Ask the Author: RD Parker

RD Parker’s innovative poetry graces the June issue and he talks with us about abstractions, madames and public transportation.

1. What if a motorcycle shop was next to the graveyard? How would you react then?

I probably wouldn’t.

Graveyards are always next to transportation. All transport drives to the graveyard. Motorcycle shops lead directly to graveyards. We all go to the cemetery. We all go to the cemetery all the time.

The twentieth century has gone to the cemetery. We live with what we bury.

2. What do you prefer to abstractions?

Words, phrases, sentences, stanzas, paragraphs, chapters, and dried papaya. If you haven’t tried any of those, I recommend them. But you have to get the right ones. Not all of each category are alike.

3. If you were a madame, what number would you be?

No one would have my number.

4. What method of public transportation do you prefer?

Buses and trains. There’s a lot of good writing about buses and trains, especially fiction. I like to watch people choose their seats. I like to look out the windows. I like to read while I get somewhere. That way, I get somewhere while I get somewhere. I wish we had buses and trains running so well and so often that we never had to schedule them or wait for them and never needed or thought we needed our own cars. Getting around could be communal instead of about stoking or relaxing fantasies of power and self-sufficiency.

5. If a graveyard was next to a subway station, how would you react to that?

Depends on the graveyard. Some graveyards lie by subway stations. Subways and graves both go underground, like the people in them.

You too go underground, it seems. You go to the cemetery. You see the regular size of the graves. Every grave is like the other graves, and every grave is not like the other graves. The like and the not like pull at each other, pull with each other, like two hands on taffy, like an interviewer and an interviewee.

It must have been hard to come up with questions for these poems. Maybe that’s good. The questions try to wrap the poems around something quotidian. These poems tango with the quotidian: they step towards it, step back, lean away, stretch, nearly fall over, and they repeat, repeat, repeat. Every repetition changes what it repeats, because it repeats. The second time is not the first time. The second time glows. The glow of the second quotidian is an afterglow. It tells the quotidian no, no, no.