Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Poets Al Black and Tim Conroy put me at such ease during this interview yesterday. I read poems from STEEP TEA and CONNOR & SEAL and chatted with them about writing with playfulness and prayerfulness; navigating life in major cities; the influence of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game ; the inspiration from Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah ; the importance of having a trusted writing group; the primacy of experience, memory, and images over objects. Get CONNOR & SEAL from my indie publisher, Sibling Rivalry .

The wolf-man is a simplistic reduction of our myriad selves. "Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands." Reading this passage helped me discover the meaning of the oscillating gun in my fiction manuscript SNOW AT 5 PM. The truth of multiplicity comes home to Harry Haller at the climax of the Magic Theater, with all its doors leading to different versions of himself. The chess player in one room is surely a predecessor of the Magister Ludi of the glass bead game. All past, present, and future selves available to one. Not for nothing is Hesse a disciple of Nietzsche, and his eternal recurrence. For me, Hesse will always be the most miraculous and unexpected connector.  After reading Safranski's biography of Goethe, I find Goethe appearing to Harry Haller in a dream. The accusation of ...

Thanks to Edward Moran, I just discovered Hyam Plutzik . Son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he became an English professor at the University of Rochester, and, though he died in 1962, a poet at large. His words quoted on his homepage immediately resonate with me: I once looked at poetry as little more than beautiful language. Later it was a way of communicating the nuances of the world. More recently I have begun to look at poetry as the great synthesizer, the humanizer of knowledge. The three ways of looking are not three different ways, but each rises into the next, as beauty becomes nuance, and nuance becomes synthesis. Or, to see the interrelationship from a different end, synthesis is valuable so long as it depends on nuance, and nuance must rest on an appreciation of beauty. The goal of synthesis echoes that of Hesse's The Glass Bead Game , in which the game is to unify all knowledge. Whereas Hesse's master-language is music, and his chosen form the quest novel, Plutzik...