Capital-t-Truth:

Your newest poetry collection, Us From Nothing, tells the history of us, humans, through a series of undeniable milestones. What are the criteria of an undeniable milestone?

I deferred to many experts for what constituted a milestone, and in the end, I wanted to make it so that nothing I left out should have been included, and no one could deny that what was included was important. Of course I was destined to fail in such a program, but I did my best. So far, the only egregious omission I’ve discovered is “Education.” I should have probably had three cantos devoted to “Education,” “Formal Education,” and “Improved Formal Education” (for the first university), but those will have to wait for a future edition, should I ever be lucky enough to be asked to write one.

Us From Nothing sounds like a really fun project. Was it fun? What led you to it?

It was immensely fun, and also just plain immense. I bit off way more than I could easily chew. But in the end, I learned so much, and I made an epic poem that I think can stand in the line of the great old epic poems. As for how I came to write it, I dealt with that subject at length in an essay just recently published in Ron Slate’s On the Seawall. Here’s a link to that essay: https://www.ronslate.com/medicinal-history-on-the-eve-of-our-future/

The very short version is that Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire inspired me, and as I say, I always wanted to write an epic in the vein of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Pound’s Cantos, Williams’ Paterson, etc. It took me over seven years!

You read at ODU’s 47^th annual Literary Festival. I noticed the audience was super engaged and excited about the thought experiment of Us From Nothing. Is an audience reaction like that a sign to you that you’ve really struck on something?

Gosh, I really hope to have struck on something. Writing the book changed my life for sure, and those who have read it who are close to me have assured me that it’s beyond the ordinary reading experience. Audience engagement has certainly been positive at the readings I’ve done. But at the same time, almost no one has reviewed the book, and the sales seem to be pretty low, so I wonder if it’s having a chance to resonate with readers. There are just so many small press books that appear every month.

I feel like poetry is a genre that is made more fruitful by its constraints. Do you find it important to experiment with form?

I adore the idea of the aesthetic constraint. One of my favorite films of all time is Lars Von Trier’s The Five Obstructions; I think every artist should watch that movie more than once. I’ve experimented with poetic form since I began writing five decades ago, and I teach forms and formal experimentation in most of my creative writing classes. When I landed on the prose poem form, thirty years ago as I finished my MFA, I realized that I had found a perfectly constraining vessel for my voice, and I started writing prose sonnets, prose pantoums, prose villanelles, prose sestinas, what have you. The “constraint” idea really gets ramped up when you’re writing creatively from research. Facts provide quite the constraint!

When combining different forms of poetry, what’s your biggest goal?

Questioning systems and institutions is (or should be) integral to a human being’s role as a citizen in a society. And being subversive toward systems and institutions that present themselves as providing the monolithic be-all-end-all capital-t-Truth is absolutely the role of the poet. Thus, I interrogate prose’s and language’s and poetry’s conventions and expectations. Always toward the goal of making something memorable and beautiful.

When it comes to starting new projects, when do you know that you’ve found something you want to dig into? Can you tell us anything about what you’re working on now?

I always find it fruitful to have multiple projects going at once. And there’s a kind of obsession that happens with the really meaty projects, where I can’t stop thinking about them and can’t wait to get back to my writing desk. Right now, I’m working on a poetry manuscript that’s more lyrical and more “about me” than anything I’ve ever published. And I’m also 40,000 words into a novel. It’s very much a poet’s novel – it takes place over the course of a single pivotal day in the life of my protagonist as he faces many choices and new situations. I’m having a lot of fun with both of those.

Is there anything else you wish people knew about your work?

The only thing that comes to mind is that I write prose poems, but they’re usually every bit as scannable as any lineated poetry being written these days. So even though my poems look like prose on the page, the line and the sentence are equally important to me.