By Evie Hemphill

 

 

I like deferred gratificationworking on things that take a long time.

Are there specific literary influences you can identify?

 Too many influences to name. I forget content right away, but my mind keeps track of stylistic touches and methodological practices that interest me. Visual artists and filmmakers provide a more direct influence (I think it's even "literary"): Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Ed Ruscha and Stephen Shore in a Pop-related vein; Jean-Luc Goddard, Agnes Varda, Hollis Frampton and Jonas Mekas in film. I'll look at this work and think, "Finally I know how to write."

 

 Pop-inflected poetic projects by Joe Brainard, James Schulyer, Eileen Myles, and David Trinidad rarely receive attention as exemplary experimental texts. This dissertation thus introduces the concept of "Pop poetics" as a metacritical third-term by which to problematize reductive distinctions between "lyric" and "language-based" postwar poetry. It probes the constructive, yet constrictive, schema by which critics have sought to canonize "radical poetry," "serial poetry," and "New York School" poetry, even as it posits a direct relation between Pop poetics and the modernist grid, the mixed-media assemblage, the serialized gallery display, and the serialized art manifesto.

Didn't even take thirty seconds. I just pasted it.

 

Creative nonfiction should take advantage of its amorphous, oppositional status (getting defined by what it is not: fiction, journalism, poetry, philosophy, etc.) for as long as possible, and revel in this freedom, and make everybody else jealous.

What do you find to be the most difficult part of your writing process? What comes easiest?

Difficulty: I have no capacity to make things up.
Ease: Ideas for conceptual projects.

With your fresh experience navigating publication, what advice do you have for young writers preparing to enter that territory?

            Start a journal, or a press, or a non-solipsistic blogso that people need to know who you are. Make sure it looks nice.
 
Is there a class you recall as your best experience teaching? Why was it so worthwhile?
            I very much enjoyed emphasizing online audio materials in a Multicultural American Literature course this spring. I could never predict which students would enjoy a particular piece.
When you're not reading or writing or teaching, what do you enjoy doing?
            Talking to girlfriend, cooking, stretching, animals.

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