Interview by Gloria Mindock, Editor of Cervena Barva Press
- When did you begin to write?
I first became aware of poetry in 7th grade, when I was introduced to it by my 7th grade junior high school English teacher. I was about 13 years old, and I very much liked William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus.” About that time, the death of a family friend prompted me to write an elegiac poem, and from then on, I realized I could address many of my feelings through writing poetry. I continued to write through high school and into my undergraduate years in college, at UCLA, where I was an English major. After college, my poetry writing tapered off, and for about 30 years—years in which I was completing graduate school, establishing my career, and helping to raise my daughter, I stopped writing entirely. I began to write again, about 16 or 17 years ago, when I began to have a little more free time, and I felt that poetry was something I could comfortably and creatively return to.
- Are there any writers who have influenced you?
My list of influences and inspirations is long, and has grown over the years. In high school, I was enamored with e.e. cummings, Richard Brautigan, Kenneth Patchen and especially Ernest Hemingway. In college, I was interested in Yeats, W.S. Merwin, Shelly, and Keats. There have been a range of writers that continue to inform my writing: S.J. Perelman, John Ashbery, Anne Sexton, Rilke, Joy Williams, Ann Carson, Lydia Davis, Paul Celan, Felix Feneon, Charles Simic, Donald Barthelme, and of course, Monty Python.
- What inspires you to write?
The sources of my poems have changed. In the beginning, much of my writing was based on autobiographical experience, which I attempted to deal with via free verse, lyrical poems. In recent years, I’ve become interested in writing poems that aren’t about me, not about a confession of my feelings or my own experiences, but poems that are anti-sentimental, capable of taking on a variety of subjects, and that are often absurd or surreal. I’m interested in found text, overheard language, and American idioms, all of which I use in my pieces to suggest the identity of the poem’s speaker. In the last 10 years or so, I’ve shifted to mainly writing prose poems because I felt that I’d reached the end of what I felt I could accomplish with the lyric, lineated poem. I wanted a form that would not depend upon my own feelings and experiences, but on another (imaginary) person’s experience, hence I began to write persona prose poems. I wanted to employ a form that felt more congenial to humor and playfulness, a form that didn’t take itself too seriously, but one that could accommodate moments of gravitas, too. So, I shifted to writing prose poetry, micro fiction, and occasionally flash fiction.
In regard to prose poetry, I especially like the appearance of the block paragraph as it tries to contain the disorder and turmoil of the speakers who appear in many of my prose poems. I also prefer the sentence to the line—as the unit of measure. I think prose poems are more approachable, more “democratic,” than much of lineated contemporary poetry, because of prose poetry’s ease of reading. Even people who don’t like poetry can approach a prose poem, or micro fiction story, because these look like almost everything else they read. I think the unassuming appearance of prose poems adds to their disruptive and startling moments.
- Do you consider your poems to be different than your flash fiction?
Yes, but increasingly the border between these two forms has blurred for me. Some readers think my micro fiction is prose poetry, and other readers think my prose poetry is micro fiction. I know there are significant differences, of course, between fiction and poetry, but I’m less concerned with the formal features of these genres than I am with writing pieces that do the best they can for the reader, regardless of the formal definitions. Much of my writing, utilizes word play, defamiliarization, the juxtaposition of unlikely associations, and dark humor. I hope these allow me to reach readers in a way that allows them to feel a mixture of emotions and to experience pleasant surprises.
- How do you see the world?
This is a difficult question. It reminds me of Thomas Nagel’s much-cited article, “What It’s Like to be a Bat,” in which he argues a reductionist attempt to explain human consciousness is inadequate. Nagel argues that subjective consciousness—what it feels like to experience the world from a particular point of view—can’t be fully explained by objective, physical science. He emphasizes that subjective experience (or the phenomenal aspect of consciousness) is irreducible and inherently tied to an organism’s unique perspective.
So much of each person’s world view is informed by their biography, although our biographies alone can’t fully explain why we see the world the way we do. That said, my biography is really important to how I view the world. To briefly summarize, I was born to and raised by two Canadian ex-pats, in a working class suburb of Los Angles, California. I attended UCLA and earned a degree in English Literature. Later in life I attended Stanford and Brandeis universities, where, respectively I earned a MA in Education, and a Ph.D. in Sociology. I’ve had the good fortune over the course of my life to work in a variety of positions and occupations, including railway worker, emergency room clerk, teaching fellow at Harvard University, Assistant Director of a national association of college and university presidents, an organization consultant, and for the last 30 years, as an applied sociologist who provides program evaluation services to the non-profit and educational sectors. I also spent a large part of my youth and mid-life surfing—an activity that subtlety influenced how I perceive the world. Each wave teaches the rider about the experience of the unexpected, the unanticipated. I try to incorporate these into my writing.
6.Who do you like in art and music?
I grew up listening to blues and rock and roll. I think these forms hugely influenced how I think about, and approach, writing short narratives and creating the voices of my characters/speakers. When I was young and listened to pop music and blues, I wondered, “Who are the ‘speakers’ in these little “stories,” these musical vignettes? What must their lives be like so that these are the subjects that they sing about?” In my 20s, I discovered Elvis Costello, Warren Zevon, Tom Waits, Talking Heads, Bruce Springsteen, Randy Newman, John Haitt, and a slew of lesser-known rock and blues artists.
As for visual artists, I like Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Diebenkorn, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Marc Chagall, and Ed Ruscha. James Turrell’s work is literally monumental, although it is closer to architecture than visual art.
- Any future plans and projects?
It seems like I’m perpetually working on the next book. I hope to publish my latest book of prose poems, I Wouldn’t Say That, Exactly, in 2025. I’m now working on another manuscript of prose poems which is, as yet, untitled. I hope to finish this collection within the next six months. Fingers crossed.
