AR: The purpose culturally is changing, at least in the United States. For one thing, there's no longer the need for storytelling, for that role it used to play - note I say "need." Rhyme is clever now, a Dixie Cup convention, not a necessary mnemonic device. Anyone can look for a rhyme on the Web now, right? So the purpose of poetry now I would say is to express things that are not available in mass media. I think of that every time I go to a reading. It's like a cult, these people, like me, addicted to words. Obviously we gather because there's a need to find something through language that we can't find on Dharma & Greg.
S: Do you have a poetics?
AR: Well, I love reading what Aristotle had to say, and I do value my formal training as a writer, but I can't say that I ascribe to anything prescriptive for what I do now. A lot of stuff I write and perform is an amalgamation of things - a snippet of music that becomes a chorus, a photo I want to use, even a headline. Here's one example: I wrote a song for my show "TV or Not TV" called "This Mai Tai Would Taste Better if I Had a Mouth." I started with that line, which appeared in a "Zippy" comic strip by Bill Griffith. It was these two sort of blobby creatures talking in thought bubbles to each other on this beach and wanting to celebrate, and that's what one of the blobs says to the other one as someone serves him a drink: "Hmmm...I bet this mai tai would taste better if I had a mouth." I laughed and laughed while reading that on the bus home from work. Now, at this time, the Gulf War was on, so I turned to another section of that same paper, and I saw the pictures of devastation in the Middle East. And I had this morbid thought about how we were being all celebratory and victorious and morally smug and yellow-ribboned as a nation and drinking mai tai's on the beach, while somewhere in Kuwait, there's some little kid whose head is blown off, some woman who no longer has a throat, thousands of people without arms. And this contrast gave me the idea for the song. I ordered a video of jet fighters and made that a visual backdrop for the piece. I wrote the drum line as this really peppy 4/4 Caribbean beat, and added cello and bass. When I performed it live with a band, I had the audience blow on kazoos during the musical interludes while the jet fighter images flew in the background. And after a few minutes, the audience would realize I had been making them cheer for the war! Against their wills, almost. I wanted to evoke the feeling that I got from all the jingoistic pro-war news coverage at that time--"We won! Be happy!" So, I know that was going a bit off track, but that's as typical as any process for me to come up with a piece.
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