500 WORDS (MORE) OR LESS: MICHELLE BURKE

Michelle Burke's Horse Loquela is the winner of the third Red Mountain Review Chapbook Series contest. She just finished her MFA in poetry from The Ohio State University in June. Drawing on her extensive experience working on farms in Ohio and upstate New York, Michelle currently serves as outreach coordinator for GreenThumb, New York City’s community gardening program. Working with the more than 600 community gardens in Gotham, she teaches gardeners to grow organically, to compost, to can, and to cook healthy meals with the food they’ve grown.

Now that is the day job for a poet.

Click the link below to check out what she had to say about Helen Keller, chapbooks, and...Amtrak in this 500 Words (More) Or Less!

1. Talk a little bit about the chapbook as a form. Horse Loquela is part of a larger project, yes? So was the process of paring it down to 24 pages more or less useful? Nerve-racking? What were your governing principles for compiling a successful chapbook-length manuscript?

The chapbook came from my master's thesis, which was a book-length manuscript. Paring it down to 24 pages wasn't hard--I was so tired of my thesis at that point that I enjoyed cutting poems from it. Really, I've never had a hard time getting rid of poems. What's harder is deciding to keep a poem, to bring myself to that point where I feel like I can say, yes, this is a finished poem, and I'm ready to send it out. That's hard.

I did find the ordering to be difficult. I liked beginning and ending with a Helen Keller poem--that seemed right. The middle was tricky. I didn't want to put a horse poem next to a horse poem, and I wanted to vary the form from page to page. The more that I shuffled poems around, however, the more I saw the ways in which they built upon each other. This was an important realization for me as a writer. I knew I was writing a lot of love poems, and I knew I was writing a lot of poems about horses and other domesticated, ill-used animals, but it wasn't until I put everything together that I realized how much the poems about the horses spoke to the poems about human relations. I became very interested in the lover's desire to be both free and tethered. In romantic love, there’s an almost unbearable need to lash oneself to the beloved, but even as we embrace such tethers, we resist them. I think it's related to Milan Kundera's idea of lightness and heaviness--I just finished reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being. We want to be light and float above the world, but it is our very heaviness that brings us to the earth, makes our lives real. Working the poems against each other in a concise format helped me to see these connections.

2. The title poem has an epigraph from Barthes that describes the term loquela as "language through which the subject tirelessly rehashes the effects of a wound." What drew you to Barthes, to that particular word, in helping you get your head around this project?

I happened upon A Lover's Discourse by chance, but I was immediately impressed by the book. It's an insane book really. Barthes sets out to unravel the very language of love--not the language with we which we woo one another--but the unuttered words we say to ourselves over and over, that endless litany of self-castigation and longing.

I also think that writing itself is a type of loquela. That's what writers do--we rehash the past and try to craft the stuff of raw experience into something finer. And all good writing comes from pain. As writers, we force ourselves to revisit wounds again and again, until something meaningful emerges. And writing is like being in love--there are moments of triumph, and that's what hooks us, but mostly it's disappointing or monotonous.

3. List three cool little-known facts about Helen Keller.

1. She performed vaudeville and acted in Hollywood.
2. She was secretly engaged, but never married.
3. Doctors replaced her real eyes with glass eyes tinted blue.

4.
Iowa or New Hampshire? Obama
Garden or Farm? Farm
Black Beauty or the Black Stallion? A horse named 20\20
Manhattan or Brooklyn? Brooklyn
LaGuardia or JFK? Amtrak
Yankees or Mets? Neither
Shiitake or Portobello? Morels and parmesan in risotto
Sonnets or Ghazals? Free verse or blank verse
Emily or Walt? Both
Dressage or Show-Jumping? Western

5. You are Poet-Dictator for a day. You may be either benevolent or despotic. Make a to-do list.
1. Give books by Lisa Olstein, Carl Phillips, Hayden Carruth, and Marianne Boruch to everyone.
2. Make tea, draw a bath, and read the stories in Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock.

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500 WORDS (MORE) OR LESS: MICHAEL MARTONE

Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and he was educated in the public schools there. He attended Indiana University in Bloomington where, as a freshman, he took part in the famous Kinsey Report by completing a survey of his sexual history during orientation. Alfred Kinsey, a biology professor at the university, had begun his famous work on human sexual response when he was teaching, after the war, the "marriage" course, an early attempt in the health curriculum to provide information in what was called then sexual hygiene. One day, a co-ed, who was to be married that summer, approached Kinsey after a lecture to ask what she could expect from her husband, and Kinsey, always the scientist, couldn't answer her since he didn't have, he realized, any hard scientific evidence. "I'll get back to you," he told her, and began his decades long project collecting oral interviews, written personal narratives, taped anecdotal commentary, and computer scanned surveys from a vast range of informants in order to build a workable database of sexual behavior.

There, years later, in a crowded lecture room in Ballantine Hall, Michael Martone participated in the very same ongoing effort of data gathering, carefully blackening with the provided No.2 pencil the appropriate bubble corresponding to the numbered response most accurately representing such desired information as his masturbatory habits and history, his sexual preference, his preferred positions (there were illustrations), and the time, to the nearest minute, of his recovery after "performing vigorous coitus." The room fell silent as the freshman class bent to this initial collegian task required of them, the quiet broken only by the scratching of pencil lead on the rigid manila IBM cards and the counterpunctual response of the rubbing of rubber erasers.

Afterward, Martone remembers racing from the building into a bright fall day, the trees of Dunn Meadow just taking on the color of the season. That night, he called his mother, who had also been a student at Indiana University to ask her if she, too, had been recruited to contribute to Professor Kinsey's report, indicating to her, as best he could, the extent and duration of statistical instrument he had just endured. "No," his mother responded, "they didn't have that when I was there. I did take this facts-of-life course the spring before I married Daddy." She went on to say that she didn't learn much, that the class had been dry and very statistical in nature. "I even asked the professor about it." It hadn't mattered, she concluded, since shortly after that meeting with the professor who had told her he would get back to her about her questions, she and her soon-to-be husband figured out how to go about the very thing that had been so mysterious.

Late one night, in a classroom where, in his senior year at Indiana University, Martone would take a class on Chaucer, his parents, ignorant of contraception in spite of the courses they took, managed to conceive their son. Though when asked, years later, by her son for further details, his mother simply said she couldn't recall much more about that night but that she could make something up if that would help. [From Michael Martone by Michael Martone (FC2, 2005)]

Q&A

RMR: Cormac McCarthy once said, “Teaching writing is a hustle.” Agree or disagree? Discuss.

MM: So I guess he doesn’t mean that in a good way. And I guess that he is saying two things. First, that writing can’t be taught. And because he believes the first, it follows those who do teach are up to something, are taking advantage of someone. I don’t agree that teaching writing is a “hustle” and I think I disagree because we have different working definitions of “teaching.” I admit I am a teacher of writing. I think Mr. McCarthy’s notion of teaching is fiduciary. By that I mean, that the knowledge of a subject is held in trust by a teacher and one goes to school to have the teacher/trustee transfer that knowledge, the secrets so to speak. This model makes sense for law, say, or medicine. If it is applied to writing—that there are writing secrets mature writers know and can transfer for a fee—if that’s the way you think about teaching and writing well then it is a hustle because it is a commodity exchange. I don’t think about writing that way. I know no secrets. I cannot withhold or dole out wisdom on the matter. Teaching for me is more like helping the writer discover what he or she already knows. I provide what I hope are interesting spaces for people to read and write and talk about writing. The space is protected. The time is given. All my students are paid to come to school. There is no tuition. Let me talk about another hustle. A friend of mine, a writer, got fed up and quit teaching for reasons along Mr. McCarthy’s line. He thought most of his students wouldn’t become great writers. He felt he was deluding them by encouraging these less-than-great writers. Now it turns out David, my grumpy writing/teaching friend, also ran in marathons. And I just asked him if when he lines up at the start in Boston, New York, Chicago does he think he’s going to beat the world class Ethiopians. Well, no, he says. And I say why do you run if you aren’t going to win. The answer is that there are other reasons to run, other benefits besides winning. Ditto writing. Still another hustle. I just heard on the radio that students of medicine and law leave grad school with a debt of $50,000 to $80,000. Sure they will have jobs that will pay that back one-day. But those secrets are costly. Not so my none secrets for my writing students.

RMR: James Frey. Brad Vice. George Bush. All have fudged, fibbed, or fabricated here of late -- with disastrous results. Your work often tiptoes the blurry line between fact and fiction. What’s more, you seem to have a soft spot for the good old-fashioned hoax. Not only did you write The Blue Guide to Indiana but -- correct me if I’m wrong here -- you sought to have it reviewed as a legitimate guidebook, not a work of fiction. Likewise, in Michael Martone, you’ve written fifty fictitious bio notes for yourself -- actually placing many of them in the Contributors sections of literary magazines prior to their collection as a book. I think of the acknowledgments section of Michael Ondaatje’s novel Coming Through Slaughter, an artistic embellishment of the life of real-life jazz forebear Buddy Bolden: “While I have used real names and characters and historical situations I have also used more personal pieces of friends and fathers. There have been some date changes, some characters brought together, and some facts have been expanded or polished to suit the truth of fiction.” When and why should we favor “the truth of fiction” over cold, hard facts, and what responsibilities must we live up to -- as readers, writers, citizens, leaders of the free world -- when we do it?

MM: My feeling is that we should all be very careful. Collectively we have made a cultural choice to live in an empirical world. That is we know things our senses tell us. If you don’t believe we live in an empirical world then why do most of us stay in school so long or go to school so young. We believe that we are born blank slates and then are filled up by our experiences. But our senses can be so easily fooled. Satire begins with the cultural shift in the West to empirical belief. So we have always lived in a world where fact and fiction was supposedly easy to tell apart but at the same time we know it’s not. And remember this. A fact is a thing done. Once it has happened it is over, it does not exist. Instead we have residue of the facts. Facts are not real. Fiction on the other hand is a thing made. It is a fabrication. Even what we call nonfiction is a fiction in that sense. It is a made thing. This made thing, this construction has a reality but it is a constructed reality. So as I said above one must be careful in the making and in the consumption of the made thing.

RMR: Either/Or (Explain or not).

Letterman or Leno?..... Letterman
Jeter or DiMaggio?..... Mantle
Libby (I. Lewis “Scooter”) or Liddy (G. Gordon)?..... G. Gordon
Bones or Spock?..... Kirk the Midwestern boy
Brittany or Madonna?..... Christina
Form or Function?..... Form
Bobby Knight or Dean Smith?..... Knight
Borrowed or Blue?..... Blue
Quayle or Lugar?..... Bayh
Barth or Borges?..... Barthelme

RMR: You are George Steinbrenner for a day. Make a to-do list.

- Wake
- Evacuate the bowel
- Oatmeal
- Shower, shave, brush and floss teeth
- Read the New York and Florida Newspapers
- Place a call order on General Dynamics, Biomet, Viacom
- Read an hour in the work of Patrick O’Brien
- Confession, Mass
- Lunch at Four Seasons (steak Tartar)
- Circle Line Cruise and visit to Ellis Island reconstruction
- Call to Sports Talk Radio on XM
- Watch TiVo, saved shows of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert
- Lou Dobbs and Kramer’s Mad Money
- Drinks at the Century Club
- Attend opening reception for Gees Bend Quilts at the Whitney
- Dinner at Sea
- View Manhattan from the top of the Empire State building
- Greet arriving zeppelin
- Prepare for bed and retire in a continuously cruising Airstream trailer cruising the West Side Highway

RMR: Fill in the blank: Michael Martone is absolutely, positively, unequivocally, 100% NOT...

MM: Serious.

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MORE INTERVIEWS ON DECK!

Hope you've been enjoying 500 Words (More) or Less. Stay tuned in March, when we post a recent e-chat we had with the inimitable Michael Martone. Here's a little teaser: At one point, he assumes the blustery persona of one George Steinbrenner. Hilarity -- with a healthy dollop of keen insight into the human condition -- ensues. You won't want to miss it. Until then, keep sending those chapbooks. And remember: We take e-submissions at RMRsubmissions@gmail.com!

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500 WORDS (MORE) OR LESS: ANDER MONSON

Just in case you weren't aware, here it is all spelt out for you: Ander Monson is, in fact, the hardest working man in show business. 300+ shows a year. A growing media presence on all the habitable continents. (Stay tuned for an exciting announcement in the very near future regarding Antarctica!) Rabid, cult-like followings germinating out in concentric circles from all the world's major cities...

In all seriousness, the man is and always has been pretty dadgum large-and-in-charge. A phenom, if you will, in the truest sense of the word. A graduate of Knox College (a school that happens to be one of the best-kept secrets in the world of writing academe, by the way), Iowa State, and the University of Alabama, Monson is the author of two books: a novel, Other Electricities, Sarabande Books, 2005, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award; and a poetry collection, Vacationland, Tupelo Press, 2005. Neck Deep, a collection of "weirdo essays," won the Graywolf Press 2006 Nonfiction Prize and will be released TODAY! He edits the online magazine DIAGRAM as well as its comrade-in-arms, New Michigan Press. His individual stories, poems, and essays have been published damn-near everywhere, including (happily for us) the inaugural issue of RMR. To wit, a sampling from RMR1, by way of Vacationland...

APPROXIMATION

The coroner’s best guess as to time of death
is sometime in the earliness
before the light has staked its claim
with hammer-blows and threats of ice
useless, spilled like perfume across roads.

As for cause, you know it’s notoriously
iffy — in this case it is safe to say death
by drowning or by impact of the body
against the windshield, against the radio dial
which left its mark, and then the drowning after,
or death due to after-prom excitement — the occasion
marked by streamers in the rafters
and the crowning of the school’s best
heads and shoulders with a tin-foil
wrapped, fake-bejeweled band.

Death due to lack of the right date
who might have taken the right route
to the after party, who might not have swerved
to miss the fish — the enigmatic trout
frozen in the middle of the lane,
body like a beacon
warning of the impending season’s
weakness, of after-graduation life
in bars and doldrum rum and cokes in glasses.

Death due to lack of escapist training,
no Houdini present, no Tupac, Elvis
surviving death at least in myth
and continuing to release
themselves in beats & language
to critical suspicion.

Death due to loneliness
and books checked out too long ago
from the Public Library
and not returned on time,
death due to accruing, reoccurring fines
that continued to mount like banks of snow
until she returned them on prom night

until I went to check them out again
to have her signature—some vestige
of her neck/her mind/her hands.

____________________

Q&A

RMR: TRUE or FALSE: James Frey is the spawn of Satan. Discuss.

AM: False. Though I don't think we should give him credit for all the ensuing and in its way enjoyable fiction.

RMR: You are large and contain multitudes. Parsed out by project, your enormous productivity -- scads of journal pubs, three books and counting, DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, etc, etc -- is truly mind-boggling. ("How does he have time?" one wonders.) All well before you hit the big 4-0, no less. Taking a step back from it, I think there might be a more holistic -- and even more impressive, really -- way to look at it: That is, it seems to me that being Ander Monson is more process than product. Would it be a mistake, then, to look at your oeuvre as one continually evolving and expanding "document" -- an inclusive and holistic pastiche that reflects a singular artistic life as it develops in real time? A career arc more akin to Whitman's or Sandburg's than, say, Robert Frost's?

AM: Interesting. There’s a kind of kinship between the work, a point of common departure for the diaspora, and a shared mythology being created that includes the idea of author, and "author", and text (and hopefully even expands the idea of the "book"; see also Neck Deep and the website extension of it). One of the pieces in Neck Deep, the big index, was originally housed in Other Electricities, though it has found its new home as nonfiction, and in a way that's what it always was. It's really not all that interesting being a writer who simply produces product. Not that I'd disclaim any individual book, or the book as a technology that we as a culture really enjoy -- it offers a whole lot of advantages and that's the medium I work in, mostly. But it's also limiting (as genre is in its way -- it provides a sort of pressure which can be responded to in a number of ways). And I am more interested, finally in creation, not exhaustion. Though that sounds totally pompous.

RMR: Ten Either/Or’s. (Explain or not.)

BALL OR DISC? Disc. See also: [this right here].
ONTARIO OR QUEBEC? Ontario.
SOUTH PARK OR THE SIMPSONS? Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
TIGER OR JACK? Jack. Though Tiger can compete on Xbox.
PAGEMAKER OR QUARK? InDesign. But not Quark. Definitely not Quark, though it's always had the better name.
PROSE OR POETRY? Hmmmm...
JEN OR ANGELINA? Who are these people?
POL POT OR MANUEL NORIEGA? I do not understand your modern ways.
CIA OR FBI? I’ve only met the FBI so am not qualified to decide.
SKITTLES OR M&Ms? Skittles blow.

RMR: You are poet-king for a day. Make a to-do list.

AM: Play Katamari Damacy for a while. Roll things into a large ball. Crunch it down and throw it in the sky, which makes people smarter.

RMR: Michigan's Upper Peninsula is...

AM: A place that I'm not even sure still exists. Is it there at all? Look at it on google earth and it's all blurred out. That's suspicious. Who's actually from there? Who goes there? Who makes it their home? And do they read? See also Tom Bissell. See also Catie Rosemurgy. See also Beth Roberts, and Jonathan Johnson. Did I tell you I killed Hemingway? Most people don't know that. I had to cut his heart out. I'm serious. I read about it on the Internet and it made me feel so good.

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7 DAYS 'TIL MONSON...

Pass it on.

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11 DAYS 'TIL MONSON...

Pass it on.

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500 WORDS (MORE) OR LESS: KATIE FORD

Whether or not Katie Ford is a "God-fearing soul," we can’t say for sure. We suspect, however, that God has fixed at least one wary eye on her. Somebody’d better -- she’s got the chops to take over the world (at least that small corner of it known as Po-Biz): Harvard M.Div. Iowa M.F.A. Latin honors from Whitman College. Good thing for us slack-ass mortals, she seems pretty benevolent.

Ford is the author of Deposition, published by Graywolf, and her individual poems have appeared anywhere and everywhere that matters. She has received an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Prairie Lights Prize, and she has contributed to the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. Currently the Poetry Editor of New Orleans Review, she has taught most recently at Loyola University, the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and Reed College.

Lucky for RMR, she’s agreed to judge the 2007 Red Mountain Chapbook Contest (!) and -- über–Good Sport that she is -- she’s submitted herself to the inaugural 500 Words (More) or Less [read the interview after the jump!]. This new feature will bring you the insights and musings of various writers, readers, and thinkers of note, all in 500 words (more) or less...

First, a morsel from Deposition:

Last Breath with No Proof

What is unremembered may be lodged she said a child may not
recall but will act it out in play doll on ground face against tile see how he takes it

by the hair by the foot by the tangled legs sweet mind made of tangled legs
and a patterned dress oh to have evidence to have the scent explained

birds trapped in chimney rustle of wings and fire or numbers etched into an arm
show me where you were hurt I am asked but I am simple unmarked remembering how

can one act out what happened in the mind how make the mind alone in a house
how show long silence what clock what song is there for hollowness who hurt you

once the ticking the voices start she did he did my mind did
and the trespass it begins again?

_____________________________

Q&A

RMR: TRUE or FALSE: Contemporary American poetry is kissin’ cousins with Christian Gnosticism of old, stingy with its secret handshakes, its extinction hard-wired into its own genetic code. Discuss.

KF: The heart of your question is whether or not American poetry will go “extinct” because it is written by a group of insiders — mean, wise, and tight. We should be more concerned that we are writing poems that will last than we are with the movement called “Contemporary American Poetry.” The poems that will last in time, and that move us now, are written because a poet is trying to write something that someone else can utter as if it came from them. When I recite a lyric by Rilke, if I attend to its music and thinking and emotions, it feels as if it is my utterance. That is a form of lyric ecstasy. A fusion, an intimacy. There can be no stinginess in the poetic task. There can be no selfishness. Individual poets might be this way, but they are human beings, so forgive them. Where would we be without T.S. Eliot’s “Preludes”? Yet he was a part of perhaps the tightest, most elite poetic circle of history. But, for the “Preludes,” I would forgive him anything. To be able to have on my lips, “I am moved by fancies that are curled / Around these images, and cling: / The notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing.” There are extinctions in poetry all of the time—good extinctions. Poems published that are not memorable die off sometimes because of compositional haste, because they are not strenuous in their language, because they are anecdotal, etc. That is an extinction. But poems that will last press against and through this — it doesn’t matter who writes them.

When you are alone, you are with a poem, not with “Contemporary American Poetry.” If the poem slays you, you will be a little more alive, a little less extinguished. When I feel this way, I am full of gratitude toward the poet who struggled and thrashed about to write that poem.

As for the “Christian Gnostics,” their texts were lost to us because they were deemed a heretical threat to the political and religious powers of what was being named “orthodox Christianity.” We have them now because they were discovered centuries later in a sand-buried library in Egypt. They are gorgeous, complicated texts. In the same way, Contemporary Poetry, if it is foolish and threatened by new genius, if it allows power — political and literary — to publish only poems of the inner circle, we could bury the poems that would have otherwise brought us new utterance, ecstasy, and lasting literature.

RMR: A couple of years ago, in the Q&A after a reading at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City [scroll down to July 20], you explained your decision to pursue the study of Divinity by quoting Tony Hoagland’s poem, “When Dean Young Talks About Wine”:

When a beast is hurt it roars in incomprehension.
When a bird is hurt it huddles in its nest.

But when a man is hurt,
he makes himself an expert.

Interestingly enough -- nearly as interesting as the fact that you know those lines by heart -- you left off the poem’s three-line dismount, which goes like this:

Then he stands there with a glass in his hand
staring at nothing
as if he was forming an opinion

All of this makes me think of Auden, addressing Yeats:

...Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

The same might be said of religion: not a thing but a way; not a noun but a verb. A means of addressing hurt, responding to it. A method of survival.

On the other hand, there’s something calcified in expertise, or perhaps cauterized. Product over process. Safe, confined, contained -- and trapped.

Your work, specifically Deposition, seems more unleashed than that. There’s a helluva lot of roaring involved. Incomprehension, too: the powerful, growling -- yes -- ferocious kind. There’s also huddling, nesting. Indeed, there’s “nothing,” as well -- “...how show long silence what clock what song / is there for hollowness who hurt you” -- but it’s the kind of nothing that won’t suffer to be blinked at dumbly. It demands an opinion, a stance, if only as a mechanism of self-defense.

Messy, yes. Painful and incomprehensible, too. I suspect (who can say for sure?) those things are part and parcel of transcendence: “Why hast thou forsaken me?” pleads the bloody Nazarene (and here’s the kicker) the moment before his spirit ascends. Last breath with no proof.

Here’s something I notice: There’s some measure of resignation in Hoagland’s sentiment, and defeat. Secular and still. But I daresay there’s a roar of religiosity in the Auden, as in Matthew 27:46. And I already said I hear that roar -- lots of them, actually -- in Deposition.

So here, finally, is the question -- loaded and unanswerable though it might be:

Where would you locate your study of Divinity and -- if I may be so bold as to ask them to join hands -- your poetry on the continuum of secular to religious, of sacred to profane?

KF: Divinity School and Deposition were part of the same time period in my life, but there is a distinction between them, and that is why I quoted Hoagland’s beautiful lines, “But when a man is hurt/he makes himself an expert,” when asked why I went to Divinity School. Expertise is a pursuit of the intellect, and, in some cases, the body. So, yes, it holds itself at a distance, a distance religious seekers don’t usually want. They want intimacy, submersion. Studying theology (trying to gain some intellectual expertise) was a way for me to contend with the powerful and destructive elements of religion, elements I had experienced in my earlier, younger religiosity. Deposition stems from those emotions, which were, I believe, flamed a bit by things I was learning in my intellectual studies. For example, I began to find clear correlations between the ways theologians and religious leaders wrote and spoke and the ways humans perpetrate violence. Both forcefully define the reality of another person, both control another, both thrive by moments of threat and moments of mercy. I have a long essay on this and can’t go into it all now. I used up too many words above! But, having this theory made Deposition even stormier. My work engages the metaphors of my tradition — God, world, human, salvation, etc. — and in that way, my work is not fully secular. If being called a “religious” poet means the questions I most often contend with in my poems concern those metaphors, then I lean towards what you call the sacred. That said, the human is included in my list of metaphors.

I am not a Christian poet. I am just a poet, and it means very little to me to say or not say I am religious. I don’t believe in God, I do believe in God. I have no interest in reading poetry that claims to be Christian or religious, in the same way I have no interest in surrounding myself with people who are eager to claim those things.

RMR: Ten Either/Or’s. (Explain or not.)

Barack or Hillary? Barack.
Clooney or Johansson? This is not an interesting either/or.
John or Paul? Small parts of both.
Psalm 23 or Sonnet 18? The psalm, I dare say.
East or West? Northwest near the East.
Elvis or Frank? Elvis.
Emily or Walt? Emily.
Martin Luther or Martin Luther King? MLK.
Audrey or Katharine? Katharine in “Bringing Up Baby.”
Loaves or Fishes? Fishes, currently Japanese varieties.

RMR: You are poet-king for a day. Make a to-do list.

KF: 1. Depose some people.

RMR: Katie Ford poems as prophecies, as tongues, as baptisms, as ablutions, as all or none of these. Discuss.

KF: One becomes ugly when one claims these things. I will say this: there are rhetorical and musical techniques in the voices, liturgies, and manners of speech you list in your question. Sometimes I use them.

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