His poems “Authorial domain of the representative,” “Risky, not to mention boring,” “your reputation is good but your shit is shit” and “Makes nonsense” appear in the forty-fourth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the poems “Authorial domain of the representative,” “Risky, not to mention boring,” “your reputation is good but your shit is shit” and “Makes nonsense.”
A: I wrote these pieces when I was working for a small nonprofit. So they’re conditioned by work, but mostly they’re not about work. I am talking nearby (Trin Minh-ha’s term) white collar nonprofit work. I am talking about everything work is not but which work suffuses. Incoherent words about leisure tentatively approach the enigmatic lurking beneath a mission statement. And then sometimes indirectness is broken by a lapse into the direct. But that can be useful.
Q: How do these pieces compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?
A: I haven’t been writing lately. But I can tell you about the difference between the poems I sent you and the ones I wrote further down the line. The poems you published are inspired by a job and cobbled together from notes I wrote each day about that job or whatever was going on in my life—once I was done being interested in work I got interested in a lake. That produced some big differences. I think incoherence is a throughline here (for better or worse) but the incoherence of the lake poems was more of a matter of decay and garbling than diaristic bricolage. After a period of piecing together jumbled messes, I decided to try sitting down and just writing them straight out.
Q: What prompted you to write daily about work, “or whatever was going on,” as you say?
A: Can’t help but turn to your freshly published essay in Coma to answer the question. First off there’s the “unanswerable why” from the quote you draw from the interview with Sarah Gerard in the Chicago Review of Books. Gerard thinks up the “unanswerable why” to describe what a good story has, but I’m nicking it to describe writing (or anything at all). Why write? There's always something that explanation can’t get at.
But more importantly, you describe writing in that essay as “a way through which to articulate, argue, document and process,” which is more or less what writing is to me—another way of thinking. I’d been reading critiques of nonprofits (most importantly The Revolution will not be Funded), felt ambivalent about my own work, and writing was a way of getting at what I wasn’t getting at, or arriving somewhere else (someplace a little off to the side).
Q: Have you any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? Any particular poets or particular works at the back of your head as you write?
A: No models, no one at the back of my head, but I wouldn’t claim I write from a vacuum. John Berryman was an early favorite of mine, probably set me on particular paths, as opposed to other ones. Lorine Niedecker is a current favorite. Frank O’Hara, A.R. Ammons, William Carlos Williams, Wendy Trevino, Jenny Holzer, James Wright all do/did things I think I draw on at some level. I also read plenty of lit journals, and feel like there’s some kind of creative writing habitus floating in that lit journal ether subliminally shaping my writing.
Q: What are your go-to literary journals these days?
A: Lately I’ve been enjoying Mercury Firs, Annulet, Grotto, new_sinews, the poetry the Cleveland Review of Books posts periodically, and Coma. That’s just lately—there’s lots more out there.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: The poets I mentioned above are an okay start. I often reread Niedecker’s Paen to Place, and also Lake Superior, and My Life by Water—I have a book of her collected works. Gary Snyder’s Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems also. Or I’ll just pull something off the bookshelf, whatever draws me from my little collection. I’ve recently pulled down Madison McCartha’s Freakophone World, Nicole Cecilia Delgado’s islas adyacentes, and Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency to read some poems or just one, or just a few lines. I think the returns that surprise me are often more refreshing or whatever than reaching for the old reliables. And then looking to what people are doing outside poetryland is important as well. I recently started a PhD program in Anthropology and have found all the readings we do to be really generative for instance. On the other hand I don’t have any time to write my dumb little poems anymore—but maybe that’s a good thing.
