Poetry is clearly not an intellectual exercise or discourse for you; you strike me as a writer who goes for and decides by strong instincts or energies, be they impulsive or not. Am I wrong?

Poetry is neither an academic exercise nor a specific repertoire, but a way of life. At the same time, I don’t think I need to express my intellectual questions about poetry in the poems. When I’m writing, however, I don’t think about this: the best poems are created by both the writer and the reader. I guess I do prefer strong instincts and energies. My friend, CM Burroughs, read my new manuscript and described a male psyche in solitude/in love/in praise — who is also at some point in the process of turning its back and turning into the self. She saw a masculinity that, for its own survival, does not want to be broken into. Even in Kafka, she said, the voice is on guard against everything, even the female body, so much so that what I see is a man so invested in his own safety that he constructs his self to be what he thinks is indivisible.

Tell me, how much of your empathy have you stretched via the craft of writing? You’ve written a few effective persona poems of the famous and the unknown.

Empathic questioning is vital to writing, in my view. Poetry does not proceed according to the scientific method, but by another kind of inquiry. Empathy manifests itself in poems through subject matter, but also through form and process. It’s often thought that when students or beginning writers choose vague or general or abstract language instead of specific or particular or concrete language that this is a technical problem. I think it’s an ethical problem. Because the student hasn’t taken a stand on X or Y issue, and is unsure of her feelings about it, she selects imprecise words. Writers feel passionately about their language and must take responsibility one way or another for those choices. Yusef Komunyakaa said, “As soon as you sit down to write a poem, you’re making a political statement.”

Has your leap to the hybridised genre of writing lent a performative reading aesthetics that you did not anticipate during the phase of creation? If so, did they violate your expectations, or… ?

I think the hybrid form does enhance the performance, though that might have more to do with rhythm than with combining genres. Genre distinctions are intended to offer formal limitations for writers, not to liberate them. My Kafka piece, which is a piece of nonfiction, was published as fiction, but I feel it’s really a poem. Probably all poems will benefit from being read aloud. The body is an amplifier and the ear is an editor.

How do you own and authenticize the jazz effects (i.e. sound and rhythmic qualities), ideas, breath and energy in your writing? Particularly when in our present époque, live jazz has to some extent lost its social reality and immediacy/ urgency.

I don’t necessarily agree that live jazz has lost its social reality and immediacy. I think particularly in the black community, jazz has always been important. It probably has a slightly higher number of listeners in the black community than in the white, although the musicians there might have a mostly local reputation.

But I’ve found that I can own jazz or make it authentic in the sound and rhythm because it’s a metaphor. This bridge connects the speaker of the poems to the subject matter. Energy, the rhythmic expectation, affects line length and line break, but it also applies a pressure on the line. This tension creates a jazz feeling, and does more than traditional iambic measure. Ellington said that jazz is about choosing to be joyful in spite of conditions. A poem can be the best possible arrangement of language to express a particular moment. Its improvisatory movement, perhaps like jazz itself, is a subterfuge.

Sean Singer COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

I notice you used the word “subterfuge” often. Is it a conscious or subconscious deliberation? What other “subterfuges” happen in your work?

Language is a kind of illusion that intimately links the reader and the writer. As a reader, I escape into the writer’s imagination. As a writer, I develop strategies to somehow bridge fantasy and reality. Maybe that is the best function of a subterfuge in a poem.

Temperament is crucial to any musicality (not just jazz). How do you explore this via the written word?

Interesting question. I think maybe a temperament of being playful and serious at the same time might be a key. Being masterful of the craft, but also being open to the “wilderness,” the part of the subconscious that won’t be expressed in other kinds of language.

What propels speed and puissance in your poems? The banal equivalence of this question already posed by ABC and XYZ would be: what is your sense of a poetic line/diction?

Speed, or how fast or slow the information is delivered, is primarily controlled by line length and by punctuation. Puissance implies a kind of potency, strength, or force that might have to do with expectation and surprise. There probably is a sexual dynamic to that in poems, because some expectations vis-a-vis tension are fulfilled and others not fulfilled. Lately I have been interested in achieving musicality and rhythmic interest in a very long line; to see how long a line can maintain music before it collapses. Interestingly, the difference between poetry and prose is the line break. To increase surprise and to put maximum pressure on the language can be exciting to read and hear.

You’ve mentioned on many occasions that labels are limits “and they’re really meant to kill you.” Do you think this strong association of jazz with your work is imposing as a label for you? Is it limiting your choices?

It’s an important question. I don’t worry about being thought of as a “jazz poet,” though I think I’ve not been pigeonholed that way. I don’t want to repeat myself, but I also find I can write about jazz’s expanded metaphor without writing jazz as subject matter. Hopefully if jazz or anything else limited my choices, I would be able to recognize it and do something else.

Some of your cartoons and political caricatures have also appeared in a literary journal… how has drawing cartoons and sketches played a role in your creative life?

I was always interested in expression, but I was drawing long before I was writing. I think if I hadn’t become a writer I would have become some other kind of artist. I don’t have any technical skill in drawing, but it comes easily to me and it’s fun to do. I have stacks of sketchbooks. I used to draw a lot more, but as I get older and life gets increasingly complex, I draw less and less.

What are your thoughts regarding the poetry scene in New York today?

New York has more poetry happening than probably any other place. You could hear a different literary reading every single night, and you can always find something to hold your attention. There are, of course, different factions within that, but I don’t have a clue what they are. There is a freedom of the mind in New York that you can’t find elsewhere, and there is a sense of the footsteps of others: O’Hara, Hart Crane, Melville, etc. who walked the streets. And there are many universities and colleges with poetry classes being taught all the time. This will hopefully engender a new generation of readers of poetry.

Where are you now?

I’m in my apartment at a North-facing window in Harlem, New York City.

(Laughs) I meant to ask, where are you now in terms of current projects?

For my Ph.D. work in American Studies, I’m writing a cultural history of Newark since the 1967 riots. I’m looking at poetry, photography, and other arts, to find out how these artists (such as Lynda Hull) were viewing Newark at that time during the urban crisis when major voices were saying “abandon the cities.” I am seeking a publisher for my second manuscript, of which all the poems have been published. I’ve begun writing my third manuscript. I also wrote a paper on the meaning of jazz in Francis Ford Coppola’s film, The Conversation (1974).