The book The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go (published by Cleveland State Univ Poetry Center; February 18, 2003).

360: I just re-read the poem, “Ask Me” by William Stafford, and felt a kind of honesty and patience in his work that I really enjoy in yours. In the most obvious way, a poem like say, Tuscaloosa Knights which ends with that line “and though it said nothing word for word/ the mute church saw” which is too, that gesture that allows the inanimate world to carry its own tacit indictments might be enough to remind a reader of this poem; but more than that, I see that though you work extensively with the image and while Stafford’s poem is not so fueled by the kinds of exact images you often capture, it does capture a kind of directness, something quiet and immense and ringing true. In an essay discussing his process, Stafford says that the poem came from free association, that he writes daily and almost of all his poems come from “free allowing of my impulses to find their immediate interest”. Does this writing process sound anything like the way you work?

E: Not exactly, but I’m hopelessly flattered by any comparison to someone like Stafford — someone that dedicated and prolific. No, my process is fairly simple. I see or think of an image that I want to write about for whatever reason, and then I write around that image to set it off or hold it up to be seen in better light.

360: Talk a little about risk. What is at risk for you? What is on the line?

E: Not sharing my perceptions by not writing all that I can is a risk. It is more of a personal risk, of course. It is like being that child in grade school who has something to say, but never does. Plus, poetry and writing is a form of memory and those memories are at risk.

360: Your book is at turns, angry, tender, and funny. Some of my favorite poems are your sharp-witted jabs at places, treatments of class and gender, and so on. Meteoric Rise, for example, is set in a tone that is sometimes funny, sad, bitter. Where do you find your favorite intersections between humor and poetry? I read somewhere that you are careful in the placement of your funniest poems when you give a poetry reading or people get stuck in that tone and laugh at your elegies. What function does humor serve for you in the poems you read, as well as those you write?

E: We have a right to joy, and I think humorous poems can make the more serious ones that much more painful. I hate poetry readings that proceed like wakes.

360: Your book, The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go, only came out in 2003, and so the experience must be, in some ways, rather fresh. What was your favorite experience connected with getting a book of poems published?

E: Well, certainly my favorite experience had to be getting a job as a poet which is what a book of poems can, on occasion, do for you. American is this bad marriage of capitalism and Puritanism, so when you tell people that you are a poet, they think you are crazy or pretentious or both.

360: How are you thinking about new work — poems or stories etc. — in relation to the work that appeared in The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go?

E: I’m trying to surprise myself. I am bored with my voice, my poetic moves. I want work that is less stiff and white boy. I want a poem of mine to be that guy who when the music starts, is the first one up and dancing. My old voice — it all has to be wiped away. But in much the same way that I always seem to buy the same clothes, I always seem to make the poetic choices down the line from topic to tactic. It’s depressing.

The poet Eliot Khalil Wilson.

E: I find all that very funny. I could read a short story and no one would come up afterwards and ask me describe or talk about myself in the context of that fiction, but something about poetry — perhaps some vestige of the Romantic autobiographical ideology — still lingers. People think I fought in Nam, that I am married, that I am divorced, have two children. The whole art/artifice thing just doesn't take hold for many readers. Personally, I’m more inclined to not associate a poem with autobiography and nonfiction. Granted, poems are just as much in history—be it personal or societal — as prose, but to me they are often more musical, more refractive, and linguistically over-determined. Ultimately, I’m flattered by readers who think my poems are straight autobiography. It suggests that my poems are sufficiently committed.

360: Name some contemporary writers you read and what, specifically, you admire about them.

E: I read and admire you actually. Your sense of play with language is something I want to learn. Just now, I'm a huge fan of Eavan Boland’s work for her clarity and mock simplicity.
I admire Auden for being Auden — the erudition and politics, the small-big voice of him.

360: I loved the way that your poem, “Designing a Bird from Memory in Jack’s Skin Kitchen” worked out in Born Magazine and the way they made of it, a short film of sorts. What was it like to see your poem literally set in motion that way? How much did you work with the computer graphics artist, Rick Mullarky and how does the final product capture the (for lack of a better word) “essence” of your sense of the poem?

E: It was creepy in much the same way that hearing someone read your work is creepy. There are different accents and phrasings that you hear and don’t like for being different. I worked with Rick only in setting up what we didn’t want the piece to do. We didn’t want it to be a war video. He was in Berlin at the time and had access to great and stark industrial images that were, in their own way, the stuff of war and loss. He got the essence of the poem.

360: Name the one book of poems you’d take with you on a desert island, if only one could go with you.

E: Homer’s The Odyssey

360: Since I predict you’ll be a Big Poet, and I think all Big Poets must answer this question, I’m asking it: I know you are a professor so you probably deal with them daily, so what advice would you give young writers?

E: Learn your craft by reading that work which is either undisputably great or that is irredeemably bad. You will learn from both. Then, find a job that will grant you enough money to buy yourself freedom and time.