Were you always a poet?

No, I started writing verse after I got kicked out of the Navy in 2001.  I had unpaid speeding tickets in about twelve different states, so Florida suspended my driver’s license for a little while, and if you’ve ever lived in Miami you’ll know that there’s nothing to do if you don’t have wheels so I sat home a lot and twiddled with words. 

Who are your least favorite writers?

I don’t want to upset anyone who’s still breathing so let’s see . . . I think Neruda’s boring; I don’t like Sexton or Plath (though her husband’s cool); Ginsburg’s too whiny, PB Shelley’s over-rated (though his wife’s good); most language poets, most spoken worders and of course Shane Allison (kidding).

Where did you grow up and what was your childhood like?

I was born in Cuba and got to Miami when I was four, and did my childhood here in semi-conscious beach bum mode.  I spent lots of time in the Everglades and something about the log-like peacefulness of gators was sacred to me, so I mostly kept to myself, kept my mouth shut and observed.  When I started playing high-school football I came out of that placenta state and discovered I lacked the social equipment that helped others enjoy public life, so I started drinking and drugging and smashing and boosting and heisting.

Have you always wanted to be a writer?

No, I started wanting to be a writer after I read David Foster Wallace.

Do you feel that there is room for politics in poetry?

No.  Politics turns good, passionate people into chattering ideologues.  Poetry is warm-blooded.

What is people's overall response to your writing?

Many people reach the tacit conclusion that I eat babies or something.  But four of my last five girlfriends became attracted to me after hearing my poems, so I must be doing something right.  

What do you think you would be doing if you weren't writing?

Heroin.

What are you passionate about?

Football.  Non-Euclidean geometries.  Girls that end up being bad news.  The possibility of telepathy.  Laughter.  Lifting weights.  Radiohead.  Cats.  Four-dimensional space.  The vicissitudes of theology.  Great egrets.  Dancing.  Guns.  Alan Watts.  Finding someone to share the rest of my life with.  Alligators.  Creating children.  Swimming in oceans.  Chess.  The Beatles.  The desire to fly. 

What do you want to get across to your readers?

That the world is fucked up but existence is not. That their minds, with practice and willingness, can save them.

Who are your favorite writers?

David Foster Wallace. Jorge Luis Borges. A.R. Ammons.Toni Morrison.  Ovid.  Martin Amis.  Chinua Achebe.  John Ashbery. Cormac McCarthy. Nietzsche of course.  Helen Vendler. Theodore Roethke. Ezra Pound’s prose.  Kurt Vonnegut. Derek Walcott.  Harold Bloom. William Burroughs. Thomas Pynchon. Hugh Kenner.  The early Amiri Baraka. Shakespeare. T.S. Eliot. Elizabeth Bishop.  James Merrill. Wallace Stevens. Hart Crane.

How do you feel about online magazines vs. the old fashioned hardcopy rag? Do you think that with the deaths of so many literary magazines these days, that they are becoming extinct?

Extinct, no, it’s just sort of a Darwinian winnowing.  The problem, Shane, is that if I go to the FIU library, pretty much the biggest library in my neck of the woods, I can find Poetry, APR, Kenyon Review, Triquarterly, Paris Review and two or three others.  But on the web I can find everything.  Now those publications I just mentioned are subscribed to by that library because they’re prestigious, but it goes without saying that they are not cutting edge and those journals that are cutting edge I have to write a check to in order to read (which I have no problem doing except I have no bank account).  So then I won’t go into a hagiography of good online journals but there are plenty out there, and there’s no cover charge.   

Is poetry dead you think?

I don’t think poetry’s ever been more alive.  

Do you think it important for the reader to identify on some level with the work instead of having to read between the abstract lines?

These are not mutually exclusive terrains.  I can see myself in a piece about hexagons or stag-horn ferns or the cohesive properties of saltwater.  I usually cannot see myself in poems that try to pander to my need for self-recognition.

What are your thoughts on poetry workshops? Do you feel they help or hinder?

First of all let me mention that I want to flog myself for having been a student at Cornell and not having taken a class with Archie Ammons.  It’s too late now.  So then workshops, they help at the first few levels of development, but once a poet has attained a certain distinction of voice and sensibility (something not many poets attain), it can get pretty inane sitting around a conference table and listening to people tell you that your poem really starts on the twenty-fifth line and that you should delete lines one through twenty-four so that the poem becomes a haiku.  And then having to take that from people who couldn’t write a good poem to save their own lives.

What are your thoughts on spoken word poetry?

Poo.  But really all good poems are spoken word pieces.  I went to an open mic recently and read three sections of Wallace Stevens’ “Auroras of Autumn,” and got a standing ovation, so why stand at a podium saying, “Revolution!  This a fucking revolution!” if good poetry can captivate anyone with a pulse?  

Don't you think there needs to be more swear words in poetry?

Only maybe in the poems of a master, or sporadically in down-tempo pieces, like when Thom Yorke says, “You’re so fucking special.”

Do you feel there's a change in how people perceive poetry?

Only because there are so many highly-compelling entertainment options out there and because there seems to be an ADD pandemic.  But see there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to buy, say, a book by Shane Allison at the supermarket.  Poetry could really take off if some messianic figure were to come along and show people the ecstasy that can be had by simply paying attention.

Are there any small press writers that you like we should keep an eye on?