There’s been some talk about the issue of poetic jealousy, which sounds like playground pettiness—you’ve already talked eloquently about this on your blog. But, in his Foreword to the Best American Poetry 2004, David Lehman says “competition often accompanies the creation of art, which is made by persons of complexity and ambition who compete not only with peers but with ancestors.” What do you make of Lehman’s idea &, if not jealousy, can we say there is competitiveness mixed up in whatever it is that fuels you to write?

I'm more interested in collaboration than competition. I've stated before that I seldom feel jealous of other poets. I do have brief flashes of envy when I hear someone has won a contest that I entered, things like that. But it's literally just a moment or two, and it's usually because I'm jealous that some fool just made 1000 dollars (or whatever the prize amount is) for writing a book of poetry! I mean, hell, I wrote a book of poetry—where's my money? Kids gotta eat, ya know.

But more seriously, I am profoundly non-competitive. I think it has a lot to do with the notion that I've had since childhood that I'm simply not very good at very many things, poetry included. I don't deem myself worthy of competition. Reading and responding to other poets and their poetry, however, is very important to me. I wrote an entire book of poems based on my real-life interactions with other poets. More recently, I scribbled a competition/jealousy poem about a hotshot young poet who shall remain nameless, but it's in the voice of a good friend of mine—the sentiments expressed are not mine. My friend, though, has the right to be jealous and/or competitive—he's a frighteningly good writer. Astoundingly good.

I may be a person of complexity, but probably not ambition. I'm frankly shocked and delighted whenever anyone responds positively to my work. Part of this may come from a couple of writing workshops I took when I first began writing poetry seriously. I'd bring in a poem and the workshop members would be silent. I took their silence as indifference on good days, condemnation on bad.

It seems that much of the poetry published these days, at least in book form, has won some sort of contest—& I think this atmosphere is partly responsible for causing personal & aesthetic divisions of all kinds. Do you see any alternatives to this contest-driven environment for a young poet trying to get his/her work out there? What role do magazines, print & online, play in this?

I don't know if I agree with your premise. Wouldn't aesthetic and personal divisions exist with or without contests? Contests are just a way to get a book published. Perhaps it’s regrettable that it seems to be the main way these days, but the only division I think this causes is between a poet and his 25 bucks.

A poet gets his or her work out there by sending it to journals he or she enjoys reading. The poet can give readings. The poet can poem on the street. The poet can self-publish. The poet can write poems in a little room and stuff the poems in a little box and show them to no one. It's a choice we make for really diverse reasons. Some people want a book for tenure, or to get their foot in the door for a job, or to please their mothers, or to make a lasting contribution to world literature. I want a book because I think it would look neat on my bookshelf. And I guess it's a line on the CV, but that seems to cheapen it, doesn't it?

You said that your poem in this issue is part of a series. It seems to me that the very idea of ‘series’ is a constraint of sorts, albeit one that can be very generative. Is writing in a series or sequence a kind of arbitrary choice you make (I will write 10 poems about King Frog) to see what develops or an aesthetic compulsion (King Frog requires complex & sustained treatment)? Is the tradition of the poetic series & long poem one you’ve thought much about?

I also mentioned that that particular "series" didn't manage to go anywhere. I wrote one other poem, based on a Smiths song, and then my attention got directed elsewhere. However, I do tend to write sequences that contain more than two poems, and I'd have to say that my use of the series is sometimes arbitrary, but usually not. When I first started writing, I would give myself assignments—you know, write 5 sonnets about King Frog's mistress and 5 about his wife. Anymore, though, I just wake up and find that I've written X number of poems about Topic Z, or in Form Y. At this point, it "becomes" a series, and I sometimes write more.

My most recent attempt at utilizing an arbitrary constraint was a poem called "Triskaidekaphobia" which consists of thirteen stanzas, each containing thirteen lines of thirteen syllables. It wasn't entirely arbitrary though—I chose the number for a specific reason.

I also think of the idea of the series as an organizing principle—it took me a long time to put together the manuscript for my first book, until I realized that I had 50-plus pages of poems that were essentially about the same situation(s), addressed to the same group of people, and that tackled, or attempted to tackle, our common concerns. At that point, I realized that the whole book was a series, containing subsequences, but more or less coherent as a piece.

I haven't thought of myself working in a particular tradition, at least not a tradition based on a particular "form," though now I'll probably be forced to consider it. I mean, I'm not writing Cantos or the Canterbury Tales. I'm writing poems about being a dysfunctional human in 2004. Is that series-worthy?

If not, then I don’t know what is. So leaving aside jealousy & ambition, exposure & constraint, what do you feel to be the biggest challenge for a dysfunctional human writing poems in 2004

I think the challenge is just keeping up, "living" and "being" a person who makes poems. I used the scare quotes not to frighten but to emphasize that to live and to be can and should be active verbs. One shouldn't be complacent, in life or in one's pursuit of poetry. Of course, I'm guilty of both, but I try. I struggle. I keep going.

All the “I”’s in the above give me pause. The question itself seems to invite solipsism, and I guess I'd like to save that for the poems. On the other hand I want to say something like this: "I turned 32 last week. I've been writing poems since I was 25. I started late. Time's a wastin'. We're burnin' daylight. Me me me."

That's it. Living and writing to make sense of life. Or not. Maybe you write to leave a legacy. Maybe you write in order to teach. I write mostly because I want to understand those things that none of us ever understand: love, sex, god, death, war, all that bullshit. So, maybe poetry is useless. I don't let that stop me, though. It's all communication, and I feel that it's important to talk to people, to tell them (as Lou Reed does in so many songs) that it's all right To celebrate. To rue. To wonder. As I type this, I'm sitting in my home office, listening to country music and drinking coffee I purchased from the local corner Evil Coffee Imperialists while Emeril Lagasse drones on from the next room. I'm barely employed, single, childless, with a pile of bills. And this all seems very weird to me. No one told me that life would be like this. Absurd. Maybe poems will help.

It occurs to me that this excerpt from Joseph Ceravolo says more than I can:

...I am a white / man and my children / are hungry / which is like paradise.