David Biespiel is widely recognized as one of the leading poets of his generation, a liberal commentator on national politics, and an expert in teaching writing. He currently divides his teaching among three universities: in the fall as the Visiting Poet at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in the spring as an Adjunct Professor at Oregon State University, and n the summer on the faculty of the low-residency M.F.A. Program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.

In 1999, looking to create an independent writing studio, Biespiel founded the Attic in Portland, Oregon’s historic Hawthorne district.

His publications include Shattering Air, Pilgrims & Beggars, Wild Civility, and most recently, The Book of Men and Women, which was among the Poetry Foundation’s selections of top poetry of 2009. In addition, he has been honored with a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, a Lannan Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature.

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.


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Nora Robertson writes fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays, which have appeared in such publications as Redactions, Alimentum, Monkeybicycle, Citadel of the Spirit: Oregon’s Sesquicentennial Anthology, Plazm and Portland Monthly. She is a contributing editor to the New Oregon Arts & Letters webjournal and is the producer and writer of the New Oregon Interview Series. Her recipe poem, “How to Boil an Egg” (below), was nominated by Redactions for the 2007 Pushcart Prize. Her performance work has been showcased in Portland in the Enteractive Language Festival, the Public Works series curated by 2 Gyrlz Performative Art, Phase One: Words + Music; Performance Works Northwest’s Alembic Series in the five-woman show Housebound, and in Tiffany Lee Brown’s site-based installation Play Me at JAW 2008 at Portland Center Stage. She lives in Portland, Oregon and works for the Portland Public Schools.

© by Nora Robertson. All rights reserved.

HOW TO BOIL AN EGG
Targhaz Interiors

1. First, you have to not think about a lot of things. The passage through the vaginal canal of the hen, the feminine parts clinging to and pushing forward the papery shell enclosing a thin membrane around the possibility of a future chicken. Maybe you had one of those experiences, like at a natural history museum or working at a diner, where you may have had the privilege to see the blood spot. Some people never recover. The taste always reminds them.

2. The kind of pan with the special core that conducts heat all over is best. Allow the tap to rush frigid and breathless. The water will need salt. Have you heard about the slaves of Targhaz who dug out chunks of grey-white salt in sub-Saharan holes, dry as their salt-block homes sucking water from their bones as they slept? Foremen only lasted two weeks. Faces rotated through like the burning yolk-yellow round of sun overhead. And what about that snake god of Ghana asking for lovely virgin bottoms, rigid and headless? I imagine I am that girl, pinioned, winner of a local beauty contest. While I’m waiting, it happens that blood drips down my inner thigh, red as hibiscus, spoiling the meat. There’s no warrior to rescue me. I have to rescue myself through biology.

3. Boil all this with the egg, seven minutes at least. If you’re hard-boiled, you’ll like it plain with a little salt and pepper. Sometimes, it’s easier that way. There are many ways to devil your egg, with blood-flecks of pimiento or the rendered fat of a hen. My grandmother used to make hundreds of these in the late 60’s for what they called entertaining. In a bone-white house with tilework shimmering milky light off the walls, she laid them out in rows on gleaming platters. My mother came into the kitchen once in the middle of the night and found her peeling eggs. Her body was bent over as she was sobbing. My mother remembers the feel of her shuddering when she rushed to hug her, the streams of salt water running down between their faces.

(previously published in Redactions)
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MY HUSBAND AS SENSITIVE INSTRUMENT

1. Delicate, quivering, he watches TV with the sound turned down low. If he had antennae, they would be curved and lightly furred. The best insects for Yucatan tacos are jumiles with their strong mint flavor. The first step is to locate the jumiles, to slide your hands between the flat of rocks and pull out the thing you want, its tiny legs scrambling against your palm. The Maya would eat an honored sacrificed one afterwards, wasting nothing of the god-flesh. It’s not that they thought they could predict time, just inhabit it more fully.

2. When two of our good friends decided to sleep with another two of our good friends and the one who was my old girlhood pal like hips rotating out of the same socket bucked up the nerve to tell me about it, he already knew. You can keep the jumile alive almost indefinitely in the crevices of a leather bag as long as you feed it the right mixture of leaves and grass. The Maya would strip the god costume off the carcass and prepare the honored sacrificed one for the coals. They thought each moment had a personality and that by careful observation, you could know which way the wind was blowing, what was dangerous and safe.

3. When it is the right time, crush the jumiles in a stone mortar, volcanic. Grind in a little chile, salt, tomatoe. The mixture will become soupy, corpuscular, time to fleck it with green of chopped cilantro and punch it with lime. The summer I drove in circles across the hot body of the country like an arrow returning to its bow, my husband already knew why. But it’s easy to tell when you’re lying, he said. Maybe no one was ever paying attention before.

4. Ladle the jumile mixture across just-made tortillas sent from a cupped kneading hand onto the griddle to the plate. It goes well with strips of meat leftover from barbeque, with fermented maize. I had allowed someone else to run the flat of his hand across my back the same way I later ran it across my husband’s, like brushing fingertips across a harp, across the steely inner strings of a piano. Rib stacked above rib, shuddering with wet.

(previously published in Alimentum Journal)

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Paulann Petersen’s work is deeply rooted in music and presence. Even her musings and reflections remain wrapped in the moment, which guides the reader through the navigable terrain of each poem. As the poet Vern Rutsala notes in the introduction to Kindle, Petersen’s latest collection:

“There are forces in our society which try very hard to put us in a fixed place…but the poet knows that the self is slippery and doesn’t fall easily into any particular slot saying, ‘Hey…you may be here but you’re also over there and maybe somewhere else entirely.’ Petersen says these things but also adds that the place you find yourself is often a transitional one on the way from here to there.”

Petersen is an extremely active member of Oregon’s literary community, a frequent workshop instructor, the recipient of the 2006 Literary Arts Stewart Holbrook Award for Outstanding Contributions to Oregon’s Literary Life, and a board member of Friends of William Stafford. She was kind enough to invite me to her home, where our conversation started off on the topic of another Oregon writer, Ray Carver.

(PP): There was an incredible resonance in Carver’s work, especially for anyone who’s experienced hard times in their life. He was almost improbably sympathetic and generous. Very few people who achieve the type of status and acclaim he received are as unpretentious and generous as he was, and IS in his stories. It’s really there. His profound sympathy for, as Grace Paley may have said, the little disturbances of man. Paley is superb too. “The Little Disturbances of Man” and “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute” are short stories…she was an enormously influential writer for people just beginning as writers. Right during Ray’s time. She might still be, though I don’t know how many people are still reading her.

Ray always thought of himself of a poet, which is incredible when someone who is credited with having changed the landscape of fiction would consider himself primarily a poet. A lot of writers cross over into different genres of course. Ursula Le Guin is a great example.

(DJ): And you?

(PP): Just poetry. I’ve written a few prose pieces. Essays, stories.

(DJ): And what about your start?

(PP): I wrote poetry as a young girl. I was in high school in SE Portland won a prize of some kind. I didn’t even know how to pursue anything with it. We had no creative writing classes, and I came from a decidedly non-literary family. Very blue collar. I never thought of this before but there was not a single book of poetry in the house, and just a handful of books in general. I can remember exactly where they were on the bookshelf.

My parents weren’t ill-educated. My mom had done nurse’s training at St. Mary’s in San Francisco. She had a sound background in biology and science. My father wanted to go to college. He was in school for a year, then the Depression started and his family needed him.

They read, but it just wasn’t a family atmosphere where books or literature were a big part of our lives. I think I had some children’s books and nursery rhyme type things.

When I went to Pomona, I took my poems to my English professor, who referred me to someone else who was sort of the resident poet. I remember him saying in effect, ‘Oh, I don’t think so’ (laughter). Something about being ‘lovely images’ but not the cohesion of a poem. And I set it aside.

As a young adult in Klamath Falls, and by now I had young children, I started reading the Saturday Review, which had poems in every issue. I also stumbled onto Philip Larkin’s poetry and began to see that there was a wonderful world of contemporary poetry out there. I started to seek it out.

(DJ): Were you teaching by now?

(PP): No. I was essentially a house wife. We had very little money, not impoverished, but not much money. My husband at that time – we later divorced – was a high school English teacher. His salary was barely above the level where you qualify for food stamps. We didn’t have much extra money, and I spent my time doing things like baking all the bread, canning, cooking from scratch and the things you do to economize. We lived on an acre and a quarter that was surrounded by farmland. It was a busy life.

When my son was in second grade I went back to school and got my teaching degree. I drove back and forth to Southern Oregon University across the mountains. It was wonderful to be in school, even those infamous method courses and the things you take to be a teacher.

Lawson Inada (Oregon’s Poet Laureate) was on the faculty. I met with him to see if I could be in his creative writing class. We talked for a while. He said, “I can’t think of a better position for a writer to be in than to be driving up those mountains and down into the valley, doing that two times a day. All that time to think. That’s perfect! You come on in.”

It was wonderful being in his classes while I was finishing my degree. I wound up getting a Masters there, and Lawson paved the way for me to do a manuscript of poems as my thesis, which was quite unusual at Southern Oregon at the time.

(DJ): Coming from this place as a child without many books on the shelf, what bubbled up within you and to steer you toward wanting to write?

(PP): Through high school and college I was a good writer. I remember just knowing where transitions belonged, where new paragraphs should start, those sorts of things.

(DJ): From when you left school to when you went back, how were you finding time to write between raising family and living the rustic lifestyle?

(PP): I was stealing time, plus reading some wonderful contemporary poems in the Saturday Review. The Atlantic was another one. The county library was wonderful as well. That’s where I discovered Grace Paley. I was reading lots of contemporary poetry, plus following my own threads of language and imagery to learn to write.

(DJ): Where did those come from? Or maybe it’s the same now? What are those triggers for you?

(PP): Usually for me it’s a piece of language that floats in from somewhere. Sound…the sonic qualities of a poem is very important.

I believe a poem is a creature of sound…a creature of heartbeat and breath. If a poem doesn’t have that sound then it doesn’t resonate with me. There are lots of poets who work in very narrative, cerebral styles. I appreciate and recognize how fine their work is, but the poems and the poets I return to are the ones where, again and again, I find an almost phonic-type music.

So I follow bits of language that have sound forms I can hear and feel pushing from them and with them. Often I’ll just start writing. I call it riffing, as a musician might riff. I let the sounds carry me from one thing to another, just pushing and pushing and carrying onto the page. Later I’ll go back and see something that looks like the kernel of a poem, or maybe somewhere in there I’ll find a whole poem in the riff.

Very seldom do I have an idea for a poem, and then write it. Idea poems don’t turn out that well for me. People like to ask, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ That to me is more like, ‘writing a poem about…’ and then having a topic for a poem. That doesn’t work for me.

(DJ): So you follow the sound and music, and then the idea is there…

(PP): The idea emerges, or I can see what in that particular riff – which might be two, three or four pages – coheres.

(DJ): Is it script across the page? Are you already starting to build line breaks in?

(PP): Sometimes the line breaks are there. Once I take something out of the notebook, and start to put it on single sheets, I write long-hand a number of drafts before I ever put it on a word processor.

(DJ): Have you always worked this way?

(PP): Some French theorists have the notion that style is learned through the wrist. I’m not saying it applies to me, but I like the idea of it.

When my first full-length book came out, Confluence Press had me fill out a fairly lengthy questionnaire so they could use information in a press release. of their questions was – and I’m going to ask you this first: To which school of poetics do you belong?

(DJ): My school? I don’t know if it’s a school (laughter). Lots of tragic hero stuff. Human weirdness (laughter).

(PP): The first thing that popped into my mind was the school of Disembodied Poetics, from Naropa. I was trying to think about what schools of poetics there were. If could figure that out then maybe I could figure out where I was. Then I knew. I belonged to the school of Embodied Poetics, because I believe in poems of the body. And I don’t mean poems about the body, but poems that are embodied, almost as if they are part of your very flesh. Poems from the body.

(DJ): There’s a great sense of presence in your poems. The reader doesn’t get lost.

(PP): That’s important to me. We choose at some point what we’re going to do. I’ve been working on a few poems that are quite surreal. I like to work like that, and I can do it, but quite a while ago I made a conscious decision – and it was something I came to over a period of time, that if I was going to err in one direction or the other, I wanted to err in the direction of being accessible to people. I love the idea of a shared voice, an almost archetypal voice that could be coming from any of us.