Is there a poem in this issue that deserves a Pushcart nomination?

 

Tony Tost's Omaha both begins and ends with lines cribbed from famous pieces. The first line's provenance is obvious:

 

The Pure products of Omaha go....Tost

 

The pure products of America go crazy... Williams

 

This is how I was drawn in to Tost's piece; as you can see, its status as "pure product" is impugned from the get-go, setting up a nice tension. Now fast forward to the penultimate line:

 

The dog does not put on the bullet's power.... Tost

 

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?... Yeats

 

The poem is book ended by these two great micro-parodies; to me, the whole poem seems "overheard" from the stream of remembered voices in the poet's mind. Pound called this the "ideogrammatic" method, a term he adopted from Fenollosa's writings on Mandarin Chinese. There are many other names for this device but I don't want to sound too geeky. My point is, among all of Tost's talk of animals and cages, one gets the impression that he is setting up an introspective zoo for his reader, but that the exhibits are out-of-control. I am reminded of Yeats's "The Circus Animals' Desertion":

 

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,

I sought it daily for six weeks or so.

Maybe at last, being but a broken man,

I must be satisfied with my heart, although

Winter and summer till old age began

My circus animals were all on show,

Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,

Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

 

As usual, I have probably missed the point entirely, but according to my way of seeing things Tost's poem is alive with an attitude of gratefulness, gratefulness to the past's great voices and to a living and universal Logos that is the spirit of all who materialize ideas. That these products should be less tame than we'd like them to be, that the offspring of the mind do not march in step or sit pretty in their cages (i.e. poetic forms & conventions), is more a cause for celebration than dismay.

 

Is there a manuscript you are working on?

 

There are dozens of manuscripts I am working on. One of these is a book of poems, but others include:

 

a) 365 TALKING MARIAS: A one-page-per-day 5" X 5" calendar with the testimony of a different woman named Maria on each page.

 

b) CHICKEN IMAGERY IN SHAKESPEARE: self explanatory

 

c) DOUBLE TROUBLE IN PARADISE: A collection of short stories based on the lives of the workers of a Little Havana McDonald's (10th Ave & West Flagler St.) which culminates in a story where all the characters join forces to poison an odd man who has been following them around for months with a notebook and pencil.

 

d) E PLURIBUS UNUM, MUTHA FUCKA!: Four dissimilar Americans (a teenage hoodlum from Jersey City, a cheerleader for the Seattle Seahawks, the inventor of the neutron bomb and a drug-addicted Cuban poet named Kameekah) collide at a four-way stop sign in Topeka, Kansas and become one person.

 

e) WE WANT OUR CATSKILLS BACK: A hundred thousand zombie deer, all victims of vehicular homicide, terrorize upstate New York until one man preaches forgiveness to them and offers himself as a vicarious sacrifice. Based on the infamous bacchanals of Monticello, New York.

 

f) SEVENTY-SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIVALENCE: A graduate English student at an Ivy League university in the Finger Lakes region of NY drops out of school to sell marijuana and becomes the puck in a galactic hockey game between the angels of Jehova and the harem of Lucifer.

 

g) I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOWNFISH: A drug-addicted Cuban poet named Klemente becomes obsessed with the mid-eighties TV adventure series MANIMAL and strives to overcome his agoraphobia by pretending he is a mako shark, then a narwhal, then a swordfish, then a man-o-war, then a merman, then a drug-addicted Cuban poet. To be published posthumously.

 

Is there a writer not appearing in this issue that should appear in future issues?

 

In my travels, I've encountered one voice that is the ideal amalgam of eloquence and vision. That voice is Catherine Meng's.

 

Do you have a poem you never published because it was too personal?

 

I have stolen

the money

that was in

your purse

 

and which

you were probably

hoping

to spend

 

forgive me

you were delicious

so soft

and so dumb

 

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

 

This is such a fruity question because many great poets are or were insufferable assholes. But since you do not ask "what famous poet," just "what poet," I suppose I would like to sit down to coffee with any of the girls that show up to Miami open mic nights and can't write themselves out of a paper bag but are gorgeous.

 

Be your own interviewer. Ask yourself a question.

 

In 1984, sir, you were given a dream in which the five-step method for human flight was dictated to you by a little ugly man named Kozak.  You had one foot in the ocean, one on the sand, and you took notes with a yellow grease pen on the back of a large stingray.  You told the stingray to stay put until visited by the lady Elizabelle, who would tell it, "You are relieved," and put on its knowledge and power, and ascend. She would rise until she spotted you, and she’d visit you in your sleep, and not run off in fear when the magnolias in your garden cleared the pollen out of their throats and sang like electric birds.

 

Tell me, where is your stingray now?