When you consider your own "tradition," do you think primarily of American poets?
"Primarily " is a funny word. The writing of the troubadors and of Dante, Bertrand, Baudelaire, Blake, Lautremont, Lorca, Mallarme, Rimbaud, ponge, Li Po, Brecht, Duchamp, Mayakovsky, Wordsworth, Basho, Khlebnikov are all central to my understanding of myself as a poet. For me, one of the distinguishing attractions of the avante-garde "tradition" has been its historic internationalism. Anglophilia is a disease that American poets have struggled with since the days of Poe, but it doesn't mean that Bunting or Raworth are not great poets with absolute relevancy regardless of where one lives.
Which historic poets do you consider most responsible for generating distinctly American poetics?
Amiri Baraka, Charles Bernstein, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley, Bev Dahlen, Emily Dickinson, Larry Eigner, Allen Ginsberg, Judy Grahn, Anselm Hollo, Leland hickman, Langston Hughes, Steve Jonas, Joanne Kyger, Frank O'Hara, Charles Olson, George Oppen, Simon Ortiz, Jerome Rothenberg, Jack Spicer, Gertrude Stein, Hannah Weioner, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Luois Zukofsky. . .
What do you see as the consequences of "political correctness" for American poetry?
"Political Correctness" as a social phenomenon is largely the paranoid construct of some of my fellow white males who know in their heart of hearts that, in a world governed by actual merit, their work (and consequently their social position) is best understood as a white supremicist (and male supremicist) movement, has nonetheless hardened positions all across gender, racial, and ethnic spectra. This has consequences that are negative across the board- - some, but not all, people read the work of Langston Hughes, one of the truly great American poets of the 20th century, but even these readers often neglect the very best of his
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