’m fascinated with the questions that theory explores. What’s more: poetry lets me get away with merely posing a question without offering a definitive answer. I get to unearth one geode, hold it up to the light, behold it for a while, let the mystery of the thing be, set it back down, and unearth another one.
Given that preamble, I’m deeply invested in Joan Retallack’s “poethics,” in ecopoetics broadly construed, in weaponized language, in sociotechnological blackboxes and poetry’s encounter (and corruption and subversion and repurposing) of such processes. I return over and over to Adorno to ponder negative dialectics and the ethical position of indeterminacy and the tactical refusal against instrumentalized reason. If I had to bundle all that up into a central question, I’d frame it as follows: How does poetry in particular offer a way to think of an alternative to the proposition that “humanity is the measure of all things,” and how might poetic approaches to language construct an under-recognized possibility for us to consider ourselves, encounter one another, and experience the world beyond us.
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’m not a prescriptivist when it comes to the social and cultural function of the writer. I have very little standing to be one anyways. So I can only speak for myself here. I’ll offer the role that–if I’m lucky–I’m able to play: gadfly. Not some systematic Socrates figure, mind you, but a legitimate annoyance for and disrupter to business-as-usual. I want to be a gnat. I want my work to be a buzz saying “Think otherwise. Do otherwise. Be otherwise.” That comes across as cloyingly grandiose, but I assure you that I’m earnest to a fault.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential. 100%. Now, that’s not to say that writerly vision doesn’t play a part and that there’s a certain “wholeness” that a writer might need to insist upon. That may especially be the case for poetry’s idiosyncrasies (and perhaps for the librettists and playwrights) compared to fiction or nonfiction. But after the initial execution of the work in draft form–especially once an editor or press picks up that work–the collaboration that follows is a process I find incredibly generative in a creative sense and significantly meaningful on a human level at a time when competition, siloing, and cutthroat paranoia seems to be de rigueur in the corporate world and beyond.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I’m a big fan of David Antin and his talk poems. This may not be so much a piece of advice but rather an articulation of an aesthetic practice that I’ve run with: In a conversation with Charles Bernstein, Antin once shared his experience reading Simone Weil and his struggle with understanding the seemingly commonplace and unchallenged terms to which she was referring, words, he says, like “Loss” “Value” “Power.” But as I looked at them I found out I didn’t understand them at all. So I started to write them down, thinking that by writing them down, I could concentrate on them, ask them questions and find out what meanings they might conceal. And I saw that my not-understanding could be a way to go on. And as I went on with this writing down I didn’t think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn’t understand.
His insistence on “not understanding” and the generative uncertainty that poetry thrives on has remained a lasting influence on me. That impulse runs throughout my latest book Ugly Ground Swell Moss in which the whole engine of the work consists of an endlessly and obsessively negotiated confrontation of relations, identities, and ethical consequences.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Boredom is, in fact, my preferred teacher and guide. I like to sit with it, the restlessness of it, and feel my creative energies churning out something on the other side. That said, I enjoy sitting in academic lectures and talks–often outside of the subject of poetry–and see what some infusion of interdisciplinarity might bring to the surface in ways I would unlikely stumble over solely by myself.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’m dying to make it down to the New Orleans Poetry Festival (NOPF) one of these years. With four kids at home–two of them quite young still–and a day job, I have to be rather selective with traveling and conferences, but NOPF is at the top of the list. It always looks to be a fantastic gathering, and New Orleans has become something of a poetry-lover’s dream community.
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 consider myself incredibly fortunate to end up where I landed–writing and editing for the love of the game, teaching a selection of classes at the University of Notre Dame, and supporting the liberal arts and higher education through my work there in the Franco Institute. That said, an alternative dream career could have been as a casting director. There’s something about the je ne sais quoi of analyzing an actor’s “fit” for a role or how multiple actors’ “chemistry” come together that I find fascinating.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Last great book: Henry Goldkamp’s Balloon Animal from Mike Corrao’s phenomenal press CLOAK. A riotous, punny, raucous sendup of performativity and theatricality.
If I may, I’ll tweak the question from last great film to last great album: Never Before Seen, Never Again Found by Arm’s Length, a leading fifth-wave emo band out of Quinte West, ON. The album came out in 2022 but has been on repeat for me ever since. Perhaps unsurprisingly given my affinity for serial poetics, I’m a fan of the album-as-unit, and anyone who’s got a spare forty minutes to sit with this album straight through is in for a treat.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m hardly a “write every day” kind of poet. I strike while the iron’s hot. That said, I’m fortunate these days to have a few projects in various stages of development. I’m shopping around a manuscript about the year following the birth of my fourth kid and my subsequent vasectomy two weeks later–it’s a cheeky, confessional, bratty work called Vasectomajestic that I’m pretty excited about. I’m also planning out a kind of extended review/lyric essay on David Lowery’s A24 film The Green Knight that also unpacks a nasty case of shingles I had last year. I’ve also just started writing a series called Glitch Whelps that rages against digital surveillance, AI and big tech shenanigans, privacy violations, and all the usual late-capitalist horrors.
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