AR: I think a balanced diet should include a bit of poetry, but also some fiction. And non-fiction: histories, biographies, academics, manifestos. I'm not a nutritionist, but I don't think it's ever a good idea to limit our diets to just one thing. We need painting, and music, and theatre, too. I don't know how exactly an arts-based civilization would function, but it would be a welcome change from ours based on property, militarization, and surveillance.
Poems will never be as flippant as the "Twinkie defense," or pad the profit margins like a marketing campaign. A poem will never have the same impact as a bomb, but I'm pretty comfortable with that.
MZ: If not the impact of a bomb, what then did you have in mind as you compiled America Plops and Fizzes in terms of both choosing poems and the order appear in and potential reader response?
AR: At his sexiest, and most subversive, the poet Pablo Neruda said "I want to do to you what spring does with the cherry trees." That's the kind of explosion I am interested in. Of course, Neruda said it in Spanish so most of us in the US need a translator to read his poems. But that's something I wanted to capture in this book as well: translation, negotiation, reconstruction.
Our memories are always selective - just ask a racist about the cause of the Civil War - but in critically reflecting upon our experiences we can begin to see the spaces where real, potentially radical options existed. What I hope these poems will do is reconstruct, little by little, the reader's own experience, the way bricks from a torn down wall can be used to build something new.
It is one thing to know where you have been and where you're heading, and that's vital, but is something altogether different to look at where you could have been, where you could be going. So it's that moment of stepping forward, after the book has been read and put down, that I'm most interested in. I want to encourage people to disrupt the paths of least resistance - the political, the social, the personal - and to do so creatively, emphatically, and with love.
MZ: One last thing - since you suggest it in your new book - what is the poet's equivalent to a sparring partner?
AR: A boxer's sonnet, maybe. A martial artist in blank verse.
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