Wallace Stevens has written: "Poetry is a way of getting the world right everyday". I wonder how this comment strikes you, if you find this to be true in your own practice, & if so how - & if not, then what the impetus in back of writing might be for you? I realize that there can be multiple reasons for writing. Many years ago, when someone asked Margaret Atwood why she wrote, she answered Why doesn’t everybody? —tongue in cheek, I think, but I always liked that answer. So is poetry a way of getting the world right everyday, or perhaps something far more humble, according to you.?

I think each person has their own unique experience. For Stevens poetry became a “way”—a path or trail he enjoyed and that made sense to him, but if you were to ask someone who was passionate about growing roses why they gardened, they might respond, “Why doesn’t everybody?” And like a gardener must find seeds, plant, water, weed and trim to enjoy the final product, roses —a poet will spend the majority of their time doing those things that need to be done before the poem can exist. For me, poetry is a process involving many other activities besides writing. The writing is the easy part. It’s the day to day living before the poem that is the real work. In my own life I have something to do with poetry every day. It might be reading, listening to a tape of another poet reading, leafing through some back issue of APR on the couch, thinking while I walk my dog, talking about poetry with my husband, or revising some old poem —the point being, there is so much more involved in the poetic process than just writing poems. I could imagine an individual fully engaged in poetry, immersed in it, who never even wrote a poem. Poetry as daily process would seem the healthiest way to look at the art, and more, the general state of being, which Holderlin called “poetically dwelling on this earth.”

So it’s all that comes before the poem, before the writing of the poem, that is ultimately at issue in the why of writing it, the why of living/being with it. The poem is an attribute of “poetically dwelling on this earth”, & others may make different marks & be there without producing what we conventionally call poems? Without putting word to page? What comes before & also during maybe? So that if it is also “during”, does something extra get created to be added back? I think in terms of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, & therefore the poem proper as creation of entity, as opposed to a continuation or expression of entity pure & simple. I think that this is true —am I following you? The rose blooms, the poem blooms, the child blooms – all three bloom or fail to, even as moods, encounters, observations, wooden tables, sighs bloom or fail to. So is “poetically dwelling on this earth” a matter of a relation between the Being & what’s outside the Being, to the end of producing significant difference?

I can only speak for myself and my own process, but yes, for me it is a buildup of ideas, emotions, memories, and connections that come before and also during the burn. Many times when I feel inspired, I’ll hold back and wait for that inspiration to compress. I like the tension as much as the release. It’s in the tension where my imagination really starts burning those emotional/social inhibitions that tell me what is appropriate to feel, express and alter in the language and what is not. During these periods I usually keep a notebook on the table and pace a lot. I talk to myself. I’ll run over to the table, jot down a word or line, and start pacing again. When the “burn” is over, I take my notebook, sit at the computer, and start to put together what’s on the page. It’s funny to me because before I started writing, I would get that burning sensation and I never knew what it was. i still don't know exactly what it is —I like to think it's "inspiration." It always terrified me because I didn't have the writing to channel it. So, I would usually get drunk or do something "risky." I thought something was wrong with me and I was too scared to tell anyone. Now I welcome, embrace, and even try to find ways to trigger it.

So burning, instead of blooming, & it is not so much the rose, the child, the poem that burns, but rather the gardener, the mother, the poet. & we’re back to the idea of getting the world right, if not every day, then at intervals that arrive often. Funny —the way you describe the burn, it is almost like an itch, a vital itch, a fecund, sometimes painful, bloodletting itch. The idea of burning & producing brings to mind thoughts of the poetic process as a form of alchemy, of starting with a dark material & losing the dross to get to the gold so to speak. But in your work the dross in the form of dark content often lives on, so perhaps the losing of the dross has to do with affirming it in some sense —with showing it for what it is so that its gold, permutated by dross, shines through? As the piece featured in this zine exemplifies, you are very much a narrative, as opposed to a lyric writer, at least on the surface, & yet the lyric comes through. Perhaps that is the transformative burn at work?

I think all I have is this moment in which I occupy. I guess, I don’t agree with “getting the world right every day” because I never have a whole day all at once, I only have this moment right now where my fingers are tapping these keys, a dog is barking in my back yard, it is morning and foggy, the man across the street is jumping his old Chevy’s battery for the third time, etc. Poetry for me is maybe getting the world right moment by moment, and sometimes not getting it right, but getting it wrong and recognizing truth by that contrast. The piece in this issue is a story, but yes, I often write narratives. I think most poets are somewhere between lyric and narrative—very few writers are pure lyric or pure narrative—Dickinson is close to pure lyric, Merrill tends to be more on the lyric side as does Stevens, but each have narrative moments. The same can be said for poets who typically write narratives—they fall somewhere in the middle and have lyric moments.

Well I don’t think by “every day” that Stevens meant getting the whole day right —more like recognizing those moments of which you speak, or recognizing that this is how —recognizing moments, be they past or present —one gets the day right. At any rate, it is interesting to think on getting it wrong & that being ok — the witnessing thing, for better or worse. Care to elaborate?

I grow from getting it wrong when I realize it. I probably don't realize it more often than I do. Maybe it's the realization that makes me grow and not the misconception. You know, that recognition of another way, or possibility that feels closer to "true".

Yes, what comes from looking & saying “oh —not quite that”. & those moments always come after the fact, or mostly at any rate —not even at the actual time, except as sort of a tickle. I think you were referring to the moment or the day re getting it wrong & then subsequently recognizing that you have, or that there might be another valid way to ‘see’, but that applies to craft in poetry too, no? Beginning somewhere with a certain sense of form, & then moving on beyond the initial conception to get it right. I know you to be a person who revises a lot. Do you look at what you’ve done, during the revising stage, & get that “oh —not quite that” feeling? I have a specific poem I want to ask you about in relation to that…

Yea, I definitely get that feeling in revisions. I just know there's something not functioning in a line or stanza. Of course, it becomes more and more clear as time passes too. A first draft may have the illusion of being perfect for a few days, but if I set it aside for a few months and come back, those "not right" places are obvious, glaringly so.

So let’s look at this poem, then —“Still Life With Irises”. I’ve chosen it for numerous reasons, but especially because I love it, & also among your more lyric, less narrative poems, I find it sort of could stand as a little map of the sensibility informing the voice at issue in the whole of your work. Ummmmmm —I’m getting ahead of myself here —let’s just look at the poem, thinking for the moment about what you’ve said relating to formal considerations:

STILL LIFE WITH IRISES

Flabby flowers stuffed in a vase,
fat on life.

Flabby as words
like involuntary. Theatrical queens,
perfectly woe in their wilting.

We all have an eye to cut,
to hold in our palm
light as a peeled boiled egg.

Irises lock and tangle
like the syllables in magnificent.

Irises pivot and quake.
Irises fake violet.
Irises, open your mouths for the bees.

So ok —this is simultaneously tight, deep, floating, abstract, & concretely anchored  —a kind of meta poem, one that could apply in its meanings to poems themselves, but also a piece with a complex elegant surface that points, for me, to what is at issue specifically in the body of your work, both narrative & lyric. What I want to ask first is whether this piece came quickly or slowly —whether it is a product of a quick burn, or arrived at after many rewrites? What do you remember regarding the process of writing this?

It was totally spontaneous. I've revised it very little from the first draft—maybe a word or two has changed and that is all. I have a tiny Van Gogh book on my desk and this is after a painting in the book. I was flipping through it and the picture moved me for some reason at that moment and the poem came rather quickly.

Ah —a quick burn, channeled through a reaction to a Van Gogh painting, & carrying something of the result of “living poetically in this world” in compressed form. The “Still Life” in the title worked on two levels for me when I read this. First, the obvious idea of a painting, but then also the feeling that the poem was about how there is “still life” going on in irises set, cut off from the root, in a vase for show – very still life indeed, but there nevertheless. I saw this piece, when thinking about it in terms of your work as a whole, as both mirror & foil to the world that gets projected through all the disenfranchised beings walking & talking & hurting & laughing & eking out existence in various survival mode fashions in your poems – the exotic dancers, wary lovers, postering pimps, prickly prostitutes, forgotten romantics etc —I saw them all as kinds of irises with “an eye to cut” (love that stanza), all of them as people you might want to tell, half exasperatedly, half wistfully, to “open [their]...mouths for the bees” —for more life, what, even if they’ve been cut off at the root already. Really, I could imagine this piece as the opening to a chapbook by you. Thinking on your poems, do you get how I’ve come to this reading?

Honestly, I have no idea what the poem means. But your reading of it is interesting. I guess it's not what you see, but how you see it. For some poems, I think readers often sense and feel more than the author because we are always protected by our own illusions and it is difficult to step outside of them...