(NOTE: After the interview below, read “Regret” and “What I Have to Say to You,” which appear with permission of the author. To purchase Punchline, click here.)
Q: In so many of your poems in Punchline (such as “Regret”), you address a being/presence that cannot answer you. Your book is full of ghosts. Maybe this is what all poetry does--intimately addresses a reader who can’t talk back. I’m curious--do you envision a reader when you write? Who do you feel you are speaking to, and why? How does communication work in your poems?
A: This is a great and frustrating question, mostly because it makes me reflect on the fact that all writers are shouting “Hello!” into the void, and only sometimes does an echo return. We are forced by the nature of the medium—the phone call made to an answering machine who no one listens to, or, a bit better, listens to but does not return the call—to send out our ideas and hope someone hears, and I suppose the poems in which I address someone, whether it be a “you” or the “ghost” of the poem “Regret,” it is tacit recognition of this. Or maybe it’s a manifestation of the plight of all existential and philosophical inquiry, that wanting to know the truth even though nothing ever comes down to say what the meaning of life is, or where we are from, or what will happen to us in the end. That aloneness is always there in poetry, and in our lives, but it’s our job to be happy with it, because there is no other choice.
