Alexandra van de Kamp

Featured Poem on Verse Daily!

2011-12-13T10:45:00.000-08:00

A poem of mine, published in the journal Arsenic Lobster, was recently featured on VerseDaily. It's a prose poem based loosely on my experiences searching for a place to live on the Northern Fork in Long Island. Let's just say I looked at some thirty odd houses and apartments before settling on an apartment for my husband and I in downtown Port Jefferson Village (see above). Nothing like traipsing around from one recently-vacated domicile to another or chit-chatting with various landlords/owners to get a taste of the quirkiness of humankind. The experience made me a bit philosophical, and the poem came out of the paraphernalia of that experience. Feel free to take a peek at the poem on VerseDaily and to explore the other prose poems and pieces in the Arsenic Lobster website.

Some Recent Prose Poems Published in Arsenic Lobster

2011-09-28T17:05:00.000-07:00

If you would like to discover a wry, entertaining and adventurous new online literary journal, check out Arsenic Lobster. If only for the title, it is worth a click of your mouse! I recently had two prose poems published in their 2011 winter issue: "Mrs. P. Goes House-Hunting" and "Head Cold." Feel free to read these two poems (which follow below) as well as explore the website to discover other prose-poetic voices and their current online issue.

Mrs. P. Goes House-Hunting

Buzz, buzz, buzz goes the world. We are each in a distortion of our own making. The glass is half whatever, depending on the day you are having—its etches and flaws encompassing the mind’s dark hesitations. Mrs. P. went house-hunting. Trees braided in and out of the clouds, pollen fell like ash onto her windshield. At one house, Doreen, the realtor, balanced precariously on a step ladder to see if anyone was home—peering inside: the room loomed like a movie scene, after the shooting: stripped walls, carpets curled up like infants, fluorescent lights with cords hanging motionless as the birds and stars in a Miró painting. Bright blue, dimpled tarp half-covered a boat in the backyard. At another home, a blue plastic shark hung near the door—mouth open. An address is something we tattoo quietly onto the self. It whispers its letters and numbers into our breathing until it flies constantly behind us, like the banners planes drag, undulating across the sky. You think a place is home and then it’s time to move on. You think you are having a bad day when you begin to envy

the bees, spinning around helpless in a puddle on a piece of pavement, the sun dousing them in an early summer glow. You envy the tight little frame that pavement becomes for them. The neat circumference of their pain. Most of the time loss fails to offer the drama required: the elegant heroines smoking cigarettes as their lives dwindle away, the enemy troops marching through the town square. Only Mrs. P. driving from name to name: Cherry Lane, Admiral Street, Possum Hill, and the laundromat a block away.

Head Cold

It begins as clouds at the back of the brain—grainy, tenderly bruised clouds. I want to be free your brain exclaims. Free from what? You ask as you make your way down the corridor: beige light pleading at the occasional window, blond shining shapes on the mopped, smooth floor. But you know what your brain means. You could duck out now, under the red-embroidered Exit sign, take off for pancakes at noon in a little, off-the-beaten-path café, the bathroom smelling a little smoky, like a memory you know you have and have forgotten. The sun notches itself another degree towards the west. In the Western, it’s all railroads and horses, the mountains like movie-star teeth in all their polished snow. You wish you could head off this cold like bandits at the mountain pass. It rumbles closer, velvety and particular, amassing in one corner of your consciousness, like people outside a theater in the rain—their black umbrellas blooming all at once. In the end, you give in. The furniture moves a few inches to the right, the pillow embraces you like a distracted mother. You are grateful as the silence thickens and grows viscous, pours over you like a kind syrup. From a certain distance, you can imagine the many small feet of birds skimming the air above your apartment building. Or you can imagine your clothes loosening their hold—the sleeves fluttering more lightly about your wrists, your black jeans shuffling like breezy curtains about your hips. This is not Spain with its olive oil and tourists. This is not Costa Rica, simmering in its varying shades of green. This is not even the sandbox you played in as a child—the damp grains of it stickingto your skin—but it is a place, and with a nod of

your head, your whole body falls in.

Only this literary journal could have phrases like this on the home page:

"Lobsters Have a Language all their Own" or "Lobsters Age Gracefully"...... Enjoy the Reading!

A Few Comments on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

2011-07-16T09:16:00.000-07:00

While at VCCA (Virginia Center for the Creative Arts) this past June, one of the poets I met--Therese Halscheid--suggested I read Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Supposedly it had oodles of literary gossip from the early 1900's in Paris when Matisse, Juan Gris, Cezanne, Picasso, etc...were first trying to make it on their own as artists. This was a time when Gertrude Stein and her brother could pick up a few Cezanne's from the art dealer Vollard as one might buy vintage dresses or skirts from a second-hand shop today--very off-hand, nonchalant purchases as none of these artists were yet known. Thus, I've begun to dip into it and it is written in a whimsical, unapologetic tone. You find out details such as Picasso's wife at the time, Fernande, only cared about hats and perfume and could talk of little else although she was very beautiful. You find out about the maid at Gertrude Stein's house, Helene, and how she disliked Matisse for having asked to stay one night for dinner after inquiring about what was on the menu. You also find out how people wanted to actually scratch a painting of Matisse's they found ugly and offensive when it was first displayed at a public salon, a picture of a woman with a fan. Interesting how new versions of beauty can so terrify.

Just for your morning, noon or evening reading pleasure, here is a brief excerpt from this "Autobiography," which is really Stein talking about her own life through the literary protagonist she's created in Toklas. Thus, this is Alice/Stein talking--a rather complicated double-image of an "I" in this autobiography, but definitely an accessible work by Stein if you forgive her unorthodox punctuation and refusal to use quotations marks:

"...Fernande was the first wife of a genius I sat with and she was not the least amusing. We talked hats. Fernande has two subjects hats and perfumes. This first day we talked hats. She liked hats, she had the true french feeling about a hat, if a hat did not provoke some witticism from a man on the street the hat was not a success. Later on once in Montmartre she and I were walking together. She had on a large yellow hat and I had on a much smaller blue one. As we were walking along a workman stopped and called out, there go the sun and the moon shining together. Ah, said Fernande to me with a radiant smile, you see our hats are a success." (pp. 14-15 Vintage Books Edition, March 1990).

Just one of the many quirky moments and spontaneous ramblings this books seems filled with. It also brings to life this time in Paris (such as how people actually got fit walking up and down the many flights of stairs to their ateliers since there were no elevators yet installed, etc...), and since Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris is also re-envisioning this same time period this summer, it seems extra appropriate and fun to read this autobiography now.

Just returned from VCCA--Virginia Center for the Creative Arts!

2011-06-18T12:12:00.000-07:00

I just returned from a two-week stay at VCCA--Virginia Center for the Creative Arts--and loved it. Nothing like being surrounded by talented writers, composers and visual artists in a bucolic setting with blue-birds flaring their lavender-bright wings in bushes and on telephone wires, with vines tendrilled around fences and long, patient green fields undulating away from your studio window. Don't mean to wax overly-poetic, but it was a soothing, beautiful setting. I met some great poets and artists, learned vinaigrette could be served five thousand different ways (thanks to the resident kitchen staff): bell pepper vinaigrette, cilantro-line vinaigrette, maple vinaigrette....and heard my first Tree Frog--a kind of wet gurgle emanating from the trees--a gurgle in short riffs repeating itself over and over again. This was the first fellowship to a residency that I had been awarded, and the warmth and welcoming atmosphere of the other resident artists was palpable and helped me settle into a writing routine. I plan to post soon some sitings of beautiful artwork I saw while visiting the visual artists in residence with me.

I'm still getting settled back into to being home again in Stony Brook, NY, but here are a few photos (see above) to get a glimpse of the grounds at VCCA. If a few more birds start showing up in my poems, their trills and vibrant colors--you'll know why. Having nature right outside my window was a true gift while staying at this artist's retreat.

Dear Jean Seberg, My New Chapbook, is Out and in the World

2011-04-30T11:31:00.000-07:00

Just thought I would announce that my new chapbook, Dear Jean Seberg, is out and in the three-dimensional physical world now! Back in late September I received the kind of phone call every writer hopes to receive at least once in his or her life--an editor telling me my chapbook manuscript had won a contest! Considering it had been a rather stressful, harried day, this was music to my ears. The editor was Sid Miller and the contest was the 2010 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest. I had been lucky enough to have my collection of twenty odd poems selected by the wonderful poet Matthew Dickman.

This collection of poems really came out of sitting on the couch--I mean sitting on the couch watching films: black and white films, Technicolor at its most Technicolor, Steve McQueen car chases, French films (thanks to my librarian husband's knack for discovering obscure, and then not-so-obscure, directors and actors and then being very good at using the local library system to get access to sometimes hard-to-find DVD or video copies of these films). We found ourselves coming up with our own homespun versions of film cycles: William Holden Month, or Yves Montand Week, or, a Jean-Luc-Godard film cycle. Thus, I re-watched "Breathless" and discovered a new interest in the cherub-faced, blond American from Iowa, Jean Seberg, who found herself (via a rather circuitous route) in a Jean Luc Godard film in the 1960's.

Hence, the title poem of this collection. This chapbook is really a journey onto a fuller, longer collection, but I believe it stands on its own as a verbal stamp of some of the images, films, words and sounds that have influenced me over the last few years since moving out to the eastern end of Long Island. I don't consider Dear Jean Seberg about film; I consider it a collection of poems infused with the atmosphere of some films I watched and how images and moments in those films flickered in and out of my life long after watching them.

Feel free to purchase a copy at the Burnside Review Website for a reasonable $6.00 and to feast your eyes on the wonderful cover created by Robert Edwin, a wonderful Port Jefferson/Long Island artist.

Jean Seberg led an enigmatic, hard-to-categorize life, and my only hope is that these poems begin to capture some of the wistful strangeness that was the backdrop to her life and the surreal collisions that can occur, at times, in anyone's life. But enough of waxing poetic! Check out the book if you are interested. I will soon be posting sample poems from it on this web site.

My Chapbook "Dear Jean Seberg" winner of the 2010 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest

2010-12-26T12:43:00.000-08:00

I'm very happy to announce that my chapbook, "Dear Jean Seberg," has been chosen by judge Matthew Dickman as the winner of the 2010 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest. Burnside Review is an exciting, clever, eclectic literary journal based in Portland, Oregon, and I am flattered to have been chosen as the winner of their 6th annual chapbook contest. Check out the journal itself and the generous comments Matthew Dickman (a wonderful poet himself) had to say about the chapbook--poised to be released in February 2011. I will keep you updated about the release date for this chapbook in a future post on this website. Currently I am scouting out possible images to use for the cover. For those of you who are not familiar with the intense, brief life of Jean Seberg, the "midwest cherub" from the sixties, just try to picture the blond pixie in Jean Godard's Breathless--the film that made her famous and the doll of Paris.

The Midwest Book Review on The Park of Upside-Down Chairs

2010-08-23T11:47:00.000-07:00

The Midwest Book Review chose to scribble a few words about my collection of poems, The Park of Upside-Down Chairs, published this past April (CW Books, WordTech Press). Feel free to click on the Poetry Shelf to read their August selection of reviews on poetry books published by small presses. My book is listed along with several other intriguing entries. Happy summer reading....

Five Inspiring World Museums!

2010-06-25T10:29:00.000-07:00

I had the pleasure this week of being the guest blogger on C.M. Mayo's Blog, Madam Mayo. C.M. Mayo is a wonderful prose writer on Mexico (and other themes), as well as a captivating, poetic fiction writer (check out her novel: The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire--just the title makes you want to read it!!!). Her blog is multi-faceted and deals with travel, creative writing, books, literary translation, and even pugs!!! Asked by her to write about a theme connected to my new book of poems, The Park of Upside-Down Chairs, I chose to blog (briefly!!!:)) on five inspiring world museums that I have encountered over the years and which, somehow, fed into several of the poems in my book. Feel free to read this "musing" on museums, as well as the blog posts of the other writers and artists she's asked to contribute to her site. It makes for colorful, informative reading!

Blog Posting about The Park of Upside-Down Chairs

2010-05-11T16:03:00.000-07:00

My publisher, Kevin Walzer, has a blog on poetry and recently blogged about my book, The Park of Upside-Down Chairs, along with several other poetry books recently published by WordTech Communications, his independent poetry press.

Stony Brook Manhattan Reading on April 27th!

2010-05-04T16:37:00.000-07:00

I had the pleasure of reading last Tuesday evening (exactly a week ago today--and exactly at this time--) at the Manhattan Campus of Stony Brook University on Park Avenue South. It was my true book launch for The Park of Upside Down Chairs--my new book just out from Word Tech Communications. I also was delighted to be able to read with two exceptional poets, Tom Healy and John Rybicki. Friends, family and poetry lovers were all in attendance. After, we had a book signing, arranged by the host of the event, the talented poet Julie Sheehan. I found Tom's work riveting, with each word dropping like a dense weight on the page. The silences in his poems are both sensual and palpable. John's poems were full of raw honest pain and a certain mesmerizing luminescence. The evening fed me--both as reciter of poetry and as listener. Here are a few photos. One taken of us at the book signing and one of me (glasses donned) reading from my poems.

The Park of Upside-Down Chairs has arrived at my Doorstep!

2010-04-11T11:00:00.000-07:00

On Friday, April 9th, I received my first full-length book in the mail! The Park of Upside-Down Chairs arrived intact, delivered not by the stork but by UPS on a rainy, unassuming evening. I am, I must admit, still in a bit of shock. It feels wonderful to weigh its heft in my palms. I know e-books, etc... are taking off these days, but there is nothing yet to replace the gentle but solid feel of a book; its intimate, yet sovereign presence--something not dependent on computers or URL's. I especially relish the whispery flipping of its pages.... I just saw Bright Star--the Jane Campion film about John Keats--and find myself feeling especially wistful this weekend and thinking of poets with first and second books and the possible fates that await those books! It is also spring in full form right now. Trees are frilled with white blossoms, yet a chill still persists in the air. April is speeding by! To access the WordTech link to my book, simply click on the following link: The Park of Upside-Down Chairs.

2010-02-13T18:00:00.000-08:00

Alexandra van de Kamp is the author of The Park of Upside-Down Chairs, forthcoming from CW Books (WordTech Press) in the Spring of 2010.

Her earlier collections include The Photographer's Interview (2006, Premier Poets Chapbook Series: 34); A Living Book (2004), with artwork by Rebecca Aidlin; and The Rainiest May in the Twentieth Century (2002 Wind Magazine), winner of the 2001 Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize.

Her poems, essays and translations have appeared in numerous journals, including Meridian, Rain Taxi, Red Rock Review, Poetry Northwest, Court Green, Salt Hill, Crab Orchard Review, Lake Effect, Quarter After Eight and Washington Square.

Her translations of two Spanish women poets, Ángela Pérez Ovejero and Marta López-Luaces, were featured in the Canadian magazine filling Station, and an interview with Billy Collins was
reprinted nationally in Imagine magazine (Johns Hopkins). She is one of the founding editors of Terra Incognita, an international literary/cultural journal in English and Spanish.

Alexandra lives in Port Jefferson, New York, with her husband, William Glenn, and teaches at Stony Brook University.

The Rainiest May in the Twentieth Century (2002)

2010-02-13T15:15:00.000-08:00

Winner of the 2002 Quentin R. Howard Chapbook Award
from Wind magazine, selected by Roger Mitchell.

Read the poem "The Rainiest May in the Twentieth Century"

The Rainiest May in the Twentieth Century

2010-02-13T15:14:00.000-08:00

For weeks, we dreamed ourselves
through each day—the corners of tables,
the intimate shapes of our hands
no longer enough
to jar us fully awake. In the kitchen,
the counters gave off their glittery stare,
but like any bottle or chair, we were rained upon
by the falling air—the rain touching
and touching us to its damp hair.

They say the dead keep growing
their hair and nails, their own kind of weather
wrapping around them, tethering them
more fervently to the earth
because of the persistence
of what surrounds them. And so,
we felt our own sleep deepen,
our bodies grow mute as stones
in a gray-green soil—reluctant to move
through such a thick, viscous world.

In the end, every window slurred our view—
the panes swelled by a slow-motion current.
My husband's body wavered, a fluid heaviness
moving towards me, and all the doors creaked
like old buoys out at sea. Even birds refused to sing—
too stunned, like us, with a certain quiet,
unable to commit to any one specific thing.

In this weather, there was no forgetting
where we were, no pushing off
from the present moment. For a time,
we were quieted, like figures
in a landscape painting who show us
they see the mountains in the distance
by the way their bodies are poised,
ready to listen.

Originally published in Poems & Plays.

A Living Book (2004)

2010-02-13T14:47:00.000-08:00

Limited Edition of 200 beautifully handcrafted books

Poems - Alexandra van de Kamp
Paintings - Rebecca Aidlin

Read the poem "A Living Book," with two paintings by Rebecca Aidlin.

$10, plus $2 Shipping & Handling

A Living Book

2010-02-13T14:46:00.000-08:00

Then the Lord said to me: ‘Do not be distressed,
for I will give you a living book’.
—Santa Teresa de Ávila

Today the air gleams like a steady page of light.
Clouds burrow into their whites and grays
as birds fly their small tight bodies
across the sky, pressing into me
the words they are. And what is a word
but the undeniable presence of each thing,
like a roof glinting with all of its shape in the rain,
its red-gray pebbled tile protruding through
the air’s vague light to tell us to shed
whatever is unsure in our minds?
If God is anything, He’s a merciless
precision—never sparing us any detail,
whether it is blood or coffee spilling.
We get into trouble when we doubt
what is given to us, as in ninth grade track
when I did the long jump and flew
as long as my eyes looked up,
but the minute I looked down,
my flying stopped.
The tree does its job by climbing,
without question, its one sentence
up the sky, the shadows by settling
into cool, sleek paragraphs,
and the grass by extending its plot,
unconcerned with beginnings or ends.

We ripple within the world’s story:
our bodies wandering their peculiar script
across the world as it wanders through us.
Each day, our mind’s dark shutter creaks
opened and closed—hinged to the question,
What do I let in? Santa Teresa, robbed
by the Inquisition of her books in Spanish,
let each window and chair lean
its word into her until her room
became a raised type—its letters precise
and inevitable—fighting off
the vagueness of the devil.

Meanwhile, the world writes its text.
A country road brightens in the evening rain—
a feverish gray cutting its way
through murky hills. I lean out my window
to accept its stubborn shine, as the glow sharpens,
gives off the next luminous line.

Originally published
in Tar River Poetry.

Books

2010-02-13T14:40:00.000-08:00

The Photographer's Interview (2006)

Premier Poets Chapbook Series: 34

$3, plus $1 Shipping & Handling

A Living Book (2004)

Poems by Alexandra van de Kamp

Paintings by Rebecca Aidlin

$10, plus $2 Shipping & Handling

The Rainiest May in the Twentieth Century (2002)

Winner of the 2002 Quentin R. Howard Chapbook

Award from Wind magazine, selected by Roger Mitchell.

The Photographer's Interview (2006)

2010-02-13T14:28:00.000-08:00

Premier Poets Chapbook Series: 34

Read the poem "Regret"

$3, plus $1 Shipping & Handling

Regret

2010-02-13T14:27:00.001-08:00

It’s a season, mi amor, a late-honeyed afternoon light staining my windows and doors.

When it comes, and it does, I am the fly, petrified in its hue and gaze—my heart locked in its

stubborn amber.

In Spain, there are chambers for the busts of saints, sacristies in which their heads are kept,

the mouths hung open—caves which store their cherished bones. Death choking those

hollowed throats, but death remembered, gingerly held.

I want to stare into those throats, feel the church-chill near my ankles, beneath my shoes,

the womb-like hum of those darkened high ceilings.

At times, what I have done or not done catches its bright hook into my lungs—snags me

to the past and its bitter tongues.

A garage sale of details, the past persistently subtracts from my now.

A stair, a chair—I can be anywhere, and it rivets me to the simple equation of my life. That

manicured, unflinching ground: what cannot be undone. The negative soil my feet tenderly

tread on.

The heart is a cave and grief sputters its flames, throws its flare of clarity against the trickling,

furrowed walls. Then the glyphs on the stone glow, and I am forced to read my one story

back to myself. Finger the hot scars of it.

Regret blinds me in my love of objects; I can mourn anything, mi amor: a cold linoleum floor,

the flat pale stare of a light switch. It makes the mind a sodden field ready to wrap its ivy

and roots around any detail: a blue and red rug rumpled beneath a table, the sucked pluck

of a window shutting against its frame. The list goes on.

Silver plum I pour into my mouth: tart and sweet, plump flesh. A past I can consume, an edible

pain. A night fruit.

A plot I memorize to keep certain streets alive in me—the soft, silver tongues of the rain littering

the stones; a gluttony of details only my mind can resurrect; a petty, personal religion that refuses

the new. A selfish holiness before which I genuflect.

In Soria, Spain, there is a church that is a cave—rugged worship cooled down and darkened

by the stone, a saint enclosed in a hard palm. I stared at her girlish face, not wanting to leave

the ripe quiet inside the earth she had found.

OFr: regreter, to bewail the dead or an ulcer of tears my stomach gladly accepts.

It is a stopped clock. When it comes, a little theatre sets itself up inside of me and the actors

won’t shut up—reciting the same lines over and over again.

I open my mouth, mi amor, and only myself falls in.

Originally published in Sulphur River Literary Review.

A GEOGRAPHY OF THE SOUL: An Interview with George Kalamaras

2010-02-13T13:14:00.000-08:00

George Kalamaras is a large-minded and fervent writer whose poems throw a wide and generous net over the globe. A lover of world poetry, he draws inspiration from a wide array of geographies—from Spain and Latin America to destinations as varied as Greece, Turkey, China and Africa. Fearless reports on the subconscious and conscious workings of reality, his poems bend and curve language to faithfully reflect a lush continuum of experience. His work has appeared in a variety of journals in the United States and internationally, including Best American Poetry 1997, Boulevard, The Iowa Review and New Letters. The Bitter Oleander and Spoon River Poetry Review have devoted substantial sections to presenting his work.

His first collection, The Theory and Function of Mangoes, won the 1998 Four Way Books Intro Series in Poetry Award and was published by Four Way Books in 2000. Pavement Saw Press brought out his second collection, Borders My Bent Toward [sic], in 2003. Among his awards are a 1993 NEA Poetry Fellowship and an Indo-U.S. Advanced Research Fellowship, with which he spent several months in India in 1994. Associate Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he has taught since 1990, George Kalamaras lives in Fort Wayne with his wife, the writer Mary Ann Cain, and their beagle, Barney.

Alexandra van de Kamp: How did you come upon the Spanish poets: Cernuda, Lorca, and Hernandez, and others, as well as those from Latin America, such as Borges and Vallejo?

George Kalamaras: The poets of Spain and Latin America came to me when I was most in need of them. I had been reading a great deal of modern and contemporary American poetry. And although I very much loved what I had been reading, I was simultaneously becoming a bit disillusioned with “something”—some lack, some absence of engagement that I seemed to need at the time. I now understand that this “something” was “deep emotion”—or perhaps emotional urgency—one aspect of what Lorca refers to as duende. (He describes the duende, actually, as the feeling that you could suddenly be devoured by ants, or that a huge “arsenic lobster” could fall on your head at any moment!) At any rate, while living in northern Colorado and studying poetry in graduate school (nearly twenty-five years ago, now), I discovered these poets. My teachers, Bill Tremblay and Mary Crow, and several poet friends in Fort Collins and Denver—particularly John Bradley, Ray Gonzalez, Jim Grabill, Jay Griswold, Bill Ryan, and Phil Woods—were becoming increasingly involved with Spanish- language poets, particularly those who embraced Surrealism. We influenced one another to various degrees, and the whole atmosphere of that time was alive with investigating the duende.

I soon found myself intensively studying the poets from Spain, South America, and Central America, some Surreal, others not, reading them almost daily for years. Lorca’s remarkable essay “Theory and Function of the Duende” is still at the core of my poetics. I immediately understood it by “sympathy,” as one might say. That is, as I read this essay I had a deep recognition—almost as if from inside my own body—of the truths about which he spoke. Lorca’s poetry itself knocked me out as well, especially Poet in New York. My favorite poets were (and still are) Cesar Vallejo and Miguel Hernandez—two markedly different voices. I read them constantly for years, memorizing long passages, and still return to them even now. As I look back upon that poetic apprenticeship, I think that Miguel helped open my heart, allowing me to say precisely what I was feeling, yet also helping me ground that deep emotion in a landscape of human suffering beyond the individual. Hernandez’s pain is, yes, deeply personal, particularly in the early work prior to the Civil War poems (I’m thinking of his first two incredible collections, for instance, Skilled with Moons [Perito en lunas]and The Lightning That Never Stops [El rayo que no cesa], and even a somewhat later—and perhaps my very favorite—poem, “I Have Plenty of Heart”). At the same time, one senses in his voice that at the depths of his suffering is the interface of the personal and social, and also—I might add—of the larger cosmic order of the universe. Cesar Vallejo similarly drew me. However, his Surrealism and linguistic experimentation excited me like no other poet I had read to that time. I can’t help but think of a line of his from his great poem beginning “Idle on a Stone,” where, in a Surreal interpenetration of landscapes, he describes an unemployed man, saying, “and what an idea of a painful valve in his cheekbone!” I had never heard language like this before! And it quite literally changed my life. So, both Hernandez and Vallejo moved me in very different, interrelated ways, like two immense rivers saturating the very water of my cells.

In addition, though, I looked to others of the great Spanish “Generation of ‘27”—particularly, Vicente Aleixandre, Luis Cernuda, and Rafael Alberti, and across the ocean to Borges, Paz, Pablo Neruda, Nicanor Parra, Enrique Lihn, Gabriela Mistral, Jaime Sabines, Alfonsina Storni, Vicente Huidobro, and many others. I also went deeply into poets from the prior generation, including Juan Ramon Jimenez and Antonio Machado, and (even a bit earlier) Ruben Dario.

AV: This reading of Spanish poets has no doubt contributed to the international feel of your poems. Could you comment further on the global sensibility that seems to run throughout your work?

GK: That comes, no doubt, from the poets I read, as I mentioned, many of whom come from various cultures outside the United States. The Greek poets—especially the “Generation of the 30’s,” who were quite interested in Surrealism—hold a deep place in my conception of a poem. From Yannis Ritsos I learned economy, distillation. From Odysseas Elytis, an expansiveness reaching into and illuminating every dark recess of the soul. From George Seferis, the melancholy of an observer who is, peculiarly, part of and distinct from the object of contemplation.

But the Spanish and Greeks are only part of the picture. I have spent the good part of the last twenty- five years seeking out poets from around the globe, from Turkey, China, Japan, France, Italy, Finland, India, Africa, and many other locales. My focus on Surrealism may have also contributed to this “international feel” in my poems that you mention, perhaps because Surrealism as a movement has constantly sought to redefine more traditional “borders”—whether those be borders of consciousness, or borders more social in nature, such as race, class, gender, and ethnicity.

That international sensibility, however, comes not just from my reading but, also, I imagine from growing up Greek-American. Three of my four grandparents emigrated to the States in the early 1900’ s. After my parents’ divorce, when I was very young, my mother, brother, and I lived with my grandparents, George and Helen Avgerinos, for several years before my mother remarried. Then we lived just a mile from them. While I knew I was “American,” I also grew up with a very strong sense of identity as a Greek. There are subtle things, difficult to articulate, where I can sense the inheritance in me of an “immigrant sensibility,” if you will.

AV: What American poets do you see yourself inspired by and drawing inspiration from?

GK: That’s a huge question because there are so many. And I go to different American poets for different things, so I am unfortunately bound here to leave out voices important to me. However, I am still most drawn to—and find essential—the work of Robert Kelly, Thomas McGrath, Kenneth Rexroth, James Wright, and a few others. These are the first to come to mind, but I read American poets widely and have recently reintroduced myself, for instance, to Muriel Rukeyser, who is incredible and with whom I feel deep resonance. Also, my contemporaries are writing quite remarkable poetry—truly revolutionary in how it approaches the transformation of consciousness—poets like John Bradley, Forrest Gander, Ray Gonzalez, Jim Grabill, Juan Felipe Herrera, Patrick Lawler, Arthur Sze, and John Yau. I want to mention Gene Frumkin here too, although he comes earlier, yet his work is incredibly vital to me. And from the younger generation now coming of age, I cherish the work of a rather amazing poet, Eric Baus.

AV: I would like to know more about your relationship to your reading and its seemingly wide range. How does it play into your writing process and philosophy? Is it a daily ritual?

GK: Reading for me is vital. I normally read at least some poetry every day, usually upon rising and again before sleeping. The great yogis and rishis of India tell us that the thoughts we have just before slipping into subconscious sleep at night, and again when first reemerging from it in the morning, are extremely powerful influences on our consciousness. So, yes, reading is not just pleasure or even important work. It’s certainly both of these, but for me it is also “ritual,” as you say. So I love the deeper significance of your use of that term!

But perhaps more to your question—I can’t imagine being a writer in this culture without being a voracious reader. When we write, we’re writing to and from the culture. We’re writing ourselves into and through and in relation to that culture. One reads not just to be overtly inspired or influenced, but more to participate in some great song, a conversation of consciousness from one person to the next, even from one particle to the next. Sure, influence and inspiration come. But I am suggesting that this should be secondary to the ritual of reading oneself, so to speak, through the consciousness and joys and struggles of those around us. Reading also grants me community and relationship (which is another reason, I would imagine, for my international focus as one way to widen the reach and understanding of what true community means). In that context, then, reading—and not just writing—is a highly charged political act.

I read poets and feel like they are speaking to me. Sometimes this comes in the form of poets who are friends or those writers whose work I follow closely. Other times, it comes from voices with whom I may have previously felt no connection but for whatever reason now do. The act of reading—as it’s been said of writing—is that a consciousness is reaching out to another. You know, you don’t have to be in the same room with someone to carry on a conversation. Again, we can turn to the yogis of India, and their exploration of the ways our thoughts participate in shaping other people (as well as the entire universe), for further perspective on the far-reaching implications of reading. Interestingly, and perhaps not altogether off the subject, I also intuitively feel that sometimes books are perhaps written for another time, maybe even unconsciously for certain people. I’ve felt this on more than a few occasions. I remember, as one example, my dear friend John Bradley discovering the Italian poet Dino Campana in the library at Colorado State University some twenty years ago. John brought that little book to my house one evening, and we both felt that, in some sense, Campana had been just waiting for us to find him.

AV: And your poems seem to be populated by just such discoveries. Your first book was on India, and your poems, in general, are peppered with the lands, voices, and viscous textures of “other” worlds. There is almost a plural tone to your poems, as if many poets were speaking alongside you. Could you further explain the roots of that “plurality” in your work?

GK: That “plural tone” may be present not just from my consonance with world poets and perspectives but also, perhaps, from my practice of meditation (from within the Hindu yogic tradition), something I’ ve engaged in for many years. Part of what emerges through that practice—or through most attentiveness practices—is an increasing perception of the world as highly fluid, dynamic, and interactive. Meditation quite literally changes one’s brain-wave patterns and helps realign one’s perception in more reciprocal, rather than dichotomous, ways. That is, one’s sense of “I” (or ego) begins to diminish (even if only subtly), increasingly dissolving into a consciousness that is less restrictive and perhaps shared by all humans, animals, plants, and minerals, all the way into the level of atoms and particles of thought. Don’t get me wrong. I’m very far from inhabiting that depth of consciousness, even after years of practice. But that’s the goal, at least, of my life and of my work as a poet.

Something similar occurs through the practice of poetry, which also has the power to transform one’s consciousness through engaging it as a writer (and a reader). And I use that term “practice” quite deliberately. In the final analysis, poetry—like meditation—has nothing to do with accomplishment, or prestige, or achievement. But it has everything to do with the life of the imagination and cultivating rich, fertile inner and outer lives that each feed one another in increasingly generative ways. Unfortunately, it’ s easy to lose sight of “the real work” of the poet, to borrow a phrase from Gary Snyder. Particularly in our consumer culture, the life of the imagination can easily become co-opted (by the artist’s desire for “success” or, even, for this or that kind of creation), and what was once held sacred may erode into just another commodity. This is not to say that “success” or a “readership” need necessarily be shunned in the name of humility. On the contrary, often times that readership (as I mentioned earlier with regard to reading) is vital to one’s development as a writer, giving one a sense of purpose, connection, and conversation. Also, shunning “success” can sometimes be a false humility that we’re just as attached to or caught by, keeping us from the deeper (and often challenging) integrative work (the ego is very tricky and finds all sorts of ways to protect itself from the necessary work of spiritual transformation!). But it is to say that we should never lose sight of “the gift” of what a readership means. This entails constantly offering back to the universe a practice of writing and living that always seeks the welfare of others—a practice that refuses to horde the wealth of the imagination for personal egoic satisfaction and, rather, continually blesses the world by offering oneself and one’s perceptions as a transforming agent and as an instrument of love. This, to my mind, is what it really means to be an artist.

Along with this, I have always felt that it is my sincere privilege to learn from, and participate in, poetry as an apprentice. My sense of apprenticeship is not part of a hierarchical model of “Master/apprentice.” In the context of the non-dual, non-hierachical model of meditation, there is no such duality, except as it appears to our waking consciousness. In other words, in the yogic moment, to be an “apprentice” with complete attentiveness is simultaneously to be absorbed in the flow of a particular practice (and, paradoxically, to fully embody that flow is indeed to “master” it). This mastering, however, is not a dominance over, but—in the nondual paradigm of yoga—it is a consonance of complete absorption in that flow. It is, in essence, to lose all sense of a separate identity (self) and contact the more expansive Self of nonrestrictive consciousness. This talk of apprenticeship reminds me of the title of a wonderful chapbook by my friend Ray Gonzalez, Apprentice to Volcanoes. I’ve always loved that title because one doesn’t aspire to become the volcano; rather, one apprentices oneself out to it to discover the source of that highly-charged, dynamic flow!

AV: Continuing the theme of books and apprenticeship, you said earlier that reading is “a highly charged political act.” Is this because reading is opening ourselves up to other voices, points of view, and cultures? Who we choose to read is really what voices we choose to make ourselves available to. Isn’t politics, in the end, somewhat similar because it involves choosing our voices, the ones we will listen to, and sculpting our opinions and actions according to those voices?

GK: First let me say that not only reading, but everything—in the final analysis—is a “political act.” We are “individuals” constructing and constructed by the social systems we inhabit. Thus, on a very basic level, there is no individual, per se, but a reciprocity between the public and private. This is one reason poetry is so important in our culture. On a very concrete level it dramatizes, and creates a forum for, the enactment of this nexus of public and private. The voice of the “individual,” so to speak, shapes and is shaped by the broader culture—and we get that culture in many ways, including, as you point out, by reading. This interconnection is something the Surrealists understood early on. The early Surrealists wanted a true and complete revolution—not only of society but simultaneously of individual consciousness, and they understood that you cannot have one without the other. So, yes, on a very basic level I would agree with your assessment, and I would, of course, include writing as, equally, a political act, for the same reason—that the transformation of consciousness entails this kind of reciprocity between public and private.

At the same time, you have to keep in mind that my perspective is largely shaped by my practice of meditation—to my mind the most radical political act of all. Far too many people in our culture are so deeply divided that all they can see is the dichotomy between “quiet” and “action,” between “being” and “doing.” Thus, meditation, for them, would be antithetical to social commitment. This is a misunderstanding, though, of the yogic treatises and of other expressions of the Eastern wisdom traditions. Too often, nonpractitioners see meditation as “escapism,” as deep relaxation only, rather than its essence of radical transformation of consciousness. There is no outside without an inside, no action without inaction, or as the Buddhist D.T. Suzuki has stated in describing the Void of cosmic consciousness, it “is neither an immanentism nor a transcendentalism.” Ultimately, in deep states of meditation such distinctions fall away, and the vision becomes one of reciprocity and interconnection. We should all read the Chinese poets of the T’ang Dynasty if we want an even clearer enactment of this. Though not yogic in the strictest sense, these poets (many of whom were not just Confucian but Taoist, Buddhist, or even Shamanic) share this sensibility, recognizing the transparency between the realms of the social and spiritual. I’m thinking, in particular, of Tu Fu and Han Shan, two poets who approached the question of transparency from somewhat different angles, with the former seemingly more socially-rooted and the latter a hermit—yet each finding deep ways to integrate and express this reciprocity. Meditators are not blind to the world of the social. They go so deeply into the substrata of interconnection that they work on incredibly deep, often intuitive, levels to transform the social. It is often the same with poetry, at least as I see the work of the poet. Through the power of the Word and through the practice of making a poem, we are in the business of transforming human consciousness in ways that affect not only ourselves but simultaneously the entire cosmos.

AV: I sense in much of your work, a weather you want to create within the world of the poem by conjuring up other geographies (both physical and psychological) and by implementing an onrush and, often disorienting, collision of imagery. Reading your poems can be a breathless experience with one image piling on top of, and veering off from, another. You, yourself, have talked about the writing of poetry as a way of disrupting the expected. Could you comment a bit here on how the style of your poems leads to “unexpected places” and on what new directions you see developing in the “geography” of your work?

GK: Well, obviously, my work is deeply influenced by Surrealism, but that is only one aspect that contributes to these juxtapositions, and—as you say—disruptions, collisions, and disorientations (what I’d probably prefer to call reorientations). An equally strong influence is my years of meditation practice. This doesn’t mean that meditation makes one feel “disoriented”; if anything, it has the opposite effect. However, it begins to reveal to the practitioner the underlying unity of all things, as well as the illusion of dichotomous thinking. Thus, much of this “onrush” of images in my poems, as you describe it, is part of my practice of attentiveness and then bringing this practice over to the reader (sometimes as jarring juxtapositions) in order either to try to evoke those interconnections and/or to help neutralize oppositional thinking.

In The Theory and Functions of Mangoes, for instance, the entire book is written in the second person as one means of disrupting the expected “I-ness” of the poems. However, this is also a way of enacting the old yogic trick of talking to oneself in order to help increasingly dissolve the “I’s” attachment to things (yogis, for instance, might ask themselves, “Okay, what are you hungry for now?” Would you like to take a walk now or later?). This also establishes an interesting complexity in the book—who is the “you” and who is the speaker (another way for me to address the illusion of dichotomy). Along with this, I wrote over 90% of Mangoes, I'd say, in couplets to once again emphasize the neutralization of opposites—in this case the apparent contradictions not only of “self” and “other” but also of Eastern and Western cultures.

As you suggest, these stylistic qualities come through as a thread in nearly all of my work, even as far back as my first two chapbooks from the 1980’s. And I explore this reorientation in vastly different ways in my new book, Borders My Bent Toward. Here, I attempt to expand the “borders” of consciousness in different ways, particularly through syntactic slippages and mantra-like seed-sounds, along with my more familiar onrush of images, juxtapositions, and associative leaps. My hope is that, yes, for the poems to create a “breathless” experience. However, it is important to recognize “breathless” in the context I intend. Rather than someone panting through a race of images, I mean it in the yogic manner of neutralizing the rising and falling currents of energy associated with the inhalation and exhalation of breath. My hope is that, if anything, the “breathless” experience you describe is calmly integrative, slowing down the perceiving power of readers in ways that open them to something larger and more expansive within themselves.

Interestingly, I had a rather noted editor, whose magazine had published me in the past, reject some later work with the comment that he didn’t know what my vision was—something to the effect that it “was diffuse and did not bear down enough and settle on any one thing.” Unwittingly, he gave me a compliment and helped me clarify my poetics even more. First, I’m not the least bit interested in my vision, in the sense of the kind of “ownership” that “my” would imply. That’s such a narrowly romantic view of the work of the poet. Rather, whatever I have to offer the reader (and “myself”) is a gift for which I’m blessed to be the vehicle. Secondly, I’m glad that the sensibility of my poems suggests diffusion and dispersal, for as physical, psychological, and spiritual beings we are continually reconstituting ourselves every second. After reading his comments, I thought, “Wow—some of the poems actually achieve that? Terrific!” This is not to say that the poem should lack focus or intent or be intentionally diffuse. Nor does this give one license to write a confusing poem, just for the sake of disorienting the reader (a common misconception about poetry that my students, from time to time, experience). Sometimes, however, the poem’s focus may include, precisely, some aspect of dispersal. Yet, it needs to establish this through an intensely focused orchestration of its energy to achieve this quality through a keen integration of sound, rhythm, image, structure, syntax, theme, and various other elements of the poem.

You ask, also, about my current projects. Besides Borders, my new work is moving in a few directions. I’m currently at work on at least four other manuscripts, each at various stages (I tend to write across projects for many years at a time). There’s the massive, blurred-genre book that retells histories of my favorite non-U.S. poets from the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s (from which the poem for Cernuda that you’ve published here is drawn). There’s another book, more personal in theme, which explores—among other things—family and my Greek cultural roots. There’s even a second collection of poems about India. And then there’s a new manuscript that dives even more deeply into the possibilities and limitations of language. Each explores the dimensions of Lorca’s duende from various perspectives, but always in ways which foreground language as the primary vehicle for the transformation of consciousness. In this way, I’d have to say that the “geography” of my work is closer to an on-going project from book to book, rather than to a terrain entirely “new.” In that way, I might call it a “geography of the soul."