How did you first come to poetry?
Like many kids I drew and wrote a lot and made DIY comic books and stories and all that stuff. I kept on doing that after my friends had stopped and when I think back to beginning in poetry, I think about that. Especially now that I’m teaching creative writing to elementary and middle school kids, it’s obvious that their brains are almost always already poeming. Maybe we don’t come to poetry as much as leave it? Maybe too we’re always coming back to poetry, the idea of making, of transformation. I started to read poetry as a genre as an undergrad and haunted the libraries and used book stores. I went to grad school and studied poetry but I think I’ve recovered from that mostly.
How does your visual work interact with your text?
Sometimes they are the same thing. I make a lot of typographical visual work, so with those text and image are synonymous. But I do collage work too, wordless, and it feels like it comes from the same part of the making mind. Sometimes I use collage to explore image sets that I’m writing about, sometimes I use collage to get out of writing ruts or around writer’s block, sometimes I collage because I’m sick of written language, generally this is teaching related. I love visual art, graphic novels, comic books, graffiti, visual poetry, photography, all things visual, and I can’t imagine deciding not to create visual art alongside/inside text art. I’m putting together a chapbook right now that combines visual pieces made from comic onomatopoeia and nature books with text-based poems that are sound maps and meditations but that also have a visual element.
How does a poem begin?
As a rhythm or a phrase or an image, almost bodily, like an extension of the nervous system first interacting with something other but then the membrane opens and the two things become a third one and use autopoeisis to flesh out a living. I’ve seen people talk about their writing process, their being in charge of the poem, having a thesis, choosing images and whatnot to get that thesis across. My experience is just the opposite of that. A poem starts with me losing or giving up control enough to explore some unknown thing with language, and going from there.
How did publishing your first chapbook change your writing?
Publishing my first chapbook didn’t change my writing. It did give me a conversation starter and a thing to gift to poets that I liked and who I was maybe too shy to talk to otherwise. It concretized for me how important collaboration is because my friend Gina Myers published it, and my friend Dietmar Krumrey designed a beautiful cover for it, so it ended up a group effort to bring something new into the world.
You’ve so far published numerous chapbooks and full-length collections. How are you finding the process of learning how to put together a manuscript? What have the challenges been?
For me, putting together a manuscript requires a lot of listening and following the poetry. It requires daily or almost daily writing practice and reading the manuscript as though you weren’t the author. The biggest challenge is cutting stuff. I overwrite and then whittle down so many many pages get cut and that can be disturbing or painful sometimes. I try to stay open-minded and allow different projects to fold together if that’s what needs to happen, or allow pieces to pop off and become their own thing. I assume I will always be learning how to do this as long as I’m writing.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
I’m always writing between work and family and other stuff. I’m an adjunct, a sometimes landscaper, a creative writing teacher for kids at a Creative Youth Center, a walker, a backpacker, a wild food forager, a reader, a cartoon/movie nerd, and on and on so all of that swirls around in the same space as writing, infects it, informs it, and sometimes gets in the way of making new pieces. I am sanest and happiest when I get to write/make a little each day with the occasional longer stretch of immersion when projects really take hold.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
I haven’t been reading many journals lately. I should adjust that. I’ve been reading and enjoying chapbooks from Above/Ground Press, from Ugly Duckling, and listening to poems and performances on Pennsound.
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
The work of Gary Barwin, Rebecca Loudon, and Kim Hyesoon is always worth spending time with. I like how expansive Will Alexander’s poetry is. I’ve been enjoying listening to Tracie Morris. Nathan Hauke and Alban Fischer both have newer work out or out soon that is exciting. Evan Gray and Megan Burns are both poets to keep an eye on.
A selection of his poems appear in the first issue and the third issue.