Sometimes, beyond that, I just get sick of all efforts to promote the work—mine or anyone else’s. But I also have to face the fact that I don’t want to abandon responsibility for getting the work out there, for letting it find its own way. 

 

Also, I love to do readings—another way, I suppose, of getting the work out there. It’s very much like singing—and so this is just pleasure.

 

TL: What is on the calendar for the summer and fall? And, are their new works in progress that you are particularly excited about?

 

SM: I’m reading with Terrance Hayes and a couple of other poets who are new to me in West Virginia in very early September, at the Sotto Voce Festival—and conducting a workshop, doing a talk. There are a number of readings coming up locally—one with Marsha de la O at the Coffee Cartel in June; another with Stephany Prodromides at the Ugly Mug; a reading in Ventura at the Artist’s Union at the end of July. I’ll be conducting some private workshops in the summer and then teaching full time, again, in the fall, and doing readings in New York and San Francisco.

 

I’m most excited about a new collaboration I’m doing with Holaday Mason. We’re each writing about fifty poems, sort of like doing a braided reading but it’s a braided writing, with poems that may or may not talk to one another very directly but bounce off of one another. I posed this as a sort of dare in late December and we both went for it. She’ll write a poem, put it in an envelope, and leave it somewhere for me. I’ll write one, put it in an envelope, and stick it through her front door—very much fun to do it this way in the age of electronic messages. The poems have quickly developed their own wacky idioms. There’s an emerging theme, I suppose, but part of what we’re trying to do is not talk about the poems—funny after twelve years of workshopping one another’s work—until we have moments, later, when we send them out in small groups for submission. We don’t talk about the content much at all, just make a few small edits. Tonally, it’s quite different from the other things we’ve been working on, so this is great fun.

 

Also exciting, though this is not new work in process, per se, but something that feels finally complete: there’s a manuscript already finished—think of it as a sort of prequel to Whore, though it’s alsoWhore-concurrent—that awaits publication decision. Perhaps the poems in that manuscript are my most accessible. Or maybe that’s something that no poet should try to judge.

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