His poems “A Quaint Cemetery,” “Night, Tucson (1/7/23),” “Note to Stuart Ross (May 11, 2024),” “Poem Beginning with the First Sentence in Gregory O’Brien’s Poem ‘Basement kitchen, Circular Quay, Sydney, 1982’,” “Note to Eve Luckring (May 8, 2024)” and “The Breathing Tree” appear in the forty-second issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the poems “A Quaint Cemetery,” “Night, Tucson (1/7/23),” “Note to Stuart Ross (May 11, 2024),” “Poem Beginning with the First Sentence in Gregory O’Brien’s Poem ‘Basement kitchen, Circular Quay, Sydney, 1982’,” “Note to Eve Luckring (May 8, 2024)” and “The Breathing Tree.”
A: I’m not sure where to start. Even if you were asking me to tell you about only one of those pieces, I wouldn’t know how to begin. I appreciate open-ended questions and yours IS open-ended. One thing I could say about almost all the poems I write, including these six, is that I begin writing a poem (or prose poem) without knowing what I am going to say after the first few words that I thought of to begin with. Sometimes, as with the two note poems among these six, I begin with a friend in mind and want to write something for the friend although I usually haven’t figured out anything beyond wanting to write something to that friend. Sometimes, as with “A Quaint Cemetery” and the piece that begins with the superb line from Gregory O'Brien’s poem, I want to see what I can find to say about something I’ve read (which is also true, I suppose, about “The Breathing Tree,” which is about one of Frank O’Hara’s incredible poems).
Q: How do these pieces compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?
A: In terms of length, the pieces are similar to most of the poems I’ve written before, although I have also written one-liners as well as the occasional poem that is more than two pages long.
I am not sure when I began writing poems in the form of letters to living and dead people, but it was maybe around 2015. Recently, my poems addressed to people are note poems rather than letter poems.
I haven’t focused on the “lately” part of your question yet, assuming that “lately” means about 1-2 years. Also, I’m not sure how to deal with comparing these six poems to other poems (and prose poems) I’ve written lately. It’s not, to me, the old “comparing apples to oranges” fallback position, but more like comparing one animal to another and wondering how to do that. These two both have four legs, but their voices are very different. Neither of these other two can breathe underwater. Etc.
Q: I get the sense that your poems are composed as a kind of discovery: a reader is seeing what is going on through the narratives of your poems in the same order you did when writing. How did you get to the point of writing poems in such a manner?
A: When I was 15, which was in 1966, I went to a bookstore in a Phoenix shopping mall, Walden’s Books. It was a remarkably good bookstore and its poetry section was floor-to-ceiling and perhaps eight feet wide. I had two dollars. I decided to read at least one poem in every book, beginning up (on a small ladder) with the A’s, and that I would reach the last book before I decided which one to buy. On the first Saturday I think I reached M or N and had found two books I liked. On the next Saturday I was down on the very bottom shelf and opened William Carlos Williams’ New Directions book, Selected Poems. I opened the book at random, read “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” and then, again, opening it at random, “Poem” (“As the cat / climbed over / the top of. . .”) and it was the first time I ever felt a book talking to me directly, an experience I could write about for several pages. I had been a big e. e. cummings fan for a few years before that, but reading Williams changed my life. And I’d written awful poems before I read Williams, but after buying his book and reading him my poems very slowly became a little better. And although I think (perhaps correctly) that even at ages 13-14, when I began writing poems, I didn’t know what I was going to say, and the pleasure was finding out what I could say, the experience of beginning without knowing what I’d write became more and more what I wanted and needed.
Q: With a handful of books, chapbooks and pamphlets published over the past few decades, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?
A: My first book, Among the Consonants, was published by The Elizabeth Press in 1980. I think my writing has gotten somewhat looser and that I trust myself a little more now. I was grateful to Ken Bolton, a fantastic Australian poet, for editing my recent book, 54 poems: selected & new. The earliest poem in that book was written in 1972 and the latest ones in 2023. As for where my writing is headed, I don’t know and am happy I don’t.
Q: How are your poems composed? Do you deliberately compose poems in clusters or groupings (whether manuscripts or manuscript-sections), or do they tend to group organically, one at a time? Are you a poet of books or of poems? Or is there a difference?
A: I almost always write one poem at a time. I am currently working on a collection of poems written over the last 15 or so years that concern death, mostly the deaths of loved ones; those pieces were --- for the most part --- not written in series. I do think there is a difference between, as you put it, “a poet of books or of poems.” I would consider myself a poet of poems. However, I do sometimes work in series. For example, in my book A Mind’s Cargo Shifting: Fictions (First Intensity Press, 2011), I have a 19-piece series of what could be considered prose poems in which I coin words (such as Blahnip, Quover, Jitch, Etowek, Duminous, Perkneek, Wunprinkstalt, and Xellotropy) and then have three to four definitions for each word, plus examples of sentences using the words (taken from books and authors I’ve also made up). The other pieces in that book are short stories. In a book I wrote about living in the Greek village Meligalas for two years (1983-1985) with my wife Leslie Buchanan, there are journal entries and poems that amount to a series, plus excerpts from Leslie’s letters. That book, published in 1994, is titled We Don’t Kill Snakes Where We Come From: Two Years in a Greek Village (Querencia Press).
Q: What was the process of putting together a selected poems? Was the selection yours, or someone else’s? Did the shift in context cause you to see or read any of these poems differently?
A: I asked Ken Bolton, a marvelous Australian poet I had been in contact with for years and whose judgment I admire, if he would be willing to read through my books and my most recently published pieces and select which pieces he thought were the best. Ken generously agreed. He chose about 75 pieces and together we narrowed it down to 54, which I then put into a sequence. While the selection covers 51 years of writing, the majority of the poems in the book are from 2016-2023.
As for the shift of context, usually whenever one of my pieces is put next to another I read both at least a little differently. For example, the six pieces that will appear in the July 2024 issue of touch the donkey each seemed different to me than I had remembered them because of the interesting sequence you have placed them in.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: I wouldn’t want to attempt to list the poets I read and reread to re-charge myself. Like many book lovers, I have a large number of books and I don't keep track of how many different poets I read in any week, but I am sure that if I did then the number would be over 30 and sometimes over 40. There are many poets I reread often, and among them are poets I am lucky enough to be in contact with.
I doubt that there has been a day in the last eight plus years, after I retired from my job as an Assistant Public Defender (representing adults accused of committing felonies) in Pima County, Arizona, when I haven’t read at least three different poets. But when I was working long hours, going from my office to court to the jail, back-and-forth, I didn’t have the luxury of the free time that retirement has brought into my life, though I was reading at least one or two poets every day back then too.
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