Heidi
Lynn Staples
Let's say you could have daily poems from any poet, living or
not, during any single year. Whose daily poems would you most
like to read? By daily poems I mean poems written daily, yes,
but also poems that make use of the local idiom and quotidian
details of the poet's life.
 Good
question, difficult to answer. I suppose I'd opt for Keats,
because he was so sympathetic a personality that I think the
details of his life and mind would sustain and renew your
interest.
 Ron
Silliman
I have heard you are an avid stamp collector. Do you see any
relationship between your poetry and philately?
There
are resemblances between stamps and poems. Both are or can be
viewed as aesthetic objects that retain an element of mystery
while conveying historical information, in some cases
unintentionally. Also, both activities, stamp collecting and
poetry writing, are old-fashioned and mark the practitioner as a
somewhat anomalous character.
Heidi
Lynn Staples
If you could invite a guest-editor for Best American Poetry 2006
from among the postmortal poets, who would you invite?
Elizabeth
Bishop. Everyone across the spectrum would be curious to know
which poems she would select. She was hard to please, and it
would be considered an honor beyond the usual to win her vote.
I'd want greedily to raid the underworld for a second editor,
and that would be W. H. Auden, a great poet who, as an
anthologist and as judge of the Yale Younger Poets Series,
distinguished himself as a reader of wide taste and astute
judgment
Ivy Alvarez
Regarding the "Best American Poetry" series, how closely do you
work with the guest editors?
That depends
largely on the guest editors. My role varies from year to year
according to their wishes. No two years have been identical. One
constant is that every year at regular intervals I send off
copies of poems I've culled from magazines, poems that I think
should be considered. But the editor is free to disregard these
suggestions. Some years the person making the selections has
felt that the decision-making could best be done in the
framework of a dialogue, and I've enjoyed that very much. In the
end it's the other person whose decisions are final, and my job
is really to help as best I can.
 Jenni Russell
Do you still write a poem every day and if you do, how
many "gems" do you collect in a month's time?
I wrote a poem
each day for parts of five years, though not since January 2003
when I started preparing the manuscript that was just published
(April 2005) by Scribner, When a Woman Loves a Man. One thing
that has happened is that the form and manner of the daily poems
has become available to me as an option, and some days I find
myself writing a poem resembling those in The Daily Mirror or
The Evening Sun in appearance (brevity, irregular punctuation)
and bearing a similar relation to the configuration of the world
that day. When I wrote a poem every day without exception, my
best months were March 1996, when I felt that everything I
thought turned to poetry, and April 1998, when the Poetry Daily
web site gave me the chance to post all thirty poems as they
were written. I love a challenge, and that was a great one.
 Birdie Jaworski
Did the critical and public responses to The Last Avant-Garde give you pause that perhaps the New York school
isn't the last avant-garde?
Avant-garde became a debased term
inevitably with the success of various avant-garde
movements. Yet the romance of the avant-garde and the
nostalgia for it are so strong that some think to pursue the
distinction as an end in itself. This would be an error. It
makes better sense to try to write well than to try to be
original. Originality isn't something you acquire by great
study and imitation of models in accepted use, academically
enshrined. John Ashbery is our greatest living poet, and the
last exemplar of the avant-garde ideal, and he knows he is
leaving us a conundrum. He has quoted the composer Busoni on
the issue of discipleship: "One follows a great example most
faithfully if one does not follow it, for it was through
turning away from its predecessor that the example became
great." Assimilating what Ashbery has done without imitating
it, and without necessarily seeking to go beyond it, is the
task at hand. In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard has a great
passage about the futility and folly of trying to go beyond
or to "go further." He talks about the disciple of
Heraclitus who, upon hearing that the master had declared
that "you can't walk into the same river twice," thought he
would go one better and said, "you can't do it even once."
By trying to "go further," the disciple had arrived at a
position Heraclitus had abandoned as one abandons a lost
chess game. That said, let me reiterate what I argue in my
book
which is that the New York School is the last
poetry avant-garde we have had, not the last we will ever
have. "The avant-garde always exists in the state of idea,"
Frank O'Hara observed. "All you have to do is be one
individual who is tired of looking at something that looks
like something else." My book is dedicated to that one
individual.
 Pris
Campbell
Growing up/living in New York has clearly been a strong creative
force in your writing. If you could pick one spot in the city,
right at this moment, to sit and feel most inspired to create
your next poem, where would it be and why?
That's
easy: I'd transport myself to my bedroom in apartment 3C of 52
Arden Street in the Inwood section of Manhattan. It's where I
lived until I went to college and then overseas on a fellowship
to Cambridge, England. In my second year abroad my father died.
I went home for the funeral, and stayed in the old apartment
with my mother and one of my sisters. Then I went back to
England. By the time I returned to New York when my fellowship
ran out, my mother and sister had moved to Far Rockaway. I never
again saw the apartment where I had lived for most of my first
twenty years.
 Amy
Gerstler
Which of the other arts (music, visual art, dance, etc.) have
influenced your poetry and in what ways?
It
inspires me to write while listening to music in my case,
classical, jazz, or American standards. For one thing it
improves my mood, and one is usually more productive writing in
a good humor. Also, I think it affects the rhythm of your
writing, and when the lyrics are as clever as they are in the
great American song book, perhaps this modifies your sense of
lyric possibility. It has for me. The lyrics I love by Ira
Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter, Oscar
Hammerstein, Irving Berlin, Dorothy Fields, Frank Loesser, Yip
Harburg, Sammy Cahn, and the rest are not poems; they're in a
different category. But in my daydreams I'd like nothing more
than to write lyrics that Richard Rodgers or Harold Arlen would
set to music.
Karl Parker
As a former student, I say you are a great teacher of poetry.
Your assignments, exercises, and incisiveness stay with me: what
do you get from teaching? What's in it for you?
That's
a wonderful compliment. Thank you, Karl. Teaching keeps you in
very active touch with people younger than yourself, so it
becomes a way to keep track of changes in the language, changes
in fashion and taste and attitude and behavior. As occupations
go, teaching especially teaching the writing of poetry
gives you very little by way of subject matter. The world
doesn't need another poem in which the teacher tries to
recapitulate an insight he or she had with "my students" in
class that day. But teaching poetry does if you give regular
assignments, as I do oblige you to think of creative
exercises, and then it is only proper for you to do some of the
assignments yourself. And if you believe as I do that
inspiration is something you help generate rather than wait for,
there are few better ways of generating it than with the sort of
self-imposed limitation that characterizes the best assignments.
So in all I think it's a net plus. Because of teaching I've
written poems I might not otherwise have written. And then, of
course, theres the enormous pleasure to be had from watching
and helping young writers develop their talent.
 Shane
Allison
Do you like my poetry?
Yes,
I do.
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