For some time now Burning Shore Press has wanted to post interviews with Tony O’Neill and Rob Woodard. They, however, came up with a different idea: they would interview each other. So in late March of this year, Tony and Rob (who live on opposite sides of the country), began an email exchange where they alternated asking questions appropriate for both to answer. Due to their busy schedules the “interview” took a fair amount of time to complete — but we think it was worth the wait. We hope you enjoy this lively discussion of poetry, prose, and their work in general.
How did you become interested in poetry?

TO: Becoming interested in poetry was a backward process for me.

I had little interest in poetry at first, at least until I stumbled across the poetry that spoke to me. I had no interest in the classics, sonnets and the like.  It wasn’t until I read, well, I think it was probably “Howl” that I realized that there was poetry that could speak to me.

I didn’t understand it at first, and that was something that weighed on me, because when I was younger I had this very literalist view of everything, that every phrase or expression in a poem had to make total sense. So when I was faced with stuff like Ginsberg, and his “listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox” of course it meant nothing “literal” to me, but the words sung, they didn’t need to make perfect sense, I finally had an understanding of the poem like a song.

Even though I read and enjoyed a lot of poets following on from my discovery of Ginsberg as a teen – Bukowski, Rimbaud, Snyder, Giorno, I still had this impression of poetry that made it … I dunno, it felt like something precious to me.  Too precious for me. I guess I had to go and live, get beaten up a little, and then when I returned to poetry I was a bit more fearless with it, and a bit less inclined to be so fucking precious about it.

I loved the big “fuck you” of Soroyan, when he wrote that one word poem “LIGHGHT”.  I later discovered the work of prison poet Tommy Trantino, and he had a Soroyan influenced poem that simply read “FUCUCK.”

I kinda had to read poetry for myself, understand how the “serious” poets worked, and then… throw it all in the garbage can and start again. That was the only way I was ever going to be interested in actually writing poetry.

When I was in Los Angeles, and filling up blood-stained notebooks with poems (most of which were lost with the notebooks, though some survived and made it into Songs From The Shooting Gallery) it was like — I didn’t have the patience for prose. I couldn’t sit still long enough. Cops banging on the doors. We have to leave the apartment, the sheriffs are coming. We’re outta the motel, no more money …  there was no time for prose, no time for it. So I was trying to get stuff down in a way that had total economy, just that.

I have since gone back and read about things like “concrete poetics” — schools like that, many other schools, who had ideas that I had used without knowing about them. Without knowing there was a “school” at all. Stuff that just seemed like common sense. One of my favorite lines of poetry, which sums up my approach to writing poems, is actually in a song by James Chance… he sang, “You gotta take out all the garbage that’s in your brain …”

RW: This might sound a little precious, but in a sense I think I’ve always been interested in poetry. When I was still in diapers my family had bought me a little record player and a bunch of children’s records by people like Woody Guthrie and Burle Ives and I would listen to these albums constantly, in large part because I found the lyrics so fascinating. When I was a little older I began a love affair with Dr. Seuss’ books, which are nothing if not great poetry for children. After I outgrew Dr. Seuss, I went thru a period when I didn’t read much of anything and the only music I really heard was  Top Forty radio and things like my stepdad’s Neal Diamond records. I do remember him reading some of Edgar Allen Poe’s work to me around this time and it definitely made an impression.

When I was around ten or eleven, though, I remember getting back into music in a big way, discovering bands like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. By my middle teens I was ditching these kind of groups in favor of the L.A. “Punk” scene. My favorite bands were X and the Minutemen, groups who viewed the lyrics of their songs as being very important. In a way, I think people like John Doe, Excene Cervenka, D. Boone, Mike Watt, and Bob  Dylan, whom I also discovered during this time, who really put the idea in my mind that words were serious things that truly had the power to change people’s lives.

It wasn’t until I was a senior in high school, though, that I started really reading formal poetry. I had a great English teacher that year named Ms. Gerber who introduced me to people like Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Wanda Coleman, and Charles Bukowski. In retrospect, it was reading Bukowski in her class that made me want to write poetry myself. Other than song lyrics, the only poetry I’d been exposed to was stuff like “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” which at that time bored me to death. With Bukowski, though, I was suddenly reading someone who wrote in a language I understood about a world I knew. It was like I’d been blind my whole life and then I could suddenly see.

From Bukowski I discovered the Beats in a big way, who stoked this desire to write poetry even further. I also began reading Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Lew Welch at this time, all of whom blew my mind. From them I learned about Chinese and Japanese poetry and started reading guys like Tu Fu and Han Shan, along with all the great haiku artists. By this point I was completely hooked on poetry and sensed that, in one way or another, it was to be my calling.

You are a prose writer as well.  How does your poetry relate to your prose?

TO: For me my poetry – as well as having its own separate place – acts almost as an adjunct to my prose.  I started writing poetry again seriously after I had finished Digging the Vein. There were sections of that, later sections, that were bordering on the poetic, I guess.  But mostly the book was very stripped down, very matter of fact.  The sections of the book I still love are the parts where the prose is looser, more experiential. Once I started writing poems again, it had a very positive effect on my writing. Really focusing on my poems helped me to be concise. I played around with narrative poems a lot because I loved the idea of telling a whole story in a page or less. The kind of dreaminess that I started to  achieve in the poems then bled over into the prose.  The next novel [Down and Out on Murder Mile], is much more informed by my interest in poetic techniques.

RW: I view poetry and prose as being fundamentally different. For me poetry is something that’s born, whereas prose is something I can build. What I mean by this is that my poems simply happen; I really can’t sit down and consciously “work” on them. That doesn’t mean I don’t revise my poetry, but that its core must come of its own accord. Prose, however, I can put together brick by brick, even on days when I’m not feeling particularly inspired or even have any good ideas going in. Sometimes, though, when I’m writing prose, I just hit a place where it really seems to be turning into a kind of poetry. That’s when I think my writing’s at its absolute best, in that I feel I’m combing the best of both worlds.

Still, I think this is more a case of parallel evolution than anything else, where poetry and prose end up in a similar place while coming from opposite directions. They’re simply too different of animals for anything else to be happening.

What do you think the poet’s role is in America in 2008?

TO: I suppose it is to question everything, to push boundaries, to challenge preconceptions.  Poetry is so marginal at the moment, but I feel that this is changing as the technology is changing. Poetry is actually becoming the perfect artistic vehicle for the digital age; it is compressed. It is a way of communicating a thought, a feeling, in a miniature form. I suppose our job is to make sure that this unassuming looking vehicle is in fact packed with incendiary devices.

RW: The poet’s role is what is has always been: to challenge authority, not in the rebel-without-a-cause sense, but as part of the antidote to the inevitable corruption that grows out of too much accumulated power. The poet’s job is to explore and find meaning in real life, not the consumer comodification ritual that governments, corporations, and the more cowardly individuals among us try to convince us is reality. The poet’s job is to call out politicians, academics and anyone else perpetrating falsehoods in our society. The poet’s job is also to somehow have fun while doing this. Life is rough at times, but it’s also amazing and beautiful. Poets, more than anyone else, need to keep their finger on that pulse at all times.

Now that you have some time and distance from your first novel, how do you feel about it?

TO: You know, I still think it holds up. I wrote that book with no idea of what I was doing, or even knowing that it would be a novel, or just a bunch of unconnected recollections. I can read that book and sense myself learning to write as it progresses. A lot of the early chapters were really diary extracts that I adapted. When I started writing the book I realized that my memories of what happened earlier in the story were hazy. Then I came across some of my old writing, and there the facts were. A lot of that old stuff was composed under the influence of meth: I’d be out partying, then go home wired and start typing everything up obsessively. So I suppose I wasn’t aiming for staggeringly beautiful sentences back then. It was more “just the facts”. So as the book progresses, the writing gets more evocative I guess. I’m happy with the way that Digging the Vein came out though. I think it holds its own very well, though I do feel that I’ve got better the more I write. Which is natural I suppose. So much of what I dislike about re-reading that book is more about my discomfort of looking back over how ridiculously I behaved when I was 18/19 years old. How naive I was. As is proper though, I have already mentally moved on. As am sure you feel too, you have to keep moving otherwise you stagnate.

RW: Writing Heaping Stones was a life-changing experience for me. It was also unbelievably painful and cathartic. I literally had no idea what I was writing about when I started that book, no story, no notion of the characters, nothing – I just felt compelled to start writing one day and that’s what eventually came out. It’s the story of a man in his late thirties who’s finally facing the fact that his life up until then and has been a failure, mainly because he has lacked to courage to truly make his life his own. In realizing this, though, he’s also gathering the strength for one last shot at making things right. As I was writing his story, I realized that it was mirroring my own life, that Heaping Stones was essentially my attempt to fundamentally change my existence. Because of this, once I got over the euphoria of its composition, I found it very hard to read – it was just too embarrassing, too painful. Lately, however, I’ve been able to pick it up again and I’m definitely developing a soft spot for the work. I can now see that, whatever its flaws, it’s an intensely honest book, which is about all you can ask from a novel.

You have a second novel coming out soon. What’s it about? How do you think it compares to your first novel?

TO: The new book is called Down and Out on Murder Mile and it carries on the story started in Digging the Vein. The novel really focuses on two things that were important for me to write about, but which for various reasons I couldn’t write about in the first book. This was my second marriage to the woman who introduced me to heroin, the subsequent downward spiral we both experienced, and the years I spent in London after I left LA. The London period was pretty much covered in a few paragraphs, almost as an afterward in the first book, when in fact they were a much more intense story than the LA years in many ways. The book is less focused on the nuts and bolts of my heroin habit, and more on the people around me. Digging the Vein is a very claustrophobic book, with very few characters. Down and Out is set in the methadone clinics of London, and is really about the long thaw that I underwent prior to getting clean. In many ways it’s a book I couldn’t write until now, because I just didn’t have the tools at my disposal to tell this story before. I just wouldn’t have known where to begin telling a story as personal and sad as what happened between my second wife and I. And of course the hardest thing to write about is not the terrible things that have happened to you, it’s to write about the positives – getting clean, the birth of my daughter, the gradual process of coming alive again – without lapsing into cliché. So that was a tricky balancing act, but as soon as I finished the manuscript I sensed that I had pulled it off.

RW: What Love Is is the title of my second novel. It’s pretty much a companion book to Heaping Stones. The events take place before those in Heaping Stones and center around the Rob character’s relationship with Maggie, a character who drives much of the action in my first novel, while being entirely off stage, so too speak.

Several years back I went thru an absolutely brutal life changing kind of relationship. I literally almost went crazy because it. At the time it was all just so painful that I couldn’t do anything but react. But later I could see that I was exhibiting all the symptoms of an addict — it was just that I was addicted to a person instead a drug. I degraded myself and her, did whatever it took to keep her around so I could have my fix. The whole thing was ugly, stupid, and pathetic beyond anything I before thought possible. It got so bad at one point that if I would have owned a handgun I’m not sure if I’d be here to talk about the experience today.

Eventually I got to the point where I had enough space from these events to see that what I was going thru was just an extreme version of what happens to a lot of people. We lose track of ourselves, get so beaten down by the world, that we start looking for redemption outside of ourselves. Some turn to the needle or the bottle. Others hide behind religious bullshit. Others just work themselves into a stupor. Many become so closed off that they simply can’t feel anymore. I was lucky in a sense, in that on some instinctive level I found a way to beak out of the cycle by latching onto someone who would cause me so much anguish that I either had to off myself or face my problems and take my life back.

The final part of the healing process was to write What Love Is. As soon as Heaping Stones was done, that same month, I just sat down and started typing. What came out was fictional story that examined the types of things I was going thru. Writing the book was an amazing experience, but at times almost as painful as the events that inspired it. Sometimes I’d have to stop writing simply because I couldn’t stand reliving those feelings again, to the point where I’d literally be shaking all over, screaming at myself, or sitting in a corner staring at my laptop completely freaked out by the day’s pages. It’s all still very painful to me. I finished the initial manuscript over two years ago and I still have a hard time reading it. It might be the best thing I’ve ever written, but I hope I never have to write anything like it again.

Let’s change the subject a little bit. Place seems to play a very important role in your writing. How does where you live, the places you been, effect your work?

TO: I find it difficult to write about a place that I am still living in, funnily enough. I do think that location plays a big role in my work. I think I need distance from a city to write about it, really. The Los Angeles I write about is a specific time and era in LA. I recreate it in my mind, exaggerate it, and play with it. It really is a vision of LA (or more specifically Hollywood) that is filtered through my experiences and memories of the place. Certain locations, streets, bars, motels have an almost mythic resonance with me. And I think being away from a place is essential when you write about it like that. If it is still your day-to-day reality, then it becomes ordinary to you. No other location has had that impact on me. I guess it’s because I came to Hollywood at the right time, and so much stuff happened to me there that really shaped who I am today. That said, I do write things based in England, even New York, but when I settle down to write a story in Hollywood, that’s when it comes the easiest. All three cities have their own special memories for me, and they also signify very different chapters in my life. Down and Out on Murder Mile is set mostly in London, but I couldn’t write that book until I was far away from that city. Rob, I know that your work is very evocative of the west coast, it’s very grounded there, and I do think of you very much as an “LA poet” although the LA you write about is very different from the LA that I write about. I guess that every writer needs this perfect backdrop that they can bring all of their obsessions to life against.  Without a doubt, I found that in Hollywood.

RW: Place means a great deal to my writing and to me. Nothing happens in a vacuum: everything is shaped to a large extent by the surrounding environment. I’m from Southern California, the Los Angeles Basin, specifically. My family has been here for generations. Because of this, I have no choice but to reflect this place in my writing, even when I’m writing about somewhere else; it’s simply and extension of who I am. The only other place I ever tried to put down roots was in Hawai’i, where I lived for five years. In the end I couldn’t do it: I just wasn’t of that place and never would be.

A deeper reason for why my work draws so heavily from Southern California is the fact that I’ve never fully come to terms with this place; I’ve always had a serious love-hate relationship with the region, to the point where the term “Death-Match” probably wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration. To me coastal Southern California is the most beautiful place on earth. My God, the oceans, the mountains, the deserts-the diversity of the landscape, the intricacies of the ecology are just staggering! But culturally I feel we’ve blown it on just about every level. We’ve smothered the land in concrete, polluted the ocean, all in order to create a foolishly overpopulated, deeply angry, barely functional urban/suburban environment that so many of us now cannot stand. I think this is the basic and profound contradiction that lies at the center of being a Southern Californian in the beginning of the 21st century – in our hearts and minds the reality of what this place is is always mocking what it used to be, or at least could have been. I haven’t written about this sort of stuff directly too often, but it’s always there, just below the surface. It’s what ultimately drives me.

What projects are you working on currently? In what direction to you see your future work heading?

TO: At the moment I’m writing a lot of short fiction.  The challenge for me is to move into novel-length writing that isn’t based totally upon my own life. At the moment I’m at the beginning stages of a new novel, although it’s at such an early stage that I’m still just experimenting with the form and the voice. I am still working with certain themes, and I still draw a huge amount in inspiration from the underbellies of the various cities I have lived in. I’m very interested in doing something which plays upon the culture of recovery that we have in America, and the selling of the idea of addiction to the masses. People are very quick to self-describe themselves as “addicts” in America in 2008. I’m more in line with the Burroughsian idea that “it takes many injections to create an addict.” But I do want to play with the language and culture of recovery in the context of a novel.

RW: Currently I’m working on a novel called Backwaters of Beauty. It’s quite different for me in that it takes place far in the future and is probably best describe as science fiction. It’s about a small society on the Southern California coast that’s literally living off the ruins of a much larger and far more technologically advanced society that collapsed an undetermined number of centuries earlier. It’s basically my attempt to look at some of the ecological and social relationships that are going on now here by stripping away most of the noise and simplifying everything. I think it might be part of a multi-novel series but I haven’t quite figured that out yet.

Hopefully by the end of this summer I will have started another project that’s been in my mind for a while now. It’s called California Ecolog. It’s going to be a series of essays on the environmental realities of my home state, with an emphasis on where the wild and urban worlds meet. What makes it unusual is that I’ve created a website where I will be posting each section of the book as I write it. I’ve always wanted to experiment with this kind of on-line “instant” publishing and I’m really excited about it.

I’m also still adding the odd poem to King of Long Beach, a collection that will be out probably next summer. I keep thinking that that book’s done, but the damn thing keeps coming back to life on me.

TONY O’NEILL is a novelist and poet based out of New York City. He can be reached thru his website.

ROB WOODARD is a novelist and poet  based out of Long Beach, California. he is also the editor of the Burning Shore Review. He can be reached thru the “Contact” section of this website.

Copyright (c) Tony O’Neill and Rob Woodard