Looking for more poetry-related information?

• For poetic forms, CLICK HERE
• For interviews with poets, CLICK HERE
• For the free monthly Poet’s Market newsletter, CLICK HERE
• For discounted poetry references, CLICK HERE
• For poetry listings on WritersMarket.com, CLICK HERE
• For 2010 Poet's Market, CLICK HERE

Earlier this year, Tammy and I took Baby Will with us to his first poetry event, a reading by Cherryl Floyd-Miller at Wordsmiths Books in Decatur, Georgia. Sadly, Wordsmiths has since closed, but Cherryl was nice enough to be interviewed for the Poetic Asides blog.

Her most recent collection of poems, Exquisite Heats, was published in 2008 by Salt Publishing. Cherryl is a native of the Carolinas and has published two other poetry collections: Utterance: A Museology of Kin and Chops. In addition to poetry, Cherryl is also a playwright and fiber artist.

Here's a favorite poem of mine from Exquisite Heats:

Voodoo Chicken

Gots me hanker. Gots me squall, peeping tall-Tom
at your lovely, in your throat, and the itch,
hellcat itch, of it rides me like a witch
into the nights, those crafty nights, no calm
will come. You just a mule teeth puppet show.
Stop and go. Chickenhearted to the core,
you say don't cross the line or crack the door.
How sweetmeat, milk. How navy black. How crow.

But love has stayed and love is made, is all
is with, for. We almost did, just about,
said we (nohow) wouldn't (nungh-ungh) fall.
This moot jinx so far in, it's inside out.
We say we won't. But reckon do. Yak. Stall
for if. Wait for good-good. Gut in. Ass out.

*****

What are you up to?

I am helping a friend build a strong healthcare firm, writing lots of persona poems, finding very interesting ways of writing verse plays and verse narrative ... and (ah, yes) -- quilting. I am truly enjoying this "season" of myself.

You live in the U.S., but your publisher for Exquisite Heats is based in the United Kingdom. How did you go about publishing this collection?

I will have to give credit for my publication through Salt ... to Salt. Chris Hamilton-Emery is an amazing and supportive publisher. He takes the risks others won't take, says the things others won't say and publishes other risk-takers others have not seemed to publish. A poet/scholar friend suggested my work; Chris asked for a manuscript; he liked the work; and we evolved to a contract and a collection of poems. I am deeply grateful for the ways in which Salt shows it believes in me and my *voice*. The faith Chris seems to have in me as an intelligent person and an artist is the kind of faith I've found only one other place: the Fulton County Arts Council in Atlanta and its Deputy Director, Val Porter.

In Exquisite Heats, your work incorporates a variety of poetic forms. Could you speak a little on using poetic forms in your writing?

Ah ... poetic forms. They are helpful play things; by that, I mean it has aided my poem-building skills tremendously to be knowledgeable about forms and make conscious decisions about using them in my work. I've found the most gifted and compelling poets to be those who know the rules and deliberately break them in order to keep their own voices intact. At this stage in my own evolution, the use of forms is both conscious and subconscious. Most of the time I know exactly what I've done after I've done it; but I'm at my best when I don't know what I'm doing while I'm doing it. Poetic forms for me are a good musical instrument to ensure this "band" called my body of work can jam as long and hard as it likes. But I'll be a traitor and leave the forms on the side of the stage if the poem instructs me to do so. Forms come often in my work, but I'm not a slave to them. My only allegiance is to the poem.

Do you use critique groups—or a network of other poets—to help with early drafts of poems?

I don't use critique groups as much as I used to about five to eight years ago. I have trusted eyes and ears who can hear new drafts at any time of the day and give me honest feedback. Usually, these are writers who have known me and my work for a long time and have earned my respect and trust. I'm not closed to critique groups, but I am leery of group dynamics and individual dramas that can be a bit distracting to the purpose of gathering: work.

In your bio for Exquisite Heats, it’s mentioned that you’ve received several grants and fellowships for your writing. Any application tips for other poets who may apply for grants or fellowships?

Yes ... apply. It may sound strange to give this as advice, but many people don't even fill out the application and wonder why they can't get grants. Other tips:

1) Be sure you really want it. Don't apply just for the money. Make sure your values align with the org or individual who is awarding the money, and make sure you believe in what the grant asks of you.

2) Apply again, if you don't get an award the first time you apply. Sometimes, missing a grant or fellowship has nothing to do with your talent or your perfect application. It has to do with timing, the number of other talented applicants and whether or not you come across as credible on paper.

3) Do what the grantors ask. This means meet deadlines, do the accompanying essay, and have a solid plan to do what you say you're going to do with the money. Having been both a grant recipient and a grant reviewer, I can truly say, if you're not sincere, it comes through loud and clear that you're not sincere.

Your bio mentions you’re a fiber artist. In what forms of fiber arts do you work?

I am a quilter who uses techniques of collage, crochet, knitting and mixed media formats. I have no formal training in any of this. I learned quilting at my paternal grandmother's feet at age 7. I learned crochet from my maternal grandmother at age 9. I've experimented with everything else enough to be *confident* about what I create. I explore the same themes in fiber art as I do in poetry: women, the South, folklore, sound music in language, myths, non-linear structures and magical realism. Much of the way I approach art is really about not wasting a single thing. Even the words you cut from a poem or the scraps you create when you cut the fabric of a quilt can be used somewhere else.

Who are you currently reading?

Two voices I think many of us have forgotten: Dolores Kendrick and Sherley Anne Williams. I am also reading a variety of modern verse plays because I'm curious about what others are doing with the form.

If you could pass on only one piece of advice for other poets, what would it be?

Write! And then write some more. When you feel like you truly (((can))) *quit* writing, then you should quit ...

*****

To learn more about Cherryl's collection Exquisite Heats and her publisher Salt Publishing, go to www.saltpublishing.com.

*****

Are you a poet or publisher looking for free publicity? Then, check out what you need to do to be considered for a Poetic Asides interview by clicking here.

It's not every day that I get an opportunity to interview a former poet laureate. So when I was afforded the chance to read Patricia Fargnoli's Duties of the Spirit (Tupelo Press), I jumped at the chance to interview the former New Hampshire Poet Laureate (her term ended earlier this year).

Though Fargnoli is a retired psychotherapist, she just published her first collection of poems Necessary Light (Utah State University Press) in 1999. And has made her presence felt in the poetry community in a very short period of time with another full-length collection and chapbook in the same 10-year span. Oh yeah, Fargnoli is also in the final stages of publishing another collection with Tupelo Press.

Here's one of my favorites (I have many) from Duties of the Spirit:

The Undeniable Pressure of Existence

I saw the fox running by the side of the road
past the turned-away brick faces of the condominiums
past the Citco gas station with its line of cars and trucks
and he ran, limping, gaunt, matted dull haired
past Jim's Pizza, past the Wash-O-Mat
past the Thai Garden, his sides heaving like bellows
and he kept running to where the interstate
crossed the state road and he reached it and ran on
under the underpass and beyond it past the perfect
rows of split-levels, their identical driveways
their brookless and forestless yards,
and from my moving car, I watched him,
helpless to do anything to help him, certain he was beyond
any aid, any desire to save him, and he ran loping on,
far out of his element, sick, panting, starving,
his eyes fixed on some point ahead of him,
some possible salvation
in all this hopelessness, that only only he could see.

*****

What are you currently up to?

On March 22, I finished my 3 1/2-year term as New Hampshire's Poet Laureate.   And my new book, Then, Something, which is due to be published in fall by Tupelo Press, is at the publishers and soon to go into production.  We've already decided on the cover.  I've also recently finished work with two private tutorial students...all of which should mean that I could rest a while, and, hopefully, turn my energies toward writing new work. But March's calendar is full of readings I want to attend and lunches with poet/friends and teaching my private class.  And April's only a little freer.  The last week in April and the beginning of May I'm going to The Dorset Writer's Colony in Vermont for a week  (and would go longer if I didn't have a cat and no one for him to live with in my absence).  In June, I'm teaching at an Elderhostel for a week, and leading an Ekphrasis workshop in July and a workshop for Teachers in August.  In between, I'm giving a couple of readings....and will be working at proofreading my manuscript for the press...and writing a reader's guide. Whew!  Would you believe I've been "retired" for 10 years now?

You've just recently finished up a stint as New Hampshire's Poet Laureate. What were your duties? Were you able to accomplish everything you wanted?

As poet laureate, I had no official duties.  Some poet laureates do a little or nothing; some do a lot. I like that what I did was left entirely up to me so that I could use the skills and interests I have in the way I wanted to.  I'd decided from the outset that I wanted to do something for children, something for libraries and something for New Hampshire poets.  And I'm proud that I accomplished all three. With the support of the NH State Library, The Writer's Project and the NH Council on the Arts, I was able to recruit 43 poet-volunteers from around the state, and to organize a "Children's Poetry Day in the Libraries Day" the first April after I was elected. The Governor issued a proclamation proclaiming April 14th as statewide "Children's Poetry Day;"  and each volunteer put on a program for children in a library near him/her.  We published articles in almost every regional magazine promoting the importance of poetry in children's lives and served about 350 children and parents on that day.

I also initiated (again with the help of Art Council personnel) a "New Hampshire Poets Showcase" link to the Arts Council website.  Every two weeks we featured a new NH poet with a poem, bio, photo, links and a paragraph about how their poem came to be. 

I also did readings and workshops around the state and attended civil functions occasionally. And I delivered a poem at the Governor's Inauguration.

When I look back at what I accomplished I'm amazed that I could do it.  I had reservations about accepting the position in the beginning because of some chronic health problems that have limited my mobility and energy.  But I'm glad I didn't turn it down; the position was life-enriching. I made many friends and have some wonderful memories.

When and why did you begin publishing poetry?

I began writing and studying poetry seriously when I was in my mid-30's in a graduate class with Brendan Galvin at Central CT State University.  Along with 7 other women who became my close friends (and are to this day), I took the class for several years.  My first poems were published in Tendril (which has been gone for years) and Poet Lore.  In fact, Brendan sent out my work to Tendril without telling me and when, one of the poems was accepted, he called me from his vacationing on Cape Cod to give me the news.

I was hooked.  I've always loved poetry and had written it earlier...publishing in the high school newspaper etc., but I knew nothing then about contemporary poetry and the only two poets' names I was familiar with were Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell.  However, it was many years later, when I was 62, that I published my first book, Necessary Light, after Mary Oliver chose it as the May Swenson Award winner.

The "why" is harder to explain.  Besides the love of poetry, there's the challenge of getting what can't be easily said into words; the thrill of connecting in a deep way to readers,  the adrenaline rush when you open an acceptance letter and the way writing a poem can somehow make sense of your life.

Do you have any method to where and when you submit your poems?

Hmmm.  I usually submit about 3 times a year....in late September,  January, and maybe June (to those journals that accept summer submissions).  But this isn't rigid and if I have some poems I want to send out and have the time, I'll send them.  I have a list of journals I'd like to have my poems in...a rather long list.  Over the years, I've subscribed to many of them and I know what kind of work they take.  I believe strongly that poets shouldn't be expecting editors to publish them if they, themselves, aren't supporting the work of presses, literary journals, and other poets.

I only occasionally do simultaneous submissions because it's hard to keep track of them. But I do them more lately because I am 71 and time is passing far too quickly...I can't afford to wait a year to hear results anymore...especially since the competition is so fierce and rejection so frequent.  And when I do submit simultaneously, I don't send to more than 3 journals at a time, or to journals that don't accept them.   But other than that, I have no specific method.

Duties of the Spirit (Tupelo Press) won the Jane Kenyon Poetry Book Award and your first collection Necessary Light (Utah State University Press) won the May Swenson Book Award. What do you think makes a good collection?

Oh Robert, it is so, so subjective!  I've several times been a judge or early-round judge of a book competition so I've read hundreds of manuscripts and I can tell what impresses me....though it probably would be different for someone else.  At the top of my list is "Vision."   I mean that the book presents the poet's unique way of looking at the world....some fragment of the whole.  And the poems must "matter" and, when taken together, seem like a cohesive whole (even though there may be single poems that are different from most of the others)....I don't have patience with the superficial or pretentious language that reveals nothing when you look under it.  I look for depth.  Craft matters to me greatly. And once I gave top prize to a book (a novel in verse) mainly because I fell in love with the "voice" of the protagonist. (He was an ironic everyman.) Of course, the craft was impeccable too.

What do you look for in a good poem?

Depth, beauty, spirit, craft, sound, humanity.  Sometimes fracturing and remaking of reality, so that I as a reader can see a thing newly. Some news to help me understand my own life and its meaning.

In Duties of the Spirit, you deal with nature and aging--even confronting death. These topics are big and well-traveled, yet you make them your own. I'm sure part of your success comes back to revision. So, how much time do you commit to revision? And how do you know a poem is done?

Revision is, for me, the process by which a poem comes into being. My early drafts are terrible.  I often overwrite pushing myself past all the voices in my head that say "Ugh" just in order to get words onto the page where they can be worked at.  I then will do maybe 3 or 4 quick revisions and put it away for at least a few days.  Then I work at it again.  If I can get it into what begins to feel to me like a poem and I'm as far as I can go, I'll bring it to one of my workshops (there are 2; one of them is online). That usually results in another revision. I have what I call my "WP file,"  which stands for "Working Poems."   The revised draft (if I'm still not satisfied which is usually the case) goes into that file...and periodically, I'll pull it up and work some more.

In later drafts, often, I'm picking at single words, or perhaps upping the ante on a phrase that feels flat...or experimenting with shifting the order around or changing line-breaks...that kind of thing.  I've often worked this way on a poem for years before I'm satisfied...if I ever am. And even when I send out a poem, I'll later revise it... or even after it's published.  I don't know when a poem is done....it's mostly just let go.

I think of revision as being like a sculptor with a block of marble.  The poet chips and chips away at the poem until the real poem (hopefully) emerges from the block of words.

Who (or what) have you been reading recently?

I read poetry every day...and not just a little. I have 7 bookcases (3 of them tall ones) in my 2 room apartment and they are all filled with books of poetry. I spend more on poetry than I do on anything else except food and rent.  Currently on my bedstand (which means I'm reading them) are: Robert Hass Time and Materials (which I'm reading for the second time); Mary Oliver's New Evidence; Louise Gluck's Averno (also reading for the 2nd time); Borges This Craft of Verse; Rebecca Seiferle, Bitters; BAP, Charles Wright, ed;  Henri Coles, Blackbird and Wolf; Charles Bennett's How to Make a Woman Out of Water; Ruth Stone's What Love Comes to; The Making of A Sonnet, Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland; Dante's Divine Comedy; and the current issues of several journals: The Georgia Review, Shenandoah,The Harvard Review and The American Poetry Journal.

On order are Ann Fisher-Wirth's Carta Marina and Jack Gilbert's new book (which I've forgotten the name of).

If you could offer only one piece of advice to your fellow poets, what would it be?

Read, read, read, and support other poets, publishers and the poetry community.

*****

To learn more about Patricia Fargnoli, check out her website at www.patriciafargnoli.com.

Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He also holds an M.F.A. from the University of New Orleans and a B.A. from Dillard University, and he has served as poetry editor at Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. His poems have appeared in Callaloo, The Iowa Review, jubilat, New England Review, and Prairie Schooner. The recipient of the Bunting Fellowship at Harvard University, a Cave Canem Fellowship, and two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, Brown is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego where he teaches creative writing.  Western Michigan University's New Issues Poetry & Prose published his first book, Please.

Brown's name has been flying around quite a bit recently--with multiple poets either praising his collection Please (New Issues) or e-mailing me directly to ask if I'd interview him. That's not typical. So, I hunted him down, and he took some time out of his busy schedule to let me interview him.

His collection Please was a great read from the very beginning. He even names the first section Repeat, which is funny, because I felt like repeating the experience of reading the beginning once I finished the end. But I'll let his words do the talking--this being one of my favorite pieces in the collection:

Why I Cannot Leave You

You bring home the food. I'm your hungry man,
Captive damsel dragged by the hair from her favorite
Streetlight to the trap of your tower, hollow icebox,
No magnets with things-to-do. No rules. It wouldn't
Be fair--you bring home the food--you can't read
Or write. I pace, check the window for my hunter. You
Bring home food and toss it onto the card table.
My teeth barely miss my fingertips--I rip
Into the bag. You like to kiss me, my mouth
Packed with the faintest franchise you could find, animal
Blood at each lip. Say carnivore, and I kiss back. I eat
My meat rare. You bare your sharpest grin. Bum
I say I love, you're my place to stay. We're against the law.
No one keeps me big as you. Fatten me, sweet ogre.
Get me some meat. Bring home food. Feed.

*****

What are you currently up to?

I'm trying to get a hold of any footage I can that shows news anchors Max Robinson and Jessica Savitch in action.  I'm working on a few poems about and in the voices of the two of them as well as poems based on scriptures from the Bible.  The second book is tentatively titled The New Testament, and I just learned that I got a Bunting Fellowship which should give me plenty of time for writing.  

I'm grateful that I've been traveling a lot in order to give readings.  I now get to meet really interesting people from all over the nation who love good poetry.  Also, I try to make sure I have enough reading material to keep me busy on planes.

Other than that, I go to the gym a lot.  I eat a lot.  I talk with friends over the phone a lot.  I teach a lot and read a lot in preparation for teaching.  I usually go clubbing when I get the chance because I like flirting and dancing.

Please is your debut collection of poems. How long did you go about getting them together and published?

The oldest drafts of some poems in Please were written in 2000, and I wrote them when I first attended the Cave Canem workshop/retreat for African American poets.  Some poems were first drafted 2007, the same year New Issues asked to publish the book. 

But seven years seems dishonest when I think of how I'm prone to reading and thinking more than to writing.  In the last eight years of my life, there were times I couldn't stop writing. Over a short period of weeks, I'd have many drafts of very different things and begin to think I may be quite literally possessed. Once, I actually had a car accident trying to get some scribbling done while driving. These periods were thrilling for me, but during them, I felt vulnerable in a way I have a hard time characterizing.

At other times, for periods as long as two years within the last eight, I didn't write at all. I couldn't even think to revise. This is, of course, painful and scary in a very different way. Today, I think I managed to get through these silences because I was much more interested in figuring how to write poems than I was in how to write a book. I had no goal other than the poem itself and could almost satisfy my yearnings to write by reading and discovering other poets. 

The voices are strong in Please. Is there a type of sound or voice (or both) you go for in your writing?

I think of writing, first, as a process of listening and, second, as a process of embodying.  I don't know that I "go for" anything in particular because I try and leave as much as I can to instinct, intuition, and reflex—even in the final stages of revision. 

For me, poems usually begin with a line from which I do some vocal repeating and pushing in order to generate other lines.  The lines that follow the first one often mimic the sound or make what seems to me some sort of counter-sound based on the first one.  Then, because I'm so interested in both music and voice, I find myself trying to figure the personality of the sounds as I am composing.  At some point in the writing of a first draft, I start to take on the characteristics of the voice that is asking to be channeled.  An example of this might be something as simple as punching the computer if the voice is pissed to the point of violence. 

You have a very nice website. Did you put it together, or did your publisher? Also, how helpful do you think having a website is in spreading the word about your writing?

Thanks, Robert.  Jerichobrown.com is the brainchild of Nick Walker, one of my undergraduate students at the University of San Diego.  He's an amazing poet, and he writes wonderful fiction too.  Nick and I argued for more than a semester.  He insisted that the website would be necessary, and I kept reassuring him that I had enough to do without thinking about ways to publicize my book and spending mounds of money to do it. 

At any rate, Nick started making moves without me being aware of it, and the next thing I knew he had come in contact with Arlene Valdes, a very talented web designer who was looking to build a portfolio for her business.  The portfolio would include a few clients for whom she'd create sites for one-tenth of what I imagine she charges now.  Nick and Arlene made all the decisions and did all the work.  My only job was to provide them with what I had already gathered for New Issues: a bio, the blurbs, the dates for readings, and of course, a few poems.

I don't think having a website hurts, but Buddha never had one, and the word spread pretty decently about things he had to say. 

Your bio mentions that you previously worked as a speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans. What was that job like? And did your experience as a speechwriter help with your poetry?

I served the City of New Orleans for four years working for Mayor Marc H. Morial, who is now President and CEO of the National Urban League.  He's an amazing leader who made his love for that city absolutely contagious.  He is also a major role model for me as my fraternity brother and the man willing to take a chance on me and give me my first job right out of college.  (The word "give" is supremely important here, considering the desperate shape I was in.)

A speechwriter goes into each speech knowing the message and figuring the best way to communicate the message as he goes.  A poet figures ways of communicating and wonders if he has a message.  I prefer the latter because it gives me a chance to question beliefs that I myself hold dear.  There is no room for such questions when working to drive a message home.

While researching you online, I noticed people commenting positively on your readings. Do you have any special reading tips for other poets?

Slow down.

Who are you currently reading?

Today, I read Versed by Rae Armantrout, some Gwendolyn Brooks, a few poems online by Rodney Jack and Wayne Johns, some George Oppen, some C.S. Lewis, a little bit from Barbara Walters'memoir Audition, and the Bible.   

If you could pass on only one piece of advice to other poets, what would it be?

Make love.

*****

To learn more about Jericho, go to www.jerichobrown.com.

To learn more about his publisher, go to www.wmich.edu/~newissue/.

For a few years now, I've been aware of J.P. Dancing Bear's work--from seeing his name floating around in literary journals. It wasn't until we became friends on Facebook (a year or so ago) that I knew he was the editor of American Poetry Journal and Dream Horse Press, as well as host of "Out of Our Minds" (a weekly poetry program on public radio station KKUP). Dancing Bear is also the author of What Language (Slipstream), Billy Last Crow (Turning Point), Gacela of Narcissus City (Main Street Rag), and--most recently--Conflicted Light (Salmon Poetry).

Here's a favorite poem of mine from Conflicted Light:

Auricle

I heard the humming engine
of a heart smaller than an anvil;
in the hummingbird's forest
my ear was mistaken for a flower--
I should be complimented
for the brief moment before
the taste of my ear canal
will forever mark the thin tongue.
The hunger that was whispered
to me, woke me from a dream:

I was the drum in the redwoods,
the tongue of green prophesies,
the anvil of summer hunger,
awakened to the canopy songs
that had lain in the linens of leaves
I called my stomach. Now I hear
the hammer's rumor of sparks
on the anvil and can taste fear.
Now I realize I worked for years
in the coded silence of a paper heart.

*****

What are you currently up to?

Well, I tend to keep fairly busy most of the time.  Right now, I'm working on getting Bruce Cohen's book, Disloyal Yo-Yo, published.  I'm also putting the final touches on my next book, Inner Cities of Gulls, which will come out by Salmon Poetry next year.  I just went through and revised my other manuscript for submission to a few contests. I've been writing two other manuscript/projects, Birthday Notes and Dancing to Orphee's Radio. Then there's reading for the Dream Horse Press and the APJ.  

You're the editor of American Poetry Journal and Dream Horse Press; you host the "Out of Our Minds" radio show on KKUP; and you’re constantly getting your own writing published widely. How do you manage to wear so many poetic hats at once?

I try not to think about how much work there is to do. I try to remain focused on whatever the task is at hand, get it done and move on. I think it also helps that I normally don't require as much sleep as most people do.  I've been a 4.5 to 6 hour sleeper since I was a kid—used to drive my parents crazy that I would stay awake until 2 sometimes 3 in the morning.  And for the longest time, my writing time was between midnight and 2 a.m., but I've learned to write whenever the mood takes me.  Dream Horse requires and APJ require that I set aside whole portions of a day to work on them.  I like to work at least 4 to 8 hours straight on either.  

Your recent collection, Conflicted Light, was released by an Irish publisher (Salmon Poetry). How did that come about?

I think Jessie Lendennie (the owner of Salmon Poetry) and I were on a large group mailing list together at one point. I tend to lurk, but I will chime in when I think I have something to offer on a topic that hasn't already been expressed.  I had piped up about something and about a day later I got a message from Jessie saying she'd read my work and really liked it.  I had been a fan of Salmon Poetry (I've got several titles on my shelves) for quite some time, and well… the rest just fell into place.

What do you feel makes a great collection of poems?

I think there are any number of things that work to make a great collection of poems.  If you are asking me to step out of my Dream Horse Press editor's hat, then I would say that a great collection of poems is one in which every page is something to be savored. That you read the first poem and it is like a fine and delicate morsel of food. You want to take your time and enjoy it. You know just from that first poem that you are in for a gourmet meal. You do not want to rush to the next page, you may want to read one or two poems a day.  And reread them. And then again.

If I'm wearing my Dream Horse Press editor's hat… I like to look for collections that hold together as a larger poem. I also enjoy crafted poems that clearly show the writer's knowledge and skill without taking away from the poem at all.  In other words, I think there should be something in the poems for a second and third reading that make those just as enjoyable as the first reading. 

On a poem-by-poem level, what is the typical life of one of your poems—from idea to publication?

I tend to work in projects or manuscripts first.  So a project comes to me sometimes as a couple of poems that I can see go together, or I will sometimes challenge myself in some way, creating a set of rules that I have to follow. I don't have one set way of writing a poem, sometimes it's a line that comes to me, sometimes it's an idea or a thought I begin exploring, sometimes it's an image, and sometimes it's a voice. I will usually play with it in my head for several days. Rolling it back and forth, adding to and taking away from it until I feel there's a core something there.

Then I will write it down, usually the first draft will take about an hour. I will then read it aloud and edit it until I think it "sounds" right. Then I have a few friends whom I might "try it out" on. I'll get feedback and "try" to incorporate that back into the poem.  Then I'll set the poem aside.  I will generally write about three quarters to four fifths of a manuscript (or when I know there's only a few months left) before I start sending poems from that project.  

I do this for a number of reasons: One, it gives me distance from the first poems I wrote in the series, so I can stand back and look at them and decide if they are ready, or edit them to the point of being ready; Two, I will not get discouraged about the entire project if the poems are rejected, and therefore question whether I should continue working on the project; Three, the editing and submission functions, I find, are distractions from the actual creative action, so I don't like to do that until later in the project. If a poem is accepted, I may want to tinker with it a little more, nothing too big, a word or a phrase at most. If a poem is rejected, I will go back and review it, read it aloud several times, possibly revise it, and send it out again. At the point where about a quarter to half of the manuscript has been published, I will begin sending that out.

The exception to this rule has been my Birthday Notes project on Facebook.  The rules I set out for myself is that the poems have to be written using an application available to me when I go to the person having a birthday that day's wall, I will also put them together and publish them on my Notes/Wall page, and I write a prose poem there on their wall and it has to be done on that day. Since it's all done on the spur of the moment, it's a different kind of writing. I have to make a decision and run with it right away. Sometimes there's been as many as nine of them to write, and you just can't deliberate choices and ideas.

How important do you feel community is to a poet?

I have mixed feelings about it. Online, I tend to enjoy being "connected" to writers all over the planet. We have fun, and I think some of us are playful. I also enjoy playing word games with other writers. And touching base with them. 

The physically local writing communities really depend on where you are and who you fall in with. I think it also depends on the types of personalities that are part of the formal organization. I remember back in the late nineties a group of us used to get together, go to readings, put together potluck gatherings and had a lot of fun doing it. It was all done in the spirit of openness and we were trying to reach across political, group or community lines. The events were very informal and fun.  I've been part of more formalized organizations and it frankly wasn't my cup of tea. 

I appreciate those kinds of groups when they are done right, and one of them I think that does a good job is Poetry Santa Cruz, they present or sponsor a couple of readings a month (usually at least one with a writer who is visiting the area), and are involved in fostering a strong poetry community.

However, I tend to be better with the online community because I can work in being a part of them to compliment my schedule, I cannot necessarily do this with the physical ones.

Who are you currently reading?

Eesh.  This is not an easy answer for me because I am constantly reading. And I could answer this with any number of parameters. So first, I'll split out the dead writers and list them (in no particular order) first: James Wright, Federico Garcia Lorca, Robert Frost, John Berryman, Larry Levis, John Logan, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Lynda Hull, W. H. Auden, Neruda, Paul Celan, and Reginald Shepherd (if you ask me tomorrow, I'd probably have a different list depending on memory).  

I tend to read a lot of magazines (both online and printed) and there are certain names that I will naturally gravitate to and read first, and I would say the same holds true if I'm in a bookstore and I see their name on the spine of a book (and I am going to limit this list to authors with more than one book published): Nance van Winckel, Natasha Saje, Mary Ruefle, Roddy Lumsden, Kathleen Jamie, Ralph Angel, Jack Gilbert, Mary Jo Bang, Carolyn Forche, Tony Barnstone, Willis Barnstone, Jim Powell, Dorianne Laux, Margret Gibson, Mary Oliver, John Ashbury, Paul Guest, Mark Doty, Sherman Alexie, Robert Bly (and again, these were off the top of my head, and I'm sure I would have a different list tomorrow). I will also add that I read and seek out any of the authors that I've published.  And just to round this off, if you are a friend of mine, naturally I'm going to read your poem if I see it.

I will also say that I like to read many different writers and have an ever-expanding list of favorites. I feel, that it is essential to keeping an open mind and to being a good editor.

If you could share only one piece of advice with other poets, what would it be?

Constantly push and challenge yourself to do new things and learn new things.  If you've never written a sonnet, then challenge yourself to writing a crown of sonnets. If you've never written anything other than formal verse, write a prose poem.  Breaking down things, understanding the craft behind them and rebuilding the way you write only makes you a stronger and better writer. Never, ever think you are "there"--always be on the journey.

*****

To learn more about J.P. Dancing Bear (including Dream Horse Press and American Poetry Journal), check out his website at http://home.comcast.net/~jpdancingbear/.

To learn more about Salmon Poetry, which published Conflicted Light, check out their website at www.salmonpoetry.com.

Suzanne Frischkorn gets to lead off the 2009 poet interviews on Poetic Asides. (Woo-hoo! Yay! Hurrah!)

I enjoyed reading Frischkorn's most recent--and first full length--collection, Lit Windowpane (Main Street Rag Publishing Company), for many reasons. First, the poems are "spare," which is a fancy way of saying they are unassuming poems that pack a punch. Second, the poems seem to communicate with each other throughout--making the whole even stronger than it's individual parts, which are doing fine on their own (many of them published in publications, such as Diode, MARGIE, and No Tell Motel).

Here's a personal favorite of mine from Lit Windowpane:

Ruin

In the spider and on the web. On the branch
and in the pothole. Yellowed grass, wilted
fern, blackened growth. On the skeletal
stems of black-eyed Susans and in dawn's
stretch. The glint of street lights. The sibilant
mulberry behind blinds. Empty sky. Listen
to these old windows,
how they lend themselves to rattle.

What are you currently up to?

I’m putting together a new collection of poems, working on some essays and editing the New Haven issue of Locuspoint.

Mary Oliver describes your writing as "select and elegant," while James Hoch says your writing is "spare." I noticed it, too. Is that sparseness something you consciously do with your writing?

No, when I begin writing a poem I don’t plan how that poem will end, what shape it will take, or set out for a particular style. I let the poem lead me.

How many drafts do your poems tend to make? And, do you think your poems go through more or less drafts now than when you first started getting published?

I revise a lot when I'm working on a poem, but I've never counted individual drafts, I know it's many -- many, many drafts. My writing process doesn’t seem to have changed with publication.

Many reviews mention your focus on nature in Lit Windowpane, but a lot of that nature seems focused on the water. Is there a reason for this?

Water is definitely one of the unifying elements of the book. I once read that your childhood landscape will always be your landscape no matter where you live in adulthood. After writing Lit Windowpane, I realize that's true. Most of my early childhood was spent on Miami Beach, and for many years I lived a short walk from Long Island Sound. The poems in the book were written after I had moved inland. In hindsight of course it’s obvious that I miss being close to the water. 

Before Lit Windowpane, you published five chapbooks. What do you feel makes a good chapbook? 

My favorite chapbooks have a focused theme, either through image, style, form, or any of the numerous ways to create a sequence of poems. I’m partial to the chapbook in any case, including the chapbook without a theme that gives a sample of the poet’s work. The bibliophile in me loves the chapbook as an art object.

You have a nice website that includes information about you, your collections, and readings. What function do you think a website should serve for a poet?

Thank you. A website allows a poet to have a web presence that’s current, directs those interested in her/his work to points of interest, and includes contact information. Basically it should function as a marketing tool.

You've been published in several journals. How do you handle submitting and tracking your submissions?

I tend to either submit a lot or not at all, meaning I’ll go through regular periods of sending my work out and then find I need a break from the administrative side of poetry. My submission tracking system is rudimentary, it’s usually a word document that lists the name of the journal, poems submitted, the date of submission, and a note on whether the journal accepts simultaneous submissions or not.

Who are you currently reading?

Jean Valentine and Ralph Angel.

If you could pass on only one piece of advice to fellow poets, what would it be?

Read, read, read and read.

*****

To check out Suzanne's website, go to: http://www.suzannefrischkorn.net/

To check out Suzanne's publisher's website, go to: http://www.mainstreetrag.com/

*****

To learn how you, too, could possibly end up interviewed on this here blog, go to: http://blog.writersdigest.com/poeticasides/Call+For+Poets.aspx

As many of you know, I've had the pleasure of interviewing several poets over the past year. To make it easier to check them out, here they are (listed in alphabetical order):

Bill Abbott
Nin Andrews
Julianna Baggott
Sandra Beasley
Helene Cardona
John M. Fitzgerald
Sheema Kalbasi
John Korn
Dorianne Laux
Diane Lockward
Tom Lombardo
Denise Low
Joseph Mills
Valerie Nieman
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Kevin Pilkington
Martha Silano
Anne Tardos
Jillian Weise

I don't usually post interviews on back-to-back days, but I thought I'd make an exception in this case, because it might be the last interview posted until after November with this November PAD (poem-a-day) challenge coming up. And I'm just so excited to share Nin Andrews with anyone who hasn't read her work.

You see, there are poets who seek me out for interviews; there are poets who I seek for interviews; and then, there are cases where me and another poet just kind of bump into each other. In the case of Nin Andrews, I was definitely seeking her out after picking up (at random) one of her previous collections, Why They Grow Wings (Silverfish Review Press).

Since I'm an editor, I've always got more books than I can possibly read, but I was hooked from the first line of this--to me, anyway--previously unknown poet. After doing a little research, I learned she was not such an unknown quantity, in addition to learning--to my delight--that she recently released two other collections, Sleeping With Houdini (BOA Editions, Ltd.) and Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum? (Subito Press).

Here's a favorite of mine from Sleeping With Houdini:

Sleeping for Kafka

I heard on the radio this morning that prayers can heal. Experiments demonstrate that cancer patients who are prayed for, even by an anonymous person, have a better prognosis than those who receive no prayers.

A person can purchase prayers from Grace Church in Kansas by dialing 1-800-prayers. Visa and Mastercard are accepted.

I read that Kafka, a chronic insomniac, felt refreshed after watching his beloved sleep. Sometimes he invited her over, just to admire how she draped herself over his couch, wrapped in immaculate rest.

Some speculate it was the dreams of his beloved he wrote.

Thoughts like dreams drift from mind to mind. Some are heavy and sink to the ground or disappear under water where they grow like sea plants, while others are light and glide upwards like helium molecules.

When Jacob saw angels going up and down a ladder, they were merely tracing his thoughts.

Nietzsche said few people think their own thoughts. Instead they are thought. Many people are dreamt and prayed. They are like seashells inhabited by hermit crabs.

Most of us have no clue whose dream we are.

And with that, here is the interview:

What are you currently up to?

I'm working on two projects, one which I hope might become a New and Selected Orgasms. And another, which is a set of essays and longer prose poems that are very loosely linked by an economic theme.  Or money.  (I know it sounds boring, so I'm hoping that's not the case.)  I was always told as a child not to talk about sex, politics, or money, and I always do what I am told not to do.

I've read that you grew up on a farm. How do you feel your childhood shaped you as a poet?

As a child, I spent a lot of time at the barn with the horses, cows, cats, and chickens.  I also spent hours just staring at things—catching tadpoles, or watching ants pull crumbs or dead ants, or bees load up on pollen as they went from flower to flower.  We didn't have a TV or neighbors or other forms of distraction, so I spent a lot of my time daydreaming.  I think it's that empty space or time in my days I became used to as a kid that has shaped me most. It's the space I still need in order to write or solve problems or just stay sane.

In our correspondence, you mentioned that you've noticed a shift in your writing from more surreal work in your first collection (The Book of Orgasms) to more a storytelling style in your book due out next fall (Southern Comfort). Do you think there's a reasoning or natural progression behind moving from the surreal to storytelling?

I tend to do the opposite of what I am told.  Write what you know, my first teachers suggested.  But I have never been a big fan of reality.  Reality feels like sandpaper on my skin.  Sometimes I think I would love to escape the everyday world, and just move into the imagination forever.  Music, philosophy, dance, poetry, painting – they all help me do just that. Like good drugs, they offer an alternative to reality.  So initially I tried not to write my personal story.

But then, at a certain point, I started thinking about my childhood, and my children used to ask me about my past.  And I would tell them stories.  Stories about the time the one-armed man who worked on our farm shot a rabid fox. About the time the same man got drunk and let the heifers run loose on the freeway. About this crazy lady who came to the farm and taught me to see ghosts and read palms.  Or about a man called Toby who would walk up the dirt road on bare feet some days, and then go down to the mud pond to catch snapping turtles.  He said he caught them by feeling in the mud with his toes.

My children wanted me to tell these stories again and again, especially when I imitated the voices of the farmhands, my father, my mother, the crazy people, and the different animals and so on. They said I should write them down. But it's not easy for me to write about the farm. It's a bit like trying to break an ocean into drops.  And of course, I don't have an ability to see these pieces objectively.

From your first collection to your most recent, you've written a lot of your poems in the prose format. What do you like about the prose poem?

In the beginning, I wanted to write carefully crafted mini-tales.  And the prose poem is designed for that.  After a while I became interested in all the ways a prose poem can borrow from other forms.  So there are prose poems that are like fables, myths and parables, prose poems that are like interviews, love letters, fan letters, horoscopes, plays, advertisements, news reports, etc. There's so much versatility in the prose poem format.  And  great opportunities for humor.

Do you feel the structure of poems helps influence the content?

Yes. I think line breaks, for example, are content.  The same poem written with line breaks and without them—can have an entirely different effect.  And meaning. 

I think choosing a form is like choosing a design for a house. If  you have a big open space with skylights and a stage, that's one kind of experience.  If you build a large house with a bazillion tiny rooms, that's another experience.  

You mention that the poems in Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum? are inspired by actual comments, notes and questions from your husband's students. Where do you find that you draw the line between reality and fantasy in your own poetry?

In most of my writing, I try to keep reality off-kilter somehow. To offer at least a tiny escape from reality. I do this in different ways, depending on the book. In Dear Professor, I use humor to create that escape.

In the orgasm poems, I am sometimes taking a literal reality and making it surreal.  Or a philosophical discussion and putting it in an absurd context.  I have, for example, an interview with an orgasm.  That poem began when I saw the debate between Senator Bentsen and Senator Quayle.  When Bentsen said: Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine.  Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy, I imagined one orgasm saying to a fake orgasm, Orgasms are my friends. I know orgasms, and you?  You're no orgasm.

In the southern poems, I mix up the characters, recast a father as a farmhand, an uncle as a father, my friend's mother as my own mother, so that I can gain some objectivity. I want each poem to speak for itself, not for my experience.  A poem, I like to think, has its story to tell, its own truth.   

The poems in Sleeping With Houdini seem very tightly wound together. When you're putting together a collection, do you start with an idea and start writing the poems to complete that idea? Or do you write poems and then fill the gaps after you notice a pattern developing?

I will write on one subject for months at a time.  I end up with a heap of poems that cling to one another like static electricity.  It's a nightmare to try to organize my obsessions.  To try to make a pattern out of chaos.  It's a little like attempting to take tiny pieces of old fabric and sew them into a beautiful dress.

Who are you currently reading?

I was just reading Shirley Jackson.  She reminds me a little of my father, her dark sensibility.  And Mark Halliday's new collection, Keep This Forever, which is as brilliant and smart-assed as Halliday always is.  And The Lover by Duras, which is fabulous, of course.  It's interesting, now that I think about it.  All of these books are taking a bite out of my peace of mind.  But they are all teaching me things.

I've also been reading Rick Bursky's The Soup of Something Missing, a little collection I think everyone should read.  He's a poet I'm crazy about.  And Carol Maldow's The Widening, a book about sexual awakening.  She calls it a novel, but it's not. It reads like a memoir written in prose poems.  Each page is a chapter.  Each page is a beautiful prose poem.

If you had one piece of advice to share with other poets, what would it be?

I never follow advice, so I don't usually give any either. 

For me writing is a little like keeping the barn clean.  Every day I check over my work and see if there are any manure balls I need to remove. And every day there are.  For sure.  So I'm never surprised by a rejection.  And I'm always amazed by an acceptance.  That someone took something of mine, cow pies and all. So I'm grateful for even the tiniest forms of acceptance. 

Not that that's advice.  It's just the way I survive the poetry business side of being a poet.  And how I keep writing.

*****

* Check out Nin's blog at http://ninandrewswriter.blogspot.com/

* Click here for more information on Sleeping With Houdini

Poetry is often at its best when it's helping readers gain greater insights into life. In the case of After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events, edited by Tom Lombardo (Sante Lucia Books), poems have been chosen to help readers to recover from subjects such as war, abuse, addiction, death, and more. The anthology includes 115 poets from 15 nations, including Donald Hall, Thomas Lux, J.P. Dancing Bear, Annie Finch, Kevin Young, William Stafford, Mary Jo Bang, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Valerie Nieman, Rita Dove, and Jeffrey Levine.

Here's a poem by Lombardo himself that appears in the Recovery From Death of a Spouse section:

Daffodils

For weeks after Lana's funeral,
my mother cooked for me,
handled death's paperwork,
opened a door--
Look outside at your back yard.
Looking outward for the first time since burial
prayers, I saw daffodils blooming,
the ones that Lana and I had planted
in a sunken rectangular spot last Fall,
set against the bright, new green of Spring,
Easter white and careless yellow.

And with that, let's jump into the interview.

What are you currently up to?

In addition to my ongoing freelance medical editing, which pays my office rent, I am spending nearly all of my creative writing time on the marketing and promotion of After Shocks. I'm also in initial discussions with two authors and another publisher regarding potential next projects for Sante Lucia Books. Sorry to say, my own writing time has disappeared. I miss it, and I'll get back to it soon. I hope.

I also spend a lot of time with my two children, Lucy (12) and Sam (9). As a freelancer, I'm flexible enough to be Mr. Mom and pick them up after school each day, manage their afternoon activities and homework. My wife, Hope, has a real job, with a salary and benefits.

After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events is an anthology inspired by your experience as a widower. Could you speak a little about how this experience led to the anthology? Also, what do you hope this anthology is able to accomplish?

I've always hated that label "widower." I was so, so young when the label attached to me. I thought a widower should be in his 70s or 80s, some old guy walking with a cane, not a vigorous young man. I felt so out of place.

After my first wife, Lana, was killed in an auto accident on April 13, 1985, I found myself a widower in my early 30s, without peer among anyone I knew. Well-wishers offered condolences like this: "You’re young. You'll get over this." Or "You're too young, you'll never get over this."

I have spent the past two-plus decades coming to some understanding of my wife's death, my grief, and what recovery means in the context of my own life.

Reading poetry gave me solace during the early stages of my grief. I returned to some old favorites—Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, e.e. cummings, Robert Frost—not a particularly soothing group, you might say, but for me, they were familiar from a time in my life when my life seemed more settled. The language, the music, the ghosts in the haunted house offered an escape from a life seemingly shattered—an escape from "if…then", "what if ", "how", "why" questions plaguing my nights, questions that had no answers.

1985 was also the year of publication of Douglas Dunn's Elegies (Faber & Faber), which won the Whitbread Book of the Year. Sometime along the way, a dear friend gave me a copy, brought back from England. Though the circumstances of Leslie Balfour Dunn's death were quite different, I felt Dunn's world embrace me.

Grief wrongs us so. I stand, and wait, and cry

For the absurd forgiveness, not knowing why.

A decade later, Donald Hall's book Without, poems covering the illness and death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, touched me in the same way.

These two books moved me deeply as books of recovery. They seemed direct, straightforward, and honest in their stories, emotion, and language.

Many contemporary poets are writing about topics in recovery. Mary Jo Bang's Elegy relives her grief over the death of her son. Linda McCarriston wrote Eva-Mary about growing up abused, which won the National Book Award. Sharon Olds wrote collections about childhood abuse and alcoholism. Others: Carolyn Forche, Bruce Weigl, Tess Gallagher, Marie Howe. Each poet has focused upon a topic of his or her own experience. They all represent a chorus of voices in a growing sub-genre of recovery poetry. I used a poem from Ms. Bang in After Shocks. The others will be considered for the second edition, due out in a couple of years.

What this anthology intends to do is show that the poetry of recovery cuts across many boundaries. What this anthology intends to accomplish is to provide its readers with a source of comfort in the language of poets who've experienced life-shattering events and have come to some kind of acceptance.

There are "115 poets from 15 nations" anthologized in After Shocks. How did you go about getting all the permissions? I'm guessing it must've been quite an undertaking.

You've heard the simile "it's like herding cats." The permissions effort for After Shocks was more than an undertaking. It became a lifestyle for several months. It took a great deal of organization, diligence, and guts. There were so many different pieces. But once I organized it in my own mind, the rest was just the grunt work of getting it done.

There are essentially two levels of permissions. The first level is the permissions from well-known, top-level poets with large corporate publishers, e.g. Donald Hall and Thomas Lux at Houghton Mifflin or Rita Dove at W.W. Norton, or Carol Ann Duffy at Faber & Faber, etc. Many of those very well-known poets have signed their rights over to their publishers, and those publishers re-sell the reprint rights, generally splitting the proceeds with the poet. In these cases, permissions became a matter of finding the permissions editor at the publisher, writing a letter, negotiating a fee, signing the contracts, sending a check. The process is well-defined, straightforward, and the permissions folks at these large publishers are professionals. They are eager to book the revenue from reprinted poems, for which you and I and they know that there's a very small market. So, in my case, as a very small publisher, the big houses were very easy to negotiate with. It was either give me a price I can afford or I walk, and if I walk, they get nothing.

I lost only one poem out of scores in this top level group. Only one publisher would not negotiate downward to a fee I felt I could afford.

The second level is essentially everyone else. Many of the poets at this level may have national profiles, many of them are well-known regionally, many of them are already award-winners. But their publishers are smaller houses than those large corporate publishers above and may not retain the re-print rights so that the author retains the rights, or if the publisher does retain the rights, it does not charge for reprints, or gives the poet the authority to grant the re-print rights. The process in these cases varies so much that it's virtually ad hoc. My approach was this: I emailed these poets, asked if they owned the rights to the poems I had selected for After Shocks. If they said YES, I took them at their word, and asked them to email permission, which they did. If they referred me to their publishers, then I emailed their publishers, and in almost all cases, received reprint permission via email free of charge. Most of the small publishers were cooperative, generous, easy to work with. Also in this second level, there were several contributors who submitted unpublished poems, so the permissions for those were very simple. The poets granted permissions. This second level was completed all via email. The first level was done all on paper, with letters and contracts and the good ol' United States Postal Service.

I must mention a few publishers like Alice James Books and Tupelo Press and Iris Press who were quite generous by not charging reprint fees when I asked for several poems from several of their poets' books. Working with editors like April Ossmann at Alice James and Jeffrey Levine at Tupelo and Bob Cumming at Iris was a pleasure. They are first-class editors, and they appreciate spreading their good poetry around.

On the other hand, there were a few small presses and university presses who were simply buttheads, refusing to negotiate or treating me with arrogance because I was not Norton or they believed I might be naïve or foolish enough to pay them exorbitant reprint fees. In four cases, I told the poets that I would not use their poems in the anthology because their publishers were not cooperating or were charging too much. In two of those cases, the poet's involvement broke the logjam. In the other two cases (both of them university presses), I lost the poems because the university presses were quite rigid with their reprint structure and refused to negotiate even a penny. So, in the end, I walked, and they got nothing. I felt this as a defeat because in the end, it was the poets who lost, not After Shocks. I had plenty of great poems in hand.

There was one other negotiated oddity in permissions. One university press would not negotiate a reduced fee, and when I told the poet, she offered to pay the fee. I refused to go along, but she was adamant. I probably should not have given in, but I agreed to pay half the fee, which actually brought my cost down within a comfortable range. She paid the other half. I really liked this poem, and I really needed it to balance out a chapter, so my editorial needs may have trumped ethics. I'm not sure that I'd do that again. It seems a bit unfair for a poet to pay her own press to buy reprint rights to one of her own poems. I'm not sure what the ethics of that situation dictate. Maybe I'll write this question to the New York Times ethics column, eh?  As editor of Writer's Market, do you have an opinion on this?

All in all, the permissions work was time-consuming and tedious. But it was worth every drop of sweat.

Also, to put together an anthology such as this, you must do a lot of reading. What (or who) are some of your recent favorite reads?

During my reading and selection months, I was reading so much poetry I couldn't believe it. Morning, noon, and night poetry. I was dreaming about poems. But what a rewarding experience! I have met poets literally around the world.

In the U.S., Jericho Brown's just released collection, Please is excellent. He's a young, Cave Canem, emerging poet. Look out for this guy! I wouldn't have known of his new book had I not met him through the After Shocks submissions. He answered my call for submissions, placed on the Cave Canem web site, and we've kept in touch. Susan Meyers' collection Keep and Give Away, which won the South Carolina Book Award and the SIBA Book of the Year Award is also a great read and a fine example of the new poetry coming out in the South. Another book that caught my attention during my reading was Martha Collins' most recent one Blue Front, a book-length view of tragic events, with huge scope, set the microcosm of her family. Unfortunately, I couldn't excerpt it for After Shocks, though Ms. Collins did submit several other poems, of which I selected two. Another recent discovery is the poetry of Joseph Enzweiler, published by Iris Press of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He's a poet who lives near Fairbanks, Alaska, works half the year as a carpenter and stone mason, then as the long Arctic winter descends, he holes up in his primitive log cabin in Goldstream Valley north of Fairbanks and writes poetry on an old Royal Typewriter all winter long.  And it's great stuff: deep, cold, brooding with insight! During selections, I read New Hampshire poet Pam Bernard's unpublished manuscript Blood Garden, a stunning real-time portrayal of her father's combat experience in World War I. Yes, WW ONE. He was an older father when Ms. Bernard was born. I selected a poem from the manuscript for After Shocks. Blood Garden is slated for publication by WordTech in 2010. Watch for it. It's another fine addition to the oeuvre of war poetry. I would also note Brian Turner's Here, Bullet (Alice James Book), which is by now quite well known, an excellent collection of war poetry informed by Turner's tour of duty in Iraq. One more—Isreali poet Rachel Tzvia Back's third collection On Ruins and Return, extraordinary, moving work steeped in the everyday activities of Israeli Jews and Arabs, living and dying side-by-side in Galilee.

There are four excellent collections from London publisher Ambit Books that I would call must-reads for any American poetry lover who would like to expand his/her reading into exciting new areas. This series is called Poets Here from Elsewhere and features four poets living in the U.K. who have left their homelands because of politics, persecution, or poverty. The books are Sir Winston Churchill Knew My Mother by Indian poet Satyendra Srivastava; Bells of Speech by Kurdish poet Nazand Begikhani, who fled Iraq after her brothers were killed in the chemical bombing of Halabja in 1988; memories of summers in brist near gradac and other poems by Bosnian poet Sonja Besford, who fled Bosnia after the civil war there, and A Day Within Days by Liu Hongbin, who was exiled from China when his poetry was posted around Tiananmen Square during the uprising there in 1989. All four of those books were written in English. I happened to be reading these four collections when I conceived After Shocks, and they opened the anthology's door to the world.

An excellent anthology that I came across during my reading, which I would highly recommend, again to expand beyond the normal reading a typical American reader usually gravitates toward: Six Basque Poets, published by Arc Publications in the U.K. It's phenomenal reading, with several excellent poets within, whom you would never, ever come across anywhere else. I found Bernardo Atxaga's poem "Death and the Zebras," and as I read it, felt shivers up and down my spine, and I knew I needed this poem as the final poem for After Shocks. The publisher, Arc Publications, was a nice discovery. It has several in its "Six Poets from…." series. Check out the web site. You won't be able to resist buying a couple.

Robert, I could go on and on. These are just a few of many, and I hate to call them out because there are others just as good. There are so many excellent poets out there whom I discovered during my reading, poets I never would have come across except for the submissions call. When you work on an anthology, you get exposed to many, many, MANY poets whom you'd never in your life expect to read. It's taught me to reach out further and further, open up to ALL poets, everywhere.

You're the founding editor-in-chief of Web MD, the world's most widely used health website, and you now work as a freelance medical editor. Does your background in medicine help inform your own writing or with compiling this anthology?

My own writing tends toward the body, the physical, sometimes even going inside the body to root around or look back out at the world from in there. My unpublished ms. has the working title The Body Functions. I'm not afraid to work with medical diction. I find there's a nice music to it when used in the right spot. I like to confront the diseases that break us down. I like to question the conventional wisdom. My approach, even in poems I've written about my first wife's death, uses stark clinical details. I feel that my 15 years of writing and editing health and medicine have given me some feeling for both the strength and fragility of this sack of bone and tissue we are blessed and cursed to live within. I think that experience colors about half of my published work, but there are other colors, tones, and moods in my work, too. I also was a scholarship college football player, and I've written some poems about all the concussions I suffered, kind of an interesting combination of medicine and athletics.

I'm certain my career as a medical editor informed the compilation of After Shocks. But there are no clinically descriptive poems in After Shocks. Where I believe it had an effect is that I have this sense of wonder when I look at us—human beings. I am attracted to poems that exhibit that same sense of wonder. We are truly a marvel. So fragile, yet so strong. The strength is not only physical. We possess a resilience within us that literally forces us to want to live. Of course, all forms of life possess this, don't they? Life wants to continue living, and life will alter itself to continue living. You can see this clearly in real time in viruses' behavior over their rapid generational evolution. Deadly viruses quickly evolve to lesser virulence so that they don't kill too many potential hosts, thus continuing their own source of livelihood. Once life takes root, it doesn't want to be uprooted. But we have something other life forms don't have…a big brain, the seat of a clever mind. Most of us use it to survive, no matter what horrors happen to us. Reading some of the poems in After Shocks makes me clearly understand that there truly are no limits to what we can survive. Just one chapter would illustrate this point: Recovery from Loss of Child. Reading the submissions for that chapter drove me to tears some days. I have children. I can't imagine the devastation of this loss. But these poets have survived what may be the worst loss of all. One of the forewords to After Shocks was written by therapist Nicholas Mazza, who lost his son in a car wreck. Dr. Mazza, who is editor of Journal of Poetry Therapy, writes: "Not a day goes by that I don't think of Chris or try to do something in remembrance of him…although there will always be an empty space on anything that I write, I remind myself that reflection can become remembrance, and this becomes a legacy for those who have gone before us. It is through poetry and story that we create meaning and form relationships."

Of course, a few of us are not equipped to survive, and those unfortunate ones choose to end their lives: facing illness, from grief, after abuse, fighting addiction. Who can blame them? It's hard and at times, can be hopeless. I've come to see that a life-shattering event has two outcomes: You either make it or you don't, and if you don't the alternative is the end of all hope. And a few of us go down that road. Fortunately, not that many. Most of us would rather continue living. Life wants to live. That's part of what I've learned as a medical editor.

So for After Shocks selections, I focused on that kernel of hope, that ray of recovery, that evidence that life wants to live. In some selections, it's in the air even as carnage surrounds the narrator. In others, it's years down the road from the event. But it's there, in each poem.

You self-published this book under Sante Lucia Books. Could you speak a little on why you decided to go this route? Also, do you plan on publishing more titles under this imprint in the future?

In one word, control. I'm glad I did it this way, because I was in total control the entire way. I had such a clear vision for what I wanted to do, had I gone with an established publisher, the publisher would have filtered my vision through its own. Compromises would have watered down my vision.

But I almost did go with a publisher. I came awfully close, and now, I know that it would have been exactly the wrong move. Publishers work more slowly than glaciers move. This anthology—388 pages, 152 poems, 115 poets, 15 nations—went from an idea to bound pages in 18 months. Triple that if a publisher is involved. Fugedaboudit!

There was a small, but well-respected, publishing house who had agreed to publish After Shocks. We reached a verbal agreement after a meeting on November 1, 2007, when I showed him an early draft of the manuscript. Then, I never heard back from that publisher again, even after repeated emails. He was so very enthusiastic, said a contract was coming. I've since heard a rumor that he has taken seriously ill or that his company may have taken seriously ill. He's elderly. Maybe he up and died? I mean, you think the worst when there's no communication.

When I didn't hear back, I moved ahead. I could not wait. I had a publishing date in mind, Autumn 2008, and I wanted to move quickly. 

I had already formed Sante Lucia Books as a dba of the company I have for my freelance medical editing work, so I was prepared from the outset to do this alone, and I will freely and openly admit, I'm glad I did. I love to have complete and total control. I would drive any other publisher nuts. This is MY idea, and MY book, and I wanted to do it exactly MY way. I am already an editor, and a darn good one, so why would I need an editor from a publisher looking over my shoulder? On the publishing side, I'm learning a few things along the way, and I contracted with Kevin Watson, publisher at Press 53 in Winston-Salem, NC, to work with me on the design, production, and printing. I have absorbed a lot of marketing over the years, having been the creative partner with some great marketing minds during my career, so I'm familiar with marketing and publicity, so I felt somewhat equipped to work those angles. Some things I'm learning as I go, and they tend to be the lowest, but most unnerving, details. For example, After Shocks, the book, weighs 1 lb. 6 oz, in its bubble wrapped envelope. Well, your postman will not take  anything heavier than 13 oz., because Homeland Security has deemed 13 oz. as the weight of a bomb that can bring down an airplane, according to my USPS carrier. What that means, in a practical sense, is that I must hand carry each and every book I mail to my post office in person, hand them over the counter, so they can be verified and stamped as "non-suspicious mail." And I discovered to my chagrin that not all postal clerks are trained to do that correctly, resulting in some copies bouncing back to me like rubber bombs, er balls. I feel like I'm a character in a Kafka novel when I carry these stacks of books to the PO. I can only carry two full boxes at a time without herniating a disc, so that means daily trips to the PO and waiting in line, which is one big, time consuming pain in the butt. Hey, would I avoid that with a big publisher taking over this anthology? You bet. But I still love it.

My imprint is named after my two children. Lucy, whose given name is Lucia, pronounced in the Italian way, loo-CHEE-ya, and Sam whose given name is Sante, pronounced in the Italian way, SAN-te. They didn't charge me a licensing fee, and for that I employ them as envelope labelers and stuffers, when they're not doing homework, playing hockey or tennis, or taking dance lessons, which seems like all the time. So, since the publication of After Shocks, I've been demoted from Editor to Mail Room Clerk!!! But I love it. I love having ALL the control over EVERYTHING. I embrace the mindless work of placing stamps and labels on envelopes. It's a nice break from reality.

Another publisher would have screwed this up somehow, taken two years longer, designed a lousy cover. I had, still have, a precise vision for this anthology, and I needed to execute that vision to the last dot on the page. For the good and the bad. Hey, there are three typos in the first printing, and those are completely my fault and have already been corrected in second printing. But any good that devolves from After Shocks, that's also my doing.

I wouldn't give up this much fun to a publisher for a million dollars. No way.

And, c'mon, realistically, is Norton or Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux or even Copper Canyon really going to want an anthology edited by someone not named Donald Hall or Louise Glück or Billy Collins or you-know-who-big-name in poetry? I'm not a twig from the Cambridge Tree.

Plans for the future for Sante Lucia Books? Yes. I have plans in the works. Yes. I will be publishing other titles in the future, but right now, I'd rather not discuss them in too much detail. I'm both superstitious and part Sicilian. If I don't jinx it by talking about it, then someone might steal the ideas. There may be a traditional collection or two in Sante Lucia Books' future. On the other hand, I have some intriguing ideas to explore vertical markets in poetry, which I don't believe have been explored by other publishers. My media experience tends to be non-traditional, outside-the-box work, so much of my planning for the future of Sante Lucia Books will be in this vein.

How have you gone about promoting this book?

I have this feeling that I am digging 10,000 holes. Most will be empty, but I will find gold at the bottom of three of them, and some others will have some loose change, lost and covered over by years of dirt.

Basically, I'm focusing marketing efforts on readings, personal appearances, and getting the book into the hands of every media outlet, editor, reviewer, producer that I can. I follow up on every single lead, every idea, every suggestion offered by anyone.

At the outset, I developed an extensive advertising plan and set aside a budget. However, I've scrapped that plan almost completely. Instead, I've spent the money on a book publicist, and a very good one, Marjory Wentworth. So far, it's working out well. Together, we've set up readings in Charleston, Charlotte, Atlanta, Boston. For the Charleston reading on September 18, Ms. Wentworth set up two live TV spots and an article in the Sunday arts section of the Charleston daily newspaper. The attendance at the reading was the largest for poetry ever at the library there. Eight After Shocks contributors from South Carolina read there. November 9 coming up: Charlotte. This has the makings of a very large reading. There will be 11 contributors reading. The local paper is planning an advance story. [note: I'll have more on this in a week or so…] We'll do the same for Atlanta on March 11, 2009, and Boston on May 2, 2009. We're looking to fill in the open dates with readings in other cities: SF/Portland/DC/NYC. We are scheduling readings where contributors tend to cluster in groups of 5 or more. I'm working with an agent in London to host a reading for the 10 British poets for sometime in 2009. I'll be heading a panel of contributors who will read their After Shocks work at the South Carolina Book Festival. I'm considering doing a panel at the AWP in Denver in 2010. There is a distinct marketing advantage to having 115 contributors. There are 115 potential sales people out there pulling for After Shocks. And they have been sending me some great ideas. And bless them all, they've been very willing to come to read whenever I've asked.

We've sent out a couple hundred books to reviewers and various media people. The results are just starting to materialize in coverage. Three newspaper articles so far. Those two TV appearances. I'll be doing an interview in November for Georgia Public Broadcasting, which will run twice, the second time right before the Atlanta reading. This, of course, is local, not national publicity, but it's a step in the right direction. Once into the NPR door, I hope to leverage to other NPR stations, and maybe, if lucky, to the national level. I have this gut feeling that After Shocks is just beginning to get some media traction. It's still early, as After Shocks has only been out for two months, but Ms. Wentworth and I have done everything we possibly could, and I feel that the results are just starting to come in.

I've been booked into 6 dates for readings/discussions at church-based recovery groups or adult Sunday schools (with book singings at the churches' bookstores), and this has been a surprising development. I'm going to push this as far as I can. I'll go to any church, temple, synagogue, or mosque that invites me, and I'm working to spread the word in that sphere. I'll need to tap into networks of pastors, ministers, priests, imams, and rabbis. I haven't yet cracked the code here, but I have a sense that religious institutions are going to become very important in the marketing effort. After Shocks is not a religious book by any means, but I'm hearing very strong reactions from clergy who've seen the book to its underlying theme of the resilience of the human spirit. These church-based readings/discussions take poetry out of the realm of the typical poetry audience and into the realm of people who might not read poetry that often, but might react to it emotionally as a spiritual experience. A strong selling point here, of course, is my own personal story. Ms. Wentworth has taught me to recognize the promotional value of that and to weave me and the book into one story. The National Association of Poetry Therapists has also been a strong supporter, using its email list to publicize readings.

Other publicity—you've graciously asked me to answer questions on this blog! Maybe there are other bloggers out there, too!

I may spring the money for an advertisement or two in the near future. I'm seriously considering a Poetry Daily sponsor box on its home page. The cost seems efficient for the reach. However, I'm not yet convinced that advertising results in sales. Readings, personal appearances, word-of-mouth definitely results in sales.

If you could pass on one piece of advice to poets, what would it be?

Keep at it. No matter what.

I rejected many good poems for After Shocks simply because there was insufficient space. I could have published a 500-page anthology. Editorial decisions do not necessarily reflect upon quality. Editors' preferences are as numerous as the stars. Keep searching the heavens for your star.

If you could pass on one piece of advice to people suffering from life shattering events, what would it be?

Recovery cannot be prescribed. There are no rubrics, no roadmaps, no matter how many books you read. Recovery is not bottled like cough medicine. I hesitate to give anyone direct advice on this, because events that shatter lives—death of a loved one, divorce, exile, acts of war, abuse, addiction, etc.—cause unquantifiable, huge amounts of stress and horror and doubt, especially right at the beginning. From my own experience and from a distance of 23 years, I can say that what helped me most is that I realized I had to embrace the pain, let it wash over me, invite it inside, make it a part of me. It's very difficult, but I've come to believe that the longer you fight it, the harder it's going to be to come to some sort of new balance. And recognize this: After such an event, you will never be the same person. That person who you were—is gone forever, so give up trying to get back to normal. Normal is going to be something new and different. Maybe not as good, but maybe better. But if you don't open up to it, the road is longer and more painful that it needs to be. I had expected to reach some closure at some point, but I have discovered that there is no closure. Not really. Recovery goes on forever. Recovery became part of my spirit, part of that new level of stasis, that new "normalcy." I'm 23 years out from the death of my first wife, and though I'm at peace with who I've become, I feel like I'm still recovering from that event. I still bear the mark of a widower. I have started a new marriage and we have two lovely children. I still think about Lana and experience grief in some form every day.

*****

For more information, check out www.poetryofrecovery.com.

Recently, I had the good opportunity to interview Iranian born poet Sheema Kalbasi who is also a human rights activist and translator. She's also the director of Dialogue of Nations through Poetry, director of the Iranian Women Poetry Project, and co-director of the Other Voices International Project.

Her collection Echoes in Exile (PRA Publications) was a Best Books Award Finalist by USA Book News. In addition to her own poetry, she also translated an anthology of women poets from Middle Ages Persia to Present Day Iran titled Seven Valleys of Love (PRA Publications).

One of my favorite pieces from Echoes in Exile is:

Ivy Nights

Deep in the mouth,
Ivies have grown.
It is rather tricky
To claim her as mine
Now that I have given her to you.
Take good care of her.

And here is the interview:

What are you currently up to?

I am working on the Danish to English translation of a poem by Pia Tafdrup for the forthcoming print publication of the Other Voices International Project, a collection of poems edited by my friend and literary colleague, Roger Humes, and myself. The anthology is the work by a number of poets from our UNESCO endorsed "cyber-anthology" of world poetry which is located at www.othervoicespoetry.org

You were born in Tehran, Iran; you are a Danish citizen; and you currently live in Washington, DC. How has your sense of place affected your writing?

Often when I am asked this question I reply by quoting from Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese poet and philosopher who writes: "He who does not prefer exile to slavery is not free by any measure of freedom, truth and duty." As a person who has been displaced on more than one occasion living and experiencing life in places with such differences in the legal, social, and political system has definitely influenced my writings.

As a Danish citizen I have experienced social discrimination, but this is far from what I experienced and observed in Iran. The country where I was born and raised in until the age of fourteen is ruled by a regime that has institutionalized gender apartheid; has mass murdered dissidents and members of religious minorities; has destroyed holy sites and cemeteries of people of "unrecognized faith"; has denied higher education and work to Bahaies; has executed people by brutal methods such as stoning; and has arbitrarily arrested and jailed hundreds of journalists, bloggers, and other activists. 

In the United States where I currently live, the rights of each individual are much more protected by the legal system than in any other country where I have lived. Surely, there are human rights abuses committed by the U.S. government from time to time, but those eventually always come to light. Abu Gharib is such an example.

In my writings I address these issues. I know what it is to be scared of falling bombs, as I know what it is to be paralyzed by fear. I experienced it at the age of 8 when several Iranian cities, including Tehran, were attacked by Iraqi missiles. The bombings killed some seventy elementary school students, and the air raid became the topic of one of my longer poems entitled "Let's Dance Cha, cha Oil," where I write: "The concentration of oil in my body is higher than Central Asia/And this makes it even more critical/To experience life/As a human with socialization goals/Because during the school hours/I and the other students had to learn/How to hide under the desks" (Echoes in Exile, P.R.A., 2006).

You are the director of the Iranian Women Project. What is the purpose of this project?

My mother's grave is in a new land far from where she was born, raised and worked. She was the first Iranian woman with whom I had contact, a lover of literature and willful creature who encouraged me to write as a child. I created this project to honor her memory so that she and other Iranian female poets living in Iran or elsewhere receive the international recognition they deserve.

You've worked as a translator. Do you feel the familiarity with multiple languages has enhanced your poetry writing?

Perhaps knowing several languages makes my poetry more inter-cultural and inter-textual without alienating or overshadowing my background both as an Iranian born, and a voyager. 

In Seven Valleys of Love, you translate the works of women poets "from Middle Ages Persia to present day Iran." Did you notice any threads tying the poems together throughout the ages?

The thread tying the poems together is the anthology’s historical overview.

Your English-language collection Echoes in Exile contains poems of loss and pain, but also poems of desire. What do you feel ties this collection together?

My experiences as an individual, a woman, a lover, a human rights activist, a mother, and an exile.

Do you have any sort of writing routine?

Yes. I have disciplined myself to write every day. Sometimes I start as early as 5 a.m.

Which poets are you currently reading?

I am reading Fahmida Riaz, a Pakistani feminist poet, and of course one of my all time favorites whose poetry I can never get enough of, the Iranian-Canadian poet and filmmaker Naanaam (Hossein Martin Fazeli). Your readers may want to familiarize themselves with this poet's writings and watch one of his latest films at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=O02yAAmU3Ww.

If you could pass on one piece of advice to fellow poets, what would it be?

I don't like receiving advice when I haven't asked for any and don't see why other people, including poets, would be any different than me.

*****

For more information on Kalbasi, check out www.frontlist.org.

This interview came about from an earlier interview with poet and actress Hélène Cardona. Sometime in June, Hélène mentioned that John M. FitzGerald's most recent collection, Telling Time by the Shadows (Turning Point), was actually a collection of secret love poems written by him to her.

"These are the poems John wrote when we first met," says Hélène. "We met at a reading he did at Beyond Baroque in Venice. After that we communicated through poetry, sending each other poems by mail or e-mail for the longest time before we even had a date. It's a very 18th century story."

Needless to say, I was definitely intrigued. John originally sent his poems to Hélène as "prayer poems," so as not to let on they were to her. Eventually, the secret broke, and they both went on to live happily ever after.

FitzGerald, a dual citizen of the United States and Ireland, has published in numerous journals and anthologies. Spring Water, a novel in verse, was a Turning Point Books prize selection in 2005. His other collections include The Mind, The Charter of Effects, Question Creation and The Zeroth Law. He recently completed his first novel, Primate, and turned it into a screenplay.

Here's a poem from Telling Time by the Shadows:

"Magus"

I would be one of the wanderers,
with heaven watching.
Observe, you reflections, I glance away.

Notice the wonder spring forth in ancientness,
steep the spell held in spices, hypnotized.
In dreams I descend twenty steps at a time,

am afraid how I'll land if I fly too high.
I try not to say I, and claim myself,
a sign of consciousness uncovering.

Who calls me, from such transience?
We will ourselves into vastness,
like children at graves,

a wind with just one chance to blow,
both toward and away from itself in surprise,
or life is waste.

There are shooting stars, then that which lingers,
even hovers like a hawk, a halo, a messenger.
None can bear looking straight into the sun.

We see it reflect off the ocean by day, the moon at night.
Imagine someone's sun fly away.
What must it search for, in its burning?

Galaxies witness it bursting through silence.
May it hover to the end in spite of where it finds itself.
Let innocence cling to the universe, swirling,

get high and go hungry, distill our minds
till we can't control what pours from inside,
and at heart remain addicts, ever humble.

And with that, let's get into the interview:

What are you currently up to?

I recently finished a new manuscript of poetry, The Zeroth Law. It's actually more of a cross between poetry and literary nonfiction that compares the beliefs of the world’s major religions to history, myth and science.

You're in a relationship with poet Hélène Cardona. So I'm wondering if you could share what it's like to be in a relationship with another poet?

Hélène is great. She is the love of my life and my best friend and a pleasure to be around. People say we're joined at the hip. I'm not so sure that being in a relationship with another poet is so different than being in a relationship with a person in any other occupation. You have to make time for both the vocational and creative aspects of life, while continuing to recognize the things that brought you together in the first place. I was used to being alone to write and it took some adjustment for me. But it helps that we have a lot of the same interests and can bounce things off of one another. And it helps that she is brilliant, too.

Your collection Telling Time by the Shadows is actually a collection of "secret" love poems you wrote to Cardona, which you called Prayer Poems at the time. Could you re-cap a little on how this developed, including when/how Cardona finally learned their actual purpose?

Yes. It's a collection of poems of love and longing. I first met Hélène when she approached me after a reading I did at Beyond Baroque, in Venice. She told me how great my poems were, and of course, I was immediately stunned by her presence. As time went on, we kept meeting again and again at local poetry events. We talked and exchanged poems.

But Hélène is an impressive person. I was always certain that it was only the poetry she was interested in, rather than me in a romantic sense. We began to meet and take very long walks along the beach, from Santa Monica to Malibu, almost daily. During these walks we would hardly speak at all. We would then each return to our separate homes, and send each other poems and letters by e-mail and post.

At that time, as it happened, I was working on what I then referred to as "The Prayer Poems." These were prayers in the traditional sense, that they were directed toward a deity. But in these poems, God is really a woman.

In your own opinion, what makes for a good "secret" love poem?

I think a good secret love poem is one that is universal. You cannot give yourself away completely. Hélène actually began to hope the poems were about her.

You work as an attorney, which I'm sure eats up a lot of time and can be psychologically draining. How do you balance your poetry with your day job?

I write every night. It's just a matter of habit. I wouldn't feel normal if I didn't do it.

Could you explain what inspired Spring Water (Turning Point), a novel in verse about the life of a serial killer?

When I was in law school, I read a number of cases in criminal law and criminal procedure, in which defendants being tried for murder raised the defense of insanity, stating that God, or the devil had told them to kill. But the case that stuck with me the most did not arise in the context of crimes, but in the context of wills and trusts. It was the infamous Tylenol case, to which we now owe the tamper-proof cap.

In this sad case, a newlywed couple was called on their honeymoon in Hawaii, and informed that the groom's brother had suddenly and unexpectedly died. The couple cut their honeymoon short, and returned for the funeral. After the ceremony, there was a reception held at the home of the deceased. Both the new husband and wife took the very same Tylenol, and died within an hour of one another. Since they both had wills leaving everything to the other, the issue was which one to enforce. The killer was never caught. That really stuck with me.

You have lived in England, Italy, and Santa Monica. I'm going to put you on the spot and ask which is your favorite place to live and why?

Santa Monica. I love it here. I was born here. But I'm also a citizen of Ireland. I lived England 2 years and couldn't wait to come home. But now I sort of miss it, and will make it a point to go back – for a visit. My mother's side of the family has a vineyard in Amorosi, near Naples. It's pretty great there too. But since you said "live," I'm sticking with Santa Monica, for now. Who knows, I might feel the need to move to Ireland, depending on who wins the election.

As a follow-up question, do you think travel helps with the poetic writing process?

I'm sure that anything outside the ordinary, everyday experience must help with the creative process. As beautiful as Santa Monica is, you can only write about the beach so many times before you bore yourself to television.

If you could share only one piece of advice with other poets, what would it be?

Read, read, read.

*****

Check out Turning Point Books at http://www.turningpointbooks.com.

Check out John's website at http://jmfitzgerald.com.

And finally, check out Cardona's website at http://www.helenecardona.com.

*****

Poetic Asides is loaded with great poet interviews. To view them all, go to: http://blog.writersdigest.com/poeticasides/CategoryView,category,Poet%20Interviews.aspx.

Anne Tardos was not looking for me; I was not looking for her; but we met on the miracle of social networking known as Facebook, because I like to add poet friends from time to time. After Anne accepted my request, I checked out her profile and her website. Then, I requested a copy of her most recent collection I Am You (Salt Publishing), and the rest is, well, this interview, I guess.

For a little background on Tardos, she is a poet and visual artist. In addition to I Am You, Tardos authored five other books, including Uxudo (O Books/Tuumba) and The Dik-dik's Solitude: New & Selected Works (Granary).

The thing that appeals to me most in I Am You is Tardos' balancing act between serious emotion and playfulness with language. Here are four parts of a 100-part poem by Tardos called "Letting Go" (from I Am You):

19

AND WHY IS everybody a monster?

Is it because it's monstrous not to be happy?

Even to be hungry and masticating and digesting strikes me as
         monstrous

The monster father's ghost, hidden inside my monstrous
         psyche

I demand to be loved
I make it a condition
This too is monstrous

"Pull down thy vanity
I say pull down."

                                   To find lightness

Then you take a deep breath. (You might as well do it right
          now.)

20.

I CAN'T LET go of my constant companion
the iPod
it tells me exactly what I want to hear
Whispering it into either ear

All it needs is some of my power

I have enough to spare
Too much for some
Hardly any
in reality

Those who fear my power would fear anything

    But enough of scary monsters hiding under the bed already

21.

DO NOT LET go of the swift instinct of self-preservation, the
        deepest of all the automatic instincts.

A certain blind pathetic forcefulness of life.

One meaning blotting out another.

Friendship exactly.

A certain quickness of impatience.

And now, in a world gone gray and baboon-like, you made
        everything baboon-horrible with your baboon lips and
        grimaces.

22.

LET GO OF the growing process and watch the withering

As all of this unfolds
I am losing love and gaining like

If you've been adored as a small child, you would probably
         understand

It is the child who is unfaithful
radical and daily transformations followed by eventual
         departure

A man who fulfills all the needs and forgives all the faults
lover, friend, teacher, son, and grandmother.

What luxurious protection love has offered
Love means "I'm not only yours, I am you. I shall live for you."

Our cat Roof
lived for us

She lived exactly as long as was required.

        If indeed it is an ending.

What are you currently up to?

You know, that’s exactly the question I ask myself almost every morning. What am I up to? As a matter of fact, I began a painting yesterday. A self portrait. I’m bound to return to it today and see what I’m up to, besides gazing at myself.

More importantly perhaps, I’m also trying to finish a new long poem in progress, entitled “E-rotica.” I hope the summer will give me a few quiet days in which to do this work. The other project is an extension of E-rotica, and has the poetic and idealistic worktitle “The Pure of Heart.”

And for my bread, hardly any butter, I’m still indexing The Nation, something I’ve been doing for years.

I Am You collects three poems dealing with the loss of your husband, Jackson Mac Low. How did you go about writing on a subject that had to have been very traumatic and close to home? Were there special challenges you found in this collection?

Actually, the book collects five new poems, practically everything I’ve written since Jackson’s death. And saying that the book deals with the death of my husband is a narrow view of the book as a whole. Sure, it deals with the loss, inevitably, but it deals with so much more. The notion of flexible subjectivities is one of the book’s primary concerns.

Some aspects of the book are inevitably elegiac, but that’s just a fraction, a background for the emotional push that occasioned the writing of the work. Inevitably, once your spouse dies, and as in Jackson’s case, dies after a long illness, your time suddenly frees up. The first thing I did was to edit a book of Jackson’s, Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works, that the University of California Press published earlier this year. They did a wonderful job. Soon after that, I Am You came out from Salt Publishing.

In the 100-part poem “Letting Go,” there is a line: “Love means ‘I’m not only yours, I am you. I shall live for you.’” Do you find that dealing with the loss of a loved one means you have to let go a part of yourself? Kind of like a part of yourself dies, too?

Indeed, I always felt that part of me died with Jackson, but at the same time, part of him has stayed alive with me, so this huge transformation could also be seen as a kind of tradeoff. Needless to say, I preferred our earlier state, but a death is also a valuable lesson in non-attachment and the ever shifting nature of the universe.

When I wrote “Love means I’m not only yours, I am you,” which also gave me the title of the book, I made the observation of the melting together of two individuals. Aside from the obvious implications of empathy and compassion in that phrase, the origin of it was a realization I had many years ago, when Jackson and I went to visit the Guggenheim museum, and decided to go off on our own, viewing the exhibit at different speeds. After a while I was ready to join him again, but couldn’t find him. I looked long and hard inside that large tube that Frank Lloyd Wright had built for the Guggenheims, and started panicking a bit, not seeing Jackson anywhere. When I finally did spot him across the gap and on a different level, I said to myself outloud “There I am!” I meant to say “There he is!” but this mistake made me think about having one’s place with or near another human being, and having one’s identity merge with that of the beloved.

In fact, what’s interesting about all this is that when Jackson died, my identity, the Anne Tardos seen through his eyes, also ceased to exist. The daily mirror he presented me with, his view of me, had gone. So in fact, we do become each other in a long-term relationship.

I’m struck by how a lot of your work incorporates images. Is there a particular reason behind doing this?

I’ve always worked with images. Just as I juxtapose disparate linguistic elements, I also include images as a challenge to a text, in the sense that the inclusion of an image on a page of text will inevitably alter the nature of the text. How this happens is what I play with by including various images, mostly of animals—my pet subjects. Another reason might be that my academic background is in the visual arts, film, video, painting and sculpture.

As a follow-up question, how do you go about choosing the images you incorporate into your poetry?

It varies. I rarely set out to look for an illustration of what I’ve written, rather I look at images all the time, make them or capture them, just as I read texts, think about them, take notes, grow from them. Similarly, an image that I’ve been looking at will find its way onto a page of text I’m working on. I might just try and see how the words and the image go together, and from there I continue the exploration until I establish some balance between the two elements. In I Am You, I’ve used fewer images than in my earlier works, as well as fewer multilingual elements. This was in no way premeditated, and may change. My approach to poetry is intuitive, within certain formal guidelines and boundaries that I set up for myself. You could call what I do direct writing or intuitive composition.

You have a handle on multiple languages. Do you feel this helps or hinders the poetic process?

I speak, read and write four languages. I grew up in different European countries and acquired, in that order, French, Hungarian, German, and finally English. The presence of these languages in my mind has been the foundation of my multilingual writing. The threshold to cross was always the letting go of, the dropping of any segregation between the languages, and allowing them to emerge within my text as they would naturally, unhindered by linguistic identification. This process led to many linguistic puns and abstractions. I can’t see my knowledge of other languages as anything but helpful, never a hindrance. 

What and who are you currently reading?

What am I currently not reading may be easier to answer. I find myself avoiding fiction, which is a new thing. I used to delight in good novels, but these days, I read more poetry and philosophy. For my poem-in-progress, “E-rotica,” I read Hindu erotology, medical texts, pornography, the classics and the various Anonymi. I have not dealt with images yet, and may very likely forego including images with this particular subject. But that’s not a final word, so we’ll see. When the right image comes along, I’ll know it.

If you could only pass on one piece of advice to other poets, what would it be?

Try to be clear in your intentions, in your statements. Step back a lot, like a painter does. Leave the room, think about the poem, or don’t think about it, and then come back to it. Read it outloud.

*****

Check out Anne's website at www.annetardos.com.

Also, you can find some of her readings and performances at http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Tardos.html.

To learn more about the collection I Am You (including ordering information and a head shot of Anne), check out the Salt Publishing website.

Some of the poets I've interviewed for this blog were sought out by me; some have been recommended by other poets; and some have come to me on their own. In the case of Martha Silano, author of Blue Positive (Steel Toe Books, 2006), it was kind of a combination of these events.

In my interview with Julianna Baggott, Martha Silano was mentioned as a new poet she took a shining to. I started to check out Martha's work, but then I got sidetracked on some other projects. Next thing I know, Martha is introducing herself and mentioning that Julianna sent her in the direction of my blog--and would I be interested in interviewing her? Anyway, one thing led to another, and wow! Silano is a great new (to me, at least) poet.

There are many excellent poems in Silano's Blue Positive collection, but the one that really grabs me is the following:

Harborview

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me
--Sylvia Plath

By the roots of my hair, by the reinforced elastic
of my floral Bravado bra, by the fraying strands

of my blue-checked briefs, some god's gotten hold of me,
some god's squeezed hard the spit-up rag of my soul, rung me

like the little girl who rang our doorbell on Halloween, took
our M&Ms is your baby okay? Why did they take him away?

Some god's got me thinking my milk's poison, unfit
for a hungry child, some god's got me pacing,

set me flying like the black felt bats dangling
in the hall, some god so that now I can't trust my best friend's

healing hands, the Phad Thai she's spooning beside the rice (ditto
to the meds the doctors say will help me sleep) Poison poison!

as if the god who's got hold of me doesn't want me
well, doesn't want my rapid-fire brain to slow,

wants this ride for as long as it lasts, wants to take it
to its over-Niagara-in-a-barrel end, which is where

this god is taking me, one rung at a time, one ambulance,
one EMT strapping me in, throwing me off this earth,

cuz I've not only killed my son but a heap of others too.
Some god's got me by my shiny golden locks, by my milk-

leaking breasts, got me in this hospital, wisps like white scarves
circling my head, wisps the voices of men back to bed you whore!

Some god till I'm believing I've been shot, guts dribbling out,
till I'm sure I've ridden all over town in a spaceship, sure

I'm dead, a ghost, a smoldering corpse, though not before I'm holding up
a shaking wall, urging the others to help me (a plane about to land

on our heads), though soon enough thrown down by two night nurses,
strapped to a bed, though for weeks the flowers my in-laws sent

charred at the tips (having been to hell and back), clang of pots,
hissing shower, the two blue pills my roommate left in the sink,

all signals of doom, though some god got hold of me,
shook and shook me long and hard, she also brought me back.

And with that, let's get into the interview.

What are you currently up to?

I'm working on a book of poems--it's almost finished, I hope--tentatively titled The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception. It's about this mother who gets knocked up, considers fleeing, fights with her husband, almost gets a divorce, has the baby, gets seriously depressed, and continuously (alternately) screams at and revels in/adores her two children. Betcha can't wait to read it!

I've also recently begun a series of poems (I would like it to be a chapbook) about body parts. And I'm working on another full-length collection about space aliens, extra-terrestrials, Galileo, ants, space junk, the universe, and related subjects--but this one probably won't really get going till my youngest starts kindergarten, when I plan to apply to every writer's colony in the country.

I recently read in an interview that you had to suffer through postpartum psychosis to write your collection Blue Positive. Could you elaborate on that experience? For instance, I'm interested in how it affected your daily life and whether you were still able to write, etc., as you went through postpartum. Also, I'm wondering how it was initially detected.

Oh gosh, that's a big question. Thanks for being bold enough to ask it. I've encapsulated what happened during those first six months of my son's life in two essays; one appears in the April ’08 issue of Redbook, the other in Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness and the Creative Process, just out from Hopkins U. Press.

Let's just say my daily life was quite different. I don't remember much about the first week at all; I was actively psychotic--hallucinations, delusions, the whole kit and kaboodle. I mean, I thought I was in cahoots with the Unibomber. When the drugs put a stop to the active psychosis, I was left with paranoia, extreme insecurity, acute anxiety, agoraphobia, and severe depression. "Writing" consisted of scribbling down a few notes about the guy down the hallway who was out to get me. When I got home from the hospital I was still in pretty bad shape--afraid to venture down to the basement, take my son on a walk. I was also prone to gut-wrenching panic attacks. Worst of all, I'd forgotten how to laugh. I remember going to see the movie Best in Show, and not being able to figure out what was so funny (I saw it a year later and laughed my ass off).

As far as the detection issue, that was pretty much a comedy of errors. After my first panic attack (ahem, slip into psychosis), I was diagnosed with sleep deprivation and given a prescription for tranquilizers, which I never took because, of course, the doctors were trying to poison me. The next time I got hauled into Behavioral Health they finally began calling what I had postpartum depression (semi-true) and put me on antidepressants, the worst thing you can give to someone who's manic. Three cheers for modern medicine! The Paxil actually sped up the process from mania into full-blown psychosis, landing me in the ER that much faster.  

More doctors and nurses are beginning to understand there's a connection between the postpartum period and bipolar disorder, but in the year 2000, at Harborview Medical Center, in the very progressive city of Seattle, I was treated like a "crazy person," not a new mom suffering from PPP. For instance, I got a wicked urinary tract infection because my hoo-ha was still bleeding and they didn't remind me to take my requisite daily sitz baths.

The collection Blue Positive seems to me to be a collection celebrating life--it covers topics such as sex, pregnancy, motherhood, and food. How did you go about assembling the poems that would go into this collection?

I hadn't thought of Blue Positive as a particularly celebratory book, but—psychosis be damned!—it's quite a mirthful romp, isn't it?

The oldest poem is "Salvaging Must Lead to Salvation"--an I-want-to-get-married piece I began in 1998. For months I was writing these pathetic (very ordinary) little square-shaped poems that were going nowhere, and then it was like the levee broke and this voice came out--not quite "me," more this potty-mouthed gal who both thoroughly adores and completely despises this man she's going to end up marrying. I knew this poem didn't fit with the manuscript I was sending out at the time (What the Truth Tastes Like), so I guess it's when I knew I had another book in me—always a relief.

Then I got hitched, knocked up, and wrote all the preggy poems ("Getting Kicked by a Fetus," "What they Don't Tell You About the Ninth Month," etc.). Then I thought the book was done (2000), and sent it out to a dozen or more places the week before I went into labor with my son. What a joke! When I "came to" after my 6-month trip through crazy-land, I realized, duh, I had actually only written a 1/4 of a book--okay, 1/2 at best. So I kept writing, and of course all the poems were now about being a mother--"While He Naps," "Explaining Current Events to a One-Year Old," "His Favorite Color is Green," etc. Urged by a friend, I sent a revised version off to the National Poetry Series; it was chosen as a finalist.

Once I knew I'd even slightly enticed a neutral reader (i.e., not my mom or sister), I kept adding, cutting, and shaping. It took two more years to (1) write the title poem; (2) figure out that I needed to begin the book with my own childhood, then move chronologically through adolescence, courtship, marriage, pregnancy, and the birth of our son; and (3) be awarded an 8-month writing residency in the wilds of southern Oregon’s Rogue River canyon, so I could get knocked up again and write the thirteen poems that close the book. And that's how it finally got finished.

Motherhood factors into a lot of your poems. How do you work in time to write around being a mother and teaching? Do you have a writing routine--or just write when you can?

Oh, goodness, I envy those people who can write whenever they want. But actually I was always poor with time management. I like rearranging junk drawers, pouring over old photos, gabbing, etc. So it's actually turned out that I write more now than ever. But okay, here's a little secret: self-imposed writing retreats. I've done three in the last year. The first two were paid for by a grant (thank you, Washington State Artist Trust), but the most recent one cost me less than $100--two nights in a friend of a friend's beachfront studio. It didn't have a stove or a bed (I slept on the floor), but hell if I cared.

Otherwise, I write when I can: on the kitchen floor while my 3 year old plays with her dinosaurs, at the dentist's office, in traffic (yes, in a moving car), at the beach, on airplanes and on fishing docks, during snack time, while they're sleeping; in between all the rest. 

How do you decide where to submit? Do you have a particular process for deciding where to submit and when your poems are ready to go out?

1. Under most circumstances I don't send to a place unless I’ve read a back issue/perused their online offerings or am a subscriber.
2. I've gotta mostly completely love the poems, the fiction, the art work, the layout, the whole shebang, or no thanks.
3. I avoid submitting to mags where I don't have a prayer (I'm not talking long shots, I'm talking completely different aesthetic).
4. When a poem is getting close to feeling finished, I email it to a poet/editor friend or two, just to make sure I'm not about to make a total fool of myself. If I skip this step, and sometimes I do, it feels risky, sorta cocky--I mean, how the hell do I know? I've sent things out too early--who hasn't?--but mostly I try to sit on my hands as long as I can, even if it feels like a poem is finished. I can't always wait a year, but usually a month or two at the very minimum allows me to find all the stupid little mistakes, OR to realize the poem is actually a piece of sh*t. 

I've enjoyed reading your Blue Positive blog where you deal in equal parts personal and poetic. What are your thoughts on blogging in relation to your writing? Would you recommend blogging to other poets?

I can't say I recommend blogging, though it IS a blast. It might be keeping me away from the real writing, but so far it hasn't interfered much. I like writing about magazines and writers I'm stoked about, asking questions, sharing personal stuff that's not quite poem-worthy, keeping my prose muscles toned. I really haven't thought about whether it's beneficial to my writing in any way; it's just stuff I would have told a friend or written in my journal, so why not put it out there? It reminds me a little of being a DJ at a tiny college radio station in Iowa. I would say these outlandish things, make little jokes, purposely mess up the PSAs--probably only a few cows were listening, but that was half the fun of it.

Could you name a couple poets you're currently enjoying? And why you're enjoying them?

The hard part is keeping it down to a couple. Here’s five:

1. Heidi Lynn Staples—wacky, wild, mind-blowing leaps;
2. Matthea Harvey—startling line breaks and imagery, lots of surprises;
3. Jenny Browne—I love how her poems are both grounded and surreal;
4. Sandra Beasley—oh man, has she ever changed how I see the world, but especially cherry tomatoes;
5. Lee Upton—her music is sump.tu.ous. Here’s a gal who knows how to edit down to the bone.

As mentioned earlier, you teach English at two community colleges. Do you feel teaching has helped or hindered your writing?

My students bring satchels and satchels of enthusiasm, excitement, and adrenaline into my life--our conversations wind me up and set me spinning. I love holding back on what I think and instead asking more questions. I love how they talk to each other, teach each other, teach me. Without them, would I still be writing?  I grow old; they stay young. I grow set in my ways; they kick me in the pants. It's an incredible honor to teach, a calling, really. If I didn't love it, if it didn't feed my creativity, I wouldn't do it. So, the short answer: helped.

If you could impart only one piece of advice to other poets, what would it be?

1. Ignore all oracles.
2. Don’t be too cocky or too humble.
3. Figure out the poems you were given to write, and get to it. 
4. When an established writer gives you the critique you begged for, listen carefully and do your best to keep mum.

*****

To find out more about Martha Silano, check out her website at http://www.marthasilano.com/.

The site includes poems from her collections Blue Positive and What the Truth Tastes Like (Nightshade Press, 1999), as well as ordering information.

*****

If you're a poet or publisher interested in setting up an interview (or just a poetry lover, who wants to make a recommendation), then check out my Call for Poets. It worked for Martha Silano, and it could work for you.

Totally unrelated, but my oldest son is today 1 year older: That's right, he's 7 years old today. Go Benjamin!

*****

Okay, I've known John Korn for a few years now through online social networks--we first met on MySpace. I've always enjoyed his words and his sincerity as a person. So when he mentioned he was coming out with his first collection Television Farm (A Menendez Publication), I wanted to use it as an excuse to pick his brain about poetry--from the perspective of an up and comer.

Here's a John Korn poem I was lucky enough to publish in my (now defunct) online journal Faulty Mindbomb: http://faultymindbomb.blogspot.com/2007/01/fmb0002.html 

What are you currently up to?

I have an interesting job. It is required of me to communicate with people who suffer from mental illnesses and encourage them to accomplish goals. I’m not saying I’m good at my job but I think a lot of the energy I once put into poetry is now being used here. As far as writing goes I am very interested in writing stories eventually. I’m also interested in digital filmmaking on a very low (maybe appropriately no) budget level. I have an idea for a series of poems taking place in a small city which I‘d like to be a small book.

How did this collection come about?

There are many moments which have lead to having this book being published. In short, when I began writing and posting my poems a woman named Didi Menendez began contacting me. She published me in her online magazine MiPOesias. After some time she began to do print issues as well as books. She eventually asked me to put a book together. She was very patient in that she let me take my time putting it in order. Didi is very active and creative with her magazine. There are also many interesting pod casts on her site.  Didi is also a great poet and recently has been churning out paintings like a machine.

Who (or what) do you consider to be the biggest influence on your writing?

There are a number of things and people that influence/influenced me. I will just mention a few poets. Ron Androla was a big influence. I was writing mostly stories before, or trying to. I never really cared much for poetry. I had liked Bukowski as a teen and Edgar Allen Poe before that, but I never was captivated by poetry enough to want to write it. I had read others, but even still I didn’t really care or never found anything that really hooked me. Not that I didn’t enjoy poetry or appreciate it. I just didn’t crave it or want to write it. Ron had such a unique voice that was very new to me and seemed (and is) timeless. The range of emotion, thoughts, and imagination that was being expressed really moved me. He would paint a slice of ordinary life with a simplicity that I found beautiful, and then paint a very surreal manic landscape that was severe and dark.  I found his voice to be intelligent, compassionate, and sometimes murderous. I loved it. Also his language was unlike anything I had read. It was addictive. I couldn’t read just one poem, I would read a series of his. There seemed to be a lot of experimentation in his poems, or that he had gone through much experimentation to get to the voice he had. I began to imitate that voice, I think. Eventually maybe I tried to come up with my own. Around the same time I began listening to early Bob Dylan. It was very exciting to have those two voices echoing down the hallways of my mind.

Also, I began reading a young lady’s blog.  She wrote many poems there. She’s one of the people I dedicated the book to. Like many poets, much of her words seemed to be scathing reviews of people and their behavior. I guess you can call them “put down” poems which I see a lot of. Though there was something different about hers. She seemed to be compassionate about her subjects. She wasn’t ridiculing people seemingly to make herself seem like the “wise” poet, or to write them off to stroke her own ego. Which is very tempting to do in poetry. It was more like she was trying to reach the people she was talking to in the poem to have them come to their senses. She often seemed to be asking her subjects to offer her the same in return. She was very graphic and creative with imagery with a dark tone which I love. I began to write her and eventually talk to her on the phone. I was not surprised when she told me that many of her poems were spawned from things she wanted to say to various people that were her friends. She also didn’t seem to be concerned about being published. What drove her to write seemed to be the need to express something she could not bring herself to do in a social situation.  She didn’t sound like any of the other poets I was skimming through with the same types of blogs. She didn’t seem too concerned about impressing  any group although she accepted praise and asked for criticism. There’s a kind of faith there. Faith in what she was doing.

As with Ron, she had an interesting language. Two very different poets but the approach and attitude seemed similar. She was experimenting. Technically she would mold her poems with different styles that I found impressive considering that when I was the same age I could not do what she was doing.  With both poets mentioned there was not just style but strong content.  I guess many poets probably approach their work in this way. It can simply be that some poets moved me where others did not. These two did. Albert Huffstickler and Stephen Dobyns are two others that really grabbed me. For basically the same reasons. Currently I’ve finally read some Walt Whitman and got the same spark. These are the kind of writers that would motivate and influence me to write to the point where I was ecstatic about it.

Do you spend a lot of time on revision?

Oh yes. Although I tend to shape the poems in appearance to not have a specific shape. If I had a typewriter or wrote my poems out longhand with a pen, it would really show how much I rearrange, cut out, and put in. There would be piles of crinkled paper. I tend to write long poems, but if I didn’t revise they would be three times as long.  I wrote mostly on a computer which makes it easier to do this, because often I would change the poem before I brought it to a close.  Going back to it later, sometimes months or a year, I will change things, even if only a word or two. When I had a blog, I often put up things rather quickly. It did not bother me so much if there were typos. With the book I went back and cleaned up. It was tedious at times.

Much of your poetry seems to describe people and how they interact. Do you intentionally try to do this?

Well, there are certainly intentional things I try to do in a poem. Since communication and interaction in various forms is something that fascinates me and I often want to explore this artistically, then yes, I intentionally do this. Though I can’t recall ever sitting down and telling myself, “Okay now I’m going to write a poem conveying how people interact.” It is something that I just naturally gravitate to.

I guess the idea of a farm that grows televisions can be all about interaction. I day dreamed that image while listening to a piece of music that was very soothing. I imagined a field at dusk. Then I began to imagine spots of colored light pushing up out of the ground. Eventually it became apparent that the spots of light were televisions growing and breaking though the dirt like pumpkins or watermelons. Immediately after this I imagined a young man and woman walking through these rows of TVs and touching them. When they touched the TVs the screens would flicker images as a reaction.

You asked if I drew the cover and I did not. My friend Jeremy Baum did. He read my poem and asked if he could draw a picture for it. I was excited to see his interpretation of it because he can effectively create surreal landscapes. I liked his vision and asked if I could use it for the cover. Unfortunately, though, I forgot to put his name in the book.  Sorry Jeremy. 

As a follow up question, is your poetry more influenced by fiction or reality? Or a blending of the two?

Both. There are poems in the book which are completely nonfiction.

"The Bridges in West Virginia Look Like Spider Webs" for example is a poem that is completely true about a drive I took through that state with some friends. In this case my imagination was very active that night, so my reality of that moment was influenced by fiction and fantasy. Taking a nap during that drive and having a vividly strange dream added to the experience. In other poems, the actual event was not so fantastic until I sat down to write it. In those cases the telling of it was influenced by fiction.

I will often fit a few actual experiences into a poem though they happened at different times. Other poems are just made up though always seem influenced by an actual experience. To me it really doesn’t seem to matter. It seems to me that our reality is very influenced  by make-believe, and make-believe is constantly trying to mimic reality. The two seem constantly entwined and both are revealing of the other.

Do you have any specific things you try to avoid in your own writing?

I have not been writing as intensely as I was with the poems in this book. I can recall sitting down and certainly being conscious of avoiding something, though not conscious enough to know specifically what I was trying to avoid. Looking back I think one thing I tried not to do was to have a voice that sounded like a guy straining to sound like a profound poet. When I read poetry I consider to be not interesting or moving, it always seems that the poet is trying to sound too much like a poet. I may be failing in my explanation of this, but hopefully you get the idea.  I don’t think I’ve always succeeded in this, but I found it very important to avoid it as best I could.

Also, when I write I often have an imaginary audience in my head that I am writing to. I tried to avoid having my audience be made up of poets. Like I mentioned poetry was rarely an interest of mine. So, in turn, it was rarely my interest to want to write poems aimed towards poets. To me, when this is done, it becomes like a language shared only between poets. I’m not so interested in that. I wanted to be more accessible to others. That does not mean dumbing down your poetry by any means. To try and interact with different people with different perceptions and convey an image or thought to them that they could relate to and hopefully provoke thought or emotion. I liked the idea of attracting even one reader that may not normally be so interested in poetry. It was something that I kept in mind to make the experience of writing poetry a mostly happy and interesting one. Even if I failed it doesn’t matter because it was what motivated me to experiment and keep up the practice at that time. Though, obviously, when the poem is complete the first person you want to take it to is a poet or someone who is familiar with poetry so you can get some feedback.

If you were to impart one piece of wisdom to another poet, what would it be?

 I would most likely send them in the direction of another poet. The obvious “wisdom” is to read and write. Whatever you are looking to do in writing you cannot start until you begin this.

*****

Click here to check out John Korn's Television Farm.

*****

Check out a painting of John Korn here.

A-ha! Here’s an interview with a poet who participated in the April PAD Challenge and wrote his first ever sestina as a result. As Joseph Mills, author of Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers (Press 53, 2008), comments, “It was smart of you (meaning me, of course) to put that towards the end since by then we were invested in finishing.”

In recent years, Mills has published two collections of poetry through Press 53; the other collection is Somewhere During the Spin Cycle (2006). With his wife, Mills has also put together two editions of A Guide to North Carolina’s Wineries (John F. Blair, 2007). It seems only natural that Mills’ knowledge of wine-making and poetry would create its own poetic blend.

Here’s a favorite poem of mine from Angels, Thieves, and Winemakers and originally published in North Carolina Literary Review:

“Aging”

To speak of a wine’s future

is to speak of our own desires,

how we hope as we age

that we’ll become more

harmonious, less acidic,

that our tannins will mellow.

We recognize right now

we have a burst of flavor,

an energy, a liveliness,

but also a harshness

which later may soften

until we’re more balanced,

more approachable,

easier to appreciate.

Hold onto us;

we believe

we’ll get better.

What are you currently up to?

At the moment, I’m working on a novel set in “Carolina Wine Country” and a young adult novel that deals with the nature of time.  I’m also drafting a sequence of poems about my mother’s dementia and other work for my third poetry collection tentatively entitled “Love and Other Collisions.”

So, what led to an entire collection of poems about wine?

In the last half dozen years, my wife and I researched and wrote two editions of A Guide to North Carolina’s Wineries.  As we traveled the state, talking to winemakers and winery owners, I found myself with material that wasn’t appropriate for the guidebook, but that I was interested in exploring and using.  I wrote a few poems dealing with wine, and they appeared in my first collection of poetry, Somewhere During the Spin Cycle.  The wine poems kept coming, and once I had more than a dozen I realized that there would be enough for a collection, and that this would give the volume a nice coherence.  Eventually I wrote well over a hundred and then culled the best.

Do you think of yourself as writing for poets who enjoy wine or for wine lovers who enjoy poetry?

For the guidebook, I had a clear audience in mind--people interested in touring or at least learning about the state’s wineries.  It’s nonfiction with a straight-forward purpose.  For poetry, however, I never think of an actual audience.  I write for myself.  I work on a poem, and I try to shape it as best as I can.  Sometimes I’m not satisfied with it, and I shelve it.  Sometimes I’m satisfied enough to consider sending it out for publication which is a way of both inspiring me to work on it more and, once it’s sent, having it out of my sight for a while.  Even with publication in mind, however, I don’t imagine an audience, someone actually reading it.  I learned a long time ago that when you publish poetry, you shouldn’t expect any kind of response.  If you do, you might be waiting a long time.

I hope the book appeals to more people than a Venn diagram middle of poetry lovers and wine lovers.  In fact, maybe it will get people more involved in both. My brother, who is a teetotaler, has told me that the poems make him want to drink wine, and my wife likes to say that it’s “poetry for people who think they don’t like poetry.”

In your collection, you use specialized terms, such as "thief" and "angel's share." Do you feel jargon helps the writing process?

I love the specialized language of a field when it is in some way metaphorical.  For example, the “angel’s share” refers to the evaporation in the barrels.  I find this thought-provoking as opposed to technical language like “thirty inch cartridge filter housing.”  I’m interested in the language that’s evocative rather than intimidating or limiting.

Jargon can sound pompous and it can obscure, but the specialized vocabulary of almost any field can be fun.  On a film set, when you “cheat” something, you’ve set up an unnatural relationship, moving things too close together, so that it will come out on the film looking right.  I find the term fascinating.  In music, there’s a chord called “the devil’s interval” which is a terrific phrase.

Religion seems twisted into the wine. Do you find that writing about both religion and wine is a natural?

Because of the nature of grape-growing--the seasonal cycle of pruning and rebirth in the vineyard--and the way wine involves a transformation of grapes, even people who aren’t religious tend to use spiritual language to talk about it.  Since what I love about wine are the stories, and historically wine has been an element in so many religions, it’s probably inevitable that I would write about the relationship at least a little.

Who are your favorite poets?

I love the work of John Ciardi, James Wright, and Philip Levine.  Billy Collins consistently delights.  There are poems by W.H. Auden, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell and Gary Snyder that I have returned to dozens of times over the years.  I’m a fan of “The Writer’s Almanac” because I like reading just a poem at a time, integrating it as part of the day, and having its selection be a surprise.  (It’s why I like the shuffle feature of my iPod.)

What are your favorite wines?

The ones I drink with my wife and with family and friends.  The joke in our household is that we only “cellar” wines that we don’t like.  If we like it, we drink it.  The second part of the joke is that there are only two bottles in the cellar.

One piece of advice for other poets: What is it?

Consider it a life’s work.  After twenty years, I’m finally writing poems that I think reward attention.  I hope in the next twenty years, I’ll learn to write poems that hold up.  And in the twenty years after that…

You write a little bit at a time, consistently, and it adds up, and the work improves.  I’ve often had the experience of discovering a way to finally revise a poem that for years hasn’t been quite right or how to use a few lines or ideas that I have squirreled away long ago.

Finally, you're stranded on a deserted island and can only have 3 things with you: What are they and why?

My wife.  She’s the only person I know that whenever we leave each other, I immediately want to call her up and see when we can meet.  Plus it would finally be a chance for us to have an island vacation together.  I would take our two kids, but they would probably get bored, so how about my iPod with a solar charger.  It not only has thousands of songs, but also audio books and lectures on subjects that interest me, such as Mark Twain and the Civil War.  I also would want a writing utensil that would work until we were rescued and something to write on.  Wait, that’s two, isn’t it.  Can we consider “a writing package” one item?  How about an incredibly durable solar powered laptop?  But, then I wouldn’t need the iPod, so what about a guitar with indestructible strings?  That’s it:  wife, laptop, guitar.

*****

For more on Joseph Mills, check out his Web site at http://www.josephrobertmills.com/. 

Here are some of his poems available online from New Works Review:

* "The Thief"

* "Release"

*****

If you're a poet or publisher interested in an interview on the Poetic Asides blog, read more here.

Like so many good poets, Kevin Pilkington also teaches writing--in his case, he's a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and teaches a workshop in the graduate department at Manhattanville College. But he doesn't consider teaching a means to an end. "I feel fortunate that I have always enjoyed teaching," says Pilkington. "It's something I do and not just something else I do besides write. I've been teaching writing workshops for most of my adult life and haven't lost my enthusiasm for being in a classroom."

After interviewing him, it's easy to see Pilkington's not just trying to say the right things. His writing informs his teaching, and his teaching informs his writing. And to great effect--he's the author of five collections, including Spare Change, the La Jolla Poets Press National Book Award winner, and Ready to Eat the Sky (River City Publishing), a finalist for an Independent Publishers Book Award. A new chapbook, St. Andrew's Head, was published by Camber Press. Over the years, he's been nominated for four Pushcarts and has appeared in Verse Daily. His poems and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Boston Review, Yankee, Hayden's Ferry, etc.

As you might expect from a successful poet and teacher, Pilkington has a lot of great information to share in the following interview.

You mentioned in a previous interview that teaching influences your writing. Can you elaborate on this some?

Over the years, I have sharpened my critical eye and ear so I can guide young poets through their poems and help them navigate towards what is working and away from what is not. So teaching heightened my critical reading skills, helping me install what Hemingway called “a built-in shit detector” for editing my own poetry.

Also, any writing teacher will tell you the importance of reading if you want your poetry to prosper. Reading and writing go together like religion and church: One needs the other to survive. So reading the great poets from the past as well as more contemporary established poets is a major aspect of my workshops. I’ve always believed the best teachers are on the bookshelves. That is how I learned to write my own poetry since I never took a writing class on the undergraduate or graduate levels or had a mentor.

If you teach great literature and are surrounded by great models, it seeps into your own writing as if by osmosis. By its very nature, great literature makes you want to go home to your desk and write. A few years back, thinking I was suffering from writer’s block, I became reacquainted with Coleridge's “Dejection: An Ode” where one of the themes is not being able to write. It’s brilliant and shot holes in my writer’s block theory; I haven’t suffered from it since.

There have also been images and lines in many poems by talented students that have, to use Richard Hugo’s term, “triggered” ideas that pushed me to begin new poems. So I am quite fortunate to be working in such a creative, fertile environment. On the practical side, there is no heavy lifting.

Because of the academic setting, do you feel you get a good opportunity to network with other poets?

I know this is a personal response to the word “network” but it has always possessed a negative connotation when it applies to writers and especially poets. There are poets who network, meaning that they attend every literary social event and make sure to get to know the individual who may be an asset in furthering that particular poet’s career. And the stakes are high for them since they are in dire need of another grant, job, or book publication. In Manhattan, these types of events take place almost on a weekly basis. There seems to be an air of artificiality and desperation at such functions. I have never understood what any of that has to do with the real work at hand which is working laboriously over one’s poems. I’d like to believe if the work is good, the rewards (notice I didn’t say awards) will follow.

However, if network conotates friendships, then it applies. At Sarah Lawrence College, where I have taught since 1991, I have met some wonderful people and formed lasting friendships. Some are poets and some are not. I have formed strong bonds with many of the poets and writers here on the regular faculty. These friendships have formed organically like most friendships and as a rule, I have a great deal of respect for their work.

For a small college, we have a large undergraduate writing program and a well-respected graduate program. During any given week, readings are taking place on campus along with an annual poetry festival. So there are many poets coming to read or teaching workshops. It is wonderful to be a part of such a bustling, creative community.

During the past few years, I have taught a workshop in the Master’s of Writing program at Manhattanville College. Aside from teaching, I’ve brought poets and writers to participate in their reading series. Some I know personally or just respect their work. It, too, is a wonderful creative environment. Obviously, I would much rather be a part of these programs that love and work with language rather than work on the roofs like my father did.

Because of these affiliations and friendships, some readings and conference work have come my way over the years. I’d like to think that anything I’ve achieved or have yet to achieve is through my poetry and teaching reputation and not by trying to make friends with some literary honchos or by hanging out near the cheese dip at the last book party.