If I knew, I'd have a lot more pieces. In the main, it's an event or a thought, something that I feel strangely strongly, maybe even ambivalently about. There's a lot of translation that occurs from the original gestation to the final product—I tend to write in metaphor, so a breakup poem may actually have to do with, say, a dead plant.

Do you consider yourself a lesbian/performance poet or a 'writer' who is a lesbian that writes performance poetry?

I consider myself a writer who is queer. I'm delighted that my work performs well, but the page is primary to me, since it can take things farther, faster than I and my voice can. That said, there's a sort of amazing connection with people during live readings—the monologue becomes almost a dialogue, and I think that's irreplaceable. Precious. Amazing.

You incorporate so many live wire elements into your work. Narrative, erotica, pop culture and sensuality in your poems. Who influences you?

I'm not sure if you're asking me who my initial influences were or what my influences are now. Kathy Acker was huge for me, as was Robert Coover. The Black Arts Poets. I'm lucky enough to live in San Francisco, where there's an amazing scene of writers, so I get to hear folks like Justin Chin, Steve Elliott, Lynnee Breedlove, Ian Phillips, Horehound Stillpoint, Carol Queen, Sini Anderson, Lauren Wheeler, Wendy O'Matik and more on a regular basis. Outside the Bay, I'm a big fan of Susannah Breslin's, currently. I also read a lot of theory, which may not be surprising. I'm a huge fan of M.Lisa Johnson's "Jane Sexes It Up."

I'm a great supporter of spoken word. I believe it's more identifiable for those who aren't normally into poetry and have this stereotypical idea of what it is. This is something people really dig apart from books by dead white men. What do you think makes performance poetry so different from the academic work-shopped norm?

Well, they come from different traditions, right? Spoken word has always (as far as I know, even as far back as Greece) maintained a populist bent, which it strikes me that a lot of "academic" poetry serves itself by obfuscating. The aim of spoken word to some degree is the aim of rhetoric—to aim, to sway, to testify, to inspire, while I think that the "dead white men" poetry you speak of is sort of a closed conversation.

There's a lot of bad spoken word and a lot of boring dead-white-men poetry (the writers of which are not all of whom are dead, white, or even men). I think that a lot of slam/spoken word is coasting by on charisma (e.g. Def Poets) and a lot of the more obscure "academic" poetry gets off on being insider-y and impenetrable. I think the trick is to take the best of both to synergize a whole new poetry—something with broad appeal, that inspires and energizes both on the page and aloud, that is always relevant to both the moment and beyond (if you're not telling me something that will change my life, don't. waste. my. time.).

It makes my heart happy as a reader of your work that you write poems that have a funny, entertaining element. Do you feel that there needs to be more of that in poetry these days?

I think there's a lot of that in a lot of poetry—I find it in yours as well, for what it's worth. I can think of a lot of poets who use humor to make their points gently -- Hal Sirowitz, for one. I think disarming people is a great way to say difficult and painful things. And America has a huge tradition of the humorist—but beyond that, I think that the use of humor in poetry (especially in the hands of queers) queers the genre.

What do you hope to get across to your readers in your work?

That's a huge question and beyond the scope of my being able to answer it here. I suppose if I could answer that, I could stop writing—I could just impart what I wanted to say and shut up, you know? In a shorthanded way, what I'm trying to do is culture jam—to read pop culture back to itself so we can see how ludicrous so much of our value system, our hierarchic system is. It's not hard to push at the myths and see them bend and break just by pushing at them. So maybe this: at the baseline, I want people to realize the status quo, this hegemony is breakable. We can make it our little pony if we want.

What's so special about 'Final Girl' apart from your last two books?

By "special" do you mean "different"? I think "Final Girl" is the most sophisticated book I've done, and the most unified thematically—it all revolves around the figure of the final girl, the last girl alive, the one who survives the slasher flick—Carol Clover defined the final girl in her book "Men, Women and Chainsaws", and I was quite taken with the figure of the survivor, the girl (boy) who lives to tell. While I was writing the book, my mother got sick with lung cancer and suddenly, I was in the position of the final girl, the one who lives to tell the story.

How do you feel about online publications vs. print?

I think they're terrific - what I love about them is that you're not limited by page count, so you have the opportunity (as an editor) to feature far more writers than in a traditional page publication. I'm sorry they're not (yet) getting the respect many of them are due because it's easy enough for anyone to put up a page—it's an outgrowth of elitism, I suppose—if anyone can do it, it can't be any good, right?

Daphne do you like my poetry?

I do. You have a terrific, wry sense of the sinister and the aggressively transgressive, as well as a terrific ear for what Stein would have called "insistence, not repetition."

What are you working on now?

Right now, I'm finishing up an edit on an anthology for Soft Skull Press that will be coming out in Fall 2005 called "Homewrecker: An Atlas of Illicit Loves." I'm also hoping to finish the manuscript of my fourth book, "Kissing Dead Girls" very soon.

Any secrets about Daphne Gottlieb you care to let us in on that yo' mama doesn't even know?