DG: I’d like to begin with your work as a bookseller. Aspiring writers
want MFAs — they want to publish their books, but very few are actually
interested in selling books that aren’t theirs. Working in this field must
give you a unique sense of what’s happening in the literary world. Can
you talk about when you took up this profession and how it has shaped
the way you see literature?
I was a reader in full bloom by the time I came to work in bookstores in the early
eighties, as I was lucky enough that my mother read to me as a child . That fact that I
was hard of hearing from birth, a forty percent loss, made me lean in closer to my
mother's voice as she read stories to me; I could hear the prose and understand the
rhymes, and the evocations of the words as they laid out a compelling narrative was
something like music to me. I understood it, I felt something greater than what my
imagination had concocted before, and early on I wanted to write my own stories. I
loved comic books and used to write and draw my own comic strips, I began to write
short prose sketches, I even tried my hand at writing little plays, usually fantasy
scenarios. And so it went, the more elevated the books I began to read, the greater my
desire to write in more adventurous ways.
The discovery of Bob Dylan and through him T.S.Eliot changed everything, as the
fragmented images, the associative leaps between stanzas, the dark and alluring
surrealism of both those scribes fascinated me for reasons I didn't immediately
understand — writing that made no conventional sense as in a message or a moral the
reader can take away with them, but writing that had impact because of tone,
atmosphere, mood, the experimentation that allowed the expression of ideas that were
implied , inferred, suggested in a manner that broadened my notions of what could be
said or done when one picks up the pen or sits at the keyboard.
My first job in a bookstore was in the 70s, while I was studying literature and writing
at the University of California, San Diego, at a Crown Books in La Jolla. It was eye-
opening to the extent that it was the first time in my life — I was in my mid-twenties —
that I experienced books in purely retail terms and what the public was reading. It
wasn't Henry James, Verlaine, or Virginia Woolf in large part, but instead an endless
stream of self-help gurus, celebrity books, computer programming books, romances. It
wasn't a good experience in general. I did become friends with Dennis Wills, who
started his fabled bookstore D.G.Wills Books , also in La Jolla, and later came to work
for him after a satisfying work history of employment at other book stores that had a
broader , much broader range than Crown had and who hired employees who were
genuine book folks.
DG: You write essays and reviews for the San Diego Troubadour. Who
are some musicians people should be paying attention to these days?
I'm not up on the majority of musical trends of the last ten years, I'm afraid. What I've
done recently for music pieces has been offering longer works related to my teen and
adult years, some artists who might have been forgotten who deserve a new listening
and consideration. Donovan, Melanie Safka, Moby Grape, Love ,Phil Ochs, Chuck
Berry, Wall of Voodoo, The MC5. This started when I noticed elements in songs, pop
songs, rock songs, soul songs, that worked and contributed to the particular tracks or
albums as being splendidly effective works of craft and even art. It's like re-reading
books you read in your youth, in college, or after graduation: you are curious whether
some novels or poems still work with some kind of artistry and whether they remain
relevant or entertaining, without apology.
Also, I've been going through the recordings of jazz artists, and you can imagine it's
the kind of self-assignment that will never be completed. But it's a quality burden to
bear. Mingus, Monk, Miles, Larry Coryell, Sun Ra, Weather Report, Michael Brecker,
Steve Coleman, Anthony Braxton have been in constant rotation in my home.
DG: You collaborated with Grammy-winning composer Libby Larsen to
adapt some of your poetry to music. This work premiered on August
22nd at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado. Can you speak a bit about
the music, how the poems were chosen, and the event in general?
It was a magical experience. Libby was in the bookstore in 2021 where I noted that
she was buying abut a hundred dollars in poetry books. I began to chat her up and she
asked me. After some talk about inspiration, the muse and touching lightly on
spirituality, she asked if I was a poet. I said yes. i have her three of my chapbooks that
were on hand as bonus, and two days later she returned with a handwritten letter of
introduction. She was asking permission to use some poems of mine for a song cycle
she was composing. Saying I was stunned is too mild a term to describe my reaction. I
said yes, of course, and noted when doing research on her via her website and many
YouTube videos of performances of her wide-ranging work that she liked to use the
words of poets for her art songs.
I trusted her implicitly, and it occurs to me that Libby is one of the most genuine
people I've ever met. She would seek my input, she said, wanting to make sure that
there was nothing I would object to in her adapting the stanzas, but my attitude was
that my part of this collaboration was completed, in these four pieces I'd written over
a ten-year period. It's been a feeling of mine that a poem isn't quite finished until
someone reads it closely and brings their experiences into the ideas , experiences, and
ironies a poet attempts to get across — the notion of expressing the inexpressible in
terms of the unforgettable — and arrives at meaning that is personal and profound. It's
wonderful, I think, that there can be any number of interpretations of a work, that
some meager words I compose find resonance with a wide variety of readers. This
was how I responded to bards whose spell I fell under: the poems I loved made me
think in a certain way and desire to create my own work. Over time, I have, it seems,
and I was , admittedly, excited having my verses interpreted musically.
The performance took place in a very fine, nearly acoustically perfect Harris Hall on
the Aspen Institute campus, a selection of three pieces for baritone and piano. The
baritone was Will Liverman, a rising star in the classical world with a richness of
range, color, and tone that makes you think of a place where deep bells ring. On piano
was the especially renowned Jonathon King, a fluidly dynamic accompanist. The
music that Libby composed for the three lyrics performed were her interpretations of
not just the words but also what she heard in the freewheeling movement of the line
breaks. Perhaps too often I've described my sense of rhythm in the spirit of a Coltrane
or Charlie Parker saxophone solo, hearing a pulse, a steadily shifting beat that fuels
each set of lines , with the stanza breaks as often as not being something like a pause
an improviser would take before going off on the next chorus to build on, at that
instance,, the melodic inventions he (or she) had just finished.
This was my sense of composing poems, each stanza being more or less a complete
statement on its own, and yet followed by another set of lines that tried to build on,
clarify or make ironic the ideas and ironies of the writing that came before, hopefully
adding up a certain kind of complexity that might not make sense in the conventional
manner but one that lets the reader “get” what it is I'm “getting at”. Libby is a
capacious composer who in her virtuosity uses a broad range of rhythms from the
wealth of music styles that have influenced her: 20th century modernism, canonical
works of the Old Masters, blues, gospel, folk traditions, rock and roll, and the jazz
tradition, from ragtime to big band to bebop and beyond. In her hands, the rhythms are
tweaked, merged, or set next to each other in parallel movements in ways that are
surprising. She is not afraid of dissonance or hard-edge transitions, but very little in
the work of hers I've listened to is strident. Her work is poetic on its terms, full of
colors and wonderful layers of movements; she can put in the middle of a mood one
of her song narrators might be in as they swirl a set of emotions that could be joy,
grief, celebration, or bemoaning of one's sad lot. She brought these elements to the
lyrics she transformed into musical statements.
What I imagined were fleeting jazz cadenzas and buttressing chord work, she opened
up into rhythmic patterns that accentuated the irony of the words. Sometimes in a
rush, other times quiet and lingering over particular phrases, King's piano backdrop
brought dynamic elements while Liverman's vocals climbed and sank , seduced,
mocked and declared the unrhymed lines before him; he was acting according the
shifts in Libby's composing. I found it all mesmerizing. In the last of the pieces he
sang, "My Father Intercepts My Trip to Another Planet", a memory of my late father
when I was a child, I made reference in the poem to my Dad breaking into song when
he got home from work, usually after he had a cocktail. The song he sang was "I Love
Paris". It's a vivid memory I have that's come to mind my whole life. Liverman sang
those lines in a soft passage toward the end of the piece, and Libby quoted "I Love
Paris" for the pianist to play just as the baritone was sweetly intoning the title. That
was the end of the song and the conclusion of that part of the recital, and you guessed
it, tears came to my eyes, corny as that might seem.
DG: Another passion of yours is street photography. Where are your
favorite places to shoot and would you like to share some of your
favorite work here?
Believe it nor, a favorite area for taking pictures has been the residential streets and
alleys of the beach area, particularly Pacific Beach and La Jolla, where it's always a
wonder to see what residents are setting out either on the curb or in the service
passages behind their homes. The lure is the accidental arrangement of discarded
things that wouldn't normally inhabit the same space, things like oversized plasma
TVs, stacks of paperback novels, abandoned computer modems, forlorn bicycles,
toasters, dozens of grimy gunning shows, forgotten canvases of some artist's attempt
at abstract art or landscape renderings, and certainly furniture of unlimited variety
such as swivel desk chairs, book cases , three-legged tables and one legged stools, all
manner of material things mashed together in offhand arrangements that are ironic, or
seem to be when I took a picture. I am also found of the older neighborhoods that still
contains the architectural styles of earlier decades. Areas like North Park, Hillcrest,
Kensington, University Heights, and especially Banker's Hill near Balboa Park, where
it seemed that all you had to do was point your camera in any direction and snap , the
result nearly always being an intriguing shot of the mixed blessings of living in a
densely populated community. Before the pandemic, I spent a good deal of time in
down town Diego where I went to most of the movies and live theater; while in the
area I snapped a couple of hundred photos over a decade's time, a record of the city's
center being transformed into something else. I've also become intrigued with bus
riders, the tired and haggard faces of citizens going to and coming from work or
whatever the particular day or night holds for them after they get to where they're
going.
DG: You’ve lived in San Diego since 1969. Where are your favorite places
in the city?
A city of many neighborhoods. I grew up early on in beachside towns, notably the
well-to-do community of La Jolla where I went to high school and later to college at
the University of California, San Diego. My favorite places in the city are the
University Heights, Kensington, Hillcrest and North Park neighborhoods where there
are concentrations of old homes built in the thirties and forties , abodes built by hand
with brick, lumber, concrete and stone as materials. Also love the abundance of trees
and all the diversity of the residents — young professionals, families, LGBTQ, whites,
Hispanics, Asian, working class, retired. I will say that San Diego's Balboa Park has
been a favorite location for decades — a lion's share of museums, live theater, music
performances, beautifully maintained. San Diego at it's finest , where you can escape
the problematic conditions of a cluttered down town and the overcrowded snarl of the
beach communities.
DG: The poems you write employ a direct, no-nonsense style, yet they
aren’t thematically repetitive the way some of Bukowski’s work can get.
Amiri Baraka was a major influence when you started writing. How have
subsequent writers affected your aesthetic over the years?
I was overwhelmed when I first heard Baraka on a 70s PBS program, a reading I
remember a good many black musicians performing a searing brand of free-jazz
improvisations while Baraka exclaimed mightily. His anger, energy, and sense of jazz-
cadenced tempos for his lines became a standard for me to imitate. Imitate I did, I was
seventeen or eighteen at the time, and I did it badly in terms of poetry but reading and
hearing Baraka helped me emerge from the rock-lyric obsessions I had previously and
it introduced me to a universe of poets who were writers , not tune smiths, artists
dedicated to expressing incredible things on the page, pen in hand. It was a varied
mix, such as New York School poets John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, two distinct
writers from whom I came to understand different ways to write verse. From Ashbery,
the ability to weave the concrete and the abstract, of how to present a consciousness
that perceives and recalls material things and events, but then associates those people
and things to a larger private world that draws unexpected associations. From O'Hara,
I learned something about how to use the first person in a poem. O'Hara's was a
master of doing this. After a period where I was trying rather deliberately to write in a
style similar to both of those poets, with time I think I evolved to where I grasped
what they were doing to succeed in their writing, and with time pared my then-
verbose stanzas to a what, I think, is my voice. Maybe Harold Bloom's idea of "the
anxiety of influence" comes into play here,where the process means confronting a
major poet of genius and learning to be influenced by their style, methods, and
personality while writing in style not at all like the older poets who provide the spark
to create one's own work. Many poets I read get to the keyboard to engage the Muse,
or at least look for it. Language poets like Ron Silliman and Bob Perelman, others ,
some belatedly, like Emily Dickinson, Thomas Lux, Wanda Coleman, A.R.Ammons,
certainly Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen. San Diego-based poets Paul Dresman (now in
Oregon) and the late Steve Kowit , two absolute masters of their craft, were my
mentors in the early years of my writing, in the mid 70s. I met both men while a
student at UCSD in the Literature Department. I'd been writing long-winded tracts
that were artless and admittedly pretentious but glutted with striking images, a
holdover from my early adoration of Dylan. Paul liked some imagery and some
passages here and there in the longer exhortations I showed him. I remember he took a
red pen and circled parts he liked , and offered some suggestions as to how the parts
he isolated could be linked together thematically, and how some passages could be
arranged without rewrite. I recollect him saying something akin to saying that half of
the art of writing poetry was in the editing and rewrite: revision, in other words. I
became less verbose over time, and eventually , in my thirties , my style evolved to a
voice that sounds , to me, genuine and right.
DG: In a short essay called “Poetry should kick you in the nuts,” you
write: “I stopped going to open readings about twelve years ago for a
combination of reasons, lack of time foremost among them, but coming
up near second was the weariness of being subjected to a continuous
stream of encrypted banality.” Towards the end of the piece, readers get
the sense that the second reason is really the first one. It’s been eight
years since you wrote this. Do you think the problem stems from a
simple matter of aesthetics, or something else? Is it because we have
too many MFA programs? Is it because we don’t have enough?
What motivated the essay and its rude title was the general exasperation I felt when it
seemed that an outsized portion of the published poets I was reading over a period
seemed to be wallowing in passive confessional poems, a species of latter-day verse
that lacked the verve or inventive language of ,say, Robert Lowell or Sylvia, to name
two outstanding examples of the genre. Lets say that many of the poems seemed
passive, defeatist, a mannered expression of dread over both the consequential and
minor incidents of a poet's life where the poems, such as they seemed at the time I
wrote my perhaps unfair grievance , seemed without rhythm , pulse, or purpose. It
seemed that so many would-be bards had nothing to say about what it was they were
trying to write about, Another matter that concerned me at the same time were poets
who spent an inordinate amount of time composing poems about poetry and worse,
speaking of themselves as poets in the stanzas. One an appreciate an irony being
established or a comic element presented, but there was little of any of that in the
deluge ; so much of it was dead serious, dead as charred soil, so much intoning of
serious matters about the art form's magical powers and the grave responsibility the
Poet, capital "p", has in the avocation. This works , I know, for different traditions, but
it's a red flag for me, as the poems regarding poetry as subject are tone deaf and the
Poets, capital "p", lack an ear for the rhythm and melody, the expressive music of
language that allows for new ideas and unexpected insights. My favorite poets are
those who engage the world that defies whatever wishful thinking one might have
about what the totality of all things should "mean" , and have the ability to combine
scenario, image, and tone and through an imaginative association of things — a sense
of improvising on a melody, perhaps, which shows my bias toward jazz — and arriving
in a place by poem's end that both poet and reader didn't expect. Frank O'Hara and
Thomas Lux does this, Bukowski at his best, the late Sarai Austin does this, Paul
Dresman, Gerald Locklin, Wanda Coleman, even Ashbery , as opaque as he can be,
gives you an idea, a definite idea of working one's way through an unexplained
existence with the senses they happen to have. These are poets who have , more or
less, broken away from any community consensus about what poetry "needs to be" or
what a poet does. MFA programs and various trends in avant garde or experimental
writing tend to become mainstream over time and soon enough the innovations
become canon , which , at the risk of generalizing far too broadly, creates a good
many scribes who write in styles that sound borrowed, second hand, with some slight
stylizing. Quantity changes quality, to use an over-cited remark. But I take great joy in
the poem where craft , inspiration and a inspired refusal to resort to easy resolution
results in surprise and resulting inspiration. The kind of poetry that makes me think
differently about the world as it happens.
DG: You’re known for writing uncompromisingly direct reviews of people’s
poetry, and they’re not always negative, either. How do poets react to these?
A few poets have sent me emails to thank me for a what they thought was a great
interpretation of their poem, if what I wrote happened to be favorable. Others
commented directly on the blog to explain poems and their intentions when they
composed them. And I remember a couple of poets mentioning what I'd written on
their blogs and academic web pages. There was a well published poet of some acclaim
who took great exception to what I'd written about a piece he had published on Slate ,
and announced on the magazine's Poetry message board that he was offering an
unspecified reward to any reader who could find what he considered to be an
egregiously inaccurate interpretation. No one to my memory took him up on the offer.
I imagine the reactions of poets who took the time to read what I'd had to say were in
equal parts delighted, bemused, irritated.
DG: What are you reading and working on these days?
Poets Tracy K.Smith, Amy King, Cid Corman, and working my way through
Ashbery's epic poem “Flow Chart”. I'm collaborating on a piece with a friend, writer
Barry Alfonso, on the Paul Simon song “American Tune”, a beautiful melody and
lyric from his 1973 album "There Goes Rhymin' Simon". It's a fascinating dialogue
we're having because the song presents us with a kind of elegy for the American
Dream, a vague but attractive idea that suggests that despite our population's diversity,
there is no division, as we are unified that hard work , anyone could find a measure of
success and good fortune . This idea has been made entirely problematic given our
country's recent and not so recent history. The song addresses the situation where
idealism slams up against hard and unsentimental realities. I'm looking forward to
finishing my contribution, which just gets longer the more I write.
DG: I’d like to begin with your work as a bookseller. Aspiring writers
want MFAs — they want to publish their books, but very few are actually
interested in selling books that aren’t theirs. Working in this field must
give you a unique sense of what’s happening in the literary world. Can
you talk about when you took up this profession and how it has shaped
the way you see literature?
I was a reader in full bloom by the time I came to work in bookstores in the early
eighties, as I was lucky enough that my mother read to me as a child . That fact that I
was hard of hearing from birth, a forty percent loss, made me lean in closer to my
mother's voice as she read stories to me; I could hear the prose and understand the
rhymes, and the evocations of the words as they laid out a compelling narrative was
something like music to me. I understood it, I felt something greater than what my
imagination had concocted before, and early on I wanted to write my own stories. I
loved comic books and used to write and draw my own comic strips, I began to write
short prose sketches, I even tried my hand at writing little plays, usually fantasy
scenarios. And so it went, the more elevated the books I began to read, the greater my
desire to write in more adventurous ways.
The discovery of Bob Dylan and through him T.S.Eliot changed everything, as the
fragmented images, the associative leaps between stanzas, the dark and alluring
surrealism of both those scribes fascinated me for reasons I didn't immediately
understand — writing that made no conventional sense as in a message or a moral the
reader can take away with them, but writing that had impact because of tone,
atmosphere, mood, the experimentation that allowed the expression of ideas that were
implied , inferred, suggested in a manner that broadened my notions of what could be
said or done when one picks up the pen or sits at the keyboard.
My first job in a bookstore was in the 70s, while I was studying literature and writing
at the University of California, San Diego, at a Crown Books in La Jolla. It was eye-
opening to the extent that it was the first time in my life — I was in my mid-twenties —
that I experienced books in purely retail terms and what the public was reading. It
wasn't Henry James, Verlaine, or Virginia Woolf in large part, but instead an endless
stream of self-help gurus, celebrity books, computer programming books, romances. It
wasn't a good experience in general. I did become friends with Dennis Wills, who
started his fabled bookstore D.G.Wills Books , also in La Jolla, and later came to work
for him after a satisfying work history of employment at other book stores that had a
broader , much broader range than Crown had and who hired employees who were
genuine book folks.
DG: You write essays and reviews for the San Diego Troubadour. Who
are some musicians people should be paying attention to these days?
I'm not up on the majority of musical trends of the last ten years, I'm afraid. What I've
done recently for music pieces has been offering longer works related to my teen and
adult years, some artists who might have been forgotten who deserve a new listening
and consideration. Donovan, Melanie Safka, Moby Grape, Love ,Phil Ochs, Chuck
Berry, Wall of Voodoo, The MC5. This started when I noticed elements in songs, pop
songs, rock songs, soul songs, that worked and contributed to the particular tracks or
albums as being splendidly effective works of craft and even art. It's like re-reading
books you read in your youth, in college, or after graduation: you are curious whether
some novels or poems still work with some kind of artistry and whether they remain
relevant or entertaining, without apology.
Also, I've been going through the recordings of jazz artists, and you can imagine it's
the kind of self-assignment that will never be completed. But it's a quality burden to
bear. Mingus, Monk, Miles, Larry Coryell, Sun Ra, Weather Report, Michael Brecker,
Steve Coleman, Anthony Braxton have been in constant rotation in my home.
DG: You collaborated with Grammy-winning composer Libby Larsen to
adapt some of your poetry to music. This work premiered on August
22nd at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado. Can you speak a bit about
the music, how the poems were chosen, and the event in general?
It was a magical experience. Libby was in the bookstore in 2021 where I noted that
she was buying abut a hundred dollars in poetry books. I began to chat her up and she
asked me. After some talk about inspiration, the muse and touching lightly on
spirituality, she asked if I was a poet. I said yes. i have her three of my chapbooks that
were on hand as bonus, and two days later she returned with a handwritten letter of
introduction. She was asking permission to use some poems of mine for a song cycle
she was composing. Saying I was stunned is too mild a term to describe my reaction. I
said yes, of course, and noted when doing research on her via her website and many
YouTube videos of performances of her wide-ranging work that she liked to use the
words of poets for her art songs.
I trusted her implicitly, and it occurs to me that Libby is one of the most genuine
people I've ever met. She would seek my input, she said, wanting to make sure that
there was nothing I would object to in her adapting the stanzas, but my attitude was
that my part of this collaboration was completed, in these four pieces I'd written over
a ten-year period. It's been a feeling of mine that a poem isn't quite finished until
someone reads it closely and brings their experiences into the ideas , experiences, and
ironies a poet attempts to get across — the notion of expressing the inexpressible in
terms of the unforgettable — and arrives at meaning that is personal and profound. It's
wonderful, I think, that there can be any number of interpretations of a work, that
some meager words I compose find resonance with a wide variety of readers. This
was how I responded to bards whose spell I fell under: the poems I loved made me
think in a certain way and desire to create my own work. Over time, I have, it seems,
and I was , admittedly, excited having my verses interpreted musically.
The performance took place in a very fine, nearly acoustically perfect Harris Hall on
the Aspen Institute campus, a selection of three pieces for baritone and piano. The
baritone was Will Liverman, a rising star in the classical world with a richness of
range, color, and tone that makes you think of a place where deep bells ring. On piano
was the especially renowned Jonathon King, a fluidly dynamic accompanist. The
music that Libby composed for the three lyrics performed were her interpretations of
not just the words but also what she heard in the freewheeling movement of the line
breaks. Perhaps too often I've described my sense of rhythm in the spirit of a Coltrane
or Charlie Parker saxophone solo, hearing a pulse, a steadily shifting beat that fuels
each set of lines , with the stanza breaks as often as not being something like a pause
an improviser would take before going off on the next chorus to build on, at that
instance,, the melodic inventions he (or she) had just finished.
This was my sense of composing poems, each stanza being more or less a complete
statement on its own, and yet followed by another set of lines that tried to build on,
clarify or make ironic the ideas and ironies of the writing that came before, hopefully
adding up a certain kind of complexity that might not make sense in the conventional
manner but one that lets the reader “get” what it is I'm “getting at”. Libby is a
capacious composer who in her virtuosity uses a broad range of rhythms from the
wealth of music styles that have influenced her: 20th century modernism, canonical
works of the Old Masters, blues, gospel, folk traditions, rock and roll, and the jazz
tradition, from ragtime to big band to bebop and beyond. In her hands, the rhythms are
tweaked, merged, or set next to each other in parallel movements in ways that are
surprising. She is not afraid of dissonance or hard-edge transitions, but very little in
the work of hers I've listened to is strident. Her work is poetic on its terms, full of
colors and wonderful layers of movements; she can put in the middle of a mood one
of her song narrators might be in as they swirl a set of emotions that could be joy,
grief, celebration, or bemoaning of one's sad lot. She brought these elements to the
lyrics she transformed into musical statements.
What I imagined were fleeting jazz cadenzas and buttressing chord work, she opened
up into rhythmic patterns that accentuated the irony of the words. Sometimes in a
rush, other times quiet and lingering over particular phrases, King's piano backdrop
brought dynamic elements while Liverman's vocals climbed and sank , seduced,
mocked and declared the unrhymed lines before him; he was acting according the
shifts in Libby's composing. I found it all mesmerizing. In the last of the pieces he
sang, "My Father Intercepts My Trip to Another Planet", a memory of my late father
when I was a child, I made reference in the poem to my Dad breaking into song when
he got home from work, usually after he had a cocktail. The song he sang was "I Love
Paris". It's a vivid memory I have that's come to mind my whole life. Liverman sang
those lines in a soft passage toward the end of the piece, and Libby quoted "I Love
Paris" for the pianist to play just as the baritone was sweetly intoning the title. That
was the end of the song and the conclusion of that part of the recital, and you guessed
it, tears came to my eyes, corny as that might seem.
DG: Another passion of yours is street photography. Where are your
favorite places to shoot and would you like to share some of your
favorite work here?
Believe it nor, a favorite area for taking pictures has been the residential streets and
alleys of the beach area, particularly Pacific Beach and La Jolla, where it's always a
wonder to see what residents are setting out either on the curb or in the service
passages behind their homes. The lure is the accidental arrangement of discarded
things that wouldn't normally inhabit the same space, things like oversized plasma
TVs, stacks of paperback novels, abandoned computer modems, forlorn bicycles,
toasters, dozens of grimy gunning shows, forgotten canvases of some artist's attempt
at abstract art or landscape renderings, and certainly furniture of unlimited variety
such as swivel desk chairs, book cases , three-legged tables and one legged stools, all
manner of material things mashed together in offhand arrangements that are ironic, or
seem to be when I took a picture. I am also found of the older neighborhoods that still
contains the architectural styles of earlier decades. Areas like North Park, Hillcrest,
Kensington, University Heights, and especially Banker's Hill near Balboa Park, where
it seemed that all you had to do was point your camera in any direction and snap , the
result nearly always being an intriguing shot of the mixed blessings of living in a
densely populated community. Before the pandemic, I spent a good deal of time in
down town Diego where I went to most of the movies and live theater; while in the
area I snapped a couple of hundred photos over a decade's time, a record of the city's
center being transformed into something else. I've also become intrigued with bus
riders, the tired and haggard faces of citizens going to and coming from work or
whatever the particular day or night holds for them after they get to where they're
going.
DG: You’ve lived in San Diego since 1969. Where are your favorite places
in the city?
A city of many neighborhoods. I grew up early on in beachside towns, notably the
well-to-do community of La Jolla where I went to high school and later to college at
the University of California, San Diego. My favorite places in the city are the
University Heights, Kensington, Hillcrest and North Park neighborhoods where there
are concentrations of old homes built in the thirties and forties , abodes built by hand
with brick, lumber, concrete and stone as materials. Also love the abundance of trees
and all the diversity of the residents — young professionals, families, LGBTQ, whites,
Hispanics, Asian, working class, retired. I will say that San Diego's Balboa Park has
been a favorite location for decades — a lion's share of museums, live theater, music
performances, beautifully maintained. San Diego at it's finest , where you can escape
the problematic conditions of a cluttered down town and the overcrowded snarl of the
beach communities.
DG: The poems you write employ a direct, no-nonsense style, yet they
aren’t thematically repetitive the way some of Bukowski’s work can get.
Amiri Baraka was a major influence when you started writing. How have
subsequent writers affected your aesthetic over the years?
I was overwhelmed when I first heard Baraka on a 70s PBS program, a reading I
remember a good many black musicians performing a searing brand of free-jazz
improvisations while Baraka exclaimed mightily. His anger, energy, and sense of jazz-
cadenced tempos for his lines became a standard for me to imitate. Imitate I did, I was
seventeen or eighteen at the time, and I did it badly in terms of poetry but reading and
hearing Baraka helped me emerge from the rock-lyric obsessions I had previously and
it introduced me to a universe of poets who were writers , not tune smiths, artists
dedicated to expressing incredible things on the page, pen in hand. It was a varied
mix, such as New York School poets John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, two distinct
writers from whom I came to understand different ways to write verse. From Ashbery,
the ability to weave the concrete and the abstract, of how to present a consciousness
that perceives and recalls material things and events, but then associates those people
and things to a larger private world that draws unexpected associations. From O'Hara,
I learned something about how to use the first person in a poem. O'Hara's was a
master of doing this. After a period where I was trying rather deliberately to write in a
style similar to both of those poets, with time I think I evolved to where I grasped
what they were doing to succeed in their writing, and with time pared my then-
verbose stanzas to a what, I think, is my voice. Maybe Harold Bloom's idea of "the
anxiety of influence" comes into play here,where the process means confronting a
major poet of genius and learning to be influenced by their style, methods, and
personality while writing in style not at all like the older poets who provide the spark
to create one's own work. Many poets I read get to the keyboard to engage the Muse,
or at least look for it. Language poets like Ron Silliman and Bob Perelman, others ,
some belatedly, like Emily Dickinson, Thomas Lux, Wanda Coleman, A.R.Ammons,
certainly Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen. San Diego-based poets Paul Dresman (now in
Oregon) and the late Steve Kowit , two absolute masters of their craft, were my
mentors in the early years of my writing, in the mid 70s. I met both men while a
student at UCSD in the Literature Department. I'd been writing long-winded tracts
that were artless and admittedly pretentious but glutted with striking images, a
holdover from my early adoration of Dylan. Paul liked some imagery and some
passages here and there in the longer exhortations I showed him. I remember he took a
red pen and circled parts he liked , and offered some suggestions as to how the parts
he isolated could be linked together thematically, and how some passages could be
arranged without rewrite. I recollect him saying something akin to saying that half of
the art of writing poetry was in the editing and rewrite: revision, in other words. I
became less verbose over time, and eventually , in my thirties , my style evolved to a
voice that sounds , to me, genuine and right.
DG: In a short essay called “Poetry should kick you in the nuts,” you
write: “I stopped going to open readings about twelve years ago for a
combination of reasons, lack of time foremost among them, but coming
up near second was the weariness of being subjected to a continuous
stream of encrypted banality.” Towards the end of the piece, readers get
the sense that the second reason is really the first one. It’s been eight
years since you wrote this. Do you think the problem stems from a
simple matter of aesthetics, or something else? Is it because we have
too many MFA programs? Is it because we don’t have enough?
What motivated the essay and its rude title was the general exasperation I felt when it
seemed that an outsized portion of the published poets I was reading over a period
seemed to be wallowing in passive confessional poems, a species of latter-day verse
that lacked the verve or inventive language of ,say, Robert Lowell or Sylvia, to name
two outstanding examples of the genre. Lets say that many of the poems seemed
passive, defeatist, a mannered expression of dread over both the consequential and
minor incidents of a poet's life where the poems, such as they seemed at the time I
wrote my perhaps unfair grievance , seemed without rhythm , pulse, or purpose. It
seemed that so many would-be bards had nothing to say about what it was they were
trying to write about, Another matter that concerned me at the same time were poets
who spent an inordinate amount of time composing poems about poetry and worse,
speaking of themselves as poets in the stanzas. One an appreciate an irony being
established or a comic element presented, but there was little of any of that in the
deluge ; so much of it was dead serious, dead as charred soil, so much intoning of
serious matters about the art form's magical powers and the grave responsibility the
Poet, capital "p", has in the avocation. This works , I know, for different traditions, but
it's a red flag for me, as the poems regarding poetry as subject are tone deaf and the
Poets, capital "p", lack an ear for the rhythm and melody, the expressive music of
language that allows for new ideas and unexpected insights. My favorite poets are
those who engage the world that defies whatever wishful thinking one might have
about what the totality of all things should "mean" , and have the ability to combine
scenario, image, and tone and through an imaginative association of things — a sense
of improvising on a melody, perhaps, which shows my bias toward jazz — and arriving
in a place by poem's end that both poet and reader didn't expect. Frank O'Hara and
Thomas Lux does this, Bukowski at his best, the late Sarai Austin does this, Paul
Dresman, Gerald Locklin, Wanda Coleman, even Ashbery , as opaque as he can be,
gives you an idea, a definite idea of working one's way through an unexplained
existence with the senses they happen to have. These are poets who have , more or
less, broken away from any community consensus about what poetry "needs to be" or
what a poet does. MFA programs and various trends in avant garde or experimental
writing tend to become mainstream over time and soon enough the innovations
become canon , which , at the risk of generalizing far too broadly, creates a good
many scribes who write in styles that sound borrowed, second hand, with some slight
stylizing. Quantity changes quality, to use an over-cited remark. But I take great joy in
the poem where craft , inspiration and a inspired refusal to resort to easy resolution
results in surprise and resulting inspiration. The kind of poetry that makes me think
differently about the world as it happens.
DG: You’re known for writing uncompromisingly direct reviews of people’s
poetry, and they’re not always negative, either. How do poets react to these?
A few poets have sent me emails to thank me for a what they thought was a great
interpretation of their poem, if what I wrote happened to be favorable. Others
commented directly on the blog to explain poems and their intentions when they
composed them. And I remember a couple of poets mentioning what I'd written on
their blogs and academic web pages. There was a well published poet of some acclaim
who took great exception to what I'd written about a piece he had published on Slate ,
and announced on the magazine's Poetry message board that he was offering an
unspecified reward to any reader who could find what he considered to be an
egregiously inaccurate interpretation. No one to my memory took him up on the offer.
I imagine the reactions of poets who took the time to read what I'd had to say were in
equal parts delighted, bemused, irritated.
DG: What are you reading and working on these days?
Poets Tracy K.Smith, Amy King, Cid Corman, and working my way through
Ashbery's epic poem “Flow Chart”. I'm collaborating on a piece with a friend, writer
Barry Alfonso, on the Paul Simon song “American Tune”, a beautiful melody and
lyric from his 1973 album "There Goes Rhymin' Simon". It's a fascinating dialogue
we're having because the song presents us with a kind of elegy for the American
Dream, a vague but attractive idea that suggests that despite our population's diversity,
there is no division, as we are unified that hard work , anyone could find a measure of
success and good fortune . This idea has been made entirely problematic given our
country's recent and not so recent history. The song addresses the situation where
idealism slams up against hard and unsentimental realities. I'm looking forward to
finishing my contribution, which just gets longer the more I write.
