I understand what you mean about a strong voice being one that has consistent honesty. You want to feel, as a reader, that you are in the presence of truth, even if the writer is just spinning a yarn. Maybe you could let us behind the curtain a little bit & talk generally about your own work—are we reading lies, actual events or creative interpretations? How important is this distinction between story-truth & happening-truth (as Tim O’Brien would say) in your own work?

For me it's really of no importance at all, at least for the most part. I've been in workshops before where other writers demand that no matter what they need to represent the events as they actually happened—even if fudging things might make the poem better. That's something I can respect. For my own poetry, though, I try not to make the presumption of truth, since I am dealing with language, and however I'm rendering an actual or fictitious event it's being passed through a sort of screening process. I've always liked Dylan as a sort of model for the artist. In his recent stuff, Love and Theft for instance, there's no way to distinguish when you're listening to his music what he conjured up or what he borrowed, what's fact or what's fiction, and in my opinion that's a pretty accurate approach to a representation of reality. There's the dream one wakes up from believing everything in the dream was actual, and then the moments of reality that seem like one big lie. I enjoy work on either end of the spectrum, and some poems are more so in one direction than others. But I constantly find myself saying 'maybe' in poems, or ‘sometimes’ or 'something.' Granted, this ambiguity can be problematic, but for me it's more problematic to try and recreate a memory or image as an absolute.

So it seems like you’re saying that there is a kind of truth, at least in writing, that is sometimes best served through invention. Lurking behind the question of honesty, though, is the idea that a poem represents an objective reality that we could define as true or false. That is, the poem becomes a kind of machine for burrowing into the truth of events where the simple occurrence of those events is important. This may be a long & obtuse way of asking a simple question—what's the role of narrative in your work? Do you consider yourself a narrative poet?

To a large degree, yes, I consider myself a narrative poet, but perhaps not in the traditional sense. You used a phrase I'd like to call attention to, because I think it's dead on, and that's the idea of something "lurking behind." The construct of narrative has been widely critiqued, but I think at the base of narrative, at least in my opinion, is a sort of recognition of desire as a driving force. And not necessarily that desire to probe things and figure the world out completely, which narrative is sometimes shunned for, but a sort of desire to represent the façade accurately. Truth, if there is such a thing, is always lurking behind, always veiled. But, if nothing else, I think that's what art is—the attempt to make the best-looking veil possible. I think there's something in us—be it biological or more likely programmed, that likes to trick ourselves, suspend disbelief, etc. I think that's why in an ever-postmodern culture we still value narrative, even while poking fun at its obvious limitations. Narrative, I think, manifests itself in many forms, at various levels. An entire poem can be carried by a narrative, an entire collection—narrative can even exist within a single line or grouping of words, a word, perhaps, if it's the right word. I think that micro fiction has really struggled to re-invent the old tradition of narrative as this enormous house with thousands of rooms and windows. Narrative can be both a simple thing and an extremely complex thing, and I think it's of value for poetry. And it's strange that we still rely heavily on this division between narrative and lyric, but I think the two, binaries in general, are so entwined in our culture it's impossible to get away from them. As of yet, in my opinion, there hasn't been an answer with what to replace narrative with if we were to get rid of it. I say why not embrace narrative? Why not embrace the lyric? Why not see what both can do together? Until we're able to reprogram ourselves as a culture—which I don't think will ever happen unless the world is destroyed and only two theorists are left to carry on—narrative is something we desire.

Last issue, Daniel Nester mentioned Mark Halliday as one of the poets working a kind of new narrative that I would say is remarkably close to this kind of lyric-narrative/narrative-lyric axis that you talk about. You may have a different read on Halliday than I do. But if you were captain of a team called the New Narrative (or something like it) & the mass of contemporary writers (no distinction between poets & prosers) were in your gym class, who might you pick to be on your team?