interviewing

I came across this thoughtful Nick Flynn interview today. At first I thought the interviewer was being brutally confrontational with Flynn, but by the end of the interview, I decided that I liked the kinds of questions being asked. Flynn is a poet whose poems I find myself going back to and re-reading, at least once a year. Some Ether is one of my favorite books of poems of the last 10 years.

I've been reading a number of different interviews with writers and poets, in order to get ideas for my own interview questions. I'm working on a project that I hope will turn out to be something really useful--some kind of permanent resource--that involves interviewing a variety of writers and artists in my community. So, if you're a writer living in or near Lawrence, I may be darkening your door, or at least your inbox, in the next few weeks.

I set up a time to interview Cote Smith this week, and I also asked Chloe Jones, a.k.a., Lil' Mumbles if she'd be willing to let me interview her some time soon. I'm amazed at how much I feel like I've been learning through reading these interviews. I've been a fan of reading interviews with writers for a long time, but this recent, concentrated dose has been motivating me to finish a number of projects, writing and otherwise. Doing all this research has also made me think a lot about the rhetorical act of interviewing. There are such a variety of approaches. In some of my readings for a course that deals with Everyday Life theory, we've been studying different interview techniques employed by The Mass Observation Movement and several Surrealists. I like the idea of juxtaposition, in terms of question types/moods, in the interview process. Interview really strikes me as a form of collage, at its heart. In order to prepare for my Lil' Mumbles interview, I spent about four hours going through iconic interviews conducted with other famous rappers. I've been collaging questions from these interviews into a kind of UR-document that I'll use for the Lil' Mumbles interview, usually using the phrase "contemporary fiction" to replace the word "hip-hop" or "rap" in the source material I'm sampling from.

This post is free of hyperbole, and that's hard for me to do.

Well Meaning White Girl by Alli Warren is now available from Mitzvah Chaps. Robert Baumann works as hard as anyone I know to build communities of writers, and to publish interesting poetry publications. Two of Mitzvah Chaps' books are on a shelf in a public school in Tianjin, China, along with a complete set of the Chronicle of Narnia, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and a bunch of other books I bought for my students, to go in the makeshift library some of the teachers at my school made for them. I think my taste in poetry sometimes runs in a different direction than Rob's, which is why I enjoy going to the Actual Kansas reading series he organizes with Anne Boyer, because I always hear new things and think about poetry differently after I listen to the poets. I once did a lot of research in order to make a baseball joke in an e-mail that referenced Rob. I really don't like baseball or any sports. I did all of this research into the Milwaukee Brewers because I love Rob and Rob loves baseball more than is appropriate. In the end, it wasn't a very good joke, but Rob is a very good Rob.

Goodbye blank space

I've never posted to this blog, even though I've had it for awhile now. I wanted to post an excerpt from something Geoffrey Dyer wrote about prose poems on the website for the journal Double Room:

Ultimately, operating in one primary form is a choice, and that choice reflects for the artist a suitability of purpose. Prose poems are willfully beautiful from their content, the shapes of the objects they evoke, the places that the reader sets those objects on their own mental canvas. The easy casting off of line breaks allows for a smooth transaction/reversal between builder, material, and user. The fact that the essential formal material itself—words, punctuation marks, the occasional paragraph—are as rudimentary as writing, only makes the non-architecture of the prose poem more inhabitable, familiar, interchangeable, and functional. John Cage examined Jasper Johns’ Flag using the metaphor of a table. The table’s surface, he says, “stimulates the tendency to do something. . .. The result is nothing special. It looks as though something had been tried and had been found to work: to have many uses, not focusing attention but letting attention focus itself” (1).

1. From the catalog of the Jasper Johns exhibition, The Jewish Museum, New York, 1964.

I like this prose poem by Geoffrey Dyer. I've been thinking a lot about prose poems lately.