Here are answers to questions posed by Lance
Phillips on his blog Here Comes Everybody:
1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?
For me, the origins of poetry are in wordplay:
Duck Duck Goose because of the excitement of never knowing when I would
be "it."
After that, Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven"
because I didn't understand a word of it. I thought learning to play it
on the piano would reveal its hidden meaning... but it didn't. But the
search got me hooked on language.
After that, Dorothy Parker because I found a slim
copy of her Selected Poems heavily marked up by my mother, with lots of
exclamation marks and smiley faces.
2. What is something/someone non-literary you read
which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?
I am a faithful reader of Rob Brezny's horoscopes
in the Village Voice because they are really well written and always full
of terrific insights into my deepest motivations. I also indulge in crime
drama and science fiction, when I have time to read stories, that is.
I love the attempt to connect the imagination with scenarios far beyond
what the mind is capable of seeing in the real world.
3. How important is philosophy to your writing?
Why?
If philosophy is, as Ortega y Gasset writes, about
"revealing the latent world poised behind the manifest world and
discovering the relations between them" then my writing is all about
philosophy. I'm really interested in trying to articulate deep links into
our human situation, which is why my work is so formally experimental.
4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American
writers? Why?
I practice translation as an act of writing, and
so try and conceptualize my reading practice through as many traditions,
perspectives, and frames of reference as I can. Sony Labou Tansi, Emmanuel
Hocquard, and Sophie Calle are important to me, as are Julio Cortázar,
Samuel Delaney, Jean Toomer, and Teresa Hak Kyung Cha. I put these writers
up as "constellations" that I look to for courage and guidance
when I'm feeling that my work is too "out there."
5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important
is it to your writing?
Poetry is important to my writing as an art of
correspondence... in other words, I read the work of my friends and people
who send me their poems in the mail. I'm really slow at reading though,
so I don't devour books like I used to. Of late, I haven't been buying
poetry because my house is too small and the poetry books I do have already
take up an enormous amount of space. But because I am a teacher of poetry,
I find that I am writing through my reading practice all the time. That
is, in the pressure to communicate the passion and urgency I feel about
poetry to students, I am a reader of what I am trying to articulate (if
that makes any sense.)
6. What is something which your peers/colleagues
may assume you've read but haven't? Why haven't you?
I'm a news junkie, but I haven't read The Anti-Capitalist
Reader or Dude: Where's My Country or other political books because they
make me feel guilty that I am not writing enough books and essays about
politics and that therefore I am one with the war mongers. I would think
this might surprise my colleagues, just because I am very interested in
the zone where politics and poetry share energies.
7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven
year old?
What is a spoonrocket?
What is a spoolman?
How many words can you think of that rhyme with ug?
Who lives down under?
Complete this sentence: A penny saved is ________.
8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so,
how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?
I believe in a role for myself, and I am a poet.
The role I believe in for myself is that I maintain awareness, integrity,
sweetness (when deserved) and an eye for injustice. And try to articulate
/ speak out / keep the faith.
9. Word associations (the first word which comes
to mind; be honest):
Lemon**mist
Chiseled**snow
I**intensity
Of**brokenness
Form**morgue
10. What is the relationship between the text and
the body in your writing?
My body is disconnected from my mind -- sometimes
my body speaks way too loudly, and sometimes my mind moves way too slow.
I can't seem to reconcile the two except in performance... the poem's
rhythm hits me, and I'll start moving. I've always thought of measure
in poetry as the gesture of the body's own rhythms that are channeled
to come through the language as it is being written. The answer to that
question, for me, is the connection between poetry and music.
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