I've been lucky enough to interview several talented poets on the blog. And to make it easier for you to read them all, I've updated my poet interview TOC. There are many more interviews on the way.

* Bill Abbott
* Nin Andrews
* Julianna Baggott
* Sandra Beasley
* Shaindel Beers
* Jericho Brown
* Helene Cardona
* Sage Cohen
* J.P. Dancing Bear
* Sara Diane Doyle
* Denise Duhamel
* Katy Evans-Bush
* Patricia Fargnoli
* John M. Fitzgerald
* Cherryl Floyd-Miller
* Suzanne Frischkorn
* Jeannine Hall Gailey
* Frank Giampietro
* Tom C. Hunley
* Sheema Kalbasi
* John Korn
* Dorianne Laux
* Diane Lockward
* Tom Lombardo
* Denise Low
* Justin Marks
* Joseph Mills
* Valerie Nieman
* Aimee Nezhukumatathil
* Kevin Pilkington
* Susan Rich
* Martha Silano
* Laurel Snyder
* Anne Tardos
* Jillian Weise

Tuesday, June 09, 2009 5:59:14 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [6] 

Some of you dedicated Poetic Asides readers may recognize Shaindel's name as a person who's commented on the blog and even shared advice in previous Poets Helping Poets posts. She's a Facebook pal and an internationally published poet.

Shaindel is currently an instructor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon, in Eastern Oregon's high desert and serves as Poetry Editor of Contrary (www.contrarymagazine.com). She previously hosted the talk radio poetry show Translated By, which can be found at www.blogtalkradio.com/onword.

She recently released her first full length collection, A Brief History in Time, through Salt Publishing. Here is one of the poems I enjoyed the most:

A Man Walks Into a Bar

He was tall, well-built, blue-eyed,
a guy most girls would want to take to bed.
Then he reached for the beer with his left hand,
revealing the stump of his right.

We could tell the second he knew that we knew.
We'd smile, but the smile wouldn't travel
all the way to our eyes. He'd turn back to the bar,
fold his arm closer so that we could
no longer see

as we rushed off to sling beers for guys
not as good-looking but more whole,
the ones who leered lecherously,
on "Short-Shorts Night"
and left ten dollar tips for two dollar beers

always expecting more, always bitter when we didn't deliver.
The quiet one, we wounded week after week, a guy
any of us would have considered "out of our league,"
"a long shot," if he had been unbroken,

the sad, blond man we were afraid to love.

*****

What are you up to?

Right now, I am grading tons of papers because it is the final week of classes where I teach. Next week is finals week, then a week break, then I teach summer classes. I've managed to get my summer classes scheduled to just Mondays and Tuesdays for six weeks, so I hope to write and read like crazy during the summer. I have a two-book deal with Salt, so I'm going to keep working on the poems for my second book with them, and I need maybe another three to four short stories to round out a short story collection, so I hope to make that happen. My other fantasy is to write a poem a day, starting with where I fell off the wagon during National Poetry Month and then start on prompts from the previous years.

I noticed a few sestinas and a ghazal in your collection, A Brief History of Time. Do you have a favorite poetic form?

I really like sestinas. There's something comforting and scary at the same time about setting up a Word document or a page in a notebook with those six end words all down the page. The rush of all of the possibilities. I want to get better at villanelles, though. Even though there is a villanelle in my collection, I don't think it's as good as the sestinas. I still need practice. And I want to work on other forms, too. So, yes, I do have a favorite, but I need to work on all of it. 

You have a confessional voice in your poems. Where do you draw the line between reality and fiction?

I think John Ciardi said it best when he said, "Poetry lies its way to the truth." Most of A Brief History of Time is autobiographical, but sometimes details are changed for the sake of sound or rhythm or meter or to make something a little more dramatic. For instance, in the title poem, I say that my mother was in jail for two counts of attempted murder, but it was attempted manslaughter. I don't know if anyone's going to pick bones about that. 

You're the poetry editor of Contrary. As an editor, what are common mistakes you see writers making in their submissions?

The biggest mistake is people sending in things that just aren't ready. It's like the second they finished writing the first draft, they sent it. Sit with the poem for a while, think about it. Go through and make sure each word is the right word, that each word is necessary.

The second thing that happens is that people leave words out or have typos. And sometimes this happens in the most brilliant works of the most brilliant poets, and it's really painful then, because I ask my co-editor, Jeff McMahon, "Can we ask her if she meant, x, y, z?" and then we're deliberating with a poet, when our instinct should be just to put it in the "no" pile. I really think we are surprisingly nice and patient for editors who get thousands of submissions for each issue. Editors shouldn't have to do that; if you're sending it out, it should be flawless, the best work you can produce. There are thousands and thousands of other writers you're competing against out there.

You host a talk radio show, Translated By. What's the most fulfilling aspect of the show?

Sadly, I don't do the radio show any more. I have a teaching load of five courses a quarter, three quarters a year, and then I teach two six-week summer courses for extra money--so seventeen college courses a year. (And I have two part-time jobs on top of that, so I'm usually working seven days a week.) It was really hard to read a book a week to be properly prepared for the show and be emailing writers and publishers constantly to keep the show booked.

The most fulfilling aspect of the show was learning more about writers all over the world. Despite the outcry that Horace Engdahl caused when he called American literature "too insular," there's a lot to what he said. I loved having to read a book (in translation) by a non-English language writer once a week. I learned so much about writers from other cultures and what is going on or has gone on around the world. It was like a global perspectives or world history course every week. 

How do you manage your own submissions process?

It's a lot different than it used to be, and I'm trying to figure it all out. I used to have tons of unpublished works, and I would send out everywhere, and then collect all of my rejection slips and a few acceptances. I still use Allison Joseph's Creative Writers Opportunities list (CRWROPPS) and Duotrope's newsletters. Now, I'm in the strange position of nearly everything I've written having been published, and I really need to get to work at producing more writing. Also, I get contacted a lot by editors and publishers asking if I have work for an upcoming issue or sending me invitations for a themed issue or anthology. This, of course, is a double-edged sword. It's really nice to get first consideration, but it really hurts when you get rejected. There's nothing like getting asked to the prom by the starting quarterback and then being stood up.

Who are you currently reading?

If it weren't a FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) violation, I would type the name of the student on the top of my stack right now. I was "sort of" reading Ellen Gilchrist's Nora Jane: A Life in Stories. My husband and I have a tradition of going to Artifacts, a used book store in Hood River, Oregon, when we go camping and fishing at Deschutes River State Park, and buying books to read in the tent each night. So, I read non-student work then. I really like Ellen Gilchrist and secretly wish I was Nora Jane. I also have a book review that is overdue (please forgive me, Jeff) of C. E. Chaffin's Unexpected Light. I've really admired Chaffin's work in the past, and I can't wait to get into the book after all of this grading is behind me.

Then, I have a giant stack of friends' (a mixture of online and in-person) books to read--Kyle Minor, Christopher Coake, Idra Novey, Kim Barnes, Patricia Smith. Just loads and loads of summer reading to catch up on.

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

Read and read and read. Read writers you admire; dip into bad writers occasionally to reassure yourself that you're not one. Read poetry, read fiction, read nonfiction about things you'd like to write poetry about. Just read.

*****

* You can try and win a copy of Shaindel's book from Goodreads.com at http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6135468.A_Brief_History_of_Time. Winners will be chosen June 29.

* She also invites poets to hunt her down and friend her on Facebook.

* And she has an author site at Red Room as well: www.redroom.com/author/shaindel-rebekah-beers.

* Plus, more info on her book is available at Salt Publishing's website www.saltpublishing.com.

*****

If you're a poet or poetry publisher and want hooked up with a Poetic Asides interview, then click here to see how you might be able to make that happen.

Monday, June 08, 2009 12:24:53 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [2] 

Looking back, I often feel like my father raised me almost entirely on adages and sayings like "early bird gets the worm" and "you snooze you lose." Another of his favorites was that we were always "burning daylight."

For this week's prompt, I want you to take an adage or popular saying and make that the title of your poem; then, of course, write the poem. There are so many possibilities: "Right as rain," "Better safe than sorry," "Penny earned is a penny saved," etc.

Here's my attempt for the day:

"You snooze you lose"

You booze you snooze;
you snooze you lose;

you lose you quit;
you quit you sit;

you sit you think;
you think you sink;

you sink you cry;
you cry you lie;

you lie you sin;
you sin you gin;

you gin you smoke;
you smoke you croak;

you croak you snooze;
you snooze you lose.

Wednesday, June 03, 2009 3:20:21 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [297] 

I first came across Frank Giampietro's name during an interview with Julianna Baggott last year. Since then, I just kept running into either his name or the title of his collection, Begin Anywhere. Finally, I decided to ask him for an interview (he's a Facebook friend--see the power of social networking?).

One of the things I personally love about this collection is that it constantly surprised me. Every time I thought I was going down a predictable road--one I didn't care to go down--the poem would take interesting side streets to get to our destination, which may or may not have been where I thought we were going originally. Eventually, I quit trying to predict our destination. Instead, I just let myself enjoy the ride.

Here's one of my favorite poems of the collection:

Juice

I'd like to begin with my addiction to heroin,
though I never shot it, I only sniffed it.
(Snorted is so, what? Crass?)
Once after seven years without it, I talked
to an Italian ex-junkie who was still smoking hash.
Because she shot it,
she claimed that she was more addicted to it.
Instead of admitting she was right, I went on
about the purity of American heroin
while she repeated no, no, no emphatically.
I found her sexy in a big-boned
Elizabeth Bishop sort of way.
If I were Elizabeth Bishop,
with my history of addiction,
I would have to write a villanelle
like "One Art,"
but my refrains would be
A1: I shared crack with a pregnant Dominican woman
A2: at the top of a five-flight walk-up on 109th Street in Harlem.
They say you can let the arms
of the repeating lines
wrap themselves around you
for comfort. It's a great form for subjects
that might otherwise be a threat.
I wish I could say that my best poems
are written when I'm afraid. Sometimes
when my four-year-old wakes up, he's afraid.
The first words out of his mouth are
I want some juice. Now I sleep with him,
and I wake up to the request
nearly every day. Honestly, there's no better way
to slip from my dreams. I worry I won't sleep at all
when he kicks me out of his bed.
When I sniffed heroin, whole parts of my body
would go completely numb as I slept.
One morning I woke unable to move either arm,
but after a minute or two, the feeling came back. It's not
that I'm afraid to write about addiction--it's just
that this is nothing like that.

*****

What are you up to?

This summer I'm working on a second book while teaching creative writing to undergraduates here at Florida State University. Otherwise I'm making video poems I call "voems" (very original, right?) and posting them to YouTube. You can see two of them here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3Wn_i0PezM.

Your website lafovea.org is rather interesting in how poets become nerves that connect to each other. Could you speak a little about how the site works and what the inspiration was behind the site?

One day after hearing the usual grousing about how nepotistic the publishing world is (an idea that doesn't hold much water, by the way), I had an idea to use nepotism productively, interestingly, as an alternative to publishing in the usual submission rejection sort of way. I thought why not have an internet site that publishes poems by invitation exclusively. And then I thought about how to do that and allow the largest variety of voices to be heard. I envisioned teachers inviting students and students inviting teachers. I also thought and hoped La Fovea might get poets from outside academia too. So I came up with the idea of publishing poetry nerves, nerves all extending from a giant poetry eyeball. I started with twelve poets with very different writing styles, all of whom I know and admire, all of them gathered around the eyeball on the homepage, and had them post two poems. Then they had to invite at least one poet. That poet then invited a poet and so on. We now have over 160 contributors. It's really working well and has been a lot of fun to see grow.

Your poems deal with topics such as being a father and husband. You are both a husband and father in real life. So, where do you draw the line between reality and fiction in your poems?

I guess I don't, in my poems that is. For instance, I have a poem about my son shooting me with an arrow. And knock on wood, he hasn't shot me with an arrow yet. But we have played with a bow and arrow, and he has scared the bejesus out of me a time or two pointing the arrow inadvertently at me or his sister or the cat. That's where I get the poems from, the possibilities for drama in real life rather than the life itself. Life itself is usually dull, as far as I can tell (maybe because I have no "inner resources").

Begin Anywhere is broken into two sections. How did you decide to organize the poems in this collection?

I had a lot of help from my editor at Alice James Books, April Ossamann. She showed me some ways of organizing the book that I just couldn't see on my own.  

Your poetry has been published in several literary journals. Do you have a method for handling your submissions?

I send in spurts, usually, and then wait for the rejections to come in. One day recently I got three in the mail at once. I think that might be a record.

When do you know a poem is finished?

After I've sat with it a week or two and shown it to one of my trusty couple of readers and gotten his or her feedback, that's when I know it's ready to send out. Finished is another story. I'm more of a poem abandoner than a finisher. I never feel like my poems are finished.

If you could begin anywhere, where would you begin?

Ha, ha, very funny. I like the 12-step program notion that one can begin one's day over at any time during the day. One can just say okay enough. Let's begin this day again. I do this with my kids sometimes when they are acting up. If things are getting hairy at the dinner table one of us will say "stop, let's start our day over." And then we have a little good morning ritual and then we start again. But even on my own, without the kids, I begin my day over lots of times as a way to keep my head on straight and my attitude and outlook rosy.

Who (or what) are you currently reading?

Right now I'm reading Joel Brouwer's new book "And So." It's really amazing. He's a poetry dude. I'm also reading Anna Karenina on my Kindle iPhone application. I have a house full of books and love paper books just like the next poet, but I have to say it's great reading on my phone because the phone is so much easier to hold than a book. Plus, since I always have my phone, I always have my book and can read while in line at the post office mailing my soon to be rejected submissions.

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

Hmmmm, I like to take advice a lot more than give it. If I could take one piece of advice, I would like to be told to be more satisfied with things exactly the way they are. That's what I need to do, how I need to be.

*****

To learn more about Frank Giampietro and his collection, Begin Anywhere, go to his publisher's website at http://www.alicejamesbooks.org/

Also, check out his online literary journal at http://lafovea.org/.

Or read "Death by My Son" featured on Poetry Daily (and the one he references in the interview above) at: http://poems.com/poem.php?date=14198

*****

If you're a poet, editor, publisher, etc., interested in an interview on Poetic Asides, then click here to learn how to possibly make that happen.

Monday, June 01, 2009 11:53:54 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [8] 

A poem of mine appeared in the most recent issue of Ocho, which was guest-edited by Atlanta poet Collin Kelley. You can see his post on the issue here: http://collinkelley.blogspot.com/2009/05/twitter-issue-of-ocho-online-now.html

To check out the issue yourself, go to http://issuu.com/didimenendez/docs/ocho24

Apparently, hard copies will be available on Amazon soonish.

This issue of Ocho gathers poems by poets who actively use Twitter. Yes, I fall into that category. If you want to follow me there, my Twitter name is: @robertleebrewer

Thursday, May 28, 2009 9:06:20 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [15] 

There are so many things that seem obvious on the surface. But when you look beneath the surface, you may find surprises. Houses that are beautiful on the outside may be completely torn up on the inside; super athletes can be ticking timebombs for heart attacks; and even "happy" families have been known to eventually reveal dark secrets.

For this week's prompt, I want you to write a poem that looks beneath the surface. For extra effect, you could possibly title the poem after your subject. For instance, you could title the poem "Happy Birthday" and then look at how it's not happy; or you could title the poem "Self-made Man" and describe how that might not be such a good thing. There are lots of possibilities for this one.

Here's my attempt for the day:

"Neighbors"

At first, I think these people don't know who
I am. But then I realize I don't know
who they are either. My hair needs cut and
my eyes need glasses if I ever want
to see. In the distance, I hear children
play their games in the dark. I walk
my dog and never see them. They surround
me with sound, and I wonder: Who are they?
Who will they become? Hopefully not just
another old man quietly walking
a dog in the rain and thinking these thoughts
while stepping on the moon in each puddle. 

Wednesday, May 27, 2009 2:20:33 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [319] 

On May 29, I'll be leading an online seminar on how to get your poetry published, including what not to do in your submissions. In the seminar, you'll learn how to submit your poetry (online and off), how to identify and study appropriate markets, how to write cover letters, and more.

As an added bonus, I will be providing feedback on one poem (of 20 lines or less) from each registrant--details included in your confirmation e-mail. So, you can learn how to publish your poetry and receive feedback on a poem for only $99.

But that's not all, my OPM just recently gave me a coupon code that'll take an extra $15 off, which would make it just $84. Just go to https://writersonlineworkshops.webex.com/writersonlineworkshops/j.php?J=683166157.

While there, don't forget to use the following coupon code: g1y3f1gq30

Wednesday, May 27, 2009 2:07:36 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [4] 

Sorry for the quiet on the blog over the past week and the lateness of the prompt today. I'm just glad to be able to deliver a prompt and poem today. On Saturday morning, I lost consciousness and quit breathing for a short period of time. Tammy and my (soon-to-be) sister-in-law called 911 and got me to safety. In fact, Tammy is the person who restored my breathing (apparently, I turned a bright shade of blue). I was hospitalized from Saturday morning until yesterday evening. In the process, I met several very nice doctors and specialists; had lots of blood drawn; was put through several tests; and ultimately am not sure exactly what my condition is or what caused my episode (though I have been given a prescription for Vitamin D, have more follow-up tests to do in the future, and am not allowed to drive for at least another week). I'm very thankful to be able to throw a prompt and poem up today and to have a wife who kept me alive and (by restoring my breathing) saved me from any brain damage. (I, of course, let her know how special she is to me, but I thought I'd share with y'all, too.)

******

Anyway, I was trying to think of a good prompt that might tie in with my recent "adventure." Sooo, for this week's prompt, I want you to write a poem about the unexpected. It could be something along the lines of the completely unexpected episode I recently experienced. Or it could be an unexpected act of kindness, an unexpected visitor, an unexpected gift, etc. There are a lot of ways you can run with this one.

Here's my attempt for the day:

"Waking in our hospital beds, we think"

We are born without heads
and build space shuttles
in our laboratories and public parks;
we dream of what worries us
while wearing our tubing and bracelets;
the lucky ones
are rolled around on their beds.

The nurses will wake us
and ask us questions;
the doctors will wake us
and ask us questions;
even our visitors--
they will ask questions, too.

No one will walk away satisfied
with our answers; they
will look at us
as if we are liars
or idiots.

They will order more tests
and blood drawn,
more questions asked
by more specialists.

Maybe this or that;
nothing confirmed
by blood or tests.

They will ask us questions
again. They will sigh.

They will tells us we're lucky.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009 6:42:31 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [230] 

For today's prompt, I want you to take the phrase "Don't you (blank)," fill in the blank with a word or words, and make that the title of your poem. Then, write a poem using that title. Example titles could be "Don't you forget to turn off the lights," "Don't you tell me what to do," and "Don't you laugh." There are many, many, many possibilities with this one.

Here's my attempt for the day:

"Don't you burn no bridges"

Plant a seed in the earth. Dream
of Beau Bridges; dream of Jeff Bridges;
dream of Lloyd Bridges; dream of everyone
with that last name: Bridges. Wonder
what it means when you do. Should
you gather up mashed potatoes, sculpt
a bridge? Beau won two Golden Globes;
Jeff won only one, though he had four Oscar
nominations; and Lloyd won nothing.
You don't need to know their successes
and failures. They are a family. They are
the dust of the earth. They reach and
toil. They burn and boil. They want more
than just an image burned on a disc or
saved on a server; they, like anyone
(like everyone) just want to find something
hidden and unexpected. A light, perhaps,
or a moment. When a seed enters the earth,
there is nothing if not possibility.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009 2:46:52 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [334] 

Justin Marks' full-length collection of poems, A Million in Prizes, was recently released by New Issues Poetry & Prose after winning the 2008 New Issues Poetry Prize. His latest chapbook is Voir Dire (Rope-a-Dope Press), and he's the founder and editor of Kitchen Press Chapbooks.

I enjoyed reading both A Million in Prizes and Voir Dire, which is a semi-long poem. Here's one of my favorites from A Million in Prizes:

Matter of Fact

I wanted to create the ocean, the sky,
the intricate structure of a leaf

and thought by now
I'd have come close.

What joy I have in knowing
creation of that sort

doesn't exist.
The world has little

use for me.
Its glare blinds.

How glad I am
for the orbit I inhabit.

A planet to the sun.

*****

What are you up to?

Enjoying being a new dad. Working. Doing some writing here and there. Lining up readings for the spring and fall.

An entire section of your collection A Million in Prizes is one long poem: [Summer insular]. How is writing a long poem different from writing shorter poems?

Writing a long poem, for me, is more comforting than working on shorter poems. Something about knowing I have a large space to work in puts me in a good place emotionally. I mean, I love writing shorter poems, but they generally don't take as long to write and if I don't have anything else I'm working on, I'll start to get real anxious. But lately my short poems are all part of a larger vision/conceptual framework, a book or chapbook, so even when I'm done with an individual poem I know I have a lot more to work on in terms of completing that particular manuscript. It makes me feel more like I'm working on sections of a long poem instead of isolated one night stands, as Spicer called them.

The end of your collection is packed with prose poems. What do you like about the prose poem?

Those poems were a real turning point in my writing. I could sense that I wouldn't be writing too many more poems like the ones from the first section. Not because I didn't like them. It was just that...I don't know...the straight-up, individual lyric poem was starting to feel limiting to me. I was and am proud of the work that’s in the first section of my book, and absolutely stand by it, but in terms of my development it was just time to move on. One of the things a book is to me is in some ways a chart of a person’s development/growth as a writer during the time in which the book was written.

To try and enable that growth for myself I decided that I needed to focus on not caring about the end result and (as much as I possibly could) turn off my inner-critic and just write. One way I was able to make that happen was to not worry about line breaks any more. At the same time, I found myself thinking more in sentences than lines—or maybe more accurately: Thinking about sentences as lines. So that was one thing I liked about prose poems. I was able to sort of pack a lot in and move about in a more relaxed manner than if I were trying to write lineated poems.

Since then I've returned to prose a good bit. A new chapbook manuscript I'm finishing up is all prose. What I hope will be my next book is a series of sonnets, but even with those I keep trying to work prose lines in there somehow to kind of break things up and build some variety into the manuscript.

The poems in A Million in Prizes are all first person narratives. Where do you draw the line between reality and fiction in your poems? Also, what do you like about writing in a confessional voice?

I don't think writing in the first person makes one confessional. My poems in this book—and in general—explore the lyric "I", certainly, but that's totally different than being confessional. I'm not confessing anything. Besides, there are so many problems with that term, even as it has been/is applied to poets like Lowell and Plath and that whole "confessional" crowd—it doesn't feel useful to me.

One of the things I try to do in my work is get an entire self (if such a thing exists) down on the page, so I don't really draw lines between fiction and reality. It's all fiction. And reality. I take from my life whatever is necessary for my work to progress/evolve/change. It potentially gets tricky when I start writing about other people from my life, but so far no one has objected or asked me to not write about them. If they did, though, I'd have to honor that.

Your collection won the 2008 New Issues Poetry Prize, and you're the founder and editor of Kitchen Press Chapbooks. What do you think makes a good collection?

I think about this a lot, and every time I start to approach a conclusion I'm reminded of some book I like that breaks the rules surrounding whatever conclusions I'm approaching. I guess, on a basic level, I think a good collection is one in which the poems become something more than individual poems that are somehow similar in feel and arranged together to make a nice flow. The poems in a good collection are in conversation with each other and form something greater than their parts.

But that definition, for me, is always changing. Over the last few years I've become way more invested in books that are projects or series/serial as opposed to more traditional collections, books that are more akin to Spicer's idea of the serial poem, or are a book length poem, etc. One of my favorite contemporary books is Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely. The subtitle is An American Lyric. I don't know what that means, or how one might define it except to say, read the book. It's prose, but I'm not sure if it's prose poems. Maybe it's a lyric essay or memoir of some sort. It doesn't really matter. Martha Ronk's Vertigo is another book I enjoy immensely that I think is a little limiting to just call a collection of poems (though it does have individual poems). It's more like a series or cycle of poems.

It’s one of the qualities I look for when I read manuscripts for Kitchen Press. Take Hit Wave, by Jon Leon. I don't know if you've read it, but I'm not really sure what it is: a collection of prose poems? A lyric novella? I could only put it under the rather general category of anti-poetic. And writing I love.

But then there's Old With You, by Lily Brown. I don't think anyone would argue that that isn't your basic collection of somewhat thematically linked, individual poems. But I love that book too.

So I guess what I'm saying is: There are basic qualities that I think make a good collection, but I also really dig work that makes questions just what a collection of poems is/can be. (As an aside, Tarpaulin Sky Press is deeply invested in putting out work that others might not consider to be "poetry.")

Your bio mentions an infant son and daughter. Have they impacted your writing in any way?

They impacted my writing before they were even conceived. I wrote Voir Dire around the time my wife and I were getting serious about trying to get pregnant. There are lots of references to babies in that mini-chapbook. There are also a lot of babies in the two manuscripts I've been working on throughout my wife's pregnancy and since the birth of our son and daughter. In a sense, it's all kind of topical. I never mentioned babies in my work until we started trying to have one/had them. I mean, I'm not writing about my babies as individual people per-se. I don't really write "about" specific people or subjects. Though I suppose there are poems in A Million in Prizes that you could argue are "about" specific subjects. Generally, though, it's not my thing. Anyway. That I'm mentioning babies at all, to me, means my babies have had a significant impact on my writing.

You work as a copywriter. How do the demands of writing copy differ from writing poetry? Also, are there similarities?

Marketing copy has to be concise and to the point, say as much as possible with as few words as possible, and it absolutely has to get and maintain the reader’s attention, even if it is only for a few moments and all you're ultimately saying is "Buy Now". Poetry is like that. (Though there are certainly worthwhile poetries out there that are not at all concerned with the whole maximum-impact-with-minimum-words model.) But I think the most significant similarity is that marketing copy is pretty conceptual. You have to think about all the ways what you're saying can be interpreted and if that fits in with what you want people to take away. For me, with poetry, it's not that I necessarily have a specific idea of what I want people to take away, but I definitely put a lot of time into thinking about how any random stranger out in the world could interpret my writing. In that sense, being a copywriter has made me a much more conscious and aware (I guess "better") poet than if I were in some other profession.

This feels even more true to me when I think about the connections between putting together a marketing campaign and writing a book, or even an extended project that spans across many individual books. You have to really be aware of how each part interacts with the other, whether it's individual ads in a campaign or poems in a book (whether that book be a more traditional collection of individual poems or something more extended/conceptual).

There's also the fact that corporate and marketing lingo is some of the weirdest, most mind-blowing shit I've ever heard. Total goldmine.

But the biggest difference between copywriting and poetry, for me, is that I often feel restricted when writing copy. I may come up with an idea or a line, but so many people above me will have their feedback that I have to find a way to incorporate, and there's also the whole staying on brand and within the voice aspect as well. And that's cool. But poetry, for me, is in large part about freedom. I really don't have anything to lose or gain career-wise with poetry so I feel generally free to do whatever I want. Of course that feeling winds up compromised by various factors and circumstances, as it must, but I'd like to think that that sense of freedom that I try to start from still remains somehow at the core of my poetry.

Who have you been reading recently?

Joe Massey, Eric Baus, Rodrigo Toscano, Jack Spicer, Frank Stanford, Barbara Guest,

Mathias Svalina, Aase Berg, Zach Schomburg, Harper’s Magazine, Wired Magazine, the most recent issue of the Agricultural Reader.

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

I've been given such large heaps of bad advice over the years, I'm hesitant to offer any of my own. So maybe my advice should be, “don’t take any advice.” Then again, I've also gotten some good advice that has often helped sustain me: Trust yourself. Don't let anyone or thing stop you. Be willing to change. Persevere. Stuff like that. That’s my advice.

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Check out A Million in Prizes and New Issues Poetry & Prose at www.wmich.edu/newissues.

Check out Voir Dire and Rope-a-Dope Press at http://rope-a-dope-press.blogspot.com.

Check out Justin Marks at his blog: http://justinanselmarks.blogspot.com/.

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Tuesday, May 12, 2009 3:45:07 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [3]