Our conversation went a little something like this"
Mickey Z.: America Plops and Fizzes kinda reminds of the story about when an art writer declared that Jackson Pollock's paintings lacked a beginning or an end and Pollock replied, "He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was." Did you embrace of "no form" by design or by natural process?
Andrew Rihn: By both, actually. America Plops and Fizzes was written while I was an undergraduate at Kent State, and one of the important tasks for writing instructors is to expose their students to a diversity of forms. Good students are able to learn these forms, but good writers must also I think experience a sense of un-learning, that is, embracing these forms in different ways. I was very conscious of forms like haiku and haibun, as well as less formal styles like aphorisms and contemporary advertising slogans, but the decision to blur and blend was a very natural one.
Having "no form" implies the existence of form, and vice versa. I find that tension fundamental to language, and it is made especially visible in creative writing. Humans seem to have an innate impulse towards language, but the languages we create are of course human systems, and imperfect. They're terrific because they make our thoughts visible; at the same time, structuring our thoughts imposes limits on them as well. So there's a regulatory function to any formal structure.
But as David Munson's artwork in the book illustrates, sometimes that regulation can be a good thing.
MZ: Patti Smith once said the role of the poet was that of a Paul Revere of sorts, e.g. not necessarily about solutions but all about waking up the populace. Any thoughts on that appraisal?
AR: I think that's a wonderful description! Poetry is a rhetoric: a way of writing and speaking that shapes the way we interact with the world. It's a way of thinking. In that regard, it's the opposite of advertising. Good poetry, like good food, is a slow process. It takes time to digest; it gives you strength. But we're inundated with junk food - empty calories, empty words. Fast food, Twitter updates, celebrity marriages. We're left, individually and culturally, bloated, weak, and constipated.
MZ: But do you see any chance of us to a more nutritious, poetry-based diet? Perhaps one day, long after industrial civilization has imploded, humans will live a modern version of the clan or village-based life and this would be more conducive to storytelling?
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