a brief conversation with the poet

DZ: These poems challenge and excite me. "Experimental" comes to mind but I think of the scientific meaning, where an honest attempt is made to understand something, one tries to disprove a hypothesis or provide more data for it. I think of the notorious parables of abstract paintings hung upside-down. Critiques of the non-representational in art and the non-linear in literature seem to boil down to the expectation that a reader is passive and must be catered to. But as your reader, I participate. I feel a joy the passive reader never can as I slowly realize that the "you" in "Anymore the Rafters Break my Heart" is in the room with the poet, and somehow that brings me into the room as well. Or maybe I'm hanging the painting upside down! In your first stanza, every line is a sentence, and it feels like jump cuts, but of one scene, or should I say one relationship, but not a mere representation of a relationship, deep in the shadows of it, where even the lovers are lost. Did I say lovers? Am I hanging the painting sideways now? I must say I'm enjoying spinning this painting around. The second stanza suggests that there is a narrative with its intriguing question. Maybe even a plot twist! The third stanza is a romantically lit close up. Every stanza is a surprise. The title escapes grammar: like a childhood ceramic in the attic, it achieves its sentiment more powerfully when it's broken. I'm supposed to ask questions, but I don't want to ask you what your poem means. I hope you can see why. Let me just stop on this poem for now and ask.... how am I doing? Is this the kind of interaction you want as a writer, or am I bringing too much to your poem? Or too little?

SM: Sticking with your apt metaphor, I'd say that any work of art in any form warrants inside-outness and more dimensions than the two or few we typically assign to it. You bravely dig deep into the poem and pull out more than a plum (Isn't it fun to mix metaphors as in some giant Vitamix?). Let me say that what you bring to this poem is "just right" for my money. You read elegantly and with fun imbuing that reading. Aren't we here to be joyful, after all? Some of my work prompted my friend the wonderful poet and critic Tom Fink to say that my work brings a positive ethos, unlike some of my fellow experimental (I'd call that adventurous, mostly) poets. You're on a parallel track with him in your view.

DZ: In "You Were the Ribbony One I Drew" there is no scene by the hearthside, but there is that one very real-sounding line, "You say I take up all the oxygen in the room." I can hear this being said, I can imagine personality traits that would inspire such a comment, and the personality traits that would lead someone to make such a comment. The rest of the poem, to me, is a trip through metaphors. I like "adventurous." Yes, it's more adventure than experiment. To me, this poem is more about love itself than any particular person, how love takes place in the mind of one person, and the other may or may not be there. The other one is ribbony, drawn, was never there (again!), is received to their own face, is dreamt. And yes you use "moth" as a verb and that is exciting but for me that's just the diving board into the adventure of this poem. Did you know moths breathe through their abdomen and thorax? I had to look that up after reading your poem. Anyway this is a love poem as far as I'm concerned but it's that love that includes both being with someone and not being with someone, the love before, during, after, and never. I have no questions for this interview. I mean, all I have are questions but there are no answers.

SM: You're right that it is a love poem, and I will add that it is a grief poem, perhaps one that overstates the line about the oxygen in the room. A trip through metaphors, for certain. And a love poem about love itself, how one experiences this. You could not be more correct than when you say "and the other may or may not be there." The ribbony aspects, that ephemera, means as experience being treated to facets of the loved one, knowing of course that this will lift away.

I suspect that "moth" could function in two ways in this poem: as verb and as adjective. I appreciate your telling me about the fact that a moth breathes through its abdomen and thorax. That's a lesson to us humans, a gift. Bravery in nature, with no choice.