ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com

Poetic Profile

Anthony Hawley

The Following Profile Was Submitted by Laura Sims, Contributing Editor

General Questions:

1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?

I grew up by the ocean in Newburyport, Massachusetts, very close to the New Hampshire border. I wrote in grade school and high school and I was exposed to poetry, but I wouldn’t say poetry was hugely present. Painting was. My father is a painter, and paintings, his studio, galleries, museums, New York, and the creative process were a big part of my life growing up. No one pushed me to the arts, but they were there a lot.

2) Who / what are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artworks, and other things that inform your work?

Well, I always come back to/am reading Michael Palmer, Louis Zukofsky, Jack Spicer, Dickinson, Stein, Celan. For a while, I was very interested in Joseph Ceravolo. Beckett, Borges, Woolf, Faulkner, and Nabokov are all-time favorites (Beckett and Woolf really made me want to write). Of course, my friends who are writers are also big influences on me and maybe the most important ones—Ryan Murphy, Kira Henehan, Laura Sims, and Corey Mead are some of the most exciting writers I know. I like Catherine Wagner’s poems a lot. Also Jacqueline Waters. Susan Howe, Barbara Guest. Right now I’m reading a lot of Hart Crane and some older Ashbery and the writings of the artist Robert Smithson. Ben Marcus and Diane Williams. My wife. My wife is the first violinist of the Chiara String Quartet and her playing, performing, the works her quartet commissions, and the music I’ve been exposed to through her has had a huge influence on me. She’s really my biggest influence. And now our daughter is a big influence on me, too.

3)  When did you 'become' a poet; when did being a poet become part of your everyday life?

I don’t think I’ve “been” a poet long. I’ve written poems for a while on and off. Everyday life? Past five or six years. I wrote stories more consistently before writing poems. Then the line separating genres got very blurry.

4) Where were you educated? Was this important?

Very. I went to Columbia University as an undergraduate and my friends, classes, and experiences there have left an indelible mark on me. I studied comparative literature, but in particular, Italian literature, and a lot 20^th century Italian poetry. Even though I was reading more poetry than I was writing at the time, all those poets affected me greatly. I would count these among influences also…Zanzotto, Ungaretti, Amelia Roselli, Antonio Porta, Aldo Palazzeschi, Dino Campana, to name a few. My friends from those years are really unusual, important, crazy people, too.

5) How has living in New York informed your work? Do you find the “poetry scene” there overwhelming, annoying, energizing, or all things at once?

Yes, all of those things. New York is, for better or for worse, constant stimuli. I think, like most people who live here, I have a love/hate relationship with the city. On any given day, I’ll not be able to imagine ever living anywhere else while simultaneously thinking that if I stay here a second longer I’m going to die.

6) What is your favorite food?

Hard to say. I cook a lot, like food a lot. I’d like to be able to say that I don’t eat meat but that would be a big, big lie. Maybe this dish: Roast duck wrapped in pancetta and stuffed with veal and pancetta.

7) Sports Team?

Red Sox (kind of by default).

8) Vacation Spot?

Southern Italy (not that I get there a lot).

9) Curse Word?

Dill-wad.

10) What CDs are you listening to right now, and which of these does your infant daughter like best?

Hmm…Devendra Banhart, Sonic Youth (Sonic Nurse), The Best of Fela Kuti, The Arcade Fire, The Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, lots of music by Messiaen, Sufjan Stevens, Charles Ives’ “Concord Sonata,” Interpol, Schubert piano sonatas. My daughter likes Schubert, Haydn quartets and Interpol lots, but if we’re dancing, well, just about anything.

11) What do you do for work, and what would you ideally / ultimately like to do for work?

I teach. I teach at Fordham University, The School of Visual Arts, and Bank Street College. I’d always like to teach a little because it keeps me on my toes, but in an ideal world, I would teach fewer courses and they would be courses people want to take (not required courses). Getting paid to travel and edit would be nice too.

12) After spending a month in St. Petersburg, Russia, last summer, what do you miss the least about it? What do you miss the most?

Having to wear bug spray to bed at night.

White Nights.

Craft Questions:

1) How do you form a poem?

It really depends. Certain poems spring from a word. Some from a single image. For a while, I was really sonically obsessed and sound directed my creative process. Sometimes I think I’m more of a landscape poet than I know. But lately, I’ve been working on a long series called P(r)etty Sonnets and with those I’ve given myself more constraints. I allot myself a certain amount of time and I’m trying to achieve a certain attitude. In those poems I’m looking for the everyday, the trite. In general, I spend a lot of time crossing out, making arrows, rearranging, and reordering in my notebook. I sometimes think that making a poem is all about chiseling away.

2) Do you use collage, found language?

Recently, yes, some found language…inconsequential exclamations and advertisements, snippets from the subway, but before that, no, not really.

3) Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?

Organic mostly, but again, these P(r)etty Sonnets are a little of both.

4) Where do you write? Is ambience important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?

We have a closet, about five by five. I write there. When it’s warm, I write outside of our apartment on the bench. In a library also—I need quiet. Place is important. Weather enters into my work a lot. At times, I like to listen to certain music, but because I’m a control freak I want to have complete control over external noise so whatever the sound, I must be in control of it. But since my time to write seems less and less by the day, I find myself writing in transit a lot—subway, planes, trains, etc. To and from.

5)  In the balance between found language and created language, where does your work fall? Do you use many sources?

I think I answered this.