Four Questions for Jessy Randall

Jessy Randall is the author of Injecting Dreams into Cows and other books. She grew up in Rochester, N.Y., where she helped invent a controversial Frisbee game and famously cried at a Dolph Lundgren movie. She is also the guiding force behind the Huge Underpants of Gloom zine series, and she keeps all her secrets hidden in decades' worth of black-and-white composition notebooks. 

DS: Why do you write poetry?

JR: This question was a lot harder to answer than I expected it to be. So I guess the answer is "I don't know" or "I can't explain it." Kenneth Koch says writing poems lets you have your emotions instead of your emotions having you. When I'm writing a poem I feel a way I wish I could feel all the time.

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

JR: My favorite poems are the ones that make me say "yes, that's exactly IT," usually when "it" is something I didn't realize needed to be captured. Sarah Sloat's poem "Excuse me while I wring this long swim out of my hair" is one such poem. She has a million bookmarks and can't find any of them.

I also like poems that make me go Whuhh-huUUHHH? such as Scott Poole's "New York Women."

I want poems to have sly wit. I want them to be about emotions, for me the most important and least understood things in the universe.

DS: Describe your works in progress.

JR: Lately I've been making poems out of illustrations in old books I find at the library where I work. I find these extremely satisfying. Most editors do not.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

JR: I love the virtual salons poets are creating online. We can't all live in hotbeds of poetry (New York, San Francisco, etc.) but we can make our own through electronic journals, Facebook, and email collaboration.

Go to Jessy's website here.

Four Questions for Isobel O'Hare

Isobel O'Hare is a poet and essayist who was born in Chicago but did most of her growing up in Ireland. She is the author of Wild Materials from Zoo Cake Press. Her writing can be found in The Account, Dirty Chai Magazine, HOUND, FORTH Magazine, Numero Cinq, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, and Cease, Cows, among other publications. She received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and she was recently awarded a Helene Wurlitzer Fellowship. She lives in Oakland, California.

DS: Why do you write poetry? 

IO: I started writing poetry when I was a kid because I didn't have anyone to talk to about a lot of very traumatic things that were happening in my life. I grew up in various abusive environments where I often felt isolated and unheard. I was already writing short stories about fantastical things like a world-traveling young girl and her pet chimpanzee, a couple of time-traveling elementary school students, as well as some retellings of classic horror stories. Poetry came to me specifically as a form of self-care when I needed someone to talk to and nobody was there but paper and pens.

These days I write poetry for a few different reasons. Self-care is still definitely one of them, but I don't tend to share the things that I write for my own therapeutic purposes, as they tend to be unfinished thoughts that are suspended in liquid anger. These are the pieces I have to write in order to get to a truer place.

Poetry can take the form of magic spells when I start to feel that some form of transformation is needed in me but I don't yet know how to achieve it. I usually end up realizing that the poem wasn't the entire spell itself but just one component of it. Maybe the eye of newt.

I also write poetry in order to translate the world as I see it into something that can be communicated to another person. It is often difficult for me to communicate my experiences of the world via spoken language, and sometimes prose seems too direct in an explicit sense. Poetry offers a form of communication that is more intuitive, and thus paradoxically more direct than saying literally what one is thinking or feeling. It creates a conduit for two minds to read one another without speaking.

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people? 

IO: That same conduit. Whenever I connect to a piece in this way, I get so excited. It makes me want to write more myself, to continue communicating in this language that exists in a universe parallel to our own.

DS: Describe your works in progress.

IO: I am (very) slowly putting together a full-length poetry manuscript. Some of the pieces from Wild Materials will be included, as well as some pieces that didn't make it into Wild Materials, but it will mostly be new poems. 

I am also working on a long-form piece on PTSD that connects personal narrative with scientific research out of the desire to further mainstream understanding of the disorder. It is becoming increasingly important that PTSD is understood as a major health concern in the United States.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

IO: With all of the recent scandals in the poetry world, my hope is that we will continue to communicate openly with one another about race, class, gender, disability, and other social issues in order to increase accessibility for all poets who are part of our community. It is consistently distressing to wake up to news of the latest scandals on a weekly basis, but the fact that we can openly recognize and talk about these events as problematic is promising. Social media has given access to so many people who were previously cut off from such conversations, and I look forward to its continued use as a tool for discussion and increased accessibility.

Isobel's Book:


Wild Materials (SOLD OUT!)

Some of Isobel's Poems Online: 

HOUND

FORTH Magazine

Cease, Cows

Four Questions for W. Todd Kaneko

W. Todd Kaneko is the author of the Dead Wrestler Elegies (Curbside Splendor, 2014). His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in Bellingham Review, Los Angeles Review, Southeast Review, Barrelhouse, NANO Fiction, The Collagist and many other journals and anthologies. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, he co-edits Waxwing and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

TK: I write poetry because I want to write poetry. To me, poetry is the closest thing to rock and roll a person can do without strapping on a guitar and windmilling their arms for dear life. The poet sits down and creates this beautiful, irreverent creature out of words and language, a creature that can make an audience feel anything the poet wants them to feel. It’s so thrilling to see a poem come to life on the page, and doubly so to see it come to life for a reader. I’m one of the lucky ones—there is this thing I want to do, and I’m privileged enough to be able to do it. Really though, I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to write poetry.

But I also write poems because I have to, as corny as that sounds. If I go for any extended period of time without writing, I become short tempered and feel like my insides are made of sandpaper. I can be a real jerk when I’m not writing, and I don’t like being a jerk. It’s not good for my marriage or my job or keeping me out of car accidents.

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

TK: When I read poems by other people, I hope to experience the world in a way I haven’t experienced it before. I hope to find a poem that lodges in my stomach or slithers beneath my breastbone, a poem that makes me want to throw up my fists and bang my head. I hope a poem will surprise me, not in that guy with a knife hiding behind the door kind of way, but in that Aristotelian surprising yet inevitable kind of way. I hope for poems that turn into a robot or an airplane or a cemetery plot. Maybe it seduces me or maybe it smooth talks its way into my boudoir. I hope a poem will grab me by the ears and make me believe that what it has to tell me is so urgent, I have to drop everything to hear it sing. A poem has to matter to someone, and I hope it makes me understand that it matters to me on a physical, emotional, or even spiritual level. And I also hope for standard punctuation.

DS: Describe your works in progress.

TK: I’m the kind of writer who is always working on too many projects at any one time. I am currently working on a chapbook of flash fictions I’m calling Bang Your Head, a series of 300-word stories about this teenage loser named Metalhead and his best friend Rockgod who are growing up together in the 1980s. Some of these pieces are also part of a larger work-in-process, a book length manuscript of poems that play with Heavy Metal songs and tropes.

I’m also being drawn back into a project I put back in the drawer a few years ago. It’s a book of poems about my family’s incarceration in Idaho during World War II along with many other Japanese-American families. My family, like many, has never wanted to talk about that experience, so the book is about the silence, how that silence is handed down from generation to generation, and how we fill those silences with other stuff. It’s kind of a painful book and quite exhausting to work on.

And on the back burner, outside of poetry, I have this series of lyric essays about professional wrestling, staged masculinity, and race that I hope I will figure out how to make it into a book one day.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

TK: When I look at poetry, I see a lot of lines being drawn, territories being carved out by groups on the basis of race, gender, sexuality—of course, they must be carved out and claimed lest they be overtaken by other more dominant territories, nations who have long since dominated the world. I think my main hope for the future of poetry is a healing of the map so that poets don’t feel like they have to compete with other groups, so that poets don’t unconsciously (or consciously) shut down voices that they don’t recognize as their own, so that poets can look at publishing markets and not feel unsafe when submitting to them. I know this is like wishing for world peace, and I don’t think I’m likely to ever see this come about.

Also, I think that for so long, people have looked at poetry as this arcane, obscure thing that is too brainy or highbrow or too chock full of feelings for most audiences. I hope for more poems that connect with the everyday culture that surrounds us in our modern world. This is a fancy way of calling for more poems about the ordinary things like popular culture, which is something that I think a lot of writers consider to be beneath their notice. But popular culture is a reflection of its audience, isn’t it? When we are horrified at Miley Cyrus wagging her tongue on a television awards show, or watching the Avengers battle a cosmic menace on a movie screen, or cheering on our favorite pro wrestlers (Brock Lesnar) as they clash with our less favorite sports figures (anyone not named Brock Lesnar), we are reacting to reflections of ourselves as a culture and how we orient ourselves to that reflection. To me, this is something worth writing about.

So, I think I just said that I hope for world peace via poems about pro wrestling. I’m good with that.

Todd's Book:

The Dead Wrestler Elegies

Some of Todd's Poems Online:

Menacing Hedge 

Boxcar Poetry 

[PANK] 

DMQ Review 

Four Questions for Ruth Foley

Ruth Foley lives in Massachusetts, where she teaches English for
Wheaton College. Her work
appears in numerous web and
print journals, including Antiphon,
The Bellingham Review, and Sou’wester.
She is the author of two chapbooks,Dear Turquoise (dancing girl press)
and Creature Feature (ELJ Publications), and serves as Managing Editor forCider Press Review. You can find her online at her blog Five Things, or on Twitter or Facebook.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

RF: This seemed like such an easy question to answer until I tried to answer it. The shortest version (which isn’t terribly short, I’m afraid) is that poetry is the art form that addresses most of the things that make me tick. It’s the most condensed form of humanity I’ve found. Also, I trained as a classical vocalist when I was younger and studied a lot of music, and poetry carries a lot of music within it, for obvious reasons. I love its sonic qualities, its rhythms, and its obsessive, glorious attention to detail. Poetry is also a bit of a chameleon—my favorite poems look and sound effortless but are in fact intricately crafted.

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

RF: Stuff to steal. Moves that make me lose my breath. Some piece of language that I would never have thought of in a million years but which feels perfect. Illumination. Shadow. The occasional sex scene.

DS: Describe your works in progress.

RF: I’m in the final-for-now stages of putting together a manuscript that mixes my old obsessions with my new ones. It’s a watery manuscript—I grew up spending my summers on the Rhode Island coast, and the ocean is such an essential aspect of my nature that I can’t escape it. And don’t particularly want to. I’m fascinated with human failings and human fears, and I’m obsessed with the idea of place and space, and those interests are all there. I’ve also started moving into exploring ways to include my belief in the essential value of life. I’m a feminist and a humanist, and I also believe very strongly in the importance of the natural world. I love the fuzzy and sweet, but I also love the creepy and crawly and the creatures that make a lot of people recoil. I want to advocate for the deep, deep beauty of the world while simultaneously exploring hopelessness and loneliness. But, you know. No pressure.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

RF: World peace? Or maybe just continual exploration of the human condition. When I say that, I mean all humans, with as diverse a swath of backgrounds as there are poets. I make an effort to read poets from as varied a group as I can think of—varied in terms of sex, sexual orientation, gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic background...whatever I can do. Some of the poetry speaks to me and some of it doesn’t and all of it helps me understand myself as a poet just a bit more. I see it as part of my responsibility and privilege as an editor to do so, but it’s also opened up my writing in ways I couldn’t have anticipated and may not be able to explain. My hope for the future of poetry is that more and more writers and editors open themselves up to experiences that don’t align with their own. There’s no downside to doing so—nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Ruth's Chapbooks:

Creature Feature

Dear Turquoise

Some of Ruth's Poems Online:

Three poems from Creature Feature

Poems (with audio) at The Poetry Storehouse

“Judas”

“Castaway” 

 Three poems at Front Porch

Next Big Thing Interview

The fabulous Carol Guess has tagged me for the Next Big Thing Series, in which writers give brief interviews about their forthcoming books. (I'm looking forward to reading the interviews of the people I've tagged at the bottom of this post.) Here goes:

What is the working title of the book? 

How the Potato Chip Was Invented; there’s a poem in the book with that name. It was inspired by a visit to the Utz factory in Pennsylvania Dutch country. I remember watching a short video there about the history of the chip. Basically, I took the real story, forgot large sections of it, and replaced the forgotten sections with references to Lionel Richie. It seemed like the right thing to do.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I had been writing a bunch of mock-history prose poems. Some of these took historical figures and placed them in impossible contexts (e.g., Fred Astaire performing with the Black Eyed Peas), while other poems were aimed at righting wrongs; certain celebrities received long-overdue comeuppance. The idea to focus the book solely on these celebrity poems came from the editors, David McNamara and Brian Mihok.

What genre does your book fall under?

Prose poems, mini teleplay, standardized test portion, etc.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Some of the characters in the book are movie actors: Christopher Walken and Max von Sydow, for example. I would want them to play each other.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

These poems about celebrities are occasionally creepy and loosely research-based—Wikipedia, basically.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

I sat in my basement a couple of Aprils ago and thought up dozens of “what if” scenarios involving famous people—Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, Richard Nixon. Then I turned these into longish prose poems that had to be pared down. It took a couple of months to revise and turn the poems into a manuscript.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I was a journalist and advertising copywriter before I became a poet. Some of the ideas in the book probably come from my brain’s inability to differentiate among these disparate media. I sometimes distort facts and serve up a poem as a tweaked biography. Anyhow, the writers who inspired me most were David Wojahn—who wrote several brilliant, celebrity-oriented poems in his book Mystery Train—and my heroes of prose poetry: Russell Edson and James Tate. 

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
I blaspheme mainstream darlings such as Thomas Kinkade and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Somehow, even Julie Andrews winds up under the proverbial bus. I also profess my decades-long love for Rosanna Arquette.

 Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It will be published in summer 2013 by sunnyoutside press, which makes beautiful books. I am so fortunate to be able to work with David and Brian.

======

My tagged writers for next week are:

Mary Lou Buschi 
Sarah Carson
Matt Hart 
Shannon Hozinec 
Jessy Randall 
Daniel Romo

Interview with Matt Hart

Matt Hart is the author of four books of poems, most recently Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless (Typecast Publishing, 2012). A fifth collection, Debacle Debacle, is forthcoming from H_NGM_N BKS in 2013. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety, he lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and plays in the band TRAVEL. This fall he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Texas, Austin.

=============================================================

DS: What’s your earliest memory of poetry (either yours or someone else’s)? What do you think led to your strong attraction to poetry, or poetry’s attraction to you?

MH: My earliest memories of poetry are pretty negative actually. Mostly they’re of being told in one setting or another that I’d gotten it wrong. That what I thought the poem was about wasn’t it at all. One particular instance with “Ode on a Grecian Urn” really left a sour taste in my mouth. I just couldn’t relate to the antiqueness of the language, nor the idyllic subject, and while I had pretty good teachers, I was wildly resistant to everything at that point and/or wanted to do things so radically my own way, that it was probably a nightmare trying to teach me anything. I heard what I wanted to hear. And this made interpretation particularly tricky, especially when the teacher clearly had in mind a right answer.

DS: I’ve always thought that the main difference between poetry and prose is that poetry allows for more interpretation. The reader is allowed to incorporate his or her baggage (or perhaps positive energy) into what he or she gets from the poem.

MH: Yeah, of course, right. But I think so many students, especially at the high school level get turned off to poetry early on, because it’s presented like a puzzle, a thing to be solved—rather than as a thing to engage with, to converse with, to sit down at the table and go haywire together. I realize that last part doesn’t make any sense. But yes, poetry allows for a different, more acrobatic, more up close and personal kind of reading. That doesn’t mean there aren’t meanings to get, but that those meanings are nuanced, because poetry activates the connotative associative atmosphere of the language, which allows me and you and everybody we know to collide with that atmosphere and find him or herself THERE! 

What was funny with regard to my high school experience was that I loved song lyrics, especially Bob Dylan and The Dead Kennedys and Hank Williams—protest music, folk and punk and twangy country stuff. I played in punk bands. I wrote my own songs. What changed for me with poetry was getting into college (where I was a philosophy major) and as a Junior taking a poetry workshop with Tom Koontz and being exposed to poems like “Howl” and Etheridge Knight’s “Feeling Fucked Up” and the Charles Bukowski book Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame (I loved that one, still do—though I haven’t read it in a long time), “Some people never go crazy/What truly horrible lives they must lead.”

DS: I have probably spent more time with The Essential Etheridge Knight and that orange Bukowski book than I’ve spent with any other poetry books. Initially, I couldn’t think of any overt connection between their poems (style, themes, etc.) and your writing. Those poets seem to infuse their work with authentic raw emotion, though, and you seem to operate that way, too.

MH: Well, Etheridge spent a ton of time in Indiana (including in prison in Michigan City, and then later as a teacher in Indianapolis), so there’s that connection. But yeah, I want to connect viscerally with the poems and hopefully with readers as well. The older I get, the more I think authenticity is a matter of being open to change—maybe on a dime. That it’s a matter of not being static—of staying open to possibility, to poetry as a kind of constant re/activity and a way of being in the world. The Beats and Knight and later the New York School provided me with a way into poetry that made sense to me, because the poetry seemed infused with the life, and the life was infused with the poems.

That said, looking back, I think the poems I loved early on were performative, irreverent, and political—often with surreal elements. I liked William Carlos Williams quite a lot too for what I took then to be a kind of generous simplicity, a concrete plainness, which I now realize isn’t simple at all. As for Keats, of course I love him now. He’s one of my favorites, as are the Romantics in general: Clare, Coleridge, Shelley—some Wordsworth, not so much Byron, but I’m impatient with him. Some day I’ll get with Byron too.

DS: How have you been able to become less “wildly resistant” and relate to the Romantics and others? Or have you changed in ways that welcome poets you might have rejected earlier?

MH: Oh, definitely the latter. I grew up. I became over time less angry. I fell in love and I fell in love with poetry. I encountered the poets/poems mentioned above, along with others like Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets, etc. that were resistant in all the ways (and more) that I was. These poetic points of resistance (to the conventions of the tradition, but also to conventional decorum and the status quo) provided me with a window into the art, which I was in some sense waiting for. I needed a portal, a vast void to climb into and GO!

So there were a lot of reasons why poetry struck me when it did. I loved that a poem was in some sense always a song, but one that contained the words AND the music. The words were the music; the music was (the) words. No cantankerous band mates necessary, no heavy lifting, no special equipment. To write a poem, one needed words—something available to all of us. But the poet’s job is to in some significant way misuse and mismanage the language (a kind of resistance) to create aesthetic effects/affect. One didn’t need to be rational all the time (remember I was a philosophy major). One could press one’s face up against the noumenon in poetry, one could taste the meadow, revel in the cool clarity of contradiction, snuggle up to nonsense.  Finally, it was expressive, not overqualified, not a thing to prove. It was a thing to be and to BE in. In a poem one could make and remake the world, vision and re-vision.

DS: When did you first find your own voice as a poet? How have you been able to incorporate other influences while still maintaining that voice?

MH: Gosh. Do I have a voice? It certainly doesn’t feel that way to me. To me it feels like I’m always trying to find my way, like I’m stumbling around in the dark, and every once in a while I trip over something, and for a couple of moments there’s a flash of bright light, a little clarity, and then everything’s plunged back into darkness. Was that the dog or the ottoman? A buttercup or a body? Writing poems is for me always explorative, which is thrilling, sometimes terrifying, and often, too, a bewildering wilderness of doubt—highs and lows and everything in between. So maybe my voice is voices (plural—or just flashes of things against the screen of the ghost in machine). Writing is a process of pitching out beyond me the sounds/images to see if and how they bounce back—I’m sending out a call for a response that I can hopefully shape into something else entirely.

As for the second part of your question, that’s easier. One doesn’t have to try to incorporate one’s influences; that happens automatically, if one pays attention. We’re all constantly filtering everything we’ve read, been told, experienced, or remember through our unique weird brains. You can’t help but be original if you keep your eyes open and avoid being a numbed out, passionless, too cool to feel anything zombie. I truly believe that we’re all a lot more similar than we are different from each other, and yet there’s nothing more strange than any other human being on the planet. On a more practical note, though, if one trusts the writing process and keeps trying things out, resists one’s habits, and continues to explore the possibilities of a practice, the influences get incorporated, mulched up and reintroduced to the soil (whether we want to acknowledge it or not).

DS: How do you think our current culture (including increased availability of information via Internet, reality TV shows, etc.) influences us as writers? Forklift, Ohio, is forward thinking in its content, but it also takes pleasure in throwback-style artwork and tactile elements that wouldn’t be possible online. It seems like Forklift leans toward a future that both celebrates and pokes fun at the past.

MH: Obviously one of the main things that has changed over the last 20 years is the speed at which we can access (though maybe not fully absorb) small and massive chunks of data/information. I think that to be influenced in a really significant way, one had to go to the trouble—one had to do real research, which required going somewhere where the information could be found, or acquiring the resources oneself. It was a more rigorous process. Now one just pulls up the Internet, and there’s almost anything. Of course, the cost of this is that the depth of exposure to the things that influence us may not be quite as great. And the things themselves may be a little more flimsy, e.g., reality TV or an “excerpt” of something I can read online. But hey, there’s give and take to everything. We gain a lot; we lose a lot. I have students now who can’t read the comments I write on their papers if I write them in cursive because they never learned to write in cursive. Of course, they have all sorts of tech skills that I don’t know anything about…. Anyway, the more direct answer to your question is: Speed of access and the quantity of information we can access RIGHT NOW have really impacted contemporary poetry, though I’m not at this point willing to go to the mat and talk about how particularly. I feel it. And I feel like I read it and write it.

Maybe that dissonance you’re feeling with Forklift, Ohio, between looking forward and looking back, has to do with the fact that Eric Appleby (Forklift’s designer/publisher) and I were both born in the late sixties/early seventies, and thus grew up without personal computers, the Internet, cell phones, etc. As a result, we sort of wobble back and forth between embracing technology/contemporary attitudes about it, and having some kind of nostalgia for the world we grew up in—not to mention also an interest in the late 19th and early 20th century avant-garde, engineering manuals, factory parts catalogs, old cookbooks, etc. There’s a sense—maybe one shared by lots of people of my generation, I don’t know—in which I want to live significantly in my own time and be a part of that, and yet I also long for something that seems lost to me now, even if I can’t explicitly say (or don’t want to say?) what that is. Again, it’s a feeling. We definitely aren’t trying to make fun of the past. I’d say we’re trying desperately to hold on to it, while also living in the present and looking to the future. I want all of it at once—which is simultaneity, which is Apollinaire. I want Apollinaire.

Jessy Randall interviews me about her book

Injecting Dreams into Cows, Jessy Randall's latest book of poems, is now available from Red Hen Press. I was fortunate to be able to tell her my feelings about the book, and now I pass those feelings on to you. --DMS

====================

Jessy: Dan, is this the best book you have read by me, or what? 

Dan: It is most certainly the best book of yours I’ve read that doesn’t include a fictionalized version of me. It is eclectic, but not in an ill-advised-potluck way. There is no Jell-O mold with bananas in it. It’s more like a mix tape made by someone who really knows what you’re supposed to be listening to.

Jessy: I would say there is a fictionalized version of you in the poem "The Way We Felt Playing Cards." Because I can't know for sure if we really all felt the same way about it. Do you think it's okay that there are two poems in the book about Ms. Pac-Man, and that they appear right next to each other?

Dan: I don’t object to anything about those poems. If you had portrayed Ms. Pac-Man as the sort who would have badmouthed the Donkey Kong gorilla behind his back, that might’ve rubbed me the wrong way. You did no such thing. I like the second poem especially because it’s not about the real Ms. Pac-Man at all.

Jessy: While we're on the topic, do you read poetry books from beginning to end or do you jump around? If you jump around, please describe how. Do you read like Aimee Bender says she reads, showing her eye pattern with this map?

Dan: It depends on whose book I am reading. If it’s a Thomas Lux book, I scan the titles, rank them, and read from highest- to lowest-ranked titles. If the poet is not a deity when it comes to titles, I might read from beginning to end. When I read your book, I used the same method I use to read Lux’s books.

Jessy: Can you make a map like Aimee Bender's for how you read my book? Would that be too much trouble?

Dan: I think it was David Byrne who said, “I ain’t got time for that now.”

Jessy: Oh, all right. Next question: which poem do you feel is the most "me"?

Dan: That seems like a trick question, like, “Why do these pants make me look fat?” But we will assume all the poems are great, and therefore, the most “you” poem shows your specific greatness the most. I suppose I would vote for “Home” because it represents a version of you I remember well: the one that lived near Elmwood Avenue and couldn’t resist quoting “Broadcast News.”

Jessy: Which poem do you think could have been a collaboration between us?

Dan: "Wedding Food." It is the logical companion for our poem "What Is It They’re Supposed to Throw?" We could (should, really) have bookends made with those poems affixed to them.

Jessy: Wow, you are right. I think I will do that right now. 


Jessy: How do you feel about prose poems? Do you feel that they are not actually poems, the way some of the commenters at io9 do?

Dan: I almost feel compelled to answer seriously. Let’s just say I would be a hypocrite to criticize a form that breaks rules, not to mention a form I use regularly. The main reason I write poetry is to break rules. Poetry has less severe consequences than shoplifting.

Jessy: Do you feel that some of these topics are not appropriate for poems? Muppets, Velcro, Pippi Longstocking, bad phone sex, robots, video games, Whac-A-Mole, etc.

Dan: Each of those topics could be a stand-in for more “appropriate” ones: Muppets (puppetry, e.g., lack of freewill or responsibility), Velcro (inability to let go), etc. Of course, you know this is true.

Jessy: If you say so, though I think you are kidding. I hope you are. What do you think is the worst poem in the book? I think it is "Trouble in Pac-Land," because Ms. Pac-Man makes a lame pun on the word "packing."

Dan: ”Something is Chasing You” might be my least favorite because it rhymes, though I believe you rhymed for fun and not to be a snooty smarty pants. You used “pell-mell,” for gosh sakes. What’s more fun to say than “pell-mell”?

Jessy: Maybe "hideous" or "berserk," which also appear in the book. One last question: do you have any memories you would like deleted in the manner of "The Seductiveness of the Memory Hole"?

Dan: Yes. I once had a female friend with long, blond hair. I had told her a story someone had told me about a drunk guy at some advertising conference, and the guy yelled to a woman, “Hey, Blondie: How ‘bout a smile?” Anyhow, I was fond of saying this to my female friend with long, blond hair. One time, I said it while I was behind her, but for whatever reason, she didn’t respond. So I said it again much more loudly. Again, she didn’t respond. Finally, I shouted, “Hey, Blondie: How ‘bout a smile?” so loudly, that she stopped and turned around. The problem was, it wasn’t my friend. It was some other woman with long, blond hair. The End