A weekly interview series of San Francisco Bay Area authors, first published at SF Weekly from October 4, 2012 to January 28, 2016 and then for a few more years at Litseen.com.
What is art? Is it necessary? Why?
Ideally a cosmic situationism, a messaging system; a wound, tongue, and nutrient; the ongoing ritual of an innate and unavoidable urge to transmit meaning and experience symbolically; an often unheard, but needed cry in the desert. A way of thinking, an alchemical or magical process. It’s necessary to me for these reasons. It gives substance to life.
What’s been most important to your writing: education, or the real world? Why?
I don’t see these things as separate. Education, both of the formal, institutionally-situated variety and the anarchic, autodidactic type, is very much part of my real world experience, and real world experience is just another kind of education. My writing relies on all of it. The way I see things, and the way I write about them are no doubt inflected by things I’ve read, whether in the classroom or on the couch, and the inverse is also true: that the way I understand things I’ve read is inflected by whatever all I’ve been through. That’s true with everybody. It’s a false dichotomy, and an unfortunate one. The classroom is as real a place as the barroom or the beach. There are different ways of being in each of them and different knowledges gleaned, but for me the poem is a place where that all is permitted to intermingle and interfere, “a place of first permission,” as Duncan has it.
