Jim Daniels

You guessed Jim Daniels, you can't be serious.

Interviews with Jim Daniels

Have you thought of a text or sub-text in these policies when you have written them? JD: Once you begin to write a policy diary, you limit yourself. However, it is more difficult to live and write a poem. Stereo types appear and Scripture rereads like propoganda. To examine these lifetimes in my letter to say that they are important and should be a part of our literary work.

AK: With regard to non-PC poetics, however, a mighty argument could be found that your mighty long verse "Time, Temperature" about breed and racial conflicts over centuries in Detroit constitutes an absolutely high tide marking (all right, possibly with the exception of Bukowski). Could you speak about how this verse was written, how it was taken up and how you are experiencing it now?

JD: It can be gentle poetic, which can prove to be self-righteous or selfish if we have to look at our own life truthfully in it. "The longest verse I've ever written up to the "Niagara Falls" was "Time, Temperature", and the cause is that I had suppressed racial correspondence for so long (see Baldwin comments below) that when I opened this gate, all this shit splashed out.

Writing and reworking it was a tough one. I' ve only reread the verse a few loud readings - once at an AWP Associated Writing Programs meeting and once in Detroit at Marygrove College. At Detroit, I got one of the few stand-up overs I ever got in a lecture from a very different crowd, and it almost made me cry.

Of course, the issue of racialism in this nation is still a big one, and many of the things that Detroit still has are related to racist questions, and although I think the verse mirrors a certain amount of space of time, I think it is still pertinent. AK: The verse is devoted to James Baldwin.

Did his letter have a big impact on you? In your opinion, how would Baldwin have reacted to "time, temperature"? JD: I had James Baldwin as a lecturer for a course at the Bowling Green School of Graduate Education, and in that grade he asked us to look at our own life in an honest way in relation to the breed.

Back then, I wasn't up to the task. Well, I consider the verse a belated treatise for his classmates. At Contemporary American Poetry on Race, as another work in this area, and at Carnegie Mellon I founded the Martin Luther King, Jr. I am still interested in having frank discussion about differences through writing verse, because Day Writing Awards are for 16 th year old community student.

Like some of Frost's early works, there are long drama soliloquies depicting a figure in a particular place and at a particular period, but you go far beyond Frost in your quest to conscientiously keep the speech slang and non-literary. The most remarkable thing about this is that it disavows the narrator in the verse and the readers, one of the comfort of poeticism, which is the view and enjoyment of the small flight achieved by using speech to transform something into something else.

Many of these verses, as in the life they describe, "It is what it is" is not a vapid fiction, it is a gloomy fact, not only of their life, but also of their spirit. Think it might have something to do with what I'm typing about. Can' t and won' talk for everyone in Warren or Detroit or the working classes or whatever.

Somebody texted me after my storybook Detroit Valleys was released to claim that my story did not mirror their Detroit, and of course I didn't say we all have our own story, and it just belongs to me. All I can say is I really hoped that it will find an audiences somewhere in the poetic world.

JD: I recall seeing Springsteen for the first time at the Masonic Temple in Detroit in 1978. In the same weeks I saw Bob Seger at Pine Knob (an open-air sound system on the edge of Detroit). Many of my writings are about literature, and I was initially more involved with composing through literature than with literature, which we studied at university.

Personally, I recall a verse from my first volume, Orte/Everyone, titled "My Dad Worked Late", where I had stapled an ending that was a little more promising, but an Editor phoned me about it, and she was right - the ending was a kind of pipe dream - I thought more about my relation with my dad than I did about the verse.

A piece of information frames the verse, stating that the rappers had cancelled a trip due to dependence on sleeping pills. Feels it odd to be a much admired and acclaimed writer with a decade-long success story, zooming in on a child of punks right from the backyard behind you and becoming a multimillionaire who radiates a house name that what looks like poetic reading as angry doggerel?

" Are there any other ways in which literature, poetic literature, rapporteurs or hip-hop can combine and perhaps be enriched, or has the boat been sailing or long ago sank in the harbour? That might seem hot, but at this point in my life I don't really give a damn, but I consider myself very, very fortunate to have found poems and been fortunate enough to have this great position at Carnegie Mellon University that will reward me for what I do and give me enough free rein to do it.

There is always an crossroads where musical pieces and poetic works fuse - I am not one to say that poetic work is poetic work and that is not poetic work. Fascinated by their mixture of words and sound. Actually, I have written a verse about attending this concerto. It discourages me a little when I see that poetic is too tightly delineated without many important votes.

The same year that my Detroit parent was bred, he was in Detroit, so we also have this interesting cross-generational connection. Thank you for spinning my work.