General Questions

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

I was born in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in the Shendandoah Valley where the Hoover name was common.  My father, Robert, was one of two adopted children of Paul Emmanuel Hoover, for whom I was named, and Pearl Skeggs Hoover.  My grandfather had a college degree and read Latin and Greek, but, to the disappointment of his father and against the family pattern, he decided to farm for a living.  His brothers became prominent doctors and lawyers in the valley.  

 My father was a Protestant minister in the German Pietist tradition in rural areas of the South and Midwest, always in places where Amish and Mennonites also resided.  Six years older than my father, my mother was raised in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, and worked as a schoolteacher.  There were always books in our house, the most intellectual having to do with theology and history.  I remember looking into dusty volumes such as Fox's Martyrs and the writings of Josephus.  My father wrote sermons, which he sometimes rehearsed in his upstairs study.  My mother wrote devotional poems, songs, and book for children, The Roads to Everywhere, published by Brethren Press, our denominational publisher.  She wrote in bed on notepads, after retiring at an early hour, and was reticent about presenting herself as an author.

 I majored in English at Manchester College in Indiana and wrote a few short stories.  A college friend told me to look into the poetry of William Carlos Williams, who would later be important to me.   But I didn't write my first poems until the age of 24, while working as a conscientious objector at a Chicago hospital.   

(2)  Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work? 

My primary influences among the modernists are Stevens and Williams, in roughly equal doses.  I also love the work of the New York School, especially the "abstract lyric" mode; Surrealism as expressed in Neruda and Vallejo; and lately Oulipo-influenced procedures.  Among other poet heroes are Emily Dickinson, George Herbert, Charles Simic, and Lorine Niedecker, all with grounding in the metaphysical.  I am drawn to the ideas of the language poets and their role as "methodists" (Charles Bernstein) and have a weakness generally for the work of eccentrics and seekers.  Irony is accurate to the social state of the world, but I trust it more when the author is capable of belief.  Two words are common in the poetry of Hölderlin, which Maxine Chernoff and I have been translating:  Quelle (source, origin, spring, well) and Abgrund, which is usually translated as "abyss."  Heidegger writes that the Abgrund is not emptiness but the essential ground from which being emanates.  In other words, the ground of being is a source or origin.  Abgrund is Quelle. There are no blank slates.  The best writing awakens us to the many worlds at hand.  Heidegger writes in "The Origin of the Work of Art":  "The conflict is not a rift (Riss) as a mere cleft is ripped open; rather, it is the intimacy with which opponents belong to each other.  This rift carries the opponents into the source of their unity by virtue of their common ground." I enjoy poetry that equally respects the richness of both difference and identity:

The outer

limits of

 

the shapely

mind are

 

often rift-

bound, but

 

they can

sound in

 

the open

throat.

I used to read Peter Handke's short, nervous novels like The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, and I enjoyed Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat, which has some of the same psychological tension.  I don't read a lot of fiction these days.  I enjoy the sculpture of Martin Puryear and the black and white abstracts of Robert Motherwell.

 (3) When did you 'become' a poet?  When did poetry become part of your everyday life?

I entered the Program for Writers at University of Illinois in 1971, at age 25, and studied primarily with Paul Carroll.  I didn't take it seriously until Paul told me one afternoon following class that I was a "true poet" and that he planned to include my work in his proposed Young American Poets II, which was never published.  I am very grateful to him for that recognition.  But it took years before I was able to think of myself as a poet.

 (4)  Where were you educated?  Was this important?

 I attended Manchester College, one of the seven Church of the Brethren colleges, 1964-1968.  It's located in a small farming town 35 miles west of Fort Wayne, Indiana.  I was accepted to Harvard but placed on the waiting list, but it cost more than my parents could afford.  I wondered for years if Harvard would have made a difference . . . or living in New York City, which would have been the next stop from Harvard, instead of 25 years in Chicago.  I now feel that Chicago was exactly the right place for me; it was just the right distance, at the right time.

 (5)  You are a Midwesterner in California.  How is that?  Is it strange?  Do you miss anything in your writing that you had in Chicago?  

We used to visit San Francisco to see Maxine's sister Marsha and her family.   We would regularly visit Carl Rakosi and August Kleinzahler on the one hand and Bob Perelman and Barrett Watten & Carla Harryman on the other, even though the two groups stood across an ideological divide.  I'm glad that we didn't have to live through the San Francisco poetry wars of the 1980s and be forced to take sides in one silly dispute after another.  Living in Chicago gave us independence from those social and aesthetic pressures.  In Chicago at that time, there was basically one poet of each kind--one Projectivist (Michael Anania), one New York School poet (Ted Berrigan), one Deep Imagist (Bill Knott), one Beat-influenced raconteur (Paul Carroll), and one Gwendolyn Brooks.  Later, Bill Fuller returned from graduate school to become the one language poet.   

I don't believe that place makes much of a difference in poetry, except perhaps at the level of reception (audience size and sophistication, prominence of local reviews).  You can trumpet your sense of place as a marketing tool.  Elaine Equi suggested doing so in the 1980s, when she was still living in Chicago.  The group would have been Elaine, Jerome Sala, Maxine Chernoff, me, and some of my students such as Connie Deanovich.  I even came up with a group rubric, the "Chicago Imagists," as our work had some of the metaphysical humor of paintings by Jim Nutt, Roger Brown, H. C. Westermann, and to some extent Ed Paschke.  Immersion in an identity would have proved restricting.  We'd have become "that Chicago Imagist group of the 1980s."  Ultimately, one needs to produce writing that is closer to the bone.   

Maxine and I are well accepted in the San Francisco poetry community, but we will never fully blend with the language poetry crowd--now dispersed at any rate--because we were not present at its founding moment.  Our social acquaintances have been poets like Elizabeth Robinson, Rusty Morrison, Gillian Conoley, and Aaron Shurin who are accepting of innovative practice without being "schooled."  The main influence of Bay Area poetics on my own work is the serial poem (Spicer), which is widely practiced anyway, and my growing interest in the Objectivists, especially Oppen.

 (6)  What is your favorite food? 

Watermelon with salt and pancakes with white gravy (both Southern).

(7)  Sports teams?

The Chicago Bulls with Pippen and Jordan, the Chicago Cubs, and the San Francisco Giants.

(8)  Vacation spot? 

Mark Perlberg's house on Vinalhaven, an island 14 miles off the Maine coast.

 (9)  Curse word? 

Shit!

(10)  It has been said that while Chicago is a great incubator, especially now, that eventually all poets in Chicago who are important leave for the coasts (you, Maxine Chernoff, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Bruce Andrews, Jackson Mac Low).  Do you think this is true?

 It's true for certain poets.  Gwendolyn Brooks and Haki Madhubuti thrived in Chicago; Lisel Mueller won both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize while living near Lake Forest; Li-Young Lee is a leading poet of his generation and lives on Lawrence Avenue; and Marc Smith, who attended Bowen High School and has lived in Chicago most of this life, made a world-wide sensation of the Poetry Slams.  So the outflow is not a complete disaster.  Plus poets like Mark Strand, Ed Dorn, Campbell McGrath, Linda Hull, Maureen Seaton, Mary Jo Bang, and Elizabeth Alexander have come and gone as visitors.  Chicago has a wonderful tolerance for certain kinds of poetry, and I was always generously treated there.  But it's ironic that fresh energy for postmodern modes, as seen in magazines like Conundrum and reading series like Danny's, would appear at the same time I was removed from leadership of a program that had sustained such activity for so many years.   

(11)  How many younger writers put on the clothes of avant-garde writing while writing pretty gimmicky work? Do you think that the quality of writing has declined since the 1980s?  Or is it just different?

 There are always competing modes of expression in poetry, and one mode always appears to be dominant.  I began to notice in the 1990s that a number of poets associated with the mainstream were suddenly turning toward the dispersive tactics of the avant-garde--that is, language poetry and Ashbery-influenced obliqueness and parataxis.  It's possible that the publication of my anthology, Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1994), influenced this trend.  Another turning point occurred in 1998 when conferences on the poetry of women were organized at Barnard and UCLA.  The Barnard conference was designed, it seemed to me, as a kind of bridge for formerly mainstream women to join company with women innovators.  Carla Harryman and Marjorie Perloff gave papers in which they put the more traditional group on sharp notice.  But their imprecations were to little avail.  The mainstream was eager to assimilate itself into the "new," and by and large this has happened.  This has resulted in some confusion about who is avant-garde and who isn't.  Remember the "Ellipticists"?  The critic Stephen Burt created the school in a paper that he presented at the Barnard conference.  His goal was to create a Third Estate that included the best features of the mainstream and the avant-garde.  Included were Lucy Brock-Broido, Jorie Graham, Liam Rector, and Susan Wheeler.  The strategies of periphrasis and self-reflexiveness, so common to Ashbery's work (though he remained unnamed), were central to Ellipticism.  But since it was created primarily for the moment, the Barnard conference, the concept seems to have disappeared.   The emergence of Barbara Guest as a major innovative woman and the Bay Area journal HOW(ever) helped focus attention on the work of innovative women.  

 At the same time, The University of Georgia Press under Bin Ramke's poetry editorship and Wesleyan University Press under Susanna Tamminen's leadership have been actively publishing innovative poetry.  The new series at University of California Press also shows an interest in innovative work, thanks primarily to Brenda Hillman.