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JH: Yes to Blake! Yes to prizes sucking, whether loudly or stealthily! The 2004 BAP had some excellent poets - kari edwards, K. Silem Mohammad, Ron Silliman, Brian Kim Stefans, Bruce Andrews, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis to name but a few. A BAP from a few years ago included Rebecca Seiferle. So BAP is not inherently wicked (not in the negative sense). Jamey Dunham's prose poem "Urban Myth" at:

Jimside

is very good - it didn't need re-writing at all, satiric or otherwise. I read Dunham's "Urban Legend" as using a decades-old expository style, with the "shocks" of the narrative deliberatively not straying too far from this imposed style. But let's talk about your writing. I'd love to hear about your the Sticky Name is All Bramhall.


Tell us about the sticky!


AHB: I was being a bit snitty about BAP. Anthologies tend to be scholastic tools, thus part of the hardening of the arteries that schools often engender. I don't particularly want to meet poets in this way, piecemeal, tho I'm sure good poetry can be found in the various BAPs. Regarding my poem, it was a lark. I muck around with texts quite a bit. It's a weekend thing to do, an activity I view both as experiment and play. Recently, and unusually, I have been using my own texts. In this case, a biographical note I had to write for school. I can't recall exactly what I did. I used find-and-replace to exchange the words 'I' and 'my' with something else, one of which replacements was 'viscous'. I sent the text thru Babelfish, Dutch to English and back, I think. I did a spell check, selecting the more whimsical choices offered. 'Viscous' became 'sticky' in the process. I read the thing word for word, and adjusted things quite a bit, aiming towards some goal or sense that I vaguely established in my mind. I know this all sounds boring and mechanical but the process feels lively to me. I enjoy the pleasure of randomness, tho I don't suppose I'm doing anything actually aleatoric. I like reacting to what I find, and the mining from the mess. I think Kasey Mohammad states in his interview with Tom Beckett that he is content, for now at least, to work with the voices in Google rather than in his head. Much of my writing is voices in my head, so listening to and accepting these outside voices is fresh for me. Your writing often seems to stem from literary involvement, not allusion or reference so much as invested by your reading. Do you feel the connection I infer? Do you feel like a conduit, or that the authors are all in heaven?