Who Is This Guy? Writer.

People on DA know you as a former GD and whatnot, but that doesn’t answer the question, “Who is this guy?” in an artistic sense. So let’s find out. That should be, "Who was that guy?" Well, I guess. Though "was" only applies in a DA sense. You still are who you are. Oh my God, is this the way this conversation is going to go? Hand me that bottle. Me first. Okay, I took the liberty of writing down a few questions. Number one - you are a published writer, correct? A published poet. Don't get that confused with a published novelist or anything. What's the difference? Well, the novel goes on the stands and people purchase it because it is your writing, generally speaking. I'm not following. I haven't published a volume of poetry that people would purchase under that same premise. I have published poems in established literary journals which people subscribe to or purchase for a variety of content, of which I am but one small part. So they don't buy it simply because my name can be found within it...well, my mother does, but that’s it. I don't consider it quite the accomplishment that writing a novel and finding a willing publisher is. Okay, I see that. Where have you been published? Let’s see…The Southwestern Review, Static, River City, New England Review…a few others. I’d have to look at my shelf to be precise about it. Have you tried to publish a volume? Not yet. You usually need between forty and sixty fully-realized pieces. I don't think I'm there yet. How about rejections? Been rejected? Hell yes. About a thousand times. By…? You name it. Even the ones who have published me have, at times, rejected me. How does one handle the rejection? Seems like a big blow to the ego to be told you aren’t good enough. First of all, it doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t good enough. A lot of these journals, when they have already accepted some pieces for an issue, see something of a theme for the issue forming based on what they’ve got. Perhaps your piece, while good, doesn’t fit with the emerging theme. Sometimes it’s too long for the available space. Sometimes they have a couple of slots left and your piece is in contention for that space with some pieces that are just dynamite. Sometimes, though, your piece isn’t up to publishing standards. You'll be really lucky if an editor tells you why your piece was rejected - you usually get a form-letter. So it's best to not even speculate about the reason. Just try elsewhere. But there seems to be a corner...a mental corner that you have to turn in order to have that perspective. I always preach that you should disassociate your ego from your poem – that is essential when it comes to being critiqued, whether the critique comes from a workshop, a website, or a literary journal. On one hand it’s a survival mechanism for the ego. On the other hand, if you are too emotionally invested in a piece of writing, how can you possibly look at it with anything approaching objectivity? How could you edit it? How could you assess it? Editors look at your piece objectively, more or less. I mean, we all have subjective standards, even journal editors. It’s more difficult to do it when it’s your piece, but if you want to get published you’d better start working on that part of the whole process. You have to get over it and start submitting your work. I know, it's easier said than done, but it is doable. Disassociating sounds unnatural. You create something so it’s only natural to have an attachment to it. Is disassociating difficult? I'm lucky to have been able to avoid that problem. Well, you're not exactly "prolific." Too true. And I think getting a late start as a "poet" helped me understand the nature of critique. Or advice. However you want to deem it. But for the younger writers, is disassociating difficult? And how do you overcome that? For me it was. Absolutely. The lesson comes in two forms – at the head of a club or at the business end of a pointy stick. Which one did you get? I got the club. From? Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg the poet? No, Ginsberg the drycleaner. Snarky bastard. Come on. I’ve told this story a thousand times. How come I’ve never heard it? Maybe I didn’t mumble it to the rock you’ve been living under. Maybe you never asked. More snark. Anyway, how’d this encounter with Ginsberg come about? Sigh. Okay. He was given a handsome fee to give a reading and conduct a workshop at my college in 1985. I wasn't in the creative writing program then and the only experience with poetry I had came from my high school English teachers who, as it turned out, knew nothing about poetry or how to teach it. They told me I was a pretty good poet, but I wanted a professional opinion, so I put my name on the standby list for the workshop. As fate would have it, I was the only non-writing major in attendance. The table’s set for a classic misadventure. (laughing) God yes. It still makes me wince. So what happened? Participants in the workshop submitted their poem to the creative writing professor and the stack was passed to Ginsberg after he was ferried from the airport to his hotel. Presumably, he spent some time that evening with them, and I would have liked to believe he read mine again and again and again with a solemn sense of wonderment. He probably did, too, not out of a fascination for my skill, but in the same sense that one's morbid curiosity is piqued by scattered bits of metal and glass ejected from colliding cars. That's what I submitted to him - a car wreck on paper. I don't have that poem anymore - long-since sent to the landfill and undoubtedly buried under several tons of compost where it belongs. Hindsight for the moment doesn't exist in the moment, and foresight is hard to come by. And I lacked the foresight to save that poem so I could look back on it, twenty years later, and cringe. I do, however, cringe at the memory. Believe it or not, it is often the worst poems we write that spur the biggest leaps in our evolution as writers. So you submitted the worst poem you’ve ever written to a legend of beat poetry? (laughing) Holy crap, that’s awesome. Do you remember it? No. While I don't remember the poem, my memory of writing it is very clear. I was alone in my dorm room, I made myself a little sad and a little angry by thinking about a fictional girl who spurned me, then I wrote down my feelings about it. I thought that's what poets did. (laughing) Silly me. My schadenfreude is red-lining. How’d it go down? The workshop was held in a musty conference room. Fourteen writing majors, two professors, Ginsberg, and me. Lucky me - my poem was on the top of the stack. He had me read the piece aloud. When I was finished I gazed at him expectantly. He looked at me for an uncomfortable amount of time, apparently sizing me up, and then he asked, "Do you want me to tap-dance or do you want me to give it to you straight?" I said, "Give it to me straight." He sighed and said, "I am here to critique poetry, not some pseudo-intellectual doo-dad masquerading as a poem." Hahahahahahah. Ah, hahahahahaha. Oh! I’m dying! Oh, shut up. His point was: I obviously didn't have a clear understanding of what poetry was and I needed to jump that hurdle before I could proceed. It was outstanding advice, and I resented it for months. Not only did my young ego take a solid hit, but he said that in front of sixteen other people who already knew he was right. Ouch. I didn’t talk about it, tell anyone, allude to it…for years. Years. In fact, I didn’t write another poem until a year later. That’s what kind of devastation was wrought. But in the end, what could I say? He couldn’t have been more right. He was right in his assessment, right in his asking me if I wanted the truth, and right to deliver it bluntly. That’s the spirit! (laughing) Take your beating like a man. Any other milestones in your early poetry career? I guess. After that incident I began studying with John Bensko, former recipient of the Yale Younger Poets prize. Sounds impressive. Like it’s for children or something. Now who’s snarky? That prize is the oldest annual literary award in the US. Very prestigious. James Agee won it. James Tate, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, James Wright, Carolyn Forche. Bunch of heavy-hitters. And the judges…wow. W.H. Auden was a judge. Stanley Kunitz, Richard Hugo. Louise Gluck is the current judge. Win that and you are a “made poet.” Okay, I’m hip. What did you learn from Bensko? Loads, but one very important lesson stands out. One day we were in workshop and he was gutting one of my pieces – it was about an encounter I had with a hooker in the Memphis train station – and he started suggesting I change some of the middle because it was too cumbersome and stagnate. He started offering creative alternatives of the “maybe you could have this happen, or that” variety. And I said, “What? I can’t change it.” “Why not?” was his response.
I said, “Because this is the way it happened.” (laughing)
And he said, “Good God, who gives a crap how it really happened? You’re the only person who knows what happened, so why does it matter?”
I think I said something really smart like, “Uhhhhh…hmmmm”
“When you signed up for this class, when you looked in the catalog for it, what section did you look under?”
“Um…English.”
“Sub-section?”
“Creative Writing.”
“What’s that first word?”
“Creative.”
“Any more questions?”
(laughing) Nope. Message received, loud and clear. That seems like an important distinction between the romanticized idea of what a young writer might think poetry is, and what it really is. How many forum threads have there been about "poetry equals truth?" Yeah. I address that in Tips For the Novice. Okay, so far it’s taken two professional poets to get you to understand what poetry is. Or what it isn’t, I suppose. Anyone else? The next poet in the workshop batter’s box was Etheridge Knight. Fascinating man. Unbelievable poet. His grittiness and musicality really brought his social commentary to life with a stark relevance, not only for the Black Arts Movement of which he was a part, but for the entire cross-section of humanity. Which is what a good poet does. You’re talking like a dust-jacket. What was that workshop like? Laid back, but very intense at the same time. If you didn’t read your piece with any kind of feeling, he’d make you read it again. He said, after a monotone, flat recitation, “If you don’t feel it, why did you write it? And if you do feel it, let me hear it.” Nice. What’d he say about your piece? Did you get shredded again? Not this time. I was sitting next to him… Ass kisser. No! Maybe. Actually, I wanted to able to read his notes. Right. Okay, what’d he say. He clapped me on the back and said, “Not bad, kid. Not bad at all! Yessir. I liked that.” Do you remember the piece? Yeah, I still have it in a folder somewhere. Maybe in my archives in the attic. Lay it on me. Uh…it’s not really committed to memory. It wasn’t even a truly original theme. I even pinched a piece of Kipling to get it started. It was about a travel agent who sat at a desk for forty years, booking trips for other people and staring at travel posters. He never actually took a trip himself, so his sales pitches were nothing more than imagined fantasies. I think I remember the beginning…

The Zambezi, greasy,
flowing easy, spawning tsetse flies
their bright blue eyes
coquettish in the sun

Yeah! Rhyme it up, Jack. I selected that one for the workshop because of the musical qualities. I did my homework on Etheridge before he came. He liked it so…can there be higher praise than that? But beyond the workshop, the real highlight of the weekend was his reading in the Rhodes amphitheater, outdoors, with a magnificent sunset. His recitation of Ilu, The Talking Drum was thrilling. Spine-tingling. Hypnotic. It’s one thing to read those kah doom/kah doom-doom lines in your own voice, but my personal tempo for it was different from Etheridge’s. Mine was faster, more European. When he recited that piece, it was deep, slow and resonant. As he explained it to me, it is an African musical pulse structure – a duple-triple pulse beat – which was something he was taught by Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka who, of course, won the Nobel Prize for literature in …uh…’86 or ‘87. It was just one of those transplendent moments. Is that really a word? Transplendent? I don’t know. I think it is now. I heard Shelley Duvall say it in Annie Hall. Then I guess it’s official. Okay. Next? The last workshop I took was in 2001 with Adrienne Rich. That was pretty much a standard workshop with many people who were more proactive butt-kissers than I was by that point. So I didn’t really get to pal around with her. But she also had that same intensity that Ginsberg and Knight had. There was a spirited discussion about word-choice and the rigors of intentional tense-shifting. Very interesting and very helpful overall, but there wasn’t any naivete to knock off me at that point. And the rest of your “education?” Writing, pondering, and reading. In that order.

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