Michael Boughn, Measure’s Measures: Poetry & Knowledge

 

            The word “poetics” has been around for a while, though its meaning changes. Aristotle’s Poetics was primarily a set of genre definitions (tragedy, epic, comedy), desire effects (fear, pity, wonder), their result (catharsis), and the rules and methods necessarily to create them. Milton refers to poetics as the “laws of a true Epic poem.” Purely technical in the sense of addressing poetry (and drama) as governed by laws external to and formative of its composition, poetics became identified (and discussed) as prosody and aesthetics in later thinking. The only question facing the poet is whether or not he or she knows the rules and is able to master them well. (“Poetics’ Bodies—Some Poetry Wars, 1913-1990”)

I’m very much enjoying Toronto poet and critic Michael Boughn’s latest, Measure’s Measures: Poetry & Knowledge (Barrytown NY: Station Hill Press, 2024), with an introduction by Charles Stein, a delightful and lively collection of essays of consideration, reconsideration, histories, accumulation, agreements and disagreements, attending a sequence of curiosities around some important decades of contemporary poetic form and thought. Boughn focuses his collection around The New American Poetry 1945-1960 (1960), the infamous poetry anthology edited by Donald Allen that attempted to define the upcoming generation of American poets, as well as connect a diverse array of contemporary poetics around the country for the first time, clustering poets into genres (some thought, arbitrarily), from the Black Mountain poets, the New York School and San Francisco Renaissance. Stretching multiple essays on the anthology generally, and on specific poets such as (and specific arguments upon or around) Robert Creeley, Robin Blaser, H.D., Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, as well as pieces surrounding multiple of these and their concerns, battles and poetics, Boughn provides a wonderful foundation of information around an incredibly lively and productive period of American writing that still holds rippling effects across contemporary poetics across the United States, Canada (in part through influences into 1960s TISH, Talon and Coach House poets and poetics) and far beyond. His essay on the long poem, for example, I found particularly compelling, pushing me to reconsider my own long-held presumptions upon the form and its history. “But the questions lingered: Is a poem a long poem, as many have asked before me, just because it’s—long? And if that’s the case, then how long is long enough to be a long poem? Or is a poem a long poem because it can lay claim to some common generic feature—beyond indetermine length—some, say, structure or convention? Or, as Smaro Kamboureli has argued, to an ’evolved form,’ a specific, restless resistance to generic definition?” (“How Long Is Long Enough?”). Boughn has that most interesting blend of curiosity and resistance that provides new ways of thinking across questions that have run across poetics for decades; some of these may never find answers, but his questions extend new thinking beyond those original boundaries.

There is something incredible in the way Boughn writes from within the moment in and around the activity he articulates—he was co-editor and one of the co-conspirators of assembling Robert Duncan’s infamous The H.D. Book, after all (something discussed here but also within Lisa Jarnot’s recent lectures [which I reviewed over here])—but with the distance of time: years of working through and with this material as writer, critic, teacher and reader, all of which bring considerable weight to his arguments. If you want to know why the mentors of your mentors, the heroes of your heroes, didn’t get along, and what the disagreements were and how they began, for example. The essay on Robert Creeley’s anger, for example, is remarkable; but one remarkable piece within a collection of remarkable pieces.

In a culture that seems to hold too many young poets featuring content not only above but seemingly to the exclusion of a comprehension of form, Boughn offers his take on a myriad of threads, and an incredible background on a period of writing that exploded onto the larger consciousness in ways that most would either have forgotten about or have been completely unaware. As he writes to close the essay “The New American Poetry Revisited—Yet Again,” an essay that really showcases his strengths as a professor:

            This is a long, devious way from where I started, typical of the course conversations take in relation to this book. And it still doesn’t begin to cover the depths of thinking The New American Poetry brings to the table. The impossibility of fully opening those depths to the blank faces around the seminar room can be overwhelming, or it can become part of a move toward unleashing a ruckus in the room. At least if you’re lucky. That’s what makes teaching it, thinking about it, different than any other anthology. For the young people coming to it cold, in complete innocence, not just of the book, but of poetry itself beyond some meagre exposure to the Romantics and Eliot, it can be like running into a wall face-first. But if you can get them to address the wall as something they bring to their reading, and then show them how to begin to take it apart, it will begin to yield the book’s astonishments and clarities, introducing the students to a new modality of thinking and knowing. Some more than others, of course. But it seems to me that you probably couldn’t ask for more than that from a book.

The force of that anthology when it landed was immense, and there is a great deal of contemporary writing still feeling the effects. There is just such clarity here. One of the more readable critical volumes I’ve read in a while, and I actually found myself wanting more, once I worked through to the end.

Stan Persky, in a recent conversation, suggested to me that the first step in teaching poetry is to explain to students how poetry is a “linguistic mode of knowledge,” comparable to narrative or mathematics. A mode of knowledge, or, say, thinking, is like what I just called a register.

 

Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh, Piece of Cake

 

The thing about family life that’s amazing is you can’t keep anything, is that it’s chaotic and you can’t keep anything in order so you begin to go crazy because you can’t keep anything in order so you begin to go crazy because you can’t keep your own separate life in order. It’s probably the reason why more than one child is about ten times as chaotic as two children, I mean, as one child, you see what I mean? No children seems very orderly to me at the moment, as if you could place something somewhere inside your house and one month later it would still be there. I remember while I was pregnant still being able to know where my things were and to know what I was doing and even to be able to keep the kitchen in some kind of order when I wanted to—now there’s no chance of that and you must get used to a certain amount of chaos (I remember when I lived alone what a pleasure my little meager dishes piling up in the sink for days without getting in the faucet’s way gave me, as if I were being modest); I’ve always believed that one should be able to bear a lot of chaos but chaos has to have its rewards and this kind of chaos often seems gratuitous and with no beginning and no end. It’s interesting to have lived a life where you always knew your life could suddenly change; overnight you could be in another country, either rich or poor. And though this sensation could still persist, theoretically, the presence of Marie and our desire to be a little bit rooted makes life seem quite timeless and change of that sort a matter of indifference. So we must use the kitchen almost continuously. It would be good to have a mother’s helper, or a mother to help us. When Marie begins to talk everything will seem less chaotic, I know it, and even now, everything changes approximately every two weeks. But when she doesn’t talk she seems to me more of an object (keys banging) and certainly then an object of care. (Bernadette Mayer, “August 10”)

Working my way through a chapbook by Brooklyn poet Anna Gurton-Wachter recently [see my review of such here], part of my response included making my way to the internet and ordering an edition of American poet Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day (Turtle Island Foundation, 1982; New Directions Publishing, 1999), as well as a copy of Piece of Cake (Barrytown NY: Station Hill Press, 2020), a book composed in August, 1976 by Mayer and her then-husband, the poet and editor Lewis Warsh (November 9, 1944-November 15, 2020). For whatever reason, it was Piece of Cake that first caught my attention when the two books arrived: a book composed in first-person prose on alternate days, said to be “arguably the first significant male-female collaboration in 20th-century American poetry.” Mayer and Warsh each write alternate sections throughout the entirety of a single month from the relative isolation of a rental house in Lenox, Massachusetts, as they attempt to write and read, taking alternate days with their infant daughter, Marie, so the other could focus on writing. For whatever reason, this is a manuscript that was composed and completed, but lay fallow for some forty years, until prompted by the “determined efforts” of their now-grown eldest daughter.

The writing and the interplay between the two writers, including family moments, literary gossip and recollected stories are entirely compelling (the further one reads, the further one gets hooked), but I find it more interesting, in certain ways, the absolute pleasure knowing that Marie Warsh would have such access to an intimate, open and detailed paired document by both of her parents during her own infancy. I can’t imagine too many people who would deny that for any one of us, such a document, from either of their parents, let alone both, would be an incredible and uniquely rare gift. Originally moving in together in the spring of 1975, the couple would spend ten years together and have two children after Marie before they went their separate ways, and onto new relationships (the children, as what I can tell from online sources, remained with Mayer). As Mayer writes as part of her introduction:

            I had been reading the Swedish mystery novels of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö in which they wrote alternating chapters without knowing what the other had said. In our book we also decided that when we mentioned a name, like Clark, we would describe a bit who that person is, a little about her or him.
            It was in this neighborhood that Hawthorne said that the weather was always too hot or too cold. It was in the local Lilac Park that we had endless discussions about communes with Bob and Eileen Callahan. We were planning to buy an old resort in the Catskills to relive The Blithedale Romance, yet we didn’t, but books were written, this one and maybe others of which we can only find mouse-bitten remains.

In his introduction (dated December 24, 2018), Warsh offers:

            I don’t know who had the idea to write the month-long journal that became this book, but my guess is it was Bernadette, who had already written a month-long book on her own called Memory. I’d been a journal writer all my life, so the idea made complete sense. Most days we were content to simply walk around the block, carrying Marie in a backpack. There was much to write about, all the tiny details of daily life, plus all the flashbacks to the past, and everything that had led up to this moment.

Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart (1913-1986) began to keep diaries at an early age, and throughout the whole of her life, most of which exist as straight journal entries, but also include scraps of writing-in-progress, including the beginnings of her infamous novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept; and her journals have been published in various volumes over the years (I keep hoping someone might take on working to get more into print). There have certainly been other examples of compelling personal journals or diaries of writers and artists that have been worked into print—off the top of my head, I can think of Canadian writer Frank Davey’s devastating How Linda Died (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2002), as well as the two volumes by painter Barbara Caruso [see my review of the second volume here]—all of which exist as entirely worthy reads, but this is very much writing produced as literary writing, and not as (despite the four decades of distance between composition and publication) a writer’s private exercise. From what I am aware of Mayer’s work, at least, hers does work through gestures of private and the domestic as equally-important subject matter for literary work. Her Midwinter Day, for example, is a book-length composition around a single day on the calendar, and working through the material that was so often dismissed as “women’s writing,” and not worthy of actual literary merit. They take turns, and the back and forth is part of what provides this volume its heft; initially I found Mayer’s writing to be more striking: writing on more intimate details of the day with Marie, and more abstract considerations, including family history and contemplations around her reading of literature and theory (there is a lengthy stretch writing on Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, who also composed a book in the area), with Warsh’s prose a bit more external: stories around publishing, and of other writers, friends and hitchhiking memories:

Another hitchhiking story, really a story about other things, takes me back to Christmas Eve, 1969, when I was stranded in San Francisco after a party at Margot and John Doss’s house with no way of getting back to Bolinas, the small town an hour north where I was living. Bill Berkson was visiting me then, I’d driven down to the city with him in his car, he’d met someone at the party and had taken off with her and the only available ride was with Joanne Kyger and her husband Jack Boyce, but that didn’t seem like a good idea, Joanne and I had fallen in love, and I told them to leave without me. I’d taken LSD earlier that evening and wandered down Lombard Street trying to locate the motel where I stayed with my parents on our first West Coast visit in 1958. The string of beads I was wearing around my neck, which Joanne had made for me, was a charm, or at least I hoped, protecting me from whatever the rest of the night had to offer. No one would hurt me as long as I wore the beads. Don’t hide who you are, the voice said. Be open. That’s the only protection. If you act suspicious or afraid a wild dog will bite you. (Lewis Warsh, “August 9”)

Both sides, really, focus on the immediate, with lengthy asides depending on where the mind might go, and include visits to the store, interacting with friends and what the other might be doing that day, all of which culminates in a visit by a group of friends near the end of the month (with his excitement building, and her excitement mixed with a bit of anxiety). For those interested in literary biography and connection, there are interesting interactions and stories around Tom Clark, Susan and Clark Coolidge and multiple others, and it is interesting to note the connections and overlaps, the ways in which circles interact with circles. This is a charming and compelling volume, especially when one considers just how young these since-literary heavyweights were at the time (she was thirty-three to his thirty-one), and attempting to live a combined literary life while raising a family.

I’ve written before in how I’ve long been interested in how couples, both of whom are writers, might interact on or around the page, especially since Christine and I began our own collaborative and as-yet-untitled project of back-and-forth poems (produced so far through two chapbooks), a half-completed manuscript temporarily put aside around the time our Rose was born in 2013. There are plenty of other examples of (Canadian, at least) poets who have interacted, whether in direct collaboration or as separate texts existing in conversation, whether Victoria, British Columbia poets Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier’s No Longer Two People (Turnstone Press, 1978) or Roo Borson and Kim Maltman’s The Transparence of November / Snow (Quarry Press, 1985). Apparently Toronto poets Stephen Cain and Sharon Harris did a small collaboration that might have appeared as a chapbook, but I haven’t yet seen it. There was Smaro Kamboureli’s poetic travelogue about being away, in the second person (Longspoon Press, 1985), and Robert Kroetsch’s poetic work-from-home about Kamboureli being away, his Letters to Salonika (Grand Union Press, 1983), and even break-up responses made between Roy K. Kiyooka via his Pear Tree Pomes (Coach House Press, 1987) and Daphne Marlatt’s Our Lives (Truck Press, 1975; Oolichan Press, 1980). There is the direct collaboration and the texts that exist, separately, in conversation; somehow Mayer and Warsh, despite not reading each other’s entries during their process, manage, somehow, to simultaneously exist as both.

It took a while for me to realize where I’d heard or seen Warsh’s name previously, and it was through The Angel Hair Anthology (New York NY: Granary Books, 2001), an anthology edited by Warsh and his first wife, Anne Waldman, selected from materials from Angel Hair magazine and Angel Hair Books edited and published by the two from 1966 to 1978. The anthology had sparked an array of further reading after it first landed at my doorstep, but not as much as perhaps it could, or should, so this is really the first of Warsh’s work I’ve spent any time with. Really, prior to this, I knew little of her work, but at least something, aware of her name for some time, and having gone through her more recent collections Works and Days (New Directions, 2017) and Memory (Siglio Press, 2020), some of which I suspect I’ll revisit, soon.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Anne Gorrick

Anne Gorrick [photo credit: Peter Genovese] is a poet and visual artist.  She is the author of: A’s Visuality (BlazeVOX Books, Buffalo, NY, 2015), I-Formation (Book 2) (Shearsman Books, Bristol, UK, 2012), I-Formation (Book 1) (Shearsman, 2010), and Kyotologic (Shearsman, 2008).  She has co-edited (with Sam Truitt) In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley (Station Hill Press, Barrytown, NY, 2015). 

She has collaborated with artist Cynthia Winika to produce a limited edition artists’ book called “Swans, the ice,” she said with grants through the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.  She has also collaborated on large textual and/or visual projects with John Bloomberg-Rissman and Scott Helmes.  

She curated the reading series, Cadmium Text ( www.cadmiumtextseries.blogspot.com ) and co-curated (with Lynn Behrendt), the electronic journal Peep/Show at www.peepshowpoetry.blogspot.com 

Her visual art can be seen at: www.theropedanceraccompaniesherself.blogspot.com

Anne Gorrick lives in West Park, New York.

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 taught me think in books.  After Kyotologic came together with Shearsman in the UK, it got easier to think of my work as clustering, hivelike pieces.  The real estate of a book, that possible space makes one less sensitive to limits.  It also brought me out of almost total writing isolation.    

The consecutive books so far aren’t exactly consecutively written.  My second book has some of my earliest work in it, work that embraced a complex long form I keep playing with: to break numerous pieces apart and reattach them.  It’s like Isis looking for parts of Osiris.  That’s my poem-making.     

My latest book, A’s Visuality, out from BlazeVOX, continues a formal and spacial poetic inquiry, and language might occasionally turn into paint.  This book really attempts to sew together the textual and visual, and includes color plates of two of my artist’s books that ended up generating the first half of the book.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’ve been writing poetry since I was a kid, not even really knowing what poetry was yet, but the scratch of the pen on paper was everything I ever wanted.  Now it feels like poetry is my personal Hadron collider - I think up these extravagant ways to collect text, smash the particles together, and hope for some new thing I never knew before.  There’s the sense that when I do this, that language is coming to tell me something, what it knows.  Lately, my work is getting more sentence-y, so who’s to say it doesn’t at some point morph into fiction.  Diana Vreeland, when asked if her stories were fact or fiction, said they were “faction.”  Not sure where the line is between poetry and fiction.  Now I’m thinking hard about the word “depiction.”   

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’ve always had to work pretty fast, because I don’t have a huge luxury of time.  Think: working full-time in educational administration; serving as President of Century House Historical Society and its Widow Jane Mine; being married to a lovely being; that on top of my art/writing life.  Usually a writing project becomes apparent pretty quickly - an inquiry will turn vast.  I’ll find a way of searching, noticing, manipulating text in such a way that I don’t want to stop until I’ve used it up.  I’ll often have elaborate worksheets of source text that I create at the beginning, but then the poem jumps out of it pretty quickly to me.  I liked frayed edges, deckles, so I don’t overwork things.  It bugs me when things are too smooth.

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 can see a book now pretty early on (i.e. some technique I want to explore until I’m done).  I’ve completed a manuscript of poems about perfumes that combine various poetic manipulations into one work, instead of keeping processes separate.  This seems like a huge leap in my own poetic, generative process, due partly to a collaboration and friendship with poet John Bloomberg-Rissman.  Anything goes with John, so this was a great teaching for me.  “Scorn nothing,” John would say and attribute this to poet Robert Kelly.  

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I had to learn how to give readings, and now I enjoy them.  I curated  a reading series called Cadmium Text for seven years.  I like readings as a forum to test drive new work, hear what my friends are doing, hopefully hear something that blows me away.  I’m half-introvert, so I have to push myself sometimes out the door to engage.   

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?
The cartoon idea of quantum physics, that particles can be many things at once, in many places at once, strikes me as something to strive for: a quantum poetics.  That language can mean and dart multiply.  The internet has primed us to be more associative, more able to make thought leaps easily.  We live in a time more complex than our language is capable of holding.  Can language be made more pliable, more plastic to better suit our world?  It’s almost a moral quest: to mean in many directions, and to mean complexly.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
My practice is almost one of finding sites of ruin porn - to play with the shambles left to us, a parking garage made out of a theatrical palace.  A reviewer in the UK said that my first book was more like graffiti on palace walls.  I took this as such a compliment.  I wrote a poem once that said  “This is a poem for a small and skeptical audience / It’s about vajazzling AND Paul Celan“  I want the high and low world in my work.  All of it.  Vajazzling AND Paul Celan.  To put the world in.  Poetry is our Hadron collider - we can find the tiny particles that compose our culture, find new ways to mean multiply at once.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It’s always been interesting.  I don’t find that people want to change my work too often, but I’m usually curious and interested to see other ways forward.  I might not adopt that direction, but it’s fascinating, and I appreciate being read deeply. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I’ve always cherished a letter that Ted Hughes sent to Anne Sexton in regard to listening to critics and reviews:  “They tend to confirm one in one’s own conceit—unless they praise what you yourself don’t like. Also, they make you self-conscious about your virtues. Also, they create an underground opposition: applause is the beginning of abuse. Also, they deprive you of your own anarchic liberties—by electing you into the government. Also, they separate you from your devil, which hates being observed, and only works happily incognito.”

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to visual art)? What do you see as the appeal?
I’m lucky to have a pretty broad creative continuum, mostly shuttling between writing, visual art, gardening and now perfume and its making.  If I get sick of one thing, I can always go do something else.  Even if it’s tedious.  Digging holes for 20 Rose of Sharon bushes is pretty boring, but also an investment in future beauty.  Or digging holes for 150 peonies. 

Many years ago, I threw poetry out of the house like a bad boyfriend, yelling at it from upstairs windows and chucking its clothes on the lawn.  I was tired of poetry’s limit to a 8 ½” x 11” page.  So damn tired of it.  I broke up with poetry and I started to learn traditional Japanese papermaking, printmaking, indigo dyeing and encaustic painting.  It helped break through the ice dam of the traditional page and let me range over larger spaces.  Of course poetry came crawling back, apologizing.  And I took it back into my house. 

My last visual art project was a series of 30+ encaustic monotypes, worked over in pastel based on deceptively simple photographs of Luis Barragán’s architecture.  His work is so spare and lush at the same time.  I’m a maximalist, so it’s fun to lay in the sun of his opposite light.   

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?
From 2008 until 2014, I got a lot of work done.  I could spend up to three days a week at my writing/visual practice, from a few hours to much more if I felt like it.  It was good to write in the morning.  My life is different now.  Less time, new job, a recently herniated disc in my neck that makes sitting for long periods difficult.  Finishing my latest book used up some bandwidth, as well as completing the editing with poet Sam Truitt for our new book In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley, due out this summer from Station Hill Press. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Since 2010, I’ve kept a notebook of poem ideas, fun things to search and make poems, notes, diagrams.  Anytime I’m stuck, I can turn to it because the book grows faster than I can write.  I also have some long term projects that I can turn to and pick up the thread when I’m stalled.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Great question because I’m crazy for perfumes!  The smell of the ocean reminds me of lost home (At the Beach 1966 by CB I Hate Perfume).  My house smells like the grassy paws of a dog (Grass by CB I Hate Perfume), woodstove smoke (Burning Barbershop by D.S. & Durga), flowers I drag in (Carnal Flower by Frederic Malle), wet dirt (Black March by CB I Hate Perfume), firewood (Cambodian oudh), snow that gets stuck in boots (yes, snow has a smell).  My husband builds and restores old race cars, so he’s got this terrific motor oil, exhaust thing I love.  That’s true home. 

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?
Yes, everything we pour into ourselves becomes food for the work.  That’s why I’m sort of careful about what I pour in.  Not a lot of junk food anymore.  I hike.  I read a ton of non-fiction.  I make visual art. 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
To write, I need to move.  Until recently I studied tennis and played it seriously, this beautiful physical chess.  Now I hike and bike.  Writing is very physical to me, and I need to be able to do it. 

Sooooooo many writers have filled my head.  A very partial list might include Nabokov early on.  The Situationists.  Dada (Tristan Tzara was my first poetic love).  The Pillow Book of Sei Shonogon.  Susan Howe.  Robert Kelly.  Carole Maso.  Anchee Min.  Leslie Scalapino.  Laura Moriarty (both - the painter and the poet).  Work by friends over the years like: Maryrose Larkin, Elizabeth Bryant, Geof Huth, Nancy Frye Huth, Lynn Behrendt, Teresa Genovese, Cynthia Winika, Scott Helmes, John Bloomberg-Rissman, Reb Livingston, Michael Ruby, Sam Truitt, Lori Anderson Moseman…

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
It’s fun to dream aloud, if aloud is a lit screen.

I’m undertraveled.  I’d like to walk the Camino de Santiago.  I’d like to visit Grasse.  The burial mounds of Ohio.  India! 

Writing-wise, I’ve got several long projects that are somewhere on the continuum of complete: a long work on the American desert, a project working with an essay by John Burroughs (my dead neighbor), a project writing into an unpublished manuscript by Eileen Tabios. 

There are some encaustic teachers I’d like to study with.

I’d like to make a film.  It might have snow and people wrapped in saran wrap.

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?
Poetry isn’t an occupation for me.  As far as I can tell, it isn’t really an occupation for anyone.  Although I’d love to live in a world where I could afford to do it all the time. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It was inevitable.  I never got to choose.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus by Charles C. Mann and La Grande Bellezza.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I spent the summer finishing edits on a few of manuscripts that were 90% done.  I will co-curate with poet Melanie Klein a new reading series in 2015-2016 called Process to Text, which will bring adventurous writing to beginning poets at the local college where I work.  There’s a long manuscript I pick up and put down where I’m writing into work by Eileen Tabios.  Trying to heal up my back issues, but I see now this will take a long time.  Started studying qigong, which seems to be helping.  There are some ashes right now.  I’m injured and curious to see what happens next. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;