Category: Interviews (2024)

Interview by Erin O’Neill Armendarez

From the start, Aji’s art reviewers were intrigued by the unique, compelling creations of Kaya Davis. How, they wondered, could she fashion anything so tiny? Thanks to staff from Ability Now and to Davis herself, their questions were answered.

It’s clear that Davis is deeply focused on her craft, and on reaching a wider audience that will appreciate her work. Her drive is an inspiration. She has followed her own imagination and intuition into a pursuit that can only grow as she devises her own miniature tools and aspires to learn animation one day. Are you wondering whether your own wild idea could ever become a reality? Ask Kaya Davis. She has an answer for you.

EOA: Please share some basic background information about yourself with our readers.
KD: My name is Kaya. I am 28 years old, have autism, and am an artist from California. I grew up in Berkeley with my parents, as an only child who was adopted at birth. My hobbies are drawing, knitting, and origami, and I do it on a very tiny scale. I am a cat lover and I collect my drawings of dolls, specifically Barbie and Blythe dolls.

EOA: How and when did you discover your artistic talent?
KD: I have always loved to draw. I’ve also always preferred smaller toys, such as Polly Pocket and Barbie, over bigger toys like American Girl dolls. There were often times that I found myself wanting clothes and accessories for my dolls that I couldn’t buy in the store. As many children do, I would use art to express myself, but as I got older, I discovered that I could make a career from my skill of drawing people and crocheting or knitting the doll clothes and accessories I had always wished I could buy. That was when I was about 14 years old and knitting and crocheting miniatures has been a passion of mine ever since. Throughout high school, I improved my knitting, crocheting, and doing origami skills, and when I turned 21 I found that I wanted to focus only on miniatures.

EOA: What first attracted you to miniature forms?
KD: I have always seen my dolls as real people, not as dolls at all. I’ve also always been interested in fairytales about fairies and other mythical creatures, as well as the spiritual world. I would sit and draw the fairies, their tiny houses, and the tiny worlds I was imagining in my head. Once I started drawing and painting on a small scale, I realized that was my preference because of the control it gave me over my fine motor skills. The more I drew, the more interest people showed in buying my work, so I figured, why not make money doing something that I love?

EOA: How did you find Ability Now, and how has the program supported your art and your business?
KD: I found the program through a referral from Regional Center of the East Bay, a non-profit agency under contract with California to coordinate supports and services for people with developmental disabilities like me. Because I have autism, I tend to have art ideas all over the place. Before attending Ability Now’s Small Business Development Center, I was struggling with how to turn my passion for tiny art into a business. I couldn’t have gotten to where I am today if it wasn’t for Ability Now’s Small Business Development Center. The staff at Ability Now have helped me focus on my goals and given me structure.

EOA: Who are your mentors?
KD: Andre Wilson, the Small Business Manager, and Alva Gardner, the Small Business Vocational Coordinator, and all the small business staff at Ability Now have been mentors and supported me along the way. However, my iconic role model as an artist is Walt Disney. I’m very fascinated by animation and making a drawing come to life with a series of images, and am interested in learning animation in the future.

EOA: Please describe your process as an artist, from idea to finished piece.
KD: This varies depending on what I’m making. I often take walks to get inspiration. Then I usually think about what I want to make and sometimes how. While I’m walking, I visualize how I want the finished piece to look. Then I will sit down and draw or paint. Because of the small scale of my work, I often also make some of my own art supplies including tiny watercolor pads, paint palettes, and knitting needles. When I sit down to draw or paint a miniature, I try to complete the whole thing in one sitting.

EOA: Of all of your accomplishments, of which are you most proud, and why?
KD: Learning how to work on a tiny scale. Mastering my skills, I would say, because without being able to do that, I wouldn’t have my business or passion.

EOA: What are your short-term and long-term goals?
KD: My short-term goal is to make more work in a shorter period of time. Long term, I would like to be well known for my art – to me, this would mean having lots of followers on my business Instagram and YouTube.

EOA: What advice do you have for novice artists and entrepreneurs hoping to attract interest in what they have to offer?
KD: Find your passion and what sets you apart from everyone else. It’s important to market yourself in a way that makes you stand out. I still struggle with this, I must say, so just remember that it’s a process and takes time. Don’t give up on your passions and dreams – if something isn’t working, get advice from family, a mentor, or someone you look up to. Follow your passion and remember to always do what you love.

Interview by Erin Schalk
​
Helen f*ckuhara began her visual arts education at the Braille Institute in 1987. While being blind from birth, f*ckuhara has pursued the fine arts in earnest, dedicating her university studies to music. Today, she remains a prolific and passionate artist who works in ceramic, mosaic, printmaking, and fiber arts. In addition, her print Dancing Fingers was recently awarded an honorable mention in the American Printing House for the Blind’s (APH) annual art competition InSights.

“I like the feel -- the tactile qualities -- of mixed media projects since I use my hands to see. I also like how multimedia allows me to work independently. When I’m in the process of making a piece, I can feel and experience the design fully as I create it section by section. In my work, I also am open to letting things happen rather than sticking to one specific plan. However, when I finish a piece, I feel somewhat sad because my entire surface is covered, and I cannot experience each part of the design as well. So, I create again. And again.” -Helen f*ckuhara

Erin Schalk (ES): Please share with us how you came to be a visual artist:
Helen f*ckuhara (HF): I started at Braille Institute in Los Angeles during the end of September of 1987, when I moved from New York to California. That’s when I started taking art classes because the art teachers at Braille made it comfortable for me to do art, since art is generally done with your hands. Basically, it involved the colors and materials being explained to me in more detail.

I also learned from Hailstones and Halibut Bones, which is a children’s book. It takes colors and puts them into poetry so I have something concrete to relate to, for example, black is the color of licorice. I like to associate art with music since I was a musician originally. For example, I might think of the bright colors as piccolos in an orchestra.
The lower notes would be the darker colors, and so on. I used to do sewing when I lived in New York, so naturally, I worked with fabrics in different colors and textures. I was aware of colors, and I wrote the color combinations on a braille sheet to remember the combinations that go together. Sometimes if I am in the mood, I’ll make something unusual, which you can do in art!

I love doing art. I love the making of it rather than the completion because once it’s done it’s finished and hurrah. But when you’re doing it, I think it’s more fun.

ES: You studied music during your college days. How did your practice evolve into visual art? Is there overlap?
HF: I studied music at Hofstra University in Long Island, New York. I didn’t have any idea that one day I would be moving to California and go to Braille Institute, nor did I know that Braille even had an art or music program.
In time, I realized art and music work together in certain ways. I read music history books, so I figured there must be art history books! I began reading art history, took art history courses, and received six credits from Cal State Northridge. In art history, I had opportunities to do some art projects related to the class such as a beehive tomb [from the Bronze Age Mycenaean civilization].

If I’m working on an art piece, I’ve thought about how to make the piece connect to the sound of music. Some people can do that, but I find that’s difficult for me to do. When I try to make shapes, it’s never the same as what I’m visualizing in my mind. For example, when I saw the movie Chariots of Fire and they played the running music, I didn’t picture somebody running. I don’t know what that feels like or what that looks like visually. I can’t compare music with art that way. However, one thing I have done is take poems that people have written and put them to music.

ES: What artists, contemporary or classic, influence you most and why?
HF: It’s an interesting question. I mainly go by era more than individuals, since I cannot see or touch the work or have it in my hand. I prefer Renaissance and Baroque music, so I tend to like art of that nature as well. The difference is I do know I could write in the style of Beethoven, or I could change a song to fit a composer.
When it comes to art, things become a bit more complicated. If somebody says, “Do a piece like DaVinci or like Picasso,” it can happen sometimes. One time, I made a piece at my friend’s house, and she said, “That actually looks like a scene from Manzanar!” I said, “What do you know? It just happened!” Likewise, if someone says a piece of mine looks like a Monet or similar, I wouldn’t know, and I’m quite surprised because I don’t have anything touchable to compare.

I can do abstract art more than abstract music. With music, I’m used to rules. So, when I wrote music, I preferred writing music with rules, whereas music now can be more freeform, so you can do anything you want.
In regard to art, I like mosaics. I’d also be fascinated to try more paper mache sculpture sometime in the future.

ES: You grew up in an artistically rich environment in New York City, and your father was acclaimed watercolorist Henry f*ckuhara. How have these influences shaped you as an artist?
HF: My family was supportive of me, and my parents and family came to my concerts. My dad was always fond of watching the conductor more than listening to the music!

My father really became influential to me as a visual artist once I started taking art classes. Before that, we would only talk about art once in a while, and I didn’t know I was going to be taking art at Braille Institute at all. For a long time, I didn’t ever think about doing art myself. Also, my father didn’t know how to teach me art then, so we didn’t discuss it much. However, I went to his art workshops and demonstrations, and I found it interesting to listen to the art demonstrations if they would talk. And some of the people at the workshops would ask questions. I always enjoyed the questions.

I began taking art classes at Braille Institute because I knew you could do art with your hands. Things opened up and my father and I would discuss. Sometimes my dad would be painting and have music playing. I would ask him, “What kind of orchestral piece did you do today?” and he would laugh. So I could understand, he would say, “Well, I have violins here, and I have trumpets there. This one is a mixed orchestra.”

As time went on, I really wanted to do an art show with my father. First, he arranged for me to have a solo show. Later on when he became totally blind and still painted, he finally agreed to have a show with me. That was exciting!
When we had our show together, I imagined a 50-50 setup. But, my dad suggested I submit more pieces to the show and he would enter just a few. He was a well-known artist by then, and he didn’t want to dominate, rather, he wanted my art to be the highlight of the show. That really surprised me!

Later on, my father became fully blind and still continued to paint. He confided in me that he was more sure of himself as an artist even when he lost his vision, because he knew all that I was capable of as an artist.

ES: What are some of your favorite artistic media and why?
HF: I like them all. I like doing mosaics because you can use different shapes and different textures of pieces, and you can make your own tiles if you want. You can also incorporate found pieces to create an image. I’ve done mosaics that are freeform and ones more like a realistic picture. For example, I once made a mosaic artwork of my neighbor’s birds. He had a picture taken from a magazine so we had something to work from. Someone helped me because I couldn’t cut out the feet since they were really tiny, but I was able to put them in place. That was a challenge!

I also like paper mache. You can mix materials into the paper mache to give it different textures. For example, I’ve experimented with adding in sand and sequins. Of course, you can put in a variety of paint colors as well. I like that paper mache is light, versus clay which is heavy. I also like basketry because you can add a range of materials like beads, whether they’re commercial or handmade. You can have different patterns and shapes of baskets, as well as wide or narrow reeds. Mosaic, paper mache, and basketry...I would say these art forms have been the most successful for me.

ES: You once said about your ceramic and mosaic combo works, “When I’m making a piece, I can experience the design as I create it section by section.” Tell us more.
HF: Some of the clay medallions or shapes were found or abandoned in the studio. With the ceramic and mosaic pieces, they’re not in my head originally. It’s a matter of what I have to work with, and then it’s placement and glazing. So, I just do them as they come. I may have nine ceramic circles of a certain size, and I begin to arrange them. Once I can say that it feels like a nice arrangement, I begin fitting ceramic or glass mosaic tiles in between and so on.

Sometimes I work in sections, and sometimes I don’t because I have the whole board to work with, unless it’s a particular section with a particular color of tiles. Then, I might try to do a border first, then fill the inside.

ES: What do you hope your audience will gain when they encounter your artwork?
HF: I leave it up to the eye of the beholder. That’s why a lot of my work is untitled. Viewers have to look for it. When people ask me about my art, I don’t have a list of all the textures I used, where I placed them, or what colors they are.
I think things change in people’s minds when they view my work. Why did I use a certain color in a certain place? Not seeing, I have no idea. I just hope that when I’m able to see them - if I get my sight back while on Earth - that I would enjoy seeing as much as I enjoy doing them.

My father used to say to me, “Seeing is believing.” And I would say in return, “Believing is seeing.”

​Interview conducted by Erin O’Neill Armendarez

To think I almost missed him. I was reading through poetry submissions (I read all submissions several times on different days for exactly this reason) and I stumbled upon Simon Perchik’s poems for the third or fourth time. This time, as I slowly read the poems, something happened, some kind of, what? I felt a deep emotional connection, a pathos. I reread. What exactly was I feeling, and why? Based on the words, the syntax, the lines, the stanzas—I couldn’t figure it out.

Somehow, through the miracle of black shapes on a white page, words, Simon Perchik had compelled me to look, to think, and to feel more deeply, although I’d be hard pressed to explain what his poems are “about”. I knew we had to include his work in the spring 2021 issue. After I sent an acceptance message, he offered to send a review copy of The Weston Poems (2021), and before long I had received a hard copy of that wonderful collection but also a wealth of information on Perchik and his poetry from Rich Soos, Editor in Chief at Cholla Needles Arts and Literary Library in Los Angeles, from whom I was fortunate enough to receive a digital review copy of Perchik’s magnum opus The Family of Man Poems. Through Soos, I learned that Perchik had spent 8 years tirelessly working on this book, which was published April 1, 2021, by Cholla Needles Arts and Literary Library in honor of National Poetry Month.

Soos hails Perchik as a “national treasure whose work has appeared in over 700 magazines, including The New Yorker, Poetry, Partisan Review, The Nation, [and] North American Review. He is 97 years old (born December 24, 1923) and over 30 of his books have been published since his first book of poetry, Bomber’s Moon, in 1949.”
According to Library Journal (Nov. 2000), “Perchik is the most widely published unknown poet in America….” All these years, he has been relentlessly honing his craft, and his goal? From the poet himself, of The Family of Man Poems, to testify to humanity’s “overriding need to comfort one another.”

Maybe that’s what I was experiencing that day when I paused for a careful reading of Perchik’s submission, comfort in recognizing that these poems, while they refuse to speak of anyone in particular, spoke of us all, of things that, while almost inexpressible, are possibly more important than anything else. Interested? If so, I invite you to read on.

Erin O’Neill Armendarez (EOA): Your latest collection of poems, The Family of Man Poems, 1982-1990, represents eight years of intensive work, a true labor of love. Please share with our readers a brief overview of this book and what it means to you as a poet at this point in your career.

Simon Perchik (SP): You asked what, if any, meaning The Family of Man Poems has for me. I don’t know the answer to that. I never considered the book as a whole. Just wrote a poem prompted by the first photograph (in the collection published by MoMA) and kept on going. I never considered the photos as a whole, nor my poems as a whole. But I now think I was wrong. On reflection the 482 photos are really 1 photo. And maybe I too, have written just 1 poem (in 482 stanzas.)

EOA: Most poets reading this interview will be jealous to discover that Charles Olson, the famous Black Mountain poet, actually wrote a blurb for the cover of one of your books. You have known so many esteemed poets and artists over the years. Which would you say was the most influential on your career as a poet, and why?

SP: You mentioned the blurb Charles Olson gave me for my first collection. Have a great story to tell you. Though I wrote in college, after admission to the bar in 1950 I didn’t write for about 10 years while building a law practice. When I began to write I found a copy of Black Mountain Review in the house and sent them some poems. I got back a letter saying the magazine had folded some five years ago. It was signed by Olson who went on to ask, “Did Corman get in touch with you?” What a welcome back! That he remembered my name, that he ever knew it had a lasting impression. He was a very generous man. But don’t think I know many poets. I don’t.

EOA: You have described your process for writing poetry in previous interviews, first writing several pages on a selected photograph or image, and then writing several more pages on disparate topics drawn from your readings on subjects in philosophy, mythology, or science. The poem itself spontaneously emerges as you attempt to resolve contradictions, finding your “hook”, which signals the beginning of the budding poem. Do I have that right? And has this process evolved or changed over the decades, and if so, in what ways?

SP: Yes, you have it right. I confront a photograph with a contradictory, irreconcilable image or idea from myth or science and then reconcile the two. Exactly what a metaphor does for a living. And it never fails. A perfect cure for “writers’ block” I hope your readers will agree after reading “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities”.

EOA: You are on record as one who eschews narrative poetry, and also as one who is deeply moved by the abstract painting of artists like Mark Rothko, the sorts of paintings that sometimes leave skeptics standing in museums thinking, “This is art?” In your opinion, how are abstractions depicting the intangible able to inspire such deep power and pathos?

SP: You mentioned Mark Rothko. He’s my role model. He knows that when you stand in front of his painting there is nothing of the real world in it. To cope, the brain will shut down. And the viewer’s unconscious tries to make sense of it. What we have in this art form is the artist’s subconscious talking to the viewer’s subconscious. I try to do that.

EOA: The philosopher Wittgenstein is famous for having said, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” In an interview with Tim McLafferty (Forge Magazine), you defined poetry as “words that inform the reader of that which cannot be articulated.” Hence, your poetry seems to try to express the inexpressible. Why, in your opinion, is this preferable to telling a story?

SP: You ask why not telling a story to reach into the reader is preferred over telling a story. The answer is simple: one is prose, the other is poetry. And poetry has the power. If I say “Your mother died” and you start to cry, if I ask you why you’re crying, you say, “You just told me my mother died.” Makes sense. But if you are listening to Max Bruck and you start to cry, if I ask you why, you have to say, “I don’t know.” Music is the most abstract art form. Maybe poets should move a bit closer to the unconscious composers work with.

EOA: I am curious about one thing, so I have to ask to gain a better understanding, if only for myself, but possibly also for readers. I completely understand what you’re saying about why you have chosen to use abstraction in your poetry. Your poems operate much differently than do narrative poems, and you accomplish what you set out to accomplish with them, which is, to me, quite mysterious, given your process.

It seems to me that there is prose that could be considered abstract as well, i.e some of Virginia Woolf’s work, some of Gertrude Stein’s, maybe some metafiction or magical realism. Or think of that ambitious, perplexing work Ulysses, by James Joyce. As you said in your essay, there are varying degrees of abstraction, given the writer. Hence--surely you do not mean to say that the narrative poems of Robert Browning, Robert Frost, Keats, Yeats, or Tennyson are not poetry?

SP: I agree with you that prose can also be abstract. And you have listed 3 of the greatest. I guess, being a lawyer, I feel the literary world needs to more clearly define what words may be called poetry and what may be called prose. Thomas Wolf uses the paragraph form for some very moving poetry. So “prose-poem” could also use a more exact definition. Maybe it’s hopeless. Writers write and let others decide where to slot the work. Maybe definitions are OK for law but have no business in art. As you see, though, as I have opinions, I also have nothing but doubts. Wish I could be more sure of my ideas.

EOA: In the same interview, you mentioned the collective unconscious, saying, “If I’m dealing with my subconscious, I’m dealing with yours, so that would be the connection.” When I read the submission that inspired this interview, although I had not yet read about your process, I felt that connection as I read your poetry. So—is your process and purpose more intuitive? When you find your hook, is it something you feel, or something you know, or both?

SP: You ask about what happens once I get “the hook”. Though you need a “starter” to make yogurt and “the hook” to begin a poem the similarity ends there. The “hook” more often than not will disappear. It served its purpose and got the ball rolling, so to speak. Once the poem has a footing, I pretty much let it go where it wants. At the end I’m as surprised as anyone.

EOA: Your poems communicate powerful feeling, yet I noticed you seldom, if ever, use words like joy, anger, courage, fear, sadness—the nouns that represent inner states of being. Do you consciously edit those words out, and if so, how does this help to create the intended effect on readers?

SP: Yes, I edit out the words that tell the reader how they should feel. I try to use words that will suggest it in a round-about way.

EOA: You seldom read your poems aloud in public, so let me ask you this: should readers attempt to read your poems aloud? Is it important for them to experience them that way? Do you read aloud to yourself as you revise? Or is it better for readers to focus on careful exploration of the visual and mental images along with the careful punctuation (or lack thereof) and shifts in syntax to fully experience each poem?

SP: I don’t like to read my poetry in public because it’s too personal, comes with a lot of baggage. Once I read a poem and froze on stage at the 4th line. I couldn’t finish the poem or the reading. Who needs it! If others find pleasure in reading the poems out loud, I’m happy. Very happy. I do not read the poem aloud while working on it.

EOA: In another interview with McLafferty, you said, “There are so many reasons why a poem is rejected. And what makes you think that the editors know what they are doing anyhow?” I laughed when I read that, because I know that it is true. We editors may miss some of the most unique, most profound work looking for something in particular, reading when we’re tired, pushing deadlines, etc. We, too, are human. What other advice do you have for aspiring poets?

SP: You ask if I have any advice for aspiring poets. Yes, I do. Don’t take anyone’s advice. Just read the poems. Just get to know the territory, what’s out there.

EOA: Are you working on another project now, or are you resting for a bit after completion of The Family of Man Poems?

SP: Yes, I am working on a new collection of photographs. I’m about halfway finished. I better be careful. I’m pushing 98 and the one thing the gods don’t like is hubris. So I won’t say more.

Interview conducted by William Nesbitt

David Kirby’s collection The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2007. Kirby is the author of almost forty books. A Johns Hopkins PhD, Kirby teaches at Florida State University, where he has taught for over fifty years, won five major university teaching awards, and is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English. Kirby has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Recently, the Florida Humanities Council presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing. He lives in Tallahassee with his wife, Barbara Hamby, a poet and fiction writer who also teaches at FSU.

In this interview we discuss his latest poetry collection, Help Me, Information, as well as his new book on writing poetry, The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them, along with heaven, hell, loss, laughter, and the Waffle House.

William Nesbitt (WN): The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them weighs in at almost 500 pages. I’m figuring you didn’t crank that all out on a rainy Tuesday morning. When did you start the project? What was the idea behind it? How was assembling the poems and writing the book different from writing poetry and what about the process of putting together The Knowledge is like writing poetry?

David Kirby (DK): Truth to tell, I wrote that book in a little over a month. Or I wrote it over 50 years, if you want to put it that way: I had a big data base of prompts and another big one of classrooms tips that I’d accumulated, and I shuffled those two files together like a deck of cards. Then came the fun part, which—oh, wait, I see that’s question #2.

WN: How did you go about selecting the poems to include in The Knowledge?
DK: This, too, was a process that had two parts. I just picked 50 or so poems that I adore without thinking too much of the lessons they taught, figuring that if my readers liked them as much as I did, they’d be self-starters and wouldn’t worry so much about having to learn or making mistakes. They’d just be enjoying themselves. After that, my publisher sent the manuscript to four readers, and those readers told me what else they’d like to see in The Knowledge, part of which was suggesting additional poems, so I added another 20 or so.

You asked earlier how writing The Knowledge was like writing poetry, and the answer is, it was exactly like that: you gather your materials, you sequence them, you do a draft, you get readers’ reactions, you revise accordingly. All writing’s like that, don’t you think?

WN: What poem would you most suggest when teaching and/or reading to a new-to-or-not-that-into-or-maybe-even-hates-poetry-audience-but-this-poem-will-get-deep-into-them?
DK: Uh-huh, yeah. Well, I think I’d send the students on a chase and tell them to go to two websites, the Rattle site and the one for The Writer’s Almanac. Those are two sites I consult every day, and half the time I end up copying and pasting poems from one or the other or both so I can use those poems in class. But this kind of thing works best if the student makes the discovery rather than getting an assignment from their stuffy old teacher.
Now if someone said, “Who should I read this weekend?” I’d tell them to read poems by George Bilgere. Tomorrow I might recommend another poet, but right now, I’m saying George. Take a look at his work and you’ll see why.

WN: You state, “if it works, a poem is more likely to be half understood rather than fully comprehended.” Is that true of all art, or is it unique to poetry?
DK: Well, all art is a game, isn’t it? And it invites the reader to play, promising to be not too difficult and not too easy but just right. Thing is, the game doesn’t have to ever end. And it probably shouldn’t. Don’t you go back from time to and look at a poem or a painting or a novel or movie and say “Dang, I never noticed that the first time”? I could read Keats forever and come up with new pleasures every time. Or listen to the Cowboy Junkies.

WN: You bring high art, philosophy, and European locales into your poetry, but you also mix in popular culture, especially music. You’ve kind of got one foot in the Louvre and one foot in the Hard Rock Cafe. Why do so many people view high art, say, Shakespeare or classical myth as something hard to understand and dull and why do so many academics think comic books, popular music, and television/movies are trash no educated adult should waste their time on?
DK: Most of us stay in our own little boxes, but man, you got to get out there and eat the world. It’s going to eat you one of these days, so don’t you want to get your chomps in first? There’s good and bad Shakespeare and good and bad pop music as well. Point is, there’s tons of both. Find the Shakespeare and the songs you love and forget about the rest. In the end, it doesn’t matter what you love as long as you love a lot of things. If you want to be a real person, that’s mandatory. Be an omnivore, damn it.

WN: Your most recent poetry collection is titled Help Me, Information, which makes me think of Pound’s oft-quoted definition that “Literature is news that stays news” and Mr. Aaker in “Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator Ode” from Help Me, Information who says, “Facts don’t work. People counterargue. They’re skeptical. But if you tell them a story, all that goes away.” News, facts, stories, information—they are not always the same thing, but they might overlap and intersect. What is the meaning of the title Help Me, Information?
DK; Shoot, I knew you’d ask me that.
[Laughs]
Let’s see . . . okay, the first thing is that that title comes from “Memphis, Tennessee” by Chuck Berry, who, along with Little Richard and Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis and a hundred others whose names we barely remember, were the pioneers, the artists who invented the music that changed the world. Other than that, everything is information, isn’t it? The odor a dog smells on your pants leg is information to that dog, as is a radio signal or a note you find on the sidewalk or a childhood memory or a space rock that pings you on the head while you’re walking along thinking about your childhood.
Look back at question #5 and my answer to it. The world is made of information that’ll help you be your most three-dimensional, so get out your catcher’s mitt, because it’s all headed your way. By the way, I had to get permission from the Chuck Berry estate to use a couple of lines from his song. It took months, and they were going to charge me $300, but in the end, they said, “Wait, we’re talking about poetry here, right? Hey, those lines are yours—no charge.” Who says poetry doesn’t pay? Or at least it doesn’t cost you anything.

WN: What did we lose when we lost Aretha Franklin whom you mention in “My Girlfriend Killed James Brown” and “Hitchhike”? When I read the end of “My Girlfriend Killed James Brown,” I wonder: do we ever really, completely lose people?
DK: We didn’t lose a damned thing. Somebody asked Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead if he missed Jerry Garcia, and Weir said, “I see him in my dreams all the time. I hear him when I’m on stage. I would say I can’t talk to him, but I can. I don’t miss him. He’s here. He’s with me.”

Oh, and here’s another quote, this from Septimus Hodge in Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia, who tells a grieving character:

We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.

Nice, huh? By the way, I hope you don’t mind the quotes. When I find that someone has said something better than I can say it, I let them have the floor.

WN: The way I read “My Girlfriend Killed James Brown” James Brown accompanies the girlfriend in heaven’s waiting room and then escorts her into her personal heaven where she finds her parents sitting at a table in the house where she grew up. Insert yourself into the end of that scenario. Who escorts you into the next room and who is seated at the table?
DK: Man, do I love these questions. In 1967, Otis Redding was touring Jamaica, and one night he walked unannounced into an after-hours club where Bob Marley was playing. Otis appeared “like a god,” as eyewitnesses say, and when Bob Marley looked up, he stopped what he was doing and went right into “These Arms of Mine.” Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if you’d been one of those in the club that night? The bartender points you to a seat and hands you a bottle of Red Stripe, and you think you’ll listen to a couple of songs and go home because you need to get to work early the next day, and the door opens, and in walks the Big O. Yeah, I’d know I was in heaven then.

WN: “Europeans Wrapping Knickknacks” suggests that there are physical ways we can give ourselves to others or carry others with us. What are the non-physical ways? Can the poem or the song be both a physical and a non-physical item or entity that endures?
DK: Well, any words can, can’t they? The words of a poem or song or just something someone says? Think about the dozens of snippets of language that you’ve read or overheard or dreamed up on your own over the years that recur to you constantly and that are almost forgettable, but not to you because you’ve charged them with meaning.
An editor took a poem of mine recently and said he and the other editors at the journal were wowed by the fact that the poem is so “straightforward,” by which I guess he means that most of the poems they get are not straightforward. So, yeah, a good way to work is find something around you that’s pretty trivial and make it the most important thing on this earth. If you can pull that off, your readers will start looking at the world differently. If you want to see what I mean, look at “Today,” that short poem by Frank O’Hara that turns the ordinary things of this world into sacraments.

WN: In “Having a Chat with You,” the narrator asks, “When you die and I still want to talk to you, / will you hear me?” What is the answer to that question? Can the dead hear us and vice versa?
DK: As far as I know, no one’s ever heard back from that “undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveler returns” (Hamlet, act 3, scene 1), but we can keep in touch with the departed. When the poet Edward Field lost his partner, he put up the most extraordinary Facebook post, saying, “we were together for 58 years. it was so wonderful i don’t mind being by myself for a while and reflecting on our life together. i am so grateful.” May everyone who loves someone else feel this way when their time comes.

WN: “Hitchhike” explains that according to Simone Weil, “Hell isn’t endless suffering; it’s endless monotony.” In “Legion, for We Are Many,” the devil himself explains that “hell’s just boring.” We learn in “This Magic Moment” that “Bravery is doing / the same thing every day when you don’t want to. / Not the marvelous but the familiar, over and over again. / Do that, and the magic will come.” Is this the secret, then, to getting out of hell whether it is spiritual or physical, real or imagined? Is poetry a passport out of hell?
DK: It is, but it’s not the only way out. I never want to come across as one of those people who says there’s something wrong with you if you don’t read poetry or you’re not a poet. There are plenty of ways to add to the world’s beauty. Jack Gilbert has this wonderful poem called “The Abnormal Is Not Courage” in which he describes a Polish cavalry charge against German tanks in the early days of World War II. Fine, he says, but attacking armored troops on horseback is not courage. Courage consists not of single king-size dramas but of basic decency over the long haul: the whole marriage, Gilbert says, not just the rapture of the first month. Go for the beauty “of many days,” of “normal excellence, of long accomplishment.”

I read a piece recently by a man whose father’s last words were, “Take care of everybody.” That’s a way out of hell. That’s heaven right there. And you don’t have to write poetry to know this, but I will say that, given its concision and precise use of words, poetry is the best way to get the message across. And what’s the message? It’ll be different for different people, but one possibility is “don’t just be kind—be kinder than you have to be.” In other words, when you’re in the drive-thru line, always pay for the person behind you. Don’t look at their bumper stickers, and don’t dawdle when you’re done in hopes of getting a wave and a honk. Just pay.

WN: “The 1909 Air Show at Brescia” says that “the things you love can kill you.” The baby in “A Baby in the Piazza” says, “Nothing’s worth loving unless it can kill you.” Is that a contradiction or an explanation?
DK: I take it more as a definition of what’s important in this life. Nothing really counts unless it has power, and to have power, there needs to be power for good and evil, power that’ll make you dance with joy or knock your teeth out. Take the internet: now you can chat with Aunt Gracie in the comfort of your own home, but you can also convince your fellow dimwits that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Yeah, I like to order crap online, but I was also able to walk into Sears and buy stuff back when Sears was a thing and not pay delivery fees. I could get along fine without the internet as long as I wasn’t the only one who didn’t have it.

WN: I see this sort of baseball diamond in Help Me, Information consisting of death, love, God, and sex. What’s that all about? Are those just topics that poets tend to write about, or do you think you focus on them more? If that baseball diamond metaphor is accurate, which one is home base for you?
DK: I’m thinking now that those four words just might be synonyms. In Howards End, one character says, “Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.” If we lived forever, we’d probably think ourselves so excellent that we’d be, like, “God who?” And love and sex would just be things that drift in and out of our life. No, no: death makes you sit up and take notice. It makes you get busy, makes you think, “Okay, time to come up with some priorities here. No more reality TV and bong hits for this slacker: I’m going to make my time on earth count for something—I’m going to make my time on earth count for something, by God.”

WN: Blake, Whitman, and Ginsberg are recurring presences in your poetry. I also notice works by them form the top three of your list in The Knowledge of the ten books you regard as “essential reading for young poets” and you describe the trio as “dithyrambic.” Why do you dig them so much?
DK: Well, they’re exuberant, aren’t they? They celebrate. They make a lot of noise. In the EQ department (or “emotional quotient,” for those who don’t throw that term around as much as I do), they’re the most emotionally healthy poets out there. Every optimistic cliché applies: they see the glass as half full, they make lemonade out of lemons, they turn mountains back into molehills.

Frank O’Hara works the same way. Check out “Today.” I’m always dreaming up new classes, and I’m putting one together now called “The Daughters of Frank O’Hara,” because, for whatever reason, I notice that a lot more young women than young men are trying to match O’Hara for sheer exuberance these days. Hera Lindsay Bird and Chessy Normile are two who come to mind.

WN: I had a student who said of Ginsberg’s “Howl,” “When you read ‘Howl,’ you know where you are.” When you read “Howl,” where are you?
DK: I’m right there on the back of Big Al’s motorcycle. I have to admit, I’m a sucker for just about any kind of come-on. What a masterful poem, huh? The poet only has to utter those first few words of invitation. Who could resist?
By the way, he and the other poets I mention in my answer to the last question aren’t just exuberant about chocolate sundaes and back rubs. They’re boisterous and excessive about everything. Take Blake: he’s as political as all get-out, but he’s never sour or resentful. He lived in a day before two-stroke combustion engines, but he invites you to clamber aboard his cosmic Harley and head out on the highway, see what’s going on, celebrate it if it’s far out, kick its ass if it isn’t.

WN: “Three’s Company” lists, explores, and documents the power of three in subjects such as politics, history, and America. There’s one heart, two eyes, and four seasons, but three appears an awful lot. Morning, afternoon, evening. Youth, adulthood, old age. Heaven, purgatory, hell. Past, present, future. Id, ego, superego. Lower class, middle class, upper class. The three Star Wars trilogies. The three Fates. The Three Stooges. Blake, Whitman, Ginsberg. Small, medium, large. Why is three such a powerful number and why does it show up so much?
DK: Gee, I don’t know. I guess it’s a Goldilocks number, isn’t it? Just enough and not too much? You always want choices, but don’t you hate those BuzzFeed article with titles like “23 Ways to Cook a Chicken Breast”?
My last two big decisions were to buy a car and get a new roof put on the house. I looked at two cars, a Toyota and a Honda. And I called four roofing contractors to get estimates. In other words, I had a little less or a little more than three options in each category. I was thinking three-ishly. Works for me, and if there’s anything to the poem, that way of thinking works for the general run of mankind as well.
Besides, three ingredients are just about all you can remember anyway. And a three-part list is punchy: you can nutshell life aboard a British naval frigate with just “rum, sodomy, and the lash.” So why would you say, “rum, sodomy, the lash, scurvy, body odor, lousy rations, bad teeth, sad*stic officers, and surly bunkmates, not to mention that I haven’t heard from Molly in the two years I’ve been at sea”? Too many details can rob a punch line of its power.

WN: Now that we’ve gotten The Knowledge and some Information, let’s talk Wisdom. With all of the instant and constant access the internet and other connective technologies have gifted/unleashed on us, it’s also become proportionately difficult—for me, at least—to unplug or know when I am done working for the day or week. How do you figure out the work/life balance and allow yourself to take a break?
DK: A break to me is an event. It’s just as important as a bike ride or a meeting with your lawyer. It’s not that I get up and write

1. Get up.
2. Exercise.
3. Breakfast.
4. Write or at least get ready to write.
5. Take a five-minute nap.
6. Write more, using ideas that came during nap.
7. Eat lunch and nap again

and so on. You need to be aware of what both body and soul need, but you should try to satisfy them in a way that’s as seamless as possible. The ideal would be glide through life as though you’re on roller skates, moving from one worthwhile activity to the other with as little self-consciousness as possible.

I’ll add two codicils to this pronouncement. The first is that you should throw in a worthless activity from time to time, though by doing so, that activity automatically becomes worthwhile. The second thing is that I’m talking the talk here, but I don’t always walk the walk. There are days when I write nothing, days on which I skip one or both naps, and other days still when I throw my head back and yowl like a cat with its tail caught in the door. I try, though.

WN: I was glad to see you giving Waffle House some love in “Waffle House Index.” Over the years, Waffle House has been sanctuary, retreat, social club, entertainment venue, shelter, headquarters, make-out station, hideout, and study space for me. I probably wrote half of my undergraduate papers after midnight in the Waffle Houses of Georgia. I don’t know that I have a question in here so much as a thank-you, but please riff on Waffle House anyway. Oh, and I saw what you did there at the end with the take on section 52 of “Song of Myself.” I think Walt Whitman would have enjoyed the diversity, the American-ness, of Waffle House.
DK: Jeez, Waffle House is like the Vatican, isn’t it? Or Buckingham Palace. Or Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin. It’s the center of the universe. But whereas those other places are ground zero for particular populations, Waffle House is like that Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty, saying come one, come all.
Waffle House is to greasy spoons what Shakespeare is to the rest of us. Man’ll tell you a great story, but he never stops there; he always throws in lots of useless beauty as well. Therefore, to fully activate the potential of your local Waffle House and have it radiate its magic throughout your entire region, remember the one thing you must always do, which is to get a waffle. They serve other stuff there, but even if you just want a cup of soup or a salad, order a waffle as well.

WN: If I went into a bar and ordered a “David Kirby,” what ingredients would the bartender put in the drink?
DK: Again, I’ve loved every one of these questions. I do a lot of interviews, and I’d rather drink a glass of gasoline than be asked “where do you get your ideas?” again. But this one stumped me, so I called in a consultant, my most mentally adventurous grad student, Brett Cortelletti. Just as I knew he would, Brett gave me the formula you’re looking for, complete with hand gestures. I’m thinking we should make an instructional video.
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Anyway, what you do is tell your barkeep you’d like a David Kirby, please, whereupon this mixologist of many years’ experience makes you a martini but neither shakes nor stirs it. Instead, he hands you the drink and a couple of quarters. You take everything over to the jukebox, put the drink on top, slip the coins into the slot, select “Long Tall Sally,” and let the machine’s vibrations marry the gin to the vermouth in a gentle and nuanced way. In just two minutes and ten seconds, your icy beverage is finished to perfection. Enjoy!

Erin O’Neill Armendarez (EOA): Please share a bit of background information about yourself.
Anthony Seidman (AS): With pleasure. I was born in Los Angeles in 1973 to a 16-year-old biological mother of Polish Catholic background and a biological father, slightly older, who was of Irish background on his mother’s side but whose father was full-blooded Ute. (These are the bare facts, among a few others, I gleaned from the adoption papers that my father showed me when I was an adolescent.) I was adopted and raised in the San Fernando Valley by a New York-born Jewish Ashkenazi father and a mother whose family hailed from Morocco, all Sephardic Jews… a weird type of cultural stew, with British passports, as my grandfather was born in Gibraltar, and yet with roots in Cuenca, Spain. Hence, my maternal last-name, Conquy, a francophone reinvention of the original place. I was informed that I was adopted early on—a healthy choice on the part of my parents—and I believe that that helped nourish my sense of reaching out to different languages and, thereby, different cultures, as I grew up hearing French, Ladino, English, and Yiddish as a boy, and then went on to become a Bar Mitzvah and read or pronounce Hebrew. As my family was middle class, there were no aspirations to enroll me in prep schools. I am a product of the Los Angeles Unified School District, and during the 1980s and early ’90s, the campuses were lively dens of heteroglossia. I remember being in 4th grade and a friend gifting me a crisp bill of 5 Córdobas while we waited in the cafeteria line for square slices of Wednesday pizza; I now realize that he was a refugee from civil war in Nicaragua. In my classrooms, the majority of the students were of color, and if they were white, that may have meant Armenian and Iranian, or they were Jewish, and many of those Jewish students were Levantine, with families originally from Iraq, Syria, etc. That was my linguistic and cultural reality. How could one not end up being a translator in such a mix? And who knows how the dice tumble and settle….Many of my high school friends were second-generation Mexican, Central American, or South American. I was eating meals at friends’ homes where the parents would simply address me in Spanish. (And with these friends, I was sharing poems, and we were reading not only Pound, Whitman, Williams, Eliot, and Shelley, but also García Lorca, Nicolás Guillén, and Paz.) Some particularly fond memories involve a friend’s father and mother suggesting I be the chambelán for their daughter’s quinceañera. There I was, giving confession in broken Spanish, taking communion, and dancing the waltz, followed by a beautiful party in the patio of bungalows that once dotted the hills outside downtown, now all razed in the cause of gentrification. Upon graduating high school, I attended Syracuse University, from which I graduated with a BA in Spanish and English. I was lucky enough to take classes from and experience a friendship with Pedro Cuperman, an Argentine-Jewish professor of Poetics and Semiotics, and also to have as a roommate a Dominican by the name of Amaury Terrero, proudly from Las Matas de Farfán. And that taught me how vast the Latin American experience is…. the differences between Mexican culture, Argentine culture, the Afro-Caribbean realities. From there, I went on to do an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso. It was a bilingual program, in the desert, on the border. I opted to live on the Mexican side of the border.

EOA: How did you become interested in translating poetry from Spanish into English?
AS: By necessity. When I found myself living in Ciudad Juárez during the latter half of the 1990s, I wished to read the best of contemporary Mexican poetry. I had an intuitive sense that Paz’s style and tone were very much of the past, and that there was a true struggle by poets, especially from the northern border regions, to capture a different image of their country in their verse.

EOA: How do you discover the poets whose works you wish to translate?
AS: I like visiting thrift shops. You hold up a coffee cup and say to yourself, this meant a lot to someone. As did that complete set of plates. That piano, well, someone may have gracefully played Satie on it, or plodded though the finger exercises that Bach composed for his daughter. Maybe some kid pounded out the opening bars to Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.” The stacks at universities and great public libraries are somewhat akin to that… you discover voices from the past in footnotes, asides, letters, allusions that no longer click with many contemporary readers. Yet these voices are gasping to be resuscitated. The role of the translator is like that of the archeologist who finds hidden statues, inscriptions. I have found—and translated—so many wonderful poets from anthologies considered outdated. The coteries change, the general taste, but often some gold gets swept away with the dross. I have some very specific poets and poems in mind… It was a pleasure to do a full volume by Salvador Novo (Mexico, 1904-1974) titled Confetti-Ash, co-translated with David Shook, for The Bitter Oleander Press in 2015. Although not exactly forgotten in his country, Novo is rarely included in contemporary anthologies of Latin American poetry, especially bilingual ones for English readers. It’s criminal, as far as I’m concerned. His poetry brims with a sense of play, irony, candid hom*oeroticism, and a tone more like that of the US poets of his time than the highly refined sonnets of a Jorge Cuesta, or the elegance in the earliest poems by José Gorostiza. I happened to discover him in a water-damaged volume published by Mexico’s Secretary of Education, a rather unattractive edition from the 1980s. I picked up the volume from a street-vendor in Juárez who was quite happy to get a 10 Peso coin and rid himself of the book.

EOA: How and when did you meet Alejandro Meter? How do his photographs and your translations work together?
AS: Great question… But to be clear, we don’t exactly collaborate—we work in the same spheres. Alejandro is a professor of Latin American literature at the University of San Diego, as well as an immensely talented photographer. For the past decade, he has dedicated his work to documenting the writers who write on both sides of the border and in close proximity to (now) Trump’s wall. It has been a delight and an honor to see that in various publications my translations of poets and narrators also showcase his photos. Alejandro has tapped into the energy of these border-region creators, and he is a regular on the scene at festivals and readings. His project is immense, and it highlights writers that are often overlooked by the “establishment” in Mexico City. Some Mexicans intellectuals still believe that the official or major culture comes from the capital, and they dismiss everything else as provincial. The far-flung cities on the border fare the worst. The Mexican writer and politician José Vasconcelos even claimed that culture in Mexico ceases where the inhabitants grill meat. (And indeed, carne asada is very much a northern thing in Mexico.) But thanks to the efforts of those like Alejandro Meter,and of such poets as Jorge Ortega—and, I hope, to some of my efforts—there is a new vision of the literature from the border.

EOA: How do you manage the difficulty of translating different dialects of Spanish? Have you worked with dialects for which there are no complete dictionaries?
AS: Although I have recently translated Dominican and Peruvian poetry, and I am well familiar with Mexican poetry from Sor Juana to Díaz Mirón to the Contemporáneos to the poets of the ’80s, like Alberto Blanco, and younger poets, I have felt that I can best render into English the poetry from the northern border of Mexico. The reasons for this are simple…. Roughly from 1995 to 1999, and with extensive stays during the early 2000s, I lived in Ciudad Juárez. Many of those from the United States don’t grasp how multicultural Mexico is, and how the south differs from the nation’s capital, which also differs from other parts in the center, and how the desert’s northern expanse is vastly different. Different as far as attitude, social interaction, language, and manners of addressing others… even dress, gastronomy, not to mention music, or what one drinks at parties. By living in Juárez, becoming a father while living there, working at the city’s main public university, paying bills, going to the bank, etc., I was immersed in the border region’s Spanish… and although there are some differences between the Spanish spoken in Tijuana, Mexicali, and Cd. Juárez, the differences are minor. Actually, the bickering that sometimes exists between citizens from Tijuana and Mexicali strikes this individual as a textbook case of Freud’s “narcissism of minor differences.” Prior to a literary festival in Cd. Juárez to which my wife—the noir fiction author, Nylsa Martínez—and I had been invited, she had never visited that border city. After a day or two, she surmised that it was like Mexicali… yet not as hellishly hot. I heard a nearly identical comment from the great Juárez writer Willivaldo Delgadillo when I asked him for his opinions of Mexicali. Tone is so important when it comes to translation... tone and register, and discerning from which social point-of-view the turn of phrase, the judgment, the gaze surfaces. I must admit to feeling lost, sometimes, in the deep south of Mexico when it comes to irony, understatement, or the endless “albures,” all of which are far more easy for me to decipher up north. Thus, when I read a poet like Roberto Castillo Udiarte, and his lines: “Damas y caballeros/ welcome tu Tijuana,/ el lugar más mítico del mundo,/ onde las lenguas se aman y se unen/ en el aló, el oquei, el babai y el verbo tu bi.” Well, I easily pour that into: “Ladies and Gentlemen,/ bienvenidos a Tijuana/ the most mythical place on the face of earth,/ where two tongues make-out and meld,/ and the local speak in Hel-oh, oh-kaye, and the verb tu bi.” It’s a Spanish, Caló, and general zest in which I was immersed on the border. That being said, when I translated J.M. Servin’s new-journalism-like account of his time living in the States, For Love of the Dollar: A Portrait of the Artist as an Undocumented Immigrant, for Unnamed Press, I also tapped into the energy he derived from his love of The Ramones, James Brown, the Beats, and Bukowski, and I remembered that landscape he conveys—New York right before it underwent “deep cleansing”—from my visits to my grandfather during the early ’80s. And Servín is very much a Chilango, a proud lifelong resident of Mexico City. We got along swimmingly when we met for our presentation of the book in Los Angeles. The first words he said to me were, in Spanish, “But why do you speak like you’re from the north of Mexico?” That made me laugh heartily.
EOA: Some claim poetry is too difficult to translate because idioms and symbols are so culturally specific. How do you handle these challenges?
AS: I wouldn’t have ever translated if I believed that. There is always some bridge, some connection. Poetry and narration are so embedded in the human DNA, it’s so natural. We tend to overlook that some of the canonical poems of the 20th century in English are translations… just think of Pound’s Cathay or his version of “The Seafarer.” Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier is just as much Castiglione’s creation as it became Thomas Hoby’s, whose translation is considered a classic of English literature. I get dizzy when thinking of the centuries of translations, new versions poured into different tongues, from the languages of India, from Arabic, which gave us the Thousand and One Nights. Hardly anyone seems to pause when quoting from the Old Testament or the New. Interesting to note that our most sacred texts are translations, and these versions have their unique twists and takes. “Vanity of vanities” is uttered with great feeling and meaning, when the original Hebrew is more like “vapor of vapor.” But those idiosyncratic or sometimes flat-out wrong choices don’t perturb me. We’re dealing with language, sound, basically air. Things are going to get lost, and then again recaptured, and perhaps—dare I say it?—transmogrified into something equally luminescent. Still, clearly, one hopes to be able to read Dante, Camões, the Popol Vuh in the original. Alfonso Reyes—that most cultured and wise essayist and poet—proposed a simple triad when it comes to the challenges of translation: “A. If it’s possible, read the texts in their original language. B. Read translations that respect the distance although they may sacrifice the beauty. C. Read translations that help us better grasp the original, even if they may contain certain errors.” I believe that option C will end up producing more poetry and literature in the translated version. Ever wonder why The Cantos open with a translation of a translation?

EOA: What do you love most about your work as a translator?
AS: García Márquez quipped that he wrote (and published!) so his friends would love him more. I think that was an honest and fine statement to make. I have benefited in a very human way—making contact, knowing other realities—from translation. I have made friends, and I have gained from their visions and realities. Recently, some of my most interesting conversations have been with Pergentino José, a Zapotec writer who employs his nation’s language from the Sierra, not the Isthmus, and I have been stunned, enraptured when he discusses the intricacies of his mother tongue, its syntax, idiomatic expressions, etc. (To be clear, I have not translated Pergentino, yet we met among our circle of poets and translators.) An example, if I remember correctly, the word for “innocent” in his variant of the Zapotec language means literally “to be flower and dew.” For a legal or moralistic concept, we get a tangible image… which is what metaphor should always be.

EOA: What is most difficult about your work as a translator?
AS: You’re working with very slippery material. But I nodded in approval when I read how the great 20th-century Hebrew poet David Avidan dismissed the Frostian mantra that poetry is what gets lost in translation. (Avidan translated many of his own poems into English.) Avidan insisted “poetry is whatever is gained while moving from one language to another, and what’s lost in translation should better have been disposed of in the original.” As I consider myself quite functional in Spanish and French, and read in those languages, socialize in them, ponder poetry in them, I find that comment by Avidan to be comforting, a true guide. So. The difficulty is there, but it’s also not a terminal roadblock. A new bifurcation opens. I have always been indifferent to the translation of “moreno / morena” as simply dark or dark-skinned. Looking though old books on my shelves the other day I (re)discovered Rexroth’s Twenty Spanish Poems of Longing and Exile, and relived the jolt I had experienced when I was sixteen—having just bought the book at the now defunct Dutton’s in North Hollywood—and read his version of “Niña morena y ágil” by Neruda. (I had already read Merwin’s version.) And it was simply that employment of the adjective of “tawny” that made my skull split open with delight. Not exactly “morena”… not this, nor that… but a “gain” for the poem in English.

EOA: Why is it important to provide the poems and images of authors who write in Spanish to Americans and to other audiences globally who read and speak primarily in English?
AS: My answer to this is very simple. We lose so much by not reading poetry and literature in other languages. We lose a lot, as well, by not regarding the poets’ faces, our shared humanity. How many times have I had wonderful evenings discussing Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Corso, Rich, with poets from Latin American countries who have experienced the dagger and poison of American imperialism? It’s about touching the real nerve, bone, and marrow of other cultures and countries… and bypassing the political slogans, the rapacious leaders and con artists.
EOA: Are there additional poets you’d like to work with in the future? What is it about their poetry that intrigues you?
AS: Oh, yes! Without a doubt. Two come to mind. After meeting David Huerta at a poetry festival in Tijuana where we both participated, I mentioned that we had in common a dear friend and a superb poet-translator: David Shook. I reminded him of our desire to translate his father Efrain’s legendary verse, specifically the volume Los Hombres del Alba (1944), which injected an urban landscape into Mexican poetry, a sense of class divisions, the mire of daily life, the tender skeletons of poets, the lack of birds, and the poet’s voice drenched in the saliva of oblivion, like a fish amid a shipwreck’s waters. Well, we received his blessings. We hope to carry over his father’s poetry into a worthy English version. And soon.

The other poet who comes to mind (among many now rushing up in my memory) is the Peruvian Jorge Pimentel (1944). Rather late in his career, he published a collection entitled Tromba de Agosto (1992), a violent and righteous whirlwind howl from the poor and marginalized in his country, in a vigorous and idiosyncratic Spanish that reminds one of Vallejo in Trilce.

Then there are the usual, canonical subjects whose poems in English version can always be furthered honed. Two examples: José Gorostiza is considered by Mexicans to be one of their greatest poets, especially for his long meditation, in Baroque register, Muerte sin fin. His earliest volume of verse was entitled Canciones para cantar en las barcas, and I have yet to find a translation of the lovely lyric “Quién me compra una naranja” that reflects the tone and meaning of the title: the speaker is not saying, “Who will buy me an orange?” but, “Who will buy an orange from me?” I would love to translate that poem’s lilting quatrains.

A final case: perhaps the most famous poem by Vallejo, ”Los heraldos negros.” The opening verses exclaim: “!Hay golpes en la vida… yo no sé!” English versions vary little from this: “There are some blows in life… I don’t know!” Yet for the Spanish speaker, it’s clear that the exclamation “Yo no sé!” should not be conveyed in such a literal manner.

EOA: What advice would you give to future translators?
AS: Read. Research. Collaborate. Do the saturation-job… read all you can of a certain poet whose work is deeply important to you. All you can about that poet as well… as in reviews, essays, letters to and from, even stiff, peer-reviewed academic studies. Know that you’re not alone. And some of the kindest and most helpful folks I know have been fellow poet-translators… among them Boris Dralyuk, who translates from Russian, Kent Johnson who translates from Spanish, Martín Camps for his translation of the Brazilian masterpiece Parque Industrial: Novela Proletaria by Patrícia Galvão, David Shook, who translates from Spanish, Nahuatl, and Zoque, Michael Casper, who works with Yiddish, Gaspar Orozco who translates from Chinese poetry, Roberto Castillo Udiarte who was the first to translate Bukowski, Lamantia, Robert Jones, and Bill Knott into Spanish, Blandine Longres, who translates into French from English… so many! I ache that I will remember others, but too late! And know that we always need new translations. Borges felt that he hadn’t suffered too much from not learning Ancient Greek—instead of resorting to only one Homer, he had Chapman’s and Pope’s. And now we have Lattimore’s, Fitzgerald’s, Wilson’s… It’s a beautiful process, awe-inspiring, as if we were watching tectonic plates shifting at a heightened velocity, with mountains rising in months rather than over eons.

Erin O’Neill Armendarez (EOA): Please share with us a bit of background information.
Jerome O’Connor (JO): My career consisted of two primary blocks of time:

1) 20 years with New York State Department of Transportation, where as a Bridge Management Engineer I was responsible for the safety of all existing bridges in our region (the Southern Tier of NYS).

2) 15 years with the University at Buffalo, where I was Senior Program Manager for Transportation Research, which was a federally funded program to improve the performance of bridges during earthquakes. This role evolved into leadership of the Institute of Bridge Engineering, which had a broader goal. We fostered collaboration among university professors who conduct cutting edge research, practicing engineers who applied the knowledge in real life, and the next generation of bridge engineers, students who ask fresh, insightful questions which also help to advance the state of the practice.

EOA: How and when did you first discover your interest in bridges?
JO: To be honest, I fell into it. I was in Brazil as part of a Rotary Group Study Exchange when I saw on TV news that a major interstate bridge had collapsed back home in the US. People there were shocked that this could happen in New York, the “Empire State”. That event changed things. To reduce the risk of future tragedies like the Schoharie Bridge collapse, legislators created jobs dedicated to bridge safety. My job of Bridge Management Engineer was one of them.

EOA: In your opinion, what are the essential features of a well-designed bridge?
JO: Although bridge users don’t think about them much, there are really too many features of a well-designed bridge to try to name. People may notice the beauty of a signature bridge, but I doubt they consider that a large part of the bridge (and cost) is underground. The foundation not only supports the weight of cars and trucks, but also its own weight, which consists of huge amounts of steel and concrete. Besides those “live” loads and “dead” loads, bridges need to be designed to resist rigorous shaking from wind or earthquakes that can occur. The last thing someone wants is a disaster. Not only can people die, a bridge failure severs a lifeline that is essential to the public for economic and social reasons. There is also a whole science dedicated to protecting bridge foundations from floods that can undermine these foundations.

Aside from the above, a bridge design team needs to be conscious of the communities being connected. They strive for a “context-sensitive design” that enhances the area while minimizing negative environmental impacts. For instance, it wasn’t long ago that some bridges were designed exclusively for motorized vehicles. Now, it is almost expected that a bridge needs to be wide enough to accommodate pedestrians and bicyclists. Unique features like observation decks are now incorporated into new bridges. Since bridges are built to last 75-100 years; bridge engineers need to anticipate future needs as well.

EOA: You’ve taken photos of many bridges over the years, including bridges damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Was that kind of damage predictable?
JO: Katrina’s worst damage came from tidal surges, the likes of which had only been seen in other parts of the world during a tsunami. Climate change is likely the reason for seawater coming ashore sixteen feet higher than had been recorded before. Bridge designers can’t predict what will happen in the future. Fifty years ago, when those bridges were being built, no one would have anticipated that the water would get that high.

EOA: Given a probable increase in future flooding in New Orleans and in other cities, both coastal and inland, can bridges be built or modified to sustain the inevitable 500 year deluges we’ve been experiencing?
JO: The trouble with building a bridge to handle inundation can be visualized by looking at photos of New Orleans after the floodwalls broke. Neighborhoods were flooded even though bridges in the area were “high and dry”. Eventually a bridge has to touch down on the ground where people live and work. If those areas are under water, it does not serve any purpose to have a bridge.

A bridge cannot function as a bridge if both ends of the bridge are underwater. It seems superfluous to say but the definition of a bridge is to connect two areas of refuge (i.e. dry land). One can say, just build a longer bridge, but in order for it to be useful, it eventually needs to come down to earth. Functionality and economics both come into play when trying to defy mother nature.

EOA: How do you partner with engineers in other parts of the world to assist in solving structural weaknesses or failure in bridges?
JO: Like any profession, bridge engineers and those in specialties within the field share ideas by writing professional journal articles, convening at conferences, collaborating on projects, learning from failures, etc. At the University of Buffalo, we hosted international meetings and workshops with counterparts from various states and countries. In 2016, I went to Ecuador after bridges were tested by a strong earthquake, the kind that we don’t typically get in the US. Observing how our designs perform is an opportunity to validate the results of laboratory experiments. We can always learn more.

EOA: Please give us an example of how the failure of a particular bridge impacted a community and the surrounding environment.
JO: First, the catastrophic collapse of any bridge leaves us feeling vulnerable; we grieve the dead but also think “it could have been us”. A perfect example is the 2007 failure of the I-34W truss bridge in Minneapolis. It physically came down, but it also put a dent in our nation’s psyche; it made us doubt the safety of our infrastructure. All at once, traffic on this major transportation link stopped. That meant an immediate change to people’s commuting habits, long-haul trucking, and local commerce. No one could tell how long it would last. It was cleaned up and rebuilt in a year but that kind of speed is not typical. Normally, a major project like that would take 13 years to go through the environmental review and design process. This was completed in a year under the declaration of emergency. I can’t help but wonder if funds flowed and procedural steps were slashed to erase the memory asap and patch up our psyche.

EOA: What do you find noteworthy about the River Trail Pedestrian Bridge in Redding, California?
JO: The “stress ribbon” design has a certain beauty in its simplicity. It’s ingenious in that it it’s draped between the concrete piers like a rope, instead of being stiff and flat like a beam. It’s an efficient use of materials and works well on trails like this.

EOA: And the Gothic Bridge in Central Park?
JO: This bridge obviously has a timeless beauty, but is also interesting because of what we do not see. It is made of cast iron, a material which is not used anymore because modern steels are seen as much more superior. I think of this bridge as art and its art defies its technical obsolescence.

EOA: And the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge in Charleston, South Carolina?
JO: Cable-stayed bridges like this have become the bread and butter of medium-to-long span bridges. They are incredibly good at what they do and look graceful in the process.

EOA: What innovations are in the works for bridges in terms of materials and/or structural design?
JO: The emergence of advanced materials and computer analysis tools is making new things possible in the field of bridge design. Not only in terms of strength but also in terms of durability, or the ability to last a long time while being resilient to the effects of extreme forces and environmental conditions. Although Ultra-High Performance concrete (UHPC) and new types of stainless steel are exciting, the one that I see great promise in is carbon or glass fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composite materials. They are used for their strength and light weight in the newest jets and watercraft, but they are especially useful for bridges because the material does not rust, the curse of both steel and concrete. FRP can replace steel rebars in concrete to make it last longer. Sheets of FRP can even be applied to the outside of concrete to add strength and increase the safety factor. In New York and Puerto Rico, an entire bridge superstructure was built with FRP. These will serve for a long time, just like that composite in your tennis racquet (wink wink).

EOA: When it comes to bridges, what keeps you up at night?
JO: I sleep well at night. Bridge inspectors are working year-round to keep us all safe and are trained to close a bridge before it becomes unsafe. That said, unforeseen disasters can happen so Congress needs to put more money into maintaining our infrastructure so we can rest assured that our families are safe. Many in-service bridges were never intended to last over 50 years but are still in use. Eventually, things rust or wear out and need to be replaced. China seems to realize that good infrastructure is needed to be considered a first world economy; why don’t we?

EOA: How do engineers create bridge designs that enhance the landscapes they occupy?
JO: Two ways: They can try to get a bridge to blend in so it gets lost in the natural surroundings or they can highlight its magnificence as a work of art as a technological wonder.

EOA: In your opinion, what makes a bridge an object of beauty, a work of art?
JO: It is art if it enhances the surroundings and is a pleasure to look at. If it causes you to gaze in wonder, we’ve done a good job.

EOA: Of all the bridges in the world, which is your favorite? Why?
JO: It’s hard to argue with iconic bridges like the Golden Gate or Brooklyn Bridge. I’d pick the Brooklyn Bridge because it was built by Roebling men and women* of great vision and fortitude in a time when the nation was demonstrating its uninhibited ambition and confidence to the world.

I’d also comment that my favorites are the many being built by Bridging the Gap Africa to help people who live in a walking world to give them the ability to get food, go to school and get healthcare.

*John Roebling designed the Brooklyn Bridge. His eldest son Washington and wife Emily oversaw completion of the bridge after Roebling’s death.

Interview of Mitchell Grabois

Erin O'Neill Amrnedarez (EOA): Please share some background information with our readers.
Mitchell Grabois (MG):The term “background” is limitless. Increasingly, I think of myself in terms of the 14-billion-year history of the Universe. When I walk around the lake and witness the sunrise filtering through the trees, when I work in my garden, when I help raise my young granddaughters and see them unfold, almost as if in time-lapse photography, I am often filled with appreciation and awe for the unimaginable timeline and the processes of physical development that led to the world existing exactly as it is, with the mountains and seas and all the plants and animals, and that humans evolved to be capable of appreciating every bit of it. Maybe there’s nothing more exalted in my experience than watching leaves being illuminated by the sun, or following the rotation of the blooms in my garden, daffodils to irises to day lilies and spirea, and on. But I also feel exhilarated when I look at the imperfect line of Quikrete Grey Concrete Crack Filler I laid down this week to keep water from percolating down through the walkway directly in front of my house and unsettling the foundation. All that means more to me than literature, written by someone else or by myself. It is unmediated experience, requiring consciousness but not requiring mind or language.

To use a baseball term, I know that this an elaborate wind-up for the discussion of poetry and being a poet, but in a literary world filled with clamoring narcissists, perhaps we could use a little more of this sort of reflection.
Moving much closer to the present, my people were Jews, which means that my history includes a couple thousand years of persecution. My paternal grandmother was born in Barr, Russia, the site of the first pogrom (anti-Jewish riot). My grandfather was born in Kishenev, Moldova, the site of the largest pogrom in Europe up to that time (1903). His father, my great-grandfather Saul, was a farmer whose land had been taken by Russian decree in 1891. He moved to Kishenev and became a wagon maker. Luckily, his partner was a Christian, who hid Saul and his family in his cellar during the pogrom. The brutality of that event made news around the world, and there was much condemnation of it in many countries, including the U.S.

In response to that condemnation, the African-American community protested that African-Americans had been, and were still being, subjected to worse injustices. It was eighteen years later that the infamous Greenwood Massacre, a violent anti-Black riot that destroyed the “Black Wall Street,” took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, an event that has received increased attention in the wake of the public execution of George Floyd. As I observed in one of my flash fictions, “Doberman Empire” (written some years ago):The ghosts of the brutal past animate the present as the ghosts of our brutal present animate what-comes-next.

Fortunately, the eddies of European persecution caused my grandparents to flee to the U.S. in advance of the Holocaust. Of my grandfather’s siblings, only one of eight survived. Even for those who did not directly experience it, the Holocaust continues to influence modern Jews (as slavery and ongoing racism influence modern African-Americans), in ways both subterranean and closer to the surface. It is an influence on my poetry, even when it is nowhere in sight.

EOA:How and when did you discover your interest in poetry?

MG:I started working on my elementary school magazine when I was in the fourth grade. By the time I was thirteen, I considered myself a serious poet. I’m now 67, so I’ve been involved in this enterprise for over half a century. As I recall, even despite Wallace Stevens being an insurance executive and William Carlos Williams being a physician, the prevailing models for poets (and writers in general) in my youth were quite different than what they are today—the poet was a sort of Thoreauvian character—a loner finding his own way. That was consistent with my personality— brooding and introverted.

EOA:Which poets, contemporary or classic, do you most appreciate and why?

MG:I’ve actually read far more fiction than I have poetry, and I’ve written nine novels. The first was in my mid-twenties. I acquired agency representation but the agent failed to get me a contract with a publishing company. The comments of the editors to whom she submitted all ran along the same lines: too literary, too strange, too feminist. In my fifties, I wrote six novels, and also got an agent (for five of them) but, though he was able to get contracts for some of his clients, he failed to get one for me. He held the bizarre belief that his inability to get me a publisher was proof of how good my work was.
I’m still trying to get an agent for my last novel. I’ve recently reorganized, retitled and repackaged it, so I remain hopeful. However, my relationship to publishing my novels is probably unlike that of most writers. I feel like an old Brooklyn shopkeeper with shelves full of dusty inventory that he’d like to unload.

But to answer the question: some poets I’ve appreciated have included John Berryman, Wallace Stevens, James Wright, William Carlos Williams, Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder and other beats, Charles Bukowski (whose poetry I find more exemplary than his prose), Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, Tony Hoagland and Zen Master Ryokan, “the great fool.”

EOA:How has your life experience shaped your writing? Is there a strong correlation, or do you prefer to write from observation or imagination?

MG:Many people have had far more difficult lives than mine. However, without going into detail, my childhood was psychologically challenging. In fact, at age 17, approaching high school graduation, I felt dead. I wasn’t suicidal—I felt that I was already, literally dead. It was… disconcerting. It took me many years to surmount that. I believe that the impetus for many poets to write is to try to make sense of emotional realities that they experience that cannot easily be understood and explained. That was certainly true for me. Over the years, as we all do, I developed my own blend of life. Sensitivity, cheerfulness, suffering, compassion and black humor are elements of that blend, and it comes out in my writing in ways that can’t be programmed or predicted.

EOA:How has your craft evolved over time? Have peers or mentors assisted in honing your process?

MG:To my benefit or my detriment, or both, I’ve been largely isolated and self-contained as a writer, and “self-taught.” I have no English or Creative Writing degree. In college I took a couple of writing courses. One of the instructors harped on “writing organically,” which made sense. The other instructor was Jim Dodge, the novelist and poet and friend of Gary Snyder. After reading many of my poems, he told me, “Despite Gary Snyder, English is not an idiographic language.”

I don’t know if I can speak to how my craft has evolved over time. I’ve never been good at identifying what writers have influenced my work and that sort of thing. I guess that’s because I’m neither a literary person, an intellectual or an academician. I don’t believe that you have to be those things to be a good writer. Certainly, you don’t have to be those things to enjoy your writing process and what you’ve written. After writing a lot of long fiction, during the last ten years I’ve focused on poetry and flash fiction, and lately I’ve gone back and started compiling a lot of it into book form. I’ve cringed at some of the work before deleting it. However, on rereading, most of the work feels fresh and:Hey,this is good sh*t. I believe that, ultimately, that’s the prize that you get from being a writer—the understanding that you’ve engaged in a creative process, which is valuable, perhaps even sacred, in its own right and, rereading your work, you have a feeling of satisfaction and enjoyment.

EOA:How did you decide upon a publisher forThe Arrest of Mr. Kissy Face?

MG:Lacking connections, and acting according to my long-held principle that I would never pay submission or contest fees, I simply found a list of poetry publishers and sent out the manuscript. Subsequently, Pski’s Porch Publishing, a small press in upstate NY, accepted and published it.

EOA:Are you satisfied with your publishing experiences thus far?

MG:Despite my natural aversion to marketing, I marketed THE ARREST OF MR. KISSY FACE to the best of my ability, and there were some sales. The publisher did little marketing. Poets should know that there is a very small market for poetry (though I understand that there’s a stronger one in Britain). If you can manipulate social media in innovative ways, you have a better chance of some success. But any writer nowadays, poet or otherwise, who nurtures the old dream of becoming “rich and famous” through his or her writing is some kind of moron. The market for literary work in general has significantly shrunken. I read an interview with John Irving not long ago in which he stated that if he were starting out now, he would never get published.

EOA:What advice would you give to other poets contemplating publication of a first collection?

MG:I was excited to have a bona fide publisher publish my poetry, but really, what does that matter? It means that one other person (or maybe a committee) liked my work well enough to put it on paper. Is that important? I think that in the future I will simply self-publish my work, as I did with one of my novels, TWO-HEADED DOG. (By the way, both that book and THE ARREST OF MR. KISSY FACE are available for purchase through my website, wordsbymitch.com, in which you can also find many of my poems and flash fictions which you can enjoy free-of-charge.) Self-publishing short-circuits the waste of time and the hassles of trying to find a publisher and then dealing with the publisher. Considering only my poetry and short fiction, I probably have ten books worth of work. It tickles me to imagine a great-grandchild or great-great grandchild or a descendent even further in the future, reading some of my work and thinking: My ancestor, Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois, was an interesting dude.

Making this decision puts more responsibility on me—if the only decisions about which poems will appear in my books are my own, and if I’m committed to quality, then my decisions better be well-considered and sharp. Also, let’s not forget the other meaning of “submission.” Why bow your head and accept your fate as a subordinate when you can embrace freedom and take your place as a fully self-determining being?

At this moment, I’m on, maybe, my sixteenth revision (typical for me) of these responses to theAjieditor’s interview questions. I revise until I am fully satisfied with a piece. I revise even after a piece is published. And that’s certainly something that any writer should know—as many, many writers have said previously:Writing is Revision.

EOA:What do you hope readers will gain from reading your book?

MG:I’ve never really thought about my writing in that way. I’ve never written with a reader in mind. I guess I hope that some of it might give readers pause, might give them a deeper sense of humanity, might amuse them.

EOA:What advice do you have for other poets when it comes to pursuing a desire to write and publish poetry, to find community and an audience for their work?

MG:Just do it?

If they’re young, they might consider acquiring academic degrees, like the MFA. There’s been a lot of criticism of the MFA, but human beings operate in clubs, through networking, so acquiring degrees, with all the consequent contacts, could be helpful. Getting published requires a combination of talent, hard work, and luck, and luck usually comes through association with other people.

​Two Poems fromThe Arrest of Mr. Kissy Face

The Arrest of Mr. Kissy Face

I kissed the woman who slices lunch meat
at King Sooper’s
She shoved smoked turkey at me
leaned away
and cried:Next!

I kissed my doctor
I’d been wanting to do it
since she first told me to stick out my tongue
and complemented me on its smoothness
and the elegance of my taste buds
I kissed her and she asked
On a scale of one to ten, how have you been feeling this week?
I kissed her again
Have you been seeing or hearing things that aren’t really there?
I kissed her a third time
Have you been feeling suicidal or homicidal?
I kissed her more deeply
really sent my tongue to a remote locale
Do you have access to weapons?

I said:
How can you ask me that
after everything we’ve been through?
Anyway, this is America

She called Security
Security knew me
from the days when I was a high school football star
and an amateur boxer and cage fighter
who went by the monikerDestructo
They were afraid of me
called the cops
warned them:Be sure to bring your stun guns
your billy clubs
and chemical weapons

The first cop who entered the room--
I kissed her
She yelledFREEZE!
Hands where I can see them!
Get down on your knees!

I happily complied

Jet Fuel

Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys
--Tony Hoagland

Gasoline smells like gin
sweet and clear
I’ve loved that smell
since junior high
when me and Pollo Murillo and Hector Delgadillo
huffed it from the jerry can
in Pollo’s dim garage

Isn’t “jerry can” an incandescent phrase
transcending its simple language?

Delgadillo said I was Mexican
I said,I’m a Jew

Delgadillo said:You may be a Jew
in your shaved-off prick
but you are Mexican in the soul
unpredictable, combustible

Then he passed me the jerry can
no worries about bogarting that
there was plenty for all

Murillo ran off a mountain road
Delgadillo went to prison
and got shanked by the Aryan Brotherhood
f*ck them

I’m Mexican
and will wait for my chance for revenge

​EOA: Please share a bit of background information about yourself.

Serafina Bersonsage (SB): I’m a Michigan-based writer with a penchant for poetry, fantasy, and more or less unpublishable ephemera: fictional lexicons, made-up annals, detailed descriptions of places that don’t technically exist. At six, I caused a small panic in my first grade class by convincing half of the students that I was a vampire. My mother introduced me to T.S. Eliot, socialism, and Bloody Marys; the precise order is hazy.

Random facts: I lived in Philadelphia for a year; I read tarot on a regular basis; I married a man who is at least as much a bibliophile as I am; I enjoy studying languages and once asked for a Latin textbook for Christmas, but was utterly trounced by Old Irish grammar. I learned to shoot tequila in my fourth year of grad school, and I once stayed awake for so long during finals that one of my professors thought that I was possessed because of all the burst blood vessels in my eyes. I can’t do math, play a musical instrument, or play sports without risking serious injury to myself and others. In high school, I refused to date anyone without a half-decent plan for world domination.

EOA: When did you start to write poetry? What was your inspiration?

SB:I started to write poetry in high school, a couple of years after I began writing fiction, mostly because I found it easier to work on poems than novels while pretending to pay attention in class. I can’t really speak to the inspiration behind my earliest poetry, because I tend to avoid rereading it at all costs. I seem to recall that some of it was vaguely Arthurian; I was obsessed with Merlin and Viviane. This was a time when I listened to a lot of Loreena McKennitt. I aspired to be an elf.

EOA: How did you hone your craft? Did you take classes or attend workshops? Did you have mentors?

SB:My formal training is in criticism—I did a PhD in English at the University of Rochester, where I wrote my dissertation on microcosms in seventeenth-century British literature. This involved reading a huge amount of rather sycophantic country house poems and trying to make sense of the stage directions for masques—Ben Jonson could be very catty about special effects!—and at one point I developed a small crush on Margaret Cavendish and crashed a stationary bike. And I think that all of this was very beneficial for my writing, because it allowed me to live in another world for several years, and also helped me to get over any lingering preoccupation with the notion of voice. For the first two years, I didn’t write any poetry or fiction at all, and, after that, I worked on my dissertation, and wrote poetry and fiction to please myself.

Eventually, I began to share my work, and the feedback that I’ve received from others has absolutely had an impact on how I approach certain things. I can tell that a piece of advice has really struck a chord when I find myself applying it to other projects—not even necessarily in the same genre. My doctoral advisor never saw my fiction, but some of her comments on my academic writing still come back to me when I’m revising a novel. Remarks on a novel manuscript by my agent (the brilliant Connor Goldsmith) have led me to poems, and various editors’ comments on poems have sometimes informed my fiction. My husband reads everything that I write. He’s an insightful and ruthless reader—a far better critic than I ever was, when I aspired to such things.

I tend to get a lot out of other people’s comments; nonetheless, I remain mildly allergic to workshops. (I can see how many writers find them helpful; I just tend to avoid formal groups on principle.) I did take one undergraduate writing class, at the University of Michigan-Flint—but, as I was also taking the GRE that semester, I’m afraid that I wasn’t terribly engaged. The most useful advice that I can recall was to aim for three hundred words a day—a strategy that has its limitations, of course, but one that served me well when I was just getting back into fiction, a few years after that.

EOA:A Witch’s Educationseems to be, at least in part, a response to cultural assumptions about gender and women who refuse to conform to them. What do you hope readers will take away from this “wicked” little book?

SB:It depends entirely on who those readers are. If they’ve been marginalized in some way, if they’ve been slu*t-shamed or judged for failing to meet cultural expectations or otherwise pushed into the woods, then I would hope that this book gives them a sense of being somewhat less alone in that, assuming that it resonates with any part of their experience. If they’ve been privileged enough to avoid such things, then I would hope that it broadens their perspective a bit. And, if they’re Trump supporters, then I would hope that it gives them a paper cut. (But I very much doubt that anyone from the third category will read my book.)

EOA: Along with irony and some delightfully sharp edges, your poems also imply some understated humor. Does that humor seem helpful in dealing with some of the especially difficult topics treated in the book?

SB:I think that the tendency to turn to humor when confronting difficult topics is a habit that I picked up from my father, who has been known to improvise some truly top-quality comedic monologues in hospital rooms. I also suspect that a certain kind of dark humor tends to be more prevalent in Michigan, or at least in the parts of Michigan where my parents and I grew up (Detroit, in their case; the suburbs of Flint, in mine). When things go badly enough for long enough, you start to turn to the mordant, the wry, the sardonic. There’s a protective quality to it, certainly, but it’s also a way of reaching outward—connecting with others by finding a way to make light of something that’s objectively not great. (I recently learned the etymology of the word “sardonic,” by the way. It involves poison and laughter and quite possibly senicide, and is definitely something that I would encourage your readers to look up.)

EOA: The copyright page inA Witch’sEducation pokes fun at the standard copyright credits. What was your process for selecting EMP as the publisher for your book?

SB:I believe that the copyright page in question, or a version of it, is one that EMP uses in all of their books. I was pleased to include it inA Witch’s Education, because I think that it’s admirably honest. Very, very few people are making (significant) money in this business. Obviously, I do think that artists should receive credit for their work, and I support the enforcement of copyright laws insofar as those laws allow artists to make a living. But I also think that it’s good to push back against the proprietary urge when feasible.

I submitted the manuscript ofA Witch’s Educationto relatively few publishers. I understand why so many small presses have made contests such a central part of their selection process, but it’s deeply frustrating, because a $28 contest fee isn’t a trivial expense for many people, and multiple contest fees can be prohibitively expensive for those of us who prefer to live by Erasmus’s words. (“When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.”) So it was a short list, and EMP was on it because I felt that the press’s unapologetically anti-establishment ethos would be a good fit for my project. Happily, my publisher agreed.

EOA: What are you writing now?

SB:I’m writing poetry on a fairly regular basis, and I’m also working on a draft of a fantasy novel, which is about four-fifths complete. The latter project tends to involve the generation of large amounts of worldbuilding material—some of it, very sketchy and utilitarian; other parts, less so. I feel tremendously fortunate to be able to spend so much time in another world, especially given the state of this one.

I’m writing this in July, when the pandemic seems to be on the wane (at least for the moment) in Michigan, but spiraling out of control in many other parts of the country. Writing during the pandemic has been an interesting experience. When my husband and I rented our current apartment, we had never expected that we would both end up working from home— He spends a good part of the day on the phone, so noise-canceling headphones were a necessary investment! Tuning out the news proved to be rather more challenging, and I’ve had to become considerably more disciplined about when, and how often, I check the latest numbers. It’s been stressful, but I feel grateful to be able to keep writing during these times.

EOA: Who are you reading these days?

SB:I’m currently reading Anne Carson, whose “Essay on What I Think About Most” I particularly like. I’ve also managed to find my way back to Donne, as I do at least a few times a year. As far as fiction goes, I’m reading Anita Desai’sThe Artist of Disappearance, and I’ve just startedThe Lord of the Ringsin Spanish. (My Spanish comprehension is better than it was, but I’m still in the process of building up my confidence by reading books that I’ve already read in English.) Assorted nonfiction from the stalagmites that appear on most unused surfaces in my apartment: Orlando Figes,Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia; John Iliffe,Africans: The History of a Continent; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson,Metaphors We Live By; andBehave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, by Robert M. Sapolsky, whose lectures on YouTube are absolutely fascinating. (I don’t think that I’ve enjoyed science class so much since baking soda volcanoes passed as cutting-edge research.)

EOA: What advice do you have for aspiring poets?

SB:Take a break if you need it! I think that it’s difficult to overstate the importance of fallow time, perhaps especially where poetry is concerned. Sometimes it’s best to let things sit—a poem or a project, certainly, and, at times, it can be beneficial to take a break from writing (poetry, fiction, anything at all), in order to find your way back to it. But that advice runs counter to the narrative of perpetual optimization that seems to dominate more and more of our waking hours. It feels nice to have goals, and sometimes it can be beneficial to aim for a poem a day (50K words in a month, etc.), particularly if you’re struggling to cultivate a consistent writing practice. But it can also be a fine way to produce an impressive amount of mediocre poems.

On a related note, I think that many poets, especially newer poets, tend to underestimate the amount of time that they should allow a batch of poems to rest before they try submitting them to literary magazines (or posting them on social media, if that’s their inclination). Clearly, for some writers, it’s the opposite problem, and they’ll accumulate years, or decades, of backlog before they submit anything at all. But I think that premature submission is much more damaging, because it can be tempting to allow external feedback (whether positive or negative) to drown out your own critical voice, and it’s harder to be objective about something that you wrote just last month. I’m fairly certain that at least 80% of the hurt feelings generated by rejection could be avoided by delaying submission for an extra few months (longer, if necessary).

I also think that it’s quite important for poets (and all writers) to study languages other than their own, and to try to learn something about the history of their preferred language(s). Obviously, it’s exciting to read works in the original, but the point is also to get a better sense of the limitations of your own language. Where does English lack nuance where Spanish conveys it, and how might a poet writing in English try to get around that? Studying the history of a language might also shed some light on that, and can be especially useful in awakening your sensitivity to dead metaphors—a necessary sensitivity, whether you prefer to engage in necromancy or avoid corpses altogether.

Katie Redfield (KR): Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you are from and where you are
working now?
Gordan Skalleberg (GS): I was born in Norway in 1960. My dad is Norwegian and my mom is German. At that time, Norway was not that welcoming for Germans, so we soon moved to the Stockholm area in Sweden. My dad is an entrepreneur and I soon started working for him during school breaks. After finishing school, I started working full time in the family business. I spent two years in Atlanta, Georgia, in the early ‘80s as a trainee and while there I met my future wife Andrea. We had three kids. I worked long days in the business, traveling a lot, trying to fulfill expectations and responsibilities. I gradually became more and more weary and almost subconsciously I was dreaming about doing something more artistic. A lot more can be said about this process, but in 2004 I resigned as president of the company and set out to become an artist.

KR: How did you get started in the arts?
GS: In my late teens my dad encouraged me to use his nice camera to develop my seeing and communication skills. I started taking more artistic photos and learned darkroom work. I really enjoyed it and found that I had a fairly good eye. While growing up we did not go to museums or galleries much, but my mom painted some and her grandfather had been a fairly well-known painter in Germany (who once painted a portrait of the Kaiser), so I guess there was some artistic influence anyway. When I decided to quit working in thefamily business, I wanted to do more art and I had to find my way.

KR: It looks like you spend time between the US and Sweden. Can you share if or how that travel has been impacted by current events?
GS: My wife, Andrea, came from the USA to Sweden and after the kids grew up and moved out, we needed a change and started looking for a place to spend some time here in the USA. We eventually found Santa Fe and immediately felt at home. I am a permanent resident, currently applying for naturalization, and we spend most of our time in the USA. We normally travel to Sweden in the early spring to be partof a large studio tour and then we alwaysspend the summers in Sweden. In the current pandemic, we have had to change these plans. We are staying in Santa Fe and hopefully we will be able to go back to Sweden in the not-too-distant future to see our children and my parents. Everything is so uncertain now.

KR: Your paintings often feature very classically posed people that give them an almost historical feel. Do you typically work from old or new photographs, from life, memory or a hybrid?
GS: I normally work from photos, more or less. I like to alter the photo images to add something that will create questions, inspire people to make up their own stories. I like to say that I am a storyteller without telling the story. I always look for old photos of people I do not know and when I find a photo that inspires my imagination I can go to work. I also use my own photos. I do not like to use photos of ”famous” people or photos where the ownership rights can be an issue. When I paint landscapes I mostly make them up; maybe I will use a photo to just get a color or a cloud or some other detail right.

KR: How do you choose a subject for a piece?
GS: As I said above, the subject has to speak to me. It is hard to define what gets me inspired. Maybe I have had an idea for a long time and then I construct a piece with the help of one or several photos.

KR: It seems most of your work is on plywood. Can you tell us when/why you started working on wood and what has kept you coming back to it?
GS: When I began trying to find my way into the art world, I started almost fromscratch and I had to teach myself a lot of things. I remember studying paintings - how the background was painted, colors chosen, materials used. Once I visited an exhibition and saw large works by Swedish painter Rolf Hansson, who had painted on some kind of board. I went home and found a large plywood sheet in my shed and that is how it started. I soon found that I could paint on untreated plywood and let the grain be a random part of my work and from then on I was hooked. I gave a really nice, large roll of canvas to an artist friend.

KR: Many of your pieces seem to juxtapose landscape and portrait. Do you typically start with one or the other?
GS: From a painterly process point of view, I start with the landscape, the background. But before I start painting I have sketched the piece and have a good plan. I will do a lot of the sketching with Photoshop and InDesign. Then I will print it and maybe paint on it or draw in ideas and work from there.

KR: Your laser cut steel sculptures and the shadows they cast are sort of two pieces of art in one. What sparked the idea to start creating these? I read that you have some background in photography. Did that experience with light and shadow play into your design?
GS: When I worked in the family business I learned to do graphic design, photographed our machines for marketing purposes and learned to work with Photoshop. These tools have been fantastic in my work. The steel pieces came about in a process where one thing leads to another. I like to describe it as hiking - you come around a bend and you see a hill and get curious about how it looks beyond that hill. So you move on. At that hill you see something else and you keep moving on - and you will never know what it will lead to. I worked on a photo in Photoshop and applied some cutout filters; then, I took that image into InDesign and played with it and soon came up with the idea of doing a large steel cutout. I made the first test with a full 8’x 4’ plywood sheet; I created a mock-up with a jigsaw. I placed it outside mystudio and was blown away by how the landscape and the light interacted with the piece. Next I wanted
to make the real steel piece, starting with some smaller pieces. I came home from the laser cutting factorywith my new pieces, had a cup of coffee and played with ideas about how to use them. I drilled two holes at the top of one piece, applied some steel wire, hung it from the ceiling, adjusted a spotlight…BOOM! The shadow on the wall was a surprise that I had not planned. But if I had not constantly been on the move to experiment, I would never have found it. So was it just luck or a result of my process?

KR: How do you push yourself forward to find new creativity?
GS: I think I have partly answered this above. Even if I am not actively painting in the studio, I am almost always thinking about ideas and looking for new projects. I do not normally take huge leaps; I try to move ahead in small steps that are based on my core artistic activity. So, when I am working, I like to surprise myself with the thought, ”I have never done it quite like this before.” As I am not trained and educated as an artist, I very often have to start from what seems to be scratch. How do I paint skin color? I do not have a patented method, so I experiment…over and over.

KR: Experimenting with as many different formats and techniques as you do, I am guessing maybe you
have encountered some failed attempts along the way. Can you tell us about an idea you had that did
not work out the way you expected?
GS: Fear of failure is always there, but I think it is especially important to take that risk. Often when I start on a painting I feel like ”this time it is going to suck.” One nice thing about painting in oil is you can add layers and work on mistakes. This normally creates depth and character and sometimes I have to remind myself to move on and add a layer and keep pushing beyond the ”mistakes.” I am currently working on a relatively large painting that I was looking forward to working on, but I lost the ”fun” and had to take a break. I will soon start on another layer and deep down I am sure it will eventually work out. I have tried to sketch landscapes to be used for steel laser cut pieces, but until now it has not worked out. Is that a failure or am I just not done yet?

KR: What would you consider to be one of your best successes as an artist and why?
GS: I think my first large laser cut piece is one of the best I have done. But in terms of success I am maybe most excited when children are intrigued by my art. I even had a blind man visiting me in the studio once during a studio tour. The place was packed with people, but I had him grab my elbow and then I ”showed” him my art. I let him touch my work and he could ”see” with his sensitive fingers and it was an amazing experience for both of us.

KR: How many hours a week do you devote to your art? What are some of your work habits that you
think are an asset?
GS: A few years ago I started taking riding lessons from a very experienced and ambitious reining trainer. I soon wanted to have my own horse. I now own an awesome reining horse and I ride 4-6 times a week. Every time I learn something new. So I normally go to the barn to ride and then I come home to work. It is a perfect balance and I am convinced it helps me in my artistic work. I will paint maybe 4-5 hours and then do other studio work. I like to keep my studio in order; I need order around me to be able to create. I do not work all the time, night and day. I need to be fairly rested to paint as it takes so much concentration. When it comes to assets in my work, I think my over 20 years in the business world taught me a lot about work discipline, presenting your ”product,” meeting with customers/clients and very much more. My years in the cable industry is my ”diploma,” so to speak.
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KR: What motivates you to keep creating? What do you hope viewers experience when they engage
with your work?
GS: If I would have to choose between riding and painting, I would sacrifice my beloved horse without hesitation. Even if I get weary at times, creating art is my passion. When I get tired or weary, I try to inspire myself, maybe by leafing through a book about one of the masters, or I go to a museum or gallery and that will most likely restore my desire to create. Sometimes I ask myself about the meaning of it all, why make art when there are so many dire needs in the world? Then I again think of children and young people, how important it is to connect the two brain halves, inspire imagination and creativity. Older people need that stimulation as well. You do not have to be an artist to have imagination and creativity – it is equally important for a designer, a technician, an architect, a doctor, a scientist, etc. I want people to be inspired by my work, even to the point where they might start painting or creating on their own.

KR: What do you find to be the most challenging aspect of being a painter?
GS: I guess the greatest challenge for any artist is to be able to make a living while doing what you are passionate about, having the freedom to work on your own ideas. In that process I think it is important to find out what success is to YOU. I believe I have to start with ME, to do what I love and make sure I am pleased and happy with my work. Only then I can give something of value to others. If you lose that focus, maybe because you are hungry, it is probably easy to lose your ”core business.” When I started out trying to become an artist, people would say ”well, you can afford it.” But it was an immense struggle, not least to break free from what I thought (imagined) other people thought about what I was doing – my family, my parents, my former colleagues and customers. It took years before I actually felt I was WORKING when I was painting. But over the years I have had countless people tell me I made the right choice and that is a great reward…and probably success.

KR: Who are some of your art influences and mentors?
GS: I do not think I have ever had a mentor. In the early stages of finding a way to paint, I was inspired by Andy Warhol’s handling of colors and I was inspired by how Edvard Munch painted. I have gotten so much inspiration from seeing work by known and unknown artists, and also to read about their lives and their work. I take bits and pieces from here and there and let that influence and inspire me.

KR: What advice would you give to aspiring artists?
GS: That is maybe the hardest question of all. It is not a good idea to try to become an artist because you do not want to have a ”normal” 9 to 5 job or because you want to call yourself an ARTIST and hang out with artists. To be an artist you have to have patience and perseverance and you have to be able to spend a lot of time alone. I read a lot about artists; I like to visit their studios. I do question whether I am in a position to hand out advice. For me, maybe I was trying not to burn out, I was desperate in a way…I had to do it.