POETS of 9for9

2007-08-01T13:42:00.000-04:00

9for9
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set 2 of 9

Jennifer Coleman
Shanna Compton
Maria Damon
Tom Devaney
Brett Evans
Greg Fuchs
Nada Gordon
Daniel Nester
David Trinidad

copyright © 2003
to all participating
poets upon publication

questions by
CAConrad

published by
Mooncalf Press
POBox 22521
Philadelphia, PA 19110
MooncalfPress@hotmail.com

9for9 is a collection of 9 questions for 9 poets and their answers. This is the 2nd set of 9 sets. Some of the questions came from dreams, others from waking ideas. The project was conducted through e-mail, questions arriving in Inboxes once a week, usually on friday.

If you wish to communicate with any of the poets included, please feel free to send correspondence to the e-mail address CAConrad13@aol.com, with the subject line "9for9 correspondence". I promise to forward your message to the poet you wish to connect with.

Thank you,
CAConrad
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QUESTION 1
If you were SUDDENLY the opposite sex, what name would you choose? How are your poems changed?
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THE ANSWERS:

JENNIFER COLEMAN
Lars. Or Jack, or Zach, or Huck. No: Lars. My poems would pitch an old army tent in the front yard and put on overalls and dig holes and dream of having some masterful purpose -- which is what they do now -- only they would do it more sincerely. They might have a lot more upper body strength and a higher center of gravity and love, love, love to do push-ups. My poems would hold words out near the chest, not down on the hip. I would take the poems now nested and close, and I would scatter them like seeds. And then, when the Suddenly-ness of it was over, I might find out my poems are really pretty much the same.On the other hand, I really don't *HAVE* an opposite sex-- I *AM* sex. So I might suddenly be the opposite of my sex, without body, without flirtation or engagement. A clear, sexless life -- like an amoeba. I would be an amoeba, and my name is Myxo-ogenella. And I'd sweep words up into my vacuole to form them into poems, but they'd only stay the same, only more slimy. Sigh. "Oh, Myxo-ogenella," I'd say to myself, "you have no poems. You only have sticky words in your pseudopodia." If I was Myxo-ogenella, I might say this: Midnight rain and the city street is mean. If I was Lars, I might change it to: Midnight rain, the city is pissed. Feel my finger whorl faster than the street. What means to me is divine; what is divine, means. My body won't let me down.

If I was Jen, I would say:
Midnight rain is glittering panties on a steep city. Your lips, lips. My finger whorls. In the streets cabs pass like applesauce. What means is divine what is divine. Means. We are wrapped in a climb and our bodies won't let us down.
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SHANNA COMPTON
I've thought about this before. Gender is a fundamental part of a writer's voice, no matter how much one tries to neutralize it. As much as I attempt to take myself out of my poems and speak through characters and personae instead, the characters are always some version of myself, and I suppose that's true of everybody. (Like you, Conrad, with your Frank poems.) I just find characters--or playing parts--more interesting (or less taxing, perhaps) than being myself. It relieves the pressure of self-consciousness. Tames the fear of putting oneself too much out there. And many of my characters are male. Like Anthony, a homeless writer in Brooklyn, who asks for pens, pencils, and paper as well as change in front of the Western Union, and when he's out of paper he writes on himself, his clothes, the sidewalk, in the snow, however he can. Or James, who's named after a friend of mine, but all my James does is shave in front of his bathroom mirror--ceaselessly. I think if I were a man, I'd really enjoy shaving or maintaining some complicated configuration of facial hair. Or there's another guy I play around with a lot, though I've never named him. I usually just call him "The Man in the Grocery Store." He shops as much to feel a part of the lives of the other shoppers as for necessity. He's in love with shopping for food, and the wish fulfillment that's so easy in a supermarket. He also has a crush on Yolanda, the express-lane clerk, but that's another story.

I tried the name S. Compton for awhile, thinking that the initial might lead people to assume I were male, but there's already a sci-fi poet with that name, can you believe it? So am I talking about making myself invisible in different ways? I guess it sounds like it, but that's not what I mean. It's more about neutralizing the ready answer, or something. And when I have written lyrical poems with "I" as the speaker--if that "I" is really me--I end up feeling self-indulgent. I have an alter-ego named Chevy, after my old car, who's Chicano. And one named Reagan--who writes erotica. They're both girls, though I guess those are names that could go either way.

Speaking of names, there are several Shanna Compton's out there too, and I'm writing a poem for them. One's a veterinarian (my occupation of choice as a child until Mom made me realize I'd be dealing with death on a daily basis). Then there's a stage actress who's also known as "The Original Nightshade" (I was in several plays in high school). And a vollyeball/basketball/track athlete in somplace called Crystal City (I played those sports too). And a real-estate agent in Georgia. Once on a message board after September 11, 2001, I saw a posting by a Shanna Compton who1s a native New Yorker but now lives in Austin. I'm originally from a little town near Austin, and now live here in NYC, so that was a weird coincidence too. So it does seem, with the common traits the Shanna Comptons share, that names are determinants, that they point you in a certain direction.

I guess if I were a man, more of my characters would be women. It's playing the imaginative game of becoming something other that's interesting. Or maybe I'd just write about my penis.
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MARIA DAMON
I would be Tambriel, archangel of timbral beauty, nomadic amber and textual dance. My poems become abundant, expansive, unafraid, unstoppable, oh to be the opposite sex, the sex that makes the word turn red, the sex that flashes upon the end of the golden arrow of blake's jerusalem. they lose none of their sensuality though they gain in confidence and number; my energy is a prolific niagara of viagra. There would be permission for glorious incendiaries of anger and fireworks of extravagant verbiage exploding and then drifting across the blueblack sky like what ezekiel saw.
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TOM DEVANEY
I would choose the name: Franca. My poems would continue to be written in English, but they would be written in Italian as well because the Franca I knew taught Art History in Rome and she was a passionate Renaissance and Mannerist scholar. She also rode her three-speed bike with a wicker basket and a proper straw hat all around the city. My poems would be published together in both languages. That would be my thing.
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BRETT EVANS
I was all set to appear in print as Violeta Duplain until my main man Ernie K-Doe died.

I had work, K-Doe Codas, upcoming in "The Other South," an anthology of not James Dickey Southern poetry (Univ of Alabama Press). I was looking forward to the break-in (as myself) but couldn't risk being banished from the Mother-in-Law Lounge, my favorite place to be in the city Sunday nights.

See also: Lee Ann Brown trying to videotape the goings-on there and getting rousted by Antoinette K-Doe.

[Ernie] K-Doe had been ripped raw and shackled by evil record co. fuckos once upon a time, and since had been supersuperstitious of people glomming onto his good name, plundering his thunder, etc. If he saw the anthology (1/22,000 chance?) he probably would have thought I was making beaucoup $$$ off of...POETRY.

I'd rather be Violeta and have him raging still on the big blue marble. He left the building, I morphed back into Brett - life blew pigcock for a while (and is still K Doe-bereft when I stop to think about it) and being myself if the anthology was pretty much pretty flowers for the funeral.

His funeral procession was mind-blowing: one of the craziest this city has been. The second line battery heading to St. Louis #1 cemetery on a July day lasciviously reinventing heat feels like forever: God has been soooo good to me.

So... uh, Violeta. If then. Today I would go Clelia and play guitar in my underwere [sic] and write sonnets about she-giants and I guess about my own ass iron-ons singing songs like Peaches. Whoa. [Flathand headslap.]

Can't Brett be a girl's name too? What is it with me and shortcuts?
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GREG FUCHS
Name I would choose: Neva Gremillion Saucier

Poems would be changed little. Subject matter would definately include partying, sex, and stopping the male tradition of war.
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NADA GORDON
If I were suddenly the opposite sex, my name would be Gordon. Gordon Gordon.

My poems are suddenly: sensitive, gently allusive, and abstract;
arcane and opaque of diction; investigations of "open form:"

while while// [[[pulchritudinicity]]]
crinkleplush ... saws

eggy... sackbuts...

the (either) and (and) the (or)
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DANIEL NESTER
First thought: I can now fuck myself -- by proxy at least: Daniel and Danielle Nester, together on one stage.

I have often heard people tell me to "go fuck yourself," which I always heard as "fuck myself."

The earliest known appearance of the word "fuck," according to Jesse Scheidlower and author of the great reference book The F Word, was in 1475.

My poetry would turn more aggressive, I think, as opposed to my effeminized, loose-lipped male poetry I write now, because I think one driving force of poetry, no matter how we try to drive away from our New Critical leanings, is to strike a balance, idea of order, whatever.
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DAVID TRINIDAD
Cindy?
I write poems about boy bands and G.I. Joe.
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QUESTION 2
Play the following scene out:
(A blue car pulls up beside you, they crack the tinted window)
Voice From Car: POET! WHAT SHOULD WE DO ABOUT THE WAR!?
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THE ANSWERS:

JENNIFER COLEMAN
ME: Which of the wars?
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SHANNA COMPTON
Shanna Compton: I'm sure I'd be at a loss for words if that actually happened. If a blue car pulled up next to me, I'd be likely to cross the street PDQ. As for what we should do about the war, it seems like we're all doing it and it's not helping. We're saying no. We're demanding that a country founded on democracy abide by the vote of the U. N. Security Council. We're standing in bookstores and on stages and library steps and writing and reading poems about how we feel.

Maybe I'd invite the folks in the car to the 100 Poets against the War reading we're having at Soft Skull Shortwave in a few weeks. If their windows weren't tinted.
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MARIA DAMON
boy this is a toughie. first my knees would buckle and i would swoon at being addressed as "poet." it reminds me of jack spicer's inflated "poet, be like god," as if we poets could just make the war stop, as god could, except that s/he won't because of this CRAZY LITTLE thing they call "free will" in western religion. we humans are free to screw up.

i assume the person calling to me from the car is not god, so i could ignore him/her. but what if it is. what if it's hillel's god who said do unto others, and also, if not now, when? if not you, then who? actually it was hillel himself, but as a prophet he could be said to be conveying a divine message.

so, poet, what should we do about the war?! is "we" "we poets" or "we people"?

i will assume the latter. okay, blue-car voice: do what you love, and also spread the vibe around. write if you love to write, and write to your congressman, or write a gorgeous manifesto, or write to your friends about opposition to the war. come up w/ wonderful slogans the way poets like lew welch came up with great advertizing lines: Raid Kills Bugs Dead. Poet, Do like emilie and lytle and put up posters of iraqui kids and get arrested and make sure all your friends on poetix know about it. Poet, do like brian kim stefans and start a website. Poet, do like Hilton Obenzinger and write Meditations on the situation and publish them informally on poetix and have your friends on poetix circulate them. Poet, do like all the poets who marched in New York Washington Seattle London Baghdad. Poet, do like Eliot Weinberger suggests and write prose against the war. Poet, do like Kristen Prevallet, Ammiel Alcalay and Anne Waldman and organize read-ins, teach-ins, read-outs and teach-outs. Poet, do like Mairead Byrne and Walter Lew and Pierre Joris and organize an anti-war event at the staunchly apolitical AWP. Poet, do like Katie Trumpener and start a program where universities hire visiting profs --artists, scholars, writers --from endangered places or places in which they are endangered. Poet, join a weekly vigil. Poet, do like Sam Hamill and compile an anthology to present to the first lady. Poet, send money medicine and toys to iraqui kids. And Vietnamese kids. And kids. And kids. Poet, do it all with as loving a heart as you can at any given moment. Do fun stuff to keep your spirits up. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings from suffering, including yourself.

Are there enough imperatives in the foregoing? Forgive the arrogance but the question's a tall order.

You can come up with your own beautiful action. make up a new word in the spirit of peace.

it is important to keep our spirits up in dark february in the face of this madness. most of all be very very sweet and loving to the people around you and that will create a pocket of peace with the ripple effect. and be brave and outspoken like many impetuous poets who don't like to always be sweet and nice and lovey-dovey. do whatever. we should --and i should have said at the outset how uncomfortable i am with the word "should" --do whatever is our strength and our pleasure.
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TOM DEVANEY
Blue cars don't wait for answers. From high school kids in blue cars yelling taunts, to men in blue cars shouting at and accosting women, all blue cars asking questions are get-a-way cars. Usually words are captions for images, but in this case the blue car is a caption for the question. Somehow the people in the car know I am a poet? How do they know this? They know because the way I take each step, one foot, then the next, then the next again. Poets each walk in a certain way, and as you know, and all very differently as well, which is what gives them away. Walking is not logical, which is why it's poetic. So I wouldn't say anything. I would continue to walk so this blue car would know where I stood (or had been standing) -- esp. in regards the war on Iraq (and the W.M.D. from our own Republican Guard). Walking, in a certain way,would be my answer.
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BRETT EVANS
Me: First, get the scram out of here and go buy some Clash records. Drive around for three hours blaring them with the windows down. That'll take you to 8pm, and then meet me at Pal's.

(Later that night, at Pal's Lounge) A no show? I'm waiting...
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GREG FUCHS
Greg Fuchs: (to himself: Are you a livery cab driver, a business man, a superstar, a law officer, a politician, a drug dealer, a pimp? Well you are all inside the same car. The only one with any possibility of having a drop of ethics or love of democracy, justice, and peace is the driver, you who can not speak. Maybe the superstar has ethics or love of democracy, justice, or peace but that's rare if you are the run of the mill greedy, eating disordered, selfish superstar.) You have the power to stop it, you are causing it, just stop it. Put down your guns. Stop your exploitation. Stop your racism. Stop your sexism. Stop your embezzlement. Stop getting rich by building weapons of mass destruction. Stop!
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NADA GORDON
At first this question floored me. I asked CA to ask me a different question, I couldn't face this one I felt so helpless.

But just now I realized what I would instinctively do: I would chant a Hindu chant I learned as a child -- I think it was recorded by the Radha Krishna temple singers and produced by George Harrison -- "Govinda" -- I don't know the correct words, but I'd fake it, I'd sing really loud, and if I happened to have my finger cymbals with me I'd play them.

But as a general rule of thumb, I don't tal kto strange men in cars who yell at me out their windows.
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DANIEL NESTER
Voice from Poet: The same as anyone else! The same as secretaries, bums, landowners, wannabe activitists! Run for your fucking lives! Say you're scared! Do something!
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DAVID TRINIDAD
David Trinidad (a la Faye Dunaway in _Mommie Dearest_): "You figure it out!"
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QUESTION 3
Explain how you see the internet's impact on poetry.
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THE ANSWERS:

JENNIFER COLEMAN
Ok, it's like this: A tanker dumps a ship-load of golf shoes into the ocean, sixty thousand golf shoes, and they bob around and circle back and end up in the mouths of a few fishes and otters and finally make their way to shore. And someone collects the golf shoes, and brings them to an oceanographer, and he uses them to study the ocean currents. And the golf shoes are in a way so much better than ever intended. It's Deep. Simultaneous. Wide. Instant. Many-faced. A poet once told me there was no such thing as a poem without time passing, literally, down the page. She was wrong.
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SHANNA COMPTON
The internet is a terrific resource for all writers, including poets. I realize how addicted I am to instant information--what's the title of that poem that goes , or who wrote that book that they made that movie about, or what the hell are all those sirens in Downtown Brooklyn going on about--every time I go on vacation and don't have convenient internet access. And there's so much out there: library databases, full-text downloads of classics, mp3 files of poets reading UBUweb!. And of course, there are all the great online journals like La Petite Zine, failbetter, elimae elimae, and hundreds of others.

And e-mail! The Monday Poetry Report is a great idea--a poetry webzine that comes to you! The best thing about e-mail is the freedom it seems to lend people to write. Folks who would otherwise rarely communicate in writing find themselves doing it more and more because of the pervasiveness of e-mail in the workplace and in customer service situations. I idealistically think this technology can only strengthen our appreciation for the written word. In the long run, e-mail and the internet promise to curb illiteracy. It's hard to imagine kids coming up in school now being able to sneak through without being able to read and write--so much of our essential information is spread via e-mail and the internet--instantly, quickly, efficiently. I'm off topic though.

Friends, writers and otherwise, have written me e-mail poems, which I find delightful. I love Frank O'Hara and the way he was always typing a quick letter or note off to someone and including a poem and sending it off. E-mail allows everybody to be like Frank. I imagine that Frank would really love e-mail. How terrific would that be to see his name in your inbox?
click here

I mean, look at me. I can't even type without sticking in URLs all over the place.
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MARIA DAMON
the internet has made poetry even more fun than it was. for one thing, it's easier to stay connected and create community even across distance. for another, the internet has given rise to e-poetry, which is very dynamic and multisensory, multimedia and all that --new realms of stimulation and imaginative stretching. it has also made it easier to organize stuff, be it a poetry anti-war action or simply a visit to a city or school to do a talk or a reading. it's good for introverts and homebodies, gives us a way to connect. i would never know CAConrad existed if it weren't for the net, and here i am, the center of all beauty, answering these questions! Imagine!

at the same time, i'm wary of exceptionalist claims wherever they pop up, and internet poetry and cyber theory in general make large claims for unprecedentedness, absolute newness w/o earlier cognates, etc. while, as my friend e-theorist rita raley sez, one cannot deny that digital and analog are different, one cannot posit any absolute or metaphysical difference. what does epoetry do that page poetry can't? the coordinations and/or slight dissonances of the various senses e-poetry can engage simultaneously, which in turn create a space that cannot be fully articulated through any one sense --the performativity of it, the multi-media aspects of it. i imagine there would be a way to do this live, in 3-d, or in other media, but of course the effects are different. it's like the movies versus live theatre. each one does something the other can't do.

i think the aesthetic of diffusion, be it in a diasporic, nomadic or postmodern- fragmentary-antigravitational sense, is made manifest in much e-poetry in a useful way. If there is a new aesthetic emerging, I'd hope it would afford us new ways of being sensuous and emotional. New textual erotics and sensory perceptivity. in general, characteristics i'd name for epoetry are: multimedia, "intersign," speedy, dreamy (John Cayley's work), meditative (in the sense of repetition-with-a-difference) --hypnotic sometimes (Brian Kim Stefans' The Dreamlife of Letters), sassy (as in the google poems of the flarf list, or komninos's cartoonish animations), deterritorialized (Mez and Talan Memmott), compositional in the musical sense (Jim Rosenberg's "clusters"). I think Alan Sondheim's work exemplifies the possibilities for e-poetry in many of the above aspects. mIEKAL aND's work shows how intertwined it is with organic processes of growth, decay, composting, cultivating, hybridism, adaptation, etc all the practices or processes of eco-terra-beloved-firma living. various listservs (the poetix list,flarf) have created discursive textures that enable (or disable, some might argue) further creative forms to emerge. nick piombino, for example, has written about how his involvement w/ the poetix listpost 9/11 became something life-sustaining for him --who'd a thunk it: a bunch of cantankerous, axe-grinding sectarian poets and critics as core community --well it's one of mine too. is this a chimera? compared to what? i sit here with a purring cat on my lap, looking out on the ocean and the crust of salt-ice glittering the boulders, cup of coffee w/ dregs, books piled high (malinowski, damon YEAH MOI, wieners, aND, du bois, issues of the NMU's union newspaper from 1946,latest issue of American Literature, articles from Critique of Anthropology, old diaries, and tax materials), connected and communicating with CAConrad.

i am especially grateful for the chance to have been involved with some epoetic projects myself (literature nation, eros/ion, semetrix, erosive media/rose e-missive --ALL TO BE FOUND AT JOGLARS), which might never have come about if i hadn't been online, though i am still a neanderthal when it comes to technology. the internet has made the beauties of collaboration a lived experience for me. The effect is that co-authorship is far more appealing to me these days in all my work, both "creative" and critical, because you double the energy and ideas available. I like the creativity of the people involved in e-poetry, and the excitement generated by mutual appreciation for each other's work. In terms of drawbacks, it can be expensive and one has to stay on excellent terms with one's collaborators, so it's a social exercise as well, which can present special and ultimately welcome challenges for curmudgeons like myself. I guess, in many respects both literal and metaphoric, i appreciate the "networking" aspects and challenges of the medium.

We have a chance to contribute to world peace through creating beautiful, ephemeral entities dependent on the fragile but infinitely generative and permeable world wide web of interbeing.
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TOM DEVANEY
Whether it’s poetry or anything else the internet’s impact is its ability to get your word *out and your screen *on. That’s why rumors and other reverberations flourish there. So my answer isn’t just about poetry, as you asked, though hopefully poetry isn’t just about poetry either. Another way to put it is “What is poetry’s impact on the internet?” Poets can find each other here, (hey),

_C

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_N

_R

_A

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that’s true and good. But I wonder what poetry’s impact on the internet is, if anything? In a way, we behave as if the WWW is flat –- which it both is and isn’t; though it's not round either. As it stands I think the current use of the morphology of the screen is thin. To put it simply we’re *screened-in*. Working with design and poetry in ways that explore the spacical possibilities of our *sceened-in* environments is one place to start to think about new ways to be able to see new spaces. Because of poetry’s self-reflexive nature and its concern with process -- IT, fused with design -- is most apt & ripe to engage the media and our notions of what is possible.
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BRETT EVANS
Just last night, as we were going to Port of Call, Michael Dominici asked me this about the Internet -- he's sort of returning to poetizing after some time in the pasture. I thought there was a certain eau de javu when he brought it up.

Anyway, the short of it is that I really had nothing intelligent to say about it. I did that White House press secretary thing of veering away from the question, wondering aloud instead about the whole mystery lineage of awful open-journal poetry aloud [ow!ed].

Really, I still much rather read poems off the page. I enjoy reading weblogs like DAILYKOS.COM, but poems -- there's usually not a whole lotta HTML going on there, so why on-line? I think the Net is a postage-saving way of sharing poems to be printed later. Naturally this doesn't apply to 9 x 9. It's all in the scrolling: I don't mind scrolling prose but scrolling through the line breaks leaves me cold.
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GREG FUCHS
Listserves in lieu of community make my ass tired. A trap between writing and a phone conversation.

Terrific publishing potential. Have liked East Village Web, Cross Connect, Realpoetik, among others. I haven't witnessed a poetry journal that has created a truly open source, democratic, scene like Indymedia. Brian Kim Stefans is heading that way perhaps.

Down with web logs. Don't blog me. If I wanted to hear your private ramblings I'd be your friend and drinking buddy.
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NADA GORDON
Since I am, according to an internet test of personality disorders, so narcissistic, I think I can only explain how I see the internet's impact on *my* poetry, and by extension on my life.

If it were not for the internet, I think I would still be in Tokyo, riding the Chuo line back and forth to work each day, wondering when the next big earthquake was going to hit and if Aum Shinrikyo was going to strike again.

Instead, I now ride the F train back and forth to work each day and wonder if Bush is going to go ahead with his petulant "I don't care what they say, I'm going to attack Iraq anyway" and if Al Qaeda is going to strike again.

If it were not for the internet, I don't think I would have published any of the four books I have published in the last four years, because if it were not for the internet, I would have never met my champion, muse, rescuer, and paramour Gary Sullivan who pulled me out of expatriate obscurity into the throb and glamor of New York, where I now have the pleasure of hobknobbing with writers who have been my favorites for years.

Of course this has had an impact on my poetry. Before I moved here, I asked Gary if he thought my poetry would get all cynical and one-liney like so much NYC poetry is, and he said, no way, you're way too Cali. But it turns out he was wrong. I now write really smartass sarcastic stuff. And if we look back at the chain of causality, it's all because of the internet.

Everyone I know writes Google poems of various kinds. Me too. How can we help when there is now so much language at our disposal? We barely have to rearrange it! I remember writing twenty years ago in my master's thesis (on B. Mayer) about a time in the future when all verbal messages might be considered art. I think we may be getting close to that time, thanks to... the internet.

I love it love it love it it's a vast octopus with infinite tentacles embracing engulfing consisting of and exuding our combined consciousnesses. It is without a doubt the most important invention of our time, one of the most important in human history, and it may possibly be our salvation. BUT WE HAVE TO ACT FAST.
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DANIEL NESTER
*Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus* “The mountains will be in labour,” Horace writes in “Ars Poetica,” and “a ridiculous mouse will be born.” 400 years of nouminal tyranny of movable type has been overturned! The poem is freed, hybridized, ephemeral! No more colleges! No more pages! No more text, a poem is like a machine at last (William Carlos Williams). A poem is not made up of words, in the end, it's made up of moving the furniture to make sure people know where to sit. Because of hypertext, the line break has become a skill for all of us. We are all poets now.Because of source code, we have all become close-text readers again. Because of the mouse, because of the ridiculous mountain-worked mouse, we touch poems again, as we did with animal skin, papyrus, paper, Xerox sheets, mimeos. CGA VGA flatcreen Palm Pilot = our new meaty vellum. Text is now a backlit stepchild. The poem’s godliness heckles the stars. Am I talking about the will here? Perhaps. “Cause I made 'em play it, made 'em say it/ made 'em okay it, made 'em obey it!”
LL Cool J, “Jack The Ripper”
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DAVID TRINIDAD
Oh, it's created a few more magazines . . . .

The Internet is great for some things (such as shopping and fact checking), but I’m coming to trust computers less and less, particularly in regard to the writing of poetry. And this after recently completing a three-year project that benefited from the Internet: collaborating with two other poets via email. It would have taken us forever if we’d relied on "real" mail. But I’m beginning to have an Anna May Wong-like reaction to the computer---like it’s stealing little pieces of my soul. I’m about to return to writing poems on a manual typewriter. One of my students gave me a beautiful vintage Hermes 2000 with lime green keys. It’s being cleaned.
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2007-08-01T13:41:00.000-04:00

QUESTION 4:
There's a new poetry library in Philadelphia and you are in charge of choosing the sculpture for the entrance. What is it?
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THE ANSWERS:

JENNIFER COLEMAN
Oh, hell, yeah! Finally, they picked me, me ME to be the one who is in charge of public sculpture! How wise. Oooh! I like this so much, I'm going to have it be a whole GARDEN of sculpture, a hydroponic and organic garden of sculpture, so's it all grows out of a pool. And it's going to be a sculpture that records on its face the weather and particulates and sound of Philadelphia and all that pass in and out of the library, and also it will record and play the music of all of it. Plus, it will shimmer and be see-through, and it will have smells, and the smells will be triggered by the words people say as they enter or exit the library and so it will count up the words of the people and the most-used word will trigger a puff of orange and the word used with the most esses will trigger a puff of clove, and any rhyme will trigger licorice and any repetition more than three times in a single sentence will cause a mist of orange blossom to hiss from a thin and shimmering pipe. Plus, while I'm in charge, I'll hire attendants to care for and groom the sculpture, and they'll be really excellent at talking to people and figuring out just what poet to recommend.
How's that, hah?
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SHANNA COMPTON
Oh, what a fun assignment! And a couple of possibilities spring immediately to mind. The first is a piece by Richard Humann. Maybe the resin books he makes--they're clear resin in the shape of an open, oversized dictionary, but they have these tiny black individual letters floating on various planes throughout. He cuts and punches these and floats them in one by one! These are some of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. And looking at one, you get the same sense of anticipation as you do reading a poem--that something important or gorgeous or funny is about to be revealed. Because the letters are suspended at different angles and at different heights in the resin, you find your eye moving from one to the next--each letter being as vital as each word in a poem. They're really breathtaking. I could look at them for hours. So maybe three or for of these on simple pedestals or bookstands--each with it's own light. But I'd want people to touch them--no velvet ropes!

Here's a similar project Richard did, using the same technique, called Possessions for Judgment Day--these are in the shape of gold bricks, though. He chooses the text accordingly, too. It's not just random letters in the resin--they actually would say something, if you could read them. He's also done braille sculptures--of the lyrics to Talking Heads songs! Want to see one? Then click HERE.

Or another artist who would be perfect is Roni Horn. She once did an installation project with Emily Dickinson poems--blocks each with one word from a poem placed in the corners of the room, along the walls, or free standing. I saw a photography installation of hers too, a few years ago in New Mexico. I think it was Another Water. (I have the book somewhere, but I'm at work!) She'd taken several photographs of the Thames river--nothing else in the frame, just the water, the little ripples and waves--and underneath them ran all kinds of captions. Each caption was keyed to a number on the photo above, and as you moved through the room reading the captions and studying the surface texture of the river, which was always changing, a sort of narrative began to emerge. I remember she had several poets and writers in there--Hart Crane and Virginia Woolf--maybe because they drowned themselves? Anyway it was a great thing to see and read and walking along it felt like walking along a river, and the motion my eyes made moving from the photo to the captions and back was kind of a buoying motion--so it was a physical poem, one I read with my whole body.

And I like Donald Judd so much too. I always get the idea that looking at one of his cubes, walking around it, trying to pick out the variances or dings or spots, is like reading a poem or writing one. It's a study in sameness and contrast, in attention and gaze. They're terrific.

Or maybe you and I should make mudpies, Conrad, with fortunes inside. Here's yours: Your letters are always a welcome diversion.
---------

MARIA DAMON
It would not be something you could actually see and touch, but it would be an energy field that would make all seeing and touching, smelling and sensing, tasting and hearing possible. It would be stimulating in a not-quite-palpable way, auratic rather than absolutely concrete, rainbow-hued without actually being visible, sonorous without actually being heard with the outer ear (or what the skalds call the "hear-hands"), deeply and deliciously textured without having only one finite decribable message for the fingertips --rough and refined, rich and dappled, mutable but not distressingly so --it would transform the passers-by subtly as they walked past it into the library, preparing them for the sensory experience of being in the presence of so much poetry --so much cognition, beauty, pain, form and history --without being either shut down or overwhelmed. it would be endow on passers by the feeling of having had sex with an angel.
---------

TOM DEVANEY
Most sculptures in front of most buildings are invisible. So creating an invisible sculpture is one idea. I think I’d consult people who know better in this matter. The first person who comes to mind is curator named Dean Daderko. He gets physical and non-physical space as well as anyone I know. It’s important that we come up with something to encourage people to have an experience with the space since they have to live with this space everyday.

The idea of *what it is* would not be the first question I’d ask. The goal would be to create something cool and stirring as rivers and oceans conspire with the ozoney clouds.
---------

BRETT EVANS
At the poetry library, in a foyer of deep dreamy purple, I would have two sculptures - one to each side. At left would be Giovanni da Bologna's Rape of the Sabine Women. To the right would be a commissioned piece by Marc Robinson, who has lived many years in Philadelphia and now Whitneys like Houston from his NY mission control. He has some sculptures which are amazing busts of historical figures he likes and other less representational, more kinetic works. Of the latter type he once did several sculptures of chairs a la houses of cards, projecting up and preposterously somehow holding together. I would let him decide to do something like this but with books not chairs or a bust of a famous preferably Philadelphia poet: Marianne Moore, say, although she's not my favorite. No, let's go with the furniture.
---------

GREG FUCHS
Interior Scroll by Carolee Schneeman including photographic documents of original performance and text.
---------

NADA GORDON
That ancient many-breasted Venus figure -- like the old Motown song:
"So Many Mammaries..."
---------

DANIEL NESTER
It's an interactive sculture with a paper tablet, where every patron must write a line. Philadelphia is one big underrated poem, and the only way to bust out of it is to let its own voice be transcribed in one big Philly Cento. Either that, or a bust of Patrick Kelly picking his nose, naked.
---------

DAVID TRINIDAD
Something by Claus Oldenberg. A giant . . . something. Or does Wayne Thiebaud do sculptures? I'd commission him to make a huge pink cupcake.
---------

QUESTION 5:
Give us a solid 90 seconds of automatic writing on the topic of canned peas.
---------

THE ANSWERS:

JENNIFER COLEMAN
Canned peas, canned peas, I want some please if you've got to get the green in the can, you got to get the sweet young ones that's right the sweet and fresh the canned greenies no mush on a flying fork for me yessir the can in the distance is the can in my dream a can for crushing can can dancers sang in the land of the green pea can and don't you stop but open the clock for the sweet pea, the sweet spinach of my youthful can can in the can of the rock solid lifting height of open sweet young pea, sweet pea, does it ever need to be told that the soft and round are also the ones in my mouth, young tweety bird? Lots of cans in the cupboard give me the one not the chick or the organce not the spinned silky little corn but the yess you guessed it yes I want a mouthful oh the splendid resplendid greenie green feelings of the tiny pittle pea.
---------

SHANNA COMPTON
You miniature planet
You singalong ball
Of the consonant's name and the vowel's gentle curves

You cloud full of fog
You jewel of the stirfry
You of the comparison, the tiny amount

You scent of the library
You missile in lunchrooms
You impossible melon, from the too-tender vine

You vegetal laughter
You tempting the spoon
You're there in the shot of the baby-butt wrinkle

You princess waker
You fairground prize
You gem under plastic in Grand Central Market

You good rhyme with me
You accent mark
Mamaw's in a bowl with butter and bacon

You infant delight
You lurker in the pear
You punctuation, alone on the plate
---------

MARIA DAMON
canned peas are not my favorites, i like canned asparagus and that's about it for canned vegetables. in terms of frozen, i just still don't like peas. they are only good fresh out of the pods in summer, scrape the pods with a finger or your teeth and the peas are sweet and crunchy otherwise it is hard to justify their existence as food, maybe the color's nice that's about it, plus they are a starch, not even a real vegetable like the leafy greens that are our so friendly friends. canned peas are a challenging topic but i like tapioca, which contains the word topic, and the syllable "pea."
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TOM DEVANEY
How to tell if your can is canned peas? Look at the label does it say PEAS? Does it have pearly green peas nested like fish eggs all over the label? Or is the can just a can without a label? If so, open it up and take a look. Yes, you’re looking at hundreds of canned peas and un-canned words, which (at the age of 34 you know) are the only words which can make canned peas.

When I think of canned peas I do not think of cans or peas. I think of the sleek canoe-like pod zipped open with a half dozen pearly peas perched like a roller coaster each pea shining with a sliver-of-sun on the edge of its perfect pea body. I think of LUNGFULL!’s Brendan Lorber and frozen pea & pasta dinners, which we had more than once, which makes me appreciate how smart and wily and good for you they are (and he was). Canned peas more than fresh make think of the expression “Don’t cut peas with a knife,” and also peeing which has nothing to do with fresh peas -- just being in the can. (Sixty seconds writing, 30 seconds editing, and a few moments of deceit.)
---------

BRETT EVANS
La Soeur silver suggestion to the top of the key came another dark album emitting mercurial joy. Mashed sometime potato clouds broker glances between floats. Clouds stack. A picnic in the ape of the question makes reefer the best choice yet.
---------

GREG FUCHS
Pre-face mask football kicker
Versus Jolly Green Giant
War is coming
Eat inside a bunker
The peas will last forever
& ever & ever
& remarkably taste fine
Unlike canned chicken.
My friend's momma
Used to make what we call roux
Peas, stirred in over rice.
I liked mine mixed with gravy
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NADA GORDON
sinister mushy sweet tinny claustrophobia
primordial ugh confinement industry jolly jolly jolly a
bit of pepper miming the unbearable as babies the
murk the liquid ooze, bite of can opener into
metal, clunk, clench as jaws or neck or forehead solidly
automatic no sweet no snap
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DANIEL NESTER
I threw away peas in a can, toilet Maple Shade, spring, in my mouth, carpe diem, put them away, flushed them down, one spat up, caught, fear, trucker fear, secretary fear, beating fear, and sequestered in the one-window room, taste of those fucking shitty peas that I never liked, no matter how much I put those puppies in gravy, no matter how much mashed potatoes I put them in, next batter for the Dodgers, next batter for the Cardinals, one on one, called out, beat up, if they're good for you why did I write this
---------

DAVID TRINIDAD
Canned peas, canned peas, the Jolly Green Giant comes to mind, ho ho ho, which makes me think of corn niblets, which I loved they were so sweet, 40 seconds has gone by already and I'm typing as fast as I can, now 60, I don't know how long it's been since I ate canned peas [I froze during last 10 seconds]
----------

QUESTION 6:
You knock on my door just as we're ready to begin a seance to contact dead poets. Who do you want to contact? What do you ask?
----------

JENNIFER COLEMAN
Ooh! I'd call William Blake. I don't think I'd have to pose a question -- he'd have something to say. I might ask him what he thinks of Walt Whitman.
----------

SHANNA COMPTON
James Merrill! You know he's just sitting there waiting for somebody to get out the Ouija board.

I'd also love to talk to Frank O'Hara. In fact, I pretend to talk him all the time. His poems make him seem so approachable. I had an imaginary conversation with last summer, kind of a "True Account of Talking to the Sun" kind of thing. You know the way he always rushed off poems from the typewriters at MoMA or stuck them in letters or notes? I figured he'd be a big e-mailer these days. Here's one of his responses (from the Monday Poetry Report):

E-Mail from Frank

"Poetry is a rival government always in
opposition to its cruder replicas."
--William Carlos Williams

Frank O'Hara surprised me
this morning with an e-mail.
He attached a picture of himself.
He looks pretty good,
considering. He said not to feel bad,
now that school is out,
even though we have a stooge
for president, now that MoMA's
moving to Queens.
He said everything still looks
good to him where he sits.
I asked where's that. He told me
not to blind cc him anymore, said
he wants to be included, but thinks
things should be done right.
He said he'll be in touch later,
when he gets back from
Rome.

(Actually, that epigraph from Williams would have been a great response to question 8!) And I've got plenty of questions for Wallace Stevens, though I'd hesitate to actually ask them. He's one of those imposing father-figure types that makes me tongue-tied. Laura Riding would be cool--but do you think she'd do most of the talking? Or Gertrude Stein.
---------

MARIA DAMON
I want to contact bpNichol to ask him to send me some of his wise vibe and gift for warmth and expansiveness --and some of his energy and talent and self-confidence to boot! I want to make sure he knows how loved he is, not just by those who knew and loved him but by those like me who encountered him in his whole soul loveableness through his work, from Martyrology through Art Facts, from the most
expansive and ambitious life-work down to the minutiae of a playful cartoon here and there, or a single conceit worked into a graphic design of great hilarity and charm.

The child geniuses --Rimbaud, Chatterton, etc --just to see what they're like... i wouldn't know what to ask them, i just want to dig their vibe...and maybe ask Rimbaud if it's true did he really turn to slave trading or was it just guns after all.

And how about the big guns: Sappho, Dante, Ovid, King David and King Solomon, and whoever wrote (if it was one person) Gassir's Lute --put 'em together in a room and listen to them talk poetics, ah that were paradise enow...

And then some of the old Norse skalds, Egil Skallagrimsson and Snorri Sturluson, and some of the women poets too, whom we only know of when they're quoted in the sagas. I'd like to get everyone above into a big room and have them talk about what poetry is and what cultural work it performs. And if, from their perspective as dead people, they've changed their minds over time about what poetry is or should be.

I think i would be in such ecstasy it would be painful. i don't know if i could contain all of that intensity. i will have to work on expanding my capacities --that's what i would ask of bp --for his help --in order to be up to such an experience. I might even ask
them to all write a collaboration, or to at least devise one. Overhearing the process of deciding how to go about such a thing would be worth the price of admission. Wow, can you imagine.
---------

TOM DEVANEY
A wonderful question and a main reason why I continue to be poet so I can be in touch with many dead (as well as many living) poets all of the time. I don't have one question or one poet. I mean, the ones I am in contact with (all of whom are very private) change on a daily basis: some just speak to me; some we both speak; some I overhear as they whisper to me while I sit and drink my morning Darjeeling tea.
---------

BRETT EVANS
And getting Dead Poets Seancy with it just inside the witchy door, now with the gentle people caught by candlelight... well, immediately I think of Ted Berrigan and Ernie K-Doe because they are heroes I always go back to. Praps I should leave them in Heaven's Lounge undisturbed though; on the corn to pea can with the Great Beyond-me is someone I don't often do cum Bible requirement.

So now I'm thinking of Joe Strummer because he just moved on and then let me summon... John Keats because I read him close to first [not counting the Dylan lyricbook] and maybe I can ask something... I was going to say "relevant" but then, do the dead need to be relevant to me? Shit, these days dead people can't contain themselves.

Suddenly it hits me Frankie O would be great to talk to but I don't want to make the circle impatient.

To Joe Strummer: Thank you for being political and simultaneously melodious in your songs. I wanted to ask what it felt like watching all [or most] of the things you howled after in your songs nonetheless end up in circles of the jackbooted winners? I'm thinking of the Sandanistas, and then, having to watch Reagan the Sequel come back when the first run was so way bad enough.

So then - besides knowing that one has to do what one has to - why continue on? Why play beautiful music to the wilderness when the Heads of the States listen to petroleum-based seashells?

To John Keats: Dude, when I was a young man I used to always say to myself, If I haven't made it [poetrywise] by the time I'm 24, I'll just off myself. The thing about Truth is Beauty when, well, Truth can be a Shit sometimes... Does focusing on the beautiful (from the Mermaid Tavern to vases to heathen cascades) help the ugliness of the world go away at all? What was it like to have to write about these things living in [imperial man-witch] Britain.

Roddy Frame said "overdose on Keats" and "Pictures of Strummer fell from the wall/ and nothing is left where they hung" on the same record.

Maybe I could find Roddy to make this supernatural conference call.)
---------

GREG FUCHS
Ted Berrigan, am I terrific?

Steve Carey, how many licks does it take?

Jeffrey Miller, is Codrescu lying?

W. H. Auden, did the bartender at the Holiday really give you free drinks for poems?

Frank O'Hara, what's the quickest route from New Jersey to St. Mark's Place?

Alan Ginsberg, why can I only think of male dead poets for whom I have questions?

Kathy Acker, do you remember when I had to sit at the kid's table?

H.D., is Kathy Acker considered a poet in heaven?

Gregory Corso, what's hell like?

Douglas Oliver, should I do a story on woman sexual tourists in Africa?

Lester Bangs, you really considered yourself a poet, right?

Blaise Cendrars, what's it like being feminine, marvelous, and tough?

William S. Burroughs, can you please order these questions to be rearranged, cut-up, and made?
---------

NADA GORDON
Mina Loy. What hair products do you use?
---------

DANIEL NESTER
I want to talk to William Carlos Williams. I want to just be awkward with him in his front room, for exactly 26 minutes, with my Honda waiting outside, and Flossie serving me unsweetened iced tea. I will ask him stupid questions, ones that haunt me for the rest of my days, an ever-revised embarassment. Williams will grumble at some point, and I'll ask stupid questions about paintings and words and typefaces.
---------

DAVID TRINIDAD
Actually, a number of dead poets speak to me through my Ouija board in my new book, _Phoebe 2002_: O'Hara (who thanks me for showing my students where he lived on University Place), Schuyler (who scolds me), Spicer (who delivers a message to Alice Notley), and of course Anne Sexton (who tells me how much she loves me, just loves me).
---------

2007-08-01T13:40:00.001-04:00

QUESTION 7:
How do you see literary criticism affecting the direction of poetry?
---------

JENNIFER COLEMAN
I don't know nothin about no literary criticism. Seriously. On the one hand, criticism is a different genre from poetry -- but that's not always the case. On the other hand -- if there's ever an audience, there'll be someone thinking and speaking about how a poem works. Are we talking about textual, theoretical, comparitive or historical criticism? Or are we talking about an evaluation of whether a poem works, or is "true," or reveals a psychological, social or ethical truth? Etheridge Knight said that the poem happens between the poet, the spoken word and the audience -- so a poem isn't a poem until it's been received and reacted to, says he.

My favorite kind of poetic criticism is the one that happens spontaneously, when a poem becomes a part of an individual or a community's very brain. I was with poets Douglas Rothschild and Michael Sharf crossing the Verrezano bridge, and one of the fellows remarked that the ocean looked like a particular line in a particular Wallace Stevens poem -- or was it a Williams poem? Was it Williams writing like Stevens, or Stevens writing like Williams? The ocean, the poets, the remembered line, the present, the history, all folding in to one another for a spontaneous and human bit of
litcrit right there in a U-Haul rental truck. That's HOT!!! But it doesn't answer the question.

I guess a whole other question is scholarship -- and the academy -- and how the study and practice of literary criticism as defined by institutions affects the direction of contemporary poetry. And -- the direction of contemporary poetry -- heck, I don't think it's moving on any one plane, really, so it's hard to say? It's a huge vat of worms, really. Huge worms.
---------

SHANNA COMPTON
This is a tough one, because I don't really seek out literary criticism--though I do read a bit of it where I happen to find it. I mean, I read book reviews on a regular basis because of my job at Soft Skull, and I'll read the poetry-related essays in Harper's on the Atlantic Monthly or the other magazines I get regularly. We do a forum or interview in each issue of LIT, so obviously I read those too. And Joshua Clover's stuff in the Village Voice is always interesting. I've read several excellent pieces in the Boston Review online. But as for how it affects the direction of poetry, I can't really say. Does it? I guess there's the famous example of Emerson's remark about the American Poet which Whitman took as a challenge as one answer. But at the same time, it seems funny to think of poets sitting down to answer or refute a particular critic's charge.

Of course, I'm a huge fan of "appreciations." Enthusiasm for an out-of-print book or neglected poet is contagious, and those kinds of pieces are more likely to send me rushing to the library or alibris. And I'm also read literary biographies ("Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet by James Atlas is excellent, as is Brad Gooch's "City Poet" about Frank O'Hara) and books like David Lehman's "The Last Avant Garde." And I collect essays and criticism by writers like Auden and Jarrell.

I guess I'm saying I don't know whether criticism is effective in so far as changing the direction of poetry, but it does often direct my reading. Is "changing the direction of poetry" even what critics set out to do?
---------

MARIA DAMON
well this is a tuffy cuz i'm mostly identified as a critic. i don't have the traditional romanticized hostility toward criticism that is supposed to accompany a poetic sensibility, but fortunately that is a fading stance; many contemporary poets are also trenchant critics and are well-read in poetry scholarship. litcrit affects poetry through a process of analysis rather than evaluation, though advocacy is an inevitable aspect of it, like it or not; the writing that gets a critical mass of scholarly attention seems to get more airplay, more recognition --to a degree (there are exceptions like maya angelou, who has not gotten a lot of critical kudos as a poet but has been enormously successful at the mainstream level mostly due to her recognition by former President Clinton; the spoken word phenomenon is another exception, where critical or scholarly attention is just now catching up with a popular/mass movement). as a critic i can only write about the stuff that really catches my attention and seems quirky enough to tangle with; so some of my favorite poets and poetry i have no inclination to write about. sometimes my enthusiasm overwhelms my ability to have anything usefully analytic to say. i feel sometimes that friends want me to write about them and i don't have the critical distance. they think i'm wasting my time writing about, say, bob kaufman and john wieners when i could be making *their* careers (as i see it they impute way too much importance to what i can do with an essay or a review). i guess what i enjoy as a critic writing about living authors is feeling that i've enabled them to experience their own work in a different way, or even simply that they feel understood and appreciated, which is important for human community though it has a limited value intellectually. or perhaps not. i had a prof in grad school who i thought was kind of a meatball, and when we got to john berryman he hauled out an interview in which jb said to the interviewer that he (the prof) was the one who'd most understood what jb was up to. at the time i thought "oh so what" but now i can see how ego-gratifying it is, this mutual admiration society between writer and scholar, to for instance get an email or a phone call saying, i love your review/paper/essay on my work i'm so glad you're out there doing your thing. it can also make it hard to be critical in the sense of uncomplimentary or challenging. It becomes difficult to separate ego from ideas.

two caveats:
1) i realize i am using at times the terms scholarship and criticism interchangeably
2) i haven't really answered the question so much as done a little confessional processing dance.
---------

TOM DEVANEY
Good ideas are unstoppable.
---------

BRETT EVANS
Before addressing Question 7, which right now I can think of nothing incisive to say about, I was thinking of another question of discourse after I left the racetrack today. I had answered questions 1-6 here without looking at any 9for9. Since I've now read the ish previous; it seems like I've been answering my questions with a dorky earnestness that is far less entertaining than some of the other poets. Do I change my answering style (consciously or sub)? It makes me think of how shows like The Real World and Elimidate eventually fall into grooves of behavior formed by those players late enough to the game to have watched previous episodes: e.g., in Elimidate if any two of the four girls want to automatically make it to the semifinal, all they have to do is feign sapphic longings and the guy will prompty ditch the straighter [yawn] two.

Okay: literary criticism. Well certainly the problem with a lot of current off-off L$a$n$g$u$age school stuff being written now is that it reads more like criticism than poetry. I mean, there's a whole lotta idea-o-matics going on but there's notta mucha music [and I'm mining Ornette with Neil Diamond] whatsoever. I think there was probably a freshness to earlier lang slang that was informed by the hot semiotic injections/ ass-rebellions of the day. Stephen Rodefer's Four Lectures does nonreferentiality/aut[h]o[r]-destruction about as sexy as you can do. It feels like he's writing with the genie fresh out the bottle. By the year 2003 a lot of like descendents of this seem pretty tired: it's like somebody you see on the bus with a pink mohawk. [Make your own punk, douche.]

Now I that I think I've firmly established idiocy in such matters, I should say that I read very little fiction when I'm not reading poetry, but the nonfiction that I read is usually apocalyptic, political, cultish, or culinary: I very rarely even shake hands with criticism when we pass in the hall. Keep in mind as well that I'm not working in academia. Ultimately I think good poems are more like people full of ideas than ideas. The light from the flashlight under the covers not the batteries. Reading Habermas may help set the points on your sparks but I don't know how it could figure much into making the poem [glow].

I like when it rains with girls at the drive-in movies.
---------

GREG FUCHS
I'm not about to make proclamations on the state of poetry, on how it's been affected by other literary genres or where it's headed, it grows in just too many directions simultaneously to boil down to a succinct generalization. I will say I've enjoyed reading John Berger, a whole lot, he's informed my visual art and writing practice. I think he's got terrific cultural and political insight and he's not a know it all, yet he writes with elegance and ease. I think he wasn't taken seriously for a long time by academics nor serious experimentals but when I was in South Florida visiting my parents I ducked into the Barnes and Noble. I looked through a new Edward Said reader, he's doing some revisionism on Berger, so we may soon see him becoming the darling. I also have been influenced by Susan Sontag, Martha Rosler, and David Levi Strauss. Now it occurs to me that all the writers I've mentioned with the exception of Saied are really considered art writers. So what do I know? What about Barthes? Dig Barthes on Barthes. See my unpublished manuscript Spoken Words On, In, and Around Contemporary Poetry to find out how I feel about discreetliterary or art genres. Isn't it all just the work?
---------

NADA GORDON
Oh god, at this point (babies' intestines being ripped out by shrapnel), who cares? What do you mean by literary criticism? You mean like Harold Bloom? Or you mean like a review that might appear in _Tripwire_? This is a stuffy question, it makes me feel stuffy and turgid to try to answer it. I also don't know what you mean by the direction of poetry. There is no direction of poetry anymore, nor should there be. Think of it more as an exquisitely spiky DAHLIA whose petals point in all possible directions. I do not, personally, feel literary criticism of any sort affecting my poetry, if that's any kind of reliable finger to the wind. I used to be affected by lit crit, when I was but a callow maid, trying to figure out what the landscape was like. But I have put away childish things, given away (20 years later) most of my college texts with dreary titles like _Textual Strategies_. On the other hand I do find certain critical texts useful for confirming the directions in which I find myself anyway -- most recently (but not that recently, having enjoyed McGann's writings on the Della Cruscans and Bakhtin on Rabelais. The word I like best in your question is affecting.
---------

DANIEL NESTER
This is the question that makes me feel the most self-conscious. Whenever you read an essay from, say, Baudelaire, when he's celebrating the painters of modern life, I don't care who he's talking about -- he's talking about an idea, or an ideal form. And he's celebrating it. That helps.When I went to graduate school at NYU--oy, vey, a very very crunchy granola pedagogy, if there was one at all, no lit crit at all--I was way jealous of students in the more theory-laden programs out there where the teachers would chapter-and-verse every idea, every line break, with criticism. Somewhere in between these mindsets, I think, is the answer. To paraphrase Stevens, I think all poets should know everything about lit crit and show none of it in their poetry. At grad school, I tried to patchwork this together with classes in decadent late New Criticism--Rosenthal and Bloom and Donoghue--all of which I still love for its veracity despite its Garamond font simplemindedness. I think people should be able to sort out what poetry they love first and foremost, rather than what doesn't work. Jarrell writes that we turn to criticism to sort out what we cannot do in our own poetry--and I find that to be totally true. Why not refer to prose sometimes? I love the S&M role of prose in this function--prose being the lapdog of poetry--good boy!--helping us in our poetic projects. Put that ball in your mouth, prose! Bend over! Trying to figure out why something resonates or affects people is so much better than playa-hating poetry or lit critc or official verse this or official that. Official verse your momma! I think there's a lot of reactionary poetry out there from people, what I call the Poets of Pedigree, and it's all an exercise in merely avoiding their own hearts. Poetic cruciverbalists never changed anyone's life, ever. Neither have those oblivious of the Great Explainers. I think criticism is a great exercise, then, but it's a cul de sac at the end of the day. I'm talking, in relation to the Crit-Addicted Pedigreed, I guess, but also about subject matter, language, forms that challenge, or using surrealism to the point of denigrated to the point of pointlessness. Just because you listen to Pavement or Captain Beefheart or know painted won't make one's poetry interesting. Ya gotsta read, too, if nothing else than to know how to dis and dismiss it.
---------

DAVID TRINIDAD
As long as poetry is written, I imagine criticism will continue to make sense of and classify it. I guess this kind of criticism is rather benign. On the other hand, criticism that attempts to control or manipulate the way poems are written scares the hell out of me. As far as my own work, I’ve always looked to poems, rather than to criticism, for direction.
---------

QUESTION 8:
Since the American war against Iraq began some poets have been saying that this is not a time for writing poems, and that our energy should only be focused on fighting against the war. How do you feel about this?
---------

JENNIFER COLEMAN
To me, war in Iraq is one outcropping of a larger force -- larger than the current administration. People (and societies) are capable of cruelty and injustice both institutional and individual. As we fight an unjust war in Iraq, struggles continue elsewhere against disease, poverty, and violence caused by the injustice of corporations, law, or any number of social systems. This war doesn't end -- so I hope with my guts that political and social atrocities aren't so able to take over our intellectual lives that poets give up their practice.

I am proud of the poets that are speaking out through poetry and public action against war in the Mideast and an administration we can't believe in -- poetry as witness and resistance. I think it was Anne Waldman who said history will hold us accountable for what we're writing today. But poetry as a creative, thoughtful practice of articulation is a tool against violence and injustice -- no matter the subject of the poem.
---------

SHANNA COMPTON
Well, this seems completely wrong-headed to me. Poems can be written in protest as well as in celebration. And celebration in the face of war can be its own form of protest, I think.

Or think of Paul Celan or Wilfred Owen. Or Gertrude Stein or Virginia Woolf. Or countless other writers. The wars they lived through didn't keep them from writing, and aren't we lucky they didn't?

I suppose, on the other hand, that actions can also be poems. Demonstrations and marches get their meaning from the like-mindedness and like expressions of the partcipants, and language is a primary element of that expression--coming together and speaking out together. And the chants and cadences are from the oral traditions.

I just don't understand the statement "this is not a time for writing poems." Is there ever an inappropriate time to write? Are poems not suitable places for protest or any other sentiments? The idea just doesn't make sense to me. In fact, all the protest-related readings, the 9-11 anthologies, and the recent 100 Poets against the War anthologies seem to prove the opposite point.

Yesterday, I was rereading a piece by Hilton Obenzinger from Jacket's tribute to Kenneth Koch. In that piece, Obenzinger recalls his experience of the Columbia University student protest against the Vietnam war in April 1968. At the time, he was on the staff of the Columbia Review, and was among the students who occupied President Kirk's office in Low Library for several days. As the conflict between the demonstrating students, the counterprotesters, and the police intensified, some of the faculty and administrators formed a cordon outside the building in an attempt to keep the peace. They kept the counterprotesters back from the buildings and the rival groups apart from each other, but their line also kept supporters from passing in supplies to the demonstrators inside. Kenneth Koch was part of this line. Hilton remembers looking down at him from a window in the president's office, and Koch yelling up something like, "So, have you written any poems while you've been in there?" Hilton and the other Columbia Review editors rushed to the typewriter and hammered out collaborations, filling several pages. He confesses they were terrible. He admits that while they "couldn1t bear to write tedious Fight-Team-Fight anthems or lugubrious, boring manifestos," the poet-protesters still felt compelled to try. "All we could knock out was intense, manic gibberish when what was needed was something entirely new written in a language no one had yet invented." But write they did, the quality of that writing wasn't the point.

Soft Skull is publishing Hilton's next novel, so we had a meeting with him yesterday afternoon. We'll also be publishing a comic book by Kenneth Koch. So naturally after reading this essay, I mentioned it to Hilton. He'd come straight from yesterday's 300K-strong protest in NYC to our meeting about his new novel, so I guess Koch's question really did stick.

Here's the link to the Jacket piece, if you're interested.
---------

MARIA DAMON
Any form of resistance is welcome. Some poets resist best by writing poems, some by becoming active in other ways. It's all important and it's not for anyone to say definitively what anyone else should or shouldn't do. To mandate against poetry is to cripple ourselves by removing one of the most powerful weapons in the arsenal of human expression and activity i.e. culture. But if any poets would prefer to write op-ed pieces or volunteer as human shields, why stop them. Some of the Objectivists took long hiatuses (pl?) from poetry, and that was okay; it fit their politics. Most people I know find this admirable rather than deplorable. Thich Nhat Hahn writes poetry as well as anti-war Dharma talks; most people I know value both, or at least nobody says, gee i wish he'd quit writing that poetry and focus on the activism. Lots of folks on the poetics list march in rallies, do extensive research on the web and share information as well as writing poetry and organizing readings against the war. It all creates a texture, a complex web of activity and verbal density, that strengthens the anti-war movement. Whatever we do, we could also do more. Whatever we do, we could be doing less. We do what we do.
---------

TOM DEVANEY
I would like to put my energy and my abilities towards an art articulating scale. One of the most frustrating characteristics of the war (and the general perception of it) is that there is little-to-no-scale for most people to take it into our consciousness. Straight ahead writing doesn't do it and the scalelessness of TV has never been more profound and dangerous.
---------

BRETT EVANS
In my first poetry writing class my teacher brought up the whole There Can Be No Art After the Holocaust idea, which struck me as somehow wrong at the time although I couldn't put my finger in the socket.

I articulated it later to myself and now to you: I don't get the arbitrary "line in the sand" [it blows] demarcating some imaginary Before - After. I mean, as wretched as the Nazi Party was, I seem to recall some decent American poets having written between our In-House Red Genocide and Stalin's red red purges.

There's a poet here in New Orleans who actually goes on record with the There is No New Writing bit. Wait... hold on a second so that I might quote...

Okay, this is from a recent anthology, Another South: Experimental Writing in the South, from his M.O. blurb in the back: "All of the words (except those used by A. di Michele) and most of the phrases have already been written, so the myth of originality is one we have to outgrow with Santa and the tooth fairy."

Again, some imaginary chainlink separating B and A. I think the real problem here is that he actually has to work through a belief in the tooth fairy. Was Byron sitting around saying, All the Pope's been written, why bother?

I'm saying what about the line Truth is Booty, Booty Truth [mine]: this guy couldn't come up with quality like that. If you're gonna talk about unique soul kittens, shit, nobody but nobody's trumpet sounds like Herb Alpert's. What the fuck does that mean?

Somebody said that irony died the day Henry Kissinger received a Nobel Peace Prize. True, absolutely fucking true.
---------

GREG FUCHS
That's like the most ridiculous proclamation I've heard since G.W.B. said we're fighting to liberate the Iraqi people. A poet is only a poet if the poet writes poems. So if you want to be a poet fighting to end war, write some poems, protest, write letters to the president,lay yourself down in the streets. And write more poems.
---------

NADA GORDON
Why America Sucks. Corporate Pigs.
It's not going to work anymore. ...
(made possible by Loquacious)
america sucks dick! america sucks dick!
Bank of America Sucks Ass
anger management is a punch in the face
Corporate America Sucks!! ... I work at a desk
and no one sees me all day! Once again for the record...
Corporate America Sucks!! grrrr. I like big butts
and I can not Lie Corporate America Sucks!!.
Actually ... America Sucks The United States of America
is currently engaged in an illegal war against Iraq. America
SUCKS - Anarchy dirtworld/ community/sucks/ Corporate America sucks
no play this game so I can get a few cents.
due to the rules and regulations we're not actually allowed
to say that america sucks.
Can't Stand Being With You ANTI-SYSTEM:
No Laughing Matter. Spank! Youth Culture
SIX FLAGS AMERICA SUCKS! America Survives ...
Missing People Spit on America! America sucks shit!!!!! ...
RE: Spit on America! America sucks shit!!!!!
Funny, Satirical and Nerdy America Sucks
America Sucks (pudding) America Sucks Cock
biggoat Poodle Destroyka Punk Vitaminepillen
FIGHT THE STATE NOT ITS WARS!!
Chase Bank Sucks. Circuit City Lawsuit.
Coke Spotlight. Corporate America Sucks.
Discover Card Sucks. E-toys Sucks.
FedExGroundBeef.com. Home Depot Sucks.
I Hate Ikea. ... America Sucks By: Mr. Fucko.
It's never made ... a bitch. America sucks,
and I'm not afraid to say that I am ashamed to be
an American. I ... america aka "the land of the free"
isnt all that it seems. ... death by ignorace. Comments:
America sucks. America can rot for all i care. Japan can shine.
India is good, america sucks, but still, job opportunity
is more important to me than culture and family,
even though those are the most important things in ...
YAWHO???! HOT OFF THE PRESSES FROM
CHUNGASPANKS GAYASS COCK- AMERICA SUCKS!
(Associated Mess). MORE AMERICA SUCKS!! Hi America sucks,
I'm George W. Bush, the president of the United States.
You can call me Dubya. ... assholes ... In the parlance of our time,
Geek America 'sucks' geek america sucks. steve, hamster lover.
brent, last action hero. melissa, where is my home? word, and you can't tell
people to rise up and slice the monarch's head off--
but you can talk about how much America sucks ...
America Sucks! ... God Bless America Sucks on Many Levels.
After the Destruction Comes More Evil. ... ... i wish i was gay.
you are all halfway retarded, sheep, just pieces of the system.
america sucks. children rule, most adults suck. i hate everyone.
---------

DANIEL NESTER
I fucking hate hate hate it when poets direct other poets what they should or shouldn't do, especially in terms of morality and war. If a poet wants to write a poem against the war, great. Protest the war , super. Actually enlist in the armed forces and fight in wars, fine. We have free will and free speech, and poets will never appear as a voting block, and politicians will never march in our parades.

Short partially relevant story: A couple weeks before the war, I sent a link to the Poets For The War web site -- just a blank subject, the link in the body -- to about 8 poet friends. The site itself is scary and tragically comic in a way, and I wanted to share that; the poems are even worse than the ones against the war on its companion site, if that's possible. Anyway, one poet who didn't get this tragic joke of sharing this link advised me to send a second email to to all concerned clarify that I was actually against the war. Setting aside the issue of humor and the indignity of explaining it, I am still confused about this peculiarly American notion that all poets must be in lockstep politically on all issues of the world.
---------

DAVID TRINIDAD
Poets write poems, no matter what’s happening in the world.
---------

2007-08-01T13:32:00.000-04:00

QUESTION 9:
APTV is the new All Poetry Television Network. You've been asked to create a poetry game show. What is it?
---------

THE ANSWERS:

JENNIFER COLEMAN
"I'm a poet laureate, get me out of here!" No, that's not it. Really, the two qualities most pervasive in today's network television in general and game shows in particular are money-grubbing and spectacle. So I'd go for that. Kind of "Fear Factor" meets "Gladiators." Contestants would bank cash for creating impromptu poems and reciting the poetry of others while under physical duress. Like, for instance, contestants would parachute from a plane and have to recite as many lines from Emily Dickinson as they can before touching the ground. I'd call the show "Skill to Instill" after Dickinson's line, "Teach me the skill, That I instill the pain..."
---------

SHANNA COMPTON
Oh, wow. Poetry TV.

I've already invented a sort of poetry game, but I don't know that it would adapt well to television, because it's kind of a solitary game. My friend Charlie Orr is designing the game board. It's called E-Ching. It basically combines the throwing of I-Ching coins with the Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson and is a meditative tool. All the big themes are in her work, right? And the poems are numbered. I had been using the I-Ching and reading Dickinson kind of simultaneously a year or two ago, and then it suddenly came to me that I should substitute her book for the usual one. They were sitting right there together on the desk. We're still working out the numbering system, which is kind of complicated.

I guess a "Stump the Poetry Nerds" kind of trivia show would be fun. And I like those poem-on-the-spot challenges, though I could never do that. Those kinds of things would be better for television, I guess. Maybe two teams competing to see who comes up with the best collaborative poem on a randomly drawn topic.

I think the Brooklyn Brewery hosted a poetry Olympics once, pitting the local MFA programs against each other. I missed that, though.
---------

MARIA DAMON
Okay, here goes A TEENAGE POETRY FANTASY, based on a FUN dream i had many many years ago. The poetry game show is a sort of poetic and magical spin-the-bottle. The 3 poets on the panel must spontaneously compose and recite a spell/poem so powerful that it will conjure the presence of the person they MOST WANT TO MAKE OUT WITH (or whatever)!!! ON THE SPOT!!! The poem/spell can be anything; but it must be powerful enough so that the loved one will actually materialize right there in the room. The poet and the loved one do not have to make out in front of everyone --the studio audience and/or the tv audience -- if they do not want. they can retire discreetly to another room specially appointed for the activity.
---------

TOM DEVANEY
Here are a few suggestions for the shows:

Fortuna -- co-hosted by Juliana Spahr and Edwin Torres. We will not use the brilliant something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue name Wheel of Fortune, but we’ll crib some elements of the show for our show. In a nutshell, the show is a sweat inducing, mind & word bending game of skill and chance where contestants test the extent to which Fortune may be mastered.

The Just Shoot Me Show -- co-hosted by the ghost of Dorothy Parker and Tony Hoagland (author of the article “Negative Capability: How to Talk Mean and Influence People.”) The show is spin off, yes, but this is TV where there are no points for originality. Tony and Dorothy would co-host -- nice gloves off -- bringing in poets to tell each other what they really think -- shooting each other up and down!

The Dating Game -- hosted by Lee Ann Brown. Poets date other poets till all have dated each other; or at least they have all dated someone who has dated someone else. This all goes a long way toward explaining the extraordinary chemistry among the guests on this show. People date and work on their work together confirming that groups are not only hot beds of ideas, but sometimes simply hot in bed. The winners know will know they’ve won by the look in their partners eye telling them that they are onto something.
---------

BRETT EVANS
APTV, huh?

I think this refers back to my HTML thang: unless some real teevee pros are gonna make this art telegenic... I don't know. I'm thinking of Tony Randall reciting this Scottish poem with heavy tra-la-la's on the first Brady Bunch variety hour slash reunion (did I mention that the Brady lads were dancing behind him in some proto-Flaming Lips bunnysuits?).

APTV should stick to essentially poetry videos [let the actual poems fly with some viz=u=els]. If I have to bling-bling it out by the pool with a bunch of Malaysian bikini angels, so be it. I'd prefer to kind of recreate the leather-among-the-heather avec maps and threewheelers look of the Big Country In a Big etc. vid.

Oh yeah - one more thing on this network: C.A. Con as the Charlie Rose of Verse world, interviewing some Miami Verse freak-phraser about the Meth, the Meth... the "method." Let it rock! Okay [no shit] I'm off to see Masters of the Obvious [for G. Fuchs' private glee: in the room where the now way-defunct School of the Imagination used to meet].
---------

GREG FUCHS
It'll be reality based game show titled "Poets On Pay Day."

Andrei Codrescu will be the host; Laura Rosenthal will be the Eddie McMahon slash Vanna White flirtatious, cohost. The theme will be Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly."

Andrei and Laura will choose six poets from applicants. They will make selections completely based on their on own unknown subjective criteria.

The six will be flown to New Orleans to spend six weeks in the French Quarter doing whatever Andrei and Laura feel like doing. The last poet standing will have a chapbook of their poetry published by Joel Dailey as an issue of One Fell Swoop.
---------

NADA GORDON
I imagine it would be like Hollywood Squares, but because I like Bollywood I would call it Bollywood Squares and make all the poets dress up in gaudy Indian outfits. There would be a wide range of types and ages of poets -- the first show might include, for example, Bill Bissett, Dorothy Trujillo-Lusk, Julie Patton, Miles Champion, Alan Sondheim, and Julia Vinograd. Rather than being asked questions requiring fixed answers, they might be given keywords or leading words and asked to extemporize something poetic. No one would lose (or win). There would be no prizes in the traditional sense, but everyone would acquire cultural capital.
---------

DANIEL NESTER
A couple ideas:

"Poetry Family Feud."

Aesthetic camps compete for cash and prixes. On this side, the New Formalists family, and on this side, the Private School Post-LangPo Family! The New Formalists would answer questions directly and shake each others' hands, and the Private School Post-LangPos would not answer questions directly and then hump each other, wearing private school sweaters and matching socks. The host would be David Lehman, of course. He would kiss everyone, including Gerald Stern.

"Prose Factor."

Students fresh out of MFA workshops are broken out of their workshop-heavy habits. In one Prose Factor Challenge, Poet-contestant read prosey poetry with artifical hip-hop rhythms in front of a real live indie bookstore or bar audience, and are then scored 1 to 10 by students on dates from nearby private universities. Bob Holman will host. No, shit, that's already been done!

OK, how about a Prose Factor Challenge wherein contestants are broken from their hard-wired habits of chopping up their prose into lines so that they would be understood by dim students in their workshop? In Prose Factor, Poet-contestants are forced to read Pessoa and Transtromer for a solid 12-hour period, then return writing deep image, make-it-new verse, and then face their dim-witted former fellow students. Contestants must drink 1 litre of boxed wine and still be able to relate the aesthetic turn their work has taken. If the poet-contestant holds out and doesn't vomit, we see how long each can hold out, timing by the second.

Another Prose Factor Challenge would be to apply electric shocks each and every time contestants make artificial up-stresses when reading their own work. The lowest-scoring contestants get to go to Mumble Island, where John Ashbery teaches them to talk like Paul Lynde on ludes.
---------

DAVID TRINIDAD
I’m sorry, but I’m drawing a complete blank on this one.
---------

ABOUT THE POETS:

JENNIFER COLEMAN is a poet in NYC and co-editor of the poetry journal POMPOM. She's also co-author of the chapbook Communal Bebop Canto with CE Putnam and Allison Cobb, and author of the chapbook Propinquity. You can see her work online at
The East Village, Speak Easy
---------

SHANNA COMPTON'S poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Nerve, Gastronomica, Painted Bride Quarterly, CROWD, La Petite Zine, Good Foot, and elsewhere. She is the editor of LIT, the literary journal of the New School. She works for Soft Skull Press, and curates the Frequency Reading Series with Daniel Nester. Brand New Insects, her first collection, was recently a finalist for the Alice James Books Beatrice Hawley Award. Visit her online at ShannaCompton.com.
---------

MARIA DAMON teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Minnesota. she is the author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry, and co-author (with Betsy Franco) of The Secret Life of Words, and (with Miekal And) of Literature Nation, at JOGLARS . Her most recent article is on "ethnographies of loneliness" in Xcp:Cross-Cultural Poetics 12. also check out the interview.
---------

TOM DEVANEY is the author of The American Pragmatist Fell in Love (Banshee Press), a collection of poetry. He teaches creative nonfiction and poetry at the University of Pennsylvania where he is program coordinator of the Kelly Writers House. He also produces the monthly radio show "LIVE" on 88.5-FM, WXPN. Devaney is a regular contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer. His next book, Letters to Ernesto Neto, is forthcoming from Germ Monographs. Tom Devaney's webpage.
---------

BRETT EVANS is a Scorpio who enjoys crosswords, summer winds, and fish soup. His last book, After School Sessions, is a must-read: great for the plane. He resides in New Orleans, LA to keep within earshot of his favorite radio station, WWOZ.
---------

GREG FUCHS is a photographer and writer living in Brooklyn. He is the author of Uma
Ternura, Came Like It Went (Buck Downs Books), and New Orleans Xmas (Range). Currently, an exhibition of his photography is on view at Soho Letterpress.
---------

Sardonic troubador NADA GORDON's latest book, V. IMP (Faux Press 2003), has been described as "mood-riddled hijinx and impudent lyric protest" and "nonsense galore, as in a bathhouse." With Gary Sullivan, she is the author of Swoon (Granary Books 2001), a nonfiction e-pistolary multiform novel. She published two other books in 2001: Are Not Our Lowing Heifers Sleeker than Night Swollen Mushrooms? (Spuyten Duyvil), and Foriegnn Bodie (Detour), a collection of poems written during her eleven years in Tokyo. Ongoing obsessions include song, odalisques, ornament, and all forms of life. Her more-or-less daily musings on life and poetics can be
found at ululate.blogspot.com.
---------

DANIEL NESTER is the author of God Save My Queen (Soft Skull Press), a meditation on his obsession with the rock band Queen. He is the editor of the online journal Unpleasant Event Schedule, as well as a contributing editor for Painted Bride Quarterly and DUCKY. His work has appeared or will appear in Open City, Nerve, Columbia Poetry Review, LIT, Slope, Jacket, Crazyhorse, and The Best American Poetry 2003.
---------

DAVID TRINIDAD's most recent book, _Plasticville_, was published by Turtle Point Press in 2000. _Phoebe 2002: An Essay in Verse_, a 674-page mock-epic based on the movie _All About Eve_, written with Jeffery Conway and Lynn Crosbie, will be published by Turtle Point in November 2003. Trinidad teaches poetry at Columbia College in Chicago. See: Trinidad.

2004-04-30T11:28:00.000-04:00

9for9
---------
set 3 of 9

Jim Behrle
Edmund Berrigan
Jim Cory
hassen
Sofia Memon
Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore
Deborah Richards
Molly Russakoff
Prageeta Sharma

copyright © 2004
to all participating
poets upon publication

edited by
and questions created by
CAConrad

9for9 is a collection of 9 questions for 9 poets and their answers. This is the 3rd set of 9 sets. Usually the project is conducted through e-mail, but set 3 was a live panel at the PhillySound Poetry Festival last August, organized by Frank Sherlock and Tom Devaney. After the festival each poet wrote out their answers for this online version of 9for9.

If you wish to communicate with any of the poets included, please feel free to send correspondence to the e-mail address CAConrad13@aol.com, with the subject line "9for9 correspondence". I promise to forward your message to the poet you wish to connect with.

Thank you,
CAConrad
p.s. check out FREQUENCY Audio Journal
---------

2004-04-30T11:26:00.000-04:00

QUESTION 1:
You are invited to do a drag show poetry reading, what poet will you perform?

THE ANSWERS:

JIM BEHRLE
This is a strange and wonderful honor. We don't have drag show poetry readings in Boston, that I know of. I would say Anne Waldman, who would be fun because she's so energetic. Can sing, dance, write: she's a triple-threat. I'd have to shave the moustache, though. But even more fun would be a Victor/Victoria swing: me pretending to be a woman pretending to be Robert Pinsky. That's a show you could take on the road.
---------

EDMUND BERRIGAN
I would arrive with the top half of Anne Waldman, and the bottom half of a tank.
---------

JIM CORY
Anna Akmatova. So seductive, so intense. Noting this now makes me want to run to the other side of the room, take down her Collected Poems, and read something. In fact, I just did!
---------

HASSEN
Charles Bukowski.
---------

SOFIA MEMON
Agha Shahid Ali. How interesting to be a Muslim woman in hijab in drag as a queer Muslim man, both devout. The question is-does s/he wear hijab?
---------

DANIEL ABDAL-HAYY MOORE
Skimming backwards from H.D., Stein and Dickinson, I would be Rabi'a al-Adawiyya, Sufi poet and mystic from 8th century Basra, which now finds itself famously within the borders of the modern map of Iraq. She was a spiritual powerhouse who also performed many miracles, although outwardly she was a poor servant who looked after her master's house during the day, and prayed in her room at night that would be flooded with light from a divine source. She wasn't a poet in the conventional sense of writing poems, but many of her words cryptically couched in poetic phrases have come down through the centuries, statements and verbal encounters of hers which make her a poet of wisdom and light. One of her poems, an anecdote really, that has survived, is the following:

Girl: "It's Spring, Rabi'a- Why not come outside, And look at all the beauty God has made!"
Rabi'a: "Why not come inside instead, And see the One who made it all- Of course, to perform this "poet" in drag, I would have to sit in a room so flooded with light you couldn't see me at all."
---------

DEBORAH RICHARDS
I said Charles Bukowski in the live version of this blog, and I think I want to stick to my first thought. Why Charles? I'd like the opportunity to be obnoxious, opinionated, and difficult. I also admire his poems for his ability to include himself in the mess of his life. My own poems and life are masked because I suppose I'm trying to find a way to be myself--whatever that is!Being Bukowski would be liberating--for a while.
---------

MOLLY RUSSAKOFF
I would perform CAConrad because he was thoughtful enough to ask this question.
---------

PRAGEETA SHARMA
Rabindranath Tagore or Byron
---------

QUESTION 2:
President George W. Bush has just decided to appoint a poet to his cabinet. You are chosen to fill that position. At your first meeting with him, what will you ask or suggest?

THE ANSWERS:

JIM BEHRLE
I think this could be a lot of fun. The White House staff gets all of August off, which is way better than the time off I get at my job now. Would I get a tank or a bomber to use on my poetic enemies? Could I send them to Guantanimo?
---------

EDMUND BERRIGAN
I would ask Bush for a paltry sum for literacy, but tell him I'm just gonna give it to my friends. It fits his methods as it's meaningless, he can use it for exposure, & the old boy network is in action.
---------

JIM CORY
I might suggest that we jointly compose something, in exquisite corpse fashion, a nature poem, the subject being, say, the lust of big cats. (Did you know lions fuck up to 25 times a day? And that their range -- even into the time of the Roman Empire -- once included Northern Europe, and England?) If he's not game (no pun intended) for that, maybe we could fashion something using only words beginning with the letter Q. That would be fun. (I he got snippy, I'd be willing to let him choose the letter.) Should the President fail to exhibit enthusiasm for either exercise, I might suggest a quick round of Risk, or maybe that we jointly explicate one of Hart Crane's more dense and many-layered productions, such as "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen." That would pique his interest. I happen to know W. is a BIG Hart Crane fan.
---------

HASSEN
I'd suggest he immediately spend a few weeks with the Dalai Lama or a few months (if not years) in a ghetto without funding and without communication with anyone outside of his neighborhood. And no T.V. (unless public broadcasting?). But ghetto survival + optimism/realism takes a certain amount of wattage if one is alone and, well, he'd probably not rise to the occasion. Better stick to plan A. If that fails, make plan B an insidious (but ultimately benevolent) plot of [my] power-of-suggestion.
---------

SOFIA MEMON
I might just check him out. I'm not convinced he's a real person, but maybe I'm just naive. After all, I believed Clinton right up until the end. I mean, who could lie to start a war that has decimated two countries, have that lie be discovered by even the most ardently ignorant, and still be grinning like Howdy Doody? I'd be looking to answer the question is he evil or just an imbecile? Future political and poetical tactics would depend on the answer to that one question. I might also suggest that he might practice saying words that rhyme with Iraq (_i'roq_ not _eye rack_). I'd definitely ask Fidel Castro's advice beforehand.
---------

DANIEL ABDAL-HAYY MOORE
I'd suggest that, since his poor brain is so monumentally taxed by his being the Leader of the Free World and the Bringer of Liberation and Democracy to Nations He Wishes to Dominate, he take one of his very long vacations to one of those little fishing huts out on a froze lake (New Hampsire, Nova Scotia, the Arctic Circle. the moon?), with Amiri Baraka. I think a few weeks in a tiny cabin with Amiri Baraka would do him a world of good. I don't know if it would do anything for the world or the "President's" (I always have to put this in quotes) foreign policy, but the two are kind of suited to each other, on a long-term, pressure-cooker-situation basis. I admire but have reservations about Amiri's sense of things too, though I support his right to have them more than I do Bush's, since the former is more in the realm of radical and provocative motormouth expostulation pointing to a truth, while the latter is more in the realm of bloody-minded, war-mongering Empire Expansion based on lies and self deceit as well as wholesale betrayal of the American Way he pretends to represent. Of course, I consider this answer a bit irresponsible as well in keeping with the levity of the question. But how do you persuade a crusty, hardened ideologue like Bush (as I would, as a Cabinet Poet, wish to do) to really look into the peoples of the world, the sufferers, the hopeful, and see with heartfelt eyes what the world needs, instead of bolstering with tired rhetoric what peer ideologues have worked out in the migraine nights of their disgusting brains? I'd like him (as well as many of the world's leaders) to contemplate the following, a poem from my manuscript book, A Maddening Disregard for the Passage of Time:
TYRANTS DRIVE PAST STATUES OF THEMSELVES
Tyrants are fleeing their countries in
black limousines
driving past statues of themselves
huddled in back seats, counting
on anonymity,
driving past statues of themselves
erected during their salad days,
hoping against hope to get to the borders unrecognized,
their last days of iron-fisted action
backfired, explosions bouncing back
like repeated radio broadcasts
in their hectic brains,
their loyal armies shooting into shouting crowds of comrades
backfiring until
giant shouting comrade-crowds filled palace doorways
demanding
tyrant blood
who now flee by back roads, at night, in
black limousines
driving past statues of themselves.
---------

DEBORAH RICHARDS
My first reaction would be surprise, as I am a British citizen and not an American national. Anyway....I'm sure the President understands the power of language, yet I'd ask him to examine how words are thrown away, manipulated, and stretched to their limits within his/our world. What would happen if he spent a week listening, recording, reading, and thinking? What would happen if he didn't have to react, "do" something important, or deal with "that" threat? What would happen if each person in this country chose a week without speech? What would be the first words we would speak after this silence? I could say more, but I'll move on.
---------

MOLLY RUSSAKOFF
I would probably resign because it is not in my nature to sit in a cabinet. But before doing so, I would probably suggest that he calm down, use longer breaths in his lines and not use so many exclamation points!
---------

PRAGEETA SHARMA
I will ask him to replace every seventh word from his speeches with a word from the dictionary. No, really, just because I am curious, I would ask him to write his own speeches. It would be some sort of truth telling.
---------

QUESTION 3:
During World War II Ezra Pound openly and actively supported fascism in Europe. Does this affect how you read his poems? Why or why not?

THE ANSWERS:

JIM BEHRLE
I don't really care about Ezra Pound. I don't read his work. But I'm not sure why we continue to single him out. There are lots of poets with asshole opinions. It's not as though we're dealing with the poems of Mussolini or Hitler. I guess if I read one of his poems and didn't know it was him and liked it and then found out it was him I might be caught up in a wave of guilt. But if we cast out every poet who had dopey opinions from being read or enjoyed, we'd become an inconsequential art.
---------

EDMUND BERRIGAN
Though I may occasionally wonder why he did what he did, I don't look to poetry as the summation of one's entire life or actions, I look instead for whatever is helpful, and believe-you-me I find it there.
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JIM CORY
Poor Ezra. Won't they ever let up on him? I say this now though if I'd been alive in 1942, with the Nazis overrunning Russia and the extermination camps in full swing, I certainly would've felt differently. I would've regarded Pound with the same near ungovernable loathing I feel on viewing, say, a Tucker Carlson or an Ann Coulter, the sort of people who fashion careers defending privilege in all its various guises, using sophistry, sarcasm and spleen as their weapons. They deserve whatever the Fates dispatch. But consider: We remember Pound's vile politics only because of the great genius of his poems, which not only broke new ground but laid the aesthetic basis for literary Modernism, Anglo-American version. His work remains readable and alive, thrilling in the way only great poetry is. It was the best part of who he was, and what he was was complicated, exasperating, brilliant, ruthless, and a little mad. But only a little.
---------

HASSEN
It doesn't affect how I read his poems. However, when reading his poetry/poetics, I am often struck by elements that I imagine also shaped his politics pedantry & authority but most of all proscriptive & dictatorial undertones. &tc...
---------

SOFIA MEMON
Nothing about Ezra Pound's work ever really appealed to me. I can't help it. I never liked it. Like I never liked William Blake. Not only do I not like it, I find it sort of frumpy and annoying, even when it's trying to be vehement and universal and profound. And I read them that way before I knew Pound was a fascist. But it's very possible that the characteristics that make Pound's writing heavy handed and reminiscent of bad dark wood paneling are the very characteristics that made him sympathetic to a particularly dumb, paternalistic and racist kind of nationalism. More generally, I think poets will inevitably and should be, though not exclusively, read in the context of their lives. I think one very sound and interesting way to read poetry is like historical fiction like a very human, very visceral way to get a handle on the world as it has been and the people who have lived it. So were I to be able to stomach Pound's poetry, that might be the most useful way for me to read it.
---------

DANIEL ABDAL-HAYY MOORE
The first statement needs more subtlety really, since Pound in his often misguided egomania was really against war and capitalist decadence, the banking system which he sniffed was Rothschild controlled, etc. He compared Mussolini to Thomas Jefferson, hoping he was an agrarian reformer for his nation, and a supporter of the arts. There's an amusing and sad anecdote about Pound's one meeting face to face with the monster, hoping he'd read some of his poetry (alas, aren't we all prone to this all too poignant failing!), and to Pound's dismay Muss kind of glanced at it, said, "very nice," and changed the subject. But, really, if character of a poet determined reading his or her poems, fewer poems would get read than they do, I think. Knowing about a poet does inform the work (someone has said that Rimbaud was really a man of action, as evinced by his restlessness and his later mercantile ambitions, so his work, especially the later works, should be read in this light, and Season in Hell is really a manifesto of a call to action above all), and Pound isn't exempt from this angle, and yes, I think I do read his work knowing his extremism (but then, I don't like his denigration of the Taoists as ismissable "mystics" in the Cantos, nor his ignorance of Islam either). Still, Pound for me is a brave cantankerous soul, who dared to speak in the public arena and suffered for it, with all his faults and mistakes. He's not quite Ossip Mandelstam in his being incarcerated for insubordination against authority (treasonous radio broadcasts with anti-semitic overtones may not be equivalent to dangerously mocking descriptions of Stalin's moustache), but somehow there's a sad story here of the military culture and the strict severance of radical thought and the trajectory of policy. I don't know what that means, but it sounds interesting. One footnote, by the way. In Berkeley in the 60s I met Oswald LeWinter, whose website search turns up some kind of spy dirt about him, but in those days he was an older poet, I think in the PhD program at the University of California, and one afternoon in his apartment he showed a friend and I a letter about Pound from his file, then still in St. Elizabeths, from T.S. Eliot, in which Eliot said that he thought Pound was better off where he was. It was a shock to me I've never forgotten, and it really does color how I read Eliot's poetry. Here was a man who put Eliot on the map, and that prune-faced subverter of ecstatic verse in favor of the ecclesiastical rational (he disliked Blake, so I dislike him, tit for tat) turned against him when he was being asked to help spring Pound from the madhouse. It was Frost, as it transpired, who was instrumental in getting Pound freed, to live his later life in almost catatonic silence, since, I guess, opening his big mouth had gotten him into such hot and nasty water. Another ironic turn of events: Pound thought the State should support its poets, and his long incarceration in St. Elizabeth's provided him with a very nerve-racking but occasionally fruitful room and board, courtesy of the U.S. government! Though he had to keep his work hidden from the other noisy loonies who roamed the halls and tried to steal his food. To answer this question, I'm actually reading a book by Eustace Mullins about Pound called, "This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound." Olson and Ginsberg also had negative things to say about Pound, though they owed much of their poetics to his groundbreaking fearlessness and depth of scholarship. Pound's ABC of Reading is still an invaluable guide to the poet's road. Finally, as a corollary to his supposed stand for Fascism is his apparent anti-Semitism, and this is from the Mullins book: the great American and Jewish poet, Louis Zukovsky, says of Pound: "I never felt the least trace of anti-Semitism in his presence. Nothing he ever said to me made me feel the embarrassment I always had for the 'Gentile' in whom a residue of antagonism to 'Jew' remains. If we had occasion to use the words, Jew and Gentile, they were no more nor less ethnological in their sense than 'Chinese' or 'Italian.'"
---------

DEBORAH RICHARDS
I am affected by Pound's views in the sense I know that they exist as a layer to reading his work. Yet I am also affected by Eliot, Stein, Woolf, and whoever else you could care to name who include negative/dismissive images of black people in their works. There is always a jolt for me as I read "classic" literature and see myself belittled. What annoys me more is that often critics or friends will tell me not to be affected by this language. Back to Pound--I think that he was treated terribly when he was sent back to the States. It is always easier to demonize the individual--especially with hindsight--because we deny our own demons. Yet, I will accept that someone will feel the same jolt I feel when reading Pound, that I experience when reading Heart of Darkness.
---------

MOLLY RUSSAKOFF
I was very relieved to find out about Ezra Pound's political leanings/ravings because I was never a great reader of Pound, we just did not get along. It gave me a good reason to discard him, especially in speaking with intellectuals.
---------

PRAGEETA SHARMA
I do think about it when I read his work and I think about his character.
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2004-04-30T11:19:00.000-04:00

QUESTION 4:
Please respond to the following excerpt from Ann Lauterbach's essay "After the Fall":

"A form contains. The forms of freedom are not without restraint, as in 'free verse,' which is not the same as formless. If we do not know how to restrain, retrain, our desires, then we will not know how to align our power to the limited resources of the world. If we do not begin to re-imagine our power, we will use it mainly to constrain others...."
--American Letters & Commentary, issue #14, page 9

THE ANSWERS:

JIM BEHRLE
This is complete bullshit. I wish I was powerful and could constrain others. There are plenty who should be constrained. But there's nothing more powerless than a poet.
---------

EDMUND BERRIGAN
I agree with Anne 100% & I think that she has tried very hard to use the brief national spotlight on poetry, which Laura Bush accidentally triggered in her plastic surgery haze, to great effect. Anne Lauterbach understands her responsibilities to the world.
---------

JIM CORY
Containing is only one function of a form. Form's other purpose is to express whatever's essential about content. I like poems in form which set out to, and succeed in, subverting form. I like the work of poets who create fresh forms for each new poem. Obviously anyone can write any way he or she wishes -- this is where aesthetic freedom comes in -- but conventional forms invariably signal conventional thought and conventional language. Was it Pound who admonished the writers of his time to: Make it new! Well, he was right on about that. Form is the great challenge and responsibility of the poet. It's what matters. Content's an expediency, and often a trap. People who mistake content for the heart of the poem write poems that turn to dust in an instant. It's not what the poem's about, it's what you do with what it's about, therein opportunity lies. And of course nothing interesting happens without passion and directness.
---------

HASSEN
When I first read this, I thought it about said it all. I further considered & wasn't sure it said so much but maybe implied it all. I suppose a form contains. Though I'm unsure that's always the case. Does containment imply imprisonment? If so, then I don't believe a[ny] form contains so much as outlines or suggests a pattern or contour for our senses to determine (or not). As for free verse, I agree it's not necessarily without restraint and of course not formless (anyway, can't form be found of anything if only in the idea of any thing?). Forms of freedom not without restraint -OK. I agree with the third and fourth sentences, though the leap seems great from the second. I'm sure she's talking about tyranny, anarchy & freedom & if I think about the previous question re Pound, I make a direct connection with all of these thoughts. However to summarize, I could better understand something like If we do not begin to imagine forms outside of the those we insist upon as well as understand there are forms beyond our understanding we will tend to constrain others and in so doing strangle ourselves. or: let loose the noose live and let live lucy the goose. Likely she said it perfectly and I'm just not completely getting it. But I probably agree. Form, I guess, is just a really vague term to discuss greed/abuse of power & doesn't seem to me as pertinent as something like point. How about specific forms? For example, an enforced or remeditated form may be a symptom of systemic insecurity resulting from, among other things, denial/ignorance/disrespect of self/other/intuition. I wouldn't say the overall utility of Form In General determines how or why one would seek excessive power. Or was she simply saying we all need some form of restraint so we don't constrain others & I'm, in proper convoluted form, beginning (for I am utilizing restraint by discontinuing) a mess of it...
---------

SOFIA MEMON
Ann Lauterbach, on the other hand, is very interesting. I'm understanding better now how you've put together these questions, Conrad. Are you really thinking about all of this? Freedom, structure, the limits of postmodernism, the problems of eventual nihilism, narcissism? I agree with Ann, like this:
>>>>>
form contains, restraint re-imagines: freedom;
desires, without restraint, constrain freedom.
we do not know how to retrain, align
we begin without, use power: not freedom.
our limit of resource is formlessness
forms retrain our voices versed in freedom.
>>>>>
or something like that.
---------

DANIEL ABDAL-HAYY MOORE
While I am not a "formalist," chaos theory has shown us that there is a persistent and consistent form even in the seemingly "formless," the greatest "formlessness" being that dimension beyond death, perhaps (from which no direct flesh-and-blood messenger has returned, alas), but while we're here we're all in some form or other, even the jellyfish, the miasma, and, I would wager, even the Imagination itself. In poetry, however, total formlessness, in the formal sense, might end up giving us all migraines, although Gertrude Stein goes a long way to the edge and peers down into the abyss (which many contemporaries seem to shinny with ease). Though we might set out eschewing the Tennysonian forms, the even-metered forms, the iambics and dactyls, and crash out of them with intensity of purpose, after the long practice of inspired writing, a sense of "rightness" comes. As Wm. Blake said: "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become Wise." A Jackson Pollock painting, at his peak, takes you inward through an explosion of traditional forms, plus a new, wild way of working, though you can spot someone else's imitation in a second, should anyone be rash enough to try, since he ended by creating a "form" by way of a certain jet-propelled yet ultimately lyrical "formlessness."
---------

DEBORAH RICHARDS
I probably rambled on with this question in the live version of this blog. I said that I saw this an American question. I still feel the same, and I'm probably going to be rambler here too.I have not read the rest of essay, so I can't speak for the focus of the original argument. Excuse my attempt at thinking through the meaning of power with this quotation. I think a Brit does not view "power" in the same way--there is the feeling that "we",in England, think the same, as though it is still a monocultural society. It is not. This means that we accept power relations of our society because that's the way it has always been. This is one of the reasons I am exiled (temporarily) from Britain. Of course, no one really cares what "we" think these days. So, I see this as a question that asks us to understand the systems of the poem and the world. An awareness of the system and the kinds of privilege of being part of this system--by being American or an American-based writer--is something that should be noted and examined. Our "freedoms" even when challenged (and especially because they are challenged)are accepted and expected. There is an assumption that the "we" consume the resources greedily without restraint. Note: I assume the "we" in Ann Lauterbach's quotation was the American.
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MOLLY RUSSAKOFF
I think this is a pretty wrenched metaphor. Poetry, as it is written, is so solitary and meditative. It really has no correlation to the actual resources available in the world. I do, however, believe that free verse is not formless, that poetry itself is a form, a form of art and of speech and of communication. A poet's main restraints are the margins or edges of the page. How's that?
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PRAGEETA SHARMA
I think she is discussing the possibility of linking our forms or styles to a more enlightened possibility when we make decisions in our poems-- Lauterbach has a certain integrity in her innovations that I find inspiring.
---------

QUESTION 5:
Tell us about a poem you read at some point during your formative years that woke you to the possibilities of poetry.

THE ANSWERS:

JIM BEHRLE
I blew this question when it was first asked. I'm enjoying my formative years right now. I could go on and on about John Berryman's "Dream Song #1." It means little to me know, there were poets in that room at the Philly Sound weekend that show me more about the possibilities of poetry. Berryman's "Dream Songs" just showed me at the time that all poems didn't necessarily suck.
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EDMUND BERRIGAN
Dylan Thomas' poem "The Hand that Signed the Paper", shined a great light on my forehead when I was 15. His collected poems had the language in it between thought and articulation, which I heard and hoped to utter. This particular one was easier to comprehend, which helped for that particular moment; as well it was an antiwar poem, and the first gulf war was happening & so it joined two worlds together for me, poetry and reality.
---------

JIM CORY
When I was 12, I shoplifted a copy of the Mentor Book of Major American Poets from the gift shop at the Stamford Museum & Nature Center, in Stamford, CT. It became a Bible, and I mean that literally in the sense that when I opened it up, the words on its pages seemed like sacred text. Even those I couldn't understand. (Crane's "The Bridge," for instance, reprinted in entirety.) Nineteenth century poets such as a Poe, Longfellow or even E.A. Robinson were discernable, logical, entrancing. I memorized big chunks and went around reciting it all to amused or irritated adults. But the Moderns were another story. Williams, Eliott, Stevens proved impenetratable. I gave up trying, assuming I was too much of a dunce to get it. What was happening was that I couldn't find a way to get beneath the surface of a poem, so I stuck with the poems which were mostly surfaces. Then one day I was on the porch reading this book and a guy who was painting our house, probably early 20s, with goatee (most unusual, even subversive, in 1966) came down from the ladder. He asked what I was reading. I held up the book. "Can I show you a poem?" He seemed both interested and kind. I handed him the book. He found what he was looking for and opened to the page with Stevens' "The Emperor of Ice Cream." "Here," he said, "read this." I did. "What do you think it means?" I shook my head, feeling rather ashamed of my stupidity. "It's a poem about a funeral," he said. "See here where it says..." -- pointing -- "If her horny feet protrude/they come to show/how cold she is/and dumb" and "Let the boys bring flowers in last month's newspapers." I could see how the images led with a certain inexorable magic to the final lines. What he had shown me, of course, was metaphor, and how it works. It was the key that unlocked most of what, up to that time, had been hidden behind technical mysteries.
---------

HASSEN
This poem woke me to the possibilities of a certain perspective of Life! poetry being my/a reflection of it. I'm not so interested in the possibilities of my poetry as I am the possibilities of my life. In any case this one poem contains lots of stuff that turns me on wonder, imagery, play with reality/convention, simultaneous seemingly conflicting truth, silliness/absurdity especially regarding such things as mortality.
---------

SOFIA MEMON
Stylistically, it was that Emily Dickenson poem that starts "Ample make this bed..." It's delicious how she uses words. And the cadence never fails. It's kind of amazing how urgent and sensual she can be while still being relevant to the rest of us. But emotionally, it was that ee cummings poem with a line that talks about "the shocking fuzz of your electric fur..." Who knew body hair could be so sexy?; this made adolescence bearable.
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DANIEL ABDAL-HAYY MOORE
The poem is by Mexican poet, Marco Antonio Montes de Oca, born in 1932, translated as follows:

ENTHUSIASM'S FOUNDATION
O singer enthusiasm, you pierce the crypt of trills
with loudest din and most avid song!
Your power is the sunrise that unfurls its flags above the hill,
the sky that unloads its purple baskets over a ravenous precipice,
the foliage of bells you ignite in an enchanted wood.
For you, who illuminates my trust,
I clear brush from the path and remove its verdant traps.
For you, who flows on a giant ocean swell
as frail as the bones of a turtledove,
as vulnerable as geranium-thatch on a wall,
as fragile as a warrior who defies an avalanche
with the single bright wafer of his shield,
I now braid my enamored offering.
For you, possessing the password required to rule in the Southern Cross,
the first to hurl yourself in between creaking rafters,
escaping from the night of the world by a frayed cable,
for you, unique word, solar incarnation of all miracles,
I stretch the stalactites of poetry all the way to the ground
and with strange lightnings ignite the heart of mankind.
(translated by Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore)

I was 22, living in Mexico, had dropped out of the University of California in Berkeley to write poetry, had already been mightily turned on by Dylan Thomas, Yeats, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Patchen, the French Surrealists, et al, but met Marco personally in Mexico City, and was amazed by his stolid and even anciently indigenous authority (yes, Indian) in the realm of the pure and fluid imaginal world. Part of the mystique was that as I was learning Spanish, romanticizing it incredibly in terms of its daily usage because of its musicalilty and the latino's love of talking, I began translating his poems, difficult because of his use of abstruse words and complex imagery, and felt I was peeling back veils from a real mystery in so doing. This poem is an example of his work, but its exaltedness, ecstatic bursting of song, and what he called "plasticidad" of image-making, where an image is in movement rather than static, really inspired my lifelong work in writing poems. He sat in his rooftop studio, drawing in pastels, drinking far too much, his long Indian face and slow manner of speaking from some deep source, and then these almost ritual poems, which seemed to come as if by miracle, were an exciting revelation to me, that even later led to Blake and Rumi, Hafez and 'Attar.
---------

DEBORAH RICHARDS
This was a difficult question, because I was not turned on by poetry when I was younger. I liked "The Listeners" by Walter de la Mare because I learned it for school.I tried to write my own rhymes, but I learned fairly soon that poetry was not something that people like me did. I believe that I didn't have the capacity to learn how to write those kinds of poems.

I was influenced by African American writers--Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou (she's a regular visitor to London). Prose was the answer, but I didn't seem to have the stamina for it. I ended up with poems--sounds a bit like the second prize to competition with only 2 contestants.

About the Gil Scott-Heron choice. There was a documentary I watched in England where Heron walked the streets of Washington D.C. He was the first person who gave me the poetry bug, but it was the politics, the poem, and the poet combination.

I've seen Scott-Heron perform in London, and a favored memory is exchanging a friendly glance with him at Heathrow airport a long time ago. He seemed like a nice guy.

Maybe I should have chosen him to for my drag persona. A nice mellow black man rather than a loud white guy. I'm Gemini.
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MOLLY RUSSAKOFF
The poem that comes to mind first, as always, is "Dirge Without Music" which floored me with its audacious claim that the poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, was not resigned to death. There is no other place that a thought this futile and sorrowful can be expressed so forthrightly and with such elegance.
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PRAGEETA SHARMA
I am not embarrassed to say that I read everything out of the Norton Anthology--it is great in high school, it's like looking at baseball cards.
---------

QUESTION 6:
What are your thoughts on creative writing degree programs?

THE ANSWERS:

JIM BEHRLE
I wish that no other degree programs existed. That everyone would be foreced to become a poet and to teach other poets.
---------

EDMUND BERRIGAN
I think creative writing programs are useful, but that I would die of restraint if I attended one. I'm not interested in the University route, but only because everyone takes it. It surely has its uses as it does its power structures. I'm choosing to struggle with a myriad of unrelated jobs in an attempt to get a different set of experiences. Most of my friends & family have MFA's. But University politics are ridiculous, and there's plenty of shit to wade through before you get the diamond that no one buys.
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JIM CORY
These programs can have value -- Naropa, for instance, is a great institution -- assuming the student learns to make his or her own judgements. Unfortunately, many teachers seem to regard aesthetic mimicry as the measure of success. They want to turn out clones of themselves, disciples. And so many who come out of those schools carry with them the virus of academic snobbery. Symptoms? Condescension, competitiveness, rank envy. Mao had the right idea, sending them all out to plant rice.
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HASSEN
I've never been drawn to it or taken any such courses so I don't think I can fairly say too much outside of it seems like a good way to spend time. If I were asked to say more, I'd wonder if there is danger for the creative individual in any institution if being a unique voice/perspective is important. & certainly not to say resistance is futile. Some of my favorite people/poets are creative writing program vets.
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SOFIA MEMON
It's nice I guess to have the excess to have such things as creative writing degree programs. Except when creative writing degree program students only have insight to offer about writing and things written and the life with enough excess to attend a creative writing degree program. I don't know. Study is useful; it does more than it ever seems to do. I like that we have (I have had) that excess. But I feel bad when writing becomes so referential to some canon or another that the rest of us louses who are trying to make a living, love beauty, make more beauty, don't know or care much anymore what another writer is talking about. On the other hand, if I were in a creative writing program, maybe someone would keep sticking Ann Lauterbach's essays in front of my nose. Maybe I would assimilate parts of her useful critique and commentary and let them shape me (without ever referring to her or her poems in a poem), and maybe that would make me a better writer.
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DANIEL ABDAL-HAYY MOORE
I must restrain myself on this question, though I have a constellation of answers, and am genuinely puzzled by the situation at hand in our present literary culture. I was counseled by a professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley that I would have to learn to write a formal essay if I wanted to remain in the department, but that, from the evidence of a paper I wrote on Walden (that was in no way formal), which he read very enthusiastically to the class, I might really want to just go elsewhere and write. So I did. The climate of the 60s in Berkeley was certainly a factor, but the idea of shouldering academic anemia and pressure, and the fact that it seemed every professor in the department was walking down the corridors with a knife in his back from one rival or another (though Thom Gunn was on the faculty, as well as Louis Simpson and Tom Parkinson), I decided to go it alone into the savage world without a safety net. Since then, I've traveled, worked at various jobs, none of which was teaching poetry or even undergraduate English in a college or university or even a high school, and have always written poetry late at night, after a day's work, resulting in over 48 manuscripts, some quite large, but attracting over the years very marginal peer or editorial recognition. I also sometimes feel the lack of an actually solid academic education, being, since then, more of an autodidact in my reading and assimilating. But then I also took another path altogether, and became a Muslim-Sufi in 1970 which led in another direction, toward Morocco and Mecca and the scholars of Qur'an and the world of spiritual realities, something I might really never have done if I'd stuck it out in the University, gotten a little teaching job somewhere, or a big one, become a more published poet perhaps, etc. etc. One of the main plusses but also minuses of writing degree programs, it seems, is that one enters a "culture" which supports, gives grants and prizes, and may even publish and make "famous" the member practitioner of poetry, but I wonder about the results. Nothing can substitute living and writing because you have to. Most poetry readings are attended these days by fellow poets. This is a cliche. Most poetry I read or hear at readings has become cerebral and inbred. The fire of the beats, who fired me up, has largely been tamed by university acceptance of wild creativity, highjacked perhaps by degree programs where students learn all the tones and voices and techniques and loosenings of inhibitions necessary to write, but may miss staggering lost in a Mexican forest at night, or falling into the London canal while working on a barge in Little Venice, or buying tins of pilchards in the markets of Nigeria, or which I don't posit as better than a degree, necessarily, but whose life experience may give a bit more grit, perhaps, than approval and applause from like voices. Do I envy the success of published works of degree holders and graduates from the warm and feathery wings of creative writing mentors and poet professors? Sometimes. Perhaps someone who wants to write great poetry should major in brain surgery or astronomy, comparative religion, or even, for God's sake, banking, and then write as if his or her life depended on it (hello there Wallace Stevens, Charles Ives). Are we in a hall of echoes where everyone begins to sound alike? Will all the poets in the audience please raise their hands? What! No janitors, aviators, marine biologists or even petty criminals in the audience? (Ach! I'm talking to myself again)
---------

DEBORAH RICHARDS
I learned a lot from the Temple Creative Program. I think programs work if you happen to be in the right place and with the right people. One year either way might have influenced the positive feelings I have for my program. This is a bit hit-or -miss. I like reading and having access to the libraries, so any kind of study would suit me.

It feels that a Creative Writing Degree gives you access to a writing community, and it annoints the writer as accredited and able to "teach" in the University. In my case, I don't think I would have been able to finish my writing if I hadn't studied in a formal way. There are lots of ways to be a writer.
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MOLLY RUSSAKOFF
Oh, if people want to go that route, it is certainly available. It might be fun to be around all those people who are writing poems. I mean, it was fun when I was at Naropa. It seems a bit like an industry. But who I am I to say? I have loved many people who partook in these programs. I guess it's just not for me, if for no other reason than I don't have the time or money.
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PRAGEETA SHARMA
I had a wonderful time, I learned how to make the transition of writing privately to a public dialogue. I learned the value of mentors and poetic traditions.
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2004-04-30T11:08:00.000-04:00

QUESTION 7:
Is there a visual artist who has inspired your poetry? If so who is it, and how have your poems been informed by their work?

THE ANSWERS:

JIM BEHRLE
Tom & Jerry. And X-men comics.
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EDMUND BERRIGAN
When I was 15 I went to the MOMA with my mom and looked at some cubism paintings. It blew my mind and I had to leave 5 minutes later. It seemed to be just like the way I wanted thought to work.
---------

JIM CORY
I know many visual artists, and I spend a lot of time visiting galleries and museums. I sometimes have the experience of being moved to tears by a painting. But I couldn't say one particular visual artist has provided a model for what I write, in the way that, say, reading the New York School, Beats, San Francisco poets, Black Mountain people, etc. showed me how to write poems. I love Demuth, Hartley, Maurer, O'Keefe and of course Joan Mitchell, DeKooning, Pollack and that gang. I like color and the attraction, for me, to painting, is every bit as powerful as the attraction to literature or music. But the method of creating a painting, vs. making a poem, is altogether different. Painters think like poets, but then again they don't. Then again, if I see a certain visual image that overwhelms, I tend to analyze it. I try and mentally re-create the process that brought it into existence. I do that with anything that gets past my guard. The greatest art, of whatever genre, belongs in a genre of its own.
---------

HASSEN
So far as I can think, no artist has directly inspired my poetry. However, there are quite a few who have provided re-affirmation of life-perspective I mentioned earlier/above. Immediately to mind come Cornell, Duchamp, Goya, Wyeth. C for wonder and play, D's possibility and humor, G's truth, vigilance, W?s ability to listen, reflect. Oh! another: I have a pic of a painting on my bedroom door ? Brad Eberhard?s ?My Squid Suit Brings Isolation. It's a found image - of Wyeth's Christina's World - but Eberhard painted a goofy red squid suit on her. One of the best things I've ever seen. The work of some artist friends really excites me, too. To answer the second part of this question ? my poems are not directly, so far as I know, informed by their work, but again, they likely (hopefully) reflect a certain perspective to living these artists reinforce. Now that I think about it, I wouldn't be surprised if the Crap I often frame (for coin) inspires me to subtly deride one or two specific & overrated artists in a future poem.
---------

SOFIA MEMON
I learned pottery from this beautiful woman named Roseanna Cruz. Boy, I'll be so embarrassed if she reads this. Anyway Roseanna was this audacious woman who was stunningly, but not conventionally beautiful and had this great black curling hair and didn't mind sweating. She was fabulous to watch-and she said while she was throwing a massive bowl that it was the shape inside of the pot that was most important. That insight, by analogy, informs just about everything in my life, including poetry. Poems work best for me like containers, telling you a thing by showing you its perimeter; humble, like bowls.
---------

DANIEL ABDAL-HAYY MOORE
I can't mention William Blake enough, it seems. He is the real Sufi English poet and illustrator of heavenly realities for me, even as his nude figures would be frowned on by the sterner and more puritan "religious" Muslims. But from the first time I saw his work, luminous, making the unseen palpable, actually radiating light as in (or out from) the paintings of Turner, I felt the breath of his multi-worldly dimension on my cheek and wanted to inhabit it. As an artist in both graphic and verbal realms, he is the model of the rugged innovator, an earlier Harry Partch (in music), certain of his mission, working in obscurity though he didn't want to (he hoped for more unanimous cultural usefulness, as did Whitman and Van Gogh), for the sake of social, political and spiritual revelation, but from the deep soul's standpoint in every case. As well as the fluidity of his figures and the amazingly otherworldly light in his paintings (seeing his paintings "live," as at the Met show a year or so ago, I was often staggered by the actual radiance that seems to emanate from within his works), his non-insipid angelic beings and spiritual entities, always Michaelangelesquely muscular and energetic, the reality of his imagination always stands forthright and strong and vigorous. As he said in the "devil's" voice in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight."

From my manuscript, Angel Broadcast:

SHOWER OF ANGELS

There's a shower of them, a downpour of
intelligent angels through the air,
landing and seeping into the ground everywhere.

They're impassive as they slide down into
matter and go, like cutouts, past its
surfaces, eyes always ahead, tinged with joy.

How could angels heed warnings? They do what they're
told, they have no
way to deny except to
burst into flame and burn
incandescently on a cloud-edge or eyelid-edge
forever, heart-edge sharp as broken glass,
their face-cavalcade showering through the air
toward and away from us

going out in a mist above the bay-waters of
human commerce.
---------

DEBORAH RICHRADS
I loved this question. I'm interested in modern art-- anti-art movements such as in Fluxus, Vito Acconci's procedures, Jeff Koons kitch, Ian Hamilton Finlay's garden project. I find that I'm energized by conceptual art. I enjoy the space of the installation, and minute detail of a Chuck Close portrait.

I would like my own work to take up space, be large, yet have the quirky detail that calls the eye to attention.

I once trained to be a volunteer docent at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, but I left before I could do real tours. I'd love to learn more and use some of the concepts and techniques in my work.

I have started (almost!!) a collaboration with Alicia Askenase on trompe l'oeil (trick of the eye)because of an exhibition I saw in Washington about a year ago.
---------

MOLLY RUSSAKOFF
My sister Julie, who I am sadly no longer in touch with. She inspired and influenced me in most ways. She had a very joyful and intuitive approach to painting. She painted large cartoonish canvasses, had a great sense of humor in her paintings, lots of bright colors. They were also fairly narrative for paintings. My parents have one of her paintings hanging that is a large literal depiction of the song ST. Louis Woman.
---------

PRAGEETA SHARMA
There are so many visual artists. I currently am loving Chinese Conceptual art as well what is happening in my generation of painters.
---------

QUESTION 8:
If L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry arrived at your door in the form of a gift, what would it look like?

THE ANSWERS:

JIM BEHRLE
(At this point I stood up and stripped off to display the homemade Charles Bernstein LANGUAGE POETRY Wiffleball Team jersey I wore under the Pirates' jersey I had on. They will soon be available.)
---------

EDMUND BERRIGAN
It would look like a stone. I would love it for being a stone, and it to my collection. I have two cats who sometimes knock the stones off their shelf. They break apart. But they're still stones, and still great.
---------

JIM CORY
I think it might be one of those rubber shrunken heads people used to dangle from their rear-view mirrors in the 60s.
---------

HASSEN
It would be portable steps. & reversible.
---------

SOFIA MEMON
I don't know. I didn't know what L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry was when I was asked this question. I'm still not entirely sure what it is. But here's a gesture at an answer: I might not like Ezra Pound or William Blake, but I love playing with form. I love the freedom to play and I love the form with which to start playing. I want both and I enjoy both. So I guess L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry would be brown goo which would be nice if it were chocolate that could be scraped into bites, or if it were paint and I could take a sieve and separate the colors and start again winding my way carefully back to brown goo.
---------

DANIEL ABDAL-HAYY MOORE
Labyrinths in lab coats with tongue depressors or
lang. gauges like Laplanders with little lights on
talking through mazes where amazement manifests

age after age in angelic formations
though to our minds or minefields
miasmas of ams as in "I am" or "you am," (Popeye)

"I never met a poem I didn't like" (Will Rogers)

as against
"I never killed a poem that didn't deserve it" (Al Capone)

(Hey, some of my best friends are L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets)
or could (should) be?

I consider some Eskimo songs poems of this ilk
(elk)

The milk of kindness flows from poem to poem
in vessels as varied as faces or surprises
---------

DEBORAH RICHARDS
It would be a collection of excyclopaedia, bound in mauroon leather-look fabric with a gold trim. The pages would be fine, and the print would be small, but it should be well-written and include actual examples of texts. As I like research, it would be a perfect gift.

I'd prefer the hard back version of the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E, because I'd find it easier than browsing the C.D-rom. Though, the C.D- rom would be easier to take with me if I moved.
---------

MOLLY RUSSAKOFF
Refrigerator magnets. Just as an aside, what really did arrive in the mail...was a free sample of special KY Jelly that heats to the touch. The weird thing was that it was actually addressed to my mother.
---------

PRAGEETA SHARMA
An orange parka.
---------

QUESTION 9:
I have a bottle of pills that will physically change you into the way you feel about poetry. You take one, and when you look in the mirror, what do you see?

THE ANSWERS:

JIM BEHRLE
I quit drinking 6 months ago. This pill doesn't sound like it would jive with my sobriety. Sorry.
---------

EDMUND BERRIGAN
I see nothing, because I have no eyes. I feel gaseous and peculiar, and everything is motion. After awhile I can tell that the types of motion are different. Then I stop having human associations.
---------

JIM CORY
It'd depend on the time of day and circumstance. If I'm just back from the the big Borders on Broad St. here in Philadelphia, having perused shelves and shelves of mediocre books that somehow made it into print, your pill would change me into that creature Sigorney Weaver faced down in Alien. On the other hand, if it's a rainy Saturday afternoon and I've taken to my bed with, say, "Poems for the Millenium," or Zukovsky's Collected Poems, I would walk in the bathroom to pee and suddenly see, looking back from above the sink, a gardenia that could smell itself.
---------

HASSEN
It seems like a funhouse mirror. I can only
.focus.on.how.the.mirror.distorts.my.image , which might be, what, a
transforming sky? shadow? vapor? Hey now...
---------

SOFIA MEMON
Once an Egyptian man living in Italy made me a meal. He fried whole, finely breaded fish. It was a little grotesque as I was a vegetarian and the fish eyes were all glassy. But it was so decadent and so irresistible. He made a spicy meat stew and drained the juice into the rice for cooking. He mixed feta cheese with olives and put oil and pepper on the every green but lettuce salad. He pulled out the only table from the wall in his one room house and set it with simple white plates. That table, set with the eyes of the fish staring up at me; that's what I see in the mirror.
---------

DANIEL ABDAL-HAYY MOORE
I came of age in Oakland and San Francisco in the 60s, met and knew the old school poets Ginsberg, McClure and Ferlinghetti, was energized by massive poetry readings attended by blissed out multitudes packed to the rafters who hung on every word and waited for every new book of poems to come out?"news that stays news" (Pound), started a poetry theater company, The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company, writing ecstatic texts to be declaimed to the night skies of psychedelic Berkeley, then in 1970 entered a Sufi realm where the poetry of Mevlana Rumi was the portal, and the diwan (or poetry-song collection) of our enlightened teacher in Morocco, Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib, became our daily reading and singing, along with studying and reciting the Qur'an, whose acknowledged sacredness of language and elevation of meaning was beyond anything I'd ever encountered. I can't be blamed, therefore, for having a take on poetry that is rooted in Beat directness but heads into stratospheric empyreans (as Jim Cory calls it) in search of new meanings and fresh inspirations. I mean, I can be blamed, of course, but I've got a good lawyer.

So when I look into the mirror, I may not see a glib or cocky self, may not see a corduroy'd poet with leather elbow patches, may not see respectable member of the poetry community looking straight back at me with confidence and even a certain self-effacing brio, but having seen a new dimension of poetry as a way toward direct, experiential knowledge of God, and as a means through ecstatic excitement and vaster dimensionality to lead others to a simultaneously experienced knowledge (as against one previously experienced and then rationally explained)?(I mean one experienced at the very writing of the poem!), though I make no similar claims for myself in terms of a station of elevation, yet having sat with someone whose "poetry" didn't come from sitting down to write, but rather from being overwhelmed with angelic dictation (see Jack Spicer?but think in terms of Sufi or Judeo-Christian mystical tradition where such ideas are assumed and expected - Saint John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, even Japanese Zen Master Dogen, for example)?

so that hopefully
if I looked into a mirror after having
swallowed such a pill
bitter sweet or bittersweet

I might see rolling hills with a strange green light splashing over them
rainbow-lit ocean waves heaving over their silvery fringes

or a hood with no face in it looking back at me

and in that open space

God's light itself
---------

DEBORAH RICHARDS
A "magic eye" picture that, with closer investigation and concentration, becomes an image. The poet is not trying to hide the image, but create another of view of a series of lines, dashes, and squiggles. In the magic eye book there are some pictures that are easier to read than others, and that's the fun, the seriousness, and variety of the form.
---------

MOLLY RUSSAKOFF
I look like a gazelle traipsing through a field of flowers.
---------

PRAGEETA SHARMA
I wouldn't see it in the mirror but I would feel wonderful all of the time.
---------

2004-04-30T11:07:00.000-04:00

ABOUT THE POETS:

Jim Behrle edits can we have our ball back? and serves as Roving Poet for WBUR's syndicated radio newsmagazine "Here & Now."

Edmund Berrigan was born in Colchester, England, moved to Chicago two weeks later, and two years from then went on to New York to study rent escalation. He is the author of Disarming Matter from Owl Press (1999). Recent poems have or will appear(ed) in or on Lungfull!, Pom, 3ammagazine.com, Van Gogh's Ear, & Cock Now.

Jim Cory, a 25 year veteran of the Philadelphia poetry scene, has been a Yaddo and Pennsylvania Arts Council fellow and published seven chapbooks of poems.

hassen writes poetry & fiction & lives near Philadelphia. Her poems have been to Skanky Possum, Nedge, Barque Press' One Hundred Days Anthology, and in the current issue of FREQUENCY Audio Journal. Hassen likes summer a lot.

Sofia Memon is a poet and welfare rights lawyer who lives and works in Philadelphia. Sofia has read her work at The Khyber, the Asian Arts Initiative. Her poetry will appear in the soon to be published anthology, Writing the Lines of Our Hands. Her writing is an exploration of sound, lyric, and form as well as an expression of cultural fusion, muslim spirituality, and humane politics.

Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore's poems have appeared in Zyzzva, the Citys Lights Review, and The Nation. His books Dawn Visions (1964), and Burnt Heart, Ode to the War Dead (1972), were both published by City Lights Books. His latest collections are The Blind Beekeeper and The Ramadan Sonnets.

Deborah Richards is known for her colorful wraps and her slips into British English. Her first collection of poems, Last One Out, is now out from Subpress.

Molly Russakoff has published and performed her poems widely over the past 25 years. She was a recipient of a Pew Fellowship in 1995. She currently owns Molly's Cafe & Bookstore in Philadelphia's Itlanian Market, where she hosts poetry and prose readings and tries to sell quality used books. She also is an editor of Joss, a poetry magazine, and the poetry editor of The Philadelphia Independent.

Prageeta Sharma is the author of Bliss to Fill (Subpress, 2000). Her poems and other writings have appeared in journals such as Boston Review, Agni, Fence, The Women's Review of Books and others. She lives and writes in Brooklyn.

2003-08-27T10:33:00.000-04:00

9for9
---------
set 1 of 9

Anselm Berrigan
Buck Downs
Mytili Jagannathan
Kevin Killian
Eileen Myles
Alice Notley
Gil Ott
Frank Sherlock
Magdalena Zurawski

copyright © 2003
to all participating
poets upon publication

questions by
CAConrad

published by
Mooncalf Press
POBox 22521
Philadelphia, PA 19110
MooncalfPress@hotmail.com

9for9 is a collection of 9 questions for 9 poets and their answers. This is the first set of 9 sets. Some of the questions came from dreams, others from waking ideas. The project was conducted through e-mail, questions arriving in Inboxes once a week, usually on friday.

If you wish to communicate with any of the poets included, please feel free to send correspondence to the e-mail address CAConrad13@aol.com, with the subject line "9for9 correspondence". I promise to forward your message to the poet you wish to connect with.

Thank you,
CAConrad

---------

QUESTION 1:
Doctors have invented a new implant which can be placed in the brains of newborns to prevent all forms of suffering for a lifetime. Is this a good choice? Explain your answer.

THE ANSWERS:

ANSELM BERRIGAN
No. Is the implant some kind of life-lasting inner joint or something? And that seems to imply that joy and suffering can be implanted (I mean if you can eliminate suffering you can probably double the load too, right?) -- i.e.: if some non-sufferers have some bombs dropped on their heads are they not going to suffer?
---------

BUCK DOWNS
Steve Abbott had a questionnaire form for poets that I assume got distributed around to his students & they used it, because it wasn't Steve who sent it to Joe Brainard. Joe did try to answer it pretty honestly even though the questions were all not ones that applied much to the life that Joe was living. For example, there was a question about significant audio & all Joe could say was I have a tape by Morrissey because so-and-so gave it to me & I listen to it some because I have it, and a question about flying saucers that shows Joe to have been more or less indifferent to the phenomenon of humanity's projection of its self-image onto foreign rocks & into strange cans.

I never think of suffering in the way this question thinks of it. I think of my sore knee, I think of my mom's bronchitis or Tom Raworth's, etc. etc. The race of newborns and the race of doctors are both demographic fictions that don't correlate to the life I live. I would not trust any scientist or medical professional who accepted the concept embodied in this question as a principle for research; I would expect them to be a serious fuckup, and the inventor of some high-priced piece of shit that would first magnify human suffering to catastrophic levels before addressing it, and then failing to address it in any significant way, and mostly leaving a big mess for crackers like me to have to come clean up and/or pay for.

I would be a lot more impressed if these doctors would come up with a pop to give my mom or Tom that would undo a lifetime of cigarette smoking and life and give them back undiminished lung capacity. Or any other serious effort to tackle an actual problem.

Ugh. I think this question was supposed to be a big fat softball that would allow me to rhapsodize in a long eloquent 'statement' about the beautiful animal man [sic] and s/her ability to transcend bad breaks & shit; sorry to have blown it, but I don't give a fuck about 'newborns' or any other abstracted classes of humanity at all. Demographic abstraction is an enemy of human contact, and human contact is all poetry has left going for it in the media/market/culture that is its substrate. Everything else, as Dave Hickey once said, is advertising and term-papers.
---------

MYTILI JAGANNATHAN
I guess I disagree with the premises and assumptions of this question. First of all, on a very basic level, allopathic medical science has a lot to learn about the operations of even "physical" pain, let alone emotional pain and suffering. I mean, just to take something widely diagnosed in the U.S. like depression; sure, there are drugs that have been invented that do help some people, presumably by acting on neurotransmitters, but even the details of this process are unclear to scientists. Also unanswered (perhaps unanswerable) is the question of causality—-are changes in brain chemistry the cause of depression, or does depression cause changes in brain chemistry? And organic bodily processes are not simply "mechanical"—they're informational and "intelligent," so even something like genetic engineering is more complex than discrete and dramatic on-and-off switches. And other kinds of suffering: what is suffering? How could you catalog, much less prevent "all forms" of it?

So that's one part of my objection. The other part is that a lot of suffering-as-we-know-it (which is where we begin, after all) is intricately bound up with social/political/economic relations and our experience as part of collective forms/structures that have powerful energies and effects (need I point out the previously unimaginable scope of contemporary global capitalism?). Of course there are biological factors that influence physical and psychic experiences, but such factors are always in play with environmental conditions, in the broadest sense of "environment." So, I think that "suffering" is not an individual condition that can be "solved" by genetic/medical solutions.

I think that socially, politically, prophetically, if you like, of course struggles for justice proceed with the "end of suffering" as a horizon, but it's just as important how we imagine and enact those transformative processes. I think the processes are inherently social, material, relational, and yes, embodied; but it's certainly not going to come about through any top-down techno/medical Big Bang. And creating a dynamic, relational justice doesn't necessarily mean the end of all pain (we won't overcome mortality, after all, we're dying all the time at the cellular level, and extending old-age might even create as-yet-unexperienced forms of pain, who knows?), but an end to those social structures that "freeze" or institutionalize suffering.
---------

KEVIN KILLIAN
I hope they invent a similar implant that would induce tolerance and respect as well, otherwise what's to prevent the human race from turning cruel if no other human will suffer because of the first implant? Then our animal friends among other species will be living worse lives than ever. Save the animals now!
---------

EILEEN MYLES
No this is a bad choice. They would have to be adjusting it constantly which would disturb the growing infants sense of balance. Actually I think they have already done this and it is vaccinations and they have so much mercury in them that kids are coming up autistic.
---------

ALICE NOTLEY
What are 'all forms of suffering'? How can science define them? I wouldn't let a scientist define what constitutes suffering -- I know you are after an answer concerning the role of suffering in existence and whether living would be better if suffering were eliminated, but I can't relate to the idea of the scientist or doctor as the eliminator of suffering. Or is it that you are thinking only of disease and physical difference as forms of suffering? I tend to think of suffering as something caused by other humans -- I tend to think of the other animals as beings who don't suffer unless we cause them to suffer or who perhaps suffer in their death throes but not much before. If you want to know if suffering is of value, that's a different question. I would prefer not to suffer and I would prefer that others not suffer even more than I do -- to know that they do is horrible and makes me feel guilty. But there is no 'doctor' and to even fantasize one is to miss the point: the doctor helps create suffering by presuming to know more about its forms than others do. My suffering has been of value to me partly because it has rescued me from the doctors and their mechanistic view of reality. But I don't think I should have had to suffer in order to find out what I know.
---------

GIL OTT
Answering this question can only be a matter of faith, replacing a spiritual entity with "science." I think the question is asked more playfully than that, but I don't think there's any other way to honestly answer it. A poet recognizes that it's one's suffering (or vulnerability) which determines one's character - I recently read a passage in Rilke's Brigge reaffirming this, though I can't locate the exact passage now - so the question itself is moot. More likely: If the suffering person could escape his suffering, would he (which raises the nearly redundant: could he, and still be himself?)? A point of honor among contemporary disability activists is that they would not accept the cure for their conditions, were one concocted. Disregarding the inexactitude of applied science, and the concomitant sufferings it inflicts on subjects in pursuit of cures, the question becomes one of identity.

Now ask me that question: Could science free me from the notion of identity, would I take the cure? But then, perhaps science, or some agency, would necessarily supply me with a reliable identity to start with.
---------

FRANK SHERLOCK
Of course this is a terrible idea! It can only lead to fascism. Those of us already walking the earth sans suffer block will be forced to suffer for those who can't feel it. Camps. Torture. Entertainment.
---------

MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI
Don't you think that a prevention from suffering would be a kind of suffering in itself? People with the implant would wander through a culture without the possibility of empathy. What an alienating feeling!! Imagine the loneliness when listening to cowboy songs about loneliness knowing that you do not know the loneliness they sing!! Having such an implant would probably be very similar to watching war live on CNN. This week I saw a movie and the girl said "I just want to feel loved" and the boy said "I just want to feel." And it seemed to sum things up in a nutshell. I wasn't even stoned when I saw it and I thought "I used to be the boy, but now I'm the girl." I think the implant would keep us all on the boy's side of things. It's a terrible place. I'd rather be lonely than be lonely, if you know what I mean.
---------

QUESTION 2:
There's a face of a poet on the kite you are flying over the city. Who is this poet? When you reel them back from the wind what will you ask?

THE ANSWERS:

ANSELM BERRIGAN
Face of Steve Carey. Steve, how did you get here?
---------

BUCK DOWNS
well if it's my kite I must've painted drawn or ironed-on the poet's picture since it's not likely that I'll be buying any e.g., Jack Spicer regalia, or anything else, at Toys-R-Us anytime soon.

Was it Jack Spicer who said,

"I think that I shall never cite
a poem as lovely as a kite?"

of course it wasn't. It was I, or actually, me.

I hope I would have the perspicacity not to reel in the kite at all, but get it up to a way cool height & then cut the string, allowing the kite to crash in a faraway place like Baltimore or even Glen Burnie, where a youngun would find it & say, "did Jack Spicer run for President, or what?".
---------

MYTILI JAGANNATHAN
Interesting: the form of this question—-the delicacy, intimacy, and magical quality of this imagined act—-makes me think of the Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña. She grew up in Santiago, supported Allende's participatory socialist government, and lived in exile after Allende's murder and the long horror of Pinochet. "Thread" is a central figure—-both material and symbolic—-in her poetry and installations. All of her work seems to be a kind of "activation": making visible and visceral the reality that we are all connected. It sounds so simple conceptually but it's so incredibly powerful. She's done installations where she has woven threads connecting two sides of a street, or the opposite banks of a river, both below and above the water's surface. I've seen a photograph of an action she did in Bogata, Columbia, to protest the distribution of contaminated milk. It was called "Vaso de leche": she announced beforehand the time and location of her action. At the appointed time, she pulled on a long piece of red yarn that was wrapped around the a glass of milk, spilling it into the street. Then she wrote a poem in the street: "The cow/is the continent/whose milk (blood)/ is spilt./ What are we doing/ with life?" Cecilia says: "I look at things backwards, as they are going to look when I am gone. I have a very intense feeling that what we do is already the remains of what we are doing. The dead water, our poems."

So this is why your fascinating image of this face on a kite, held by a string, floating over the city, reminds me of her. I'm not sure I can guess what words she'd say, perhaps some new instance of her practice of poetic etymologies emerging from what she saw across Philly, breaking words apart "so that their internal metaphors were exposed" and new paths of meaning revealed. One of my favorite of these etymologies she's done: "SOL-I-DAR-I-DAD (Give and give sun)." What spaces, what words would she thread together in Philadelphia?
---------

KEVIN KILLIAN
The poet is Ronald Johnson, and when the kite comes back I'll ask that face, will you ever forgive me?
---------

EILEEN MYLES
Bob Kaufman. How did it feel?
---------

ALICE NOTLEY
No identifiable face -- it keeps changing. (No special poet.) The question I ask is awful.
---------

GIL OTT
The poet's face on my kite is Frank Samperi, reclusive when he was alive, but now deceased at least a decade. I would ask him to elaborate on the word "procession," which he used to distinguish from "process." I imagine this man's mind as pure witness, tuned to the essential deity of events, and so
endangered.
---------

FRANK SHERLOCK
It is the worn, defiant face of Osip Mandelstam. I read him "Nightsong" and ask if American poets will likewise study the science of saying goodbye.
---------

MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI
The kite is a mirror that shows me I have no face. The kite asks, what are you, little girl?
---------

QUESTION 3:
You open a book that won't close. Maybe you accept it? Maybe you struggle to close it? Each chapter is titled INSTRUCTIONS FOR POETS. Instead of words a variety of strange shapes fill the pages. The last page is blank so you can communicate to other poets an idea you feel is vital. The only requirement is that you use no words, but draw a picture instead. Describe what you would draw. Explain the drawing if you want, although it might be more interesting to let us figure it out.

THE ANSWERS:

ANSELM BERRIGAN
I would draw a three-dimensional cube.
---------

BUCK DOWNS
In the alternate universe from which this question comes and in which I can draw with any efficacy at all, I would take yet another page from the Bill Hicks playbook that is my practical guide to spiritual matters & draw a picture of my parents fucking, in honor of the great creative power of cock & cunt that makes the human race go cat go.
---------

MYTILI JAGANNATHAN
A book that won't close—-another magical image, reminds me of my earliest obsession with fairy tales. But I don't know what I would draw. If I can pile magic upon magic here, perhaps this: a page of unidentified animal sounds, actually heard when the page is touched.
---------

KEVIN KILLIAN
A drawing of a green fairy, sprung from the absinthe label, quickening silver wings above the old city night sky, some would see it is of Kylie Minogue, others will turn the page and end the book.
---------

EILEEN MYLES
It would be a bear trying to get his paw in a honey jar.
---------

ALICE NOTLEY
The drawing is of a human torso between the shoulders, throat area and just below the navel. Above the navel are several holes, small rather blurred circles in which one can see the remnants of letters of the alphabet without being able to make them out precisely. An upper curve of a P or B or R for example, but what you see looks damaged as if the letter has been roughly pulled out. One is not sure if there are four or five holes because one of them is so faint. However, it is possible to see that the holes are bleeding. One has the impression that a word has been ripped out of the torso and what is left are the ghosts of letters, the ghost of a word.
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GIL OTT
This question is too cute. I am a poet, a writer, a word artist, and my medium is words. Indeed, "strange shapes fill the pages" when I read, but their articulation is verbal. In my experience, an image is a knot, a complex made of words that is untied through a visual synapse. If I am to continue playing this game, I will offer the image of fire, not A fire, but the Biblical or spiritual fire, that burns everywhere and consumes nothing.
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FRANK SHERLOCK
Paging through this imaginary book, I imagine myself trapped in a prism- or bouncing around a cylinder, like a nerd stuffed in a dryer. Maybe I'm running the outside of a spinning wheel like a sequined circus vet. My page would be simple- the outline of a thick, red arrow pointing to the top of the page. Away from the map reader.
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MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI
A small dot slightly left of center. It looks like a perfect dot, but with a magnifying glass you can notice that the edges are uneven. Most importantly, the dot is so small you can easily pass over the page and assume it is empty. The title of the chapter is "The definition of poetry."
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2003-08-27T10:31:00.000-04:00

QUESTION 4:
S.A.M., the three things Elizabeth Bishop believed made a satisfying poem: Spontaneity, Accuracy, Mystery. How does this compare with what you look for in a poem? Or do you have an acronym of your own?

THE ANSWERS:

ANSELM BERRIGAN
I don't know, I haven't known how to answer this one. I'm afraid that looking for satisfying elements would fuck with my head in a way that I'm not into, at least not right now. I'm lately very interested in a quality or disquality of poems that makes readers uncomfortable, even scared. But the poem still has to be alive, and that does take skill, if not necessarily technical skill. Skill of word by word awareness of all that juice you and I know poems may have. Maybe that is a technical skill, like attentiveness being a technical skill, or kindness(?) -- another set of questions there. I know a lot of very intelligent poets who know what it is their poems are doing, and have a lot of interesting things to say about poetry, other peoples' poems. But their poems are weaker than their ideas, essays, theories, and I find myself not wanting to engage. As for S.A.M., the idea of spontaneity as something to look for strikes me as passive-aggressive. I now want to say that I look for poems that are as fucked up as people, but that doesn't sound right either. I like music. I got told that was simplistic once by a guy poet, but I'm a simple person.
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BUCK DOWNS
hmm how about SPAM (SILENT POWERS ALL MINE)

well one person's Mystery is another's Empty Ritualism, and Elizabeth Bishop seems about as spontaneous as Halley's Comet, I mean really. But then perhaps she sought those things because she knew from her own poetry how they are forever in short supply.

Since I don't teach and I don't learn, I feel relatively freed from the need to be consistent or coherent in what I seek & all such as that; & indeed, if all or most of what I got from a poem conformed to what I was "looking for", wouldn't that be like changing socks twelve times a day for variety, & shouldn't I just quit.

But I was thinking about the death of Jeff Buckley again this weekend after "Mojo Pin" came up on the old shuffler. The mysterious flavor of Jeff's predicament arouses me whenever I think about it, to be misunderstood so thoroughly, so terminally; as though the soul of 29-year-old Freddie Mercury woke up one morning to find itself trapped in the 45-year-old body of Bob Dylan. What a curse! to go to bed supple and sexy and powerful, and wake up profound and appreciated and old.

It's hard to imagine what E.B. wanted to get over in formulating her S.A.M.; I would tend to dismiss it as cheap pedagogy. But mnemonics are for the givers of tests and grades, and so are not of any real concern to poets and poetry.
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MYTILI JAGANNATHAN
I'm friends with spontaneity and mystery, though I'm not sure about accuracy. This is the kind of question that's quite dependent on mood. And I love the activity—-reminds me of Lee Ann Brown's _Polyverse_. Here are two (I had to stop, I could go on forever):

SCRIPT SCRIPT

Surprise
Caressing
Reverberate
Inciting
Plurals
Tender
Scrappy
Capacious
Runaway
Intersecting
Potent
Traffic

or, together:

Scrappy Surprise
Capacious Caressing
Reverberate Runaway
Inciting Intersecting
Potent Plurals
Tender Traffic
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KEVIN KILLIAN
I'm not particular about accuracy, and spontaneity is an illusion isn't it, the great artifice of Bishop's own poetry, which so many seem to like so much, and that precisely introduces the element of mystery, so it seems like a fine definition viewed at in one light. She's so articulate, she makes me feel like the fuzz that rises off of an old dead dandelion.
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EILEEN MYLES
I like legibility, pace and artifice.
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ALICE NOTLEY
I look for Truthfulness, Relevance, and Great Skill. They do not make a good acronym.
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GIL OTT
Sounds good to me. I wouldn't second-guess another poet's criteria for satisfaction. But what I look for in my reading anymore isn't satsifaction; I want the writing to spur me to write.
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FRANK SHERLOCK
D- directness
E- engaging the world of objects & of souls
R- redirection
A- action, verb attention
I- illumination
L- liberation
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MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI
I think that I probably would agree with Bishop, though I do not know what she means exactly by "spontaneity," "accuracy" and "mystery." I only imagine that I know what she means. I haven't read an essay or anything. When I'm at a reading my "liking" or not "liking" is usually answered by my snide "he ain't got no music" or "she ain't got no music." But music is more than sound or more accurately meaning is not separate from sound.
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QUESTION 5:
All day long whenever you open your mouth a song comes out. Maybe you get used to it. Maybe you want to adjust the bass or treble. But what is this song? If there are lyrics, is there a particular line you want the world to hear come out of you?

THE ANSWERS:

ANSELM BERRIGAN
It would be something like Joe Strummer's incomprehensible singing; you'd have to be willing to feel it in order for it to be anything for you. This is similar to my feeling about drawing the three-dimensional cube: I drew that because it's the only thing I can draw. I can't sing, so I relate to Strummer's singing, and I love it anyway, and his lyrics, even though I discover that I've imagined them wrong from time to time. Then I just have two possibilities for the line instead of one, which is how i like to approach lines anyway, at least. I've almost always had crappy radios so I can't say much about bass or treble. The basis for my music has always been incompetence of a sort, and music.
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BUCK DOWNS
The hoot about this, as well as one of the bona-fides that prove my freakhood, is that this question pretty accurately describes my daily life for the past twenty years or more. All day long whenever I open my mouth, a song does come out. This happens most intensely when I am walking; in converse of the old joke, it seems I must "walk and chew gum" at the same time, or I won't get down the street. This despite the fact that my voice to me sounds like a fifty-fifty blend of Martha Raye in her Polident years and Lee Marvin in Paint Your Wagon.

This morning I had one of the wickedest ear-worms known to man: the guitar solo leading into the second chorus of "I Love A Rainy Night" by Eddie Rabbit, as thoroughly muddled and irreparable a song as could be heard on AM radio in the last thirty years. Later, sweet relief, it was fragments of "Testify" by Ronnie Wood, but as if it were sung to the tune of "Mustt Mustt" by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Party. Or sounded like that to me, who knows what it sounded like to anyone outside of my head. "Imagination," as Chet Baker once sang, "is funny."

I used to be ashamed of this habit when I was a kid, because most everybody who ever heard me do it either made fun of me or they put the glad hand on me about how I should join the chorus, the choir, the whatever; stupid pimps, always trying to sell you a stupid job. But, you know, shame is for chumps; and every day is another opportunity to get the fuck over it already.
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MYTILI JAGANNATHAN
Oh god, this actually happens to me all the time. I have songs in my head that I sing and that can fill me up for hours. I can't really describe the lyrics I sing in these moments—-maybe a few English or Tamil words in the mix, but strangely for the most part, they're not really words in any language that I can identify. (I sometimes joke that it’s "fake Hindi"). It's more a matter of melodies that stick in my head and syllables that ride across them. A kind of folksong—something you can sing in a group—clap your hands to—-or weep strongly to—-a simple stanzaic structure, but punchy words/rhythm, lines ending in vowels. Within the group singing, moments of call-and-response, join and depart. Sometimes the same songs recur, weeks apart, innocently.
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KEVIN KILLIAN
Oh, I'm too shy to sing in public . . . Maybe in the shower.
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EILEEN MYLES
he whistled and he sang
and the green woods
rang
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ALICE NOTLEY
There is no song that comes out of me. My head is full of the shitty lyrics of others, countless songs, I wish I didn't know so many. I have a fear of dying with my mind playing some hideous Beatles song or an ancient show tune. I don't think song lyrics should be memorable.
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GIL OTT
(...)
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FRANK SHERLOCK
"Minstrel Boy" is an Irish traditional song that can carry me through just about anything. It's an amazing idea, to walk the streets of Philadelphia with the bagpipes moaning out my mouth. I'm partial to a recent version of the song by Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros.
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MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI
These are the words I can remember from the last few days. Name the songs and win a prize: "Puerto Rican Jane, o won't you tell me what's your name," "And Mary Lou, she learned how to cope, she rides the heaven on a gyroscope, the daily news asks her for the dope, she says, man, the dope's that there's still hope", "I said I'm hurt. Honey, she said, let me heal it." "Man that ain't oil that's blood," "I guess I really dug her I was too loose to think", "Hey bus driver keep the change, bless your children, give them names", "Let the broken-hearted love again!!," "Did you hear that the cops finally busted madam Marie for telling fortunes better than they do, for me this boardwalk life's through, you ought quit this scene too." And each line comes one at a time upon waking and grinds like a washing machine as if the words were the window for the day. Maybe that's why there's been so much "that ain't oil, that's blood".
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QUESTION 6:
IS THIS AN EXCITING TIME FOR POETRY!? PLEASE EXPLAIN! THANK YOU! (or explain why it is not)

THE ANSWERS:

ANSELM BERRIGAN
This is an exciting time for poetry, to me. But I always think it is an exciting time for poetry, no matter the realities present. I started writing poems and being involved with poetry in part because of that excitement and the fact that it felt and feels timeless and immediate at once. I do not care about the apparatus of publishing, or the local politics, or the attendant map-making and map-burning that go on within poetry communities and circles in the face of this question. Time is exciting, devastating and cruel, yes, and there is kindness in there, and joy -- any particular time contains these things. Poetry allows me to see it. Not to see it better, more clearly, etc., but to see it at all, I think sometimes. Time, the times, anyone's times. Poetry is never not there, despite rampant claims otherwise, or, more to the point, despite no claims for or against, in many places. Poetry is older than money, and fresher than money. And lately I am excited by and for poetry because I do not want to see it be anything defined by "our times" or "the times", which cannot be owned, like poetry.
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BUCK DOWNS
well you get the times you get
& you can get excited about it

why do I continue to remember Ms. Dabney who in 8th Grade covered an entire blackboard with the words 'ONLY THE BORING ARE BORED' Ah well it keeps me entertained.

As poetry's social obsolescence has become nearly complete some 100+ years after the advent of recorded sound, I feel pretty good, freed as I am from the tale of the tribe, unacknowledged legislation, arms and the man, and all the rest of the pre-20th Century crap that has been foisted upon poets by the collected cops priests and teachers of the race, who have always resented the fact that poets get to talk right to god all the time, no vows, no training, no tenure required.

The load of social relevance, poorly-borne for centuries by poets and poetry, has been taken up by the media, thanks, and the newspapers and their generations of broadcast descendents have wonderfully siphoned all social obligation out of the making of poems. The politicization of literacy has, despite itself, been quite a helpmate too, since poets no longer have any reason to teach anyone how to read in the wake of government monopolization of the education industry.

So all told it seems like a great deal if you have no aspirations to boss others around. Poets no longer have to do any of the cultural shit-work that they have been forced to do for centuries in order to make their way in society, and or but they still get to make poems, talk to god, get real high, & about two or three other things that make being alive so very cool to begin with.
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MYTILI JAGANNATHAN
Yes, definitely! There's such a proliferation of kinds of poetries that people can encounter now. So many language traditions and evolving practices, sonic propensities, cultural contexts, nows/thens, oral/aural, pictorial, pixeled, parchment, palm leaf. . . And movements in many countries have been challenging the class/color/communal/gender lines within their cultural spheres. I think for people who are aware of this intense spectrum of activity, it might also make them anxious in some way, either because of loss of previously held power, or simply because people need sustainable communities, and the continuity that underlies real conversations. Of course, global and local power imbalances on the language/culture front will affect the way any interactions occur, but I'm interested in seeing where these crossings take us.
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KEVIN KILLIAN
I'm excited. There were a few years in the doldrums in the late 80s and early 90s, when it seemed that everything was just being done to death, and the people who were experimenting in prose were miles and miles ahead of the poets (excuse me for casting this in the form of a competitive trope like CHARIOTS OF FIRE). And then something turned around and I began to notice immediate, local, grass roots signs of a rebirth of poetry, here in San Francisco at any rate. There was a lot of excitement, stemming as usual from the young poets who were going to school at New College, at UC Berkeley, and at San Francisco State, as well, of course, as a larger group without any academic affiliation, these homogenous lumps of people suddenly met up, collided, brokered up, reformatted, and, I think changed the nature of poetry here in the Bay Area. With this new generation came a subsequent return to status of an older, unfairly occluded and in some cases half-asleep generation whom the new kids took as their models and teachers, Whalen, Kyger, Clark, Berkson, not only the Bolinas bunch but a dozen others as well. Someone should write a book, or better yet create a documentary that would trace the sociological roots of this renaissance. With Helen Mirren as Lyn Hejinian, Ashton Kutcher as Anselm Berrigan,Casey Affleck as Adam DeGraff, Michelle Rodriguez as Renee Gladman, Johnny Depp as Travis Ortiz, and Ian McKellen as Philip Lamantia.
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EILEEN MYLES
Well, we're in a very conservative repressive time and poetry can always get up on its hind legs and speak and the temptation to say the wrong thing is there, and so you can do that or not, I mean there's a lot of choices and I say we're living in a state of active complexity, so yeah I think I have to agree, it is an exciting time for poetry. Dive in.
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ALICE NOTLEY
I don't care if it's an exciting time for poetry or not. Though I wonder what it's like for the poets in Ethiopia right now.
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GIL OTT
The only "exciting" times for poetry are those when the art permits the illusion of progress: either when the scales fall from my own eyes and I write, well, without obstruction, or those glorious moments when I perform and click with the crowd. These are both personal excitements, and I think you're asking about the collective. There the illusion of power is magnified, but its beauty is diluted. The community of poets grows diverse and accepting of its diversity. This, I do believe, is happening in Philadelphia. But while a crowd is necessary for an audience, it grows oxymoronic when applied to poetry, which is intrinsically individual. Back to my statement about diversity. Tolerance, cultivation, eagerness for diversity, these are the only collective strengths of poetry. The community in Philadelphia was long balkanized, but is putting that behind itself, and that is exciting.
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FRANK SHERLOCK
This is very exciting time for poetry! More poets than ever before-more styles. More style integration. Less Cold War leftover new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss bunk. To the chagrin of select elders looking for direct overthrow attempts (for relevance confirmation), today's poets take influence & move in their own direction- albeit outside the established framework.

This is an exciting time & an important time, particularly in the United States. A "war without end" has begun. The American poet is much more likely to suffer a civil liberty attack from John Ashcroft than s/he is to be attacked from Al Qeda. The coming years promise to be even more exciting in a dark & vital time.
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MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI
Any time is an exciting time if you're in a room alone or with people and excited.
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2003-08-27T10:30:00.000-04:00

QUESTION 7:
Are you living in the same geographic region of your childhood? If so, how does this affect your poetry? If not, is that location still relevant to your poetry?

THE ANSWERS:

ANSELM BERRIGAN
I am currently living about five blocks from where I grew up in Manhattan's East Village. The fact of living here does not affect my poetry, although I have noticed in considering this question that I haven't written as much here as I did in Brooklyn, San Francisco or Buffalo (11-12 years that period, covering 1989-2000) -- but that is incidental so far, I think. The location is still relevant to my poetry as a source of personal shaping, tho' the neighborhood was different when I was growing up (more families, more dangerous, more politicized, less expensive; somewhat kinder). I did not like this area when I was 16, and I don't think that has much to do with anything but me at that age, and our small apartment. My tendencies to like people (individuals, as opposed to the species; like Swift, in a sense) and to look at them are highly shaped by living in this area along with being brought up by parents who were very open people, in a community-oriented sense. God damn people coming through the apt. every day. This is built into my poetry. Also, we had a railroad apt. of four rooms for a family of four, which meant not a lot of space. Consequently I read a lot, though I might have done so anyway, and I learned to be comfortable in my head (for privacy), and to search around its edges (tho' I never would have put it that way until now), which is also built into the poems, I think, or has been a constant source of poetic incitement (is that a word?). I tend to feel incited into writing, as opposed to inspired or agitated. This neighborhood does all of those things to a person who spends substantial time here, however.
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BUCK DOWNS
I grew up in a part of the southern U.S. (Florida below Lake Okeechobee) that has enjoyed a rather retarded integration with the antebellum Union, Dixie, and the reconstructed postwar States in turn, and in fact has not been overly friendly to human development as far back as the Micosukee. Of course, some ten years plus after the build-through of I-75 and the expansion of Alligator Alley through the Everglades, the predecessor landscape has knuckled under to subsidized agriculture and luxury residential construction. So where I grew up no longer exists in every relevant sense except for a resuidual taxonomy of older roadways &c.

My people are not from there at all, but from Mississippi, specifically Jones County, whose slight claim to historicity [sic] is a secession against the secession [a.k.a. THE FREE STATE OF JONES], led not by anti-slavery ideologues or pro-Union crypto-nationalists, but by straight fucking crackers who saw both Feds and Confeds as rolling up to screw them over.

So whichever of these places I am from it is all about place out of place, intuitive and rational senses of stepping out of the national or community sync to do the necessary work of covering your own business. And the discovery that every described place is nowhere, that it always already no longer exists, or only exists in a fatuous dream, or only exists as a social limit of the allowed, or only exists in "advertising and term papers", to quote Dave Hickey (again).
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MYTILI JAGANNATHAN
I've lived in Philly for the past 7 or 8 years, so no. I grew up in West Virginia. It's such an interesting question for me—I haven't really thought about the physical geography consciously in relation to my poetry, although I'm sure some level of influence still operates. But I can say that one of the most important moments for me as a poet was finding and reading Muriel Rukeyser's stunning documentary poem, "The Book of the Dead" written in 1938 after she traveled to West Virginia to investigate the story behind the escalating numbers of deaths from silicosis of mine workers in Hawk's Nest and Gauley Bridge. It's a breathtaking poem that both exposes the complicity of Union Carbide and its local subsidiary in the miners' deaths and registers the landscape and people with passionate integrity. The crazy thing is that I never heard of this poem while I was growing up in West Virginia—I read it for the first time in my senior year of college in Boston. Why wasn't it taught in every high school in the state?? But as fate would have it, I spent the year after college back in West Virginia doing domestic violence work in Sutton, just an hour from Hawk's Nest, where there's now a beautiful state park. On a trip to the park, I found a sign that mentioned the site of the old mine, but no mention of what happened there. (And this was national news in its time, Congressional investigations were held, etc.). I think that experience, the embodied re-experiencing of a landscape first encountered through a poem—-and the simultaneously visceral consciousness of an erased history—-changed my relationship to West Virginia, gave me a deeper sense of locatedness, and gave me a shifted context for my own memories of growing up there.

My strange experience of racial identity/consciousness is also strongly shaped by the West Virginia context. The state is something like 97% white. I have repeated vivid childhood experiences of explaining that I was "Indian," and being greeted with racist miming gestures/ "war cries" that enacted TV stereotypes of Native Americans. "Not that kind of Indian," I would say. But almost no one, not even adults, in my early childhood world even knew that India was a country. (That began to change after the movie _Gandhi_, which came out when I was in 3rd grade). Now I see that those moments of "mistaken identity" forced open a different trajectory of connection and solidarity for me.
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KEVIN KILLIAN
No, when I was a boy I lived on Long Island's North Shore, and today I live South of Market in San Francisco. This transposition, from Northerner to Southerner, gave me more freedom to write. There it was always a question of duelling influences, Whitman whose mall I used to cruise on Saturdays, O'Hara who was run over on Fire Island a few miles from the house of the Amityville Horror. Walking home from school I met an old man who implied that in his own youth he had been the boyfriend of our town's famous novelist, Owen Wister who wrote "The Virginian." You long-legged son-of-a- If you wanna call me that, then smile. With a gun in my belly, I always smile.
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EILEEN MYLES
No, the region of my childhood is totally irrelevant. I'm looking at a different landscape at this moment and the more you sit with another set of conditions, the more you find yourself in a different poem. I want to be in a different poem.
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ALICE NOTLEY
At the moment, mentally, when I write I am living in the exact same geographic location I grew up in. I am writing about Alma, who is god along with various other women who are god, and the dead women, all the women who have lived and died and anyone alive who qualifies as a dead woman. I am a dead woman for example. There are also a few men among the dead women . After an exasperating time in the first book of it, trying to vindicate the rights of all the women who have ever lived, and then being confronted with the sheer maleness of the War on Terror, the bombing of Afghanistan and coming war against Iraq, the dead women have decided to relocate in a gully in my home town. That is a long preliminary answer. I grew up in the Mohave Desert, in Needles California, and I still live there in my head at the same time as I live in international cities. It is a town that has been vilified by many writers in single sentences; and Leslie Marmon Silko has burnt it down in a novel; but I think it is the most beautiful place in the world. I live in the gully of dead women, behind the wrecked Rec Center, with a lot of burrowing owls and such.
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GIL OTT
Yes, I came up in suburban Philadelphia, and so was implanted early with a fake rural ideal, which succumbed in adolescence to a yearning for true intellectual community. I never found this community in the university, and my early poetry is informed by those twin desires: idealized rural and alienated urban. What community I subsequently discovered, and has in time come to fill those gaps, is more international. Naturally, place is formative of any writing, even in suppression. In my adult years, the city proper, its decadence and its diversity, have provided the material of my writing.
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FRANK SHERLOCK
I have remained in the area where I grew up. The urban image & thematic patterns of the city run through my poems, not so much as a matter of intention- but of my personal factual base. It's what I have to work with.
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MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI
I'm too close to home, like a failed American dream. I keep looking to some horizon but the rising rents are starting to block the sun. It keeps the song sad and reaching.
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QUESTION 8:
How does the oral tradition fit into your poems? And/or how not?

THE ANSWERS:

ANSELM BERRIGAN
The oral tradition, as I understand it, is built in to my writing and reading of poems. Basically, and most broadly, everything I write that gets shaped into poetry must work aloud. That means several, at least, different things; not all of which I can articulate at the moment. But I edit in part by reading the work out loud, and it has to finally work on the page and as a spoken piece of poetry for me to feel like something is done, and done well enough to take outside the parameters of my own attention. I love reading poems out loud, whether someone is there or not. The art of poetry as an oral practice is one that I feel deeply connected to -- understanding that I was raised around poetry as a spoken as well as a written art. The theatrical performance of poems or poetic monologues, spoken word and slam poetry/poetics, rap (music and freestyle), the many types of blues music I've been exposed to, certain modes of standup comedy, informal storytelling (and I'm sure I'm leaving some things out) -- all of these have influenced my listening, writing, and reading habits and practices in heavy ways. But you know, anyone who pays attention to how sounds come out of their mouth is interesting to me. So I take it as inherent to my work that there's an oral quality I need to attend to no matter what kind of practice I'm engaged in, i.e. even the most wacked out experiment or straightforward narrative has to work sonically, with a wide range in mind, deliberately, as to what I mean by "work". I consider every reading to an audience a performance, even if I'm just gonna stand there and read, which is generally what I do. But what the voice does in conjunction with the work makes for a performance, for me, so I try to work it as hard as I can to make for as good a performance as I can. And I know for a fact that all I need is my poems and my voice to give something to the audience, which has nothing necessarily to do with what they are looking for (other than a reading itself), that they can take with them. I like to perform, I like to read poems that I have read before (they always sound different), and I like to interact with an audience. These facts of my practice are, in my way of thinking, connected to the, or an, oral tradition. The history of the oral tradition is something that I feel I will be learning my entire life, as well, and that needs to be said. Much of what I know has to do with the English language and certain components of African traditions (for instance, it was very important for me to have someone explain at a certain point that alliteration was more of an early basis for poetry in English than rhyme - which was imported - largely as a device to make stories, poems, etc. easier to remember and pass on in a pre-writing age), and that is limiting (gotta work on it).
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BUCK DOWNS
Well I can start with the luxury of having thrown away my four previous answers to this question to say isn't it great we are no longer hemmed in by the limits on human achievement that reside in the "oral tradition" --

If you mean homer cavalcanti & all the pre-typewriter stuff resusciatated and greenhoused for the sake of Western Civilization and its curators well sure anyone who hasn't done their homework is just a slob. But at the same time the lost world is the lost world & I for one am in no hurry to get it back. Orality is either an obsolete distribution channel or a skeleton key with which one may elude the ruthless commodification and trivialization of spiritual values that results from a print-publishing teleology, or both. Whichever. To paraphrase Ted Berrigan, if I really believe in it, I can't really talk about it.
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MYTILI JAGANNATHAN
I think the oral tradition/impulse is at the base of everything I do. All of those earliest experiences of aural meaning that are so deeply inscribed: lullabies, babytalk, Sanskrit chants, Tamil songs (both traditional devotionals and popular Tamil cinema songs), bilingual puns, the way something in your body changes when you switch languages, nursery rhymes, jump-rope rhymes . . . In terms of poetic composition, I definitely write both for the ear and the eye (love that linebreak!), but the spoken/heard dimension tends to come first in the sequence of my writing process. Sound captivates me and pushes me on.
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KEVIN KILLIAN
I think it's the other way round and the tradition is too big to fit into the poems, and yet the poems seem to fit into the tradition very comfortably. Huge goblet with room for all kinds of brandied waters, blood.
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EILEEN MYLES
Oh I think my poem is a magnetic tape of the oral tradition. Since I only imagine in the technology of my time I think of the poem as a gleaming stripe of highly sensitive material that is somehow marked by every quiver of the fluting human voice just the breathing and the grunts and fullblown words and phrases and the absence of sound of any sort, no wind hits the mirror, but all of it I think is oral I think because these electronic impressions are stuck on the tape by the idea of the voice as it narrates I'm sorry now the technological aspect might be wrong-headed possibly digital but the gleaming stripe seems more genital than say digital. I wonder why we are so damn fixed on the oral as the appropriate organ of poetry when it could be obviously as cerebral cardiovascular and genital. it all seems related and if you want to give it to the oral, go ahead. The oral tradition. I mean why not give it to the ass. The mouth or the lips or the throat are just the metonymically assigned organs when in fact the practice comes from all of it and seemingly in live poetry practice only huffs out orally last, like shitting.
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ALICE NOTLEY
Which oral tradition do you mean? My poems contain great sounds and tones and rhythmic figures; they sound terrific when I read them. They are meant to be read on the page aloud mentally. I am utterly influenced, in my writing, by the fact that I give poetry readings. I don't feel as if I belong to any tradition in this respect except for the general tradition of the performer for smallish audiences. I am thinking a lot, at the moment, about a flamenco singer named Tia Anica, who didn't begin to perform until she was in her fifties. I think I have to begin again.
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GIL OTT
I guess I have to turn the question around and ask: What is the "oral tradition?" I usually think of it in Western terms as the mnemonic devices in rhyme and meter, which enabled the Greeks to remember and pass on such epics like the Odyssey. This tradition flowered in the lyric of the troubadours. But I actually think the "oral tradition" in contemporary American poetry is more influenced by African and Caribbean poetries/musics.

However conceived, the oral -- spoken or sung -- is essential to any poetry; concrete poetry is really more of a visual art. Naturally, within that concept are many, many divisions, thus the great diversity and richness of poetry today. The big divider today seems to be "Is it for the page, or for the voice?" I could say I've written both, though the very notion of page-bound poetry is a fallacy. It will always be voiced, even if silently. (This is an admission that I still move my lips when I read!) I could also say that even when I write narrative or other prose forms, I am always aware of the music of the words, and the rhetorical, and spiritual, power of that music.

So in the end, I'd say my answer to the question is: to degrees.
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FRANK SHERLOCK
I'm paraphrasing an Alan Gilbert version of the poetics of orality (from an upcoming essay in FENCE), & it goes something like, "Poetry can never be separated from either its utterance or reception." Certainly not a brand-new idea, but it's the latest manifestation that caught my ear. Poetry for me is processed in a kind of Homeric, Burnsian, B.I.G. manner. The oral tradition is bona fide alive & I choose not to separate myself from it. But that's just me. Many poet friends I know choose to hone their work in relative solitude. To them I say godspeed & give me a holler once you're away from the desk.
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MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI
I use my mouth a lot.
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QUESTION 9:
Write a letter to president George W. Bush.

THE ANSWERS:

ANSELM BERRIGAN
After sitting and writing a letter to George W. Bush, and even sending it off to CA to include in this piece, I felt foul and cheap. I only want to speak to the people who will be reading this, not to him -- a man of whom it has been said on CNN, "Even if there was zero percent support for invading Iraq the President would go forward anyway because he believes it is the right thing to do." I utterly reject this man's principles and morals, and his version of life; and I reject the terms of this reality that has been imposed upon us by ages of war and greed. It represents a total failure of imagination, and our consciousness, collectively, needs to be rebuilt -- a practical need of the species, as a matter of fact. That is the work I am interested in, beyond the immediate necessity of opposing war in all of its forms. Bush is just the most current visible by-product of this failure, and can go fuck himself.
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BUCK DOWNS
Dear Mr. President: I am a poet, arguably the greatest since Shakespeare, and I am writing you today to ask if Camp David would be available for my use at any time in the next twelve months or so.

My regular job has kept me pretty much on the hustle non-stop for the last five years, and it has been hard to devote the necessary time and energy to my poetry while holding up my end at work. I'd like to be able to take a break for a month or so & relax & catch up on my writing. Camp David is near my home here in D.C., & so it would be an ideal place for me to retreat for say 3-5 weeks. There I would be able to concentrate on reviewing and completing an initial draft of my next book of poems, to be called JONES COUNTY.

I know that when you are at the presidential retreat, it is a time to recharge, reflect, and return to Washington better able to fulfill your duties as President. It is that kind of experience I would like to enjoy at Camp David, and perhaps in some way even capture and preserve in my poetry. I also know that Camp David is primarily set up to provide you and your family the privacy they need, and I would not want to interfere with that purpose. So I would be interested in making use of Camp David at any time or times of the year when you are not actually using it.

I can drive, cook, and shop for myself, so the impact of my visit on your staff could be reduced to nearly nil. I am gainfully employed, but not within the precincts of academia; this means that other traditional writers residencies, such as Bread Loaf or McDowell, are not available to me. I believe that an opportunity to visit and create at Camp David would result in new poetic work for America and would reflect well on your administration's affection for literature and the arts.

If you want to find out more about me, you can simply type "Buck Downs" into Google & browse through the results. To discuss the availability of Camp David, I can be reached at the address below.

Thank you for your time, Mr. President. I look forward to hearing from you.

Buck Downs
Box 53318
Washington, DC 20009
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MYTILI JAGANNATHAN
DEAR KING GEORGE W(AR)

Cant write cant
sew cant stop
cant grow cant
cry cant constitute
cant count cant
route cant right
a letter by
sacrifice
the alphabet
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KEVIN KILLIAN
President Bush, how I wish that Bill Clinton were still in office. I always liked him and you just seem dumb. You make everyone look bad with your relentless paranoia and your greed. Dismantle the war apparatus, oh, but you can't. Soon we'll have nowhere to go and the lessons of the 20th century will all be unlearned. You remind me of the mad Nazarene with the demonic spirit in the pig from the New Testament. That must be the one parable you didn't pick up at Amherst or wherever it was. To you I feel that I must speak in very short sentences. Lots of periods. Bye.
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EILEEN MYLES
Dear George,

[Text unavailable. Poet felt unable to assemble language when confronted with the opportunity to speak to this "man." Poet thought of lips around the mouth of "president" which resembled mass grave. Saw shifting selfish eyes of college gang-banger. Poet feels there is no possible conversation with person who recently delivered supercilious state of the union "address."]

Truly,

Eileen
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ALICE NOTLEY
No. I declared him dead -- a spiritual vacuity -- at the end of my talk on The Iliad and Postmodern War. I have no interest in expressing my opinions to him because he isn't there.
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GIL OTT
427 Carpenter Lane
Philadelphia PA 19119

George W. Bush
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington DC

7 February 2003

Mr. Bush:

First, let me point out a few things:

1) You were not a popularly-elected President. You did not gain a majority of votes in the 2000 election, and the only way you received a majority of Electoral College votes was through the political bias of a discredited Supreme Court.

2) Your domestic programs - policies toward the environment, women's rights, affirmative action, worker's rights, and civil rights in general - run against the grain of the American experience of the past 60 years.

3) Your disdain for the common wealth in favor of privilege is bankrupting the country.

4) Your unilateralism in international affairs, and your apparent dismissal of even the most moderate differences of opinion has brought the world to the edge of worldwide conflagration.

Pretty impressive. How do you do it? You, more than any terrorist group, have benefited from the events of 9/11/01. You have shamelessly utilized that tragedy as a spectacle, playing it over and over again in order to diminish debate, confuse the public, and thereby cover your actions.

Mr. Bush, I believe in the future. I refuse to engage in the dialogue that will shape that future by utilizing the rhetoric which you and your handlers have created. It would be better for all of us if you would simply admit your failures and get out of the way.

Good bye.

Gil Ott
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FRANK SHERLOCK
Dear George II:

Thomas Paine will haunt you when you're gone. I may feel sorry for you someday, but not today or tomorrow.

Good luck,
Frank Sherlock
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MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI
Dear Mr. Bush,

How come you think that we're just a bunch of dumb hippies in the streets? I'm not dumb at all. In fact, your machine paid for my Fulbright scholarship. That's when I learned what capitalism was. When I got back from Berlin, I walked out onto Times Square and the lights were so bright, I had to hide in the public library. After I stop the war, I want to sue Nike, Pringles and Cup 'O Soup for taking up space in my brain without paying rent.

But back to stupid. This is what I think is stupid. 1)Occupying an Arab nation for 5-10 years and trying to build a democracy. You say you want to protect Americans, but occupying Iraq is a little or a lot like colonization and would make a great recruitment ad campaign for Osama. Meanwhile, you haven't managed to send any security funds to any cities. We're all having to pay for our own duct tape. And anyhow, the colonizer always loses. Remember, we used to be a colony. 2)The fact that you got to be president. I should have really said this first, but I'm not in the mood to cut and paste. But seriously, this is the whole problem. 3)The fact that people think I'm not American because I think it's stupid that you're president. In fact, this bothers me so much that at protests I've started waving an unaltered American flag when I yell "Drop Bush, Not Bombs." 4)Giving 30 Billion dollars a year to Israel 5)Writing mandatory public school reforms and then not giving states the money to implement them. There are more things that I think are stupid, but I don't want to overwhelm you.

I think it's very smart that you don't teach people to read in this country. It makes it easier for them to like you. Fox news has those great little slogans, so the people don't have to read. They can just love you and hate everything else.

Between the taxes and the war I've come to think you're evil incarnate.

Sincerely,
Magdalena Zurawski
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ABOUT THE POETS:

ANSELM BERRIGAN's latest book is ZERO STAR HOTEL. He has two other books, Integrity & Dramatic Life, and They Beat Me Over the Head With a Sack.

BUCK DOWNS lives and works in Washington, DC. His first book, marijuana softdrink is available from Edge Books.

MYTILI JAGANNATHAN lives in Philadelphia, where she has been actively involved in the community arts work of the Asian Arts Initiative over the past five years. Her poems have appeared in _Combo_, _Interlope_, _XConnect_, _Salt_, _Mirage#4/Period[ical]_, _Rattapallax_, and _Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics_. See Mytili at Pew Arts.

KEVIN KILLIAN is a novelist, art writer, poet and playwright. He has written several books including I CRY LIKE A BABY, SHY, ARCTIC SUMMER and ARGENTO SERIES. With Dodie Bellamy he is editing the work of their late friend, Sam D'Allesandro, for a collected stories volume. He lives in San Francisco.

EILEEN MYLES is a poet who lives in NY and a novelist who teaches at UCSD. Latest book of poems Skies, on my way, latest novel, Cool for You. Visit EileenMyles.com

ALICE NOTLEY is the author of more than twenty books of poetry. Her book-length poem THE DESCENT OF ALETTE was published by Penguin in 1996, followed by MYSTERIES OF SMALL HOUSES (1998), which was one of three nominees for the Pulitzer Prize and was the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. Her latest book DISOBEDIENCE is the recipient of the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize. She now lives permanently in Paris.

GIL OTT is Editor and Publisher of Singing Horse, a literary press. Now in its 27th year of continuous operation, Singing Horse has produced over twenty-five titles by emerging poets and writers. The journal Paper Air, which the Press published from 1976 through 1990, was the recipient of an Editors' Fellowship from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses in 1985. He has published thirteen books of poetry and prose, including The Yellow Floor (Sun & Moon, 1985), within range (Burning Deck, 1987), Public Domain (Potes & Poets, 1989), and The Whole Note (Zasterle, Canary Islands, Spain, 1996), and Traffic, Chax Press (Tucson, 2001). He is married to the poet and educator Julia Blumenreich. They have a daughter, Willa. They livein the Mt Airy section of Philadelphia.
Some links to Gil Ott on the web:
one
two

FRANK SHERLOCK curates the La Tazza Reading Series w/ Magdalena Zurawski in Philadelphia. His poems have recently appeared in Puppy Flowers, TOOL and can we have our ball back? Past chapbooks include 13 (ixnay 1999) and a collaboration with CAConrad entitled, (end/begin w/chants). Their latest joint effort is an open-ended project materializing as The City Real & Imagined: Philadelphia Poems. A new series of poems appears in the new ixnay reader

MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI is a waiter/writer living in Philadelphia. She is working on a novel called THE BRUISE. Pom2 includes her poetry.