32 Poems Magazine » poet interviews

Jessica Piazza: An Interview With Serena M. Agusto-Cox

Serena — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 05:00:53 +0000

Poet Jessica Piazza

1. How would you introduce yourself to a crowded room eager to hang on your every word? Are you just a poet, what else should people know about you?

Usually I just tell people that I’m a word-nerd and that I’m generally ridiculous. I like getting that out there early. I also probably pipe in that I’m from Brooklyn, New York pretty early on, because I’m really proud of where I come from. Brooklyn has definitely become the trendy place to be for artists and hipsters of all ilk, but growing up deep in South (read: uncool) Brooklyn is a completely different story, and a very particular story at that. Other than that, I’m more likely to talk about my dog than myself. His name is Special and he’s seriously….special.

2. Do you see spoken word, performance, or written poetry as more powerful or powerful in different ways and why? Also, do you believe that writing can be an equalizer to help humanity become more tolerant or collaborative? Why or why not?

Those three genres are powerful in VERY different ways. I never really understood the spoken word vs. written poetry debate. They’re not at odds because, in my eyes, they are entirely different genres with just a few overlapping skills necessary to excel in them. For example, to do written poetry you don’t have to be skilled at public speaking, performance art, communication through body language, etc. (Though, as I’ve written in several places, I think it’s a shame when poets don’t make a concerted effort to be great, engaged and engaging readers, since people often give their hard-earned free time and money to come watch them at readings.) And to be a really good written poet you have to have a way with the page, with white space, with the tricks of craft that allow a simple line break to become a pun or a double entendre. Those craft tools are rather different from the ones a great spoken word artist has to possess. I find spoken work to be very moving in a kinetic way; I like feeling like a part of the entire experience, in the sense that my energy (as a part of the crowd) helps to flavor and drive the performance. I also am excited by how the particular spoken word artist becomes the conduit for the piece’s ideas, and how the words and the speaker are inseparable. Written poetry is powerful for the opposite reason to me….the written poem at its best isn’t attached inextricably to the poet, but becomes–upon reading and rereading and contemplation–the reader’s own.

And yes, I think writing has always been, in certain forms and in certain climates, an equalizer. However, I also think in other forms and climates, writing has alienated people of different classes, genders, cultures, etc. Words belong, collectively, to all of us, and so they are not inherently useful toward specific good or specific bad ends. Writing is so powerful it can lead people to amazing understanding and love (think Harriet Beecher Stowe) or to, well, total darkness (think of the mass suicides that took place after people read Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” or, in fact, the horrifying affects of any propagandist writing.)

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

Ha! Obsessions are my obsession. A quick Googling of me reveals that my entire writing life for the past few years focused almost primarily on ruminations about clinical phobias and clinical philias. I wrote poem after poem inspired by these weird obsessive fears and obsessive loves, and my entire manuscript is anchored by them. For me, that was subject was a natural one, since I get addicted to ideas or projects themselves and have to play them out until I’ve killed them in some emotional way. I mean, I *only* write poems in projects, and that’s beginning to bite me in the ass as I try to create a second manuscript. For example, how do you fit together a dozen strange ekphrastic poems with erasure poems made from news articles and tiny, technical poems about bridges? It ain’t easy, kids. That’s all I’m saying.

4. Most writers will read inspirational/how-to manuals, take workshops, or belong to writing groups. Did you subscribe to any of these aids and if so which did you find most helpful? Please feel free to name any “writing” books you enjoyed most (i.e. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott).

I’m not much a reader of books on writing, but one did move me, years ago. It’s not specifically writing focused, even! It’s called “Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking” by David Bayles and Ted Orland. It contains this astonishing tidbit: “If ninety-eight percent of our medical students were no longer practicing medicine five year after graduation, there would be a Senate investigation, yet that proportion of art majors are routinely consigned to an early professional death. Not many people continue making art when – abruptly – their work is no longer seen, no longer exhibited, no longer commented upon, no longer encouraged. Could you?”

Reading that only articulated my already steadfast determination to provide artistic communities: spaces for the sharing and appreciation of poetry, in person and on the page. A year interning with Robert Pinsky (and Maggie Dietz!) at “The Favorite Poem Project” in Boston—an endeavor that set out to prove poetry touched ordinary Americans—was the perfect groundwork for me. As hundreds and hundreds of love letters to poetry poured in that first year, I realized that the power of great literature is not esoteric—it’s visceral, vibrant and necessary. It was right there…proof that poetry could have power as a pop-cultural force, not just an academic byproduct. I wanted to find a way to work with this idea, both expanding poetry’s place (and scope) in education, and simultaneously ensuring its recognition as a viable source of popular entertainment and inspiration.

To that end, over the years I helped to found a popular reading series (Speakeasy Poetry Series in NYC), a successful national literary journal (Bat City Review) and a small university press (Gold Line Press). Funny, though…it’s ironic that, at first, I never thought of teaching as a way to advocate poetry in the community. But when I started as a Teaching Assistant in 2003, I saw the impression that well-made literature could make on generally unimpressed students, and I’m proud to say that I’ve helped create many new poetry lovers over the last eight years of teaching at a college level. No wonder teaching became a passion—it doesn’t get much more inspiring than that.

5. Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

See above. I don’t think it’s an obligation, per se, but it sure as hell should be a priority. The humanities are not experiencing a golden age in the mind of the average American right now, and I think that new technology and a little creative thinking could turn that around eventually. Spoken word and slam events, which we talked about earlier, actually did traditional poetry a huge service by sparking a poetic interest in people who didn’t think much about it (if anything) beforehand. However, I think we can do better, and I think we should. For the most part, my colleagues and I want jobs teaching in our field, not only because we need to make a living (would we have chosen this career if money were the first priority?) but because we believe that it’s actually important to teach literature and writing. You asked me if literature and writing can change the world, and it can, but that takes a rare piece of writing and a specific cultural or political situation indeed. But what writing can absolutely change, and quickly, are the hearts and minds of individuals…for the better. As poets, I believe most of us want to do this, but we don’t really have that opportunity unless we concentrate on advocating our genre in the mainstream world. We don’t have to be part of an antiquated art form unless we choose to be, and I don’t believe we have to dumb down our writing to be popular. I mean, look at music as a genre! There’s Ke$ha, there’s Radiohead, there’s Sigur Ros: definitely a sliding scale from translucent to opaque, but all popular in their own right. Poetry can have its narratives, its lyrics, its formal verses, its language play, and there can be something for everyone, as long as the quality is there.

I think part of the problem is that we as poets accept, and even sometimes encourage, the insularity of our world. We think confining poetry to this small, mostly academic (but either way certainly elitist) world will protect our jobs, or keep us at some higher artistic level, or simply make us these strange, interesting creatures in the eyes of the laypeople we meet at parties and such. But all it does, honestly, is encourage fewer people to read poetry. Poetry! Remember it, poetry, that thing we love and that changes our lives and that everyone should have the opportunity to love?

6. When writing poetry, prose, essays, and other works do you listen to music, do you have a particular playlist for each genre you work in or does the playlist stay the same? What are the top 5 songs on that playlist? If you don’t listen to music while writing, do you have any other routines or habits?

I write quite often in coffee chops or public places, so I’m accustomed to (and work well around) the white noise of public daily life. When I do listen to music while writing it has to be either lyric-free (like classical) or I have to know the lyrics so well they don’t distract me from the words I’m seeking for the piece. Some of those inspiring, tried and true favorites include Joni Mitchell’s album “Blue,” Everything But the Girl’s “Amplified Heart,” Josh Ritter’s “Hello Starling,” and this really emo indie mix I have with lots of Arcade Fire, Shins, Decemberists and same such bands. It’s weird, though….I’m pretty much all over the map as far as musical inspiration. Sometimes I’ll write to Feist and sometimes I’ll write to old-school Wu-Tang albums. It’s a toss up.

7. In terms of friendships, have your friendships changed since you began focusing on writing? Are there more writers among your friends or have your relationships remained the same?

I’ve done a masters degree at UT Austin and just finished my exams for a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing at USC, so I certainly have benefitted from the communities created by workshops; students and mentors alike. I’ve kept my own writing circles strong and rely on my closest, amazingly talented writer friends (most especially Jill Alexander Essbaum, Heather Aimee O’Neill, Rebecca Lindenberg, Joshua Rivkin and a fantastic slew of school colleagues I keep in touch with) to keep me in check. I wouldn’t say my circles of friendship have changes since I started writing (especially since I always wrote, and it was always a factor in many of my friendships) but I will say that years of working with my closest writer friends really adds a strength and intimacy to those friendships. Seeing draft after draft means you see people at their most vulnerable, art-wise, and it takes a strong bond to navigate that well.

8. How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

Sometimes I don’t. But I don’t think that’s about writing. It’s really the same for any desk-based profession, no? Just get up out of your chair and do something physical. But that hasn’t always been my strongest point. I go through phases. Then again, I go through phases of prolific writing and artistic dry spells, too, so maybe that’s just my personality. And it doesn’t help that I love to cook decadent food!

9. Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?

I’m obsessed with food. I love to cook. I stress cook, in fact, and tend to procrastinate by cooking new dishes and posting about them on Facebook. It’s a pleasure and a curse. As far as pumping myself up….truthfully, I don’t know. Talking to my writer friends helps, reading an amazing book or poem helps. Sometimes I can’t pump myself up at all, and when those dry spells hit I just have to weather them. Luckily, with all this academic work to do, the time I can carve out for my creative writing becomes a pleasure instead of a chore.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

I don’t have a writing space, really. I have an office I barely use; when I’m home my computer and I are usually parked at the dining room table. I do like to write in coffee shops and other public places, though. Noise doesn’t bother me, but life going on around me inspires my work. My ideal writing space, then? At home, it would be somewhere airy, with a lot of light and nice breezes and maybe a view of people on the street. (Meaning, I guess, that it wouldn’t be in LA, where there mostly are no people on the street.)

11. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

Oh man. As I mentioned above, projects are sort of my bread and butter.

For poetry, I’m shopping around my manuscript, Interrobang, which predominantly consists of formal poems about clinical phobias and clinical philias. I’m also working on several poem series: one of strange ekphrastic poems, one that’s obsessing over military alphabet code words, one of small poems whose titles pair together two unrelated words, one with my terribly talented friend Heather Aimee O’Neill where we take New York Times articles and do erasures. It’s a hodgepodge!

Fiction-wise, I’m working on a short story collection where each piece is inspired by an old time superstition. (There’s an amazing exhibit on this at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which is my favorite place in Los Angeles. After I saw it I knew I had to do something with it.) The kicker about that collection is that every story in it is written entirely in iambs. It’s crazy-time; I’m not going to lie.

As for nonfiction, I’m working on some semi-serious and semi-humorous memoir pieces about my young/younger life, which was—no exaggeration—completely insane.

And, as always, the all-consuming dissertation looms. Thankfully I’m really excited about it. The gist is that I’m trying to analyze the visual and audial aspects of literature to gauge how those elements interplay with the more classic semantic and narrative analyses. It’s all grounded in fairly recent neuroscience discoveries that delve into how the human brain processes text. Did you know that reading isn’t actually an innate human function at all? Meaning, we have no mechanism for reading, per se, but we combine functions and processes from several areas of the brain—all originally used for other purposes—to create “the reading brain.” It’s intense and fascinating, especially since I’m no scientist.

Please check out a sample of her poetry:

Eisoptrophilia			
           Love of mirrors
                               Impression pressed upon the glass perfects
                               even the grossest forgeries.  Reject 
                               the sea.  Reject the turning tide.
                               Just below clear water, I reside
                               as duplication of the lake.  Take me 
                               away, another underneath again.  
                               What mirrors cannot ditto isn’t sin.

Eisoptrophobia	
        Fear of mirrors
                                What mirrors cannot ditto isn’t sin
                                simply performed behind the glass.  Within
                                the frame of windowpane, negated dark.
                                Those fleeting squares reveal our darkness back.
                                Aloof, the rain plays taps.  Above, the trees
                                are inimitable.  Distinct, thus blessed.
                                Reflected, I am never at my best.

--Originally published in Mid-American Review, Volume XXX, Numbers 1 & 2 Fall 2009/Spring 2010

David Mason: An Interview With Serena M. Agusto-Cox

Serena — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 05:00:49 +0000

Poet David Mason

1. How would you introduce yourself to a crowded room eager to hang on your every word? Are you just a poet, what else should people know about you?

I would recite a poem by someone else. Mother Goose, for example. Then I would recite another poem by someone else. Auden or MacNeice or Dickinson, perhaps. I might ask the audience to repeat a poem after me, to join in the recitation. I wouldn’t say much of anything about myself unless I was asked in a question and answer session.

One of the great curses in life is a lack of eloquence, an inability to express some portion of what one feels or experiences. I think eloquence can be found in a lot of places, and so can its opposite. I’ll take eloquence wherever I can find it. As for the second half of this question, you seem to be asking whether poetry “makes nothing happen.” I think Auden responded well to his own controversial statement when he called it “a way of happening, a mouth.” As for its effect upon others, I do not think one can generalize in that direction.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

I have obsessions, yes. Death and love. I’m always wondering what a person is, what a human being is, which might be why I like to write about other people. Weather. Landscape. Seascape. I react to weather the way werewolves react to the moon.

I’ve co-edited a poetry textbook, so I can say with authority that none of these books is sufficient. Never took a creative writing class in poetry, but had an undergraduate one in fiction. Did belong to an informal writing group when I was a gardener in Upstate New York, and met several people more talented than myself, yet somehow persisted in this craft and sullen art and began to get the hang of it.

5. Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

Poets don’t have any obligation to do anything. Nor do readers. It’s a free country. I like a certain level of access in a poem, but I also love a whiff of mystery, a sense that the inexpressible has been cracked open or exposed to me in some way. I wouldn’t want to dispel any myths. Myths are there to cast a spell, not to be dispelled.

I prefer listening to music when I can really listen to it, not as background or wallpaper or white noise. Since I am hard of hearing, I have to strain quite a lot to make out words in songs, so I can’t really write when Dylan‘s on the stereo. I’d rather sing along, even if I have to use my own version of scat half the time.

7. In terms of friendships, have your friendships changed since you began focusing on writing? Are there more writers among your friends or have your relationships remained the same?

Some of the best and longest friendships of my life have been with fellow writers. I’m only now getting around to admitting that I have a “kind,” I belong to a certain subspecies of the human that I needn’t be ashamed of. I always thought non-writers were superior beings, but I’ve changed my mind about that. I don’t think writers are superior. But I do think they are my “kind.” We understand each other.

8. How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

Who says I’m healthy? I try to stay fit as a person, exercise as often as I can and eat reasonably well and try not to drink too much. But you asked how I stay healthy as a writer. I guess I would say by reading my betters. If I’m not reading something that really moves or impresses me, I feel unhealthy.

9. Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?

I don’t believe in writer’s block. If you’re not writing you’re living, so what’s not to like about that? I have never been blocked in my life. Don’t have the foggiest idea what the term means. As for food, I am omnivorous. I’m just trying to eat less, to carry less weight around in the world.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

I’ve never had any trouble writing anywhere I’ve been in the world. I did until recently have a lovely office that used to be an artist’s studio, with north light and brick floors–a beautiful room. Now I live in a tiny cabin, 380 square feet in the shadow of Pike’s Peak, and it serves just as well. People who need the perfect space in which to write are sissies. Your brain is where you write. It’s portable.

11. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

The most exciting work involves my collaboration with composer Lori Laitman. Our first opera, The Scarlet Letter, will have its professional premiere at Opera Colorado in Denver in 2013. My libretto will be published as a book in 2012. Our oratorio, Vedem, premiered in Seattle last year and is now out on CD from Naxos. And we’re at work on an opera based on my verse novel, Ludlow. Also, I seem to be writing a lot of love poetry lately. The dam has burst.

Check out a sample of his poetry:

SEA SALT

Light dazzles from the grass
over the carnal dune.
This too shall come to pass,
but will it happen soon?
A kite nods to its string.
A cloud is happening

above the tripping waves,
joined by another cloud.
They are a crowd that moves.
The sky becomes a shroud
cut by a blade of sun.
There’s nothing to be done.

The soul, if there’s a soul
moves out to what it loves,
whatever makes it whole.
The sea stands still and moves,
denoting nothing new,
deliberating now.

The days are made of hours,
hours of instances,
and none of them are ours.
The sand blows through the fences.
Light darkens on the grass.
This too shall come to pass.

–first published in The Times Literary Supplement

Rachel Zucker: An Interview With Serena M. Agusto-Cox

Serena — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 05:00:17 +0000

Poet Rachel Zucker

1. How would you introduce yourself to a crowded room eager to hang on your every word? Are you just a poet, what else should people know about you?

Is anyone “just a poet”? I don’t know anyone like that. I’m also a professor and teach at NYU. I’m also a doula (labor support assistant). I’m studying to become a Childbirth Educator (so I can teach birthing classes to pregnant couples). I’m a mother of three sons. I’m a devoted wife to my husband, Josh Goren. I’m always starting new projects and hobbies. For example, I just started a blog, where I post one sentence descriptions every day. I also write prose. Is there a room where a crowd hangs on my every word? I guess, maybe a room full of students who are there for extra credit…

I think spoken word and written poetry are both profoundly powerful in their own way. I love storytelling. I love good slam poetry. I love David Antin, Spalding Gray, Tracie Morris. In the fall, I’m going to spend one week of the semester talking about spoken word including Steve Benson whose work I’m eager to get to know.

I absolutely believe writing (and reading) can help people become more tolerant. Learning about others and identifying with them is the basis for empathy. Naomi Shihab Nye writes eloquently about the social and political power of poetry. If you don’t know her poetry and her prose, you should. When I read her I feel hopeful and also chastened. I know I have not done nearly enough as a poet to make the world a more tolerant place.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

I have many obsessions. I wish I had more time to watch television. I really love television but don’t watch at all now. I want to watch the new Game of Thrones mini series. My husband has read me all the books — thousands of pages — we have 200 pages left in the last book.

I recently posted a list of books that was most useful to me on 32 poems blog. None of these are writing manuals but all of them functioned as how-tos. I started a writing group many years ago — a peer group — and the group stayed together (with members coming and going) for almost 10 years. It was tremendously helpful to have that group, post MFA. I met Arielle Greenberg that way! And worked with these great writers. I stopped wanting the group because I was mostly writing prose. Now I miss it. But I have my correspondence with my dear poet friends: Arielle, DA Powell, Laurel Snyder, Sarah Manguso, Sarah Vap, Wayne Koestenbaum, David Trinidad, Matthew Zapruder–just to name a few who have given me invaluable feedback on my work and supported me in my writing.

I think I read a lot of books that are really thinly veiled “how to” live books and these help me write. I read memoirs and parenting books and cook books.

5. Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

Poets should dispel that myth if they’re trying to “sell” inaccessible poetry. Some poetry is very difficult and some readers like difficult work. I think the greater issue is that some poets eschew and deride poetry that is accessible. And, there is poetry that is accessible and wonderful. Kids usually like poetry. Then elementary and high school teachers (some of them) mess it up. Thank goodness my son thinks the teacher who is trying to ram her very specific interpretation of Edgar Allen Poe down the throats of all the 6th graders is dumb. He likes the poems and seems to mostly feel sorry for the teacher. So do I.

The music of Luna (Dean Warham and Britta Phillips) was the sound track to Museum of Accidents but otherwise I really don’t like listening to music when I write. I find it completely distracting. I love to listen to talk radio when I do almost anything, but for writing, I need quiet. I have a bad habit of eating while I write. I’m trying to stop doing that.

7. How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

I go through phases of more or less healthy and fit. Recently I realized I’d gained more weight that I liked. I’ve been running regularly and lifting free weights and watching what I eat. It’s boring and time consuming and important. Last year I ran a half-marathon, which was a huge accomplishment for me. I’d love to do that again one day but don’t have time for the training.

8. Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?

I really love coffee but have had to stop drinking it all together. I have really debilitating insomnia and the caffeine makes it worse. I feel really sorry for myself about giving up coffee. I’m sitting here mentally smelling it and just feeling sad.

9. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

My study is a total mess. Right now, on my desk I’ve got piles and piles of stuff: broken action figures, books, this stupid “make a plate kit” I’ve been meaning to send away for months, old magazines, student poems, drafts of my own poems, empty teacups, sticker sheets, overdue bills and contracts–oh look! Superman and Batman are locked in a tawdry embrace! Anyway, you get the picture. It’s chaos. I like the idea of a clean, peaceful desk but it only ever lasts a day or two.

10. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

I’m working on a new collection of poems called The Pedestrians. I’m writing one sentence a day on my blog. I’m blogging for the poetry foundation am about to start an essay about the birth of my son for an anthology on birth stories. I have a half-finished picture book and two finished but unpublished picture book manuscripts. I have the first three pages of a YA book, story, something that I’d like to work on. And I have another idea for a long series of poems that is too new to talk about.

Check out some of her poetry or prose.

Stephen Cushman: An Interview With Serena M. Agusto-Cox

Serena — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 05:00:15 +0000

Poet Stephen Cushman

1. How would you introduce yourself to a crowded room eager to hang on your every word? Are you just a poet? What else should people know about you?

People should know I play a mean game of Frisbee golf, am fluent in Maineglish (ayuh), am told I can make anything naughty with the lift of one eyebrow, and am the go-to person for old school drinking songs.

If I am elected Miss America, I vow to work for world peace, mostly on the written page, although I’m happy to perform or do spoken word, if I can wear my overalls. Poetry is 4300 years old; if it could help humanity become more tolerant and collaborative, it would have done so by now. And perhaps it has. Who knows? If it weren’t for poetry, we might be even worse than we are.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

mountains, Bible, ocean, foreign languages, other cultures, ocean, meditation, sky, high vantage points, ocean, America, good champagne, the calendar, history, ocean, Time, garlic, beauty, ocean, travel, guitar solos, did I mention ocean?

My inspirational/how-to manuals: Hendrix (any album; also Hendricks, the gin), Thoreau, Cranmer, Whitman, the mountain, world travel, the ocean.

5. Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

Emerson says, “let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not.” Speak true.

From the room where I write, the music is silence. Or the hawk, the phoebe, a cow lowing in the pasture across the way, maybe the neighbor’s tractor. The dog panting to go out.

7. In terms of friendships, have your friendships changed since you began focusing on writing? Are there more writers among your friends or have your relationships remained the same?

As a writer I fly least turbulently below the radar. Luckily, therefore, my friendships are not related to or dependent on my writing life.

8. How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

I’m currently co-editing the new edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, so hoisting the page proofs of that around keep me pretty buff.

9. Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?

If love be the food of music, play on. And on.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

A laundry-room-size patch containing card table, laptop, photos and posters of family and teachers, full floor-to-ceiling books, two big crank-out windows, and dictionary is ideal.

11. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, essay on the meeting of Lincoln and Emerson in February 1862, always new poems. Did I mention world peace?

Thanks to Stephen for answering my questions. Please do check out a sample of his work below, which was published by 32 Poems:

Supposing Him to Be the Gardener

Supposing this to be the sun
And this to be the rain,
Supposing clouds to be caviar
And wind to be champagne,
How can one tell divinity
From a tree turned red
Or Do not hold me from what else
Its leaves might well have said?

Casey Thayer: Interview with Serena M. Agusto-Cox

Serena — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 05:00:26 +0000

Poet Casey Thayer

1. How would you introduce yourself to a crowded room eager to hang on your every word? Are you just a poet, what else should people know about you?

I hesitate to identify myself as a poet, having heard too often the response, “Oh, can you recite a poem for us?” Or the reply, “My daughter writes poems too.” I feel the same hesitancy I imagine comedians might experience when faced with this question: if we admit our interest in poetry or comedy, we’ll be asked to prove it, either that, or our efforts will be simplified as something anyone can do. It’s slightly irksome because while I encourage everyone to write, I have difficulty with those who equate my dedication to writing with those who sit down and write poems in their journals. There’s nothing wrong with journal writing, certainly, but I become frustrated with the common misconception that poets don’t work (and often work hard) on their craft.

Instead, I’d call myself a teacher. For the past five days, I’ve taken part in the marches around the capitol in Madison over our governor’s bogus budget repair bill, holding a sign that reads, “Proud to be a teacher.” That’s how I’d like to be remembered and identified, as a teacher who chose a life of public service.

This sure is a question with very large implications, and I don’t necessarily want to dive into the print versus spoken word debate, but I will say that poetry adapts much more easily to performance than other written forms—it was, after all, historically an aural form—and I do think that spoken word can delight in ways written forms can’t. For me, however, this adaptability doesn’t necessarily mean that poetry is better or more accessible when performed. Personally, when I hear a poem in performance that catches my ear, I need to see it on the page. This could very well be a shortcoming in my ability to stay attentive or process spoken poetry, but I can’t escape the page. The page, that tactile experience of holding a book, allows me to sit with the work, to mull it over at my own pace. That reflection time is what initially drew me to poetry. I don’t find this same satisfaction with spoken word poetry.

At the same time, it might be pointless to evaluate them by the same measure: I classify them as different forms that simply strike different chords. If I’m trying to engage young readers, I forego Ashbery for Taylor Mali. If I’m curling up on my couch, I reach for Sandra Beasley’s new collection instead of queuing up Youtube clips of Saul Williams. I see performance poetry as walking a middle ground between print poetry and hip-hop freestyle and improvisation. It satisfies my need to be engaged visuals and audibly, but it doesn’t replace my desire to see poetry on the page.

To answer your second question, one of the arts’ most-enduring benefits is its ability to foster tolerance, to expand one’s perspectives, and to encourage reflection and non-linear thinking. We hear the ignorance and apathy of younger generations continually bemoaned, but there perhaps has never been a time in our history where more younger people can engage with art: computer programs have opened the door to self-recorded CDs, design programs to DIY chapbooks, Youtube to greater recognition for independent films, the internet to vloggers and the rise of Justin Bieber. As for bringing artists together, I think mash-ups and the popularity of bands like The Hood Internet and GirlTalk (among many other groups) illustrate that we’re hungry for collaboration.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

I move through obsessions like Pam Anderson moves through husbands. Before I bought my current vehicle, I became obsessed with reading up on car buying tips. That died out to a short-lived obsession with meditation that died out to a fascination with Catholic sainthood that died out with an interest in tea. Some might call me directionless, but I’d call myself insatiable. In my poetry, I seem obsessed with the American southwest, although I’ve never visited and only recently began working my way through Clint Eastwood’s back catalog. I’m obsessed with the sound of words, rhyme, and repetition. I seem obsessed with the sonnet, or at least, poems that clam up after 14 lines. I am cursed by my lack of self-discipline and singular focus to have only a surface and superficial understanding of a wide-range of subjects. I can change your air filter, but I can’t find your spark plug. I can tune your guitar, but I can’t fingerpick.

For me, inspiration comes less from any rhetorical text or how-to manual and more from collections of poetry, though I did find Triggering Town very influential in forming my aesthetic and Bird by Bird served as a good introduction to the world of writing. When I feel directionless, I will pick up a collection of poems, searching for techniques I can steal. I don’t feel any of Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence.” Jude Nutter’s Pictures of the Afterlife is especially inspirational, as is Cecily Parks’ Field Folly Snow. Jack Gilbert never fails to inspire, and Sandra Beasley’s work (especially her recent collection I Was the Jukebox) spawned so many poems that I should probably send her a bottle of wine.

As for writing groups, I have trouble joining them. It’s not that I don’t want to commit myself to the work of others or to help them improve (I am a teacher, after all). However, it’s difficult to know whether all the effort of fully giving oneself to a poem in workshop will be appreciated. One time, years back, I responded to a batch of poems sent to me by an old friend with copious commentary, suggestions, praise, and constructive criticism. I suggested readings, enclosed in the manila envelope poems, and photocopies from essays. I never heard back. It was such a deflating process, to give so much of myself and to have that dedication ignored, that perhaps I’ve been guarding myself from that disappointment ever since.

5. Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

Poets, just like any writers or communicators, have an obligation to their readers. Unless a poet has developed her craft, obscuration frequently reads as a lack of control. Young poets (and here I’m talking more about undergraduate writers than young professional writers) too often hide behind the John Ashbery defense—if he doesn’t make sense, I don’t have to. He even says in his book Other Traditions: “Unfortunately, I’m not very good at ‘explaining’ my work… I am unable to do so because I feel that my poetry is the explanation. The explanation of what? Of my thought, whatever that is. As I see it, my thought is both poetry and the attempt to explain that poetry; the two cannot be disentangled.” I find that young writers point to this same defense, though Ashbery has already staked that territory. Young poets need to find their own.

All that said, although there are examples of unnecessary obscuration in poetry, this cry of elitist and inaccessibility is often not due to faults in poems but in the inability or unwillingness of readers to engage with poetry. I do think that poets should and should be able to demand more of their readers. Readers simply are underdeveloped critically; they have not been given the tools to appreciate poetry. The way to solve this, in my opinion, is to stress the teaching of poetry by those who know how to crack open a poem for students. In my creative writing courses, I have student boldly proclaim their hatred for poetry, yet when I take them slowly through “To His Coy Mistress,” they sit amazed that way back in the 17th century, boys were trying to pull the same tricks they do now: “C’mon, we’ll be dead soon, so let’s quick have some sex.” The key is to take poetry slowly, to analyze and fully understand each line before moving on to the next. With the short-attention spans bred by twitter, aggregating blogs, etc., teachers may find it very difficult to slow students down. But this meticulousness is necessary in understanding and cultivating an appreciation of poetry.

Unfortunately, I have never been able to listen to music when I write. Either I end up tuning out the music to the point where it becomes white noise (and thus pointless) or I focus on the music and neglect my work. When I painted, I listened to Beck’s Mutations non-stop, and when I grade student papers, I find that the soundtrack to The Darjeeling Limited, Bon Iver, and S. Carey make good companions. If I did have a top five list, it might look like this: “Separate the People” by Mates of State, “Furr” by Blitzen Trapper, “Heart of My Own” by Basia Bulat, “The Curse” by Josh Ritter, and “Jolene” by Dolly Parton. Any would make good company for a late-night writing session, preferably along with a cup of strong coffee.

7. In terms of friendships, have your friendships changed since you began focusing on writing? Are there more writers among your friends or have your relationships remained the same?

Writing and isolation seem to be lovers or at least good friends. For me, they come as a pair, and I must court both if I want to produce poems I can live with. Because of this, I keep my circle of friends pretty small and tight. I’ve never bought into the idea that my worth is tied to the number of friends I have, though I understand why others enjoy the company of a big group of friends, and I don’t fault them for it. Instead of a large group of friends, I prefer to seek out a few people who understand me and me them, who are committed to me and me to them. Life’s too short to waste on uneven friendships or lifeless conversations over a bottle of beer at the local tavern. That, and since I’m married to my best friend, I don’t have to go far for good company.

I have found that it is dangerous to have too many poets as friends. They are an unstable and unreliable lot. I did enjoy graduate school for all the deep, melodramatic conversations about the nature of the writing-process (and all the beer), and I do find it refreshing when I can talk with someone who can elucidate a position on Bob Hickok. Sometimes, though, friends can provide a good escape from writing. Plus, the seemingly good-natured questions about my work—“Did you hear back from the Walt Whitman book prize, yet?” or “Whatever happened to the manuscript you sent to the Paris Review”—seem to have darker implications when I get them from poet friends.

8. How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

Just like a doctor who reads medical journals to stay current on new practices and treatments, I think it’s important for poets to keep a few toes in the current of contemporary poetry, which I try to do by reading literary journals and blogs. Nearly all of my work has been inspired by a line, image, title, etc. of something I’ve read. Beyond that, I try to write daily. I’m not always successful in this.

9. Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?

My palate tends toward the plain and flavorless: beans and rice, steamed broccoli, tortilla chips. As a special treat, I enjoy aged cheeses, cheese curds, and string cheese. Anything dairy. I am a Wisconsinite, after all. Inevitably, one night a week, my wife and I will be too tired to cook, so we’ll throw in a pizza. Some Fridays, we’ll head up to a local Irish pub across from the capitol in Madison to get fish and chips. I’m a little concerned about how regimented I’m becoming in my eating habits. I fear I’ll turn into my grandfather who schedules his weeks around where he’s eating. I’d like to have exotic tastes and be able to tell good caviar from bad, but I simply lack any real interest in food.

Writer’s block seems to set in whenever I complete something: a manuscript, a sequence, heck, even a poem. I try to stay involved in writing by using those down times to send out work. Even compiling manuscripts, licking stamps makes me feel active. I scour old sheets of notes for sparks and try a variety of “exercises” to spur on new work. I allow myself to fail. Finally, I use that time to recharge my stores by reading. It’s the best cure to writer’s block I’ve found.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

Currently, I am nomadic in where I write, not having space in my cramped Madison apartment for a proper writing environment. My office at UW-Rock County has nurtured the drafts of some keepers along with the medical and law school libraries on the UW-Madison campus. A nicked up, rickety old table in the back of Fair Trade Coffeehouse on State St. has given birth to a few poems. I have scribbled away in the various hidden corners of UW-Madison’s student union and hardback booths of the Rathskeller. I write best on a big table that’s not overly cluttered so that I can spread out, a place close to a stack of poetry books to which I often retreat whenever I hit a snag, someplace quiet, and finally, a place with good lighting and a view of something: sailboats dotting Lake Mendota or the sweeping arc of an old cement building. UW-Madison’s law library has a wall of windows that look out on Bascom Hill; it’s a nice place for absent staring and the distraction that is necessary for any sustained poetry writing.

11. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

Now that I have started sending out my first book manuscript, I have allowed myself to consider beginning a second. I have a number of poetic sequences I’d like to develop into book-length manuscripts, though I know many of the sequences will die before they read that point due to the changing winds of my obsessions. I have a series of apocalypse poems (with an underlying zombie theme) that I’d like to keep developing and a sonnet sequence focusing on “minor gods” (“the silent god,” “the invisible god,” etc.) that I hope turns into something. Also, I’ve been eyeing a temporary jump into prose. I have a creative non-fiction piece about my short time as a night shift parking officer in the works and a few short fiction ideas sketched out.

Finally, I’d like to get more into collaborative writing. I just started a project writing with a friend of mine, Eric Smith, where we take turns trading lines for a bunch of ghazals. Eventually, we hope to turn the ghazals into something cohesive, but for now, it’s been exciting to post a half-finished couplet and wait to see what Eric will add.

Thanks to Casey for answering my questions. Please do check out a sample of his work below:

Aubade

Leaving Hotel Skandia in the grey dawn’s growl

of car horns and red light district litanies—

Oh little boy, you run an ache through my bones.

We trade our hands for luggage, haul off

what I’m carrying home: a bag of salt licorice,

a list of useless Danish words—My ham

is frozen and Spot me. I have nothing

for moments when grief comes heavily

like a mouthful of peanut butter and sticks

in my throat the whole way down.

I choke out an order for two train tickets,

lights flicking off at Tivoli, the terminal

hunkering over us as the clock tower

calls out the hour and keeps on counting.

When I tell you, The stars like your hipbones

shine, and, If you sing, you mold me like

a pastry in my crude translation, I misspeak.

I mean to say that love is hard when we

have only our hands to help. The train car

filled with passengers asleep on one another,

winds its way through tunnels to the airport.

The morning nearer now, we press our lips

together. Where we open, we close.

The city like a book covered in words.

Hope Snyder: An Interview with Serena M. Agusto-Cox

Serena — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 05:00:27 +0000

Poet Hope Snyder

1. How would you introduce yourself to a crowded room eager to hang on your every word? Are you just a poet, what else should people know about you?

I would say I’m a poet, a translator, and the founder and director of the Sotto Voce Poetry Festival.

I believe that the power of a poem begins with the poem on the page. The poem has to work on the page before it works on the stage. That said, I also think that reading a poem in front of an audience is a crucial experience for both poet and public. It is important for the poet, if she chooses to read her own work, to read as well as possible. I believe poetry and theater go well together. In my opinion, writing can create a dialogue between writer and reader, a dialogue that could lead to understanding, and, eventually, to tolerance. Think of all the novels and poems that have helped us appreciate different cultures, while at the same time capturing a universal experience.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

I am obsessed with my desire to have people recognize the importance of poetry in our lives and to value its power. This is what led me to found the Sotto Voce Poetry Festival and what motivated me to organize it for the past seven years.

I do not belong to any writing groups, but I have attended workshops at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Gettysburg Review’s Conference for Writers, and the Latino Writers’ Conference in New Mexico. Workshops at Gettysburg and Bread Loaf were helpful. I’ve also taken a couple of workshops with Stanley Plumly at The Writers’ Center in Bethesda. These were very beneficial.

5. Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

I believe that poetry has something to offer everyone. Poetry is about language and about the human experience. Just as there are many different languages and unique human beings, there also are different styles of poetry that appeal to different readers. A reader can choose the poetry that he or she prefers. In my opinion, poets have an obligation to speak the truth as they see it. The reader may or may not understand the poet’s message, but that is true of all other forms of art. In my opinion, the purpose of poetry, like the purpose of all art, is to express through word or image what matters to the artist. The reader/viewer, brings his or her own experience to the work of art and a dialogue is created. If, as a poet, you want to write poems that only you will understand and if you do not feel the need to be read or understood by others, that is your choice.

Even though I think I should listen to music while I’m writing, I don’t always do it. That is something I would like to change. I think music can be very helpful while writing. In the past, I’ve listened to classical, Latin American, Spanish, and Italian music. Among my favorites, Beethoven’s 7th symphony, a Spanish singer named Rosana, the sound track for the film “Frida.”

7. In terms of friendships, have your friendships changed since you began focusing on writing? Are there more writers among your friends or have your relationships remained the same?

Yes, my friendships have definitely changed since I began focusing on my writing. Most of my current friends are poets, fiction writers, and editors. It is comforting to know that there is a community of writers out there that understands and appreciates what I’m trying to do.

8. How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

I try to walk or engage in some sort of exercise every day. Most days I walk 30 to 40 minutes. This year I joined a gym. I’m seriously considering hiring a personal trainer.

9. Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?

I love pasta, most Italian food, good salads, Thai food, and red wine. Coffee in the mornings is very helpful.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

At present I have two writing spaces, one at home, and a tiny office in town. My study at home is very pleasant, but it’s overcrowded with papers and books. That’s a distraction. Also, I have a hard time detaching from my home environment when I write there. The telephone rings, people stop by, and I find it difficult to get back to my work. I don’t know how other writers feel about this, but it has been my experience that friends and family who are not writers do not understand or respect the fact that writers need time and freedom in order to write. My office is quite small and does not have a bathroom, but when I do make it there, I can work for a couple of hours without interruptions. I’m still trying to find the perfect writing space, though I realize that I’m fortunate as it is.

11. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

At present, I’m working on a poetry manuscript titled OLD LIES AND NEW PREDICTIONS. I have also started translating the poetry of a Cuban writer named Wendy Guerra. I’m taking a sabbatical from the poetry festival in order to assess it and to decide what direction I would like to take it in the future.

Thanks to Hope for answering my questions. Please do check out a sample of her work below:

In The Changing Light

At first he believed she would be back, and that he would open the door.

In the meantime, he kept his job, adopted a dog without a tail,

soaked in the hot tub, and lounged on the couch they had bought

on sale. “Custom made,” the sales woman had explained

stroking the velvet. In the afternoon light, it shimmered

like silver. After four years, the other woman

has learned to cook rosemary chicken and threatens

to fill his days and his bed. She goes through the house,

gathers sweaters, pictures, and paintings. Now there will be

room for her pills and her make-up. With a drink and Barry White

on the stereo, he rests on the couch in the changing light. In his hand,

the pearl earring he found while re-arranging the cushions last night.

–Published in The Gettysburg Review (Summer, 2009)

Charles Jensen: An Interview With Serena M. Agusto-Cox

Serena — Wed, 25 May 2011 05:00:33 +0000

Poet Charles Jensen

1. How would you introduce yourself to a crowded room eager to hang on your every word? Are you just a poet, what else should people know about you?

Along with writing poetry, I am an off-and-on arts administrator, an editor for a small press, a writing teacher, managing editor for a sporadic online literary journal, an arts advocate on the local and national level, and a consultant to small arts organizations. I wear a lot of hats, but I don’t necessarily consider them mutually exclusive from being a poet. Being a poet makes me a more meaningful arts advocate in some ways–I can speak to the power of writers in the schools, for example.

I don’t like the limiting writing into discrete genres that are then put into opposition to each other. I think writing is most effective, most meaningful, when it cribs from many genres and traditions at once. To touch on the next part of your question, one book that had a profound effect on me and my writing was Claudia Rankine‘s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, which explores toxic culture, grief, and racism in America–but from a very personal, subjective perspective. If you’ve ever seen her read/perform from that work, you know it’s a multimedia experience with video, with her voice adding a significant layer of meaning to the work. How we can divide those impulses into camps? I prefer to look at the tools available to me and then choose which ones are essential to whatever project I’m completing.

I have written a lot of work about the American experience of gay people, partly in an effort to establish some understanding of difference. Is it effective? I don’t know. But it was work I felt called to do. On the flipside, not all writers need to take on this kind of burden–there are many stories to be told, many ways to tell them.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

I’m pretty sure none of them are secrets. I love some aspects of “low” culture like trash pop music. I aspire to find ways to sew that into my work as a poet somehow. I am also really connected to film, both as a narrative art and as a form. Physical aspects of film are closely related to the work of poetry for me. I give extensive thought to sequencing, montage, collage, and narrative. Any two things placed in juxtaposition create a narrative. There’s a great story of the Kuleshov Effect, wherein an audience’s construction of narrative changes when the same photo of a person (mostly expressionless) is interspersed with a shot of soup or a shot of a baby, for instance. In the soup narrative, the audience describes the man as looking hungry. In the baby narrative, he looks happy. That effect of context is something I carry with me–how do individual poems, individual lines, individual images speak to each other?

I think it’s hard to find good poetry manuals because so many of them use floofy platitudes to describe the work: “The poet is the person who hears the elephants coming and makes the graves!” “The poet must plug in the lamp and make it sing!” Etc. That’s why I think it’s more effective to look further, at other art forms. The language of design–line, color, etc.–were very instructive to me in thinking about the physical presence of a poem on the page. Film theory, as I alluded to above, was important too–ideas of subjectivity, the lens/the eye/the I, “suture” (editing theory)…

I think everyone should read “Ron Carlson Writes a Story” by Ron Carlson. He is brilliant and his enthusiasm for writing is entirely palpable in this how-to “manual” that deconstructs his writing of his story “The Governor’s Ball.”

5. Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

Poetry itself is none of those things. It is the attitude of the reader that determines what poetry is. The only way to dispel the myth is for people to encounter poetry on their own. I always liken it to television. If you had never seen television in your entire life and then one day turned it on, only to see Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, you might say, “Gosh, I hate television.” But most of us realize that television is a multi-dimensional form with various strategies aimed at different audiences. If you watch television long enough, you will find something that speaks to you. This is true, too, of poetry. But because the poetry world has a reputation of being closed, or because it is taught in high school as a “symbolic” art practiced by dead white people, it loses a lot of its contemporary allure. I think now, more than ever, poetry strives to be egalitarian in a lot of ways–people just need to look.

I almost never listen to music when I write. I have basically no routines or rituals, either. There is a great TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert in which she describes how the poet Ruth Stone explained her inspiration to write, that she could hear it coming through the fields like a train rushing at her, and she would run into the house and grab paper and a pen to get it down before it passed. That is similar to my experience of writing. It’s not as loud or as obvious as a train, but I am sensitive to a change in the way my interior monologue sounds, and that moment is the beginning of a poem. If I write it down, I am generally rewarded with a complete poem. If the moment passes, it can’t be recaptured (not always a bad thing, in my mind, as many of those I do catch end up in the “circular file” anyway). I do tend to revise poems for a very long time, though–often for years, and I often work best on revision once the work has been placed in the greater context of a full manuscript.

8. How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

I find teaching is an essential way to stay engaged with writing on a level that is very enriching for me. For example, I confessed to a student recently, “I just don’t understand why people write in syllabics.” Four days later, I was experimenting with syllabics in a new poem. I said the same thing in a workshop but about iambic meter, and for three months wrote nearly every poem with an iambic meter–and really enjoyed it! In a lot of ways, teaching forces me to embrace and/or interrogate my own assumptions about poetry as I strive to encourage my students to make their own decisions and determinations. And oftentimes, our discussions help me see work in new ways, and for that I’m very grateful.

9. Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?

I don’t get writer’s block. If I seem less inspired to write poetry, it is my creative brain telling me it is either time to revise old work or read books. Reading generally prompts me to write, and so does going to art museums (the Portrait Gallery is one of my favorites).

I cook dinner almost every night, which I suppose might be one of my few rituals. I have really come to enjoy it after years of feeling at sea or underprepared to complete new recipes. It has become a meditative time for me, and also a time when I become aware of the “physical making” of something, the hands-on work of bringing together various ingredients to develop flavors. I try to connect this to the practice of writing.

I also work out five days a week–a combination of yoga, cardio, and weightlifting. It’s a gift to myself, about an hour a day when my brain gets to check out while my body does the–forgive the pun–heavy lifting. That, too, is part of my writing practice. While my body exercises, I train my brain to associate and go off on its own to wherever it lands.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

It is always a total disaster–I would change that! My apartment is very small and my desk is very big–about 30% of my living room. The window is behind me. The room gets almost no natural light. It is absolutely not my ideal writing space. In Phoenix, I had a loft apartment with 20′ ceilings, 17 feet of which were windows. My desk sat up in the loft area, overlooking the living room, facing all the windows and light. That was an amazing place to write. I miss it every day.

11. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

I have a lot going on! I’m putting the finishing touches on a new manuscript of poems and have been writing a few kinds of fiction–a novel for adults, a YA novel, and I recently finished a YA short story that will appear in an anthology for GLBT teenagers. I’m also very slowly writing new poems, but I feel like now would be a better time for me to read, so I have a big pile of books all ready to go!

Thanks to Charles for answering my questions. Please do check out a sample of his work below:

IT WAS OCTOBER
–for Matthew Shepard

I was love when I entered the bar
shivering in my thin t-shirt and ripped jeans
and I was love when I left that place, tugged along at the wrist
as though tied, with a man I did not know.

I was love there in the morning
when our sour kisses bore the peat of rotten leaves,
fallen October leaves. And it was love that we kissed anyway, not knowing each other’s names.

I was love in that bed
and I was love in the hall and down the stairs and into the freezing rain.

I was love with hands punched deep
into the pockets of a coat.
I was love coated in frozen rain.

Back home, I was love stripped of the cigarette-stung shirt, love pulling the stiff jeans from my legs.
I dried my hair and I was love.

It was October. What did I know of love that year,
shuddering in my nervous skin. Miles away, the boy was lashed to a fence and shivering.

Where that place turned red and the ground soaked through
with what he was, I was love.

What did I know of love then
but that it wasn’t enough.

Kathleen Winter: An Interview With Serena M. Agusto-Cox

Serena — Wed, 04 May 2011 05:00:38 +0000

Poet Kathleen Winter

1. How would you introduce yourself to a crowded room eager to hang on your every word? Are you just a poet, what else should people know about you?

I love living in the country, being outdoors. After growing up in Texas, I shipped out to Massachusetts after college, then to California and lately to Arizona to get an MFA at Arizona State University. My favorite job ever was night-shift in a Brookline bookstore, working with lots of other writers. I love the Pacific. I’m not religious; yoga is about as spiritual as I get. I’ve worked as a baker, tech editor, lawyer and writing teacher. I’m a sloooow reader. The last time I had a TV was in 1989–can’t take that stuff. Also, I’m looking for a teaching job! Within two hours drive of Glen Ellen, California.

Poems can bring us into other people’s brains, so poetry can help enhance our empathy, tolerance, interest and understanding by helping us realize how much we have in common with the strangers who surround us. Also, reading poems can connect us to writers from the past, giving us a sense how they were similar mentally, although they lived hundreds or thousands of years before us and probably on different continents. That realization can make us more aware of ourselves as part of the project of the species, and the species and life on Earth as a continuum, and therefore, with any luck, make us more interested in acting in ways that will help folks in the future.

As far as modes of delivering poetry, what I’m most familiar with and practice is the written version, or the written version read aloud in a fairly non-performative way. But I heard Patricia Smith recite her poems in a performative style a few years ago and she was terrific, so maybe I need to get out more. I just heard singer and guitarist Michael Zapruder (Matthew’s brother) this month at Gulf Coast’s off-site AWP event, performing poems by some of the Wave Books poets, and I loved that show.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

I’m obsessed with swimming, dogs, reading and writing. Also with trying to find, enhance, extend, maintain, and understand fluidity and human interconnections. Also, with getting rid of every single billboard in California, starting first with the ones on highways. (We’ll start there and then move east across the country.) Also, frozen yogurt and Tarkovsky movies.

I’m a junkie for school, so I’ve loved being in an MFA program, and all the workshops, classes, readings, conversations that involves. Before going back to school I was in several workshops with poets in Sonoma County, Calif., and at Esalen Institute at Big Sur. Those experiences helped keep poetry at the forefront while I was working as a lawyer.

The essays in Stephen Dobyns‘ collection “Best Words Best Order” and Jane Hirshfield’s “Nine Gates” have helped me to better understand what I want to accomplish technically, and how to go after it. Maybe more importantly, I find that reading good non-fiction can inspire me to immediately want to write. Donald Hall’s anthology of essays by poets, “Claims for Poetry” is useful but frustrating, because Hall includes far too few women poets and far too few poets of color.

5. Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

Since poetry is joy, knowledge, power, beauty, news (and entertainment), I think helping more people find poetry–either to make it themselves and/or to enjoy reading and hearing poems–is an important mission for poets. But that doesn’t mean we have to or should write in any certain way. I guess volunteering is the means. Making yourself available in communities where poetry doesn’t abound yet.

I can’t listen to music while I write or edit poems–it interferes with my ability to compose and to hear the rhythms, sound qualities of the words. If I’m reading, I prefer music without words, especially jazz, baroque, or ambient music. Favorites are the Impulse recording of Duke Ellington & John Coltrane, the “Passages” CD by Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass, and anything connected with Jordi Saval.

7. In terms of friendships, have your friendships changed since you began focusing on writing? Are there more writers among your friends or have your relationships remained the same?

Many more writers now. ! Halleluja !

8. How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

I swim, walk a dog, and try to eat green things in between the tortillas.

9. Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?

I write when I’m seized by the energy of inspiration. For me, “inspiration” generally means intriguing words, sounds or phrases that came to mind (lots of times this happens when I’m trying to go to sleep, or have woken up in the middle of the night, or first thing in the morning). So I think I start lots of times with the music of language. A bit less frequently, an image or idea or possible “subject matter” will occur to me and get me started. Sometimes running or swimming will kick me into the writing zone. Food usually doesn’t work (too distracting!)

I’m not so great about overcoming writer’s block . . . I guess I just wait it out, in hope and faith that the poems will start again. I’ve noticed over years of writing that my periods of writing are very cyclical: weeks or months of intense creativity, followed by a fallow time. So far, thankfully, the words have always come back, eventually.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

Now, while I’m finishing up the last semester of the MFA program in Tempe, I write in a rented room in a house that’s two states to the east of the house in California where my partner and dog live. So the ideal writing space is back in Glen Ellen with Finnegan lounging next to me in the ratty dog bed. My desk right now is two filing cabinets with a board across them; I’m looking at drywall. Back home I often write in bed, and look out through the windows at douglas firs, toyon, and madrone trees.

11. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

I’m trying to publish my first full book manuscript, “Nostalgia for the Criminal Past,” which is free verse lyrics with a few prose poems mixed in, and maybe four or five poems (loosely) written in form. The second book I’m working on now has a double crown of sonnets and then a lot of experimental (at least for me) style poems, so I’m trying to figure out if all these poems can live together in one book.

Thanks to Kathleen for answering my questions. Please check out her sample poem:

Wrong Sonnet: Multiplicity

My husband asks Why don’t you write a poem
about why you like Virginia Woolf when
nobody else does.
The excruciating detail of a marriage
is what I like, I say, the drifting
in and out of Clarissa’s mind and into Peter’s,
how they notice the flow of London traffic
as a living animal, how they feel
themselves distributed in sub-atomic
bits into each other and over the city’s squares
and towers, out into the hedgerows, the waves.
But Clarissa wasn’t married to Peter
he would say, if he’d read it, she was
married to Richard. And I’d say
maybe she was, maybe she was.

–Previously published in The New Republic.

Jeffery L. Bahr: An Interview With Serena M. Agusto-Cox

Serena — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 05:00:02 +0000

Poet Jeffery L. Bahr

1. How would you introduce yourself to a crowded room eager to hang on your every word? Are you just a poet, what else should people know about you?

I have been in love with computing for almost 45 years, back to a time when I could go to a large social gathering of 1000 people and be the only one involved with computers. I’ve studied every facet of computer science, been a professor and been in the industry all my adult life. I’ve only written poetry the last 12 years. I think there is tension in my poetry between the analytical and the mysterious.

I was never all that enamored of spoken verse. I supposed I’d rather hear a poem in my head with my own cadence and emphases. There are exceptions I can think of, however. I love hearing Plath readings of her own work.

As for writing helping humanity: I supposed it depends upon what is written and read, but good writing or informative writing helps anyone with the courage to listen and be changed.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

The only thing I’ve ever truly been obsessed about were a few women in my life.

I have a bookshelf filled with books on writing poetry (e.g., Triggering Town (Hugo), The Poet’s Companion (Addonizio), . . .), but the most valuable experience that actually made me a better poet was my years of running and participating in online poetry boards, including Alsop Review, QED, and others. I got lots of feedback when I needed it, and in return learned how to critique poems, and how to appreciate disparate styles.

5. Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

Poetry can be quite excellent and still span a very wide range of aesthetics. Some of those aesthetics take time to understand or acquire a taste for, and some are more readily accessible. For example, I think Bob Hicok, G. C. Waldrep, and Mary Jo Bang are terrific poets, but a “lay person” is probably going to connect more quickly with one of Bob’s poems. I don’t think there’s anything you can do about this, and the same phenomenon takes place everywhere in the arts (music, visual art, sculpture, . . . ).

I can’t do anything while listening to music more difficult than balancing my checkbook. The only rule I used to have was “write first drafts inebriated, then edit while sober”, but now I just write poems when I feel like it. I also used to write with pen on paper and type it all later, but increasingly, I just compose while in Microsoft Word.

7. In terms of friendships, have your friendships changed since you began focusing on writing? Are there more writers among your friends or have your relationships remained the same?

I have dozens of friends, some very close, whom I met through poetry. I probably know of or have emailed or blog-commented to/for/with another hundred poet buddies. Some of my poet friends I’ve known longer than a decade, chatted on the phone many times, and still not yet met in person. Some I’ve met finally at AWP or while traveling near their home town. These days, I keep in touch with email, Facebook, and my weblog (www.whimsyspeaks.com) , which many of my poet friends read to keep in touch. It is strange because in my personal and professional life, I have a completely different set of friends with completely different world-views and personalities. Some are even, God forbid, Republicans.

8. How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

Well, I quit smoking and joined the Y. As a working software engineer, I’m in front of a monitor a lot (like 60+ hours a week), so I’m not worried by the sedentary nature of writing, I need a way get out of my chair periodically anyway (like taking a 15 minute break on my treadmill).

9. Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?

I have over 100 cookbooks and like to cook, so it’s hard to get down to one favorite food, but I can probably get the number down to two dozen (see Whimsy’s Cookbook on my weblog). When I have poet’s block, I try to figure out some new source of inspiration, like an art or history book I haven’t read.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

Like a lot of poet, ideas come unbidden at all times. I once wrote a poem about Lucie Brock-Broido meeting Steven Segal at a museum because I was reading LBB when Under Siege came on. I write very quickly and don’t edit a lot, so a poem can come from anywhere and at any time really. Anyway, I suppose what I was getting around to was: I don’t have a writing space.

11. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

I have finished a manuscript of poetry that I think represents the arc of my life in the last decade. I will tinker with it and submit it to lots of contests and cross my fingers.

Thanks to Jeffery for answering my questions. Please check out his sample poem:

Walking Reliquary

Primitive, and so, face
of stromatolite, glottal-stop
cilia, pre-Cambrian gut.

Derivative, and so, grackle’s
nest mate, jackal’s familiar.
Nose like a nocked arrow,
eyes like a lemur’s, only lonelier.

Fatuous, and so, bag of bones,
old bones, some close to broken,
others opposable. Scot organs
and pipes, blood of a Choctaw,
stretched skin of a Norse war drum.

Inattentive, and so, collapse
at the waterhole, hair growing
gray like the seat
of a prayer bench.

Ebullient, and so, grief
of a treed raccoon,
arms like a starfish. Grin
like the wolves
at a timberline.

Acquisitive, and so, Isles
of Langerhorn, rings
of wild cypress, rings
of dead Popes.

Transitory, and so, brain
of an ocelot, brain
of a cockatoo,
mind of a lilac.

Heretical, and so, postprandial
half-life, quarterstaffs
for thighs, three-fourths
of a pumpkin’s DNA.

Incorruptible, and so, knuckles
like gambling stones, shroud
of a leper, eggs like a fossil find.

Redeemable, and so, water-logged
flesh, airborne ash, sedimentary compression.

–The title is taken from a line in G. C. Waldrep’s “Confessions of the Mouse King”

Terri Witek: An Interview With Serena M. Agusto-Cox

Serena — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 05:00:36 +0000

Poet Terri Witek

1. How would you introduce yourself to a crowded room eager to hang on your every word? Are you just a poet, what else should people know about you?

I prefer not to say anything “about” myself in such instances, especially if people really are hanging there (which is very kind of them). I’m deeply suspicious of the desire to ingratiate myself. I feel instantly tempted. Yet no one’s desires will be assuaged by any autobiographical material, no matter how sweet or how shocking it is. Oh good—I didn’t tell you/sell you/sellout. My resistance kicked in! Fortunately, the time between the two responses is shortening.

I love ephemeral creations, and as I have been working with Brazilian new media artist Cyriaco Lopes since 2005, have become more and more enamored of doing things that disappear—words and images (he uses photographs and video), sound pieces. We did some ipod voice pieces for an installation and I loved that…watching people lean into the rooms to catch fragments, etc. Of course I still love words on the page. But I really like staging “events” with him where we switch out—it feels unexpected, even when I know what’s going to happen, as I do now with the day you left, a 50-minute piece we’ve done several times. Actually, I find collaboration deeply mysterious and satisfying. I make no larger claims for it except that it puts you right into someone else’s technical stuff in a way that seems pretty magic. Is this equalizing? More that to play together in the same space feels temporary and precious. Maybe world peace would feel just like this.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

Well, I’m completely enthralled by museums, galleries, and contemporary art sites. I now go to Miami Art Basel every year. I have had some of my very best moments in the presence of great art—-sometimes even not great art that just catches me in a certain way. Fill in your own amazing experiences with such things here.

But mostly something just sorts of presents itself and then I follow it without trying to think too much. For example, last summer in Brazil I slept in a pouso in Ouro Preto where it turns out Elizabeth Bishop had stayed. I felt such a hit from that room I’m going back alone this year to try to write in the room. We’ll see what this is about—I have a few mini-stirrings, but am ignoring them, as it’s early days. But I have the plane ticket, and a folder that says “Ouro Preto.”

I love writer’s workshops. Of course I teach them, which is a great joy—both at writers’ conferences (this summer at West Chester) and at Stetson, where I run the creative writing program. But I take them whenever I can—In the last two years I’ve been in workshops led by Terese Svoboda, Brenda Hillman, and Jericho Brown. I live 40 minutes from the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Always incredibly interesting. I about died in Terese’s—didn’t realize it was a fiction workshop. I’m the one who left the drunk on the sofa in the group story. But why stop being a student?

5. Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

I think we have an obligation not to treat people like they are stupid. As a first year student once said to me after a Mark Strand reading: “okay, I don’t understand it but I get it”. Everybody “gets it.”

Can we dispel anxiety? Only by not-dumbing down. Reading only non-fiction prose (the bulk of our educational materials) may inspire a certain lack of confidence in newcomers, and I’ve taught a few undergrad classes which seemed to be poetry re-hab for smart students who’d been treated poorly elsewhere. But act like we all “get it” because at some level we do. No explanation. No apology. Last night in “Reading the Lyric” A firefighter had gotten her fire station friends (who likewise claimed to hate poetry) to find a sonnet for her online. It was about penguin/human parenting…she had us read this as a class to her 5-month old baby. Don’t tell me I couldn’t ask this class to read the Waste Land out loud without notes. Baby Samantha gets the Thunder lines.

I listen to music in the car and in the cardio room—usually only playlist rule is that it has to be in Portuguese. But my husband Rusty made a playlist of R&B hits from the year of the Civil Rights Act (1964) that Cyriaco and I used in an installation, and that’s now completely internalized.

But not when I work—I get the rhythms mixed up. My husband works with music, so I hear it in the distance during the day and evening. But I write early—before 9am—so it’s bird cacaphonics for the most part. School busses. Trash pick-up. The girl who crosses the lawn to the bus stop talking to friends on her phone.

7. In terms of friendships, have your friendships changed since you began focusing on writing? Are there more writers among your friends or have your relationships remained the same?

Well, I really am grateful for my friends who are writers and artists —as Lynn Chandhok said of AWP 2011: some days it’s “one loving face after another.” I like that we are so spread out but close via facebook, etc—have been reading Lowell’s and Bishop’s correspondence, and it sounds so familiar….and yet what a job it was for them to get letters to each other! I love the casual way we can pick up again—and rejoice at each other’s successes or feel envy. I love when someone get us to really re-think, as in Claudia Rankine’s recent call. Clan recognition. A happy thing.

8. How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

Well, I have become a strength-training addict and go to classes 4 times a week. I have walked on the beach with a friend several times a week since 1994. The early morning or late afternoon beaches are never far from my poetry—all the blue and gold musing.

9. Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?

You sound like a gym rat yourself—and maybe a CSA member! Rusty is a great cook and as one or another of our kids is usually a vegetarian he’s very resourceful and skilled. Loves doing it, thanks goodness, as I’m impatient and inattentive (bad kitchen combo). Ost of our local friends are foodies so I just let them do it. My contribution is putting fruit in different colored Pyrex bowls

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

I have the best—big chair, light coming in over a shoulder from a wall of window, and Florida outside.

11. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

Alison Granucci and I are working on a collaboration from my new book, EXIT ISLAND, due out in 2012—she dances, I read. Pretty interesting so far. Cyriaco is designing an artist’s book version of this book, and I’m thrilled—he has amazing ideas. Plus we have a piece due this summer and maybe something else in the fall.

But poetically I’m in a start-up stage again. I’ve been writing a little under the heading “social art” too early to say what these are yet. Maybe the Bishop/Ouro stuff is connected—and the hits of 1964.

Thanks to Terri for answering my questions. Please check out a sample of her work from her 2012 publication, Exit Island:

Ale’m

q. Where am I?
a. Ale’m (Beyond)
q. What am I tripping over when I try to wake up?
a. Rock underwater
a. Rock awash at any stage of the tide

Given that one eye, the forgetting one, plays it close to the vest, stays small. Given that from here no mar with its fault line horizon, no broken tide of the mouth.

No greeting but green. Fanned (given) but no veil, no dingy velvet curtain yanked to burlesque in a banana hat, Tem Banana na Banda. The ship depends on frapping line, flares, buoys, subjected people. Today’s left eye, opening first, depends on palmetto, the understory, what can be eaten without collapsing into some telenovela loop of how the bus left Arlington without her. How the man said my puppy’s in the car. A palmetto, one or more handed, fibers by the brown millions curled at the base. Green motionless wavings. The lid palpitating a little–not in memory’s exhaustive enumerations (palmetto), not in surprised-in-sand lanterns (palmetto), but in green (verde, verdade) the truth.