1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
To say my first book changed my life would feel strained. At least in the most obvious practical terms, it had little to no impact on my life. I know I had hoped it would lead me to a more concrete professional footing and therefore translate into material change in the form of income. That did not happen. Subsequent books were no more life altering in this sense. That being said, it would be very hard to overstate how much publishing that first book (or second, third, etc.) has meant to me and has meant for keeping alive that part of my life that is "being a poet." So, the first book feels now like it represented a kind of culmination of a long phase of student writing and aspiration while at the same time opening the horizon on an equally long phase of establishing myself in my own mind as a "real" writer (rather than a hobbyist, I suppose). In short, it felt fundamentally validating even if it never served me as a professional credential in the way that publications do in the academic marketplace, and it also established an expectation within me for pursuing further such validation. Twenty-two years later, the need for validation has changed a good bit, but I won't pretend it has completely gone away. I do trust my own artistic inclinations much more deeply now then I did then, confirmed in part through two decades of further reading, writing, and testing of those inclinations in the actual experience of life. Where once I hoped to leverage a livelihood out of poetry (which even then struck me as a somewhat dubious pursuit), I have long been free to let poetry's work be a sufficient end in itself. I believe this translates into something more purely in keeping with my own idiosyncratic artistic vision, which in turn feels more validating than the early accomplishments, if in a slightly different, more wholly personal way.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
The simple answer is that other forms seemed impossible to me whereas poetry did not and so I started doing it. I still don't know how people manage to write imaginative prose, even though I have many close friends who do so very well. Probing a little more deeply, I have always been drawn to the elliptical nature of even the most straightforward lyric writing. The compression and leaping of lyric figuration, as well as the blend of revealing and obscuring that serves as the lyric's engine has always made poetry feel like the most memetic of modes for experimenting with the materials of what it is to be alive. And this sort of experimentation is what I find most compelling about literature.
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 don't have a tidy answer for this question. Process and project for me have tended to be pretty organic and have developed at different speeds. Likewise, some poems have come quickly, some slowly, many more have foundered and been abandoned. On average, I guess I'd say most poems that have survived have appeared quickly and then been revised meaningfully but not radically over the course of a few years. As poems appear, they tend to influence the way I think about the ones that preceded them, which guides the way I revise.
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?
For the most part I think I am an example of the former. In a couple of cases I thought I had a project-level concept in mind from the outset (Little Ease and No Grave Can Hold My Body Down). But, in the end, even those books ended up dictating their own path to me as I went. At most, I think I have a vague idea from the outset of what a gathering of work is going to be interested in, but I tend to learn the real nature of the interest as I'm going and as I'm finishing up.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I don't love giving readings. I'm too shy for that, which means that I have to push past my shyness to perform, and pressing in that way feels inauthentic. In some ways, it feels perverse to make public the product of poetry's very solitary and private work, but that of course is a kind of contradiction, given that the meaning of publication is literally "to make public," and I've pursued publication for years. In short, I don't think readings have much to do with my writing, but I do want (for reasons I can't completely justify) to share that writing with other people. Sometimes I give readings as a result, and sometimes it goes relatively well, although it never feels quite right to me.
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?
There definitely are. Most broadly speaking, I'd say my poetry is concerned with the place where metaphysics, ethics, memory, and psychology come together in the present moment. In practice, this has always been a kind of soteriological inquiry: of kairos and eschaton and an accounting of a new heaven and a new earth fitfully breaking into lived history, specifically history as lived out through the dot, in the great network of being, represented by my own mind-body-soul.
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 have always trusted the idea that artists (including writers) should pursue their own weird paths with as little distraction as possible. They belong in the wilderness, and so their role is outside of typical systems we tend to associate with ideas like "role." First, their role is to be marginal by virtue of their devotion. Secondarily, the products of that devotion may serve the culture, but that's the culture's business, not the artist's.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It has been helpful to me to have another, trusted person challenge my decisions. It hasn't always been a formal editor who has done this most helpfully, but once the wilderness work is over, I find it very valuable to get feedback from people who know my work and can see with fresh eyes.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Cut the longest swath you can for as long as you can.
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 start every day early with an hour of coffee, reading, and contemplation. It sounds a little precious, but I find it makes my life much more manageable. I don't write every day, but often this beginning does lead naturally into writing, and when it does I'm always grateful.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I tend to be in agreement with David W. McFadden, as cited in question 13 below. I tend to go back to reading, always. I guess I'm less inclined than I used to be to think in terms of writing being stalled or not. I want to say that at this point I see living and writing being close enough to one another that I'm writing as long as I'm living, even if there isn't ocular proof left behind. Sooner or later there tends to be some kind of receipt, and that's gratifying, but often I feel like the work that needs to be done first needs to be done in silence. So, I don't do as much conscious looking for inspiration as I once did.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Junipers. Honeysuckle. 'Lectricshave.
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.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
The 17th-Century English poets continue to be very important to me in both my work and my life. Dante has continued to figure more prominently in my imagination over the years than I expected. Rilke, Kierkegaard, Bergson, the Black Mountain poets, Ortega-y-Gasset, Deleuze, Karl Barth, Jürgen Moltmann.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
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?
Priest. Were I not a writer it's hard to imagine being at all, but writing is not my occupation. I've had many jobs, and being a writer has rarely gotten in the way.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I wasn't very good at much else. Or, I seemed to have a talent for writing and less talent for other things.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Last great book was Septology by Jon Fosse. Last great film was Vesper by Kristina Buožytė and Bruno Samper.
19 - What are you currently working on?
I've been writing quite a bit the year since I finished the Salms manuscript. I'm not sure what all this writing might amount to, but formally these are short lyrics. They seem very quiet to me, and I'm not sure how many of them are really even really poems. I've been thinking of them of "figures," so eventually I will have to figure out what that really means.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
