What writers have inspired you?
Oh, we'd be here all night and half the next day. I'll only barely scratch the surface: Mary Biddinger, Victoria Chang, Richard Siken, Noor Hindi, Khaty Xiong, Stan Heleva, Lynn Emanuel, Gary Fincke, Cheryl Townsend, Patricia Neubauer, Jonathan Kinsman, Debra Allbery... like I said, we could spend forever on this subject. There are so many wonderful poets out there.
What projects are you currently engaged in?
I just finally managed, in my fifth year of trying, to complete the poem-a-day challenge in 2020. For added pain and suffering, I also read about the Buson Challenge about halfway through the year (ten Japanese short-form poems a day for one hundred days) and incorporated that for one hundred days of the poem-a-day challenge. I have also, for a few years now, been working on a full double tarot deck of poems (one poem for each upright card, one poem for each reversed). It's taking longer than usual because I'm waiting for things to really hit the kind of weirdly offhand/slant definitions that come to mind when I read normal definitions, and those can be both surreal and exacting. Which is a tough combination indeed.
How have you spent the year 2020?
Much like I spent the year 2019, except instead of breathlessly waiting to see if the government was going to officially consider me disabled, I found out they would in March. While on the one hand, having had arthritis for twenty-eight years is no picnic (especially when it's been getting worse the past two years), it's great to be able to be able to devote a great deal more time to poetry, which I've always considered my main career. It also had the added benefit of 2019 being such a horror financially that it prepared me for 2020 in ways most people didn't get--not that I'd wish having to crowdfund one's life on my worst enemy.
How have you maintained your artistic skills during lockdowns?
To me, poetry has always involved looking at the world through a different lens, kind of--not terribly different, but recognizably different enough that you look at, say, a tree, and it doesn't just look like a tree, but it's connected to other things in your memory banks, and off you go from there. (For the record, when I'm not in "poetry mode", I'm in "music mode"; the creativity is always there, it just comes out in different ways.) So the poem-a-day project over the past five years has really kept that lens in front of my eyes, as it were. Who knew? All those how-to-write books I read when I was twelve knew what they were talking about--you keep doing it, it just becomes muscle memory.
Do you have any goals for the New Year?
Complete the poem-a-day challenge again!
Is community important to your writing? Are there any magazines or small presses that you feel a strong attachment to?
I'm trying to make community a part of it again; I miss the days of weekly critique groups. Not that in-person things are really possible at this time, but I'm hoping that once we're past all this, I'll be able to find a local college with a liberal arts program who might be willing to put something along those lines together (back in the early nineties, I was involved in one at Montgomery County Community College, near Philadelphia, that was fantastic). Getting down deep, getting to know people and their work that intimately, it's a huge benefit.
It fills my heart with immense joy to see New York Quarterly in the process of rising from the grave.
I was gobsmacked by my first acceptance at Chiron Review back in the early nineties, and I'm still gobsmacked when I get something accepted there. Some folks have their New Yorker, some folks have their Paris Review, I've got my Chiron.
Porkbelly Press, and their various zines, chapbooks, etc., are always delightful. Gigantic Sequins and Rust and Moth publish nothing but poems that punch you in the gut over and over again, and it's phenomenal.
Then there are the magazines that are still working the eighties/nineties zine aesthetic. The Charleston Anvil is the closest you're ever going to get in the 2010s to Portland (Maine)'s legendary Headcheese. Spill Yr Guts is handmade horror that makes me happier than anything that looks professionally-produced. Ez.P.Zine has that wonderfully anarchic damn-the-torpedoes feel to it that defined early nineties zine culture so well. (I'm dying to find more places like this!)