Alexander Long is the author of three books of poetry, Vigil (New Issues, 2006), Light Here, Light There (C&R Press, 2009), and Still Life (White Pine Press, 2011). With Christopher Buckley, he is co-editor of A Condition of the Sprit: the LIfe & Work of Larry Levis (Eastern Washington UP, 2004). Long is an Assistant Professor of English at John Jay College.
We asked Alex a few questions in anticipation of his reading with Robyn Schiff and Joel Nathanael on December 1st--here's what he told us:
YAPRS: Do you have a favorite book that people who know you or your work might not expect you to like?
AL: Ah, you mean the guilty pleasure book? I think the first "big" book I read cover-to-cover was Danny Sugarman's No One Here Gets Out Alive, his biography of Jim Morrison. It's pretty lousy, if I remember it correctly. I think I was 9 or 10. The only memory I have from that book is Sugarman's account of Morrison's deep hatred and fear of heroin...but every other substance was OK. But now that I think of it, the people who know me or my work wouldn't find this all that surprising. Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction is difficult and fascinating and tedious.
YAPRS: Is there a poet whom you wish more people would read?
AL: Beside myself? Of course, there are many, too many. My instinctual response is Larry Levis, who's still in that realm of being a poet's poet. Not a bad place to be. I probably won't get there. But Levis hasn't reached a readership, I think, beyond poets. Levis's work deserves to be held up with other seminal American poets like Frost and Whitman and Dickinson, to be brought up in casual conversation among, I don't know, accountants, or janitors, or florists as they golf. That's how beautiful and powerful his poems are; they penetrate, and then inhabit, the mind of anyone who comes in contact with them. I think, too, Christopher Buckley's poems speak--no, sing--singularly. He's got some 17 books of poems now and why he's not better known is a mystery as well. Bill Matthews is a genius. Phil Levine is a hero and a genius. Bill Olsen's poems are a very real force. David St. John's, too. Mind you, these are poets I love, and a crucial distinction must be made between appreciating and preferring a poet's work. Then there are those who are in my generation: Sebastian Matthews, Curtis Bauer, Beth Bachmann, Kate Northrop, Major Jackson, James Hoch, Elaine Sexton, Patrick Rosal, Jason Gray, Dan Groves...the list goes on, and is too long. Why is it too long? We're a lazy, passive populace, Americans, and poetry--like good jazz and real comedy--requires effort from the audience. We don't want to react. We want to be fed, like a suckling pig.
YAPRS: If you were holed up during an Iowa blizzard and you could choose only one person with whom to ride out the storm, who would it be and why?
AL: Is my wife reading this? No matter. The soul's always held to account. I'd love to meet my grandfathers, both of whom died when my parents were young, before I was a climax, or an accident, or a twinkle in an eye. I'd love to know my parents as kids, and what better source than their fathers. I'd also like to try to keep up with Keith Moon, both on stage and off. And James Brown. What a fucking blast that blizzard would become.
YAPRS: To what do you aspire in your writing?
AL: Such a grand question. I don't know. Phil Levine put it this way, and I'm paraphrasing: All I've wanted is to be in the room of the great poets. That pretty much sums it up. But, when I was first starting out, writing made me feel better. Not just intellectually or psychologically or emotionally, but also physically. I'd get those Dickinson goose bumps. I'd be awakened to the world in ways I didn't know were there. The poems were crap; they weren't even bad poems yet, but they were necessary. But, you see, these are the selfish aspirations. I'm trying to migrate from selfishness, and my migration was thrust forward a great deal by a comment Marilyn Nelson wrote on one of my poems. I love Marilyn. She's a terrific poet, and a sweet, generous woman. Which is why I was surprised to read her comment on a poem I'd given her to help: "Is this how you want to be remembered? Really?" She let me have it, for I deserved it, and I did a 540.... I asked her about it, and she apologized, and I reassured her that there was no need for an apology; the only thing that needed expressing was my gratitude to her. I'm trying to write poems that have very little to do with me. That's what triggered STILL LIFE, getting out of myself and whatever pain or pleasure I've endured. I'm not all that special, and writing about my unspecial self isn't going to make me any more special. And Marilyn's right: do I want to be remembered as a whiner? Who does? I'm aspiring to be generous, and I should've been doing that from the start. I'm still trying to understand what generosity can mean in the act of writing a poem, and I suspect I'll be trying to for the rest of this life.
YAPRS: What drives you and/or your poetry?
AL: The mysterious, but undeniable, fact that all of this is going to end.
YAPRS: If you weren’t a poet, what would you be?
AL: An anonymous bass player in a great band.
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