------------------------------------------------------------------- I guess I'll start with the basics: ------------------------------------------------------------------- How old are you? > 23. Where did you grow up? > I grew up in Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis, MN. All Minnesotans know that Edina stands for Every Day I Need Attention. Where are you living now? > Now I live in downtown Minneapolis near the University of Minnesota on a street dominated by Somali refugees. It’s strange to walk around and not hear a word of English. Which city would you rather live in right now: the one where you grew up or the one you're in today? > Oh, Minneapolis for sure. Moving back to Seattle (where I went to school) is also something I’m looking into. Who do you work for and what do you do for them? > I work for Fresh Color Press, a digital printing company. We make all sorts of things, mostly commercial: business cards, posters, postcards, invitations, brochures, booklets, pamphlets, direct-mail stuff. I work in the bindery, which means I’m in charge of the pieces after they come off the press, doing whatever needs to be done: trimming, folding, collating, staple-binding, spiral and wire binding, shipping. Do you enjoy doing that sort of thing? > Yeah, I love it. It’s fascinating work, and as a writer it’s cool to be a part of the “practical” side of the industry. Like this book I just finished writing, I can design and print and bind it myself, which is so great. What would you rather do, if you didn't have to worry about money? > I’d write poetry and do things that inspired me to write poetry. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Moving on to bigwhoop-related issues: ------------------------------------------------------------------- What was the main reason you joined bigwhoop.org? > I needed a place to “publish” my writing portfolio, and I loved the idea of having a dynamic portfolio on the web instead of a static portfolio on paper. What do you hope to get out of your blog? > I hope to incorporate it into the rest of my site more; make it a place to publish mini-reviews, highlight music and books that I’m interested in, publish short-short stories and poems for the first time, and genrally make it more than just “here’s what I did with my day,” although I do plenty of that too. Is it going the way you had hoped initially? > Initially I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t see it as part of my site; it wasn’t as important as the poems and essays and stories I was publishing. So it’s going far better than I had orignally imagined it. What do you hope others will get out of it? > I hope they’ll take the time to comment on the stories and poems I post there; it’s a writer’s dream to get instantaneous feedback, which is exactly what I can get from the blog. And I hope they’ll take me up on some of my recommendations—nothing makes me happier to hear something like “Hey, I just picked up this Wilco album because you wouldn’t stop talking about it. I love it!” That’s so great. How many of the other people with weblogs on bigwhoop have you met? > I’ve met you briefly, and Andy Morrison is my homeboy. How often do you read the various bigwhoop blogs? > Fairly often. It’s an intelligent and witty community around here. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Hobbies and stuff: ------------------------------------------------------------------- What sort of side projects are you working on that aren't part of your full time job or bigwhoop? > Like I said, there’s this book, City of Cold Ribcages, and there’s soon to be another. I write a lot. If I don’t, I get jittery and stressed. Like Andy, you're an eagle scout, right? How does that training help you these days? > Well, knowing how to tie a bowline or a two-half hitch or how to apply a tourniquet isn’t really helpful everyday, but all the leadership training I received is infinitely useful. Just knowing how and when to take charge, or when to be patient and let someone else take the lead, is really important. And some of the basic values Scouting instills are essential: trust, loyalty, friendship, kindness. Any other hobbies you'd like to mention (poker, fantasy baseball, etc.)? Which hobby or sport activity would you have the hardest time giving up? ------------------------------------------------------------------- Big Issues: ------------------------------------------------------------------- The term 'poemosity' makes me think of poetry slams. If you've heard of peotry slams, could you please explain what they mean to you in such as way that someone who has never heard of them might come to understand what they're all about? Alternatively, if you've never heard of them, speculate as to what they're all about. >A poetry slam is an event rather than a simple reading. Poets get up and read their poems in a very dramatic way; there’s usually yelling, hoots and hollers, call-and-response, and a considerable amount of improv. It’s a very social thing; as an audience member you’re part of this experience, this collective, you’re involved in the poetry-making, as opposed to a poetry reading, where you sit quietly and listen intently. The poetry slam is a direct descendant of the Beat reading, where anyone could get up and yell out a poem or two. Poemosity is definitely like that, because my website isn’t just a bunch of poems sitting there. It’s the blog, it’s quotes and links, it’s the instant feedback I mentioned before. I made a big rant about the word “poemosity” about a year ago, which you can find here: http://hays.bigwhoop.org/archives/001920.html That post’s sorta my statement of purpose as a writer. Personally, as a kid growing up, poetry seemed to me to have a VERY bad rap. Do you think this is true for most kids? How do you think we can make poetry more 'cool' for the young kids? Or is that even something we should try to do? > We should definitely try to make poetry cool again, because it IS cool. This goes back to that post I pointed to in the last question. I’m willing to bet that nearly everyone writes poetry at some point in their life, usually in their teen years. Teens are attracted to poetry because of its rawness, its energy. Teens know you don’t need grammar to write poetry, you can just rant in stanzas and rhyme once in awhile and it’s a poem. And this is attractive not only to teens, but to people of all ages all over the world. So, why do we all cringe when our middle school English teacher tells us we’re going to read Robert Frost? (I know I did—it took me until college to discover poetry’s beauty) It’s because we’re taught from a very early age that poetry is stuffy and boring. I have no idea when this notion entered our collective consciousness, but there it is. So it becomes a generational thing: stuffiness begets stuffiness. Students who are taught that poetry is dry become teachers who teach that poetry is dry. It’s depressing. I think what happens, what scares young people away from poetry, is too much emphasis is placed on understanding the poem. Students are taught to search for form (“A sonnet goes abab cdcd efef gg”) and theme (“this poem is about World War II”). But they never know why a sonnet is written that way, why it’s so elegant. They’re never allowed to explore that. They never know why a certain poem is such a poignant representation of WWII. They’re told why by bored and fed up teachers. They’re told which words to remember, which metaphors to track, without ever really knowing why. Kids are not allowed to explore the pure aesthetics of a poem. Knowing iambic pentameter is great and all, but if it doesn’t DO anything for you, what’s the point!? Same with rhyme, alliteration, anaphora, and all sorts of other poetry terms I could spew out. If a poem isn’t BEAUTIFUL to you, why should you give a damn about the technique and theme behind it? You shouldn’t. What it comes down to is, if you can’t see the beauty in the language of a particular poem, you’re never, ever going to understand it. The problem here is our obsession with testing. You can test on form and technique and theme, but you can’t test on opinion. And if you can’t test, you can’t give grades, and our society you can’t have school without grades. So, something in this structure needs to change in order for kids to enjoy poetry again. Poets are a mischievous, hilarious, stubborn, weird bunch. And so are kids. There’s no reason why they can’t get along. When I first started listening to rap music, I was surprised and impressed at the emphasis on the lyrics. It was a refreshing alternative to most pop music, and really it still is. How much do you think rap music and poetry share in common? >Everything. Rap is poetry, and so is traditional songwriting. This fact is constantly overlooked. Singers like Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, James Mercer of the Shins, Stephen Malkmus of Pavement, and Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse are creating some of the best poetry of our generation. Listen to Wilco’s “I’m trying to break your heart” or the Shins’ “New Slang” and tell me that isn’t some amazing poetry. Same goes with hip hop: MCs like Mos Def, Talib Kwali, Common, Outkast, the Beastie Boys, MF Doom, Sage Francis, the Streets, Rum DMC, Grandmaster Flash, even Snoop Dogg, are creating some of the most unique language and variations on language in the past and present centuries. And hip-hop is only getting more and more literate. I think much of the future of both poetry and music can be found in hip-hop. Rap’s greatest contribution to poetry is the way it ripped poetry down from its elitist tower and brought it to everyone. A lot more people can relate to rhymes about White Castle than to rhymes about diverging paths in a wood. White Castle is what people know; it’s a mark of their childhood, like so many other things rappers rap about. Along with this comes an immediacy that traditional poetry never had. You don’t see poets having freestyle face-offs. Rapping is something that so many people can do and so many more want to do, so competition and camaraderie (think about rappers making guest appearances on their friends’ songs) are fostered. Again, it’s more like the Beats than anything else. This collectivist attitude is what makes rap so fascinating and essential. And to relate this to your last question, rap may hold the key for future generations to get turned on to traditional poetry. What's harder to write: poetry, essays, or comic books? >I’ve yet to attempt a comic book, so I can’t say anything about that. Poetry and essays present a similar challenge. With poetry and essays you need to strike a balance between language and message, and sometimes that balance seems impossible to find. I you get too lost in your poetics, the reader will stop reading. But if you get too direct and preachy, the reader will get bored or pissed off. The only difference I can find is that essays oftentimes require research, and poetry simply requires you to live. Therefore, essays are harder. Haha. You have one to a few sentences to give one piece of advice to people you think might be reading this. What do you have to say? >”Take it easy, but take it.” Woody Guthrie.