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In keeping with the traditions of the internet this is where you will find the answers to the most common questions posed about me, my poetry, and One Stranger to Another. Why print on demand? It’s pretty simple. Yes, there is some slight loss of prestige in choosing print on demand, but from an economic standpoint there isn’t any comparison to be made. I tried several times to beat the deal I got publishing through 1stBooks and I never came close. What it boils down to is that with print on demand you’re looking at a one-time fee for what is essentially an unlimited press run. Through traditional printers the best press run I could come up with for the same money was 1500 copies. I also had to consider that no matter how I did the math I kept coming back to a projected sell-through of 80% just to turn a small profit. In most traditional publishing houses that would be considered an insanely optimistic percentage to hope for, let alone depend upon. Most magazines for example consider themselves lucky to reach a percentage in the upper 50’s. There is a long and honorable tradition of self-publishing in American literature; I simply see no dishonor in going it alone. Granted, many review outlets and virtually all of the state and federal arts endowments view print on demand titles as vanity publications and one must get used to the guidelines that say, “no p.o.d. please,” but this is a small price to pay for the opportunity to publish your work in an unadulterated form. I figure, if the work is any good, and I think it is, eventually it will find an audience. Who are some of your influences? The flip answer is everyone and no one. The honest answer is that early on I was an enthusiastic reader of Poe and I still think he’s underrated. After I got a little older, high school say, I read Eliot and Cummings and their contemporaries with a fairly open mind, though looking back, I probably read Yeats with the most profit. There is something about the way he created a world that was unique and walled off from his contemporaries, but that was still engaged, sometimes quite publicly, with the mainstream of his country’s culture and politics that excited me. To this day he has few imitators or legitimate heirs, because, I think, he realized his vision so thoroughly that he didn’t leave much room for lesser poets to infringe upon his work with their lesser efforts. I would also like to see my work become part of the public dialogue, though I am not political in the same way, or to the same degree, that Yeats was. After Yeats I like to think I began to find my own way and avoided any major pollutions of my work with pale imitations of this or that master. Whitman was something I carried around with me in a satchel for quite a few years, now I mostly carry it in my heart. I guess I would also have to admit that Seamus Heaney is an influence in an indirect way. I enjoy his poetry, but there is almost nothing in my style that would indicate that. Rather the bog poems in their choice of subject matter crystallized certain ideas of mine about prehistoric peoples. I would also have to cite Louis Leakey’s People of the Lake as an influence in this matter as well as certain essays by Stephen Jay Gould. The sneaky thing about influences is that not everything that influences a poet is poetic. Certainly the connection between scientists and poets is not new. At least since the 1800’s that sort of cross-pollenization has been fairly common, but I imagine a few of you would be surprised to know that some of the skills I employ in my poetry I learned while I tried to learn how to write comic books. One of the things about comics, good ones at least, that makes them similar to poetry is that they both benefit from compression and they both allow a writer’s instinct to go over the top to flourish without shame. Prose is a harsh taskmaster and banishes even the most mundane of sentences as hopelessly rococo. It is with good reason that the purple patch is relentlessly trimmed by the thoughtful writer, otherwise the audience’s ear rapidly becomes insensate and a trifle bored. But in the poem the most highfalutin of phrases can be uttered with out such fears due to the different expectations of the audience as well as to the implied brevity of the form. Likewise the comic book writer can become quite operatic and if the art is similarly pitched no one finds fault. If I were to be wholly honest on the subject of influences, I would have to cite Denny O’Neil’s Batman stories, like A Vow from the Grave, and Ghost of the Killer Skies alongside Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. The world’s funny that way. Learning how few words you can really fit into a word balloon tends to make you learn to choose the words that count the most and also to trim everything you can. In essence that’s what poetry is to me. It all goes back to Coleridge’s dictum: “The best words in their best order.” Do you have any other books out? Not yet, but soon I hope. My plans are to release a book of haiku sometime in 2004. I’ve composed the raw material, some five-hundred haiku, and I’m working it over for public consumption right now. Who are some of your favorite contemporary poets? Like everybody else, I enjoy Mary Oliver’s quiet professionalism and craftsmanship though her’s isn’t a showy style. I like to listen to Billy Collin’s read his poetry, though I get less out of it on the page. I like Seamus Heany for all of the usual reasons: exemplary craft, humane outlook, sly humour here and there. I’ve lately taken a liking to Gary Snyder’s poetry and non-fiction. Something about his view of the interconnectedness of the people and the land strikes me as being in the best traditions of American naturalism despite the slightly displacing veil of Eastern religions. And that’s about it, sad to say. I belong to several poetry message boards and see a great deal of earnest effort, a lot more sophomoric preening and a certain amount of middle aged mediocrity foist upon the world under the guise of poetry. Too many people seem to be under the impression that “freedom of expression” and sincerity are enough to place a work of poetry beyond criticism. They aren’t.
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