Fine Flu Journal Fine Flu Journal- june 2014 | Page 22

Faulkner, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Memory obliterates
time, in a way, or at least the linear experience of time, the clock time
most of us live by day to day.

9) Do you ever think in what way the reader perceives your
poetry and has this thought ever influenced the way you
write?
Probably not enough. I tend to write for myself as audience, listening
for what pleases or moves me in terms of sound, image, action.
Luckily, it often works out that readers respond in ways that please me,
but certainly not always.

10)

Is there a certain idea (or ideas) you are trying to

communicate through your poetry and in what way do you
use the language to help you with this?
Sometimes, especially in the more “documentary” kinds of poems I’ve
written about my family history, as in my chapbook My Son Writes a
Report on the Warsaw Ghetto (Flutter Press, 2013) or in the few poems
I’ve been commissioned to write. Often, though, I surrender to the
spell of the words in my head, letting the first line or phrase tumble out.
I then try to follow where that opening leads, so often I sit down to
write without a subject in mind or a conscious agenda. Sometimes the
voice is mine (or mine in certain moods), but often it is someone else, a
character I discover through the process of writing the poem. With
some exceptions, I am not a particularly autobiographical poet.

22