Daniel Nester

In an interview with the Gothamist, you imagined a very humorous meeting with Frank O'Hara and the 6-year-old David Lee Roth in 1962. Seriously, has Frank O'Hara influenced your work? And what would you have said to the young David Lee?

Reading O'Hara totally freed up my work. It's guided me, for instance, in integrating the sprit of New York into my poems. He's the one poet, to me, who really matters from the New York School poets from that era; everyone else rides his coattails.

I think it's humorous or amusing that Roth and O'Hara were in the same neighborhood back then. But I do think that the candor and humor of both people relate to each other—O'Hara's personas is the same as Roths' "get some leg tonight for sure." There's that flamboyance.

I also believe that poets don't interact with the real world enough, the real objects, the "humane particulars" as William Carlos Williams call it. It's one of my shibboleths that poets retreat into their own world before even giving the tangible world a chance. I, too, reject, much of that tangibility. Don't get me wrong. The real world sucks. But I need something to write about once I get up to my ivory tower!

Do you believe there is a difference in the poet's role in today's society versus fifty years ago?

Nagatory there, good buddy. Not a whiff of a difference. Just to write poems.

It seems that the latest internet fashion is to have a blog. What has your blog done for you lately?

I have conflicted views about having and reading blogs.  On the good side, they ensure a type of personal contact with people, and shows a side of people you wouldn’t get to read about otherwise.  On the other hand, it’s a bit of a chore to censor one’s self once you realize that 200-1000 people are reading what you have to say.  It’s an odd combination of power and neurotic embarrassment.

Are you working on a manuscript at this time? Tell us about it.

I’m forever finishing up Desire is the Gasoline of Life, a cycle of confessional lyrics, as well as The History of My World Tonight, a title I got from the great poet Leonard Gontarek, which are neurotic, New York-peripatetic poems.

Help me out here, tell me if you feel there is a poem in this issue (besides yours of course) that deserves a nomination to Pushcart and why.

Can I say what shouldn’t be?  Just kidding.

It seems that Ted Kooser and many other poets revise their poems over 30, 40, 100s of times. Tell us what your process is for revisions.

I have two general kinds of revision processes.  In one, I tinker with line breaks, stanza breaks, general mechanics.  All the words are correct, I’ll think; it’s merely the order that needs help. Another is when I “translate” the poem, move word by word and think of another way to say what I am saying.  I find it’s a great way to cut through the fog.  Oftentimes, it creates a completely different poem, so I get two for the price of one.

Which writer that is not on this issue do you feel I should keep an eye out for future issues and why?

I’ve been chasing down Mark Halliday for poems in my various editorial endeavors.  If you get him for an issue, I’ll hate and love you at the same time.  When narrative poets sit down at the Narrative Poets Tavern and think about how this whole desiccated anti-narrative movement is going to finally die, we think of Mark Halliday riding in on a white horse, holding copies of his books and rescuing us all from abhorring referents for the sake of it.

Do you find that you have a theme in your poems that you have explored several times in your writing?

Candor, gesture, touch, autobiography, rock and roll.

What question would you ask yourself if you were interviewing you and what is your answer.

Interviewer: Mr. Nester, it seems to me you are a perfect combination of the timeless lyricism of, say, Keats, as well as the better avant garde projects of the past century—how do you do this all, sometimes in the space of 4-6 lines?  And still be so physically attractive—even, I daresay, hunky?

Nester: [Laughs out loud.] Well, thank you! I don’t know how to respond to such enthusiasm about my work, as I am so engrossed in my projects that I cannot step back, as you have, and come into my office in the middle of my busy day!  Nonetheless, let me attempt to answer you.  Yes, you are correct in pointing out some of my influences.  Keats is a hero of mine—guilty as charged—and I at times I do feel him speaking to me as I whip out my notebook during an afternoon in the park.  At the same time, I do feel the limitations of the Keatsian lyric in this modern society of ours.  How can we follow an undiluted Romantic project after the wars of the past 100 years, the dawn of the Information Age, and the latest spate of flawless Kinks reissues?  I think my entire life I have been trying to reconcile these notions.  And so I do allow what you call the ‘avant garde project’ to seep in, [coughs], as it were, and infuse my work with a certain restraint.  How can we, after all, allow the over engorged Romanticism of the past to enter our bodies without, if you will, cock-blocking it with some hard swats of an avant garde hand?   As for my physical appearance—as you put it, ‘hunkiness’—I will say this: The Body Shop’s Crème Contour des Yeux Quotidienne, although pricey, does wonders for those maturing patches of skin beneath an intense writer’s eyes.

If you could have coffee with any poet who would it be?

Bert Convy.

What advice do you give to someone just starting out?

“Have a good time all the time”—Viv Savage, This is Spinal Tap.

Do you have a poem that you never published because it was too personal and would you allow me to publish it in this interview?

The most personal ones are the ones one should publish, and are the ones I usually send out into the world.  Otherwise, what is the point?