Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Interview

Nelson: I’m curious about your notion of the anti-poetic. What does that look like for you? Is that the everyday diction, the pop-culture allusions, the sense of it being so very much of the contemporary world?

Balzer: Yes. And I worry about those things because, I guess, it’s an evaluation of my own life, which does contain a lot of the pop-culture material and detritus that piles up onto everyday experience. And what’s poetic in that? I feel like I lead a very anti-poetic life. I have to work. I’m not a teacher of poetry. Poetry doesn’t have a day-to-day resonance in my life. Poetry is often very absent from my life. So I was trying to figure out how to marry day-to-day life with the poetic. I was trying to bring poetry back in. So the anti-poetic is my attempt to access what was really poetic for me. And it involves a lot from pop culture. I had to figure out how pop culture separates, or doesn’t, from my existence. I had to figure out how it diminishes my existence while I have a craving for it.

Read Stephanie Balzer's entire interview with poet Christopher Nelson here.