INTERVIEW WITH A POET He begs his host and the audience to be so gracious as to forgive him because he’s “rather hungover” from staying up all night reading Nietzsche and drinking Maker’s Mark and hasn’t had his prescribed cappuccino and scone yet. Plus he’s “positively exhausted” from his two month reading tour and needs to take a break and let the “well fill up.” A font of incomparable input we sup it up like burros in a cultural desert: he tells us if you don’t want to take the bus on your reading tour you can always take the train or you could fly in an airplane or drive in a car and if you want to save money on food it is best to eat in cheap restaurants rather than expensive ones (although occasionally it’s nice to splurge). He tells us the best way to get “free in your mind” is to stop worrying about money and it is assumed the subject of how his bills are paid is either a matter of mystical serendipity a rich woman or a government check each month. When he’s not cutting poems down “to the bone” he does fantasy football supports angry women on Facebook buys new head phones alerts the populace to the presence of Tom Waits and this strange new music called the blues acts as curator of newsboy caps and guidance counselor for hipsters. He tells us his “ironclad character” was “arduously attained” and it took him “years of suffering” to find his “voice” which is odd because he’s 29 and sounds very much like every other stoner that ever rode a pony in the small press parade. His fourth “full length” is coming out soon he has a primary publisher but he writes so “feverishly” that he is obliged to occasionally “let” other people publish his work. He mentions 38 poets by name and then reiterates how he detests name-dropping and groups MFA programs too well maybe not DETESTS because not ALL groups are bad a poet needs to have a community “generalizing is the proctectorate of idiots” and hate is not a word in his vocabulary suffice it to say he is on the fence when it comes to groups and MFA programs while the evidence is still being tallied. He reminds us that poetry is something one must do in isolation with a pen or a typewriter or a computer or a magic marker or a stick in the sand he himself has written poems in the margins of sky-mall magazines and on cocktail napkins which proves a poet will write because a poet must write, period. He advises youngsters to get back to nature but not the roses and trees and deer and waterfalls kind of nature in other words, “write what you don’t know” except sometimes it is also good to “write what you know.” His most recent book opens with a Whitman quote and if you don’t know who Whitman is well then you’re still shitting yellow in mama’s wam-wam. He tells us it is best to eventually get down to prose writing because the world just doesn’t take poets seriously due to the fact that civilization has been in decay since the time of Bukowski and perhaps even a bit before that. He says he thinks it is important to “keep literature dangerous” and to illustrate this he explains that one of his chapbooks is bound with birch bark. In closing if you have even “the remotest interest in modern literature” you will not miss his latest collection though what it’s called I can’t for the life of me remember— something with “blood” in it.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 19:47:47 +0000
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