The Mad Poets Blog

 Frank Sherlock and the Philadelphia Poetry scene are synonymous. His work has been published widely in the small and electronic press. He is the author of Wounds in an Imaginary Nature Show, (Night Flag Press), Spring Diet of Flowers at Night, (Mooncalf Press), ISO, (furniture press) and 13, (ixnay press). Past collaborations include work with CAConrad, Jennifer Coleman and sound artist Alex Welsh. Publication of his most recent collaborative poem with Brett Evans, entitled Ready-to-Eat Individual is forthcoming in the near future. Frank has hosted a number of poetry series in the city, the latest The Night Flag Series and is a regular contributor to The Philly Sound Blog. You can visit with Frank at  http://franksherlock.blogspot.com/ 

What Others Say About Frank Sherlock:  

“I’ve been lucky enough to see Frank’s work evolve for more than a decade now, and we’ve been even luckier to publish a fair chunk of it here at ixnay press as well. His writing is equal parts body, brain, & spirit - the poems negotiate both the darkest avenues & brighest skies of our fair city, always with the keenest eye, the sharpest wit, the sexiest strut. & by the way, the man can break a line like no one else in the business.” -  Chris McCreary- co-editor, ixnay press 

 “Frank Sherlock’s poetry uses a poetic composting system, where thoughts and noticings which might evaporate or be discarded from the mind are collected and made into an area of material where perceptions and insights can grow. Like Buck Downs, he uses a kind of poetic witness protection program to relocate micro-social speech rhythms, self-reflective process descriptions and figures of speech” - Drew Gardner’s Blog 

The Interview:

Q. You recently survived a battle with meningitis and other health issues as a result of the meningitis. How are you feeling now and what effect did winning this battle have on your outlook on life?  

Well, having the opportunity to have an outlook on life has done wonders for my outlook on life. I think about it less as a battle than a surf outing. Just without the water, the temptations, the sun, or the speedo. But I did have an assless gown in the hospital, which was less comfortable and even less flattering, if you can believe that. Surfing in a hospital bed in late January takes some imagination- or in this case, sick delusions & hallucinogenic painkillers.  I remember being in the hospital bed and imagining watching myself surf on television- like the end of Basquiat, one of my favorite films. But I tried with mixed results to imagine the soundtrack differently because I thought it would change the outcome. As you might remember, things didn’t end well for Jean-Michel. But I don’t want to diminish the seriousness of the situation, because it was serious and there were a lot of friends who were very serious about helping me live. And they did. They helped me live. Battle… This is something to think about. Because I wanted/wished that I was battle-ready, but I was really just surviving- riding this out and hopefully getting through this. And I want to come back to the soundtrack of it all, because it was soundtracked. For days in the ICU, I would awaken in the middle of the night alone, and Jimmy Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross” just played over and over in my head. And I love that song, but I didn’t want it in my head. Not for this. It’s a pretty sad song, after all. I wanted something more defiant, a kind of F U anthem. I tried to get The Pogues’ “If I Should Fall from Grace with God” to stick, but it just wouldn’t. So I surrendered to the sadness and just tried to make it through. I won’t be the same when I hear that song again. I hear a snippet whenever I lay down to sleep alone.

  Q. Over the years you have become entwined in the poetry fabric of the city. Your work is enjoyed by academics and blue collar types. To what do you attribute this appeal?  

Academy, meet the street. Street, meet the academy. Talk to each other already. I would like to talk more about blue collars, but they’ve gotten so hard to find here. In the boom of Sixth Boroughness, the homeless population has doubled in the last four years. But I appreciate the notion of appealing to blue collar types because I like to talk to ghosts. My favorite poems are written w/ Slovenian philosophers and Irish bartenders. I am attracted to the genius they’re willing to share. The poems I put my name on are collaborations of encounter. I’m a thief without record, and so I continue to steal. But when they work, the poems are acts of exchange. I have never really written a poem all by myself.
America has enough specialists. Narrowing in becomes a kind of cultural compulsion that I’ve never been so much interested in. If the poems do appeal across academic/everyday folk divides, I’d like to think it’s because they write poems with me, and can hear/see traces of themselves in the speech, in the voiceprints. Maybe that’s the appeal. But a lot of people seem to like my shoes too, so you never really know. 

 Q. It’s two in the morning and you are at the door at Dirty Franks Bar and a poet enters the bar that you recognize and admire; who would that be?

You’d better be pretty special to walk into the bar at two in the morning. That’s my time to go home. So I want to say no one. Nobody’s that special. Okay, that’s a lie. My people are my people, so they’re always welcome on some level, just maybe a little less so at that hour. But there’s at least one person who can show up any time. It will never happen of course, but should she walk through that doorway into the bar & out of the bizarro world, Alice Notley is welcome anywhere I am anytime she feels like. Her combination of integrity & of course her poems are an ongoing source of inspiration for me. And she’s the only poet who ever made me cry during a reading. I look to Alice as a model of the possible. Too many artists get a bit of popularity doing a particular thing, writing in a particular way. They spend the last thirty years of their lives writing more or less the same poem with diminishing drive & effectiveness.
Alice dismantled & rebuilt. She dismantles over & over again coming back to us w/ these beautiful new machines made from the parts surrounding us. These parts are not shiny & new. They’re older than all of us. But they’re functioning in new ways.   A few years ago, I met up w/Alice in Paris at a Vietnamese place for coffee. I remember honing my imaginary poetics, philosophy & mythology speak before we met in preparation for our conversation. Now, she’s family because her biological sons are poetry brothers to me. But family can be the most intimidating, right? We mostly just talked about sex & the police, but that’s not important, let me come back. She has been very generous to my companeros who are writing the most important poetry in the world right now. She’s smart enough to not be too smart for the generations that come after her. This is probably why she can dismantle & rebuild while so many older poets are left watching their own work age. The dedication of her new book reads, “for my sons and their friends.” Come on in, Alice!

Q. Please tell us about “Spring Diet of Flowers at Night” published by Mooncalf Press.  

The poem is dedicated to lovers in wartime. It was commissioned as part of Poetry, Politics & Proximity: the Third Annual Kerry Sherin Wright Prize for an event at UPenn’s Kelly Writers House. It’s a kind of micro-environmental read on political engagement, or a kind of politic of everyday life. Living in the empire is a daily negotiation, creating willful capacities to engage in acts that both oppress and resist oppression all day long. It is a mad age, and trying to live a dignified life within this time is a maddening pursuit. And a necessary one. Not out of the goodness of our hearts, or even some imperialist patronage, but for our very survival as people we’d like to meet if we could meet ourselves on the street. That’s what Spring Diet of Flowers at Night is about for me today. It was about something else when it was written. And it’ll be about something else when you read it again I hope.  

 Q. Who were major influences on you as a developing poet and why?

 There are many of course, but I’d like to talk about my old friend Caesar. He is a high school drop-out & a genius. Our friendship was one founded on argument. Over the years we’d have protracted arguments for hours at a time over the restoration of the Peacock Throne, pornography or the end of the Roman Empire. We argued through science and art, music and history. It was through argument that I came to poetry. He was always, always reading back then. I read a good bit, but I had to really study to make new arguments, and to keep up with him. He is a true autodidact who develops a reputation for his erudition, then rejects any notion of official respect and moves in a totally different direction. When you have someone close to you who isn’t afraid to change their life, it gives you a courage you didn’t know you had until you see it in front of you. He lives the Coltrane adage, “You can learn anything from anyone at any time.” Nothing is dismissed if there is knowledge to be found. He embraces the lesson &/or the joke, whether it comes from a prostitute or a Marine Sergeant or a homeless Lakota man he met on the Broad Street Line. I wasn’t intimidated by the arts because he taught me to apply art through the ages to our everyday lives. His integration of literature in everyday life is without pretense and with great enthusiasm. He spoke of the Iliad’s relevance to the punk rock vs. corner-boy wars around South Street. He noted the Dickensian conditions of Sixth Street below Washington, in the area that was South Philly. He’d see Rasputin at the Woolworth’s counter, and an Ezra Pound look-alike lurking by the peepshows with a large manuscript under his arm. He continues to be an influence because the people I encounter in the city we share are influences as well.

Q. Are you working on any new projects and are there any new works ready for release you would like to share with us?   

Daybook of Perversities & Main Events was recently released on Cy Gist Press. It is called a privilege to grow skeletons that grow to become something. Gunfire resumes. Over Here is a chapbook just out by Katalanche Press. Our true stories have always been different than their true stories. The oven’s been exploded. The bread is still expected. This is for you. Let’s eat.  Anyday now, a collaborative piece I wrote w/ Brett Evans in New Orleans in 2006 called Ready-to-Eat Individual will be released on Lavender Ink Books. It’s a NOLA journal & State-of-the-City poem for the Year 1 A.K. (After Katrina). And this spring, Factory School will be releasing The City Real & Imagined:
Philadelphia Poems. It’s a collaborative wander piece with CAConrad that jumps off at LOVE Park & explores the not-yet histories & archaic futures of Philly that haven’t yet been sold to the New York Times.  

Thanks so much, George. Cheers!

What Others Say About J.C. Todd 

“J.C. Todd’s poems are filled with lyricism and intelligence but with much that

I find so exactly right that I believe I own it. She seems to be made of decorum

and depth, and though I’m incapable of such quiet grace I covet it. “Beloved”,

she says, “your body/..will stop/your skin Stiffen into the canvas/of an abandoned

tent.” My god how awful and how perfect this is! For Todd, the body, ubiquitous

and rich is an elegant anchor- she can say men kissing and neurons, Dendritis,

and retes, she can say pissing and I feel I have been caressed and saved.” – Renee Ashley

“What I love about J.C.’s work is how it always surprises. Starting out with images

of wind, trees or snow, it may appear to be just another nature poem. God knows,

we don’t need any more of them. But then there’s a turn which shifts me into

a familiar state of  unknowing, and it’s a bit uncomfortable.” Peter Murphy

THE INTERVIEW

Q. You have translated the works of Ecuadorian Poet Ivón Gordon Vailakis, Latvian Poet Amanda Aizpuriete and Lithuanian Poet Giedre Kazlauskaite. How difficult is it to translate works from one language to another and what drew you to translation?

          All communication is a form of translation, from my mental figures and emotional colorations to yours. My physical experience to yours. My embodiments to yours. It’s a wonder there’s any agreement of meaning, even between speakers of the same language. So, yes, translation between languages is difficult in that its goal is to convey the poem whole into another language whose structures and history may not be sympathetic to the music and meaning of the language of the original. But the act of translation is also a chance to renew the relationship with one’s mother tongue.

Translation drew me because I wanted to destabilize my relationship to my mother tongue. I was of an age—late 40s—when I was concerned that I had grown too familiar with my personal use of English. I’d seen the work of other mid-career poets become elegant repetitions of their earlier work, beautiful but dangerously close to stagnant. I wondered if this were a neurological situation. Do patterns of structure and diction become so engrained that they short-circuit discoveries made through language? Poetry demands new language routes, new perceptual and contextual routes that drive thought beyond the predictable structures and strictures of grammar and rhetoric or that bend them to new uses.

I’d spoken American English since I was a year or so old and listened into it since I was six fetal months, the point in development when hearing begins. With almost fifty years as a speaker of English, it was time to loosen up by entering into another language. I had begun to learn and then lost Spanish twice before, so when I was awarded a poetry fellowship by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts in 1998, I decided to study in
Quito, Ecuador. While there, I met Ivón Gordon Vailakis, a poet whose third collection, Colibríes en Exilio (Hummingbirds in Exile), had just debuted in Quito. We traded poems and soon she asked if I would co-translate this book, working with her directly and with her English-language translations. Eventually, I translated some of her poems independently and a number of these have appeared in The Bucks
County Review, The Drunken Boat, Crab Orchard Review and other journals. While I did not become fluent in Spanish, I gained enough of a foothold in its structure to begin to reinvent my relationship with English-language structures.

A few years later, when I edited a feature on contemporary Lithuanian poetry for the international poetry webmagazine, The Drunken Boat, I wrestled with a another dilemma: that of translating from a language with a small word pool into a language with a much larger pool of words. English has approximately four times the number of words of Lithuanian, or its sister language, Latvian. At first, having a larger pool of words to draw from seemed completely advantageous, but translation is not only a matter of the best word but also of preserving a sense of how the grammar supports and shapes the meaning, so translating was quite a challenge.  I gave it a try because I wanted to include the work of a younger poet, Giedre Kazlauskaite, a student at Vilnius
University who had won a student debut award in 2002. We met at the university kavine (café). She brought her English-speaking poet-friend, Jurgita Butkyte, and English-Lithuanian and Lithuanian-English dictionaries. Over tea, we made rough translations of two poems. This modest project was a gamble for another reason: there was no hope of my learning Lithuanian, a complicated language whose linguistic forms are close to its root language, Sanskrit.  So when I met Latvian poet Amanda Aizpuriete in Riga, and read English translations of her poems, I knew that translating her would present challenges. Amanda’s aesthetic depends on subtle tonal shifts. I wasn’t sure I could carry their register across into English, nor was I sure that I could convey the layers of history embedded in some of the poems, a history configured by centuries of domination by invading nations. Translating her is a work in process.

Readers can visit translation features I have edited or co-edited at <www.thedrunkenboat.com>:

·Lithuanian, 2:iv (Winter 2002)

Ivón Gordon Vailakis, 4:iii-iv (Fall-Winter 2004).

· Latvian, “To Be the Roots,” 5:iii-iv (Fall-Winter 2005)

· Slovenian, 6:iii-iv (Fall-Winter 2006)

Q. Over the years you have received numerous fellowships and grants both in the United States and internationally recognizing your work. How have these honors assisted in the development of your work?

  Most awards offer financial support that makes projects possible. For example, one of the Leeway Foundation awards was in support of a specific project: travel to the Baltics, where I gave readings and lecture, wrote poems and made translations, then to Germany where I had a month-long residency at Schloss Wiepersdorf, an arts colony south of Berlin. Other awards, such as a state arts council individual artist fellowship for poetry, have allowed me to stop working for a few months at a time in order to write. An award that surprised me was a scholarship to the Baltic Center for Writers and Translators in Visby on the Swedish island of Gotland. Granted at the urging of the Latvian Writers Union, it allowed me to work in person with Margita Gailitis, the poet and translator who was my co-editor for the feature on contemporary Latvian poets in translation. I am heartened when I receive an award; not only is it a validation but also a reminder that the work is being read, that it might find new readers, that it might take unexpected directions.

Q. Pine Press released two of your chapbooks; “Nightshade” and “Entering Pisces”. Tell us about the chapbooks and where one may order a copy?

Each is a limited edition, printed on archival paper. Beautifully designed. The first edition of Nightshade is hand-bound and hand-sewn. What a shame they are out-of-print. Occasionally one or the other surfaces through internet booksellers, and Spring
Church may still have a few copies of the second edition of Nightshade  (Spring Church Book Company, P.O. Box 127, Spring Church, PA 15686 / 1-800-496-1262).

Entering Pisces was published in 1985. When the publisher, Kerry Shawn Keys, invited me to submit a manuscript, it was the first time I had considered gathering my poems into a book. It seemed enough to write them—it still seems enough. Piecing together a manuscript from poems that had not been written with the intention of making a book, I began to listen to the poems as elements of dialogue that advanced a single action. I was looking for a dramatic structure without a literal narrative. The book is not themed but it is an emotional whole. The second book, Nightshade, began in a frenzy, six poems drafted in a few days at the end of 1986. I had just finished Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a long stretch, as I am a slow reader, over thirty hours of reading and drifting off, then waking. The barometer was falling; a redheaded woodpecker kept drilling the white oak outside the den, mining for grubs before the storm broke. The bird and Beloved knocked loose my own lost sister, dead in infancy yet growing inside me so many years. The core poems, my mother’s lament given in her voice, circle around the absence of her baby, my sister.  It took many years to write the poems that completed the first burst, but Nightshade was a book from the start. Its shape emerged from the struggle between the lyric impulse and the narrative with the lyric subverting and interrupting the story so that grief could rise up and come to rest. Further disrupting the narrative, I have included a few poems from Nightshade in What Space This Body, changing the context in which they are encountered. I wonder how they will appear to the reader meeting them for the first time.

Q. As an associate editor of The Drunken Boat and several translations, what advice can you offer to poets submitting their work for publication?

My work as a contributing and associate editor has not involved reading submissions so much as developing projects. The Drunken Boat  (www.thedrunkenboat.com) considers submissions by invitation only. Rebecca Seiferle, the editor and publisher, has made a vital, international space for writers like me to report from the field on our passions and obsessions with poetry.

As a poet who sends to journals with open submissions policies, I can suggest that sending out poems is initiating a conversation. You don’t know if the conversation will be picked up or if it will fall flat. Sooner or later, there will be a response. When it comes, you continue the conversation by sending again. When you read poems that speak to you, you continue the conversation by submitting to the journals or web magazines where they appear. It is so important to pay attention to your own aesthetic or thematic preferences in dialogue with those of the journals and books you read. Reading intensely is the baseline for this type of conversation.

Q. Who are your major literary influences?

I’m reminded of a book, People Who Led to my Plays, by the avant-garde American playwright, Adrienne Kennedy, which begins with “Elementary School: Fairy tales, My family, The radio, Jesus, My teachers, The movies, dolls, paper dolls, Hitler, Jane Eyre.” The final entry in the book, in a chapter titled, “A Voyage” is “Myself.” As it was with Kennedy, a multitude of people and places mingling in my thoughts and imagination have inspired and strengthened my writing and given it form.  I’ll mention a few.  My mother and her sister read to me from infancy, encouraged me to memorize poems and songs and later paid attention to my writing. Often around five o’clock—I remember this scene as if it were permanently winter: early dusk, wind at the window, the lamplight a patch of warmth in the corner of the sofa—my mother would read poems from Palgrave’s anthology, The Golden Treasury. It was her moment to settle into herself, between the day of child- and house-care and the evening of husband- and child-care. Thomas Hood was a favorite, also Shakespeare’s and Wordworth’s sonnets and songs, and that seducer, Herrick, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may/ Old time is still a-flying…,” whose lines I invoked when I was a teen on the verge, reading Whitman, Sandburg, Melville, de Beauvoir and the Jane Cooper poems that an uncle snipped from The New Yorker. The childhood of poems and the backyard garden and the beach where we went on summer weekends—the transformations in these spaces were at the center of my perception. There was no separation between world and word, between image and imagination. So the physical world has had a profound influence which I’ve been told is apparent in my poetry.

Other influences: poems given in the human voice, pop tunes from the 40’s on the radio, my uncles and aunts singing the pianola melodies of their youth. Medical dictionaries and handbooks. But this is not what you mean, is it? 

I have read deeply and been struck to the quick often enough that making a list of influences seems to trivialize the impact of reading. During the years of writing the poems collected in What Space This Body, I have returned often to the work of Denise Levertov, to Whitman, to translations of the Greek anthology poems, to the work of Lucille Clifton, to the English Renaissance and Metaphysical poets, to Rilke, especially Edward Snow’s two volume   translation of The New Poems, and to the philosophical writings of Gaston Bachelard and Teilhard de Chardin as well as turning to an array of popular science writers and naturalist-essayists such as Verlyn Klinkenborg.

Stirred by the poetry of Eastern Europe, now I find my gaze turning toward the violence and the silence between those who dominate and those who are suppressed. I am looking closely in the spirit of these lines by E.  B. White about the irreconcilable differences between art and capitalism. His poem refers to a Diego Rivera mural commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller. “I paint what I see// I paint what I paint// I paint what I think, said Rivera.”  To feed this newer work, I am reading George Steiner, Theodor Adorno, Paulo Friere and various wartime diaries and touching back to Mandelstam and Akhmatova, and to the poetry of Eleanor Wilner, Carolyn Forche’s The Country Between Us, especially the poem “Because One is Always Forgotten,” Ai’s poetry, particularly Killing Floor and Sin and, in Fitzgerald’s translation of the Illiad, the hail-and-farewell moment before battle when Achilles gazes on his shield, contemplating its images of peace-time civilization.

Q. You have traveled the globe presenting lectures on a number of subjects in various countries and universities. In addition you have worked closely with the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, New Jersey State Arts Council, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. It is apparent you enjoy sharing your work with others but also you take the time to mentor other poets and writers. Tell us of your experience traveling and working with others.

The maps and country entries in the1936 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica let me know the world was huge and teeming. They were my passport to everywhere else, yet, except for a summer inEurope and trips to California and Alabama to adopt my sons, I did not travel further than a few hundred miles from the place of my birth for almost forty years. Then Europe, the Andes, Mexico, Vietnam. In the future, who knows?
Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, Tibet, Hokaido?

I am not a good tourist, not a consumer of goods. Most of the travel is in connection with poetry: France, to lead a poetry workshop; Lithuania and Macedonia, to participate in poetry festivals; Sweden, to write and edit; Latvia, to translate and edit; Germany, to write, and then to lecture for the U. S. Embassy at American Studies programs in German universities; Ecuador to study Spanish.

Traveling, mentoring, translating: these are interwoven strands in a life-long interest in speaking across boundaries, an interest, by the way, shared by the Poetry Program of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation (<www.grdodge.org/poetry/>) and by the Cape May Getaway where I lead poetry workshops each January (<www.wintergetaway.com>).  Borders are functional; the skin, for instance, is a permeable boundary that protects the body but also transmits sensation. It is not always in the best interests of humans to dissolve borders, but we can develop workable relations with the other side. Some of the poems in What Space This Body imagine human-to animal, human-to-plant, even human-to-mineral communication.

As for mentoring, what isn’t passed on, dries up. It’s a privilege to teach and be taught by my students, to make discoveries and recoveries with them. There is community in learning, just as there is community in reading and writing. For a number of years, I have been part of a remarkable faculty team in the Writing for College summer program at Bryn Mawr College, leading workshops in creative writing for high school-age young women from around the country and sometimes from abroad. Writing for College is a true community of writers in that we use our passion for writing and reading to make a space in which young women can value their intellects, emotional sensibilities and voices. (<www.brynmawr.edu/ summerprograms/ writing.html>)

Q. Wind Publications, (http://windpub.com/booklist.htm ), will be releasing your full length collection, What Space This Body in January 2008. The collection consists of several years of poetry, what inspired you to create the collection?

.  In her poem, “Oh Look and See,” Denise Levertov writes of the transformations over the garden wall. That’s the stance of my book, the space which bridges the domestic garden and the wildwood beyond it. The speaker wants to enter into the transformations, to be part of the changes, much as Richard Wilbur describes in “The Beautiful Changes:” “The beautiful changes as a forest is changed/ By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it. . . .”  Tuning to it, not only to beauty but to whatever appears before me that also appears in me—that was my inclination as I gathered poems and shaped them into this book.  Initially I worked with groups of poems that seemed to cluster naturally, but that process diminished the possibility for dynamic tension. Once I began to look for new contexts for key poems, surprising kinships appeared, affiliations that might shift or shade a poem’s original intention. Although the poems had been polished and some published, they became new matter to me, matter I tuned to and then could reconsider and possibly revise. I thought of them as new land, not lands I was discovering, but volcanic lands created by eruption. Looking back, this seems a romantic idea, overweening and false, since I am not a volcano nor any type of landmass, a critical assertion against a too-common pathetic fallacy of seeing topography or geography and a woman’s body as equivalent. At the time of assembling the collection, however, the figure helped to disrupt the intentions I had for the poems. For example, this poem about the ocean and the priest-poet wandered off, becoming that poem about the sky and eventually the modest poem about enormous or perhaps amorphous mysteries at the far edge of consciousness.

The poems are making a context where “it” is inconceivable, where there are no objects, but only subjects. Isn’t that is what poetry is, what all art is—the locus of conjunction? Concurrently, the voice of the poems, that live-feed of consciousness into language, is rooted in the physical body. In the City Lights edition of Notes on Thought & Vision, H. D. asks, “Where does the body come in?” The poems of What Space This Body resonate with her question.

Q. Three poems in the collection stood out for me, “Endless Caverns”, “Under” and “Remembering”. Tell us about these poems.

If this weren’t a blog interview, I’d ask you to tell me about those poems. Isn’t a poem often more, or less, or other than what the writer thinks it is? Suppose my comments crimp the poems or shape them into Grade A Certified patties for the reader to consume hygienically? This is my hesitation. Instead, I’ll describe the circumstances, as I am aware of them, that initiated each of the poems. 

“Under” had two moments of initiation: a dive off Marathon Key in
Florida and my re-reading of the dive log many years later. In addition to notes on the time and length of the dive and ascent, the depth of the dive, pre- and post-dive tank pressure readings, and so forth, the log listed fish and corals and reported that I was almost struck on the crown of the head by the bow of the boat pitching in surf as I descended on the anchor line. Yet the journal from that trip rhapsodized about the fish and the camaraderie of campfires and disco bars and a romance blooming between two other divers. There was no mention of the split second of danger. The disjunction (or conjunction?) between near disaster and sheer pleasure set the poem in motion. I wrote “Under” just as I was coming back into language after the first trimester of pregnancy when it had been difficult to speak and write clearly. It seemed that language had gone under. Carolyn Forche had read at a poetry festival in
Harrisburg, where I lived at the time. I wanted so much to speak to her and couldn’t put two words together intelligibly.

“Endless Caverns” found its final shape through a collision of unconnected moments. A photographer working on a National Geographic book about the Blue Ridge Mountains asked me to direct a powerful light onto the wall of a chamber in the Endless Caverns, a cave system near New Market, Virginia, while he shot photos. Then he shut the light down to photograph in the dark, using a flash. I’d noted the startle-effect of the flash in my journal as an aside amid pages of description about the cave formations, yet when I re-read this entry years later, it was the flash that triggered a poem. The poem couldn’t find its shape; the drafts flopped around, more like fish than caves, until, at a workout, a physical trainer gave me an instruction, “Float the tongue in the mouth,” and the poem crystallized around it.

What is it about “Remembering” that draws people in? When the composer Lona Kozik set it as part of a suite of songs for soprano voice, the music was lush, layered; I felt as if the text were ascending on carpeted stairs. Through her composition I could hear the motion of rising as the dramatic action of the poem. “Remembering” began in the multi-purpose room of an elementary school on a Parent-Teacher night. My daughter’s third grade teacher, Miriam Harlan, read aloud Robert Muench’s book, I’ll Love You Forever, and asked parents to write in response to the story. She refused to show Sheila McGraw’s whimsical illustrations, directing us to the pictures in our minds. In a few minutes, I wrote a fairly clear draft of “Remembering.” It is one of a very few poems that have arrived as gifts. Everything in the poem is true, and yet I could not say it happened except in my body as I was writing. Polishing it a few days later, fooling with end rhymes and line breaks—so you see it did not spring, like Athena, fully formed from the thigh or head of Zeus—I realized it could frame the poems of Nightshade. Until this moment, Nightshade had been the story of a mother; after “Remembering,” it was also the parallel but barely told story of her daughter, a daughter who lived, a daughter who thought she had indirectly compromised the life of her baby sister who had died. The story of the compromise would not be told, but its terrible power would infuse the living daughter’s voice, which would be the frame for the mother’s voice, which was the cradle of the baby’s absence. I’m grateful to Robert Muench and Miriam Harlan for realigning Nightshade and Beloved, which is also a living sister’s story about her dead sister and their mother.

Q. When “What Space This Body” is released you have readings and events scheduled. When and where will they be?

What Space This Body will have an auspicious first signing at the Book Fair at the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) conference in the New York City Hilton. The time has not been set, but it will be during the day between Thursday, January 30 and Saturday, February 1, 2008. If any poetry curator is looking for readers for their series, I hope they contact me. Other readings in the region are:

· Monday, 2/4   Robins, 7pm. Francine Sterle and J. C. Todd

· Sunday, 3/2 Manayunk Arts Center, 3 pm

· Wednesday, 3/26   US 1 Poets at Princeton Library, 7 pm

· Tuesday, 4/1   Poetry Round Table in Andover, NJ, 6:30 pm

· Tuesday, 4/15   McNally Robinson Books in Soho, NYC   7 pm. 3 Wind poets: Diane Lockward, Sally Bliumis-Dunn and J. C. Todd.

I will also be leading poetry workshops for elementary school students in
Havertown, PA and Southampton, NJ.

Q. As an educator, do you see the next generation coming of age embracing poetry as an art form?

That’s the only way to embrace poetry—as an art form. Anything else is verse or worse. Among the college and high school students I teach, I see a renewed interest in form, both experimental and received, and in merging genres. There is a sometimes rambunctious experimentation with diction, with sound bites, with fragmented or frayed thought in which narrative breaks off or diverges into wandering. For some students, there is a sense that language itself might fly apart. Others drive toward order in music and meaning. What matters most to me is their engagement with language.

Q. What would you prefer, a cheesesteak or scrapple and eggs?

How about steamed blue crabs and a pint of Troegs’ DreamWeaver?

What Others Are Saying About “What Space This Body” by J.C. Todd

“Here is the scared body Whitman celebrated, but taken to a deeper intimacy in both sensual and scientific knowing J. C. Todd can relish unblushingly the most interior matters of thebody, make language exude sensuality and a myriad rich scents, while keeping her head.So be prepared for a rare combination of daring material and meticulous intellect in thesepoems of arousal and awareness, and, above all praise.” – Eleanor Wilner

“Something of the verbal sass and sheer intelligence of Heather McHugh; something of the bodilyfascination of Sharon Olds; something of the natural reverence of Mary Oliver, and the naturalexuberance of Amy Clampitt; something of the philosophical ruthlessness of Louise Glick~and yet something altogether her own. An adored husband, a sister lost in infancy, and always the body, measuring itself against nature and against time, with eloquence and without hubris:these are the songs of “that small piece of gristle/ I sing with” The remarkable poems ofJ.C. Todd – Karl Kirchwey

“In her memorable book, What Space This Body, J. C. Todd writes with deep feeling aboutthe bonds between people, the oneness of marriage partners, and the ties between herself and natural things. She achieves a rare distinction in “Standing in a Winter Field Gazing at a Photograph of Ice” and “On the Beach”, tow poems in which she meditateson her own growth and on the world’s mysteries. Her poems are striking for a calmbut passionate tone, musical lines, and, especially humanity.” – Grace Schulman

To place a prepublication order for What Space This Body, send a messsage to the press, http://windpub.com/booklist.htm (use “Contact Us”). The cost is $15.00; the press will pay postage.  Or use the postal address on the website, and mail the check and your request and mailing address.  

The book will also be available at Robins in February.

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 Mel Brake was raised in Philadelphia, PA. He graduated with a B.S. degree from West Chester University. He has written poetry as a method of healing, self love and to express his inner thoughts and feelings.  He was a guest speaker on The October Gallery Radio Show, WHAT 1340 AM discussing and reading his work.  He was the featured poet with Live Poets Society of Media, PA. , Mad Poets Society of Media, PA and Poet and Prophets of Swarthmore, PA  Recently, he was featured poet at Robin’s Book Store by Philadelphia Poets. Some of his works appear in the current issue of Philadelphia Poets Journal, Mad Poets Review Fall 2007 and Writing Outside the Lines Winter 2007. This coming Spring 2008, he will be featured at the Manayunk Art Center Philadelphia, PA.

The Interview:

Q. You have the title Poet Laureate. Tell us of the experience and duties of the Poet Laureate.  

I would hope that when and if Delaware County has a program for Poet Laureate that it would be a great opportunity to showcase the wonderful local talent in the area. Both Bucks and Montgomery Counties have a Poet Laureate program and why not Delaware County. I chose to honor myself with the title of Poet Laureate with the same boldness as Neil Armstrong claimed rights to the moon.  Besides my sister-in-law thought it was a good idea. I guess you can say that I am forward thinking.

Q. What drew you to poetry as a form of expression?

I would say love. I feel there is no better way for me to express love for myself and others than through poetry. For many years, I was on a personal quest to find myself and odyssey if you will. Growing up, I watched epic movies which depicted the main character who would climb the tops of mountains or take a long journey in foreign lands for self discovery or to profess his or her love for someone else. For me, poetry is that inner journey where I can find myself and find love.

Q. You have recently had work accepted for publication at a number of magazines. Many poets find the submission process to literary magazines to be difficult. What has your experience with having your work accepted?

I am very happy that Mad Poets Review, Philadelphia Poets and others have accepted my work for publication.  The experience for me is like when I was a child and I would hope that Santa Claus brought me everything I wanted, even though I knew that my mom was really acting like Santa Claus. The anticipation and the desire can be a challenge because I want all my works to be published, but realistically as one editor said to me in a rejection letter, “it’s all relative”. No one likes rejection but it’s a matter of finding the right editor who sees merits in ones poetry. Recently, I went to an open mic in
New York City and after reading a few poems this editor on the spot said I want to publish your poems. Like Tony the Tiger would say, it feels GREAT to have ones poetry accepted for publication.

Q. Over the past year you have read your work at a cross section of poetry venues in the Delaware Valley. In some areas audience size has increased dramatically; to what do you attribute the increased interest in poets?

Family and friends. Someone had commented, the majority of people who showed up to my readings were family members. And what is wrong with that?  When I first began reading, I would ask people who knew me to come to my readings.  I don’t know where I would be without the support of my mom, brothers, sisters and friends, because initially no one knew me. The good news is when they show up, they are exposed to different styles of poets and poetry and they may want to be apart of another reading without me begging or blackmailing them. Aside from the support of family and friends, I think audience size will continue to increase for poetry readings as the numbers of readings continue to increase all over the Delaware Valley.

Q. What poets, past and present do you read and who are your favorites?

Some of my favorite poets to read are Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Nikki Giovanni and even the Russian Poet Sergey Yesenin to name a few. There is a special connection when I find a quiet place and read a book of poetry by one of these poetic giants.

Q. You are at the Mad Poets Bon Fire, the crowd is leaving or going camping as you sit on a bench and watch the fire dim. A poet sits next you and begins a conversation. Who would you want that poet to be and why?

This is a good question. I would want that poet to be myself. I feel that I have so much more to learn about poetry and it’s an art form that I have only discovered. As I mentioned in a previous answer, I am on a personal journey of self-discovery and poetry is my medium. I have learned so much from having talks with poets such as Lynn Blue, Arlene Bernstein, Rosemary Capalleo and many others. But at the end of the day, I am responsible for my own growth as a poet and I am still learning to find my own voice among so many very good poets everywhere.

Q. Are you working on any collections and should we anticipate seeing your work soon?

I am reaching out to editors to have more of my work published. I feel that it is just a matter of time before my poetry is published in the form of a chapbook or series of collections. And if any editors are reading this, well reach out and touch a brother. Until then, I encourage everyone to pick up a copy of a journal where my work is published.

Q. Tell us about Mel Brake.  

Well, it has been said by others that I am a man of mysteries and this is true. But if anyone reads or listens to my poetry they will find me somewhere in between the lines. George, I want to thank you and Mad Poets Society. Peace Love and Light.

To schedule Mel Brake for a reading please contact him at mbrake1@msn.com

Justin Vitiello, Professor Emeritus of Italian at Temple University is an intricate part of the poetry scene in the City of Philadelphia. Vitiello has traveled the globe, published over twenty works of poetry and essays in English, Spanish and Italian. A peace activist, Vitiello was active in the Civil Rights movement and Anti-War movements during the Vietnam era, protested the proliferation of nuclear weapons during the cold war, boldly stood as a non-violent reformer to the Mafia in Sicily and conducted research for the Ghandi Peace Foundation in India. In the midst of this whirlwind of activity Vitiello continues to curate the long running Moonstone Poetry Series at Robins Bookstore in Philadelphia. He has provided a stage for new and established poets, mentored hundreds of poets and provided beautiful works for others to read. A citizen of the globe, Vitiello remains uniquely Philadelphia.

The Interview: 

Q. You recently retired after thirty-three years at Temple University. What are your plans and what can we expect to see from Justin Vitiello? 

 I now have a website: www.justinvitello.net. I’m in the process of including critical comments and bibliography. After 33 years at Temple, I plan to continue living as I have done as a peace and human rights activist, scholar and critic, poet, globe trotter. As I travel I write more and more. Now, after a free year traveling in Mexico, Peru’ and Italy, I have 3 new poetic works in progress:(1) Viajes en espanol/Spanish trips (Odi anarchi/Anarchist odess (3) Ultime poesie familari ed etniche/Last family and ethnic trips…

 Q. I enjoyed reading “poppies and thistles”, (Whirlwind Press). Poet Elizabeth Pallitto describes the book, “It is the precise intersection of these domains of life that the relentless imagination of Justin Vitiello is at its best”. Share with us the inspiration for this volume of work

     What inspired “poppies and thistles”? 40 years of living and traveling in Spain. The reader can get a feel for the experience of being, living and loving in a new land and culture. I went to Spain before I ever visited Italy, but felt very much at home as soon as I got off the USS Constitution at Algecrias. That experience is my inspiration. 

Q. Labyrinths and Volcanoes: Windings through
Sicily, (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1881901165/smarterbooks-20) examines Sicilian realities; please tell us of the journey that inspired the book.

The journey that inspires “Labyrinths and Volcanoes” is expressed, I hope clearly in the chapter of the book “Train South: Journey Through Time”. Significantly I pass Naples, (of my grandparents origins), to go to Sicily to work with Danilo Dolci, (an anti-mafioso and pro-Gandhian). More and more, as I studied the Island and made friends, I stayed and wrote so much scholarly and poetic work about it. By the way, the book is in Italian, winner of a major prize in Sicily.

Q. The Moonstone Poetry Series is woven into the fabric of the Philadelphia Poetry scene. It has provided a forum for established and emerging poets to present their work. To what do you attribute the success of the series and your motivation to continue hosting the series?

As to the Moonstone PoetrySeries, credit is due to the Robin Family and Herschell Baron, (6pm on 9/25 to hear his daughter read). I started reading at the store in 1982, at an open, and Herschell and I just
“Hit it off”. That’s a hint to Robin’s success: Openness to alternative and radical literature, diverse ethnical and sexual movements, independent thinking, however you view it. Larry asked me to organize this series as I was retiring from Temple. I am very happy to be part of this major cultural action in the city. Too bad WHYY ignores it.   

Q. You have authored twenty volumes of work, do you have a favorite? 

My favorite book? The one I just published (”poppies and thistles”). Or the first creative work I got into print? (II carro del pesce di Vanzetti/Vanzetti’s Fish Cart). Or all my kids? I’ve never repeated myself. All my babies are unique.  

 Q. You have been on the poetry scene in Philadelphia for many years. There seems to be a recent outburst of poetic growth in the city. The audiences of many readings are populated by fellow poets. Do you see a time when poetry will extend out once again to lovers of poetry and not just poets?

 As to the poetry scene, I still don’t think we go out to reach the general public or even the public of Border’s and Barnes and Noble. You’re right we reach fellow poets and aspiring ones, and certain ethnic and gender groups who gravitate around the neighborhood. Will we eventually attract more people? Well Shelley said poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. But I’m not so opitimistic. Many poets die unappreciated.

Q. Please share with us who your favorite poets were as you developed your poetic style.

My favorite poets: that’s easy, (as soon you will be able to read on my webiste in critiques): Lorca, Antonio Machado, Ungaretti, (all of whom I have translated), and Dylan Thomas… At first in my 20’s I was to imitative of them, but I hope now I have my own voice.

Q. What is your greater love, creating new poetry or translating poetry?

Creating my own work in American, Italian, Spanish, transposing my different versions back and forth. But I also love translating the poets I love most, besides those mentioned above: Ciullo d’Alcamo, Michelangelo, Gaspara Stampa, Lope de Vega, Gongora, Quevedo….

Q. You have traveled the globe yet you return home to your adopted City of
Philadelphia. What drew you to this city and what keeps you here?

Yes, I’ve been lucky to travel- and it shows in my poetry-but I lived in Philly because of my job at Temple and my son’s growth here. Now, living in Center City, I don’t put it down in contrast to my birthplace, NYC. It’s very liveable here. I don’t need a car. I can walk and take public transport most places I want to go. So I enjoy the city for what it offers. Before I make another global trot to live in Italy, Spain, whatever for the rest of my life, I’m happy to be doing what I do.

To learn more about Justin Vitiello please visit www.justinvitiello.net and the Moonstone Poetry Series and other events at Robins Bookstore please visit http://www.robinsbookstore.com/events/       

CAConrad has been a fixture on the Philadelphia poetry scene for many years. He is passionate about poetry and in particular poetry in Philadelphia. His passion extends to a number of political and social causes in the city and at one point time he considered running for Mayor of Philadelphia. CA has been published internationally and has toured reading his work throughout the
United States. His first love is Philadelphia and if you hear a discussion or are at a reading downtown you will either hear CA or hear someone speaking of his work. He is a regular contributor to the Philly Sound Poets Blog, has been a guest editor at a number of literary journals and has published a number of works to include The Frank Poems, advancedELVIScourse and his recent full length collection Deviant Propulsion. You can visit with CAConrad at his blog  http://caconrad.blogspot.com/

What Others Say about CA and Deviant Propulsion:

“Conrad is a fearless combination of the out front & tenderness, subtlety in the literary equivalent of outrageous drag….” Ron Silliman 

“Deviance for CAConrad is survival; deviance is an act of faith: a religion against religions; it’s a private, vulnerable deviance distinct from the grand malevolent brand. There is something loving and lonely about Conrad’s deviance. His poems propel deviancy–his deviancy–into the poetry. In a country that wrongly casts poets and poetry itself as deviant Conrad’s poems here are unflinching. That is, the poems are not about deviancy, each in its own artful way, is an act of deviancy itself” – Tom Devaney. 

“I’ve been living with and loving Conrad’s work, and his person — his entire being; the man is radiant! — for years and years. Having the book here is almost as pleasurable as being in the man’s physical presence.” – Joe Massey 

“CA Conrad is committed to numerous political issues, most notably economic disparity and gay rights. His first collection of poems, Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press), has Publishers’ Weekly comparing him to Allen Ginsberg. Indeed, Conrad’s poems have that sexy playfulness and the willingness to expose hypocrisy that leads through Ginsberg back to Walt Whitman, with a bit of the New York Schools (Frank O’Hara and Ted Berrigan in particular) thrown in to keep it humorous.” – Kevin Thurston

 THE INTEVIEW: 

Q. What direction is life taking CAConard?

A.  Most of my family in the dirty little rural Pennsylvania world I grew up in worked at the factory making coffins.  Direction is a wondrous idea from there.  The factory was closed down during Bill Clinton’s NAFTA reign of terror, so no one back home can proudly say they’re making coffins bound for George Bush’s reign of terror in Iraq.  What direction?  Aren’t we all headed down the up stairs at this point?  What a relief our slide into destruction might actually wind up being, right?  It was a beautiful day today.  It’s okay to enjoy the day.  It’s okay to get the Love.  In fact it’s essential to get the Love.  Every moment we can we had better do so now.  Everyday I feel like storing each beautiful thing I smell and feel and hear. Do it for those burning alive in the deserts of Iraq.  It’s going to be a terrible day when we all finally understand how much we contribute to suffering.  Tattoos that read I SUPPORT IMPERIALISM WITH THE TAXES I PAY!  In the end what do we deserve?  If we could understand punishment as a nation the way Germany was asked to understand it half a century ago, what would it be?  As a nation we must all pay, not just our leaders who made it happen.  And not just the leaders who allowed it to happen.  But the tax payers who fund this war and continue to fund this war.  The you and me of the equation.  The consumer with the house so full the storage rental so full.  Everything’s got to stop soon. The direction of this nation is erasing any pencil marks making plans on the map.  If freedom is this damnation of bullets at other souls than I don’t want it.  Fuck my direction.  I have no idea how to make this world work.  I have no idea how to make money.  I have no idea what to do when the rent goes through the roof.  I have no particular angst at the moment either way about it. Last week I was at work in Rittenhouse Square and a man had a heart attack on the third floor of the parking garage next door and drove his car through the wall and out onto the street and flipped upsidedown and I never saw so much blood.  It was as if every drop of blood was wrung out of him.  And people said to me they thought it was a movie being shot.  And other people said they though it had something to do with terrorists.  And everywhere I looked people were standing there with their cellphones taking pictures of it.  And calling friends and sending the pictures.  “DO YOU SEE IT!?” It’s funny how we have to actually KNOW someone to care about their death.  Maybe we don’t care about the death of the trees in the woods because we don’t know them.  Maybe we don’t care about the end of the polar bears because we don’t know them.  Maybe we’re not selfish, maybe we’re just big stupid babies who need to actually know, really connect and know to care.  Maybe we are selfish because we don’t bother connecting.  Maybe we have no idea what we deserve.  Maybe we deserve whatever is coming toward us right now.  Maybe the Light we keep hearing about is the path the bullet that hits you takes but you can’t tell anyone about it because you’re quiet, and gone. The light thrown from the sun is beautiful this time of year, end of summer, in Philadelphia.  It’s painfully beautiful.  What direction?  My direction is American and not noble.  If I were noble I would have the courage to stop paying my taxes and stop funding an evil I know, and you know, is happening in our names whether or not we choose to say it’s in our names.  I participate.  I am here with you in this dark feast, gliding in and out of the calendar as if someone else is going to make this story have a nicer plot.  Our brutality is daily in Iraq, in the supermarket, the butcher, the child labor, the need to believe in the consumption of joy brushing teeth with a toothbrush someone’s hands made somewhere in the world who we don’t know and don’t want to know.  A spasm of recognition as the alarm goes off.  Hello hands, hello yourself they say.

 Q. What would you say was safer; being trapped in a high rise on fire or an evening drinking with Joe Massey?

 A.  HAHAHA!  I LOVE this question!  I don’t feel unsafe around Joe at all as he’s a trusted friend, but my inclination is to say it’s safer in a high rise fire because it would be funnier.  He’s famous of course for his readings, getting drunk and saying things at the microphone you never, ever forget you heard him say.  My favorite time was when he wanted me to shove a Rolling Rock bottle up his ass in the bathroom after a reading, and I said, “JOE THERE’S NO LUBRICANT IN THIS PLACE!”  Lubricant is often on my mind but later I realized there was soap, which I hadn’t thought of at the time.  Yes, you look back and think to yourself, JESUS!  WHY DID I FORGET ABOUT SOAP!? And also his girlfriend (from that time) was there and wasn’t too happy about him asking me to do this.  Girlfriends are always an issue to consider of course, besides soap I mean.  She was very nice and I wonder sometimes where she is.  Anyway, soap, Joe, high rise fires. Now if Joe had asked to shove a bottle up my ass instead it would have turned into a different story.  And that’s all I’m going to say as I need to leave SOMETHING to your imagination! 

Q. Deviant Propulsion, (Soft Skull Press), was your first full length collection published. What effect did the positive reception of the book have on your current writing and when can we expect to see another volume of work? 

A. What?  What is this question?  What? I’m still queer, so the book didn’t make me heterosexual.  Was that a goal?  I don’t think so.  But I’m one of the few queers who will actually admit that our odd race of deviants are going to subvert this world.  It’s only a matter of time.  Oh yes, you hear stories all the time of queers wanting to get married, wanting to settle down, blah blah blah, have babies and prove how NORMAL we are.  Oh yes, you hear these things.  But we’re not normal, we’re odd, and some of us will hide it.  But we’re not normal, and yes we’re here to confiscate the things the national mind holds pure.  Even those (especially those) who pretend to want a normal life do this.  As an honest queer I’m telling you I’m always ready to take a giant shit on the holiest of cloth you offer.  What the hell was the question again?  Oh, I’m confused. But my current work isn’t something I would say is a result in any way of the Soft Skull book.  Soft Skull is a marvelous blessing of course as they take very good care of their authors.  But I’ve recently completed a series called (Soma)tic Midge, which is coming out later this year from Jack Kimball’s FAUX Press.  These (Soma)tic poems were written in a series of 7 colors where I would eat a single color all day long, then write.  Several of these have been published online:

RED on listenlight:  http://listenlight.net/07/conrad/ ORANGE on MiPOesia: http://www.mipoesias.com/2007/conrad_ca.htm  GREEN on Sawbuck:  http://sawbuckpoems.blogspot.com/2007/04/caconrad.html BLUE on Coconut:  http://www.coconutpoetry.org/conrad1.htm 

And now I’m working on other (Soma)tic poems, and have developed a free blog which will contain weekly updates with a new (Soma)tic exercise each week.  Here’s where it can be found:  http://somaticpoetryexercises.blogspot.com/ Poetry is the CENTER of my world, and has been so for most of my life.  The ways to get the poems out is infinite, and no one should be afraid of writing them. It’s kind of funny to hear poets CONCERNED about their poems lasting for hundreds of years when the world is such a dangerous place, and threatened.  It will be a miracle if there is anyone left in a hundred years to read them. Now is the time to say FUCK YOU to those who would tell us how to write.  Just write!  And if you’re having trouble getting started then maybe try one of my (Soma)tic Poetry Exercises, or make one up yourself.  What is most important is making space in your life for the writing.  And getting out of the pain of routine, and to not allow the pain of routine to become a routine of pain which files down our sharp edges.  We must keep sharp to keep alive, keep as alive as we can.

 Q. If you were sitting on a bench in Rittenhouse Square and an unexpected person sat down next to you, who would you want that person to be? 

A.  Franz Kafka, my first Love.  I’ve never Loved another man like Kafka.  It breaks my heart over and over and over and over thinking about the dumb fucking luck to be born decades too late.  But I would LOVE Kafka to sit next to me in Rittenhouse Square on a bench!  And I would want it to be a bench where we could see the little goat statue, you know that statue?  He’s a little goat, and a little pissed or playful, and he’s getting his horns ready to RAM someone! But Kafka, yes.  And I mean the dead Kafka.  Capital D, Dead Kafka.  I’d like to nibble his Dead ear, listen close for his Dead pulse that never appears, and of course ask him what he’s been up to all day.  “Where were you earlier Dead Kafka my dear?  Oh, don’t answer, your jaw hurts, I know, I know, don’t worry.” It would be even better if Dead Kafka were some kind of freak literary zombie vampire, and I would GLADLY let him chew on my wrist and drink my blood, a little snack from my wrist.  Ah, Dead Kafka, my dear one. There’s a Kafka altar in my apartment, and a lot of Elvis things as well.  The Kafka and Elvis connection is bigger than most people realize.  Two special forces with separate beams of energy, but when combined, WHOA, let me tell you, IT! IS! like breakfast with a CASSANDRA! 

Q. Who were your major influences growing up and who currently influences you as a poet? 

A. Kafka turned me on first.  Turned me on in the sense that the imagination suddenly had this GASH in the side of the wall someone else had put up in front of me, and I could see through.  Poets, early influences?  Molly Russakoff came to my high school to give a reading.  I was in a bad way out there in deep, rural Pennsylvania.  My life was so fucked up, and unsafe in an extreme way surrounded by fascists who were not armchair fascists.  But Molly told me to read Joseph Ceravolo, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, and off I went!  I had already discovered Kafka, my mind was already ready and open.  Molly gave me this silver platter.  I’m always in debt to her for this. But influences now?  You mean poets whose work I Love and am STARTLED BY now?  My friends!  No doubt about it!  The best poems I’ve ever read in my life are by my friends!  Frank Sherlock, Dorothea Lasky, Ish Klein, Ryan Eckes, Linh Dinh, Jessica White, Jenn McCreary, Brenda Iijima, Joe Massey, Laura Jaramillo, John Coletti, Erica Kaufman, Stacy Szymaszek, Carol Mirakove, Brett Evans, Magdalena Zurawski, Kathryn Pringle, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Divya Victor, the list goes on.  These are the poets I read and feel a velocity of color, ingenuity, problem solving, entire new structure, sand, wood, metal, wickedly honest, and like none of it ever imagined in my past.  The fucking pyramids could be rebuilt in a day! 

Q. You have been active for a number of years in the Philadelphia poetry scene and all its ebbs and flows. What directions do see poetry as an influence in Philadelphia moving? 

A.  Hmm. Philadelphia is a bucket of shit now that the rich are taking control.  Fuck the rich!  They have NO IDEA what this city was like in 1986 when I first moved here!  Yeah, now they want to claim this town, call it their own, say it’s building an arts scene. Building an arts scene!?  Wow!  They know NOTHING!  In 1986 I moved into the Imperial Hotel, just a teenager at the time.  And the center city area was The Zulli Nation, named after landlord Al Zulli.  He was a generous guy, and his friends Doug and Cindy were my crazy, generous landlords.  They all loved artists, and kept the rents low, and we could afford to create things, write, paint, whatever we wanted, and NOT have to fight all the time like we do now!  Now these rich greedy scumbags are here to cut everyone’s balls off and make everyone work and work and work.  Unless you’re fortunate to have money, it’s going to be rough in this town soon, very soon. I’m planning on opening The Philadelphia Poetry Hotel one day to make room for poor and working class poets who want to move to the city and WRITE!  I meet young poets all the time now who are the age I was in 1986 and they can’t do what I did!  My rent was 210 a month in The Zulli Nation.  That same apartment is now almost 1500 a month.  And people say stupid shit all the time like, “Well, you have to consider inflation.”  What!?  This city is 300 years old!  How can you excuse THAT as inflation?  That’s NOT inflation, that’s GREED! http://poetryhotel.blogspot.com/ Greed wants to stand in the way of the history of art, and I’m going to do my best to stand in the way of greed, at least for some poets.  My goal is to open this hotel and have it be cheap rent so poets only have to work a part time job like I did when I first moved here.  Then they can spend their time in the libraries and bookstores, and museums, learning, writing, reading, learning, writing, reading, being beautiful.everyone’s got no time for bullshit, which is what I Love most about Philadelphia.  You want bullshit, fuck yourself and look elsewhere because we’re BUSY! Philadelphia is not a place I ever intend to leave.  They’ll have to drag me out of this town clawing and screaming.  This city is where I learned to write poems.  This city is always ready to give that to anyone who wants it.  I truly did understand how to Love the world here in poetry.  And I learned that I need NO ONE’S permission to do that.  And I learned that I need NO ONE’S direction but my own in how to do that. Some people say (especially ignorant newcomers) that this is a mean town.  First, GO HOME if that’s the case!  But second, there is a grace, a powerful grace in a city where everyone’s got no time for bullshit, which is what I Love most about Philadelphia.  You want bullshit, fuck yourself and look elsewhere because we’re BUSY!

 

Adam Coben hosts the Blam reading series held in the East Falls section of Philadelphia. He has performed his work at numerous venues in Philadelphia and the United States. Adam attended the Jack Keroauc School of Disembodied Poetics and has had his work published in Spectrum Magazine, Besides Person, Young Jewish Voices, Hinge Online and N.U.T.S. journal. Adam currently has two projects in the works, Naked Howl a developing on line journal and a chapbook in progress entitled, “The Red in Black on White”. He will be reading his works on September 6^th for the Mad Poets at the Milk Boy Café in Bryn Mawr with poets Anna Mendoza and Alla Vilnyanskaya. 

The Interview:

Q.  As a performance poet who also writes do you find it difficult to put poetry that is well liked live to paper and have it appreciated by those who read it?

Wow- this is a question I have ruminated about a lot.  Early on in my writing journey I wrote a lot for myself as the listener; then transitioned to doing performance/spoken word poetry.   The change occurred after I heard a spoken word poet; I think his name was Kahlil, in this underground poetry club in
Boston.  This was around 1993 and I had been writing these short confessional poems, that all ended in ellipsis.  I saw him and was completely blown away.  I subsequently found the Beats and started writing performance pieces.  I think it took me years to realize that my pieces were for an intended listening audience.  I liked the thrill of the audience being startled, or laughing, and crying.  The older I get, as a poet, the more I look at my poems as pieces of art on the page.   I think many poets go through the transition, from writing because they have to (emotional crisis), to writing to please an audience, to writing for the sake of their own artistic voice or center.  As I work to be more and more published I realize that my voice changes due to the fact that I’m analyzing my poetry for how it moves on the page.  I want my work to transport the reader- not necessarily to the experience that I’m conveying (although that’s wonderful) but beyond to a new internal emotional, psychological, social, or spiritual shift.  I want them to have their own poetic revolution every time they hear a piece of mine.  I’m also not overly concerned about what people like- I want to challenge them to go beyond their self when they listen to my work; if this happens in performance or on the page than I’m lucky.  I have to stay true to my ever evolving voice- if an audience gets it I’m even more blissed out.

 Q. The “Blam” reading series in East Falls is getting a lot of “buzz”. Please describe an evening at the series. 

 I’m very excited about Blam!!!  A perspiring earth shaking evening starts with our guests/poets/writers/performers arriving around 7pm and we all eat, drink (The Set Table is BYO), communicate for about a half hour, so the libations of conversation, food and drink fuel us.  Many artists contact me to sign up for the reading/open mic in advance, for those who did not sign up in advance,  I pass around a sheet for all to set their slot.  I usually give a short intro for each poet/performer.  We have an eclectic mixture of performers- newbies, lyricists, spoken word artists, story tellers, emo-poets, comedic gut busters, hip hop heads, surrealist realist imagists and the list could go on; but I’m not good at categorizing.  Then we let the night roll- each performer gets 7 minutes.  We have had folks like Tamara Oakman, Peter Baroth, Michael Kennedy, Mel Brake, Michael Cohen, J-knivez, and Courtney Bambrick.  People have told me, after two separate readings that they have been “the best open mics they have been to.”  Shit, I hope that continues. For me, I threw it together because poetry, art..etc…is about community/revolution and fun.  I have too much fun.  We are also now highlighting a different community/charitable organization at each open mic.  They get time to speak, recruit volunteers and raise awareness.  I believe poetry - in order to be relevant- must stay connected to its service roots.  To be a poet is to serve the community; so it’s our duty to help social causes. 

Q.  You are currently developing an on line journal tentatively entitled “Naked Howl”, will the journal be monthly or quarterly and what is the targeted audience?

NakedHowl is still in its first stage of conception right now.  I intend to have it be quarterly- and will have space for poetry, fiction, non-fiction, small films, political rants, and music.  I am working with Ms. Arlene Ang, who resides in Italy, and we are just beginning to piece it together.  NakedHowl’s title is gleamed from two aspects of Ginsberg.  “Naked”comes from a story in his Biography, Dharma Lion, by Michael Schumacher.  Ginsberg was heckled on stage by some asshole and Ginsberg proceeded to strip his clothes off and scare the heckler out and shouted, “The poet is always naked on stage.”  The story leads me to adopt the poetic name Naked, for several years due to the frank quality of my work, and join it to Ginsberg’s masterpiece for the Web journal’s name.  The target audience needs to still be formulated, but will probably service the edgy- off beat mind altering work I know and love; from such a text as the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry.

Q. Your attendance at the Jack Keroauc School of Disembodied Poetics had a major impact on your view of poetics. Please describe the impact and the resulting transformation. 

The strangest impact the school had on me was being anti-poetic for a while afterwards.  I wanted poetry to strip down consciousness when I was at the Kerouac School.  I wanted an all out revolution. I wanted the poets I was hanging with to tear up money and use poetry as a means of commerce.  I was definitely an anomaly at the time at the school.  I was very much full of fire at the time and the place was too watery- too emotional and less actualized. I actually threw out everything that I owned- including my poetry- I was a monk on fire- I got burned out due to my own flame. I was probably just a lost ego maniac, who was suffering with samasara.  Finding my ground in what I was taught- which essentially was traditional workshopping, along with mind bending/calming conscience techniques (meditation/chanting/tai chi), made me crave a balance for my work.  I think it has only really begun to materialize in the last year.  I am balancing the written poem, the performance, with creating community and expanding it.  So in a sense- poetry has become commerce for better or worse- a definite marriage made in balance.

Q.  Your poem “A cold blush in four parts” was published at the Hinge (http://www.hingeonline.com/works_literary.php?contribID=202&vi=7:4 ). The poem is trim yet the images stunning. Is this poem reflective of your work overall?

This piece is probably reflective of my work in its purist form; but to say overall would not be fair to the rest of my pieces.  I have gone through a recent phase where a lot of my work was structured in about 4-7 stanzas; but I have written monster pieces and even shorter pieces.  I have now come to a place where I am using stanzas with four lines a lot, and the imagery is mixing with wry humor or philosophical emotional charges.  More and more I’m seeing the poems in my head as I drive, walk, meditate or shit.  I guess I do have a tendency to want a poem to be bare bones and to catch the reader off guard in its brevity.  I want the reader to read the piece and elongate the poem in their heart’s eye; if they have to.

Q. Music currently dominates a new generation as it develops; as a ninth grade English teacher do you see an increased awareness of poetry and a desire to write poetry with your students?

I’m not sure that an increased awareness for the poetry that comes off the page is occurring, but my students are so inundated with music lyrics they are definitely closet poets.  For the majority of students- poetry evokes fear and vulnerability and I teach at Dobbins; where these two qualities are hidden with a false state of bravado.  Many of my students love rap, and R&B.  They are tantalized by the creativity of certain lyricists- Young Jeezy, Kanye West, Jay Z, to name a few.  I do force my students to write poetry and place almost no restrictions on the content.  They get to write sonnets, haiku, stream of consciousness poems, list poems, and more.  It becomes a good outlet for the frustrations that my teenagers have. 

Q. You are currently working on a chapbook entitled “The Red in Black on White” when should we anticipate completion and what direction is the work moving in?

I’m targeting late October, but I’m taking a wait and see attitude right now.  I just got word three of my pieces will be published in pipebombmagazine.org and I have pieces pending in several other publications.  I’m curious which pieces will be accepted and that may effect how I proceed with the chapbook.  I have been working (gratefully) with Leonard Gontarek- one on one for the last two months- as a sounding board/poetic mentor- to see what pieces will work best together in a book of about 25 pieces.  I also have written so frequently that I tend to look at the poems I have produced today, rather than two months ago.  The pieces that will probably be in my chapbook will be erotic pieces focused on my wife, political pieces and short narrative pieces; actually all of the pieces are 18 lines or less.

Q. On September 6^th you will be reading at the Milk Boy Café in Bryn Mawr with poets Anna Mendoza and Alla Vilnyanshkaya. I have seen the three of you read your works before and anticipate a dynamic evening of po from the three of you. What can folks expect from Adam Coben on the 6^th?

Laughter, laughter, laughter, gratitude, drooling, drooling, water drinking, exhibitionist behavior, blowing kisses to my wife as long as she is there, laughter, ah poetry.

 Nathalie F. Anderson’s first book, Following Fred Astaire, won the 1998 Washington Prize from The Word Works. Her poems have been singled out for prizes and special recognition from the Joseph Campbell Society, The Cumberland Poetry Review, Inkwell Magazine, The Madison Review, New Millennium Writings, Nimrod, North American Review, and Southern Anthology, and have also appeared in APR’s Philly Edition, Cimarron Review, Cross Connect, Denver Quarterly, DoubleTake, The Louisville Review, Natural Bridge, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, The Recorder, Southern Poetry Review, Spazio Humano, and in the Ulster Museum’s collection of visual art and poetry, A Conversation Piece. A 1993 Pew Fellow, Anderson currently serves as Poet in Residence at the Rosenbach Museum and Library, and she teaches at Swarthmore College, where she is a Professor in the Department of English Literature and directs the Program in Creative Writing.

What others say about Nathalie Anderson: 

          “Nathalie Anderson’s poetry brings to my mind what John Logan’s called “a ballet of the ear.” She appreciates rich, textured language, and has a consciousness of sound as well as movement, elements more rare that you might think in contemporary poets. Her investigations of phobias, in particular, are smart, witty, and—haunting’  –Louis McKee

“Philadelphia poets owe Nathalie Anderson endless thanks for her tireless dedication to all that we do here in our city. No one has ever stepped forward with such indivisible scope in such a divisible environment as the poetry of Philadelphia. Her support and sincerity are the lessons for all poets to shift and widen the world view as much and as often as possible. Nothing but the best of thanks to Nathalie Anderson.” – CAConrad

The Interview:

Q. You have written that “anxiety — especially sexual anxiety — is my most frequent subject”. Is there a cause and effect? 

I’m not certain what you mean by “cause and effect” here, but I do believe that anxiety inexorably turns a person self-conscious, and a self-conscious person inevitably becomes a more obsessed observer, so *maybe* the more anxious we are, the more likely we are to be able to perceive the structures supporting our anxieties, analyze them, display them.  When I wrote this statement, almost 15 years ago, I was especially conscious of the double bind society imposes on women, punishing either pliancy or self-reliance, beauty or plainness, intelligence or air-headedness: as John Berger writes so chillingly, “a woman must continually watch herself.”  I still try to write through my own anxieties, but my poems these days – in the wake of my father’s death from Alzheimer’s — probably focus more on anxious aging than on anxious sexuality or sexual politics. 

Q. In the poem “The Miser” the male subject requests you not write about him, yet you do in images that could make the heart race a bit. Do you often refer to life events in your poetry? 

 I guess my poems nearly always arise from something I’ve experienced or observed, but – nearly always – I twist and intensify the inciting incident or perception until someone who’d been with me at the time might well not recognize it anymore.  I like the force, the immediacy, that comes with the pronoun “I” – though, maybe ironically, that intensity sometimes leads me to write in the second or third person to soften the insistence of apparent confession.  If “she” did it, after all, we’re all detached observers; and if “you” did it, then we’re all equally culpable!  But I like what happens when an “I” enters a poem: I think the reader pays attention in a more engaged way. 

 Q. Your book “Following Fred Astaire” has been described as fine writing, wry humor, and relevant. Released in 1999 by Word Works; could you tell us how the book was developed? 

Well, one answer would be that I wrote a bunch of poems, arranged them and re-arranged them and added to them obsessively over several years, realized finally that the conglomeration had become unwieldy, broke it in two, rearranged the poems again, and finally got lucky with a publisher!    But a better answer is that the poems in this book do focus on anxiety – especially the sequence about peculiar phobias, the dream poems that punctuate the four sections, and the many poems where longing and apprehensiveness intertwine (like “Red Sea,” maybe about junior high school crushes; or “Gossip,” maybe about friends so intimate they’re perceived as – might as well be – adulterers).  I think the book finally came together for me when I decided it was going to be about anxious desire, and so dropped from the manuscript most of the poems, however effective, that stood to the side of that topic.  I like arranging poems in different arrays, to see what happens when they rub against new neighbors, and this book must have gone through at least 30 permutations before The Word Works chose it for their Washington Prize.

 Q. My favorite lines from the poem, “The Troll” is “Dunk her or drown her, she pops right back up with her havoc and hoodoo. She’s the mange in your manger, iceberg in your bath.”  What was the inspiration for this poem? 

Thanks!  I’ll mention for people who may not know that this poem appears in the Endicott Studio’s on-line Journal of Mythic Arts, one of several poems of mine that they’ve kindly picked up during the last couple of years: here’s the URL: http://www.endicott-studio.com/cofhs/chTroll.html  I got the idea for the poem during a bout of extreme end-of-semester grouchiness when I appalled myself by responding with fury when a couple of people asked very small favors of me – I guess my own minor version of road rage.  I felt like a troll, and started playing with the idea of a creature that would relish that rage rather than feeling shamed by it.  There’s a lot of word-play in the poem, which I hope both softens its nastiness and also makes it more disturbing, moving from the familiar “thorn in the flesh” and “skeleton at the feast” towards more peculiar associations, like the mange and the iceberg. 

Q. Ashland Poetry Press released “Crawlers” in 2006. Could you describe the book for us?   

Here’s a version of what I’ve been saying to introduce the book at readings:  Crawlers found its shape in the last years of my father’s life, and, as he lost himself to Alzheimer’s – as he forgot how to speak, how to eat, how to walk, how to stand – it made me think about what a struggle it is to learn how to do those things in the first place.  So Crawlers poses poems about a child’s coming into consciousness with the complications surrounding the father’s loss of consciousness, drawing connections between a child’s ways of coping with bereavement – my mother died when I was three – and the father’s disappearance as he ages.   In this book, too, I’m interested in the subtleties of domestic atrocity, the daily stinging cruelties hidden behind the wall of family.  All our fairy tales – with their disregarded younger brothers, their murderous stepmothers, their Cinderellas – map this terrain, and the book plays with those archetypes – but it also skitters with arthropods: bugs, insects, crawlers. We share the earth with insects.  They own our yards, our houses.  Rather like our families, we can’t evade them.  

I’m also interested here in the distinction that the literary and cultural critic Edward Said has made between filiation – accepting or acquiescing to the family and the world-view we’re born to – and affiliation – in which we actively choose our associates and our beliefs, even if they are the ones we were born into.  Affiliation seems to me to extend the idea of standing on our own two feet, and in the book, I’ve used travel as a metaphor for getting beyond the limitations of the self. So, although the riddle of the sphinx doesn’t actually appear in the book, I think it makes use of the implications of walking on four legs, two legs, three. 

Q. You maintain a poetry events list that is without equal in the Delaware Valley and beyond. How did you get involved with the list and how does one person manage so much material?

 The list began on a much smaller scale: I wanted my students to know about literary events in the Philadelphia area, and eventually began to pass along the information I was gathering, to friends and then to friends of friends, and so on.  I now send announcements to upwards of 450 people, not counting my students.  How does one person manage so much material?  Ineptly, alas!  I try to keep up with events at local colleges and universities, but otherwise the task of keeping current with every reading series inevitably gets beyond me. I used to make up calendars periodically, but that labor quickly became overwhelming too, so now I’m more a conduit than a compiler: people send me their announcements, and I pass them along. I’m thus dependent on the list itself for its effectiveness, and I thank you ALL for assisting me so admirably!  For anyone who’s not yet signed up, my e-mail address is nanders1@swarthmore.edu.  I should mention that there’s another, frankly more professional list in the area, a list run by Kathye Fetsko Petrie that leans more towards fiction than poetry.  It costs money to access, but it’s a lot more comprehensive: book clubs, book reviews, book advertisements.  I believe Kathye’s e-address is kpwriting@comcast.net. 

Q. You have written libretti for several operas. Where is your love of opera rooted and are there any new projects in this area? 

I actually came late to opera.  My former colleague at Swarthmore, Sue Snyder, would sometimes invite me to performances at the Met, and I was blown away by the force of the emotion those singers could project.  Even for a novice, operas are laced with familiar melodies, so that suddenly an aria will snap the plot into clarity, suffusing happenstance with implication. It’s been thrilling to work with this material, to put together the little verbal skeletons that music will flesh out and bring to life on stage.  Thomas Whitman and I are bringing a new project to completion soon: a version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” where Holmes is bested (as Watson puts it) “by a woman’s wit.”  We’re going to try out some scenes at Swarthmore this coming spring; and Orchestra 2001 plans to present the opera in concert during their 2008-9 season.   

Q. The poem, “Country Night,County Donegal” describes a country western night in an Irish Bar. I did not know the Irish enjoyed country music let alone a professor from Swarthmore. Do tell? 

The year I wrote that poem, Garth Brooks was the top-selling musical artist in Ireland: amazing, I agree!  If you go to a local pub in, say, Connemara or Donegal, where various local people regularly get up to sing, they’ll typically serenade you with Johnny Cash or Patsy Cline!  I confess I prefer Irish traditional music to just about any other kind, but I grew up in the South, where that tradition turned itself into Bluegrass, and I enjoy especially the edgy area between country and rock: the Band, Roseanne Cash, kd lang. 

Q. Could you describe your experience and responsibilities as the “Poet in Residence” at the Rosenbach Museum and Library?  

A little over eight years ago, the Rosenbach decided, as part of their community outreach programming, to sponsor poetry workshops at local centers for the elderly.  Although they approached a number of individuals and organizations, I was the only person to carry through: I’ve been leading workshops at the JCCs Stiffel Center in South Philly for the Rosenbach every spring since then; in fact, this summer the Museum is publishing a small anthology of poems by the workshop participants, which I’ve helped to edit.  During my second year with the program, the folks at the Rosenbach asked if I’d like to be “Poet in Residence” in recognition of the work I was doing, and of course I leaped at the chance.  As the resident poet, I’ve also had the great pleasure of putting together readings at the Museum in conjunction with their exhibitions: an evening celebrating literary parodies; poets’ responses to early photographs or maps; poems wrestling with spiritual and secular rituals, occasioned by the exhibition of Judaica that’s up right now.  The Rosenbach has put together small collections of the poems written for two of these events – 26 Letters, 26 Poets (poems commissioned for the exhibition “R is for Rosenbach,” celebrating the Museum’s 50^th anniversary) and Conscious Mapping: Poets Journey through Verbal Geography – and should have one out any day for the Chosen exhibition. They also invite me to read nicely juicy passages on Bloomsday, which is such a cool thing! 

Q. What direction do you see poetry moving in the first decade of this century? 

Oh golly, I don’t know!  One of the most exciting aspects of poetry these days, I believe, is that so many different styles seem to be flourishing at once.  As I read through the journals, though, I’m struck lately by a return to what one might call lyric mystery – breath-taking phrases, often in disjointed, even surreal relation to one another.  I think maybe this tendency springs (paradoxically?) from theory-intensive movements like LANGUAGE poetry: in denying subjectivity, side-stepping master narratives, and disguising its cerebral side, this sort of work sometimes begins to look surprisingly like Symboliste poetry, without the formal constraints. 

Q. What poets were early influences on you and who do you read out of the current crop of poets? 

I began my poetic initiation through my mother’s college poetry text, Louis Untermeyer’s anthology of modern British and American writers, and took especially to Hopkins, Yeats, Stevens, HD, Eliot – ironically, the very people I most frequently teach today – plus women writers like Christina Rosetti, Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, Edith Sitwell, Emily Dickinson, Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay.  These days, I especially relish the contemporary Irish writers  (Heaney, Longley, Muldoon, Boland, McGuckian, ni Dhomhnaill etc etc etc).  I read a lot, but feel like I only scratch the surface of what’s available.  Poets I’ve read this summer include Michael Dumanis (My Soviet Union), Jessica Fisher (my former student! whose book Frail-Craft won the Yale Prize for 2006; she’ll be reading at Swarthmore this spring), Terrance Hayes (Wind in a Box), HL Hix (Chromatic), Dorianne Laux (Facts about the Moon), and Natasha Trethewey (Native Guard). 

Q. You were a fellow at Yaddo, awarded a Pew Fellowship and your books have received wide acclaim.  What advice would you give poets who are applying for fellowships, grants and submitting work for publication? 

I’d say, keep trying, and don’t take rejection personally.  Not that I manage to avoid getting down at the mouth myself, but I try to look at these competitions as if they’re the lottery: winning is so unlikely that you can’t, you CANNOT, feel bad about not receiving notice!  And if it happens that you do succeed, remember to reassure your fellow writers even as you celebrate, because – however wonderful your work – believe me, luck was part of that success!   

Q. In addition to publishing your poetry you have read at a number of venues around the country.  What are the benefits for a poet to share their work in public and specifically what is the benefit for you? 

I love to read.  I think the poet’s voice can raise the words off the page to grip the reader, and there’s something especially satisfying in seeing, actually seeing, people respond to your words.  With so many people writing (and – alas – not so many people buying) poetry these days, poetry readings offer a space where you can introduce yourself to a wider audience.  I know some poets are execrable readers of their own work – yes, I too have heard them – and I know that a lot gets lost when we try to take complications in by ear.  But I think readings are dynamic, potent opportunities to extend our reach. 

Q. Your work has been published widely in print and on the internet.  There is a school of thought that the internet via online magazines has provided an outlet for poetry that no longer exists in the print form.  The other school of thought is that the internet has reduced the quality of poetry that is available to readers.  Do you have any thoughts on this? 

I’m more a print person than an internet person, and haven’t often submitted my work to on-line zines.  But I’ve seen simplistic work in magazines, and compelling work on-line, so I don’t believe that either medium is by definition dangerous or sustaining to what we do.  I’ll often chance on a poem on-line and then go looking for that person’s books; on the other hand, if I read something awful on-line, I’ve educated myself about that poet pretty cheaply! 

Q. Where will others be able to hear your poetry in the near future? 

I’ve been reading a lot this past year, with Crawlers hot off the press, but haven’t set much up for the coming year yet.  I’ll be reading new poems at Swarthmore sometime in the fall, and hope to be reading soon for the MAD Poets, as well.  On November 3, I’ll be leading a workshop for the Montgomery
County Community College literary festival, and hope many of you will join me. 

Contributor Note- Nathalie Anderson is our last interview of the summer season. It has been a pleasure to interview the poets who have appeared here, all unique, talented and inspirational in their own right. I hope you enjoyed getting to know them as I have. Enjoy the rest of the summer!  - G Emil Reutter.

 Dee Rimbaud is an artist, writer and new-age gypsy. His travels have taken him along the highways and byways of Europe and Asia. His favourite country is India, which he has visited several times; and where he met his partner, Su (on a bus to the ancient kingdom of Hampi). Su and Dee have one daughter, Rosie Sunshine, who was born on the Autumn Equinox, 2001. They spent several months travelling round Portugal, Spain and France in a small camper van the following year, and decided that they would sell up and live a life of no fixed abode before Rosie turned five. Dee’s first poetry collection, The Bad Seed was published in 1998 by Stride. His second collection, Dropping Ecstasy With The Angels was published in 2004 by Bluechrome who also published his novel, Stealing Heaven From The Lips Of God Dee’s website, which features his art and writing and various writers’ resources, is at www.thunderburst.co.uk.

The Interview

Q. The Book of Hopes and Dreams was recently published by Bluechrome Press http://www.bluechrome.co.uk/store/shop/item.asp?itemid=126&catid=72 . The anthology was created to raise funds for a special cause and you were the editor. Could you tell us how the anthology came together and about the cause it was created to support?    

When I was young I was very concerned about the state of the world and actively political.  I went on demonstrations and even briefly enjoyed the privilege of standing outside 10 Downing Street with a group of activists, shouting “Maggie Maggie Maggie, Out Out Out!”  Of course, our shouting had no effect.  Nor, in fact, did any of our demonstrations.  This was back in 1980.  Soon after that the USA fell under the spell of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr and thus began the nastiest, most retrograde two decades of the 20^th Century.  I watched from the sidelines, feeling powerless and horrified, as everything that previous generations had fought for gradually went to hell.  I guess, like many people, I believed there was nothing I could actually do to stop this process.  Then on the 11^th September 2001 (whilst in hospital, after suffering a brain haemorrhage) I watched the world have its own brain haemorrhage.  There are many people who believe this atrocity was orchestrated by neo-con conspirators; and I have certainly come across much evidence that supports this viewpoint.  Whether or not it was a conspiracy, it was certainly a catalyst for the USA and the UK to begin a campaign of illegal wars, the first of which was against Afghanistan.  It was also a catalyst for me to shake off the dust of decades of political apathy.  I remember hearing on the radio that the USA had bombed a series of caves where Osama Bin Laden was supposed to have been hiding and they’d killed a bunch of goat-herders and their children.  Having recently become a father, this news hit me with particular poignancy.  I felt it in my guts like I’ve never felt anything before.  And this feeling made me want to do something… but what?  What the fuck could I do? About a year or two later I heard about the Glasgow charity, Spirit Aid (http://www.spiritaid.org.uk) and their brave endeavour to help the people of the far flung, mountainous province of Baglan in N.E. Afghanistan (a region particularly badly hit, not just by the Americans, but also by the Russians and the Taliban).  Spirit Aid managed to raise enough money to buy a mobile cl