Gerald Maa: There is a strange communion in reading these poems. The poetry does not feel completely like a soliloquy overheard, as John Stuart Mill famously characterized it. Rather, the poems feel as if spoken sotto voce, an intimate conversation between two amidst the din of the greater public. What is the hope for and from the reader of these poems?
David Woo: I like intimacy as a desideratum of the poetic impulse. My work may be “a call in the midst of the crowd,” but it is far from being “orotund sweeping and final.” Our times are too diminished for anything but sotto voce confidences to neighbor, friend, lover, and stranger. And yet I don’t hear a dialogue, imagined or hoped for, when I’m writing a poem. A long time ago the first poem that I ever published appeared in The New Yorker and, in my innocence, I thought I would receive some sophisticated feedback from my readers. The only piece of fan mail that the magazine forwarded to me was a note from a teenage girl. It was written in purple pen and all the dots over the i’s were little hearts. It was very sweet and kind, but it wasn’t what I expected or wanted. I write as best I can and send my work into the world. I no longer hope for anything in return. And even if I could, it would be futile to control any response. “It must be abstract, it must change, it must give pleasure,” Wallace Stevens famously said. I’d go with the second and third if I had a supervillain’s power of mind control. But I don’t.
For the rest of this conversation, go here.