Steve Halle
Who are you're biggest creative influences? The poets I've published and developed relationships with through editing Seven Corners (7C).
Artists, musicians, and writers like Kamau Brathwaite, Samuel Beckett, John Coltrane, Malachi Ritscher, Walt Whitman, Ronaldo V. Wilson, Gertrude Stein, David Antin, Samuel R. Delany, Raul Zurita, Kurt Cobain, Charles Mingus, Paul Celan, Harryette Mullen, Ariana Reines, Albert Ayler, Joyelle McSweeney, Thelonious Monk, Dennis Cooper, James DeFrain, Dave Rempis, Jeff Parker, Ken Vandermark, Aram Shelton, Roxane Gay, Rob Mazurek, Russell Edson, Franz Kafka, Chuck D, Johannes Göransson, Lee "Scratch" Perry, Charles Bukowski, Courtney Love, Lara Glenum, Feng Sun Chen, etc. (this list could be much, much longer).
The bloggers and others associated with Montevidayo (
www.montevidayo.com). Underdogs and those beneath the underdogs.
Most of all, my teachers and mentors, especially Ross Gay, Anne Waldman, Robert Archambeau, Duriel Harris, Br. Robert Ruhl, Jerrol Leitner, and Tara Reeser.
As a poet how would you define success? Success as a poet means writing poems that you find interesting enough to make you want to write more and better poems. If you aren't interested in your own work, how can you expect others to like it? Poets' success flows from their internal motivation, their own commitment to doing the work as best as they can. As much as poetry needs an audience, poets' success is all self-generated.
Do you think the internet is crucial to the success of writers today? No, not based on my above definition. I will say, however, that in order to gain attention from other poets, contemporary writers need to have more tools at their disposal than just the writing. There is no better contemporary tool for finding readers and other writers to network with than the internet. I don't think that making connections with people takes away time that I would otherwise spend writing—I need to be disciplined enough to do the work. I also don't believe that having confidence in my work, promoting what I'm working on online, or talking about contemporary issues with other writers in online communities tampers with the imagined purity of the writing life or the practice of writing.
Steve Halle is the author of Map of the Hydrogen World. His creative work appears or is forthcoming in Jet Fuel Review, 1913: A Journal of Forms, and the Dirty:Dirty anthology from Jaded Ibis Press. He edits the online poetry journal Seven Corners (7C) and directs co•im•press. He is the assistant director of the English Department's Publications Unit at Illinois State University.
www.poetsandartists.com
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