Yeah.
But well, I guess what I was saying
is those poems are still getting published by reputable presses.
And certainly, DJ Renegade, Regie Gibson and Crystal,
they're all obviously intellectuals as well.
I guess the thing that might separate them on some level
is just the level of respect that I
think that goes in both camps.
I mean, I think that certain academic poets
aren't respected the same way in the performance poetry arena.
Just as performance poets aren't respected
in the academic arena.
Even when they do get published.
But irrespective of how much they might say they don't care,
they both are often cross-pollinated.
So I know Rita Dove, just to point it out here, is going
to be on Def Poetry Jam this season.
And I've done slams with Regie Gibson, Stanley Plumly, Ed
Hirsch, all from the same team.
So it's just you find that people--
there's a certain respect across those different arenas.
But I think there's still a difficulty
in trying to make sense of that in marketing.
How do you market?
So Crystal Williams went from being predominantly
a performance poet to being almost exclusively
an academic poet.
She has an academic job now at Reed College.
I'm afraid that's what happens to some poets.
Yeah.
Well, they have to pay the rent, so it's like--
Well, and I think that that's a good point too because,
I mean, if you want to make a living as a poet,
where else can you make it?
Right.
Yeah.
I'm kind of interested on the forms.
Is it Sommer that was talking about forms?
And you have that one dictionary definition.
Is this something-- I mean, how did you
come up with this concept?
Is that something that you got from somebody else?
I'm sure I did.
I don't know specifically.
But I mean, I certainly have seen more of this in the--
there's journal out of the Bay Area called Nocturnes.
And they do-- I mean, I've seen a lot of poems that
play with the structure, not necessarily as definitions,
but with the structure of footnotes and things like that.
And I think just spending so much time with the dictionary
while I was doing that book, some of that
came out organically.
But I still wouldn't say the same thing to you.
I'm sure that people have been doing
that, playing with these different, quote unquote,
"found forms," and fitting the poem into that form.
So I don't know if anyone has used a preposition
as a frame for the poem.
But I wouldn't say that I doubt that hasn't
happened in some form or another before that.
And then a lot of it was just the thing
that Gertrude Stein talks about as far as this
being silent and meditating, just
that process of being alone with the work
so long that things just start coming out over time.
And I think that, for me, that's pretty much the process.