Paul Corman-Roberts is a poet and performer out in Oakland, California. He is the poetry editor at Cherry Bleeds and his recent poetry collection (neocom)muter is out now from Tainted Coffee Press. Interview by Lynn Alexander.
LA:When was the first time you can remember calling yourself a writer, describing yourself that way? When did you start writing poetry?
PCR: I probably first described myself as a writer when I was drunk and trying to impress a girl at a party or something. I do remember getting kind of snotty and elitist about it around the time I started working at the New College of California just before 9/11. I got sick of everyone calling me a poet so I started referring to myself as a writer. Of course, everyone totally made fun of me after I started doing that.
I didn’t really start thinking of myself as an actual poet until quite recently, probably around the time I published my first book Coming World/Gone World (Howling Dog Press) in 2006. But I really did start writing poetry in 1989 for the sole purpose of trying to impress girls, while I was burning to be a tortured playwright, or filmmaker, or sketch comedy writer. When I got tired and burnt out on all that shit, and tired of impressing only girls with poetry, I found I still wanted to write poems for myself.
LA: How did you become an editor at Cherry Bleeds? What do you think sets it apart from many of the sites out there?
PCR: Tony DuShane created the position of poetry editor at Cherry Bleeds in 2006 so I would stop stalking him. The evening I pulled the junior scout camper up outside his apartment is maybe when I crossed the line. Truthfully, I don’t know why Tony did it. Except for Bukowski, he pretty much hates poets and poetry, but for some reason he let me publish flat out poems in Cherry Bleeds before anyone else did, and then I think he probably started getting inundated with poem submissions so naturally he said, “hey, let my fanboy do it.” And of course he knew very well I would accept the post without properly thinking it through.
The reason for that is because Cherry Bleeds is one of the oldest running e-zines around…we weren’t the first transgressive online journal; we weren’t the first online lit journal in California…but we’re maybe the first truly “roots” lit e-zine since it really grew out of the Live Journal community almost as a regular fiction workshop. The periodical was always there and always consistent, and it definitely did not rub shoulders with Academia the way some “outlaw” magazines like to. Not that there’s anything REALLY wrong with that if one is up front about that intent, but with some of these folks it does smack of Courtney Love wearing Gucci.
That said, Cherry Bleeds is probably going to go under dramatic changes in the next year, because it has become something of a neglected dinosaur…some of its staff, including yours truly, have suddenly discovered “careers” which is always a bad thing for a small ‘zine, but one thing I know is no matter how distracted we get, we’ll never leave the enterprise in uncaring or compromised hands.
LA: You have a rather eclectic list of creative influences, and you seem open to many different styles of writing. How would you characterize your own? When do you feel the most at ease, creatively?
PCR: In the end, my writing is essentially dramatic; either a monologue or a dialogue because my first real love was playwriting. I really started by thinking of my stories in scenes and shots. It was only later that I learned poetry was the basis for not just all other written art forms, but really for all rhetoric. A poet and a lawyer used to be the same job back when we were colonizing caves. Now the professions sit at opposite ends of the rhetorical intent scale: A lawyers job is too strip all meaning from words until a group of them can only mean one possible thing. A poet’s job is to try and infuse as much possible meaning into a group of words. No wonder poets make so much more money than lawyers.
I’m most at ease creatively when I’ve got my fangs on an idea and I’m not in a mood to let go because I’ve got the idea dead to rights. It isn’t always writing. Sometimes it’s performing or producing; sometimes it’s editing; sometimes it’s introducing people as a connector, preferably over a drink and/or a smoke. I’m at my greatest ease creatively when I know I’m engaged in activity that is going to have impact years down the line. Obviously this doesn’t always work out, but the risk is always worth it.
LA: Do you feel that your goals have changed over the years? How have you changed with respect to your writing and performances as a family man with multiple and often competing responsibilities?
PCR: My goals haven’t really changed; I’m still as ambitious as I ever was, though I’ve learned that as I get older goals have to be a little more refined and given more time to ferment. Only a very few twenty and thirty year olds get to rule in the literary jungle. And that jungle beats most down naturally, but I’ve also learned that if you beat back at it, goals have a way of suddenly materializing on the path in the otherwise overgrown wilderness. Maybe not the way you planned or thought they would, but you learn to take what the jungle gives so to speak.
I think getting married and becoming a parent gave me a little bit of perspective in that when you take on those obligations, not everything lives and dies with the most recent issue of P & W or the local lit supplements. Being forced outside the industry pressure cooker can actually be helpful, can get the artist to be truer to themselves because you almost have to learn not to tolerate the expectations of others. The best things materialize when you least expect it. My first book contract showed up in the mail the same year my daughter was born, and I think just being overwhelmed with parenthood, that REALLY caught me by surprise.
LA: Who’s out there now, doing what you love, admire?
PCR: In the small press right now I’m really a huge, huge fan of Luis Rivas, Aimee De Long, Sara Fran Wisby, Sara Beth Hamry…I know, its like the attack of the three-named Sara’s. And I think all of them are writing really insanely good stuff right now, each at or near the top of their respective games. Up in the major leagues I’m like so many others, tied up in Roberto Bolano though right now I’m reading “Nazi Literature in the Americas” which I think flies under the radar as his most heady stuff. In poetry Ann Carson is pretty much Goddess in my book. It’s the whole playwriting thing again.
LA: Your writing, such as in your new book of poetry “(neocom)muter” (link to publisher, Tainted Coffee Press, etc) often includes observations about society and it’s systems, structures, priorities. Would you say that social criticism is an important part of your work?
PCR: The thing about neocom(muter) is that it’s much less political and way more shoe-gazer than I think what my very small but very loyal and devoted audience has been used to from me. That’s a mixed blessing; now I find myself wishing I had been less self-absorbed and more strident, but of course when I was developing the neocom manuscript, I wanted to be less politically polemic and more “transgressive.” I’m learning how to balance the two extremes, so you can probably expect my future work to ramp up the social criticism while still trying to keep the darker emotional tones in whatever happens next for me.
LA: What’s next for Paul Corman-Roberts?
PCR: Readings, readings and more readings. Will continue to promote Cherry Bleeds, but will also be featuring at the Main Street Rag reading in Kansas City in August and doing my first Lit Quake festival gigs in October for their 10 year anniversary in San Francisco. I’ll be work-shopping lots of fiction, both flash and short stories, and trying to develop longer sustained pieces, maybe do my part to help re-invent the novella, which I think is a very important movement in literature right now that’s trying to jumpstart and defy the industry, much like the online people are trying to find ways to defy the old model. The more ways we can find to re-invent and re-re-invent the beast, the longer we can keep from getting real jobs.
Neocom(muter) At Tainted Coffee Press