An open book on the patio table,
Pages turning back and forth
As if it were reading itself
And lost its place

I find that surreal and metaphysical modes of thinking are commonplace in your work. Yet you have a reputation as a comedian. I guess readers fixate on your conversational tone and many jokes. Which of these hats fits you better: the wizard's or the jester's?

PV: Either hat would be down around my ears. This is a hard question to answer for a lot of reasons. I might not be remembering it right, but in the Symposium I think Socrates is telling Aristophanes that a poet should write both comedy and tragedy, but then Aristophanes falls asleep—from the effort of trying to reply!

As a young poet I found that in writing longer poems I could move around more freely, bring in or combine serious and comical turns. I also started adapting forms like an index, or an addendum, or footnotes and the like, for the same reasons. A lot of that grew out of what painters like Dine and Oldenburg were up to. It seems "old hat" to me now, of course—this was over thirty years ago, though I still do it when an idea pops up. Adapting such forms, or animating one was like putting on a mask, impersonating a character, which is very liberating in a creative sense. The concept may be amusing but the effects can be serious and various. The mask changes, too. That's what I like, to move within a form that changes along with the poem.

The same goes for poems that have a conversational tone, it opens things up for me. Every syllable is deliberate; the naturalness, the immediacy but not the sloppiness of conversation is what I'm aiming for. And once a poem like that gets rolling, if I'm getting it right, there's a freedom, an openness, an inclusiveness where even the interruptions are making connections and if the cadence, the imagery carry along and sustain the impulse that got things moving, then, well, I'm having a good time. Even if the poem is pretty grim, as in "King Nasty", sort of my grand guignol take on amoral politicians.
 
Anyway, I prefer poems like that in general, those that have a human being in them, as opposed, say, to that precious orphic voice, that messianic stance some poets adopt, or to poems where a human voice is undetectable—there's not much risk or excitement in meaninglessness or blandness. Christ, I read a recent anthology where the editor attempted to justify the selection by saying aesthetics was sacrificed for political effects. That sounded like a false and simplistic choice. As if in dire times artists have to stop being artists just when more than ever they should be.

KZ: You once worked for an architectural magazine. I have long been interested in the resonance between architecture, a space art, and poetry, a time art. Is there a fifth dimension in which these two art forms interlace? How is a reader of a poem akin to an occupant of a building?

PV: It's been said that before the invention of the arch we had great structures but not architecture, which existed only when the arch—like fiction or metaphor in writing—permitted interior space. I think a good poem allows us to enter an expanding interior, "a mental theatre", to use Byron's phrase for the unstageable plays he wrote. "Another dimension" is at least a good metaphor for what's going on when the formative imagination shapes time the way an architect shapes space. Samuel Daniel and Dryden—I don't mean to get so quotey here, but both compare the pleasure and freedom of writing to a type of construction that allows them to change the building as they go along. I liked Daniel's metaphor so much I pasted it on the end of "The Curious Builder". Both in reading and making a poem we follow what seems an instinctual search, following not a dream the movement of a familiar dreamscape plot where in a long familiar place we find and enter a new dimension . Even asleep the mind is still at it, still building. The idea of a poet as maker goes at least as far back as Horace, linking the creating of a poem to its purpose: To edify and delight, edifying as in "house building" as well as "teaching" or "guidance".

KZ: I'm currently reading Peter Davis' "Poet's Bookshelf", a book where eighty-one of today's poetic luminaries list the books that have been essential to their craft. You are quite the rebel there: most of the works you list were written before the 20th Century and are soundly canonical. Your peers, on the other hand, go out of their way to list books written within the past fifty years. What does this say about your role in contemporary poetry?

PV: I limited my list—which of course could have been longer and, as I said, could change by the week—to poems that I've found to be inexhaustibly wondrous—and humbling. I like the idea of contemporaneity, poems that retain an intrinsic appeal no matter when or where they were written. If there is any point I was trying to make it was to link what I like in current poetry to a tradition. That is, for the most part, the poems I chose were all radically inventive. Knowing that these break-through poems are still in some canons gives poets who are interested in the truly innovative and adventurous something broader to draw on.