1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I don’t know if my life changed, but a certain anxiety eased—at least for a little while. It gave me a little more confidence to think I could make a life writing poems. In some sense, it didn’t have to do with getting published, but a sense that being at work in the work itself is what is most worthy. I found an ethic that I’ve tried to hold to for nearly 30 years. The early work is so long ago, I feel like I have no idea—though I think, I suspect, that certain concerns trace through, even though the poems have grown wider in their approach and cares—a poem as ethical form, a leaning toward the philosophical, a need to honor other poems and poets.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I had an extraordinary high school teacher who could actually teach poetry. I remember distinctly understanding a poem for the first time—John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” I simply didn’t know a human could do that in words, and I was desperate to learn how to do so myself.
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?
There’s not much rhyme or reason here for me, I’m afraid. A sense of whole book can come in a flash, and I’ll spend the next year working on it; sometimes I’ll sit on a single line for months, waiting for the next line to appear. I think I have an intuitive sense of a direction--& then sort of blindly stumble in it, blind until I learn to see.
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 line that comes to my ear as a gift, often at random, walking the dog or bird-watching or reading a book. If I don’t forget it in two days, I know it’s likely a poem. Sometimes a book; sometimes not.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Not counter, just apart from. I am the sort of writer capable of enjoying giving a reading, who often doesn’t. It makes me much more anxious than it used to do. I say “yes” with much trepidation.
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?
Yes, almost always. My work is most often agitated into being by something I’ve read. I think I’m mostly trying to learn how to think, and the poems are laboratories of a kind, an epistemological laboratory, to find out if I can learn to think for myself the thoughts another person thinks. I’m not trying to answer questions; I’m trying ask them. I suspect—and this comes from 15 years of translating from Ancient Greek—that the current questions are the questions that have always been questions. Not “current questions,” but a currency of questions.
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 so sure it’s different now than it’s ever been. I sort of think of a poet writ large as a sleepy watchman at the periphery of…of the knowable, I guess. I don’t think of it as a role, per se. I’m with Emerson when he says, “Do your work, and I will know you.” Poets get itchy in a uniform, and the art itself wants to dismantle any authority a given poet might feel as their mantle. The role of the poet might be to refuse the role of the poet.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
The only work I do that is heavily edited is art and poetry reviewing. I think of it as a collaboration; I’m grateful for another mind.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Heather McHugh to me: “All you need to do is make friends with the dead.”
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I like to know how words behave in different genres, how words think when out to different uses. A long time ago, inspired by Emerson and Thoreau, and inspired by Susan Howe and Lyn Hejinian, I decided to try to form myself into a poet-critic, poet-thinker, I’m not sure what the right designation is…I don’t find it a hard transition, just a different use of the same muscle.
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?
For 15 years I’ve been nearly religious about waking up around 5:30 in the morning and translating for an hour. It humbles me into the day. For my own poems, I avoid routine. I labor with translation and reading in hopes of being worthy of a poem coming to me—and when one does, I set to work, and stay at work, until it feels done.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I memorize poems I love. I read. I go to the gym. I go birdwatching.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Blue spruce.
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?
I’m very attuned to visual art as a primary influence. I’ve written a book that parallels a work of Robert Irwin’s. Working now on a poem pondering Duchamp. I’m in active collaboration with the ceramicist/sculptor Del Harrow. Music, yes—but music is for me a method more than a subject. Physics, yes—. And what isn’t nature?
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
The list is very long, and I don’t want to anger the ghosts by any omission. Many polestars. Each a worthy north. All my work is in the end to honor them by following the direction they make possible.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I have a real desire to develop a material practice. It’s my only real regret that I don’t have one. But I have plans.
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?
My back-up plan was to be an art historian of the Song Dynasty.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’ve loved poetry since I was 15, & I’ve never looked aside. It’s the only thing that ever made sense to me.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just re-read all of Wallace Stevens. And then am doing so again. Great—. Film is harder for me. I recently re-watched Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil. It’s great. “They say ‘Time heals all wounds,’ but it’s more true to say, ‘Time heals everything but a wound.’”
20 - What are you currently working on?
Homer.
