DJ: The entire collection follows a narrative thread throughout. Was that always your intent when building this collection, or did that come more organically?

ML: I wrote poems that appear in the book over a pretty broad span of time — maybe a 12 or 13 year period. When I was writing the poems I wasn’t thinking in terms of structure or a manuscript, but when I reached the point where I thought I had enough for a manuscript, I started thinking very consciously about having something of a narrative arc, or a shape to the manuscript. I wanted the book to move in a particular direction, but I didn’t write the poems themselves with that in mind.

DJ: So it came about after you’d been in the process of writing?

ML: That’s right.

DJ: Did you have to return to any poems after arriving at that conclusion? Fill in any blanks where you wanted to build up the arc?

ML: After I submitted the manuscript to contests and Prairie Schooner picked it up, their editor, Hilda Raz, asked me to write, or at least add several more poems to the manuscript. I didn’t have any existing poems that I felt were appropriate or would fit the book, so I did have to write four or five new poems after the book was accepted. Then I placed them in the sequence where I thought they would fit.

DJ: Did the editor offer any insight into why she wanted the additional poems?

ML: I think it was more about length, and not that the manuscript felt lacking. She wanted to fill it out a little more. I was happy to do that.

DJ: Where did those poems slot in?

ML: Mostly in the second section. “Beyond It,” “To Her Body,” and “The Book of Ash” are three poems I added. They’re near the middle.

DJ: As I was reading the collection, there were four poems specifically that felt to me to be a part of a sequence — as it happens, “Beyond It” and “To Her Body” bookend this sequence, with “Finding My Mother” and “Forgetting” in between. In looking at your arc, they do sit right at that peak, if you will — if this were a novel, these poems would be the middle chapters. Were you trying to build the feeling of a pinnacle moment with these poems?

ML: I don’t think I was consciously trying to build or amplify what you refer to as a pinnacle moment. It’s possible I was attached in some way to that section of the book. There’s a lot of energy concentrated there. But I don’t think there was anything conscious about why I decided to add the poems there.

When I was looking at the manuscript, that area looked like the best place where they would fit in. It’s interesting that you saw them as a sequence. I think there’s something to your observation, though I wasn’t thinking about that at all.

DJ: So you were just writing them without thinking about where they’d go?

ML: Yes. I wasn’t thinking about the sequence at all.

DJ: What is your process, then, when you compare the art and craft of writing an individual poem vs. the art of compiling 30 or 50 poems into what you’d like to be an intentional sequence? I think that for a lot of poets, especially as it relates to first books, the idea of putting together a manuscript is foreign, or at least it’s not discussed all that much.

ML: My experience with first books, when I look at others, is that the books tend to be more of a general amalgam of poems written over time. Then the poet may arrange them so they read like more of a self-contained project.

I think it’s important for poets to just write poems, then figure out the sequencing after the poems are written. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad to have something of a book-length project or entity in mind before writing the poems. Then again, that can be somewhat suffocating to the writing process.

Looking at this book, there’s a central theme and/or central themes that reoccur. I think a lot of poets . . . we tend to be obsessive types. From book to book, we tend to write the same poem over and over — meaning those same obsessive themes show up in our poems again and again. With that in mind, it felt like an organic process to have isolated poems, then put them together in a book. I do agree, though, that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of attention on or talk around how to arrange first books in a shape that carries the reader through from beginning to end.

DJ: Do you expect that the reader would or even should read this collection in a cover-to-cover manner?

ML: I think that’s the best way to read it. I like to read anyone’s collection, unless it’s an anthology, from beginning to end in a linear fashion, because I do think that a lot of poets are holding that ideal in various degrees of consciousness, sensing the book’s movement from beginning to end. I think reading the poems in the order they’re arranged gives more meaning to the reading experience. Of course there are specific poems you go back to because you’re compelled by them for whatever reason, but I think with the first read, it’s important to read from beginning to end. But that’s just me.

DJ: In your collection, we know there’s this very intense middle section, where things really build up to it. There are some of the poems toward the back of the third section — “The Night Garden,” “How It Happens,” and especially “As Told By Three Rivers” — my reading is that they’re coming from a different voice. “As Told By Three Rivers” — and maybe this is just my sensibility from having grown up in Pennsylvania and having lived for a time in southeastern Ohio — something about the language has an iron ore quality to it, as if you’ve gotten the land from that part of the country into this poem. Do you feel this shift in voice might be related to when you wrote certain poems?

ML: I think that’s true. “As Told By Three Rivers” is probably one of the oldest poems in the collection. The other ones you mentioned, those are all a little more recent. Again, I was just going by my intuition and my ear, and when I was arranging the poems, I wasn’t thinking about which were older, which were newer — I just wanted the manuscript to work as a coherent whole.

There’s a more relaxed tone . . . a tone of release to the poems in the last section. This might lend itself to the voice you’re referring to.

DJ: I do want to share that the book, as a whole, was difficult for me at first. I kept coming back to it then putting it down, then coming back to it. The poem that really first pulled me in — and one that I think is both difficult yet inviting — is “White Hydrangeas as a Way Back to Self.”

ML: I can still remember sitting in my old office back in Oakland and really struggling with it, wanting to make it right.

I tend to write about experiences that have happened in the past, or states of mind that I’m more removed from in the present day, and are therefore a little easier to approach from the distance of art. And I do warn people that some of the poems can be hard to read. I swear — and I don’t say this in a self-aggrandizing sense — that at almost every reading, there is at least one person crying in the audience. I have a mixture of, “Oh my goodness, I really traumatized this listener,” while another part of me is grateful that they’re being touched in such a deep way.

DJ: Ideally, you recognize your role in providing them an opportunity to release something.

Could you tell me a little more about the process of writing “White Hydrangeas”? It’s this lovely poem broken up in small segments — does this reflect the way you wrote it, with parts coming here and there?

ML: I started writing it with the intention of having it be a sequence of sections. I was initially inspired by Jane Mead, a wonderful poet who was also a teacher of mine. In her second book, she has at least one or two long poems written in these short fragments or sections that are then strung together to form the long poem.

Then I just started writing it. I had a vague image in my mind of a Wallace Stevens poem — I can’t remember the title, but it starts out with him envisioning white flowers in a bowl or vase. (Editor’s note: my guess is it’s “The Poems of Our Climate.”) It was such a meditative, pure image, and I knew that I wanted that to be the central theme.

These two things — the idea of the short, strung-together sections, and the white flowers — are really how it started.

Then I played with it for quite a while. I started out with four or five then kept adding, then started thinking it was too long . . . ultimately it became what it is. In the end, I think the poem is a journey in itself.

DJ: It definitely has that quality, especially beginning with the line, “To enter the mind is a dangerous act.” Then you come back to that thought with, “To begin is a dangerous act.”

Structurally, how the entire book is built, it shows up right at the end of Act Two, if you will, which is the perfect place for what you wanted it to be.

ML: There’s this quality when you start to write something — you have an idea of what you want, but you really aren’t sure. Often, a poem sort of says, “I want to go this way,” or, “No, I don’t want to go that way no matter what you do.” And that happens with almost every poem.

I’ve had different responses to the first section, the line “To enter the mind . . .” Some people have said they found it gutsy to only have one line on a page. Hilda, when we first started talking about the manuscript, felt there was too much white space on the page. She was wondering if we could just take it out. I gave it some thought and told her I really felt I needed to have just that standalone line. She was fine with it. And other people have had a whole range of responses.

I think it’s necessary for a writer to heed those inner voices that say, “This is really important” — as long as it’s helping and not hindering the work.

DJ: And as long as the inner debate is healthy, and isn’t just being driven from a place that says, “No, I want to do it my way just because.” And I don’t get the sense you have that challenge.

ML: Just lots of other problems. (Laughter)

DJ: The book has a lot of Jungian qualities to it . . . the shadow self, and deep unconscious. Do dreams often weave their way into your work, whether in a literal sense or as an exercise of delving into the unconscious?

ML: There’s one example in the book, “Finding My Mother,” where the images of a dream actually made their way into the book. The mother’s body lying in a field, for instance. Of course I had associations as I was writing the poem, but the dream material is woven in.

Dreams are a rich source not just for writing but for teaching us things about our lives and selves. I think the unconscious is always with us, even in our waking life, and especially when we sit down to write. I feel an important aspect to the writing process is getting into that sort of dream space, the in-between reverie space where one has access to both conscious thought as well as whatever might be coming up from the subconscious. Then we mix them together in that middle realm. Obviously, I have no idea how any of this happens, but I believe it’s an important part of the process for me and a lot of other poets and writers as well.

DJ: I feel that being connected to the dream life is to yield a conscious construct of the subconscious images that come, and to actually step away from as much as we can from the conscious world when trying to translate the subconscious message.

I’d like to talk a little about the autobiographical component to the book, especially with the work delving into the mother relationship. Is that something you’re comfortable discussing?

ML: What I’m willing to say is that my mother did go missing in 1995, and it’s an unresolved disappearance. The rest I’d like to leave to art and whatever associations readers would like to make.

One of my concerns with discussing a particular poem’s theme is to be sure not to collapse the space that exists between the reader and the poem. If we give too much information about a poem, then it collapses that mystical, alchemical process that happens in the in-between.

DJ: To stay there for another minute, when entering into these types of deeply personal poems, do you find it difficult to give so much to the poems, then turn them over and put them in the world? Is it a process of healing for you?

ML: I think psychic distance is important, especially when writing about difficult or painful material. By the time I started getting into writing about certain things, I’d had enough distance and the necessary psychic detachment. Of course, grief has its own agenda and its own timetable. Feelings can come up at any time.

Putting the poems out into the world was not as hard as sometimes reading the poems to an audience, depending on my state of mind. I will consciously not read certain poems because they feel too difficult to read. And that seems to have dissipated as time goes by, especially as the book begins to feel more and more like its own entity, and not so much a part of me.

I think there was a time — not so much now — where I really feared that unleashing the book onto the world would be like committing a trauma onto my readers. “Oh no, here’s this dark, heavy, painful material . . .” There was a part of me that almost felt guilty or responsible for the reader’s experience in a way. I don’t feel that so much now. It’s art. People can take from it whatever they need to, including nothing if that’s the case.

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Read five poems from The Darkened Temple on the Guest Writer page. Visit L’Esperance’s site for links to reviews and interviews, and to learn more about her work.

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PS: I really think I work too much. I would like to have my dog Lily be my guru and teach me to lie around and steal.

DJ: Have your written Lily poems?

PS: In her voice? No.

DJ: When you say “working too much,” is it a balance thing? Too much mental work? Because I know you’re a walker and a swimmer.

PS: I’ve always had too much to do, and have always been organized enough to get everything done. Going to graduate school while working while raising kids . . . I was just always doing everything at once.

DJ: Coming out with two books . . . was it accidental that they both came out?

PS: Yes. I would not have chosen that. I actually wrote Under Taos Mountain quite a while ago. It kept being a finalist in chapbook contests. It was always the one where they’d print the other guy but wish they could print me. Finally it just won one. The poems are from about four or five years ago.

DJ: And what about Six Lips?

PS: They’re since, May the Generations Die in the Right Order, probably in the last three years.

DJ: Then with regards to A is for Anne, were you writing any of these around the same time that you were going in and out of the Hutchinson persona?

PS: Rarely. When I start doing the historical narratives, it’s like writing a novel. As you can imagine, it’s totally engrossing.

Sometimes I feel funny being interviewed, because I feel everything I have to say I put into the poems.

DJ: Well, let me ask you the following, and maybe you can get an idea of where I’m coming from. Regarding the poem, “Heart Failure” — and I’ve seen a number of poems about your relationship with your mother — was there ever a point where the poem ended at the end of part one?

PS: Yes. They were two separate poems. I put them together.

DJ: What changed?

PS: I didn’t want to be as harsh a person as I sounded. That’s the honest answer. And if my sister ever read it and it ended at the end of part one, she would have never spoken to me again.

DJ: Is that a challenge for you, or a concern?

PS: As it happens in many families, my sister got along better with my mother, I got along better with my father. My mother died last April, and my sister is still in heavy mourning.

I talked to my sister this morning, and she just found out her son and his wife are having a baby girl. She said, “Mother would have been so happy.”

DJ: And that thought doesn’t cross your mind?

PS: The only time I think “my mother would have liked this” is when I go shopping. She loved to shop. I was always busy working and had no money. She would approve of me if I ever spent money.

DJ: I have two brothers. My mother used to say when we were kids that she was glad she had sons. Her relationship with my grandmother was always distant.

PS: I think there’s not enough separation between mothers and daughters. My mother was kind of anorexic, and also insufficiently separated from me. In her mind, I was obese.

DJ: Did she communicate that type of language to you?

PS: Absolutely. When I’d visit she’d come up and do the calipers, pinch my side, that sort of thing. I would say, “Gee, thanks Mom.”

DJ: Does your sister write?

PS: She’s a lawyer. We’re completely different.

DJ: Do you think being a poet helps you in the grieving process?

PS: I think people like you and me, because we’re attuned to different things, we’re just thinner skinned, and everything gets to us easier.

When something hits you, it hits you more intensely. When they start talking about torture on the radio, for instance, I have to turn the radio off.

Were you ever told as a child that you were over-sensitive?

DJ: Yes. I was told to stop being so sensitive, and to stop talking so much.

PS: When I was a little kid and started learning about history, I was overwhelmed about how much history there was. I thought about how it becomes harder and harder to know about the past because you keep getting further away from it.

My sister was never struck by history until she went to Israel. Suddenly it was in her face. I just think writers and people of the ilk are more imaginative. You can get into something completely. And writing is a way to deal with stuff.

I grew up having poetry read to me. My grandmother would sit on the porch and read poems to us, have us memorize different things. I started writing when I was very young, and for years wrote very skillful — albeit bad — imitations of other people.

DJ: I only read box scores. And I would read them over and over and over.

PS: And visualize the game?

DJ: Remember the game from the night before, or imagine the games I didn’t see.

PS: When I was a kid I thought baseball was a show. It was always on the radio. Like a serial.

I worried about how you could have the top-half of an inning before you could have the bottom-half. When you built blocks, you know, you’d start from the bottom and go up. Finally someone took me to the Polo Grounds and pointed it out on the scoreboard.

DJ: Going back to the books, there are instances when you come upon the topic of death from a place of starting over or rebirth, rather than a place of ending. Having watched what your mother went through, was there anything that spurred these types of thoughts or poems?

PS: My mother spent three years dying hard. She lived in New York. I flew from Portland to New York once a month. That was my life for three years.

Somebody asked me recently if my work has changed. I said, “I think so. I’ve raised my children, paid for my house and buried my parents.” Those are major life chores. Anything can happen now.

DJ: Is that a topic, death, that’s become more immediate for you now?

PS: I have time to think, catch my breath.

My mother had a live-in aide. She couldn’t take care of herself. Whenever I would come, the aide would take a vacation.

It was hard work and a hard death. At the end they gave her morphine, but they weren’t allowed to do it so I had to give it to her.

DJ: Are there certain parts of it you don’t care to access in the realm of writing? A compartmentalization where certain things are memory, and that’s where they’ll stay?

PS: I worked for five years as a home health aide. When it became necessary, I could be quite clinical.

My sister couldn’t deal with anything about my mother’s body. At one point, I was licensed to do that stuff. In a sense, there was something I could do in the room, whether it was wash her, give her medicine, or whatever.

DJ: Were you able to approach it from a place where you said, “This is a body, this isn’t my mother, it’s just a body”?

PS: When I worked as a home health aide, whomever I was taking care of, I had to love them for the time I was with them. Although I had tremendous resentments and grudges against my mother, I felt that I could love her at least as much as I could love a stranger.

DJ: Did that possibly open up more compassion?

PS: It was generalized compassion. And my sister, in a way, is having specific grief, where for me, the only way I could be nice to her was to generalize.

But there was one point where I think I’d just come back from my mother’s, and I had to go back sooner than in a month. I was lying in bed with my husband, and I was just shaken by the whole thing. I said to him, “If she lives another six-months, I’m going to die.” I felt like a plane I’d be on would fall out of the sky . . . something was going to happen. I couldn’t keep doing it. And eventually she died.

I have a poem that’s going to be in my next book that quotes her as saying, “If I ever die.” That was her attitude. If. She was a character-and-a-half. She died with a perfect manicure, of course. Absolutely perfect.

DJ: My grandmother, when she was dying, would ask my mother how her lipstick looked. It’s interesting what we hold onto at the end.

PS: All women are vain. And also, when you go back to that generation, women were seen more as objects than they are now. They spent more time on their looks than on their educations.

DJ: So your writing of Under Taos Mountain started before your mother began dying?

PS: It started with a residency through the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico. When I arrived I had some sort of minor tooth issue. I’d recently had a root canal. It eventually turned out that I had an infection deep in my jawbone. I didn’t get it taken care of until I got home. In Taos, everyone was treating it like a toothache.

I was in pretty severe pain, and I managed to get some Vicodin. I was sort of just living on the Vicodin. I’m not a real druggy person, but I needed the Vicadin to the point where I’d wake up in the middle of the night because I needed more.

There I am with this throbbing pain in something of a Vicodin cloud, and outside the casita I was in, there sat a three-trunked Aspen in the front yard, opposite where you’d put a writing desk. And the tree was full of magpies.

I don’t know if it was because of the Vicodin, or because the magpies were slightly weird, but I felt like they had an attitude about me. I would say that’s total paranoia, except other people have told me they’ve had this happen with magpies as well.

I had gone to work on something else, which I brought with me and did some work on. I was also working on the Hutchinson book, but I kept getting interrupted by the magpies. I’d have to stop and write a magpie poem. I wrote them all during my first six weeks.

DJ: So you were already in a place where you were transmuting, almost . . . connecting with the Hutchinson consciousness and allowing other voices to come in.

PS: That’s true. I was channeling Anne.

DJ: Perhaps the magpies saw an open channel.

PS: I like that theory.

DJ: And when you came home with this book of conversational magpie poems, what was your crafting process?

PS: The book was basically done. I sequenced them mostly in the order I wrote them — I swapped a couple here and there, because it seemed to flow better that way. I condensed a couple of them, especially where the conversation seemed repetitive. I didn’t write any new ones.

DJ: No “unused magpie poems” lying around anywhere?

PS: I think I threw one or two away. It was just a very strange experience. I sort of felt like Poe with the raven.

DJ: Did you think at any point you might have been going crazy?

PS: No more so than usual. Is that a good answer?

DJ: That’s a great answer.

PS: I think most writers are manic depressive. As we get older we learn how to manage it. If you get too depressive, you do something to get yourself under control.

DJ: Tell me about the voice you use when you read these poems aloud.

PS: Magpie has more authority than I do. Outside the casita, Magpie knew it all.

DJ: And she knows she knew it all.

PS : Magpie was mean.

DJ: What about the idea of Magpie as muse?

PS: I hate to blow your analogy, but almost everything I write is quite literal. I was writing to the magpie.

DJ: So when you write of rebirth, which shows up often, is that aligned with your beliefs?

PS: I was raised as a strict atheist. I’ve been very faithful.

The way I write . . . I guess there’s something about keeping keeping yourself half-asleep so you can access things.

DJ: It doesn’t sound like something you can “try to do” as much as it sounds like something that is.

PS: You can arrange your life if you want. I know all these people who say, “I go to the gym first thing in the morning.” I would never do that, because it’s such precious time. To some extent, you can make it possible to access certain things.

DJ: There’s also the idea of simply being available to seeing things.

PS: Taking Lily out first thing every morning works for both of us. I usually find myself reciting lines on the way home so as not to forget them.

When I get home, I grab my yellow pad and a pen, and jot down the stuff I thought about when I was walking, and try to get out everything I had in my head so that, even if I have to make calls or grade papers, I’ll have it when I sit down later.

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Read our interview from January 2009 here.

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DJ: You’ve been at it for a long time. I read an interview you just did with BT Shaw, where she asked you about choosing the poems for this collection. Was that difficult?

CR: My editor really wanted to lean on some stuff that had already been in books. I was more interested in poems that hadn’t come out in book form. I’ve worked with the editor before. We’ve always had something of a tugging match. Our negotiations usually revolve around a couple of drinks of whisky . . . on his part at least — I don’t drink. So we had some pretty healthy discussions about certain selections.

DJ: Why is it important for a poet to have a person who gives another perspective when putting together a collection?

CR: In this particular instance, it’s rather unusual. When I first started publishing, I would usually just take a box of poems to an editor and say, “OK, do what you will.” As I got more mature, I realized I didn’t want all of that responsibility in someone else’s hands. I wanted a part in the selection. I had to declare my independence, say things like, “Look, I understand what you’re saying, but this particular poem has a certain meaning to me.”

Editors see a lot of stuff. They get something of an edge or bias, especially people who are used to working with writers of a certain caliber. Then they come upon someone such as myself who’s past a certain point and is willing to hunker down and say, “I know what you think, but that’s not what I’m doing here, and I don’t want to lose what I’m trying to do.”

I was very insecure for a while. I don’t have the usual background of a poet, or of someone who writes for a living. Maybe this is kind of dangerous to say, but I don’t have the formal background, the MFA . . . I didn’t go to Iowa, didn’t study writing. The only writing classes I ever took were in short fiction at the University of Oregon years and years ago.

DJ: Was there a point in your life as a poet where this sensibility of not having a certain degree stood in your way?

CR: If you write, and I think this is especially true for poets, you’re always on the edge between being sure and unsure. “What the hell am I doing? Why am I spending all this time doing something that may or may not ever amount to anything?” I used to get a little bit of that laid on me, but not so much anymore. Not necessarily from my close colleagues, but from other people.

A long time ago, I was the faculty advisor for the poetry committee at Portland State. Certain people would say things like, “You’re not even in the English department, what the hell are you doing here?”

Unfortunately, there’s a question of legitimacy about being someone who simply has written but doesn’t have a certain degree. I’ve been writing for 40 years. Maybe there’s something there that may or may not equal an MFA. Who knows? Sometime around 1976 or ’77, I thought maybe I’d go to the University of Montana and get an MFA. I talked with some people I knew, and they said, “We’d love to have you, but why?” After you’ve created a body of work, it’s kind of silly, unless you want to become a teacher. I already tried to teach. So I never got the MFA. Maybe it took me a bit longer to get where I am because I didn’t come from that world of workshops. I just tried to figure it out on my own.

DJ: Did you seek out mentors?

CR: I sort of picked them along the way, but not in the traditional sense. I’d become interested in their work.

I was interested in Robert Creeley. He was one of my models, if you will. When I really got into writing, guys like Creeley and Gary Snyder came off as really impressive. To a certain extent I’m still following Creeley’s footsteps. Looking at his later poems, he uses these really short lines, as opposed to what you see from a lot of contemporary poets using really long, Ashbery-style lines.

Other people have come and gone without me really thinking about it at the time, but looking back I can see their influence. In the ’50s, the first poetry I ever really read was W.D. Snodgrass, who’d just won the Pulitzer Prize. It turns out, Snodgrass and I . . . and I never talked to him face-to-face . . . we actually corresponded for a long while. He was a mentor, not because my writing was anything like his — he’s definitely more traditional with regards to rhyme and meter — but he impressed upon the possibilities of being a poet, the idea that you could lead your life as a poet, which is as good a way to lead your life as anything else.

A number of my influences have been rather oblique or subtle. Impressions have come from a person’s work as much as what their work was about. Here I was trying to figure out life as a poet, and I’d take a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. And that’s still the case, to a degree.

DJ: It sounds like you came to an awareness around something Snodgrass said, that you could lead your life as a poet. At what point did you accept that as a truth?

CR: For the last 10 or 15 years, I’ve come to consider the fact that the focus of my life is on writing poetry. It took me a long time to get there.

I come from a family where if you literally weren’t working with your hands then it wasn’t legitimate work. For 40 or so years of being a poet, and being a lot of other things as well, when somebody would ask me what I did for a living, I’d say things like, “Well, I’m a poet but I’m also a land surveyor.” And they’d say, “OK, land surveying . . . let’s talk about that.” About 10 or 15 years ago, I started saying, “I’m a poet,” If that was as far as the conversation went, then so be it. I wasn’t going to try and prop myself up with things like, “Yeah, but I’m also a medical translator.”

DJ: And you’ve taught in residencies?

CR: Yes, but I don’t do it as much these days.

DJ: What have you seen in the last 20-25 years with regards to how students take to poetry?

CR: I used to not feel this way, but I think a lot of it nowadays has to do with the electronic age and the visuals that pop up on screens. There’s been some kind of change. Of course, my grandson is nutty about games, but he’s also a great writer and a prodigious reader. But I don’t think this is the case for most kids, and even adults, who are really tied to their screens.

Last year in one of the schools, I was passing out paper with poems on them when a young guy said, “You should just put this up on screen.” Part of it is my own bias, I suppose. I work on a laptop, but I still print things out to read. Computers are useful, obviously, but the screens get distracting.

DJ: Don’t you think there’s something to the art of scratching and editing on paper? A sort of tactile connection between the words themselves and the process?

CR: I do, but I’m not the best example. I was dragged kicking and screaming into the electronic age, and swore I’d never have a computer. Now I’m not sure what I’d do without one.

I do like that scratching around. I’ll still go out in the backyard and write by hand. I recently bought a manual typewriter, but I don’t even know if I could actually get away with the act of typing. It’s a lot of work. Eventually you wear yourself out, especially if you’re putting together a manuscript. It would take forever. I can’t figure out how people wrote fiction before computers? Or maybe computers make the whole act too easy, which can have a critical effect on quality.

DJ: Maybe Hemingway’s first draft was like a fifth draft when you factor in his level of attention? As if he had greater intention regarding what he put down.

CR: I think in the old days, people wrote more carefully. And I mean the physical act of writing on paper as much as more focus on what they were writing. Professors would write everything out then have someone typed it up, which presupposes that the typist could actually read it.

In a way, technology has made us lazy. We’re less careful. All we need to do is hit a few buttons and change everything at once.

DJ: Going back to The Book of Shadows, when you had the chance to review your old work and your new work, how do you feel about your recent writing compared with pieces from 30 years ago?

CR: In some senses, I’m still writing the same way, but I look at things a bit more carefully.

When this book came up, I realized that many of the older poems wouldn’t stand a whole lot of change. Also, I believe there’s something not quite genuine about looking at something 30 years after the fact and saying, “Oh, well, I’ll just rewrite this.” I think certain things need to stand, no matter how frail or awkward, as a kind of example of a period.

A few people tried to talk me into correcting some of the older poems. I just felt there was a kind of grittiness or rawness, an awkwardness that had some value I wanted to keep, rather than going back and rewriting things to “make them better.”

No one’s ever convinced me to do this. My wife’s an editor. She likes to mention things about punctuation. Well, I have no clue about punctuation. So of course I can go back and punctuate a poem . . . maybe it would make it make more sense. But when I was writing this or that poem to begin with, punctuation wasn’t part of the process. Of course there are a few places where I went back and added punctuation, tried to make things a little nicer, but for the most part I’m not that interested. The spark that was there when I wrote a particular poem is different now. To go back and rework it just isn’t that interesting to me.

DJ: Was there a certain period in your career you enjoyed more than others?

CR: At any moment I’ve enjoyed it as much as any other moment, because there’s nothing like the individual spark behind a particular poem. I think I’m enjoying my current writing more than anything, which isn’t to say that my work has earned any more or less critical acclaim, whatever that is.

DJ: Acclaim’s elusive.

CR: People do review my books, but not that much. A very good friend of mine said this about The Book of Shadows: “This is a really good book, and you can be sure it’s not going to get the attention it deserves.” I’ve come to accept that.

I never thought the book would be reviewed in the New York Times Review of Books, for instance. They’ve got all the books they can handle, and how you get a book reviewed in there is beyond me. Frankly I don’t think it’s that important to the kind of writing I do.

One thing I’ve learned after so many years is to be happy with what I’m doing, and to realize that, for me, this is important work, whether anyone else thinks so or not. The writing itself has value, and that’s what’s important, whether or not it receives critical acclaim.

DJ: Was there a point when acclaim was more important?

CR: Absolutely. Anyone who’s ever written feels that way. You want to be noticed. You want somebody to say, “This is good,” or to give you some sense that what you’re doing is valuable in some way.

There was a time, before publishing got so big, where you’d send poems off and an editor would actually write back and say, “Hey, this isn’t so bad, but it’s not exactly what we want.” Some people still believe that if you send work to a publication that you’re going to get some sort of response back. It’s become so overloaded with so much stuff coming and going, that you might get a piece of paper that says, “This isn’t right,” and maybe someone might sign it.

When you’re younger, you’d like to be in magazines like Field or Atlantic Monthly. When you get a little older you realize it’s more complicated than that. If someone is offering $500 for a poem, they’re looking for someone who will give their publication a little more credit.

DJ: Do you remember the point where you got over that and finally decided that it’s just about the writing?

CR: Probably in the last 10 or 15 years. That’s all part of coming to the conclusion that no matter what I do, any kind of fame or money that comes along in the process is no longer important.

A fellow writer used to ask me when he’d see me, “Carlos, why are you doing this? And don’t give me any of this bull about honor or nobility.” It used to frustrate me.

DJ: How would you answer that question now?

CR: I’m doing it because I think it’s important. And I like it. It’s a perfectly legitimate way to conduct your life, whether or not you earn a dollar.

I used to be very defensive, always trying to explain what it was I did. Some people would get it, but most people wouldn’t. Most other writers would get it, but still there were some that didn’t.

People don’t know what being a poet is all about, especially if you’re just trying to be a poet and not an entertainer, which is a whole different art form and way of thinking. I’ve forever tried to explain what it is that I do, and quite often I’ve just copped out. “Oh, you know, I drive a bus . . .” People could relate to that. Now I just tell them I’m a poet because that’s what I am.

–

We met recently to discuss his latest collection, his method, and a little baseball for good measure.

DJ: You mentioned at a reading that the first half of the book was based off the Old Testament, or that the Bible informed some of the writing?

DB: Some poems in the book are riffs on Old Testament verses. The poem that introduces the book, “Evening Watch,” sets the tone for the agitation. The first poem of the book is “Genesis 12.” The word I use is “covering.” I “cover” Genesis: 12, the way a band on the corner covers “House of the Rising Sun.” There’s also one on Genesis: 27.

DJ: There are a few that feel like they’re from that same historical period, or at least feel tied to an older world. The poem, “The Husband’s Tale,” for instance.

DB: Yes. That’s a play on Chaucer.

DJ: What is it like to “cover” something like Genesis?

DB: With “Genesis 12,” I was trying to write my own version and interpretive dramatization of the chapter. There’s another poem later that fits the same category, “Old Adam Outside the Wall of Eden.”

The Biblical Genesis: 12 is the point where Abraham leaves his homeland and heads to Canaan. It’s a transitional chapter. If he doesn’t leave Ur, or wherever, and go to Canaan, a lot of things don’t happen. He’s a fanatic, and his leaving is tied to his fanaticism.

My take on fanatics is, they’re so far around the bend in their fanaticism, that they come right around to the edge of doubt. If you could flip them, you could flip them easily, and they would not know what they’re doing. People who come out of fanaticism are often like, “Wow, it was like a bad dream.” Or an addiction.

I wanted to tell the story from this awareness. The poem ends with the sentence, “I’m certain I’ve lost my mind.” Of course that’s what the fanatic has done: he’s lost his old mind to take on a new mind.

It’s trying to look at Abraham as a prophet, but one who’s just not sure. It’s just not that pleasurable for him.

DJ: Was it something about the crucial aspect of that chapter that attracted you to it or was it more casual than that?

DB: The poem doesn’t address that larger, transitional moment in Biblical history, or whether it’s even factual. It addresses the emotional state. That’s what’s interesting to me. Being both lost and found — and that’s not a Jewish tradition, per se. It’s a more Evangelical tradition.

Abraham knows what he’s doing, but he also knows that by doing it, he’s wandering. It initiates this type of wandering motif throughout the book.

DJ: Your book?

DB: Yeah.

DJ: Because the Bible has something of a wandering motif as well.

DB: Which has been misplayed through the centuries.

The book begins in the scorching desert with the certainty of being lost. It’s a paradox. I’ve tried to give a contemporary take on the whole tale.

DJ: Do you think someone needs to be knowledgeable of this particular chapter to appreciate the poem? There’s a lot at stake in doing that.

DB: It’s written under the assumption that you’ve googled “Genesis 12.”

DJ: A spot that really jumps out is at the end of the second line, “I settled in and slept like a seed.” What does it mean to sleep like a seed?

DB: I pinched language from Genesis: 12 to create something of a foundation of diction for the poem. I think “seed” is a word that shows up in the King James version. For me, that word is resonant because Abraham plants the seed for the Jews, and the covenant he makes with Yahweh is, “Go here and I will make a great nation out of your seed.” This is the post-covenant chapter. That’s where the word “seed” comes from in the poem.

DJ: There’s also the notion that a seed knows, in its own way, what it will become. The information’s imbedded in the seed. You can literally envision a seed in the ground. The story of that seed is already in the kernel.

Overall, the language in the book is at times evocative, and at times elusive. Coming from these two places, what are you going for? You seem to be asking the reader to dig a little.

DB: My way of making poems begins with words . . . literally creating a word palette. This is especially true in the first two-thirds of this book, except for a poem here and there. To go off your word “evocative,” I might create a different framework for it, which is “expressionistic,” or “impressionistic,” as opposed to “representational.”

I’m willing to go with a lot of color, a lot of drip — Jackson Pollockish — a lot of texture, excess and exuberance, even if it gives up a little in the narrative, or you have to find the narrative inside the texture.

I try to accentuate the dramatic voice. To me, these poems really feel like spoken, staged monologues. A lot of them are flat-out dramatic monologues, such as “Genesis 12.”

I conceived them as more Kandinsky-esc, rather than Norman Rockwell-esc.

DJ: A reader has to get through the texture first to arrive at the narrative.

DB: Yes. And I think once you get the last part of the book, it’s a matter of weights and measures. Let’s stay with “Genesis 12.” You asked, “Do you have to know Genesis?” Yes. You’ve got to know the narrative to access the monologue. But later on in the book, the narrative becomes more overt, and you don’t need to have any other apparatus to follow the poems.

DJ: I’ve read very few poetry books from cover to cover, starting with the first poem and continuing through to the last. Your book seems to call out for a reader to do so. I’m not sure if this is from how you structured the book, or that I simply found a narrative . . .

DB: What did you see the narrative as?

DJ: There’s a steamroll to it that kept calling me back. Like a snowball gaining speed on a downhill. Was this a conscious thing?

DB: The book begins in that sort of scorching desert. The representation for that is the prophet Abraham. But the poems in the first section are also self-portraits, in a way, ones in which my face doesn’t appear. Emblematic self-portraits. I’m not sure they’re symbolic — I think that might require too much strategizing — but they’re definitely emblematic.

Then the second-half expands into a larger historical context for this consciousness . . . the anxiety and pressure of being lost. There’s a bit of self-laceration thrown in. It’s a post-September 11th world in the second section.

The third section turns back, starting with the poem “Bad Marriages,” at the end of part two, to the relationship things being hinted at in the beginning.

By the end of the book, it’s all about relationships. It ends with a couple sitting on a porch, not in the scorching sunlight, but just a mild sun. They’re warmed by it, instead of turning to madness. It’s a large arc that exists in a context. At the reading you mentioned earlier, I started with a couple of political poems. These were all written with our current air hovering over.

DJ: They don’t stretch back earlier than 2002?

DB: That’s about right. “Old Adam” is one of the oldest poems in the collection, and next to it, “Overcast” is another old one.

DJ: In “The Husband’s Tale,” returning to your mention of these being emblematic, are you the husband?

DB: I could be the husband. But again, it’s an emblem. I’m the conduit. When you write dramatic monologues, it’s hard to know which mask goes on whom.

Say you write a dramatic monologue in the voice of the husband. Is the husband holding the mask of the self, or the self holding the mask of the husband? I don’t know the answer to that. That’s depth psychology right there. But it is a veiling.

In Wild Civility, I wrote some poems in the voice of poets . . . William Stafford, Robinson Jeffers, Xerxes. Xerxes is a warrior. I’m not a warrior. If I could speak like a warrior, or if Xerxes could speak through me as a conduit, what would he say? So if the husband can tell his tale through me as the facilitator for the husband to speak, at that point, by my reckoning, that’s what he would say.

DJ: Do you go looking for poems? Did you come looking for Xerxes?

DB: It usually comes out of the word palettes I mentioned earlier.

DJ: Tell me more about them.

DB: I should show you this book I’m writing. It’s my method — I call it the Attic method, since it happens here.

So, let’s say I need to start working on something. I start writing down words. They might be words in my view, they might be words I’ve run into. And I begin thinking, “I’m going to start collecting some words.” Words, phrases, pieces of writing, snap things, etc.

Just to do one in the room here, I might do “lampshade,” “Eskimo,” “tundra,” “little cowboy,” “windowsill,” “interview.” And I’ll just put them in a list. There’s nothing special about it. And from there I’ll just start making associations. I tend to do it by sound.

With “Eskimo,” I might do, “skidoo,” “snow cone,” “moccasin,” “sycamore.” I’ll get anagrammatic, or perhaps echo-grammatical is a better word for it.

Also, I love proverbs. I’m always looking for them. I might hear some scrap of old stuff or something obscure. “Kills bugs dead.” That sort of thing. So I’ll put that on a list.

DJ: Do you know who wrote that?

DB: Kenneth Koch.

DJ: I thought it was Lew Welch.

DB: Was it Lew Welch? I think it was Kenneth Koch.

DJ: I think Welch wrote it.

DB: You might be right. I think it was Kenneth Koch. Who knows why it popped in my head, but “Kills bugs dead,” would go with “eskimo.” It has the echo thing.

Then I just put them on a line and begin making these things. From this I’ll develop a title. I might have “carcass,” and out of that I might have gotten to “Xerxes.” It’s an associative thing.

DJ: So “Xerxes” would have come from a different word?

DB: Oh yeah. It’s the echoing.

DJ: It’s this process of riffing. Like a palette.

DB: Sort of like a palette. Or like tuning up, or stretching before you work out. When I go to compose, I have a title, and I have these words that have begun to well up. Or perhaps an experience might have happened.

My latest poems are in the form of letters. I want to write one to a friend about his mother dying. I already wrote one to him that anticipates his mother dying. I wrote it about a year ago. This is a companion piece. So now I’m starting to think about language that associates — where he’s from, things others may not know about him. It all starts with words.

Right now he looks sort of Hemingway-esc. So “Hemingway” is on the list. He has a little place on the Yucatan, so some of that language is there. Then I associate. “Hemingway,” “whale hunter,” “hawk eye,” and so on. I’m just making this stuff up as we talk. Then I try to find combinations that this voice would say. Once I start getting a riff, I begin to cross-reference. I don’t have to use all the words, nor do I try to. Instead, I try to write myself into a place where new words arrive. That’s when I discover what it all is. Then I make my draft, which usually comes very fast.

I just did an interview, and the girl asked, “Does a poem ever just come on you and you have to sit down and write it?” And I said, “No, I don’t work that way anymore. I start building it from a list.”

Think of an architect. If a building idea comes on to them, they don’t run out and start building it. They plan it out.

I get to live with the emotion longer. As I begin developing it, I also develop the emotion. By the time I start to compose, a draft will come really quickly. It’s different than how I used to work, and different than how a lot of people work, which is to sit down and start, “On the bus today…” You kind of chicken scratch it out until you find the thing, then you start editing, drafting and revising.

DJ: You’re building from the other way around.

DB: Totally from the other way around. I’ll try to nail it.

DJ: Your first drafts are often close?

DB: Yeah. Or if I don’t like it after a few weeks or months, I have my list. I just go back and make something else out of it.

I call them versions. I might make multiple versions out of a single list. And I don’t care which one I decide to keep. There are no consequences to which one matters or doesn’t matter. My parents won’t come out of the sky and judge me if I don’t have version or the other (laughter). I won’t explode.

In my method, I’m not just working on one draft. They’re multiple drafts and multiple lists. I might take the words I didn’t use and use them for something else.

When I’m really working, then I’m building all the time. It begins with language, but the language comes right into me and my experiences. And I have to have a title first. I need to know who’s speaking.

DJ: And the title comes from the list?

DB: At some point I’ll commit. I’ll go, “I can do it out of this voice or that consciousness.”

I was more slavish to this in Wild Civility. Almost all of those are one-word titles, except for the ones that are people. I would pick a word, “mushrooms,” for instance, and speak from the experience of taking hallucinogens.

DJ: And “The Attic Method,” as you call it, is a book in process?

DB: I’m almost done. The draft of it is called, The Writer Has a Thousand Faces. It’s really about how I write, or, more precisely, how I avoid writing. With this method, I’m not writing anything. I’m living with the language as a way to figure out what I might discover.

I have full faith that whatever someone writes down on paper, as soon as you begin to draft and revise it, the doors and windows of perception begin opening and shutting faster than you can perceive them. The writing, then, begins steering you in a direction.

Revision is about trying going back where you can get other thresholds to open and close. Almost like, “Oh, I’m trying to say this,” or, “I missed that exit two miles back. I want to go there.”

DJ: In talking about how you used to write vs. how you write now, you mentioned that now you get to live with the experience longer.

DB: Yes, before I make a first draft.

DJ: Taking this architectural idea, do you think that the desire to run and write down an idea the moment it happens comes from fear of losing the idea? And perhaps overtime you’ve grown patient and gained the awareness that there is no fear of losing it?

DB: I can accept that interpretation. I also believe . . . have you ever seen the movie called, The Gumball Rally? It’s about a cross-country race. The scene I remember — and this may be my own version of the scene at this point — the two Italian guys get in the car, the young Italian who’s super excited to do the cross-country race, and the old aging veteran. The young guy has modeled his whole look after the old guy. They’re about to drive out of the lot when the old guy reaches up to the rearview mirror and snaps it off. The young guy looks and asks, “Why did you do that?” And the old guy says, “What’s behind us is in the past.”

I don’t worry about what gets lost. Once you start going, you find things anyway. For me, what insists on being retained is going to continue to insist. I don’t keep journals . . . for starters, I don’t have the organizational capacity to do so. If something doesn’t want to stick around, you fill up with a new thing.

DJ: Do you keep your lists?

DB: I’ve not been very good at keeping them. I just threw a ton away. But I have a few around, and I’m going to reproduce some for the book.

DJ: How do you envision the book?

DB: I see it as very slender, probably Letter to Young Poet size. I think the manuscript right now is about 50-60 pages.

I had started a similar book earlier. It was more of a, “Here’s the mindset you need to have as a writer,” sort of thing. I lost interest. It was exciting for a while, but it just stopped yielding. You know a thing is done when it stops yielding the same excitement it once did for the person who’s creating it.

Then I gave a talk on this method, and it was really well received. Do you follow baseball?

DJ: I was a pitcher in college.

DB: My talk was like Pujols’ home run off Brad Lidge. The one that’s still flying around up there from the Astros-Cardinals series. The speech was like that — I got a pitch to hit.

And I don’t know why they pitched to Pujols in that situation. Do you remember this?

DJ: It was 3-2 in the series, right? Houston won the series anyway.

DB: It was phenomenal. I was watching it with my son. We were both saying, “Why are you pitching to this guy?” We were pulling for Houston. Who pitches to Albert Pujols in the ninth inning with two runners on and a one-run lead?

DJ: He tanked for a couple of years after that. It took him a while to come back from that.

DB: The funniest part of it was, they had a shot of Andy Pettite in the dugout, and you can see his mouth go, “Oh My God!” It was a rocket.

DJ: How did we get onto baseball?

DB: I gave a craft talk about my method, and even the prose writers came up to me afterwards and said, “That makes so much sense, I’ve never thought about it this way.” For me, it was a light bulb flipping on.

Last month, I got a long letter from someone on how the talk affected him to the point where he changed everything in his novel, and then his novel got accepted.

I went back, reframed the book I’d started and made the lecture the core of it. I pinched a few things from the other manuscript to flesh it out. There are still some parts to fill in.

One thing that’s missing in the book is that I don’t really address other genres clearly. I’m going to circulate it to other people and ask them what comes to mind for their genres. Fiction, non-fiction, so on. Right now it’s written as, “You do this with poems, you do that with poems.” I want it to be a bit broader.

DJ: Otherwise it would be called The Poet has a Thousand Faces.

DB: That’s what everyone already believes.

–


An excerpt of our conversation previously appeared on Read Write Poem.


–

HH: I feel dead about some current poetry.

DJ: How so?

HH: A lot of it feels like it’s just been ground out of the poetry machine. And poets will speculate. I’m not particularly curmudgeonly about “the death of American poetry.” Some people blame workshops, or just the overly democratic poem, or the overly accessible poem, or even the overly inaccessible poem.

DJ: When you’re doing a review, do you have to jump out of your sensibilities of “This is how I write, this is not how I write?”

HH: Sometimes it’s about wearing the intellectual cap and being the more objective critic. Sometimes it’s just about being open-minded to different styles. Like in music or the visual arts, which I pay a lot of attention to, I like a lot of different things. I’m not someone who has to have this certain kind of thing, this certain kind of genre or style, or else I get turned off. I tend to have very broad tastes, which is helpful in writing reviews. Sure, in the end, who I am as a writer, and what I think is really great, or what I really love, is going to play into a review. I think we expect that out of our critics and editorialists. We want to hear their opinions.

I like writing reviews. They break me out of….you know, when you’re writing a poem, you have to really believe that you’re writing the most beautiful thing in the world. I really think that. You should love the stuff you’re writing. Otherwise you should change it, because obviously it’s not really and completely you. When you write a poem, you should say, “This f—ing poem is great.” At least in that moment. And the next day, if you still think it’s great, then you got something. In reviewing, you really have to back off from that love of your work.

DJ: Backing off from that, even if the poem you’re reading doesn’t come across as a great poem, you still have to do…what?

HH: You have to look for what is admirable in the work. Is it doing something that you can’t do? Is it doing something well? Is it making you think about something? Is it handling syntax in a way that’s very athletic and inventive, yet is still intelligible?

If this were a scientific evaluation, you could apply different tests and apparati and get interesting readings. So I try to think of it from these other angles.

DJ: Have you ever gotten any backlash on a review?

HH: I don’t really pan anybody. If I really dislike a book, I pass on it. You know how it goes…in the world of journalism, if you don’t like something, then the thought is that you should just trash it. They certainly do in reviews of theater in the NY Times, and occasionally in the book reviews.

Not often, but once in a while you’ll see someone really really trash a book. I don’t do that. Let someone else do that. I don’t know…maybe I’m a coward.

DJ: Or you’re being fair.

HH: Well, if I can’t say something more sophisticated than, “I hate this book,” then I don’t really need to say anything.

DJ: And you get positive response.

HH: I get a few emails from time to time. Most of the time I don’t hear back. I’m not really networked, I suppose. I have reviewed a number of major poets. Merwin most recently. I’d love to get a note from W.S. Merwin that says, “I read your review and you had some insightful things to say.” That’s my ego, too. But also, maybe it would be sustaining. Like anything with poetry, we don’t get paid much.

I hear back from people who read the reviews…students and people doing dissertations. So I do get follow-up questions. It’s nice to know that I may be part of the dialogue. That’s why I like reviewing. You’re part of the conversation. It’s nice to be there.

DJ: To be there…there’s also the passion of being part of it all. You mentioned ego; it’s nice to be acknowledged for what it is, but there’s also that simple desire to be in the pool, so to say, just because you like how the water feels.

HH: That’s right.

DJ: I think that drives a lot of the interconnectedness of being associated with poetry on any number of levels. As a reviewer, a writer, a networker.

What are your writing funks like?

HH: My only problem with writing is finding the time. The world would love for you not to write. The world would love for you to take out the garbage, mow the lawn, do more service at the university, be better prepared for your classes, paint your house, call your father, write that letter to your friend who you haven’t returned the letter to in three years. The world always demands those things of you, and you have to say “No.” That’s my biggest battle.

DJ: Saying no?

HH: Saying no and finding the time to work consistently. Right now I have about two mornings a week. I have one full day. I go out to my house in Falls City on a Tuesday afternoon. I have Wednesday morning, all day Wednesday and maybe Thursday morning where I’m not disturbed. I don’t even have email out there. No student stuff, no family stuff even. Although if something comes up, I have to be there for my wife and step-sons.

Most people don’t live that way. Most people are not artists. For a long time, I was embarrassed to even say I was an artist. It sounded egotistical. It sounded pretentious. . . “Oh, I’m an arteest.” I didn’t like that, but I’ve learned I actually have to think that way.

DJ: Do you ever have any trouble calling yourself a poet?

HH: I used to be embarrassed by that. Now I say it. But I’m careful. I still don’t have cards that say, “Henry Hughes, Writer.” Some people do. Or stationary, or web sites full of their enchanted gardens.

Being an artist in busy America, or anywhere, is challenging. That’s my biggest obstacle. I’ve always loved to write. What are your funks?

DJ: I was trying to get the last layer on a poem that involves a firewalk. Earlier drafts would get to the firewalk…the poem would resolve after the firewalk, but I was skipping the walk itself. I’ve never done a firewalk.

The poem is highly imaginative, but I kept getting to that same place. It was one of the few occasions where I actually knew what I was avoiding. So I took a day off…and this is a meaningful poem to me. I was grinding on it. I took a day off and went to hang out at an artist friend’s studio. I was hanging out with her and another friend of hers. I was just sort of soaking up this feminine energy, I guess. I told them about the poem and they said, “Just shut up and write it.”

HH: Best advice I’ve ever heard.

DJ: The next day I went for a hike, just kept staying away from it, then I came home and wrote out the firewalk. The funk there, I guess, was that I kept grinding and getting to the same place, knowing exactly what I had to do but not knowing my way through it.

HH: Most people would stop at that grind, and they would finish the poem and that would be it, or they’d never finish it. A real writer goes back to it again and again. After a long hike…after a number of years. I don’t think you were in a funk. I think you were in a place that required another full flight of stairs, another few swings of the pick, another hundred miles. I know that place well. Even people who write every day get to those places. They probably get to them more often. That’s where, you know, we need time to work.

DJ: How long were you in Asia?

HH: I was in Japan for three years and China for two years.

DJ: Is there a carryover of that Asian aesthetic into your work?

HH: To some degree. The East Asian aesthetic, which I’ve always admired, has found its way into some of my writing, and certainly into the way I just, you know, keep my room a little more stark and simple, the way I look at painting. There’s a certain austerity, especially of Japanese forms and of some Chinese too, that certainly is present.

I’m very interested in East Asian history and culture. It really woke me up to the world. Prior to that I had never really traveled, except for drunken exploits in Mexico or to Canada for fishing. This really woke me up to a whole other world, and politics, and poverty, and beauty, and time, and history. That changed my writing, and made me, I feel, a much better human being.

DJ: That was before Men Holding Eggs?

HH: Yes. There are Japan and China poems in there, and there are many poems in that collection that were informed by the experience.

DJ: I wanted to ask about what seems like a uniqueness I’ve seen in your work, and “Parking Lot in Portland” is a great example. Sometimes your lines go way out in this fanning sort of way. Can you tell me a little bit about that? What are you hoping for with that style, whether you’re looking for something more from the story itself or something else, and if this was something you were doing in Men Holding Eggs.

HH: Less so in the first book. I think Moist Meridian is a more mature book, and I feel a deeper sense of rhythm and the mind’s music, as I call it.

Many of my poems are stories. An easy way to tell a story in a poem is to write a narrative poem. Good old William Stafford, “Traveling Through the Dark,” or Donald Hall, take you out to grandpa’s farm sort of stuff. I do a lot of that in Men Holding Eggs. I like the narrative poem. I grew up with James Dickey and Dick Hugo. I just wanted to tell stories in cool sounding language that did some funky things, that transformed in places I wasn’t expecting. I couldn’t write fiction all that well. It wasn’t that interesting somehow. People didn’t really like it.

If I’m going to write stories in poems, then what can I do? One thing I do is I start of kind of slow, kind of tentative. I start reaching…reaching…reaching. The line seems to reach. I find that that’s kind of the way I read them too. I gain momentum and kind of stretch out to the margin. I guess I’m approaching prose, at least in the spirit, not so much in the rhythmic motions, but in the spirit of wanting to tell a complete story.

Then I kind of come back. I’m going to close it off. I’m not going to write a novel. I’m going out to tell you something and I’m going to come back.

It feels natural. I’m not the kind of poet that sits down and says, “I’m going to write a sonnet, or I’m going to write a villanelle,” or God forbid a pantoum or something. I really write what I want to say, and then end up looking at the lines after. It seems to me that I’ve found this motion naturally. I say this unpretentiously. I wasn’t taught to do it. I’m not trying to emulate someone or some style. I’m sure critics can look at it and say, “Oh, well, that’s a C.K. Williams line that’s been truncated front and back.” That’s for critics to do. To me, it just feels right.

DJ: You used the word ‘motion’. There is that motion to it, from what I’ve noticed. The book as a whole…there’s a lot of sailing in there.

HH: Yes, yes.

DJ: So going from the title then inward, there’s a water quality to a lot of what’s happening in the collection.

HH: I love water.

DJ: The poems feel as if they go out like waves and then come back. When you first started to write in that form, did you try to stop it at all, or find yourself saying, “What the hell is this?”

HH: No. I just rode the wave.

I’m not very resistant to a lot of things in my life. I tend to go with things. I’m a very flexible person. If a group of us is going out for dinner, I’m pretty easy. I’ll walk pretty far. It doesn’t bother me. Or I’ll stop right here. I’ll eat Mexican, I’ll eat Chinese, I’ll go to a gay bar, I’ll go to a straight bar. It doesn’t bother me.

I feel that way about certain motions in my writing too. I don’t really resist them.

When you edit, you have to cut things back, because there’s a lot of bullshit and clunky exposition in there. Then you have to be tough with yourself. It’s like cleaning out the closet.

But in terms of my original creative process, if it feels right, I just kind of go with it.

As for others…I can see sort of the neo-formalists saying, “Henry Hughes is rather undisciplined,” or, “Just more free verse. Where’s the rhyme, where are the metrics?”

I don’t care. Clem Starck, with whom I read at Wordstock, he said something wonderful at one of our readings. He’s a great and interesting man.

He said, in response to a question about formalism, “It’s fine if you want to write formal poetry, and I admire form. But it’s hard enough just to write in very spare language, in a minimal number of lines, something meaningful and still sound human.” That’s a paraphrase, but he said it at one of our readings when someone asked a question, and it makes so much sense to me.

I want to say something meaningful, I want to say it in as few lines as possible, and I want to sound human. If I have any artistic agenda, it’s to sound human but not careless.

–

Read five poems from Moist Meridian, as well as a review of the collection. Watch Henry Hughes and Clem Stark read at Wordstock 2009.

DJ: How’s Topeka?

ES: It’s beautiful. They’ve had a really mild summer so things are still really green. Usually by this time of year everything’s been blasted by the heat and drought. It feels like the way I like to remember it.

DJ: What does the idea of Topeka usually bring up for you?

ES: It has four pretty distinctive seasons, and two of them can be pretty rough. Summer is usually very hot. Winter is usually very cold and miserable. The nice part is usually spring, and apparently it’s felt like spring all summer.

I grew up near the middle of the city in an old leafy neighborhood. It doesn’t look like it’s in the Plains. It looks very comfortable, especially compared to my more urban and country wanderings. It’s sort of like the Shire right now.

DJ: Let’s get to your urban and country wanderings. One of the things that sticks out in Mister Skylight is that the language seems really tied to place, though at times it seems to be a number of places. At other times it seems to be a place that may not truly exist. Maybe an amalgamation of different places where you’ve lived or traveled.

When you go back to place in your process, do you find yourself going back to one place more than the other, or do things turn into a bit of a stew?

ES: I think you’re right. Even when the places have names that are accurate details, the poetry takes place in the imagination. If I say, “Topeka”, it’s different than saying “Topeka” in an essay, or than taking a picture and saying, “This is Topeka.”

There are a lot of places in the book. Some are places where I’ve lived or visited. Some of them, like the Skeleton Coast of Namibia, are places I’ve never been to. They’re all imaginary places as far as the poems go. The people in the poems are real people, the family and friends, but they become imaginary through the process of poetry.

The places mean different things to me, and have a lot of associations that, once you put them into poems, become art associations. They become aestheticize Topeka, aestheticize New Orleans, aestheticize California.

One of the animating conflicts for me in putting the book together was the struggle between looking at the place as real vs. as the poetic. Then there was the very real need to try to say something meaningful and true and honest in a social and political way about what happened in New Orleans, about what happened to my friends and the city I love and very nearly me. That was not imaginary. People died, lives were changed.

DJ: You’re referring to Katrina?

ES: Yes. The flooding and the aftermath, which made me very angry because it wasn’t an act of nature or an act of God. The levees failed because they weren’t built to spec by the Corps of Engineers. And the rescue operation was botched because of human failings and lack of courage. Suddenly that doesn’t become just an imaginary thing to play with, like my memories of Topeka. Instead, it’s something that changed my life and my way of looking at the world. At the same time, I didn’t want the book to be…I didn’t know how to write just about that. What results in the New Orleans poems, even some of the ones that I wrote before the storm, is a sort of struggle between us and the media, which doesn’t have any answers but hopefully creates interesting lines.

DJ: You said a second ago that the botched efforts and the botched recovery related to human failings and lack of courage. There’s an underlying quality in a number of your poems where it seems to be an unwavering spirit in the face of things like despair or disaster. These are the exact opposites of human failings. What does that say about you, and is that itself a comment, without being a direct comment to things?

ES: That spirit is hopefully the heart breaking impulse, the storytelling impulse and the lyric impulse to respond internally and to want to communicate that to somebody. The alternative is silence, which may be the most proper response to things, but doesn’t capture that spirit of looking back and looking around at the present, and wanting to communicate to people you are around or you wish were around. Perhaps that’s the spirit you’re finding in these poems. The impulse to dance. The impulse to draw. The impulse to do whatever it is that poems do. Whatever you’re doing in poetry…that need to be reaching out, to be expressing the joy and anxiety and imagination, and wanting or needing to share that.

DJ: Tell me about something you said in an interview from November of 2008, that an economic downturn can be “a good time to be a writer”.

ES: That’s a little tricky thing for me to have said. In truth economic downtowns are miserable in all practical respects. For a poet, whether boom times or bust times, it’s all the same if you’re sitting down at the page. In times of worry, there’s more of a need to listen.

Most of the economic downturn I was talking about had to do with Seattle when I got there. What you learn is that when times are great, art seems like a luxury. It seems more ephemeral, decoration, pretty, something to indulge in. What I saw, going back to Katrina, was that, after the plumbers, after the electricians, the sheet rockers, the carpenters, and somebody to make some food, after receiving those necessities in the wake of something bad having happened, there was also a need for art, for poetry, for storytelling. There was a need for people not just to make art but to have art around. In a way, art helps us understand, frame, move on, move forward, and remember this thing that just happened.

All through the city, one of the things that was really meaningful, and that taught me a lot about cities and people, was just how important cultural organizations are, these places that provide chance and reason to go and look at some kids’ drawings, for instance, that depict their memory of the evacuation. Or a lot of the fantastic, moving, sad and tragic music that’s still being made by people who went through the event.

DJ: Do you think there’s a therapeutic sense to all of this?

ES: I don’t believe art heals. I don’t think “healing” is exactly the word. It’s something like healing. Something like what physical or emotional healing is and does. But it’s something different. It’s probably not as good as those things, but meaningful.

I’ve always been kind of an “art for art’s sake” guy. Then I saw that art as having this whole other value that is for people’s sake.

One of my favorite poets is Roque Dalton. He’s a poet from El Salvador. His father was the head of the Dalton brothers, these bank robbers from Kansas and Oklahoma in the ’20s and ’30s. He escaped with his money, went to El Salvador and married locally. His youngest son, Roque, was a committed Communist guerilla and also a diplomat in Prague for a while. He was eventually executed by his revolutionary cadre for disagreeing with them. He wrote a number of magnificent books of poems, some under his name, some under other names. He says — and I think he’s clowning around himself a little bit — that a poet’s relationship to the bourgeoisie is to be either a servant, a clown, or the enemy. Within the scope of the quote, as a poet, it’s either one of those three things.

At times I’ve felt like all three. At times I feel like the servant. Other times I feel like the clown. What he’s saying is that you should be the enemy, and that you’re not automatically the enemy just by making art and poems. It’s easy to fool oneself and to be the fool if you don’t acknowledge the social aspects of your work. I’m not claiming to be any one of those three, but the quote is useful to me in looking at my own work and in looking at this book, to ask, “Well, am I being a jackass, am I being a servant by not bringing certain things in my work, or am I participating in the world the way that I should?”

DJ: Which one of those categories would you most say you’re closest to?

ES: I don’t know. What he says about the clown is that the clown poet plays around, but in the end, before he’s executed, he’s going to say how sensitive and kind the masters are. In the end, he’ll end up as the servant too. In the end, the clown is as bad as the servant.

I bring this up because it’s on my mind, but I think that Dalton is exaggerating a bit. Maybe not. No one wants to be the fool, right?

DJ: No.

Before New Orleans you were in Seattle in the early ’90s. I read it created a desire within you to get out and go somewhere where life seemed a little more “real”.

ES: I was in my early 20s. I’d finished school fairly early. Seattle’s a wonderful city, and it’s very much a working city, despite the grunge era and the idea of “slackerdom”. It’s not a city of leisure or lots of public or street life. It’s a cultured town, kind of a high cultured town. I wanted someplace that had some life, that had people around from very different backgrounds who looked different from me and were doing different things, who had a little soul, a little color. New Orleans fit the bill.

DJ: Had you been to New Orleans before?

ES: Never. I had no connection with it except for having read a lot of books, either those that are set there or that were written by New Orleans writers. I think New Orleans has the greatest literary heritage in the country, and the best, most thriving literary scene right now in the country. I’m honored to be around that.

DJ: How did living there affect your writing, especially going from that place where you were either feeling stifled, or where nothing spurred that type of creative flow that New Orleans would create?

ES: I was maturing. I was finally becoming an adult in my personal life, which has more of an influence on one’s work than anything else.

New Orleans was a place to mature, and to mature interestingly. It was different than being off in the suburbs, doing adjunct work in the middle of nowhere.

Aside from growing up and becoming more understanding of the world, New Orleans affected my work in a number of specific ways. For one, I fell in with a poetry community of magnificent writers, each with very high standards where things like imagination and craft were concerned craft. They had a lot of different interests, not all being of American traditions.

Also, there were a number of people I worked with at an arts high school that was started by Ellis Marsalis and some other musicians in the ’70s. My colleagues, other poets…they demanded that you take poetry very seriously. This was different than the ways other poetry friends had approached it. And it was all we did. For the five-years that I taught with this great group of writers, all we did was read, write and talk about poetry amongst ourselves and with some really talented New Orleans kids.

I also worked in an art museum. I’d never been immersed in visual art to the degree that I was there. Between the artists living and working in the city at the time, and spending all day in the museum, I started to developed and internalize a relationship with art objects from many different traditions.

Then there was the party atmosphere. The nature of the city as being partly very public and exaggerated, kind of the Mardi Gras carnivalesque spirit was unbelievably exciting to me, and to my life and work. But also, the other side of New Orleans, more of the Latin side, is very private and reserved. I found it to be dignified and reflective in ways I’d never encountered. Those too sides of the mask became very important to me and my view of how life should be lived, poetry should be written, and how wine should be drank.

Those are some of the big ways that New Orleans changed my life and affected my work, leading to this book. I’ve been very all-consumedly committed to poetry since I was nine-years-old. I think the path that led to this book was probably more interesting and led to a more interesting book than some of the other paths that I’d been on in places like Seattle or Montana or Kansas.

DJ: How long was Mister Skylight in process? Was this a collection of poems over time that after a while you decided, “I have something here,” or was there an intentional design to where you were going?

ES: There was no intentional design to the book. The first poems in the book were written in 1993. A few stanzas or full poems are that old, from my last year in college/first year in grad school at the university of Montana. The bulk of the book was written between 2001 and 2006. That’s when I finished. After that I went through some continued editing work with Copper Canyon and some other readers.

I started publishing in ’95. Most of the poems I published in magazines aren’t in this book, but I had a lot to choose from, and the book had many different shapes and forms up until 2006.

“Mister Skylight”, the individual poem, was the entire book at one time, and was 70 or 80 pages. Then I did a heavier edit, was more severe with it and brought it down to about 17 pages, closer to its final form.

The poems that I started writing in 2005 or 2006 helped shaped the book. These consist of some of the longer poems where I feel as if I’m indulging figurative imagination, particularly memory loss. That’s at the core of the book. Memory loss.

“Mister Skylight” the poem permeates the book. The book moves toward this poem in a conscious way. These other later poems were also central to whatever it is I was trying to do and sort of coalesce around the longer poems.

DJ: Tell me a little about the title itself.

ES: “Mister Skylight” is a nautical term. It’s a warning to the crew that usually the ship is beginning to sink, or is being consumed with fire. The ship is at its end. But the warning comes without wanting to alarm the passengers. It’s a warning for the crew to start readying the lifeboats, or to start preparing for abandoning the ship so it could get done in an orderly process.

I ran across the term in an article back in the ’90s, about the sinking of the MV Estonia, this big tragedy in the Baltic Sea. The survivors recalled hearing, even as it was sinking, “Mr. Skylight to numbers one and two, Mr. Skylight to numbers one and two.” That was probably the scariest thing I’d ever read for some reason, not just the phrase but the thought of being a survivor, or temporary survivor, and to hear that sort of warning, which is misleading and is personified as something that is nauseating and grotesque to me.

I struggled about whether or not to put a note in the title, but I thought that as the work really takes place in the imagination and I don’t like burdening things with notes, I’d rather let things be in the language that they are rather than having any reference to the world. That’s an ongoing question of mine. To what degree is poetry referential? I’m not smart enough to know the answer.

DJ: And how does the title connect to the poems themselves?

ES: “Mister Skylight” in the poem is a personified thing. At times he’s a character, at times the speaker. And Mister Skylight seems like an excellent alternate name for the personified image we have of Death. Something honorific and enigmatic and unwelcome.

Beyond that, it serves the function of other kinds of bewilderments. There being this uncertainty of what is being said, what is being told to you, the uncertainty and suspicion about the official line, what the bridge is saying sort of thing. Is this language being directed to me? Am I the passenger or am I the crew? Am I drowning? Am I surviving? Am I responsible for what’s happening? Or is it something that’s happening to me, that people are doing to me, that nature is doing to me? Am I the agent or the actor?

That uncertainty about poetry, about language, about citizenship, about being alive in the present moment, I express often in that poem, either through the figure or through the phrase that pops up as “Mister Skylight.” My hope is that it comes through even better without the explanation. That the feeling comes across, even if it’s not intellectually expressed.

–

DJ: How are you spending your days?

VL: Frantically juggling a lot of freelance writing. Plus I just started dancing again. And I tend bar two-days a week in a rock ‘n roll bar. That’s my passion. Rock ‘n roll.

DJ: You’re in a band.

VL: If I could quit everything else and just write music, I think I’d be more successful and happier.

DJ: Where are you dancing? Magic Gardens?

VL: Mary’s Club. I don’t really get along with the management at Magic Gardens.

DJ: Because of the book?

VL: No. When the book comes out maybe they’ll try to kill me. When you read the book, the manager is kind of the villain.

DJ: And now you’re doing the run-up on the press end?

VL: We’re planning a couple of parties, one here, one in Seattle. Then we’re doing a four-date tour out East. It’s a small press.

DJ: Do you write as Viva?

VL: Viva is my public character, so I do a lot of writing as Viva Las Vegas.

DJ: When I was looking for stuff, I found Liv , I found Liv Osthus, I found this New York Times piece…

VL: Ahh…

DJ: The name connects with Viva somehow.

VL: It’s Norwegian for Viva, but people always screw it up. By default I’ve become Viva everywhere.

DJ: Do you ever feel there’s a time when it all has to be packaged as, ‘Here’s me…here’s what I do’?

VL: I do. And I struggle with that. We all think about our careers. I think that Viva Las Vegas has been good for my career, but the only way to take it further is with more notoriety. I don’t know if I want that, per say. I certainly don’t like how you pursue it. I’m very happy with the friends and notoriety and fame right now. The writing that Viva gets is a lot more interesting than the writing that Liv Osthus gets.

Right now, my extra energy is going into my book, which won’t earn that money. And my band is a hobby.

DJ: The book won’t earn money?

VL: Yeah, I mean, it’s a book. Books don’t earn money.

DJ: Do you think that’s the legacy of the book, just being a book. Do you think it could become a screenplay?

VL: A lot of people have been interested in screenplay rights. We actually wrote one for Sundance in February. It got through the first round of competition. It didn’t get accepted for the final. My friend and I were commissioned to turn it into a screenplay in five days. No one expected to get it through the first round.

DJ: Did you get commissioned to do the book around the time you found out about your cancer?

VL: I found a publisher around the time it was diagnosed, but the book has nothing to do with the cancer. It’s interesting…there’s more money in that industry for writing, if you can call writing about cancer an industry.

DJ: So you’d written it before you found a publisher.

VL: I’d been writing it for four or five years.

DJ: And the cancer’s become more of a back story thing?

VL: That’s my publicist’s idea, that you need five words, or whatever, that will come up on Google search. “Ah, the girl with breast cancer who has a book…how do I find her?” Breast cancer. Stripper. Book. Search..

I wrote an article for Portland Monthly about the cancer. It had a lot of readership.

DJ: What about dancing now?

VL: Well, I’ve been doing it for three weeks again. The first week was terrifying. I haven’t come out, put out a press release and said, “Look, I’m back.”

I’m still feeling it out. I find myself watching the customers thinking, “OK, what do you see? Are you noticing anything different?” Some of my old customers come in…they’re thrilled that I’m back. They know what’s happened. They think it’s great. But most of these guys have never seen me before. They don’t bring that to Mary’s Club with them. I certainly don’t bring it with me. This is my body now. It’s been through stuff. Bodies always go through stuff. There are scars here. The first time, last week, I heard somebody whispering to his friend, “Look, those are fake.”

I wasn’t about to be like, “Yeah, fuck you, I had surgery ’cause I had cancer.” You know? But it’s interesting.

DJ: How long did you step away?

VL: I took about a year off.

DJ: Did you think you’d come back?

VL: I thought maybe. I wasn’t sure. I had no idea. I was really very busy. When I saw the results after the surgery, I realized there was no reason I couldn’t. And after about a month of the surgery I was basically on stage naked with my band.

DJ: You get naked with your band too?

VL: Yeah. Coco Cobra is really different. When I slip into her I find myself doing things that neither Viva or Liv would do.

DJ: Tell me about that.

VL: About Coco?

DJ: About Liv, Viva and Coco. And any more that might be in there.

VL: There’s Lila Hamilton, who I only use to obfuscate everything. A group of strippers fought City Hall one year. We wanted to talk about dollar amounts and stuff, things I didn’t want revealed. So I used this proper name.

DJ: It should be like Lila Hamilton, Esquire.

VL: Yeah, right. She’s probably an attorney.

DJ: Or she’s taking night classes.

VL: Sure.

DJ: Tell me more about them.

VL: Coco Cobra has long black hair. Drag queen. Sky high platform heels. Almost always wears fishnets…sometimes only wears fishnets. All of her songs are about sex and fighting. She’s perpetually horny. I think the back story is they’re all from Detroit.

DJ: It’s you and the rest are men?

VL: All men. We were the Killers before the Killers. The guitar player has written almost all the songs. He was in a band called the Spider Babies that were famous for just offending people. These songs are along the same line. He came to the first practice with all these lines, and they’re just ridiculous. They are all about sex and fighting. I thought of the name. It just came. And Coco’s not me. These are not sincere thoughts….”I need sex, I need sex, I need sex.” They’re not…it doesn’t come from the heart. I’m sure it comes from Coco’s though.

DJ: And it’s not cabaret.

VL: It’s Rock. It’s like The Ramones.

DJ: That imaginary line between reality and comic book…

VL: Ramones are a great comic book. For some songs I can totally feel the emotion behind and interact with the crowd, but otherwise it’s campy. It gets a little boring.

I play solo sometimes when I have time, and I find that a lot more satisfying.

DJ: As whom?

VL: As Viva Las Vegas. I’m hoping to do more of that…play music, write songs, record albums. I love doing that. But I had to make money. Stripping was very regaling, and then I became the spokesperson for that industry, which is a role I still feel is very important.

DJ: You became the spokesperson here in Portland?

VL: I get interviewed all the time. Playboy comes to town, and I’m kind of the contact person.

DJ: How did that happen? Just a natural evolution?

VL: The Willamette Week had me on the cover about 12-years ago in a big debate about porn vs. feminism. It was me vs. a college girl from Brown. She was very upset about the number of strip clubs in town. She wrote a letter to the editor…

DJ: Did she know it was Ivy League vs. Ivy League?

VL: Oh yeah. Of course. They played that up. My dad’s a preacher, we’re both very polite, similar ages, etc.

When that happened, a lot of people instantly associated me with the industry. I mean, seven-years later in New York City, people came up to me and were like, “You were on the cover of Willamette Week.”

Exotic Magazine here in town then asked me to be their editor…they’d seen my columns in Willamette Week. So for eight-years I was editor of that magazine.

DJ: As Viva?

VL: Yes.

DJ: You have a pretty extensive catalogue.

VL: I should have a better website (laughs).

DJ: Is there a place where you want to “graduate” to, or a place where you’re only doing X couple of things, but not doing all the other stuff?

VL: I always want to be performing and writing. I think I need both. If one of those things could bring in enough money…that would be the place I’d want to be. Ideally I wouldn’t be in bars at all. Not dancing or bar tending. I love cabaret, I love theater.

DJ: When I saw you at Back Fence…

VL: Sheer terror…

DJ: Which is what I wanted to ask: you seemed bashful. Almost in a child kind of way. Rather than ask you who that was, out of these people, I want to ask what’s more terrifying for you, exposing your body or your emotions? Where do you have more terror?

VL: Baring your soul is way more terrifying. I’ve always loved theater for that reason. I am by nature a very bashful, very shy person. In middle school I didn’t even talk. Then I found the theater, which was the one place where I could inhabit a role and be loud, or be whatever was called for. Be upset. Be feminine. Be masculine. I really loved it.

And still…I studied anthropology. I like to observe. I always find myself going back to the notebook. Just kind of watching in the corner. So when Viva’s called upon to get up on stage, I’m like, “Oh, I have to shut the book and get up there.”

A good friend said she thinks I’m most innocent when I’m dancing.

DJ: So it becomes this tease…

VL: I always appreciated innocence on stage. I want to come from a place of innocence so other people do too. Then you connect and go from there. I love interacting with people and opening them up a little bit, then opening myself a little bit. That’s what I’m addicted to, stage-wise. The strip stage is great for that.

DJ: There is some soul that comes out there as well.

VL: More so than most of the other things. The other things are scripted. Especially Coco Cobra. Even maybe playing a song alone, because with a song people only get that bit of emotion. But dancing isn’t scripted. It’s improvised. I try to connect with each person. The conversation will range from travel to politics to Minnesota…I have my few “greatest hits”. You know, “:I’m from Minnesota, I love New York City, traveled all over the world.”

DJ: When you were 20 and studying anthropology, where did you think you’d wind up?

VL: I always wanted to play music. But I felt obliged to go to college. I was a national merit scholar…I had a free ride wherever I wanted to go. That was what my parents wanted. I hated the whole college thing.

DJ: Williams?

VL: Yeah.

DJ: Hated what?

VL: The privilege. I think I would have been better at a university. I didn’t like sitting down at a desk. Didn’t like reading very much. I liked meeting people. That’s how I learn. And traveling abroad was great. The rest of it was slogging through. The second I left I came out here. Stripping was quite largely a rebellion against academia and privilege.

DJ: What is your relationship with your family?

VL: It’s a pretty good relationship. They’re not thrilled with my occupation. My dad was much more accepting.

DJ: What was it like telling them? Or is that in the book?

VL: That’s in the book. It was bad.

My mom and I had had intellectual discussions about stripping throughout the summer (after graduating). I was really fascinated with the society’s hypocritical view of stripping, and the origin of that view. I was fascinated by “why”. These are entrepreneurial women working for themselves.

DJ: Was there a touch of your inner anthropologist that led you into stripping?

VL: Oh yeah.

DJ: From that observation roll?

VL: Certainly.

I went to my first strip club on spring break, senior year. We were in New Orleans and I had to do it. I loved the environment. I loved the characters. The stripper, after her set – she was great…very mesmerizing, got down to a G-string – then she came over to our table, sat down with us three college girls, started asking all these questions. It broke down that fourth wall. It blew my mind. I really saw this untouchable performer, then the humanness of her came out.

DJ: That kind of brought you in?

VL: At the time I’d been studying a lot about how different cultures view sexuality, bodies and gender.

I set up an audition in my hometown that summer. My mom seemed to get my point about things. “Sure, this sounds interesting.” Then when I told her about the audition she said, “No way, not in this town!” And it wouldn’t have been good.

DJ: Where?

VL: Duluth. My dad has his church there.

DJ: Dylan’s birthplace.

VL: Yes it is!

DJ: Are you a big Dylan fan?

VL: Huge Dylan fan. I do a lot of covers.

DJ: Not as Coco, I take it.

VL: No, not as Coco. As myself.

DJ: All these performers inside you, they are all ways to express yourself. If there’s a time when you’re not performing, who’s that? What’s it like?

VL: I’m the anthropologist sitting in the corner. I spend a lot of time in solitude writing. But I can’t live with that. I’m super extroverted. I need to be meeting people. At the same time, that can be exhausting. I wind up putting it all into those communications. So I need to go home and process.

DJ: When you’re on stage, whether you’re Coco or Viva, does the anthropologist come in? Does your mind ever turn over where you start to examine what’s going on?

VL: I guess not. I love that area…I mean, I don’t judge anyone who comes into bars. In anthropology you tend to put people into cliques. I never say, “Oh, there’s a businessman who came through the door,” or, “there’s this kind of guy.” I have my little quips though.”

DJ: Quips?

VL: For instance, if a guy in a suit comes in, or a whole clique of them, they’re usually the hardest customers. They can be awful. They think that they’re supposed to be a little rude. So I always say, “What liberal arts prep school did you guys go to?” Something that kind of puts them off. I have my little ways.

DJ: Do you ever wonder about how you’re viewed? Or does that matter?

VL: I don’t care what they’re thinking. I like connecting with people. I thrive on that. There will always be assholes. I try to ignore them as much as possible.

DJ: How do you know when you connect with someone?

VL: You feel it. They’re captivated. They’re in the moment with you. You can create the performance around that.

Some people really respond to the music. There’s something we really love – that can be the entree into conversation.

If somebody criticizes my music, that’s the worst. I freak out. Some guys are dicks. Those are the guys that come in to mistreat you. They’re in every bar, not just strip bars.

DJ: Have you ever danced to Dylan?

VL: Not so much. I find that doesn’t work for me in clubs. The ’66 Albert Hall version of “Let Me Follow You Down” – I like that one. It’s kind of loud.

Mostly, I think it might be too personal and message driven.

DJ: On average, about how many people per night fall in love with you?

VL: (Laughs)

DJ: Isn’t that the dream?

VL: It happens all the time. But it happens just as much in regular bars as it does in clubs. I tend to be too friendly, maybe.

In a strip club, most people know…99% of them know that they’re never going to get your phone number. But a few still fall.

DJ: Do people approach it?

VL: No. Never. It’s Victorian in there. Guys hit on you a lot more in regular bars. Guys don’t hit on you in strip clubs. Unless they’re very young and very dumb.

Read an excerpt from MAGIC GARDENS, and visit Viva’s site.

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DJ: At a time when people seem to going to poetry as a way to reflect and take solace in the world, there’s the question of how small presses and online journals continue to put it out there for the public to consume while also making it financially viable on their end. You must see this with WritersDojo.org.

JS: What’s interesting is it’s not an issue in Portland. The community here is incredible. It blows me away. We hear time and time again where big name poets come to town and they’re shocked. Literary Arts puts on an event and the place is sold out. The poets can’t believe it. How are we selling out the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall for poetry? It’s unbelievable.

For WritersDojo.org, we’ve never had an issue finding and publishing amazing poetry. And our readership for poetry is off the charts. I know publishers in other states and other cities are struggling to find the amazing submissions and to find the readership for it. In Portland it’s not an issue. We’re something of an anomaly.

DJ: So we should change the name to Poetland?

JS: Along with all the other names…Stumptown, all the others.

We just published a podcast not too long ago by Diana Abu-Jaber. She was saying in the Middle East, people look at poets as the serious authors. For years and years, it didn’t matter if you were a professor or what genre you were in, if you were an intellectual, you wrote poetry. In Middle Eastern culture, in a lot of places, the poet is a very serious person, a person a letters, the elder statesmen of literary folk. And the novelists…the idea is, who can take a novelist seriously? You’re writing fiction.

DJ: Whereas here it’s the opposite.

JS: I think many people look to the poets here as…well, you’re a poet. It certainly puts an assumption on your politics, for example.

DJ: I mentioned to some of my workshop students that I write poetry, and the kids were beside themselves. “You write poetry?” And I said, “Yeah.” And they said, “Well, you don’t look like a poet. You don’t act like a poet.” These are 10-year-old kids. We went around the room and each kid described what a poet should look like. They had the weirdest impressions that involved everything from wearing moth-riddled sweaters to smelling like cats to walking around with your nose in the air.

JS: I think the idea of the poet, and what a poet is is changing all the time. And obviously poetry itself keeps changing. More and more, the younger crowd is looking toward spoken word poetry. Or kids realize that rap music is poetry. Somebody, maybe it was Rod Stewart or someone like that, back in the 80s was asked where all the great poets have gone. He said, “They’ve become musicians.”

DJ: I saw a Dylan quote recently where he said, “If I can put music to it, it’s a song. If I can’t, it’s a poem.”

JS: Exactly.

DJ: Jumping to your own work, outside the Dojo, how is the balance for your own writing right now?

JS: For the last 15-years I always had one foot in advertising and also in journalism. Every creative professional I know, whether they’re a copywriter or a graphic designer, has this balancing act. Everyone wants to just do their creative work, but they have to put food on the table. Obviously, with the economy the way it is, it’s even more of an issue.

Lately I’ve been able to step away for the most part from advertising and work on my fiction most days. We’re very fortunate, and not a day goes by that I’m not happy for it. But I’m also looking at freelance work again because I have to. For me, it’s about prioritizing and keeping my creative work as a priority. What works for me…this idea that financial advisors have of paying yourself first. So every morning I pay myself first with my creative work. It’s when I feel most connected to the page. I spend the morning hours with my creative writing. Regardless of what happens with my professional life, I’m not going to let that go. I think that’s what happens with many professionals. They feel like they need to focus on whatever it is…writing for newspapers or magazines, or working with editors who might change their stuff too much but they feel like they need to take the gig. Or maybe they’re in advertising or PR and they let the creative stuff slide. And as the days and weeks and months go by, it’s harder and harder to get back to the page.

DJ: It is a challenge.

JS: I’ve been working on a novel for quite some time, and I’m getting close to finishing. The times that I’ve stepped away from it for something else, whether it’s a short story, or life happens, or whatever’s going on, it’s much harder to get back into it. Where am I, where’s the story arch, who are these characters? When I’m working on it every day, or I’m thinking about the story every day…if I step away for a month and try to go back, it’s challenging.

DJ: Everything becomes frozen in that spot where you’ve left it. I’m wondering if there’s ever any crossover between this work and that, or where this work (professional ) informs that work (the creative), where one begins to seep into the other?

JS: In the advertising world I’ve always been more of the brand, headline, creative type of copywriter. The concept of what is creativity and how do you access it on command – mood has nothing to do with it. As a professional, you need to wake up and have creativity on tap. What does that mean exactly? When do I feel more creative? It’s an idea I’ve been thinking about for some time, so in that sense it overlaps. And when I was working in advertising full-time, I would write and do the marketing stuff sometimes for 12-hours a day, then come home and still have to find time to write. That’s where I developed my morning writing habit. Before I go give my creative energy to sell some widget, I’m going to write for myself.

Finding that creative juice, regardless of what you’re doing – my brother is an entrepreneur and a martial artist. Artist is right there in the title. For the Dojo, we’ve adopted the metaphor- and this concept connects to the martial arts, this idea of being a center for excellence. In business you’ll find it takes a lot of creativity to generate the energy of creating new business.

In advertising, I worked with designers, photographers, producers, web developers, etc., in creating this bigger brand concept. I always thought of it as creative. So the question wasn’t, “How do I stop doing this dry, boring stuff?” Because the energy and the project was always creative. The question was, “How do I stop focusing on selling products and services that I don’t really have a passion for?” Does the world need another BMW? I don’t think it does.

But there’s a mixed feeling in me about that. On one hand, products bring a lot of value, because they brings jobs, and the list goes on and on for how things play into the community and the economy. But if my passion isn’t 100% there, am I doing a disservice for my clients?

DJ: That’s a good point about the work itself being creative, because the work IS creative. The challenge is that idea of whether or not I want to support this, or if I’d rather be doing something else all together different.

JS: And on the other side of it, the fiction writing, I’m trying to be a professional writer. To me that means two big things. First, thick skin. I’m going to send things out, and they’re going to be rejected. Second is the showing up every day aspect. I’m going to write from this time to this time everyday, just like a full-time job. Where does mood come into it?

Having the discipline to come to the page every day…in the marketing world, it’s obvious. You’re going to sit in your cube, or wherever, and do stuff that you don’t want to do. That’s part of the distinction between the serious, professional writer, and someone who loves to write as a hobby.

The Dojo has a lot of members. Everyone’s serious about writing. When they come through the door they focus on their writing, and that’s what they’re here for. Many of those folks have other jobs or do other things, and there’s this sense of solace and community with other writers. The core members are professional writers. They use the space as their office. They’re here working.

When you see the amount of work they do, and the amount of daily effort that’s required to show up and keep plugging away every day, it’s a huge inspiration. The folks that are well published, the ones whose names are well recognized – they’re the quietest about what they’re doing. They’re here, their white earbuds go in, and they’re in their zone every single day, just writing, writing, writing, writing, writing. The level of prolificacy is phenomenal. For me, since I’ve been working on the same novel for four or five years, it’s especially interesting and inspiring.

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DJ: You definitely have a lot going on, between your own work, your work with Contrary, what you’re doing at “the school” and your radio program (blog talk radio). Is there one area where you get greater pleasure or satisfaction?

SB: I guess everything feeds into more material to write about. It would be nice to have more free time to write. Still, I learn a lot from my students and from my other part-time jobs. They give me more time to think about writing.

DJ: A lot of your work reads in a way as if it arrived on paper exactly how it happened, almost in a “channeled” sense. I don’t mean “channeling” in a new age way, but more so like the poem came out of you in one long gush. I’m trying to get a picture of you working when suddenly you’re hit with this wave…

SB: I work a lot in my head, more than I ever write down. I wish I were one of those writers that carries a notebook and pen everywhere. I go through phases where I try to make myself do that. Sometimes something will stay in my head for months or even years before I write it down.

DJ: What finally gets you to write it down? Why does it stay so long, and what gets you to say, “I have to get this thing out?”

SB: Sometimes because it doesn’t feel finished. I’m not saying it’s a finished product in my head and then makes its way to paper. It’s like a seed. It has to germinate for a certain amount of time. Sometimes I write it down because it feels like it’s almost done, and sometimes I write it down because I’m afraid of forgetting either a part of it or the whole thing.

DJ: Would you say you’re mentally crafting pieces?

SB: I always feel like there’s a frame around things. When it feels like I have enough to build on it, that’s when it goes on paper.

DJ: So you’re never too worried that you’ll actually forget something?

SB: There are things I think I’ve forgotten.

DJ: Looking at the poem, ELEGY FOR A PAST LIFE, you mention in the second stanza:

“Back then at sixteen
I thought we’d make it out together,
and become writers.”

How long has this been going on for you, getting these lines coming to you, and at what point did writing enter your life?

SB: I probably wrote before I could physically write. When I was little, I would tell my mom stories, make her write them down then read them back to me. I was sort of a writer before I knew letters or the alphabet.

I think it was either high school or undergrad when I made that leap between wanting to be a reader and being a writer. I don’t know if I felt confident about my own work until I started having things published, first in the undergrad literary journal, then later in places right out of college.

DJ: It’s interesting that you showed up in the world as an oral storyteller, because there’s a wonderful diversity in the language of your poetry. Did you make your way to poetry from other places, or has poetry always been a place where you found a home and a voice?

SB: Some of it might be that poetry requires a shorter attention span. When I was an early teen, I remember reading my mom’s old poetry books and feeling like I could read a lot in one sitting, because mostly they were just stripes down the middles of pages. So I could read much more poetry in a short amount of time than I could, say, fiction. I feel this way about writing it also.

I’m trying to get better about spending more time at poems and fiction. I think poetry is my natural progression as a writer, then eventually I’ll move onto fiction. A lot of writers move in the same way.

DJ: So you’re actively writing things other than poetry?

SB: I have about half of a short story collection done. I need three to six more stories to be long enough to send out.

DJ: When you mention that poetry requires something of a shorter attention span, how do you say this is a benefit when it comes to online publishing? Especially when you consider the fact that there are well-regarded online literary sites and opportunities popping up all the time.

SB: I’ll sit down and read a 500-page novel in hard copy but I’d never do that on screen. I don’t know if it’s a physical issue, where staring at a screen that long isn’t good for your eyes, or if it’s a psychological issue, where we feel that things online should be short. There’s definitely something to the fact that people will only spend so long reading something online. You expect it to be no more than three screens if you’re scrolling, as if there’s an intuitive link between how long something is and how much we’re willing to read. Which is a good thing for poetry.

In general, I think people are in the mode of reading shorter fiction when they’re online. They’re more likely to read a 2,000 word story online than a 10,000 story.

DJ: Is that sort of shift completely positive?

SB: I don’t think it’s positive. It might just be one of the necessary evils that happen. I don’t want to think that we’ll be like Japan, where our literature turns into text message novels, or whatever the craze is. I hope it doesn’t go that far, but I think we have to be realistic that, if we’re sending things to an online venue, people are only going to read a poem that’s one screen, or a story of about 2,000 words.

DJ: As you’ve edited and been a reader for print and online places, could you speak to whether or not you see a different caliber of writing coming in?

SB: With Contrary, at least right now, I’m the final poetry editor. Of the 1,000 or so submissions a month, I only see the top 20 – which makes it really hard to choose. I’ve gotten things sent to me directly where I’ve felt people didn’t even look at the literary journal, but I haven’t seen any differences in quality from when I was a first reader for print to now.

DJ: Do you have any sense of shifts going on as it relates to the financial viability of small press publishers vs. online journals?

SB: I just know it’s expensive going to print. Just look at the big newspapers that are shutting down or selling right now. Print no longer seems to be where people are getting either their news or reading material, and I think we’re moving more to the online end of the spectrum.

In one issue of Contrary, we had nearly 100,000 page views – there’s no way we could afford to print 100,000 issues, or even 20,000 issues for that matter. I think a lot of it is the economy, but some of it is environmentalism – we’ve all seen journals give thousands of back issues away for free. It’s sad because there is something to the hardcopy print world and the tactile feeling of a book, magazine or journal. Unfortunately it’s expensive to do these days.

DJ: A hundred-thousand views is huge. When you think about a journal like Contrary, if it was exclusively in print as opposed to online, it would probably be a regional-type press.

SB: Definitely. And if anyone weren’t from the University of Chicago, or around the South Side, it would just be word-of-mouth subscriptions. People would read their classmates who were published in there, and that’s how it would spread cross country.

>>>>


DJ: Getting back to your work – do you see a line from certain poets or writers that you’ll be carrying or are carrying through your words? Who are some of the writers who have spoken to you or continue to speak to you?

SB: I’m sitting at my desk and there are a bunch of black and white postcards of different writers right in front of me…Anne Sexton, Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg – I don’t write in that style, but I think I have the feeling Ginsberg does. Dylan Thomas…

I think there are some amazing writers who do very different things. To me, Anne Sexton was really brave. I have the poem, FOR MY LOVER, RETURNING TO HIS WIFE, taped to my door here. How brave is it to even start a poem with that title. You’re admitting you’re having an affair with a married man, and you’re going to write a poem about it. When she did that, it was a period where you don’t do things like that.

With Robert Frost, there’s a plainsong, rural feel in a lot of his poems, but there’s this immense depth there if you know to look for it. At the end of OUT, OUT – and I don’t remember the exact lines, that’s the poem where the boy’s hand gets cut off by a chainsaw – and at the very end it says something like, “. . . and they, because they were not the ones dead, returned to their affairs.” That’s just an amazing ending.

DJ: Tell me a little bit about “feeling that feeling” that Ginsberg felt.

SB: There’s a Ginsberg quote to the extent of, “Poetry is not the party line, it’s what you’re thinking alone at night.” I think he did a lot of beautiful, philosophical things with writing, even if our styles are different. If you can channel some of what he said when you’re writing, then you’re onto something.

DJ: I remember from some English class long ago, hearing Ginsberg’s work referred to as “confessional poetry.” I don’t know if you find yourself doing anything like that, which would get us into a conversation of “the I”. Or maybe I’ll ask you that first – is your “I” necessarily you, and is there a lot of you in your work?

SB: I would say in this book, the “I” is usually me. But then, part of my artistic license is that I can lie, or can make things sound more dramatic, either for the sake of the poem, or change words for the sake of rhythm, meter or alliteration.

DJ: If most of the “I” is you, tell me a little about the poem, A MAN WALKS INTO THE BAR. It feels really confessional. Is this a snapshot of something that’s true-to-life?

SB: When I was 21, I worked at a sports bar the summer before my senior year of college. It was a different world – it was a place owned by a former NFL player. There were a lot of big guys waiting tables who had either been pro or college football players. While I was obsessed with getting into Harvard or Princeton for grad school, this was my summer job.

DJ: There are all sorts of questions I want to ask now. Where was this?

SB: Alabama.

DJ: The poem mentions short-shorts night?

SB: There wasn’t officially a “short-shorts” night, but you knew that if you wore short-shorts you’d get more tips. We weren’t Hooters, but we knew if we dressed like Hooters girls, there’d be more money involved.

DJ: And this guy without a hand walks in?

SB: Maybe it was an arm. It was a long time ago. I remember he was standing at the bar, and the rest of the servers – we were all checking him out. As he turned, we saw that one of his arms ended around the elbow. Then there was this weird moment of recognition where he knew we knew. That sort of thing. You feel bad taking part in re-wounding somebody, or reminding them of an injury.

DJ: So now if we return to the beginning of our conversation, and your way of carrying verses, snippets of a verse, or concepts of a potential poem, around in your head, was this something you carried around for a while? And when you bring something like that to the page, is there a reconciliation?

SB: I probably carried this poem around for five years. I don’t know if I was actually thinking of writing the poem. I was just thinking about certain jobs I’d had and different things that had happened. That was one experience that seemed somewhat deep out of, you know, carrying beer to people.

Writing it – even though I have no idea who this man is, and the chance of him reading my book is somewhat astronomical – I feel like, more than a confession, it’s sort of an apology.

DJ: I get this idea of you as someone with prompts all around you. It may take years for them to make it to the page, but there’s almost an unconscious gathering of material going on. Is there something that triggers these to release and find the page?

SB: That’s where I start sounding like, “It’s ancient Greece, and the muse makes me do it.” I’m not sure what it is but I have to write it down.

DJ: Do you try to avoid that type of language?

SB: Not with other writers, but with people in general, it may sound flaky.

DJ: Tell me just a little bit about your daily practice, what does it look like when you factor in all the other things you do? How do you honor the page?

SB: A lot of it is just in my head. Things get committed to the page when, for instance, I’m caught up with grading, or during winter or summer breaks. I used to feel guilty saying that, and I still sort of do. I have a lot of things in my head right now, but I’m surrounded by piles of grading and other things.

DJ: You don’t keep a journal?

SB: No. I’m really undisciplined in that way.

DJ: One of the reviews I read of A Brief History of Time says “there’s something for everyone in the book”…

SB: That review means a lot to me because it’s from a former student who has a very busy life. He’s an Iraq war veteran, and isn’t the typical “reader of poetry” when you think about who goes and buys books. A MAN WALKS INTO A BAR was the poem that really got to him because he was awarded the Purple Heart. I think the poem reminded him of vets he knew who came back as amputees.

The fact that a former student of mine, this big tough Iraq war vet, wrote a heartfelt review of my book is really important to me.

DJ: In the poem, A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME, there’s this wonderful line right in the middle of it when you’re talking about giving up on loving people and loving things instead:

“I’ll love mountains as only a flatlander can”

There’s a lot being said in that one line, the idea of loneliness, longing, everything being new…could you talk a little about the emotions coming up, and what that’s saying?

SB: Being from Northern Indiana – first of all, it’s flat. If you go somewhere and you suddenly see mountains, they don’t even seem real at first.

Human relationships can be so hard. A lot of people have the thought that, “Oh, if I could just live in a cabin it would be so much easier.” The poem combines these ideas. And mountains have been here so long. The Rockies have been here for 65-million years, which makes the idea of the people coming in and out of your life seem somewhat transient. The mountains are always there for you.

DJ: With regards to distance, or the idea of being removed from a story that eventually comes forth as a poem – does being away from the story create a panoramic view for you where things feel safer? How does this factor in, especially when you consider the gap between the origin of a poem and its eventual creation?

SB: Part of it is trusting that an idea is worthy of being literature – if that doesn’t sound too lofty. I think when we’re either new or young writers, we have this egocentric belief that everything is brilliant. Sometimes for me, it’s about seeing if something is even worth hitting paper. If it stays in my head for weeks, months, years even, then it’s probably worth writing down.

DJ: So it doesn’t have to do with safety or being away from it, but more about the its worth?

SB: With some of my poems, I think they’re probably painfully open about things that might never be safe. In A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME, I mention,

“This will explain why my father is
still married to my mother even after she tried to knife him
just days after coming home from jail
for two other attempted murders.”

I don’t know for sure that my mom tried to knife my father. It’s something my brother told me when I was away at college. Right there I say my mom was in jail, and I say why – it was actually attempted manslaughter, but “murder” sounded better. Fewer syllables. And if your mom has tried to kill two people, why make it sound like less than it is?

When I was first writing, everything was about “the art”. I didn’t care about people, or if I hurt them. It was pretty selfish. Then my book came out and my parents told me they ordered it. I thought, “My mom’s going to sue me.” And I actually got this really civil email that they enjoyed my book and thought it was quite good. I thought, “Wow, I talked about you being in jail.” Either she didn’t see that part or it didn’t register as something that should bother her.

DJ: So now how do you show up with your students and help them access the things they need to access?

SB: I keep in mind that most learning is done by imitation. There’s this great quote by Saul Bellow, “A writer is a reader moved to emulate.” I try to find writing that will connect with them so well that they’ll want to write like that. I think that’s really the only way to do it.

There didn’t used to be MFA programs in creative writing. You used to just read the great writers and do what they did. I really believe it comes down to reading a lot, writing a lot, show don’t tell…those are the rules I give to everybody. It seems strange to be paid to teach when there are so few rules, but the rest is just detail.

The poems in his first collection (Here, Bullet, © 2005, Alice James Books) reflect in lucid detail his own experiences as an infantryman in Iraq. In addition to discussing how his military experience continues to influence his work, we also touched upon other places from where he draws his language, his early influences, and his role in the ongoing conversation around the war itself.

DJ: Are you consciously aware of how the military language comes into your work? Can you remember back before the military to what your language was like, and how it’s shifted?

BT: With these two books, I can see the effect and influence, and how the language drives the line. It affects the psychology, too, in the type of language I’m using. I’m sure there are subtler effects I’m not yet aware of. It might take some time to figure out the deeper psychological influence.

On the surface, and in the lines themselves, I can see the lingo and jargon that’s used “on the job.” I’d have to go back to some of my old stuff and see what’s there, because my family has generationally been in the military, so the language was always sort of there, just not as much when I was younger.

DJ: I’ve heard other writers use the expression “drive the line” before. As if the words are there, though not exactly a conscious thing. The poem’s already moving, you’ve already accessed what you need to say, and the language wells up because it’s in your makeup.

BT: Imagine a phrase comes to mind. I sit around with it for a week or two. I write it down quite a bit. I try to start a poem, but it doesn’t work. I try again, and it still doesn’t work. I stew on it. Whatever the phrase might be – maybe military jargon, or something I used when I was in uniform – it has a certain music.

I play trumpet and bass as well, and it’s similar to when you’re writing a song. You start off in a certain key, which leads to certain notes. I might not be aware of them ahead of time, or I might not be prepared for them. Maybe I was just noodling around, and suddenly it feels like it’s being birthed on its own, like there’s a connection that leads to certain pathways. If that makes any sense at all (laughter).

I think the words drive and create certain possibilities that come forward from them and feel natural in the process of doing so. If it feels unnatural, then there must be a reason for feeling that way, or I just need to scrap it and try over.

DJ: It’s not like you’re trying to force something where it doesn’t belong.

BT: Yeah. It’s like when you hear false notes, you know it’s not right. You keep working at it.

DJ: So the music of the poem, especially playing bass and trumpet, must be very important to you.

BT: Language is musical. The way we speak, the phrases we use…music is inherent in the language itself. Playing an instrument, it has an influence, but I don’t think it matters so much. I like the rhythms of language. That’s why I gravitated to poetry more than prose. I’m still learning how to write a sentence. Maybe once I figure that out I’ll dabble at something longer (laughter).

DJ: I know you were in Bosnia as well as Iraq. Being around these other languages, was there a sense of allure to their musicality?

BT: It starts back here in the Central Valley, California. My father was a Russian linguist in the Army. His main hobby, even to this day – he’s trying to learn Thai, Cambodian – is to learn parts of new languages while brushing up on stuff he’s previously studied. I was sort of raised in that environment.

I’m not multi-lingual in any way. I know a few phrases here and there. When I was in Bosnia, it was frustrating because I didn’t have much contact with Bosnians. I wasn’t out patrolling the streets and meeting people. In Iraq, I was out meeting and talking to people. It was more intriguing in that sense.

DJ: Were there other writers in your family?

BT: Several. My aunt – she’s not published, but all my life I looked to her as the wordsmith of our family. She seems to have more knowledge than the dictionary has in her head. A very amazing woman. My dad as well. He’s not a writer, per say, but his affinity for and interest in language affected me. Also my uncle was an English teacher who lives about an hour away. He would drop off books that were above my grade and reading level. So it was inspiring, encouraging and challenging. And I’d send him stories or poems and he’d comment back, try to encourage and urge. It was very helpful.

DJ: You have these split influences, which is quite interesting. I’m curious, outside of war writers and things like that, who were your earlier influences?

BT: Some of them are still my influences. I mentioned this elsewhere, and it’s a question I should have considered more carefully earlier. These people, my uncle, my aunt, they’re big influences, but I’d say one of my biggest influences is a guy who doesn’t even write any longer. The guitarist in my band, a guy named Brian Voigt. I’ve known him since I was seven. He’s brilliant. He’s helped shape a lot of my thoughts about art by the arguments we’ve had over art through the years.

In a similar way, a poet named Stacey Brown, who I was in graduate school with, is my best reader. She seems to know my work better than I do, and knows how to challenge me. A lot of people in the MFA program for that matter. Their influence lasts to this day as well. A guy named Nick Barrett was always saying, “Compression.” It wasn’t a new idea, exactly, but it was new to me, and I got it from Nick.

DJ: Tell me about compression in your work. It seems to me that there’s just enough air between your lines where it’s not completely flattened. Is that what you mean? That idea of keeping the story dense? Because there is a good density to your work. Not too dense. More like a happy medium.

BT: If it feels like the work comes close to it, then I owe it to the people who helped me revise. As I was writing the first book, and still now, the word “compression” is in the back of my head. Often there’s a part of me that wants to tell too much and do too much of the reader’s work. I really have to focus on cutting so I leave some of the work for the reader to do, sort of create the “unsaid,” in a sense.

There’s a poem, TWO STORIES DOWN, where a man jumps off a building. Hopefully people have to figure out “why” for themselves, because the narrative doesn’t really address the reason behind it. And who kills who at the end. That kind of thing.

It’s almost one of those cheesy stories with a sort of “cliffhanger ending”, in a sense, but I think that poem is one of the most blatant for what we’re talking about now, because the lines are compressed a bit.

The lines themselves, musically…I have a tendency to use a lot of anapestic rhythm, that rolling sort of, “du-du-dum-du-du-dum” stuff, which I like a lot, but I wind up with a lot of “fors” and “ands” and other connective tissue language. Then in the revising process I try to compress and cut those out to heighten the pressure of the language. It works sometimes and sometimes it doesn’t.

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DJ: Going back to our earlier conversation about music, I see where you might fall into too many “thes” and “ofs” to create a certain sound at the sake of stretching the language out too much. Compression brings it back to the language, and the music is there anyway if you let the language take over.

TWO STORIES DOWN is an example where you create slowness in a moment that probably, in reality, occurred in a split second. You capture it in such a way that it becomes this slow…as if we are watching a movie and the film slows suddenly. We see a guy jumping in the air in what, to him, seems like a joyful leap because he’s hoping for a certain end. The end doesn’t come the way he envisioned, but it comes.

BT: Part of what spurred the writing of it was because I didn’t know what the soldier, that sergeant, should have done. He wound up being sent to the colonel, who basically chewed him out for killing this guy. We were stunned. He tried to help the guy and the guy took his knife. What was he supposed to do? Then it was the sergeant’s life on the line.

There’s something much more important to it than the actual narrative of what happened. It’s still true to the narrative of what did happen, but I tried to keep it open a bit. That’s probably the only one that, when I’ve gone to a high school, students will debate about it.

DJ: I also wanted to ask about the poem, ASHBAH, which is somewhat haunting, subject wise. There’s this great juxtaposition between the ghosts of American soldiers, who are wandering and unsure, and the ghosts of the Iraqi dead leaning toward Mecca. You can read this in a couple of ways. Of course the Iraqi dead are in their homeland, and therefore closer to Mecca, while the American soldiers are far from home. Or is there a greater commentary going on there, as it relates to faith?

BT: Some of the backstory that led me to think along those lines, and that allowed for this poem to develop in the first place is that, one of my friends is a photographer in Pennsylvania who often goes out to the Gettysburg battle site. She says she feels a very strong sense of souls being trapped there. That was in the back of my mind, not constantly, but it was one of the things I thought about, figuring I could die there, or people with me could die, and there were people dying around us.

I remember having this idea of being trapped in an alien landscape, a beautiful one, but one that wasn’t home. It seemed tragic that the world could work that way, and it reminded me of Southern soldiers that might have been from Florida but got killed and stuck in Gettysburg.

I knew I was walking a line with that poem because there is a sense where one side is given faith and is at home, and the other one is wandering, hoping for a way.

DJ: That wasn’t your intent, but you did leave it open…

BT: It could be interpreted that way, and the person interpreting it wouldn’t be wrong. I feel very strong that the poem finishes in the reader. If it lands that way in the reader’s psyche, and they can justify it from what they see in the poem, then they’d be correct.

DJ: The idea that the poem finishes in the reader, I guess that’s the best anyone could ever hope for.

BT: That’s the honor as the writer, the honor that we readers give to writers as we read their work. It seems that if the conversation happens, then the writer’s been successful.

I don’t judge success on people liking it, or “getting” what I thought it was supposed to mean in the first place. Just the honor of that conversation is pretty amazing. I’m already happy at that point.

DJ: The book stands on its own merit, but there’s also the extra connection to the war and the national appetite for the war, especially in 2005 at the time of its release. Did you ever get the feeling that, “Oh, now I’m going to be branded as a ‘war poet’” or anything like that?

BT: I struggled with that a little bit. Prior to Here, Bullet coming out, I wrote roughly about seven other books from grad school on. Things were published here and there, but they were on a wide variety of topics. Part of me was thinking, I don’t want to be so-called “Hollywood typecast,” and have this become my niche. But another part of me was thinking, “People need to hear the stuff on the other end of the conversation, and if I need to write it in order for the conversation to begin, then it’ll happen.” That’s not a bad thing. But I wouldn’t want to write it just to write it.

Also, I want to be a writer who has the opportunity to write about other things, because there are so many interesting things in the world. I understand “the idea” of writer’s block, but at the same time it’s hard for me to understand the reality of it. It doesn’t seem to be a problem of finding something to write about, but it seems to be, of all the things in the world, what am I going to write about today? There’s too much in one lifetime to write. We live such short lives.

So I struggled with that, and at the same time, these emails kept percolating up from guys I’d served with who had gone back to Iraq. And I thought, “I’ve got to write a second book.” I figured that years from now I’d write a second book about the war, but I didn’t realize it needed to be said now.

And I think it does because stuff kept coming to me. Then poems started coming out. When I think about it, there might be people who want to engage in this conversation, because now it isn’t the war “there” any longer, but it’s become the war “here at home”. It’s a different conversation completely.

DJ: That’s a huge conversation. What were those emails that were coming in…what were they saying?

BT: Different guys telling me about raids that had gone on, about helicopter gunships firing upon villages. I’m hearing about the wounded, I’m reading the email and 15-minutes later I’m sitting at a coffee shop on an outside patio with palm trees nearby and people talking on their cellphones. It seemed like there’s a war taking place, we’re a nation at war, but it’s absent here somehow.

I started looking around and thinking, maybe I can find a war here imagistically, but I’d have to find imagistic rhymes. I wondered, what rhymes with “helicopter motorblade”, and I thought about the fan blades in the hardware store hovering overhead.

The starter was, I was shopping for nails for a building project, and there were a (ton) of nails for whatever you need. One kind was called “double-headed nails”, which are used for building scaffolding. They look a lot like the firing pin that used to go inside my weapon. That started this process of looking for and creating imagistic rhymes. And also, there’s the idea of an over-layering of life. I’m living here in Fresno, but at the same time, all around me, war is taking place, and I’m a part of that same world. It’s a matter of if I choose to recognize it or not.

DJ: In your own way, and maybe in that Tim O’Brien way of, “The Things We Carry,” due to your experience and the fact that you maintain relationships with people still there, it’s almost like you’re in two places at one time.

BT: I don’t think I’m alone in that. I think a lot of people feel a psychic disconnect. I don’t know what the word for it is. Disjunction between the way the world seems and the way it really is.

DJ: Like a dissonance almost.

BT: It’s not dissonance though. It’s more of a consonance. There is a dissonance there, but our ears aren’t tuned to it. We have to tune our ears to, “Oh, we live in a really fucked up world, and we need to fix this stuff.”

Everybody right now, it’s become, “Oh no, my wallet! The economy!” And I understand, because we have to survive, but at the same time, there are responsibilities that need to be tended to. If there are 400,000 or 700,000 dead Iraqis, for example, then we have ghosts that we have made, that we’ve collected. Maybe I wasn’t involved in them personally, but I had the American flag on my shoulder. So, America, as a collective, is doing this. I feel we need to shoulder the burden of our responsibility.

DJ: You have a very sobering view of the whole experience and the reality of what the war is. Have people or groups asked you to speak out against the war?

BT: I’ve been asked by some politicians to speak at political rallies and events. I’ve chosen not to do that. I don’t want to preach to a choir. I really would rather talk to the people with whom I’m furthest away from on agreeing, then find a way to affect them, regardless of where they may stand on these things, that might spur them to do something.

DJ: As if to affect them from the middle path…

BT: Yeah. To preach to the choir, then we’re just singing a song together. If I can somehow invite in people who disagree with me, and if they’re affected somehow, it might alter their consciousness in some way. I don’t mean just me. I think the process of people doing it in many different ways, if we have this type of communication with people we don’t always get along with, creates a bridgework.

If I go to a rally just to fire up a crowd, I’ll fire up some fairly motivated people who don’t have any trouble motivating themselves. For me, I’d rather talk with the people who disagree with me, and I with them. I might be able to learn from them as well, which you have to be open to.

DJ: So you do feel something of an obligation, and it’s not something you’re shying from?

BT: No. And I know it’s odd, because there’s the whole deal of the “writer making art stuff,” and sharing his art, but then there’s the other part that says there’s no way to avoid the political, especially with this particular type of art piece. And I think all art in a sense has a persuasive component, which makes it inherently political.

Even if you paint something that’s just trying to show an idea on the construction of beauty, or something like that – maybe it’s a sunset, and maybe on some level it’s a comment on death. Someone will get the deeper value out of it, the greater appreciation of life and beauty – that’s the political content.

Here, Bullet is right on the surface in the political context. I’m honored to be a small part of a huge dialog. Within that I want to avoid pushing away the people I most want to affect and get in dialog with.

Is all art political? Leave a comment and share your thoughts – we’re happy to post them.