An Interview with Alan Reade


S: To what extent do you use poetry readings/public readings as a kind of sounding board for work-in-progress? Does the audience serve as a kind of informal editorial board in your editing of a poem?

AR: I do this all the time - although, with some pieces, a lot of visuals and music go with the piece, so I'm not "testing" it on its own, in pure written or even spoken form. There's a lot of stuff I've written that I'm not sure stands so easily on its own as "poetry," per se.

S: Let me be really dull and predatory now and ask you about influences. Excluding the Beats and Charles Bukowski, what poets or artists have had the most influence on you?

AR: (laughs) I wrote this poem in 1989 dedicated to Bukowski. Since then, to tell you the truth, I haven't really been reading a lot of him. Most of the beats, I love. Ginsberg and Burroughs especially. I actually interviewed William S. Burroughs in Seattle once. I was 19 or 20 and he bought me breakfast. The weirdest thing was the way he ate: sort of like a mechanical eating machine. I couldn't believe I was sitting across the table from him! And his people, his handlers, treated him like such a precious doll - "Have him back in an hour! Be careful!" And I felt like, "Oh boy, let's look both ways before we cross." And then I caught myself and went, "This is William Fucking S. Burroughs! He is one tough cord of wood." I asked him, "Do you have any advice for young writers starting out?" and he said "No," and kept eating.

S: I've often surmised that the problem kids have with reading is not so much a matter of literacy as a matter of oracy. What do you see as the connection between literary and oracy? To what extent is orality - the art of hearing and sounding - essential for the reading, aloud or otherwise, of a text?

AR: Well... I'm not sure I can give a direct answer to that question, but one thing I've noticed is that the more widespread literacy gets in the everyday world, the more it seems to morph into something short-form, truncated... sometimes a kind of verbal graffiti. Look at e-mail. Soon anything over three words will be considered lengthy. Just the facts, please. Whatever can fit in

The copyright of the article An Interview with Alan Reade in Performance Poetry is owned by Billy Marshall Stoneking. Permission to republish An Interview with Alan Reade in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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