Since the context implies that the "one", the "beloved" of this passage (which reminds me of the Datta passage in The Waste Land) is sort of an embodiment of your ideal audience, to what extent do you think a poet must be a closeted creature, or a pining creature, or a “whatever-it-takes-to-keep-the-writing-meaningful” creature?  Or have I misunderstood the passage?

I'm very struck by the question because I've never conflated, in this piece anyhow, the beloved with the reader that the poet most wants to be loved by.  I think that a poet, more than wanting to be understood, wants to be loved through his or her writing.  Barthes said that writing begins the moment when the beloved is no longer available.  I think that in addition to writing, a heightened sense self-consciousness also begins the moment when the beloved is no longer available.  This constant self-awareness transforms one into a character and everything serves as a symbol, and every gesture becomes either lethal or redeeming.

Ostensibly, “How to Write on Grand Themes” is written in (or at) a second person perspective, but it is clear that you are talking to yourself (or, if you’d rather, the speaker is talking to herself).  Someone (Hal Incandenza?) called this technique the first-person-and-a-half perspective.  Sometimes stuff written in 1.5PP is more fun to write than to read; in your poem, however, I get the feeling that the “you” is me (the reader) and yourself.  It is a friendly, coquettish, inclusive “you.”  Is this what you intended or am I way off?

This is exactly what I intended.  I wanted to create a sort of manual or instruction sheet on how to transcribe the grand themes of one's life, however insignificant these themes may appear to others.  Attempting to translate that experience so that it is at once self-referential and inclusive of the other is tricky, and one can find oneself oscillating between greed and sloppy self disclosure.

Do you have a name for the feeling that comes over a person when he or she is alone and horizontal and cannot remember whether things are rising or falling?

I think I call that writing.  It’s the moment when one is no longer in one’s body, that is, the moment of artistic creation.  I’m reminded that there is another out-of-body experience that occurs when one is horizontal, but that one occurs in the other dreaming vessel: the bed. 

The formal premise of your book, The Body, is fascinating, unique and a bit loopy: it is a series of footnotes to an invisible text.  I am reminded of Eliot, Marianne Moore, Nabokov, David Foster Wallace and other footnote fetishists, but you take the conceit a huge step further by just giving us the annotations.  Do you remember what was going on with you when you got the idea for the book's format (like e.g. what were you reading, what were you watching, what were you smoking)?

I remember the period when I was composing The Body as being one of the most lucid periods of my life.  It was a lonely period: I don't remember having any close, daily friendships.  I was in Texas, waiting to begin my first semester as an MFA student at Notre Dame.  It was summer, and I found myself surrounded by sunflower and barley fields, drying corn stalks and dust storms.  I didn’t have an internet connection.  I took a lot of Polaroids.  Most of my friendships survived through phone calls and letters.  I had quit my job as a waitress and had the time to read and write.  I read a lot during this period, but what I loved most were Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, Kafka’s Trial, Kathy Acker’s Pussy, King of the Pirates, essays of Joseph Campbell, and various issues of Conjunctions.  I was also excited by a special issue of the Seneca Review that was dedicated to the “lyric essay.”  I was thinking in terms of form, and I knew that I wanted to write a piece that was seemingly random, whose underlying theme or leitmotif wouldn’t be immediately obvious.  I began to write footnotes; I was attracted to how the footnote allowed me to not insist on continuity.  I intended to go back and write the footnoted story later, but as I wrote more and more footnotes, I began to realize that the story was being written and it was the story of blankness, space, and emptiness.  I realized that I would then have to mirror this thought in form, and thus the blank pages were born. 

In The Body, one of the footnotes discusses a secondary definition of "footnote", namely "something related to but less important than a larger work or occurrence."  So the invisible (or unwritten) thing The Body annotates may not be made of words at all.  It may be life itself, though somewhere else you say life is itself a subtext.  So I guess what I want to ask you is when working with all these coordinate and hierarchical dimensions (texts and subtexts and dreams and dreams within dreams), do you ever fear that nobody will get you?

I think my biggest fear was not accurately representing the secret life that I most wished to portray, mainly the secret life of hope and what it means to believe in something, however lacking in evidence this something is.  I see The Body operating at many levels: spiritual biography, billet-doux, dream diary, epistolary, journaling, apostrophe.  I only began to be fearful that no one would understand The Body when some readers and reviewers referred to the book as a “gimmick.”  If people saw my work as a gimmick, then there would be no way to convince them that everything in existence is but a footnote to some other life.  There would be no way to convince them that the book was dealing with longing, affirmation, mystery, belief, and awe.

Have you ever had the dream in which you write the ideal work of literature, a text so radiant that it incinerates whatever page it is printed on?  If so, what details do you recall about this work? Or, if not, what aspects do you think this work might possess?

I have never had a dream in which my work incinerates the page, but I did dream when I was twelve about dolls that incinerated houses.  I woke and typed it up.  I still have a copy of the story.  I often dream that I am either reading or writing, and I often do like what it is that I read or write.  I often like what I read in these dreams more than what I write in them, but I fear that to write these works would infringe on some strange dream-ghost author or dream copyright.  I dreamt once that people were being tied up to poles and set on fire; I was freed because I wrote a good conclusion.  The ideal work of literature, I think, would be radiant, in that it would address how the otherworldly touches upon the earthly.  I think the best literature occurs when mere mortals meet the ethereal, and when, if there is a choice between making a journey through the dark passage or one that is beautifully lit, the author chooses the dark passage only to light it up quite nicely through epiphany and the intersections between the mundane and the magical.     

It is common for poets to be asked, "What poets have influenced you?" I instead want to ask you what books that are not composed of poems have influenced you (e.g. novels, essay collections, philosophical treatises, monographs on semiotics, literary theory based on Kabala, geometry textbooks that never became canonical, uh, dissertations on lawnmower repair, field guides to bird-watching, invectives against the Pinochet dictatorship, etc)?

I love reading all sorts of books, and books on astronomy and astrophysics have always inspired me in that they give one a sense of being finite, small, and helpless but at the same time a mechanism of an infinite, grand, and significant universe.  I have also been influenced by Kafka, Barthes, Nabokov, Emerson, Einstein, George Steiner, and Joseph Campbell.  The writings on art by Ruskin, Vasari, and Pater are all quite beautiful.  I also like looking through books of interesting facts or oddities.  The writings of the pre-Socratic philosophers, especially Heraclitus, have also been a source of inspiration. 

Your work seems preoccupied with loss and subjective transformation; in “Grand Themes” you even speak of “the aforesaid moment already acting as artifact.”  Tell me how this theme may apply to people. Someone was close to you, was heavily cathected by you, and is gone.  What does his or her memory do to you and what do you do to it?

I think we often participate in events or relationships when we know the inevitable outcome has nothing to do with permanence or ever after; after all, to live life is to participate in this loss on a grand scheme, to be confronted daily by one’s impermanence.  I think that whenever we are faced with loss, we naturally want to make a site for remembrance: we bury the dead with tombstones and lay wreaths and flowers on their graves.  With a lost love or acquaintance, the ceremony of remembrance oftentimes involves writing, cataloguing, obsessive projections into lonely futures, obsessive repetitions of scenes passed, asking oneself, Well, what if I had only said or done such and such? The memory of the lost one causes us to obsess; obsession in turn causes us to showcase, to record, to document, to give ourselves some sort of receipt or proof of the whole sorry affair.  The upside is, of course, these manufactured souvenirs are always quite lovely, always make up perfectly for the absence endured.