Bio: In the collective imagination—of the handful of people who might sometimes imagine me—I'm identified with Los Angeles, which suits me fine. But I'm also satisfied to be associated with Fresno and the San Joaquin Valley, where I studied with Philip Levine, Peter Everwine and Charles Hanzlicek, and with San Francisco, where I spent my first couple years and, eventually, several subsequent years. As long as my parents were alive San Francisco was my primordial home. I emphasize this here, because some are perpetually startled to discover I'm not an L.A. native. Moreover, when I mention my Northern California roots some folks forget, and are startled all over again, later, if the subject should come up again. Please, L.A. is my willfully adopted city. Certainly there're marvelous writers who've lived all their lives in the place of their birth, and then there's the other sort—the ones who must get out of town. I love San Francisco, but I needed a big city—a big, big city. However, if I were born here in Los Angeles I'd be elsewhere by now. Like I say, I'm that sort.

I've taught at various colleges and universities, most recently at SDSU, where I filled in for a time for the wonderful poet Sandra Alcosser, who injured her back when she stepped back to admire some roses. (Beware of beauty. Small wonder the Aztecs associated certain flowers with death.) I teach regularly through the UCLA Extension Writers' Program, where I've developed classes on areas that interest me, the persona poem, the socio-political poem, and the poem noir ("Poetry Goes to the Movies").

My books, alas, are out of print, though one, In Danger, can be had for a price—often a small price. My poetry has shown up mostly in West Coast publications, and in a few national magazines, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, The Antioch Review. I'm in lovely anthologies, including Robert Mezey's Poems of the American West for Knoph's "Everyman’s Library" series, and Dana Gioia et al's California Poetry from the Gold Rush to the Present.

In the past eighteen months I've nearly stopped sending to magazines. Funny, I began to envy—then emulate!—Frank O'Hara, who rarely submitted his work; he wanted to write, write, and not bother with all that. And he had such a pleasurable life—at least that's my impression. I've enjoyed writing poems and not folding them together with a cover letter and SASE. Now, though, my friends are urging me to send my work out.

An artist's relationship to rules is often an accurate indication of her talent and overall experience with the craft. Reading someone who makes a show of brazenly ignoring all the rules is just as telling as reading another whose voice is polished yet never challenges established forms and boundaries. "Answers and Four Common Questions", on the other hand, manages to present a rule and then proceeds to gracefully break it, preserving the spirit of the rule in the process. What do you believe this particular rule was meant to guard against and how did you go about breaking it without "plunging into the pitfalls"?

Well now, this "rule" is a bit different in that it came from a friend instead of a poet-professor and, in this one case, I'm not sure I altogether agree with it. It seems to me a question—including one that closes a poem—can resonate with shades of meaning, or open a provocative new terrain of possibilities. One of my favorite final lines comes from a poet I know little about except for his name, Jon Swan—"How will either of us get/ rid of this dream buried deep in our flesh/ except by dying?" For me—for my sensibilities—that's a knock-out. (The poem's called "Conjuring Blues in the Surf at Nantucket," and it appeared in The New Yorker, early 80s). But of course it's in the rhetorical mode, and the question contains the answer.

Neruda wrote a book of short poems composed entirely of questions, wonderful ones, such as "How did the abandoned bicycle/ win its freedom?" and "Is the rose naked/ or is that her only dress?" In this case the questions behave like lines of mischievous lyric poetry that upend our commonplace way of seeing, thinking.

However, I think my friend was referring to a closing question where the various forces of the poem don't coalesce in some interesting way. In any case—to get around, finally, to answering your question—I took on this "rule" because for me it offered interesting possibilities for a poem; in fact, straight off it started to assemble itself in my imagination. I knew I'd play around with the ordering of questions, inverting everything, putting the answers first. And I knew I'd explore different categories of questions. As it turned out I went from the classic childhood question, "Why is the sky blue?" to a sort of existential cry.

Maybe the challenge here was to arrive at an end that drew the parts of the poem together and at the same time exploded them into some larger territory. I don't know if I achieved that, but at least I made some worthwhile gesture in that direction.

Since beginning poets often have a hard time discerning when and how to take risks or deviate from convention, your "Broken Rules" series could prove helpful by way of demonstration. Have you ever considered using these poems as a teaching aid?

No, it's a provocative idea but I wouldn't do that, simply because I don't ordinarily use my own poetry in class. I mean I do if we're on a particular topic and one of my poems makes for an excellent example, or I feel that in the context of the discussion it'd be useful to discuss a poem's "back story," how it came to be. Usually, though, I read and discuss the work of other poets I admire, and on the last night of class, at every level, beginning through advanced, my students recite a poem they've memorized—not one of their own. It's great fun, actually. At the end we always reward ourselves with food, often—depending on what people have brought—a fabulous array of treats.

I'm no fan of workshops in which students read only each other's work-in-progress. We should read the work of our peers, yes, but we should always be seeking out writers who're better than we are—how else are we going to expand our sense of what's possible?

Speaking of rules, what are some of your own rules that you do adhere to when writing poetry?

Pound's immortal "Go in fear of abstractions" from the revolutionary "Don'ts" manifesto. That's huge, and to this day poets disregard that one at their peril. Well, actually, three or four celebrated poets seem to have been given a special dispensation to trade in abstractions. (And sometimes I look at certain of their poems and feel it's time for that special dispensation to be rescinded). Ninety-nine percent of the time, though, abstraction, and reliance on vague, vaporous, abstract nouns, is the mark of the beginner—not simply for poetry, for any kind of literary writing. People can try fiction writing, creative non-fiction, wherever, but they can't get around it. A couple abstraction-happy beginning students of mine did flee poetry for fiction—and ran smack into all the same conditions: "Be specific, be visual, and develop the details". Your imagination is going to have to do that kind of work, no matter how much it gripes and whines and wants to lie down on the job.

I love Pound's phrasing, that outrageous imperative, "Go in fear of..."—so against the grain, really, because in our age we're taught that fear is our enemy, and most of the time that's true. However, if you're a fearless zoo visitor contemplating sneaking into the cage of a polar bear... For some reason I'm now thinking of that nut who made news a few years back. He believed—as he explained later—the polar bear gestured to him as if to invite him into his enclosure, so the guy climbed over the barrier. He lost a lot of blood but survived. I've always remembered that. He may have been the product of a certain New Age enculturation. You know how that swinging pendulum can't get it right; humankind goes from brutalizing animals to trespassing onto their territory and trying to hug and cuddle them—neither of these actions is very wise, right? And neither makes for good poetry, or good poets. Poets, good ones—I hope—can empathize with all sentient creatures yet be alive to the possibility of danger. I suspect I'm no longer talking about polar bears, or even Pound, but some larger position vis a vis poetry and the world.

Anyway, with regard to the poem you're publishing, I must've forgotten—for a moment there—to go in fear of abstractions, because suddenly I notice that the Mother of All Abstract Nouns appears in that last section. "Life". I swear I virtually never do that. Actually, that last sequence is far less image-based than most of my work, but it has a velocity, propulsion, which I hope keeps it from going all pale and diffuse.

Aside from rules, what do you try to emphasize in your classes?

Other than the warning against abstractions—at least until students have become savvy experienced writers and can use them judiciously—I don't usually talk in terms of "rules". Oh, I suppose there're certain other "rule-like" things I insist on, seemingly little things. I'm always after them—in a joking way, really—to banish all boring titles. They keep forgetting. "History," that's terrible. "Memory"! Can there be a more boring title than that?! It seems teeny-tiny but I'm trying to impress on them that the poem begins with the first words our eyes fall upon. Take nothing for granted—nothing! Sometimes poets—unconsciously—begin to set the standard for themselves early on. And of course the opening lines really set the standard. If the poem starts off with flat, lackluster language, though it might wobble in and out of interesting material it's not so likely to find its way to a sustained, vital way of working.

Much of the time, though, we're discussing the poet's intention, what is she, he, trying to convey, or what is the primary area of exploration here? Wherever there might be an issue of clarity, focus, intention, I'm asking: what do you want the reader to come away with? What do you want the reader to understand—or to intuit?

Now I work with many advanced poets—"professional" poets, in that they've come into their own voices, are writing quite well, and publishing. They've been studying with me for years, and they're familiar, of course, with this level of conversation. On the other hand, it's interesting to observe the response of some newer, emerging poets when I ask them that question: what do you want your reader to understand? Sometimes I get such a look of bafflement and wonder, then slow realization: A reader? You mean there's a reader?

They'd been writing for themselves, solely as a form of self-expression. And that's O.K., but a workshop, at least the kind I teach, moves participants beyond themselves. Now there's an engagement; there's this reader, and the poem's an experience they'd like the reader to participate in. It takes a long time to make that happen. I can't think of any poet I admire who didn't work at it for years, either in creative writing classes or with a mentor.

Who are some of the poets writing today whose work you most admire? Why?

How about I mention a few books I find essential: The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees; Morning in the Burned House by Margaret Atwood; Philip Levine's Pulitzer Prize winning collection The Simple Truth; The Incognito Lounge, by Denis Johnson; Lynn Emanuel's, Then, Suddenly…; Alabanza by Martín Espada; John Allman's Loew's Triboro; Reasons for Moving by Mark Strand; Yusef Komunyakaa's Neon Vernacular—which also won a Pulitzer, if anyone would like to keep track of that sort of thing; Barbara Hamby's, Babel; David St. John's The Selected (Larry) Levis.

As I say—"a few" only, of many. I can't just go on and on.

No one thing ties all those poets together, but these particular books have recurring traits. I love the fierceness of Atwood, Kees, and Johnson, though it's almost foolish to say that because they're such altogether different expressions of fierceness. And I love the wit in the Strand, Hamby and Emanuel books, but—here again—they're wholly different types of wit. Strand doesn't write at all like Hamby. He's spare and dreamlike, she's all lush, verbal foliage—foliage with attitude. I like heady, abundant writing, and the wry, understated sort, too. I like drive and bold assertion, so long as it's under control. Focus. Impact. I'm totally pro-impact.

I studied with Phil Levine. He wrote The Simple Truth as a much older man, and for me that book gathers the passions and experience of a lifetime together with artful discipline perfected over decades. It includes many of my favorite poems, such as "The Poem of Chalk". Wow. That is a thing of beauty.