ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com
Poetic Profile
Rodney Koeneke
General Questions
1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?
I was born in Omaha in 1968 to a family of itinerant German accountants. They made that ‘70s trek, so common among their kind, from the Midwest to the Sun Belt—first Tucson, then L.A. I grew up in a place called Hacienda Heights, just east of Whittier which is east of East L.A. It’s home to the largest Buddhist temple in the Western hemisphere.
My parents are readers, though not especially of poetry. My mom had a yellowed anthology of the Romantics I used to take down and read in high school when I was feeling bad. There was a lot of poetry in places that aren’t books. I was reluctant to write at home for fear my parents might see me doing it. Not that they’d mind but I’d feel monitored and embarrassed.
2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?
Poetry-wise, I kind of moved from Yeats to Pound to Kerouac, and from there to a lot of the poetry that flows from him—Clark Coolidge, Michael Gizzi, you know them when you hear them. Some current-day poets that goad me to try for more are K. Silem Mohammad, Nada Gordon, Drew Gardner, Cynthia Sailers, Gary Sullivan, Brent Cunningham, David Larsen and Katie Degentesh.
Outside of poetry, it’s mostly music. I love jazz and all but for “informing your work,” it’s bands along the Pavement/Guided by Voices axis that probably most shaped how I want to write now. I’m sort of surprised that innovative poetry isn’t more popular when bands with loopy disjunctive sound-driven lyrics like these are.
3) When did you 'become' a poet, when did poet become part of your everyday life?
Probably when I left academia. I was trying to become a professor of history, but didn’t want to leave San Francisco. In figuring out why considering a move was so painful, I realized it was because I really wanted to stay here to try and be a poet.
4) Where were you educated? Was this important?
I went to a public high school in L.A., then studied history at U.C. Berkeley and Stanford. It was important for bringing me to Northern California and keeping me here for twenty years. Later, it spurred me to ask where that interest in history had come from and why it led in the end to poetry.
5) For many years you’ve lived in San Francisco, a hotbed for experimental poetry. What is it like?
San Francisco’s a wonderful city that’s been obscenely Manhattanized. On the outside it still looks the same as it does in those Hitchcock movies, but you move through it feeling your days here, if you aren’t rich, are probably numbered. It’s also an itinerant Western sort of place, where lots of poets spend a few years but only a handful stay for good.
Experimental poetry’s very strong here thanks to key independent bookstores like Green Apple, City Lights, and Modern Times and institutions like the Poetry Center at SFSU, Small Press Traffic, New Langton, and Small Press Distribution, among others. The writing programs bring in a good crop of new poets (and audience members) each year. The Language legacy’s also strong, as a lot of them still live here. Plus there’s Kevin Killian.
But experimental poetry here, probably like anywhere, is a small part of a larger poetry world that doesn’t necessarily acknowledge its existence, itself part of a large and complicated cultural scene that doesn’t necessarily acknowledge poetry. For a lot people, this is still the town the Beats built and not much has happened since. Still, I wish I could stay here forever.
5.1) Your book, Rouge State (Pavement Saw, 2003) is so different from many American poetry books. Where does the work originate?
I thought if we could just switch those two letters, “rogue” to “rouge,” the whole valence of the war and this presidency and my own failure in academia would change, like the Saint Simonians thought the seas would turn to lemonade.
5.2) You have a new book coming out with BlazeVOX books next year. What is it like? How has the work changed since Rouge State?
musee mechanique collects work that first appeared on the Flarf listserv. A lot’s been said about Flarf, which is funny because as I understand it the whole thing started as a joke among friends.* I came onto the list at the beginning of 2003, when the initial heat of using Google to write zany, outrageous stuff as a way to sort of counter the pieties of 9/11 had cooled into something more fractured and harder to characterize. Five of us from the list have books coming out in 2006, so it’ll probably be more clear what the work’s like, and what it came out of, then.
*For the curious, Mike Magee’s got a great piece on Flarf at: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html
6) What is your favorite food?
Vodka
7) Sports Team? or Activity?
Not really
8) Vacation spot?
New York City
9) Curse word?
Cripes
Craft Questions
1) How do you form a poem?
Mostly from lines written earlier in a notebook, often misread later. I also generate some pieces by typing phrases into Google and sculpting a poem from the search results.
2) Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?
I’m not too clear on this distinction. Lately it feels more like just plain process, the German kind, “Prozess,” a trial.
3) Where do you write? Is Ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?
I buy extravagant notebooks for myself, then end up writing in cheap drugstore pads that fall apart and have to be taped up in order to fool myself that I’m not really writing when I write in them. Is that a ritual or a habit? Once I’m putting those notebook lines into a computer, I don’t really know where I am.
4) In the balance between found language and created language where does your work fall?
There are those myths where the god creates the world ex nihilo, and those where it gives form to some material already eternally existing, an updater of templates. I’ve always wondered: who made that preexisting formless stuff? I have the same question when I look back at almost any of my poems.