A devil came to me Saturday,
laughing and calling himself Charlie,
shaking the rain out of his hair.

I felt my hindsight slip
as I followed him out to his bike,
as I left my roommates watching TV.

This is the first time you’ve been interviewed as a poet—and it’s a self-interview.

I know. It’s weird.

Try to get past that and tell us why, having been a musician all your life, you started also to write poems.

Back in high school I pursued both music and poetry, but I matured far more quickly as a musician. So I went to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, then to New York to become a freelance drummer and percussionist. The beauty of freelancing, for me, is in the variety of musical styles I’m asked to perform in while collaborating with players who provoke me to make contributions I would never come up with on my own.

The warm-blooded saint
and the icy blue killer
met one day on
the path of dust.
They stole from each
other, vitality and
secrets—they embraced
In the null gray morning.

The radiator
has been cold for quite
a while and no sooner do we
put our sweaters on than we hear,
beyond our reading, a low, deep, faraway
snap, cool as the cue that comes from the fingertips
of a leaning-in bass singer in a doo-wop group, then more
snaps rise closer and higher in pitch, like other crooners creating

The runner’s the disciple of travel,
Ambassador from determination;
All the wars a runner fights are civil,
The self-turned challenge, the primal agitation.
We tritely say that running signs the human
Spirit, community of close-stepping pack,
Second wind as individual omen,
We measure with matched morals on the track.

You call yourself a “woman-poet entrepreneur.” What do you mean by that?

I run the West Chester University Poetry Center and the West Chester University Poetry Conference, I edit Mezzo Cammin,, and I direct Story Line Press, I teach. I also do my own writing—poetry, articles, and reviews. I wear a lot of literary hats.

At the same time, when I speak about entrepreneurship, I mean following through on an idea: creating something where there was nothing. Like most entrepreneurs, I believe in the big dream. When I launched The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project in 2010, I wanted to do it in Washington because of the symbolic resonance of the location. Then I created the event from scratch: the fund raising, the evening, the project itself. That evening at the National Museum of Women in the Arts remains one of the best of my life.

One day, she realizes she’s blown up:
It’s not surprising with their snacking choices.
Still, while she likes him any way, she notices
That he is distant. Taking a first step,

Why are you having such a hard time with this self-interview?

I guess because there’s too much freedom. It’s easy to answer someone else’s questions, but not so easy to answer my own, or even to articulate what they are.

Well, what if you just think of questions that you think would be fun to answer?

Isn’t that cheating?

Remember Rizzo from the movie Grease? The indomitable Stockard Channing played a smoldering hottie who rivals the perky Olivia Newton-John. We recognize the split: Betty Rizzo struts her T & A. Wholesome Sandy flaunts perfect teeth.

Back in the day Rizzo was called a slut, a word that even sounds dirty. Leap forward thirty-five years and we’d be her cheering squad. Sure, Rizzo boasted a fine rack and leaned toward the uncouth, but like today’s female protagonists, she had moxie and smarts. Think: Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook. Think: Katniss Everdeen in Hunger Games. Think: Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. These characters have more in common with the brazen dames immortalized by Crawford, Stanwyck, and Davis than they do with the kittenish Newton-John. Fifty years ago, in The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan inspired women to stash their aprons next to their brooms and see what else the world offered. How would the prophetic Betty have reacted to what Elizabeth Hand calls the new Femininjas?

1. The Muppets on The Muppet Show

This one’s job
was to yearn.
This one to love improbably.
This one to be pathetic.
This one to run berserk.
None of the jobs were useful
but we did them very well.

I speak god language
because people die
and god is the tongue of death.

Death stopped time, left me behind
my father with the small pot of raspberry jam
he ate with a spoon.

My story-line is a birth, a tooth-
ache, a wedding, a broken wrist, a messy fissure,
a death by fire.

Hi, Evan, I think I follow you on Twitter.

Yes, I follow you, too. You’re hilarious. I love Twitter, but it’s also part of my job. I gather stories constantly for a daily news aggregate centered on creative writing and the publishing world, so I’m always reading, and Twitter is an amazing resource. I’m paid to use Twitter, but I’ve given myself over to it—not sure I can stop. It’s the first thing I reach for in the morning. I smoked for twenty years—I recognize the impulse.

On his motorcycle, Brin drove me to Pine Lake
to go diving. I gripped his waist, loosely afraid

of falling into the traffic on North Elm Street
or Randleman Road, where the cars were racing on

and off Interstate 40. Pine Lake was carved out
of a cow-pasture by bulldozers and filled from

a nearby swamp in 1952. On one side were rows
of small white houses with wire fences—our side

~ after “Marguerite au Sabbat” by Dagnan-Bouveret

A woman, standing near the fires, seems
alone, the flames behind her glowing red,
whipped by a swirling wind, eternal, torn
by air to tongues, by voices harmonized
as if the chants, renewed in light, were born
a thousand years before, and overhead
merge with both flame and smoke, casting a shade

Tell us a little bit about your new book of poetry, THE MORROW PLOTS. What’s the significance of the title, and what was your inspiration for writing the book?

When I lived in Upstate New York—way up on the Canadian border—during the awful winter, I became obsessed with The Morrow Plots, an experimental cornfield on the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign campus. The local and campus agronomists conduct important crop experiments there, and then disseminate the findings among the U.S.’s farming industry. So, it’s an important square of land, and hallowed ground in downstate Illinois. You do not trespass on the Morrow Plots. The legal and social consequences for such things are dire. The Plots are regionally revered. Illinoisans lend the Plots this crazy holiness. I was born in Illinois, and I think I was oddly homesick for the Midwest all the way up there near Canada among the defunct Go-Kart tracks and Shining-esque hedge maze that my wife and I lived behind (the area was a bedroom community for Manhattanite boaters in the summer time, and so had all of these kitschy tourist traps that would go skeletal come winter). Yes: we lived behind MazeLand.