A Conversation with Matthew Rohrer

Ernest Hilbert

Winter 2004-05

Can you say a few words about your childhood? Where did you grow up, go to school?

I was born in Ann Arbor in 1970. I grew up in Oklahoma, in Norman, which is where the university is, but I was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan and really considered that my home, my spiritual home. My parents and I led a life of constant rebellion and denial about Oklahoma, which truly was a lame place. It was pleasant, and we had wonderful friends there, but it was lame and embodied our country’s fear of success and consequent aggressive mediocrity, and it was referred to as “the buckle of the bible belt” as well.

I went to a Catholic school for two years in Ann Arbor, first and second grade, before we moved to Oklahoma. It was relatively liberal for a Catholic school—no nuns, and it was Ann Arbor in the mid 1970s. But even as a kid I thought it was kind of ridiculous. I got in trouble for mocking the priests a few times, which, as a first grader, I wasn’t even really aware of—I was a painfully well-behaved kid so this wasn’t malicious. It was just too easy. Apparently during my interview with the priest for my first communion I answered their questions about church symbolism so well that they were still talking about it to my uncle who became a priest fifteen years later.

In Oklahoma I attended public schools, which were totally fine. I resisted being in Oklahoma though until the day I left at age 18, and I think this both helped and hindered my growth as a human being and citizen. It’s always nice to have something to resist and against which to identify yourself. But it’s also, I think, vaguely pathological to fight something like where you live for ten years.

I went back to Ann Arbor for college, and I studied English and Creative Writing. I had a wonderful teacher and mentor, Ken Mikolowski, who introduced me to poets like Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Ron Padgett, and Frank O’Hara. His classes were very aggressively designed to offer his students an alternative to studying Tennyson and Walter Savage Landor. I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop right after graduating from Michigan, and was surprised and startled to learn that Berrigan and O’Hara and Notley were not the Western Canon. I only met one other workshopper who even liked them while I was there.

Did you read much when you were a child?

I read all the time. I read fairly early, before first grade, and the two books I remember reading first were a novelization of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and a novelization of Star Wars, which included a scene with Jabba The Hutt, unlike the movie. I became interested in Science Fiction early on, not all of it, but what I considered, in my young mind, to be Classy Science Fiction. This included Ray Bradbury (though it wouldn’t now), Arthur C. Clarke and one or two Philip K. Dick books, which I obviously was not getting in the way he intended. I also read the Lord of the Rings trilogy twice before fifth grade, and the Narnia books. I remember my parents read the Lord of the Rings—it seemed like a national event in Ann Arbor in the 1970s—everyone was reading it. My mother had a light blue shirt that said Frodo Lives! When I was eleven I wrote a fan letter to Ray Bradbury, and he sent me a reply, which I still have. It meant a lot to me. It’s in a frame, next to my letter from the novelist and memoirist George MacDonald Fraser.

Your early reading was primarily in science fiction and fantasy, which is not at all unusual, at least here in the United States. Did this particular introduction to the world of books have any lasting influence on later reading habits or on your own writing? Do you still read science fiction or fantasy? How about the Flashman series?

I don’t still read science fiction or fantasy, though I have read the Harry Potter books, and I do read Philip K. Dick. He is, in fact, my favorite prose author. And it’s kind of a joke that he’s still considered a science fiction author. I think his books are amazingly well written, and his mind is enormous. I think the Harry Potter books are really fun, and Rowling’s sense of plot and character is great. I know people are down on her, but there’s no denying the swiftness and economy of her plotting, and the adroitness of her characterizations. The Flashman books are some of my favorites too, I suppose for the very same reasons. As a poet I’m not much interested in plot or character, obviously, but I really look for it in fiction. Not just plot as in what-happens-next, but really intelligently worked out ways of making action seem real. The Flashman books have the added benefit of being raunchy and also political criticism.

Did you read poetry before going to college?

Like nearly every American child, I did not read poetry and I was not asked to read poetry. My parents did have a tape of John Ciardi reading his children’s poetry, though, and I loved that. I listened to it all the time.

Do you recall the first poem that meant a great deal to you?

In high school, my junior year English class studied some poems and I had to do a collaborative presentation to the class on the poem ‘The Garden’ by Ezra Pound. It was the first moment that I ever “got” a poem, and also the first time I got to leave school during the day with another kid (we all drove to school in Oklahoma) and go to the diner to talk about a poem. There was also a beautiful greenish Chinese tapestry reproduced on the facing page in our textbook, and I connected with that too, so that is inseparable in my mind. But I still have the poem memorized, and I remember that as being important to me. This could be because the poem is extremely clear, and only has one image in it, which is also its first two lines: “like a skein of loose silk / blown against a wall”. I also worked on the school literary magazine with this same kid, Nick, and he and I became friends, and he introduced me to my favorite songwriter, Robyn Hitchcock. Robyn Hitchcock’s lyrics are fairly poetic, or at least more so than most of what was available to me in high school in Oklahoma, and that was also a big influence. Hitchcock’s songs had a ferociously humorous freedom to them that was liberating and absolutely new to me at the time.

When did you first get the idea that you would like to be a poet?

The first time it even seemed possible to be a poet was when I met Lance Henson, a Native American poet who came to visit my high school writing class. He was very gruff, but he was the real deal, and he was obviously living his life as a poet, which was something that honestly just hadn’t even occurred to me. I doubt it is unusual that I made the assumption that poets were, well, from a different time. Certainly no one talked about poets doing this, poets doing that. That’s probably different now. I think high school kids have been exposed to poetry as a living art in a way that I never was. The Internet I know has a lot to do with that, and probably things like the Def Poetry Jam. Even President Clinton’s having Miller Williams and Maya Angelou read at his inaugurations was something my generation didn’t have.

James Dickey read his poem ‘The Strength of Fields’ at Jimmy Carter’s televised inauguration gala in 1977, though this was with other entertainers at The Kennedy Center, not at the actual inauguration. You also remark that when you were younger you did not think of poets as being alive today. We often see this sort of attitude expressed in the popular press, as when someone refers to Eminem as a “modern day” poet, as if to say a “modern day knight” or a modern day “pirate,” something from another era altogether. Where does this come from?

That’s a very funny point about the “modern day pirate.”

Well, in truth, there are many pirates active today, particularly in and around the Java Sea. Whenever one reads about it, as with William Langewiesche’s excellent long essays in the Atlantic Monthly or his book The Outlaw Sea, the editors have to remind us that there are such things “present day pirates,” since we naturally imagine pirates from their golden age in the eighteenth century, with the eye patches and parrots and big shirts. So why do you think we see poets in the same way?

I think it’s simply that the media cannot find a way to make poetry enthralling to the public. I believe it is not that poetry is not enthralling, but just that the public has not been convinced that it is, through round-the-clock coverage. I think incontrovertible proof of this is that somehow the public has been convinced that Paris Hilton is enthralling. Or, to push it even further, that movies are enthralling. There is simply no glamour in poetry, as far as the media is concerned. And glamour, to them, means money. That’s why the Emmys, the Grammy’s, Paris Hilton, and movies are so much a part of our culture, I think. If poetry were featured regularly and unapologetically on radio and in newspapers, people would get on board. That’s what people do. They get on board. There is no underlying naturally occurring reason why people know the names of movie producers and directors. It’s just that the media talks about them all the time, because there [are is] so much glamour and money surrounding them. People would just as easily know the names of the editors of famous publishing houses if they heard them every time they turned on their TV or listened to their radio.

But I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I don’t care that poetry doesn’t make more money, and it would be stupid to even try to imagine what that would mean for poetry. I’m just pointing out why I think the media, and hence John Sixpack, is so mystified by the idea of poetry. Poetry is not a topic to be discussed seriously in terms of reviews or cultural pieces, but it is a term to be thrown around when describing someone who does something else really well: a CEO who’s impassioned appeals to the board of directors are like poetry, for instance. Or my favorite: a few years ago an NFL player was accused of shooting his wife, and they interviewed his friends who, in his defense, said he wasn’t that kind of guy, that he wrote poetry.

When one looks at the best-sellers list for poetry, it is rare that one finds much outside of Tupac tributes, sentimental poems written by children with terminal diseases, collections of love poems for Valentine’s day, Jewel, that sort of thing. When books of more serious poetry break up into this list, they are usually by someone like Franz Wright or Hal Sirowitz, two poets who are carried by Kmart and Wal-Mart. What would happen if poets started selling like novelists or even started to make TV or movie money?

Wait—Franz Wright’s books are available in Wal-Mart? Well, if that were to happen to lots of poets, and if they made TV money, or movie money, this is my prediction of what would happen: there would be exactly the same number of good poets as there are now; there would be hundreds of thousands of more bad poets than there are now because of the possible money to be made; and the public would know who Frank O’Hara was, who Anne Waldman was, and what the Poetry Project was because with lots of money swirling around the poetry world, the media would get involved and do shows about us. But I honestly believe the writing would remain more or less the same. The good writing. Although it is hard to believe how much bad and frankly uninformed stuff there is out there already, with the stakes so low.

What were your experiences with poetry as an undergraduate?

The first person I met in undergrad was my Resident Assistant, and her father is Robert Pinsky. I had never heard of him before, but when she found out I was interested in poetry she told me about him, and then my father bought me two of his books. I really wasn’t able to judge them at all. I had no mechanism for doing so, not having really read much poetry by the age of 18. At the time, it seemed cool to know the daughter of a poet. As I’m saying this I realize that I’ve inadvertently lied to people over the years, when I told them that my first poetry reading ever was Anne Waldman and Ed Sanders in Detroit. Now I realize that was my second reading. The first was a small, intimate afternoon with Robert Pinsky in a stuffy classroom on the Michigan campus. I remember he read his poem about the shirt, and that I had to fight off an intense and absurd urge to go up to the chalkboard and write “Robert Pinsky” on it, with an arrow pointing to him, for no real reason.

That is quite amusing. Have you ever felt that urge elsewhere?

I used to have to go to church when I was young, and I used to sit there in a sort of dream-state, nearly believing that I was doing what I could see myself doing: which was standing up in front of everyone during some solemn moment and boogying or just generally freaking out, which always involved flailing my arms.

You were remembering your undergraduate experiences with poetry. Please continue.

My poetry mentor and inspiration in college was Ken Mikolowski, who taught a combination workshop and lecture class on poetry. Ken unapologetically sought to teach us about the “other” poetry, and we read Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, and Ron Padgett. Our bible was the big yellow Up Late anthology edited by Andrei Codrescu. Everyone who was anyone on campus had that big yellow book with him or her at all times. It was a shock to go out into the world of poetry at large and find that most people didn’t even know whom these writers were. Or certainly didn’t respect what they did.

In my senior year, I took a senior seminar with Alice Fulton on contemporary poetry. We read ten books that had come out that year: Dien Cai Dau by Yusef Komunyakaa, which I enjoyed, then a book by Pattiann Rogers, one by Thylias Moss, a few others even more forgettable, and the selected Charles Simic. I had never read Charles Simic. I was about done with the over-wrought niceties we’d been reading all semester, and reading him was a revelation. He seemed to bridge the freedom and black humor and brevity of the poets I’d learned to love in Ken’s classes with a gigantic historic seriousness. This is what made me fall in love, later, with Tomaz Salamun [insert proper characters for publication] even more: his absolute embracing of the New York School of poetry while remaining an Eastern European historical folklorist. Simic read on campus near the end of that semester and that was it, I was hooked. I definitely began to mimic his style after that, and it’s no shock to anyone who’s read my early poems that he was a big influence.

When did you publish your first poem? What was it, and what magazine?

I didn’t really understand anything about submitting poems when I first did it, which was in graduate school. I think this would definitely not be the case with most MFA students today. I say that because I have this feeling that MFA students are extremely savvy about the business side of the poetry world now, in a way that ten years ago many of us were not. I came straight from undergrad, where I had studied in a strangely removed world of “Second Generation New York School Worship.” I didn’t know anything about being a poet in the sense of having things published and “The Struggle” in general. My first year there, feeling that my classmates were up to something secretive which might involve them becoming published, I decided to try it too. I made the mistake of just sending to places without knowing what they were. I guess I was lucky, because in my first batch of submissions I got three acceptances. One was in a thing called Ajax Poetry Newsletter, and it was literally mimeographed with blue ink. It had poems by nuns and prisoners in it. My poem was on the front page. Another was in the Cream City Review, and the third one was in the Denver Quarterly. Donald Revell was the editor then and he was going to be a visiting teacher at Iowa the next semester. So I thought he’d be a great reader for me. Actually he was not a good reader for me.

Why was that? What is expected of a reader?

I guess what I mean by saying Revell was not a goodreader for me is just that ultimately he and I didn’t share an aesthetic sensibility, and so his critiques of my poems were odd. His sole written critique to a poem was once a suggestion that I say “grandmother” instead of “grandma” because apparently no one says grandma. But I don’t mean to nitpick.. Another part of it was his belief that one can be political simply by enacting disjunction and such in poetry. “Toasted Susie is my ice cream” is a line by Gertrude Stein that he returned to again and again as the most politically radical thing ever written. I think that’s ridiculous, and I think it is a sign of a serious social maladjustment not to be able to make a distinction between “political” aesthetic gestures and politics in terms of human society. But this is everywhere, and I only take him to task here because he’s come up in these questions.

Is this a problem that afflicts most American poets, the inability to distinguish between the politics of the page and the larger politics of finance, law, and physical power? For instance, is it possible to believe you have made a significant political act by writing a poem in the United States?

I don’t think this is a problem that affects most American poets. But there is an element that conflates the two very different concepts of “political”. They mistake the small for the large—they assume that doing radical aesthetic things to language, which make conservative readers uncomfortable, is interchangeable with doing actual political things that make actual conservatives uncomfortable. It’s not even as naïve as thinking that to write a poem is a political act in America today. That’s fine, if naïve. If you spend time writing a poem, that’s time you’re not shopping or driving around wasting gas, so in that respect it does become a small, and extremely small political act. But that isn’t what I’m talking about, because what’s worse is the assumption, and I think it is a smug and entitled assumption, that by writing a so-called avant-garde poem one is in fact committing a political act. But there are many stages on which politics is enacted, and the stage of sentence structure in poetry is not one in which real people’s lives are actually affected. The recent presidential race is a good example of how language and truth are manipulated by both sides in arguably radical and avant-garde ways, but at the end of the day the political reality is decided by action—by hacking vote-counting computers, for instance, or by making it difficult if not impossible for people in certain counties in Ohio to cast their votes. This is the politics that affects human beings, and I guess I’m only going on so much about it because it enrages me to see seemingly intelligent and good-hearted people pompously claim that their crappy soul-less poetry is actually doing something to stop the Bush administration.

You won the 1994 National Poetry Series. What was it like to win that award?

It was amazing to win that award especially on the day I did win it, because I’d just been laid off from a summer job that day at noon and returned home to think about what else I might do for money, when I got a phone call from Dan Halpern at the National Poetry Series. It was also amazing that Mary Oliver chose the book. Our writing is so different. In fact, this is embarrassing but when I got the phone call telling me I’d won, I had to go to the bookstore to check out Mary Oliver’s books, because I’d never even heard of her. I think there was a sense among my classmates that it was good, or at least funny, that I’d won, because I was not one of the poets who were really doted on by the faculty at all, and when I say faculty I guess I just mean Jorie Graham. I was definitely not given the funding or teaching positions or even time of day really that other superstar poets were. And so when I won, it was funny, I guess. People were happy. So I went out and got a margarita and a Cobb salad for lunch. But I still didn’t have a summer job.

So, how long had you been writing before that early success?

I’ve been writing since I was about eight years old. The first thing I wrote that I remember vividly was “The Cavalry vs. the French Foreign Legion,” which my parents typed up and stapled into a little chapbook. It was an exciting tale of blood and misplaced vengeance. I was in third grade. Then I steadily wrote science fiction stories based on movies and books I liked. One of them had a spaceship named Abenteuer, which is German for “adventure.” That was in fourth grade. In high school I wrote a series of stories called “Progressively Shorter Short Stories.” Someone died in each of them, in progressively truncated ways. In high school I started writing poetry too, but probably like most high school kids, I hadn’t really read poetry. As I mentioned, I’d read a poem by Pound (‘The Garden’) and that was about it. But a girl I liked was reading Anne Sexton and writing poems, and I started doing it too in order to have something to talk to her about. The ploy never worked, but we’re still friends and we still talk about poems.

W.W. Norton published your first book. Who was your editor there?

Carol Houck-Smith.

She saw your first book through press, Hummock in the Malookas, which appeared in 1995. What was your relationship like with Carol Houck-Smith when working on this book?

My relationship with her was fine. She seemed to like the poems and was very supportive of me. I was a little surprised because the other contemporary poets Norton publishes are lame, and her favorite poet of all time is Stanley Kunitz, whose poems are about as exciting as riding an escalator. She did sit me down and suggest some edits on the manuscript, which took me by surprise. But her suggestions were benign for the most part, and the ones I didn’t agree to she let slide. I think the overall sense was that, since this was a prize book chosen by someone outside Norton, it was unnecessary for anyone at Norton to like it. I was lucky that she actually did.

Can you say a few words about the title of the book?

Well, the title was one I’d had with me since 1989 when I took a course at Michigan called Evolution and Extinction. It was probably my favorite class, and I still remember more from that class than from all the others combined. But the thing I remember most is that the teacher, who spoke very quickly, once said something about finding a fossil “in a hummock in the Moluccas”. But I had never heard of the Moluccas and so I just heard it as a really rich-sounding, kind of hilarious phrase, and I wrote it down phonetically as “a hummock in the malookas.” The phrase stuck with me, and I kept writing it on the title page of my various notebooks, until I wrote the poem with that title, and I thought to myself: this is clearly the title for the book! And I guess it did catch people’s eyes. But what’s funny is that absolutely every single one of my teachers at Iowa strongly urged me to change the title, because it was too goofy.

What happened with the second book, Satellite? Did Norton display any interest in it?

No. That’s where we had our little problem. But the truth is, looking back at it from this comfortable distance; I know that Satellite as it was finally published by Verse is a far superior book to the Satellite I gave Norton. I had two more years to work on it, so it shouldn’t be any surprise. But I was just confused and kind of pissed off about how Norton dealt with it. Ultimately though, they wouldn’t have liked the way it turned out, and that’s how I know they were wrong for me, because I’m really proud of Satellite. I have a satellite tattoo. I’m really proud of it and Norton hated the poems in it. They wanted them to be more personal or “real” I think was one of the terms they used. But like I said, I don’t want to dwell too much on it because Verse did a beautiful job with it.

Did Norton attempt to change individual poems line by line or did they restrict their comments to general assessments of the book’s content?

Well, both. I sat with Carol for hours after work, literally hours, going line by line over poems. She wanted everything made ridiculously clear. There were some poems that I remember clearly her only comment on them, written at the bottom, was: “so?” But in general the book was not direct enough. I wasn’t saying things directly enough for their taste. They wanted names, dates, and specifics. I’m not kidding. They wanted me to read Donald Hall’s latest book and be more like him, so that readers would know about my personal life.

Could this be viewed in terms of changing attitudes in American poetry? Do you feel you are part of a generation of writers who are less likely to write that personalized kind of poetry, or is it simply that Norton’s editors had very explicit terms in mind when deciding to publish a book of poetry?

I do think there is more of a trend now in my generation to write poems that are lyrical and emotional without relying so much on the explicit domestic details that someone like Donald Hall or Galway Kinnell or Sharon Olds employs. But having said that, I wouldn’t want to herald a new era of salaciousness-free poetry. I think this kind of personal revelation, no matter how unnecessary or embarrassing, is always going to be something that attracts people to poetry. I know there are people younger than me out there writing these very drippy, confessional things. I imagine you could sit in on any of the graduate workshops at NYU and learn a lot about the modern confessional poem—probably a lot more than you’d want to know.

I guess one of the things that excites me about poetry in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is that it keeps opening up, it keeps folding in older traditions with newer concerns and bringing forth exciting new forms of poetry—and it does all this without really killing off any of those old forms. People are still writing in all those forms that some of us consider outmoded or passé now. The New Formalists are a perfect example. They’re writing in forms that people three or four generations ago thought were already passé.

How does a small, independent publisher like Verse Press differ from a big 5^th Avenue publisher like W.W. Norton, pros and cons?

Being published by Norton was great, but mostly because of the name recognition. It really helped my parents deal with my situation better; to know that someone who had published other books they’d read would publish their son. Not that they haven’t always been amazingly supportive, but it certainly helps to be able to drop a name like that. And then Norton’s publicity people got me an interview on NPR’s Weekend Edition, which was great and which directly led to three high school students writing English papers on my book.

Having won one of the most prestigious awards for young poets, what are your feelings about poetry contests in the US?

They’re one of the only ways new voices in poetry get published—even by the big houses. Penguin is basically only publishing new poets who win the National Poetry Series, for instance.

Should it be the only way that new poetry is published?

No, and it isn’t the only way. It’s just the main way for small presses to fund the publication of new books, and sadly, the same is true for the big presses. They’ve moved away from the idea of publishing best sellers to fund their literary books, and realized that if all their books were best sellers, they’d make more money. But there are presses out there who are able to publish new work without using contests—Coffee House and Graywolf come to mind but there are others obviously. I think they do it by being good at choosing what they’re going to publish. You can’t screw around if a University or some big source of money does not back you.

W.S. Merwin and Richard Wilbur are notable for the ambitious amount of translations they have undertaken. Some poets, like Dana Gioia, hold public posts and publish numerous collections of observational criticism and essays. Others, like Daniel Halpern, devote great energies to publishing and editing poetry. Outside of simply writing poetry, does the poet have a larger role in both the republic of letters, so to speak, and in society at large?

I think a poet’s only job is to write really great poems. Other things are secondary, and I think oftentimes they are psychologically transparent attempts to turn oneself into something bigger. Being a poet isn’t really a very big or important thing, and certainly society doesn’t have much use for a poet. But instead of feeling inadequate about this, and trying to do something vaguely poetry-related to puff oneself up, I think the best thing to do is to just keep writing the best poems one can.

Does a poet have any duty to help distribute or promote poetry? In other words, what, if anything, does a poet owe back to poetry? Is poetry larger than those who write it or is it merely an extension of their personalities?

That’s a hard question to answer. I do think poetry is larger than those who write it, but I don’t think poets owe anything back to poetry. I think it’s no different from life—people are all alive, but they don’t owe anything back to the concept of life, or even to the reality of its continuation. If people can help popularize poetry, that’s probably good. But I think it’s a slippery slope if one begins to feel that one has a duty to promote the idea of poetry. Where does that lead one? Away from one’s own poetry, from my experience. Everyone I’ve ever met who has a lot of energy to spend promoting the idea of poetry or poetry’s position in society seems to do so because they have a lot of energy that they’re not spending on their own writing. If poets owe poetry anything, it must be to just write the best poems they can.

Are there any literary critics or theorists you enjoy reading or have found helpful as a writer?

No, I don’t enjoy reading any critics really, and theorists are the last people I would read. And I’ve read plenty, I’ve taken graduate classes, I’ve taken undergraduate classes, honors classes, Christ, what a nightmare. I’d be terrified to meet someone whose work is consciously influenced by literary theory. They’d be terrifying to behold.

Who do you think is going to be remembered as the most notable younger American poet of the 1990s?

There will never be any consensus, anywhere, ever again unless the world blows up and we can all agree it is gone. But if you ask me this years from now I will say it was Joshua Beckman, because I believe he balances good writing with absolute and honest humanity. And I don’t believe anyone who tells me that an artist from any era was any good if that artist exhibits technical skill but zero human feeling. But ask someone else and they’ll tell you something else.

If you could pick four 20th-century poets to teach in a course on English-language poetry, whom would you pick?

Wallace Stevens, Ted Berrigan, Tomaz Salamun, and John Yau.

No women?

Well, I’d teach C.D. Wright or Alice Notley or early Leslie Scalapino also. And dump Salamun, because I wouldn’t really know what to say about him besides that he’s astounding.

You were at one time the acting managing director of the Poetry Society of America. Can you talk a bit about that?

I was acting managing director only for a few weeks while they were looking for a replacement for Caroline Crumpacker. But I did work there for almost two years, as the director of the Poetry in Motion program. In many ways the PSA was a dream job for someone like me, but it got to be too much. It was ultimately just a little charity project for rich people, and I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but rich people are awful, simply awful. Poetry in Motion itself was one of those classic good ideas that were ruined by meddling and nonsense. The MTA [Metropolitan Transportation Authority] in New York City co-founded the program with The PSA, and Barnes and Noble funded it. But the bureaucracy at the MTA was intense, as you can imagine. They have two million riders a day, every day. So there were all sorts of lame legal wranglings going on between the MTA and the PSA over who “owned” the idea. And Barnes and Noble kept increasing the size of its logo on the posters until it was basically larger than the poems. The PSA started up similar programs in over ten other cities around the country, which were actually all much better than New York City’s. In those cities, the PSA working in collaboration with local organizers got to choose the poems, and they focused on getting a certain percentage of them to be from local poets. In New York, the MTA had final absolute say over all the poems and they decided, against all logic, that the poems could only be about eight lines long. So you got unsatisfying segments of good poems. But this was all a part of why working at the PSA was bad for me. It was almost like being a poet, but it was an ugly uncreative side to it. It’s probably better for people who really love poetry to do it themselves, and work at a flower shop for money.

Was there pressure from the giant bookseller to use poems from their shelves?

No, the pressure all came from the MTA. They’d reject poems for absolutely lame reasons. It was demoralizing because in a partnership between a poetry organization and a transportation authority, one would assume that the decisions on which poems to put up would be left to the poetry organization.

What poems were rejected, and why?

Well, the MTA rejected Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’, which would be a perfect poem for this program: it is very short, and it is about a subway station. The problem is, at least according to the MTA, that Pound was a fascist and anti-Semite. And that is true, and it is despicable, and makes it very hard to read his poems. The whole problem with the Pound poem just underlined the folly of the whole public art situation for me; it all seems like a good idea until somebody gets sued. The worst example of this was in the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts. The Pioneer Valley Transportation Authority pulled, at the last minute, after all the posters had been printed, Gerald Stern’s ‘Cow Worship’ because, according to the astute literary minds at the PVTA, it would offend people who did not worship cows.

You were also the events director at the Academy of American Poetry?

Yes, but mostly my job there was coordinating National Poetry Month, but I did have to direct some events. It was the worst job I’ve ever had.

What was so awful about it?

What was awful about my job was organizing events that had to please wealthy people. Wealthy people are hard to please, and they demand ridiculous and illogical things be done for them. And I learned that I have no tolerance for that.

Can you remember any particularly aggravating occasions?

It was just a bad situation and I got a good excuse to leave—I was invited to participate in two international poetry gatherings in Slovenia, and to do so I had to quit my job. Everyone was more than willing to see that happen. The best part of that was that I was interviewed on national Slovenian television, and when I mentioned that I’d quit my job to come to Slovenia, I think that made me something of a hero there. That’s the thing about Slovenia—on national television they actually talk to poets. Some of the other poets there were featured in Slovenia’s Glamour magazine—including Matthew Zapruder and Joshua Beckman, two poets who have never before been associated with the word “glamour.”

Did you make any valuable contacts at these jobs? Is there a bright side to such jobs?

I guess there might be a bright side to jobs like this if you don’t burn your bridges. But I burned all my bridges. The funny thing is, it’s actually come back to haunt me in a slight way. The review of my second book, Satellite, in Publishers Weekly was dismissive and dumb if you ask me; especially the part where it cattily mentioned that I’d worked at those places and contemptuously said that that should help booksellers with the book. I think, if anything, working in those places is a slight liability. People see them as vaguely corrupt, somehow.

What is your philosophy regarding arts institutions? What would happen to the art—be it dance, poetry, music—if the institutions suddenly disappeared?

The institutions are necessary. The PSA and the Academy do good things for poetry—Poetry In Motion in the buses and trains is better than advertising. And National Poetry Month, love it or hate it, has definitely raised the public’s awareness of poetry. When you ask about my philosophy on this issue, I think that begins to get into the realm of politics. I do not believe in the market economy. I do not believe that all things must be put to the marketing test, and if they are popular enough to make money they survive, and if they do not make money, they disappear. This was essentially the government’s argument during the 1980s with the NEA. But really, except for food, all the best, most worthwhile things in life fall outside the confines of the vulgar market. Well, food and recorded music and books. And drugs. And liquor. I guess I just mean that art, and it’s production, and it’s continuation, really aren’t the same as tampons and it seems to me that that concept shouldn’t be that hard to understand. Central Park doesn’t really make money either, but that doesn’t mean that we should sell it and build fast food restaurants on it. Besides, the whole spurious market value argument breaks down if you start holding up the military to these same standards. How many weapons systems boondoggle things would be in place if they actually had to perform well and pay for themselves? And that is my philosophy.

Do these jobs, coupled with your other editorial positions, make you an insider, by some people’s standards? And if so, is that a bad thing? Is literary success always something of an inside job, so to speak?

That’s what Publishers Weekly said. But the answer to your question is yes and no. No, writers do not have to be insiders to have success. However, once a writer does attain some success, it just happens that they become, to some degree, insiders. You begin to meet people. You have your work published alongside other people’s work. You immerse yourself in the world of writing in a much more serious way than you did before you had any success. To hold yourself outside that reality is disingenuous.

Do you consider yourself a New York poet?

No. I’ve lived here longer than anywhere else in my life, but I don’t think that makes me a “New York” poet. The fact is I think most of the poems I’ve written while living here are about trees. I always cringe when I hear about people referring to themselves as a regional poet or a Western Poet or whatever. Who are these people? Before they even sit down to write they’ve severely limited themselves.

Let’s talk a little bit about your extempore collaborations with Joshua Beckman. These collaborations resulted in the popular book Nice Hat, Thanks and the CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. How does this work?

Briefly, Joshua and I had been hanging out recording back-and-forth improvised collaborations and having a lot of fun doing it, but not thinking at all of anything beyond the fun of the process of getting together and taking walks through different parts of the city, recording these spontaneous poems. In July of 2002 he had to give a reading at Bar Reis in Brooklyn and we decided that we would do our collaborative thing there, live, right in front of everyone. It seemed crazy, and I hadn’t been nervous before a reading in years, so it was strange to be so nervous. But there we were, about to perform poems we hadn’t written yet, on topics the audience was going to provide. Our publisher was there and he loved it, and he told us that he would do a book of the best of the ones we transcribed, provided that we plan a huge national tour to promote it. Part of this was, of course, to promote it, but mostly it was because the performance of the pieces is really where the fun is—the book is something we think of as equivalent to a musical score. Everything’s there, but it’s the live aspect that people took to, and which drew us in, in the first place. The CD is just an extension of this idea; it’s taken from readings we did on the tour to support the book.

Why did you choose to do it with Beckman?

It wasn’t a choice. He and I are friends and we were spending lots of time together. And separately we wrote poems, which is usually considered a solitary act. So we thought maybe we could bring together our love of writing with our love of just hanging out. Neither of us had an idea to start a collaborative project, so it wasn’t a matter of finding the right partner or anything. It really just happened slowly, and was never taken seriously as anything other than a diversion until our first public performance of it, which really excited lots of people who were there, especially the bartenders. I think if you can get the bartenders to come up to you after a reading and tell you they loved it, and have them buy your drinks for the rest of the night, then that really means you’ve done something extraordinary.

Did writing games such as Exquisite Corpse, used by the Surrealists, influence you?

Yes, eventually as a way of generating new approaches to our project, but we wanted to write “real” poems, so we were thinking less of these writing games and more about historical collaborations, like the amazing ones between Kenneth Koch and Allen Ginsberg at St. Mark’s, or between haiku and renga poets in Japan.

Can you talk a little bit about your national tour for that book? I saw you and Joshua at Molly’s bookstore in the Italian Market in Philadelphia, and I understand you had already flipped one car by that point. What are your road dog stories for that poetry tour?

Yes, we flipped my friend Jack’s pickup truck within two hours of setting off on the tour. It was a setback. That night at the reading at Harvard we were in shock basically, but gave an inspired reading. Several of the pieces from that reading are on the CD. Then Joshua’s step mom let us use her car and we continued with the tour, which was a little less than a month long, and we read in twenty-five states. We flew to the west coast and rented a car, driving up from San Francisco to Seattle. We also read up and down the East Coast, and we drove into the heartland and read in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, Virginia and the nation’s capital. It was an amazing experience. We read everywhere, from people’s living rooms to brunches to Harvard to bookstores and a really crappy dive bar in Nashville where a punk band called Anti Griffith opened for us. We showed up at that bar with ten nurses, which, let me tell you, is a really excellent way to show up at a dive bar. We kept a log of the trip on Joshua’s laptop and every time we could we emailed it to Verse Press—they have it up on their website still: <www.versepress.org>.

Matthew Zapruder has remarked that your poems and collaborations with Beckman have helped him through some dark times. How do you feel about such a high compliment?

Well, that’s probably one of the best things you can hear about your own work. “You have just won two million dollars” is another thing that would be good to hear about your work, but it wouldn’t really tell you anything about what you’ve written. I mean, the poems I love and that have gotten me through dark times have done so because they feel like they have something very human at their core. I’m interested in all kinds of poetry, but the poetry that makes me feel like it is all worth it is poetry that, no matter what its surface, has, as its underlying principle, connection with other humans. This is one of the reasons I love to read ancient poetry in translation. Despite all the linguistic and cultural obstacles in the way, it is possible to connect very meaningfully with a really ancient poem. So if Matthew or anyone else thinks my poetry does this for him, I feel like I’m on the right track.

Your most recent book is A Green Light. Can you comment on that title?

I think the light that filters through leaves is beautiful.

How does that relate to the poems in the book?

In the poem that includes that phrase, “Ancient Chinese War”, it functions as something eternal and vaster than human influence. “Even you, whom I revere / you are only one blade of grass / and a green light shows through.” Many of the poems in the book refer to nature in a way that is somewhere between Buddhism and The Force. The green light of plants and leaves is the color I saw coming through the whole book.

What are your feelings on form in poetry? When writing in free verse, do you recognize a loosely modulated sequence of feet in a line, as T.S. Eliot did in his dilating pentameters of The Four Quartets, or do you focus more on the rhythms as entirely exclusive from metrics?

My feelings on form in my poetry are mixed. I can’t lie and say I pay attention to the metrics unless I’m writing in iambic pentameter, which I do frequently.

Do you write in fixed forms?

The most common formal element I employ is, as I think I mentioned before, syllabics—specifically, seven syllables per line works very well for me for some occult reason. I like this because it is more or less invisible to the reader, but functions for me as form is supposed to function: as a system of hurdles and rules which propel the writing.

Timothy Steele points out in his book Missing Measures that every poetic revolution in history, from the ancient Greeks to the English Romantics, involved shucking off outdated diction while refreshing poetry with everyday language. In every case, meter and rhyme were retained, but were redirected to create a more “natural” or at least less “artificial” sound. It is only with the modernist movement at the start of the 20th century—with figures in English language literature such as Ford Madox Ford, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and W.C. Williams, following the lead of French writers—that meter itself was seen as archaic and limiting. Historically speaking, literary critics from imperial Rome to imperial London discussed ways in which the use of metrics in poetry could beneficially rejuvenate prose. It is only very recently that poets have been told to learn from prose. This may derive from the ascendance of nineteenth-century novels such as those of Henry James and Flaubert, but it has led to the great majority of American poets ignoring meter and rhyme altogether. Considering all of this, what are the stakes today when it comes to form in poetry?

As for the Timothy Steele quote, and the stakes when it comes to form in poetry: I think poetry is best when it is propelled by the excitement felt by its practitioners, not when it is behaving itself and politely fitting in. For a couple hundred years formal metrics have not been necessary, and poetry has pushed extremely far in every direction, going so far as to, in some cases, not even include actual words. I think this is to be expected—poetry was given its freedom and, like an American student in Europe on a study abroad program, it went hog-wild, indulging in every excess. Maybe that’s what it looks like to us now. But poetry will not stop being written. And what emerges in the next hundred years will, at that point, be an obvious descendant of some experimental take on form that we’re seeing right now. This seems so obvious to me that I feel silly saying it, but it’s analogous to the situation in the visual arts. No one could have said to artists in general at the end of the Renaissance “Ok, that was great. Now just keep doing that, and whatever you do, don’t look any closer at your medium or think about what it means to do what you’re doing. Just keep painting the kings, baby.” Just as no one can possibly wish that poets had just found the sonnet and stuck with that forever. People want to know more and keep pushing. That’s why we have this stupid space program. Really, nothing except Tang has come of space exploration, and all of that money could have been used to help people here on Earth. But you can’t say to humanity “That’s it. Just stop striving now.”

There seems to be a Slovenian axis running through several writers of our generation. Andrew Zawacki published the book Afterwards, an anthology of Slovenian writing since the Second World War, and Matthew Zapruder published a poem in the last issue of this magazine called ‘Sleds in a Supermarket’, which was about an all-night grocery in Ljubljana. You mentioned that you have visited Slovenia. Can you talk a bit about that?

Slovenia is where we are all going to move when America officially becomes the fascist theocracy that it basically is already. Slovenian people are the most beautiful people I have ever seen. The reason we all have that connection to Slovenia is because of Tomaz Salamun, who is our hero. And through him we have met legions of amazing young Slovenian poets. Poetry has a huge place in public life there, so it’s fun to visit a country like that. You feel, briefly, important.

How do drugs and experiences with them figure in your poetry and your life in general?

Anyone who thinks about it logically has to realize that there is no reason why marijuana should be illegal. Anyone who’s against it has some other uptight agenda going on that they can’t think beyond. I enjoy drugs, and try to use them when I can so they don’t feel lonely. People say a lot of mean and untrue things about them and that must make them sad. And I think if you have an open and loving relationship like this with drugs you realize that they are nothing special. They won’t make your poems better, or your life better. They will make music better. But I don’t write my poems with drugs, I use a pen and a notebook.

One of your most popular poems is ‘M.K. Ultra’. Can you say a few words about this choice of title?

I can’t imagine this poem being popular to anyone. In fact, I’ve stopped reading it aloud because I think it just doesn’t work as well aloud. M.K. Ultra as a title was, perhaps, a stretch, but the way I approached that poem was with the title in mind first, and the tone that that lent to the poem I wanted to write. Having that tone in mind helped me put together the poem. The title is the name of a secret CIA operation that attempted to use LSD to control minds: Mind Kontrol Ultra. There was another operation that used LSD and hookers called M.K. Naomi. They are real, by the way, you can find all the information you want on them through the Freedom of Information Act, or, you know, the Internet. But there is an obviously heavy political element to this program that I wanted to steer clear of—critiquing the government’s fucked up policies is better done in a newspaper. All I wanted was the general spooky feeling. I cut up, literally, lines from poems that were nearly ten years old and laid them out on my carpet and composed new ones out of them, all while listening to Leon Redbone. So really it ends up having basically nothing to do with the CIA program. But like I said, I needed something to get me into the poem, some way to structure these lines, and having that in the back of my head helped. Plus, I kind of thought I was screwing with these old lines of poems, putting them in situations against their will, in the same way that the CIA did this to unsuspecting American citizens.

When a young Stephen Spender met T.S. Eliot, Eliot, who had published several of Spender’s poems in the Criterion, asked him what he wanted to do with his life. Spender said he wanted to write more poems, to which Eliot responded encouragingly. Spender went on to say that he wanted to “be” a poet. Eliot said he didn’t understand what Spender meant when he said, “be a poet.” We know that it is impossible to make an actual living on the sales of poems, and this has probably been true, with few exceptions, for well over a century. Can you say a few words about the financial life of a poet, what a young writer might expect when setting out to “be a poet?”

Joshua Beckman was just in Seattle and went out to some bars by himself and, because he’s an affable guy, he started talking with various people. And he told me that several of them, when they found out he was a poet, sort of broke down and began making excuses for why they’d stopped writing, or why they were working for The Man. And that’s happened to me too. It’s very odd. Someone finds out you’re a poet and they begin making excuses for why they stopped doing something creative with their life. It’s awkward; what am I supposed to say, that it’s OK with me? Implicit in all of this is that they had to stop doing what they loved in order to move on, or make money or something. And yes, it’s true. There probably hasn’t been a money career in poetry in a couple hundred years or more. So you have to do something else. It’s not like I’ve been sitting on a plush velvet cushion for the past ten years writing poems. I wrote all of my second, third, and fourth books while working full time, more than full time. I was working full time jobs, either publishing or temping, and working on Fence on weekends and in the evening to some degree and then playing in a band. And writing poems. You just have to keep writing poems, that’s really all there is to making a career in poetry. The list of famous poets who have had other careers goes on and on and we all know the names—[Wallace] Stevens, [Joseph] Ceravolo (though he’s not famous), [William Carlos] Williams. People who stop writing because they have to work full time are actually people who just stopped writing and work full time.

How important is humor in poetry? Why is it traditionally accorded a subordinate role to the seriousness of tragedy and experimentalism?

It’s important enough that when I recently wrote an essay for the Academy of American Poet’s web almanac on this very topic I said that people who can’t understand that humor can serve in the interest of great artistic and social seriousness are apes, shaved apes who’ve been taught to read.

What are your influences in comic poetry?

I think there’s no doubt that my major influence in comic poetry is the absurd and ironic strain that runs through all literature from the beginning of time. The Surrealists, sure, they really popularized it, them and the Dadaists. But things like Rabelais, the wonderful Sufi and dervish tales, folk tales from all cultures, trickster tales—all of these deal heavily in irony and absurdity. And I can’t get enough.

Do you have comic influences outside of poetry?

I gravitate towards humor that relies on the same things. The Simpsons, Monty Python, all the usual things, nothing surprising. But I don’t think that I would consider these influences in my writing. I certainly don’t sit down to write comic poems. And frankly, I mean, you can disagree, but I don’t think my poems have been funny since my second book, Satellite. I’m always surprised when people accuse me of writing “merely” comic poems.

Who has described you as being merely a comic poet?

Oh, it’s mostly the cowardly and self-righteous unsigned Publishers Weekly reviews that feel like they can point to a moment of levity in my work and sweepingly damn the whole book for being light or comic. The funny thing is, they said something about A Green Light that they mean to be critical but which I’m going to use as a blurb in the future. They say something like “more David Letterman than Tomaz Salamun.” It’s delicious.

Why did you move away from humor in your poetry?

To me, to write is to employ all the emotions and strategies that I’d employ in daily life. To do any less is, I think, dishonest or at least suspect.

Has an inborn sense of irony prevented many members of our generation from achieving more direct and emotionally intense kind of writing?

No, I don’t think so at all. I really don’t believe that you can’t use irony in the service of beauty, truth, or great art. Also, just off the top of my head I can think of a bunch of poets of my generation who have an inborn sense of irony but who have also written really powerfully emotional poems: Anthony McCann and Matthew Zapruder, and G.E. Patterson’s Tug especially, and many of the poems in Jeff Clark’s first book. I’m leaving dozens and dozens of great writers out.

Do you consider yourself an avant-garde writer?

No.

Is it possible to be a genuinely avant-garde writer in the United States today?

I guess I don’t even know what it would mean. The people who consider themselves “avant-garde” are certainly not avant-garde. All those Krupskaya [an avant-garde publisher] types, Steve Evans types—they’re no more avant-garde than my grandma. It doesn’t seem very avant-garde to model your aesthetic after what used to be avant-garde almost 100 years ago. Maybe avant-garde is a word like “genius”. Anyone who uses it to describe himself or herself is automatically not it.

Or maybe it’s just one of those words that can only really be applied historically. It seems to me it only makes sense in terms of a lineage. If something right now is seen, years from now, to have greatly influenced poetry in the 22nd century, then I guess you could retroactively call it avant-garde. But right now, nobody has any clue which version of the many aesthetics will have that privilege. Billy Collins might be avant-garde. We won’t know.

Surely Billy Collins is not avant-garde, largely because, whatever else he might be, he is the guard, and he represents an old guard at that. However, it brings us to an intriguing point. Has the practice of technical innovation in poetry exhausted itself at this point?

I guess that’s what I was driving at. Obviously Billy isn’t pushing any envelopes, except the ones he’s pushing through the bank window. But in terms of technical innovation as the definition of avant-garde, I think it has started to get dicey. It’s hard to get further from “regular” writing than has already happened with Dada and Language Poetry. Once the signs are cut from the signifiers, or signs themselves aren’t even employed (think of the poems with unnecessary hyphens and parentheses and stuff) then really, where else can you go? How then can breaking linguistic rules continue to be the definition of the avant-garde?

I’m going to name three magazines that publish poetry, and I would like to get your feelings on their importance and their choices.

New Yorker

The poems in the New Yorker are consistently tame. Everyone knows this, I’m not saying anything that every single poet doesn’t already know. No one who takes contemporary poetry seriously even considers the New Yorker as an outlet for poetry. What’s sad is that it is one of the few mainstream magazines that publishes poetry, and therefore many people who don’t encounter good contemporary poetry see what’s in the New Yorker and they’re baffled. I wish I could get a hold of their mailing list and send all of their subscribers a little note that says: these poems aren’t good. Intelligent and interested people who haven’t read a lot of poetry are always saying to me “I must not get poetry, because I read the poems in the New Yorker and I just don’t think they’re any good. I must be missing something.” This is sad. But not as sad as when a dog has only three legs.

Poetry

Poetry is really full of itself. What is it they say, that they have had a hand in the development of contemporary American poetry? That every important canonical poet of the 20th century has published there? That might have been true up through Wallace Stevens. Then, a long, long dry spell. A very dry spell. Poetry magazine, despite its reputation and now its millions of dollars, really hasn’t been an influential magazine in decades. No one reads Poetry to find out what’s going on or what is exciting. If you told me I had to read an issue of Poetry right now, I’d actually offer you money not to read it. I’d buy my way out of having to read it. I’d pay at least $7. And if I were stuck in an airport during a blizzard and all I had to read was Poetry, I’d start to read it. Sure. I’m human. But I wouldn’t finish it and I’d feel a low-level anger that I’d have to assuage with some kind of big pretzel.

American Poetry Review

Well, I like APR even though they’ve rejected me a couple times. I think they’re a little hit-or-miss. I guess what I mean by this is that I like a literary magazine with a real pungent powerful aesthetic principle driving it. APR seems to publish kind of all sorts of stuff, and plenty of it is good. I guess the real test is, though, do I have a subscription? I do not have a subscription. The photos are an excellent touch. In fact, I’d like to see American poetry in general return to having author photos on the front covers of books. I can think of lots of great 60s and 70s books where the front cover was just a big fat picture of the author, with the photo bleeding all the way to every edge. Heather McHugh especially comes to mind. Eleni Sikelianos gets a special award for having herself on the cover of her new Green Integer book.

What magazines do you subscribe to?

Man, I am a terrible person. I don’t subscribe to any literary magazines right now. I’ve let all of my subscriptions lapse. And I stepped down from Fence so really I’m about as supportive of literary magazines right now as Colin Powell is. The one I was most pleased to subscribe to, though, was Conduit.

Speaking of author photos on the covers of books, do you choose the artwork that appears on your books?

For A Hummock in the Malookas, they showed me the cover and I liked it, though I think that was beside the point to them at Norton. For Satellite, I had stupid ideas, which I sent to Jeff Clark and he wisely ignored them and designed a beautiful book. He would have changed it if I’d really objected but it’s beautiful. A friend of Joshua Beckman’s named Ben did Nice Hat Thanks. The poet Paul Killebrew did the drawing. I think it’s great, it’s simple and I think it actually embodies the whole project in its simplicity and in the sense that the ball, which the two boys are playing with, says “Poems” on it. Paul gave us lots of drawings, including the same scenario with different heads we could substitute for each boy. Paul also drew the picture of the two of us that’s on the audio CD. Beckman and I wrote and designed the cover of that, and Ben did the inside. Jeff Clark also did A Green Light, and I think he did an amazing job. It’s totally nuts, and I know lots of people were kind of leery of it, especially people at the distribution company who have to go into bookstores and sell it to buyers. But it has my name in huge pink letters on the cover, so I love it. That’s pretty close to having my picture on the cover. Jeff actually thought his design for Satellite was too staid and quiet for my poems, eventually, and he thought the design of A Green Light was more appropriate. The photo on the back is actually about 10 years old; Jeff took it at my apartment, or maybe his apartment, in Iowa. I’m wearing a t-shirt my sister made me—it has the cover of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America on it.

How important is reading to you? How much time do you usually spend reading and what do you read?

Reading is really important to me. I try to read all I can. If I ever have a night to myself, I lie on the couch and read. It’s hard now, though, being a stay at home dad—I only get to read a little in the afternoon when my son naps, and then a little at night. But I have to fit everything else into the night hours too, so I get to read much less than I want to. But to me, reading is the best thing I can do. When I was a freshman in college, my friend Todd and I went to DC on spring break to stay with my aunt and uncle. He had a cool cupola room and all the Kurt Vonnegut novels. We stayed in that room for about two days straight and read about nine books each. To me, that was one of my best vacations ever.

If you could have a conversation with any historical figure, whom would you choose?

I bet it would be out of control to have a little sit-down with Rumi in the desert.

What would you talk about?

I’d let him do most of the talking, but I would ask him for some wine. And then ask him what Time is.

Let’s talk a little bit about your career as an editor. You were until recently one of the two poetry editors for Fence magazine. How long had you been with them, and how did that start?

There were actually four of us: Rebecca Wolff, Caroline Crumpacker, Max Winter, and me. Rebecca and Caroline and I were founding members of Fence—we started it in 1997. It was a lot of fun, a lot of work, but mostly for Rebecca, who did almost everything and then was the lightning rod for lots of criticism. We did a lot of events early on in the life of Fence, so at first there was a lot of organizing of readings and things, including buying ice and wine and trying to get liquor companies to sponsor our events, which they actually sometimes did. Lillet was the first one, I remember. That stuff’s terrible though. Eventually my role, and Caroline’s and Max’s, was just to read the poems and have meetings where we decide on what should go in. After a few years we started doing books too, and all of us got involved in the process of reading manuscripts. It was all great and heady early on, but it was a lot of work, and we were doing this all for free, on our own time, so it started to take its toll. Eventually we’d all been doing it for a long time and I can’t speak for the others, but Caroline had a baby, my wife had a baby, Rebecca had two babies. I think we also felt like we had accomplished what we’d set out to accomplish. We should go hang a banner outside our East Village office that says MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

How is the editorial approach at Fence different from similar magazines, like Jubilat or Open City?

Well, I’m friendly with the editor of Open City and she’s said this to me, so I don’t feel bad telling you: Open City has no governing poetry aesthetic. She’s made it quite clear that she makes no claims to being a good reader or critic of poetry. I think she said she just goes on recommendations from friends. Which would explain why lots and lots of the poems in there are . . . curious. Jubilat is a good magazine but I can’t really speak to their editorial approach. You’d have to ask them. But I will say, at the risk of way overstepping the boundaries of what is true or politic to say, that Fence came first and other great magazines like Jubilat and Crowd and LIT followed. Maybe Fence just did it first, and there was a zeitgeist that everyone felt. Or maybe Fence paved the way. For one thing, I know that when LIT was starting out two of their editors came to a party at my house and told me, proudly, that they were copying Fence, right down to the trim size. Great, I said. I was drunk, but it seemed like flattery and chicanery at the same time. Fence arose because Rebecca and the rest of us saw a situation wherein poets who were not clearly in one camp or the other had few outlets to publish their work; and also, few outlets would publish poets from differing camps between their covers because things were so stratified. The thinking was: How come I like to read Jim Galvin, Tomaz Salamun, Leslie Scalapino, and C.D. Wright, but no one would ever publish a magazine that would be a home to all of them? Likewise, what about all the poets who we love who are neither language poets nor New York School poets nor New Yorker poets nor mainstream academic journal poets? Who publishes them? So we did.

You say that Fence came first? What do you mean by this? There were certainly hundreds of lit mags in the country at the time Fence debuted.

I just mean “came first” in the sense of embracing this post-genre idea, or whatever you want to call it. I don’t think I want to call it that. But the idea that a journal could be an experiment in bringing together poets who would never before have been found in the same journal.

Are you married?

Yes.

Is she also a writer?

No, she’s a museum educator. She’s the director of school and family programs at MoMA

Do you have any children?

A currently feverish little 2-year-old boy named Seamus.

Is he by any chance named after Mr. Heaney?

No, he’s not. Susie and I both have Seamuses in our families’ pasts, and it’s a name we’ve both loved for a long time. But I will admit to liking some of Seamus Heaney’s work, and I met him when I was in Ireland. I also saw his penis in a pub bathroom. Which I only mention because it reminds me that when I first moved to New York, my editor at Norton who must have felt really sorry for me, arranged for me to meet with several editors at various publishing houses. So I went to meet Galassi at FSG, even though he made it clear that he wasn’t hiring and that he didn’t have much time and that this was an informational interview only. So we’re sitting in his office and he asks me who I like, and I’ve just been reading Ted Berrigan for the millionth time so I say “Ted Berrigan” and he scowls and points to some books behind him and says “We tend to publish writers of a higher, or more literary sort than that, many Nobel Prize winners . . .” I’m paraphrasing of course but it was obnoxious. And so I said “Oh no, I like some of those guys too. I like Seamus Heaney. I saw his penis.”

Have marriage and fatherhood affected the way you write poetry?

Marriage has not affected the way I write poetry. Fatherhood has only on a superficial level; I have much less time to do it now. Especially since I’m home with him all time. I don’t even have a subway commute to myself. But on the other hand, he has a fever now and he’s still taking what is already a 3-hour nap, but instead of writing I just re-read TED, the memoir of Ted Berrigan written by Ron Padgett. I do have an idea for a poem though that I’m going to go write right now.

What is your usual compositional technique?

Well I think that’s really difficult for someone to describe or even be aware of, but I can tell you that saying “I do have an idea for a poem that I’m going to go write right now” is definitely not my compositional technique. Having an “idea” in the sense of having something to say never works for me. I want the poem I write to be like a good poem I read—I want there to be surprise and discovery. For the past several years I think my most successful poems have come from working in a series. And for those, my only ideas before sitting down to write were structural: I have a feeling that the next poems I want to write will be tall and skinny, or short and fat. Maybe I’ll come up with a syllable count for each line to make sure the structure stays as I envisioned it, plus having an arbitrary syllable structure works well for me; it’s really no different from having to write in iambic pentameter or writing a sonnet. I assume this is true for most poets, but maybe not, so I’ll just mention that poems of mine that are published represent about 1% of what I write. There’s a lot of discovery in my process, and when I say discovery, I mean really crappy false starts.

You speak here about ideas for your poems. William Carlos Williams regarded the poem as a machine made of words, and you’ll recall that when Edgar Degas complained of having so many fine ideas for poems, Stéphane Mallarmé answered that poems are made of words, not ideas. How do you respond to either of these comments? Are your poems driven more by ideas than by close surface or deliberately ambiguous use of language?

Thank you! I love that anecdote about Degas and Mallarmé, but I’ve never known who the actual characters were, and I sort of assumed it was apocryphal. But I think it is an extremely useful thing to keep in mind. I totally agree that poems ultimately succeed or fail because of their words, not their ideas. In workshops I often get poems about dying parents or some issue of social importance, and it’s hard for the students to grasp, but just because a poem is about something weighty does not make the poem itself good. My poems, when driven by ideas, are always miserable. But like I said, when I just have a structural picture in my head, it often leads me somewhere new. Having an idea is only going to lead me to that idea.

What is your attitude toward revision? Is it an important part of your writing?

It’s funny that you ask that because I used to think there was a big divide between the act of writing and the act of revising. To me, at the time, writing was only what happened when you sat down and wrote stuff down fresh, onto the blank page. Everything else you did after that was tinkering and not, technically, writing. So you can imagine that I began to get really uptight and paranoid about how little I was “writing”. I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but eventually I came to the (probably extremely obvious to everyone else) conclusion that anything you do to your poem—writing or revising or tinkering—is all writing. It used to bother me. And I think that a certain amount of guilt associated with writing is good, I think it keeps you honest. It keeps you going back to your notebook, and hopefully it keeps you feeling like you’re never done. When I started working collaboratively with Joshua Beckman, I know that my understanding of writing as a much larger process came together, because it was through that project of improvising and collaboration that I really came to understand that writing has to be about the process and not the product, or you’re sunk. It’s hard though not to think a lot about the product: the finished poem. Of course you want to have written a poem that’s good, and that’s completed. But I think as a goal it is suspect because there are so many factors that contribute to a good completed poem, and most of them are quasi-mystical, frankly, and hard to replicate. But thinking of writing as a process is what propels you as a writer and helps you continue to do new things. And I think if you’re really focused on the process, obviously you become focused on revision as a part of that.

Do you regret anything you’ve published?

Yes, a few single poems that were published in magazines and never made it to a book, just things that if I’d waited and inserted them into my hypercritical process of deciding if a poem is going in a book, wouldn’t have survived. Also a poem I wrote which was pretty mean-spirited about a person; there was really no reason to have written it, and someone wanted a poem for their magazine and I gave it to them without really having sat on it and thought about it. I regret that one. A few poems in my first book seem very childish to me now.

Are you religious? Is there a strong spiritual element to any of your poetry?

I’m not religious. But my poems do concern themselves with mystery, because there is a big Mystery out there. If I were forced at gunpoint to worship something, I guess it would be Time. Because Time is pretty fucking all-powerful and mysterious.

You are nearing what some would describe the midway point in your career. Do you have any regrets?

No, I don’t regret anything I’ve done, except those few poems I mentioned above.

What are you working on at the moment?

I just handed in a new manuscript so I’ve been revising and reworking that for the past few months. Now I’m rusty and I’m just writing a little bit here and there to try to get it back. I’ve also been reading a lot, looking for a sort of new feeling for my new poems. I just finished the selected Joanne Kyger book, which was really great and inspiring in its simplicity. I also just read Eleni Sikelianos’s Monster Lives of Boys and Girls, which made me a little envious. Now I’m re-reading Philip Whalen. Right now I’m intrigued by the loose lines these people use—so many of my recent poems, and most of the poems in the manuscript I just turned in, are short or in short sections.

Is manuscript for the book to follow A Green Light?

If it’s accepted it will be my fifth book.

Do you have a title?

Five Poems.

What are your plans for the future?

I look forward to writing different poems.

Do you see yourself working in publishing or at an arts organization again?

No, I think publishing is terrible and I’ve burned all my arts organization bridges.

What is wrong with publishing?

In general nothing is wrong with publishing, in that it is the industry which makes my favorite thing: books. But there are a lot of opportunities wasted in publishing, most of which comes from houses deciding that (or I guess being told by their stock holders that) they should be mostly concerned with making money. But probably more to the point is just that I think publishing is a terrible place for someone like me to work. Someone who likes books to the point of fetishizing them. Someone who cares if a good book is turned down in favor of a crappy book which will make more money. Also, I was once told by the president of the publishing house where I worked that if we (this was in the big weekly editorial meeting) were so interested in being readers, we should go back to graduate school, and what she wanted was employees who thought about how their books could sell. So that’s terrible, or at least that’s a terrible place for me.

Do you have any closing shots you would like to impart, words of wisdom, advice, or anger?

I just think it’s important that people recognize that the social stigma against saying “I told you so” is malignant and dangerous. How else will people learn?