Here Comes Nobody

Hate to take pleasure in another person's misery, but I couldn't help but get a small kick out of this notice regarding the failed Here Comes Everybody anthology. Already mentioned my annoyance with the massive amounts of poet interviews online and in little magazines in last year's Top Ten Poetry Pet Peeves (which is already dated, jeez the cars in PoetryLand move fast these days), but this is too much: poets willing to give these interviews online, where anyone can search and find them, but balking at them being set down in print? What are they afraid of? Was the interview just an online fling not substantial enough for the page? Or's it that these interviews aren't sanitized the way many are before they're printed? (Recently at work we typeset a book with a long Noam Chomsky "interview" in which it seemed half of the answers were completely rewritten at second pass—why not stop calling it an interview at that point and make it another essay? Because it "allows" for a relatively more casual tone? Academics make me nauseous even when geniuses are involved.) Are these poets afraid to see their scrappy little interviews "legitimized" in print? Isn't this all just part of the continuing privileging of "the book" prevalent in Academia, further evidence that PoetryLand is primarily a lonesome, self-important, and hence pathetic, division of the big A? You're never a real poet until you publish a real book. It doesn't matter if the book's published by a friend, or on the suggestion of a former professor or mentor, or if you had to pay someone to read your manuscript—that's somehow more legitimate than doing the work yourself. Whatever.

HERE COMES NOBODY

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?
Uh, probably "The Celebration of the Lizard." Uh, in eighth grade my friend Pat gave me an extra copy he had of The Doors, Absolutely Live. Uh, that was on it. Uh, that counts, right? "Lions in the street and roaming / Dogs in heat, rabid, foaming / A beast caged in the heart of a city. / The body of his mother rotting in the summer ground / He fled the town. / He went down south and crossed the border / Left the chaos and disorder / Back there, over his shoulder. " Uh, how can you not love that when you're a thirteen-year-old boy? Plus, years later, I discovered it was still pretty good if you recited it in the voice of Mickey Mouse (my Donald Duck's OK, too, but of limited vocabulary).

2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?
Excuse me, but I'm peerless. Anyway, I read Time and Money and Consumer Reports and The New Yorker.

3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?
Really? Why?

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?
Tu Fu. Li Po. That's it. I once had a dream, like when I was nineteen and just started reading poetry and shit (you know, like Schoppenhaur and Nietzsche—the shit people start of with when they realize their life's empty and they better get a "move on"), and it was me and Li Po drinking wine and tumbling down a hillside. There was a moon involved, and possibly a pond. Maybe it was the ocean.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?
White-meat only.

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?
Sarcasm, bitch.

5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?
Not as much as I used to. We're on a low budget since the second kid came along. I owe almost my entire output of the last thirteen years to the poets whose work has moved or bothered me in all the right ways.

6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?
No one's assuming anything about what I have or haven't read. Which is good, because I haven't read most of it.

7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?
Well, I've explained it to Vaughn (my three year old) as merely the artistic use of words, and I used the old dance analogy: poetry is to speaking, as dance is to walking. Here's one of her poems:

Vaughn writes on the blue sky
and the blue sky writes
on Daddy
and the blue sky writes on Vaughn.

She's a genius, no?

8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?
"The Poet?" Oh, poo. I guess the answer is no.

9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon—lime

Chiseled—face

I—You

Of—about

Form—free

10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?
Hmm, I often have this hollow feeling about my chest. That might explain the hollowness of my poems, which, in any event, are made more than written.