What are some of your favorite smells?
Bodies. A baby’s neck after they breast feed. Skin moist from a shower. The nervous sweat of people performing or the excitement of bodies on dance floors. The crusty smell of activist meetings. The fecund odor of desire. Hugging you….
What are you working on right now?
I will soon begin what may be my last book of poetry. It will consist of poems I have written in the last two years. Poems with deeper imagery. Poems not published in previous books of mine.
If there were one thing about the Bay Area that you would change, what would it be?
I would bring back the artists and the sense of possibility. I would bring back heterogeneity, and prevent ugly new condos from replacing all the lovely Victorian and Edwardian beauties. I’d also bring back more dive bars. Also, I would make it cheap. If a place is cheap and by the ocean, it’s a good place to be.
What are you working on right now?
I am working on “An Excel Spreadsheet About My Feelings,” the follow-up to my 2013 work, “A PowerPoint About My Feelings,” and the usual number of no doubt highly-marketable longform personal essays.
If you got an all expenses paid life experience of your choice, what would it be?
I don’t want that. If you’ve got the cash, though, I can send you a list of young people who would be more than elated to take a trip outside the Bay Area. I can pay my own way and chaperone. Or perhaps we can fund their college education? We could also just use some Chromebooks; do you have Google’s number?
When people ask what do you do, you tell them… ?
If in their eyes I detect the usual understandable flicker of disinterest about the conversation, in order to let us both go on our peaceful separate ways, I say “English professor.” If for some reason they seem to really want to talk, I will say “poet.” More often than not something weird happens after that.
We’re celebrating four years of Quiet Lightning on December 4th by taking Chicken John’s bus into Fairfax to team up with Pints & Prose for the thirteenth and final show in this year’s Tour Through Town. The curators for this momentous occasion were Meghan Thornton and Ian Tuttle, and they have selected: Keenan Norris Jennifer Williams Read More
Our incredible lineup for November 13th with The Center for the Art of Translation: Melissa Chandler Steven Westdahl Kristina Ten Emily Weinstein Caroline Kessler Gaston Yagmourian Amy K. Bell Julie Morse Curated by Katie Wheeler-Dubin, Lauren Traetto + Evan Karp, the first 100 people to The Lab receive a free copy of sparkle + blink. 7:30pm, Read More
today’s the last chance to submit to our november 13 show with the center for the art of translation. but you have through the 28th to enter the center’s portion of the show. then we come to the end of our yearlong tour through town: for our four year anniversary we’re going to rent chicken john’s bus Read More
What is art? Is it necessary? Why?
James Salter (one of my heroes): “Everything is a dream; only those things that have been written down have any possibility of being real. That’s all that exists in the end, what has been written down.”
