ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com

Poetic Profile

David A. Kirschenbaum 

General Questions

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

I was born and lived in Brooklyn, NY until just before my 10th birthday.

There was no poetry that I can remember from then, other than Dr. Seuss books. The first writing I can remember from when I was young was when I lived in Long Island, after moving from Brooklyn, and I began to cut out photographs of sports stars and write my own captions for the photos. And I remember in 6th grade English class we had to make a project for a component of the class on Greek mythology. My sister helped me make greeting cards where I put tracings I colored in of different mythological figures on the outside of the cards. On the insides I wrote four lines of greeting card verse in what I now know was A-B-C-B. I guess those four or five cards were my first poems.

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

Being a poet-editor, it¹s always been those poet-editors who influence me, as a poet and a small press editor. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ed Sanders, and d.a. levy foremost. Among my contemporaries, I¹ve always enjoyed Bill Luoma¹s work, how damn consistently great it is, especially My Trip to New York City. And Sean Cole¹s postcards, not just the ones he sent me as a writing assignment for four straight Decembers (2001-2004), and which became his book we published The December Project, but the simple vacation postcards I¹ve received from him that spurred on that assignment. Most of my writing the past few years has been done in month-long postcard or postcardesque projects, and those projects stem directly from my love of writing postcards and the pleasure of finding a correspondent in Sean who takes the art of postcard writing as seriously as I do.

There are also some newspaper columnists who I¹ve loved over the years and have read religiously, especially Mike Lupica and Pete Hamill. And Harvey Pekar¹s comics have been doing for a long time what I try and do with my work‹use one person¹s life as a way of exploring the minutiae in everyone¹s lives.

3) Where were you educated? Was this important?

As an undergrad at Hofstra University I was an editor at The new voice., the alternative student newspaper, as well as a co-organizer of our anti-Apartheid movement. I wrote a bit for the school yearbook, even worked for a semester for the concerts committee. All the while I kept ignoring my studies (my last two years I earned as many credits as my first four). So I kept asking my professors if I could take incompletes.

Eventually I started dating someone who moved back home after a year. That first winter break I visited her and we went to the library at her new school to do work on our respective incompletes. I would do a little work, gaze over at my girlfriend, and then start writing in the margins. I would always start with the same words‹the lyrics to The Beatles¹ song ³Help²--and eventually those would lead into my first poems. Soon I¹d begin writing the poems directly into the margins, skipping ³Help.² This was January of 1989.

A year later I began writing poems more regularly. My best friend Ian Wilder¹s dad was a professor at nearby Adelphi University, and Ian would take me to the monthly coffeehouses there where I would read my poems aloud to others for the first time.

Around the same time I met Rod Sperry, who I would start Boog Literature with some two-and-a-half years later. He took me to readings in the upstairs lounges of the tower dorms, and turned me on to Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. When I started a new student newspaper a year later, I wanted there to be poems in it, unlike the other two student papers, so Rod became The Oracle¹s poetry editor.

Eventually I¹d end up at SUNY-Albany, getting my M.A. in American history.

There wasn¹t much poetry in the history department, but there were a whole lot of poets elsewhere in Albany. The poets were roughly broken up into two categories. There were the state worker poets, the locals who often times grew up in the area, and who frequently worked full-time jobs for the state.

Dan Wilcox was the one who named the group and was their unofficial representative. He¹d always tell me that he had a grant from the state to write poetry. ³I give the state 35 hours a week and the rest is for me,² he says.

The icon was this poet-organizer Tom Nattell, who passed away about a year ago. He was the organizer of the longest running local open mic, at this punk club called the QE2. It was held the last Monday of each month, and I remember a time when I would only read at it if I had new work to read. And because it was the big scene of the month I always made sure to write new work to read each month. Tom would come around with his young son Noah and they would read anti-Columbus and anti-George Bush the elder poems, as well as in memoriam poems for AIDS activists and the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He would work with SUNY to bring people like Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and Anne Waldman to campus and to the QE2. He curated a yearly summer series in Washington Park at the Robert Burns statue, and he would have poets read each New Year¹s Eve at the First Night celebrations. It was through Tom that I¹d earn the first money I ever made for reading poems.

Eventually, after much pestering, Tom allowed Boog to put out his first ever chapbook.

The poet Alan Catlin was part of this community, tending bar at the student frequented Washington Tavern. And then all sorts of other great locals who gave the scene its flavor, including Tom Clark, D. Alexander Holiday, Don Levy, Mary Panza, Charlie Rossiter, and Jessica Stein, this teenager who came in from the suburbs to read her poetry as often as she could.

The other category was the students, who would turn over every two to four years or so, injecting new energy into the local scene. The three big ones for me were Katie Yates, Rachel Aydt, and Chris Funkhouser. Katie had studied at Naropa, where she was Anne Waldman¹s assistant. I had heard about Naropa before and thought about going there, but it was Katie who got me there. She introduced me to Chris, who was coming from Santa Cruz, California, where he founded We Press, to study at SUNY-Albany. And Rachel, an 18-year-old SUNY student who I saw hit all the local open mics and whose work Rod and I dug enough to make Boog¹s second chapbook. And I also met for the first time in Albany David Baratier, who was studying at nearby Siena College, and Chris Stroffolino, who had just moved to the area to get his doctorate at SUNY.

It was all of these poets, all of these communities that provided me my poetic education.

5) What is your favorite food?

I barely cook, ordering in most of my meals. My favorite place to get delivery from is the closest Famous Original Ray¹s Pizza, none of which are original or associated with most of the other Ray¹s Pizzas. My favorite dish is the baked ziti, which is also something I like to cook when I throw the occasional small dinner party.

6) Sports Team?

Born in Brooklyn, and having always lived in New York state, all my favorite sports teams are from the area‹Mets, Jets, Knicks, and Rangers. And it¹s the Mets, the first team I ever rooted for, from the time I was six-and-a-half and my big sister and brother returned from the Mets defeating the Reds in the 1973 N.L. Playoffs with a hunk of Shea Stadium grass that we grew in our Flatbush, Brooklyn apartment for some time.

7) Vacation Spot?

It has to be the San Francisco bay area. My mom¹s the youngest of six children, four of whom eventually settled out in the bay area, leaving me with 50 or so relatives in Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco, Fremont, and other cities throughout the region. I made my first visit for a cousin¹s Bar Mitzvah in the summer of 1975 when I was eight-and-a-half-years-old. My parents took me to the then-Oakland Coliseum to see the Baltimore Orioles against the Oakland A¹s, the first of many times I¹ve been to that ballpark.

As I would visit family over the years I would discover the Haight, walk through Berkeley, go used bookstore shopping everywhere, go in City Lights Books for the first time, wander Golden Gate Park. As I got into poetry I would go to readings, from Above Paradise to my first ever slam at Laval¹s Subterranean in Berkeley. I¹ve even organized Boog readings by many Bay area poets I¹ve befriended over the years on my last three trips to the area.

8) Curse Word?

Favorite curse word to say, to hear, to think of? The first word that entered my head was cunt. I mean, it¹s weird to have a word in your head that you can never say, well, almost never say, which I guess is what makes it a fun one.

9) What interests you that you have not gotten to yet?

I¹m guessing this is a poetry and publishing question, yes? I¹ve hit a groove for now with the press. I¹ve always wanted to do a free community newspaper, and we¹ve been doing that for the past four years. When I started Boog City I thought that I knew all these great poets, artists, and musicians and I wanted to expose them to bigger audiences. We distribute 2,000 free copies of the paper every month. It¹s very rare that a poet can say that their work is in something with that kind of reach, and I¹m really happy that we can do that for them.

When there¹s a poet whose work strikes me enough to put out a bunch of their poems, I do a Boog Reader pamphlet. And I always do instant, event-related publications when the mood strikes me.

With the events we do, I¹ve been enjoying our ³d.a. levy lives: celebrating the renegade press² series. It¹s nice to get my fellow small press editors in from out-of-state and help them have a place to expose more people to their press and authors. And the classic album shows, where we have anywhere from six to 13 musical acts perform records live, everything from Nirvana¹s Nevermind to Pink Floyd¹s The Wall.

I¹d like to start doing the old shows I did again, with musicians performing their own material and two or three poets reading their work. I talked with Matt Roth, who runs the local record label Olive Juice Music about doing a short-run series featuring his musicians and Boog poets. Hopefully we can get it together for sometime down the road.

As for my own writing, I¹m still doing my nightly poems. I guess I¹d like to get my work out there more, but my only problem is that I keep submitting work to friends who run journals and ultimately they reject me, be it because of co-editors who don¹t like the work or the unintended themes of their publications. It¹s always been weird for me, as when friends submitted work to me when I was in charge of picking poetry for Boog I always did my best to publish it, even asking for more work to look at if the first sub didn¹t hit me. So, yeah, I want to get my work out more, but when friends treat you the way that some of mine have it makes you a little bit leery about submitting to strangers.

10) What is your ideal day?

TV, some writing, not leaving the apartment.

11) Do you have mystic connections to places, things, ideas?

The biggest one is to the Flatbush section of Brooklyn where I grew up.

Craft Questions:

1) How do you form a poem?

For the past four or five years I just write them, doing a slight edit as I go along, rarely going back and editing them. They¹re basically done in anywhere from 5-30 minutes. I¹ve almost only been writing them as part of nightly writing projects, writing a poem a day right before bedtime about that day. That¹s why I try not to edit them and I write them when I¹m near sleep, so that any barriers I may have had in writing the work might be lessened by the hour and only slightly cleaned up first draft nature of the poems.

2) Do you use collage, found language?

I do listen to and sample conversations I hear as I walk, subway, and bus the city, and what I see while watching TV or reading. I grab lines from songs, too, and usually sing them when I read the pieces aloud.

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

Almost all of my writing is done on my PowerBook while sitting on my bed. I try to figure out when I¹m going to bed, and then about a half-hour or so before that I go to that month¹s blog. I think sometimes during the day what I¹m going to write about. It could be the biggest event of my day, like when my sister recently had surgery, or it could be something cool and small I saw in a Miami Vice rerun in the middle of the night.

I almost always try to write with music on, usually jazz, because I want the only words to be the ones in my head. Though if a certain song with words in it evokes someone, and I want to write about them, I¹ll put that song on permanent repeat and write.

In 1989, Ginsberg talked to a class I was peer teaching on the Beat Generation and the Counter-Culture and told us all we all should carry a small memo pad with us so we¹re always able to write down poems that come to us. Since then I have, and my pads contain everything from shopping lists, to poem fragments, to errands I have to run. Also, when I write with a pen, I only use a Bic 4-color medium point pen, partially because as a copy editor I always have red at the ready.

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