One of these poems, "Flood," grew directly from a dream – I really did have a sleeping vision of myself doing something like surfing a flash flood, only to discover that all the water was going into a gigantic culvert or something. Must be like the sense that you're about to go over a waterfall. (I didn't know Kay Ryan's poem "Niagara River" when I wrote this, but if you know that poem you'll see the thematic connection, I think.) So in the case of this poem, there is a dreamscape automatically, although the way the poem ends is more with a grasp of reality than with expressing any sort of preference for dreams.

The other poem, "Futurecast," did not grow from a dream, so far as I can recall! It's more of an ecologically-aware poem, I suppose. The landscape does seem stark and in a way simplified, so it resembles dream-based poetry, but its pessimism about humanity's control over the immensity of the Earth is really rather more rational than irrational or surreal. Alas.

It might be hard to realize from those two paragraphs that I'm actually a huge fan of surrealism – I'm not sure who couldn't be!

 

 

 

It was a terrifying and near-death moment full of fear for me, to be truthful. I woke up with a start. I probably didn't, that is, me personally, me autobiographically, get up and go outside to look at the stars, but I do think the remedy I describe myself (or my persona) as pursuing, is useful. I was anxious about disappearing into nothingness, but after all, the expanding universe involves whole galaxies going further and further apart, farther into what seems like nothingness. I think I moved from a personal fear of death to a larger ease about it, in this poem.

 

Water is at the core of both “Flood” and “Futurecast.” What is the implicit narrative you would like the word “water” to evoke in your poems?

This is maybe too hard a question for me, but let me try to form a response: I grew up in Kansas, 4th generation on my mother's side, and knew my grandfather quite well, who grew up on a farm out there on the plains. I know those farmers relied on rain and had a vulnerable relationship to the weather, daunting enough to shape their religious views (and their political outlook, too, for that matter). I'm just a suburban gardener myself, and where I live we don't usually have to worry about not having enough water – but that it is a precious and necessary thing, not always available when we'd like to have it, is something I am never unaware of.

 

I have several unpublished poetry manuscripts for which I'd like to find publishers. I realize I'm not alone in such a situation or such a desire! And nonetheless I continue to write. Right now I'm working on both prose poems and lineated, lyric poems, some of which approach traditional forms of "the tradition" by systematically warping various rules and constraints – rhyming the beginnings of lines, for instance, instead of the ends.

 

Where would you like to see yourself writing in ten years? (Would you like to acknowledge that your writing is better, the same, or completely different?)

I do hope I'm writing in ten years. Let's leave it there!

 

 

Rain. Soon

the swift gutters overflow, traffic stops,

 

I’m alone in the flood.

A sheet of plastic drags me:

 

I’ve grabbed one end, try to keep it flat:

it’s pulling me along like a motorboat

 

and I’m a waterskier, under the freeway,

a charioteer past the shopping center –

 

at the last minute I see the huge drain;

let go the plastic;

 

awake, I walk

around the house,

 

look up:

starlight above scattered clouds:

 

galaxies

not coming back.

 

 

 

 

 

Maybe not the huge peaks way in the distance

but so much else will be landscaped.

 

From a small boat at sea

outside the main shipping lanes

you will still see stars at night.