INTERVIEW FOR AMANDA HUCKINS

1. WHAT IS YOUR OPINION OF THE NIKE SLOGAN "JUST DO IT" AND HOW DO YOU
THINK THAT IT HAS AFFECTED YOUR PHILOSOPHY ON PHYSICAL ACTIVITY??

i think it's a good slogan. it's a nice, bare slogan. now i'm thinking about it, and i realize that "just do it" is a rather ballsy slogan for an athletic apparel company. it is almost non-commercial, encouraging us- the public- to disregard the impulse to outfit ourselves for adventures in fitness. it could be thought of in absolute opposition to "just buy shit". like, "i know you're thinking you need new tennisshoes and maybe some kind of sweat-absorbing ipod arm holster before you hit the trail, but you need to JUST HIT THE TRAIL NOW". i'm no marketing whiz, so i'm not going to even pretend to know how this kind of thing sells stuff. maybe i'm just interpreting it wrong. i've browsed some info about nike that was in a weekly, this whole thing about nike being "found out" by wikileaks to be a company with a surprising amount of integrity/accountability. so maybe it's just pure truth and goodness that runs nike and they could pick any three words and everyone would want nike stuff.


in my own life, i agree with this slogan but its impact on my physical movements is relatively minimal. subliminal if present. i like walking places, and that's how i get exercise regularly. i go through phases of wanting to get in the habit of running but i "just do it" when i'm pissed of or feel pent up. and even then i wear 13-year-old shorts from when i played sports.

2. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THE QUESTION "WHERE ARE YOU FROM?"?

i enjoy getting and giving this information, especially when there are obvious accents involved. what sucks is when the initial question gets followed up by some flat regional assumption that is completely uninteresting i.e. "where are you from?" "iowa" "lotta cows, huh?"


i always assume it to mean "geographically". like i don't ever answer this question "i'm from a middle class, loosely religious household headed by married, heterosexual parents."



3. WHERE ARE YOU FROM??

i grew up in Sioux Falls, SD. my family moved when i was 15 to Gretna, NE and i resented being made to leave my home, so i stubbornly referred to myself as a South Dakotan whenever the topic of origins came up, even into my college years when the initial resentment was long dead. over the last 2.5 years in Portland, i've devised the answer: "i grew up in South Dakota and went to school in Nebraska. i'm from the middle of the country." i say that whole thing. every time. often people will assume i am from somewhere rural, and then i have to explain that i've never lived in a town of less than 100,000 people that wasn't part of a large metropolitan area.


there's this phenomenon of people in different cities calling me their "friend from Portland" in certain contexts. that feels weird but since so many people here are imports, i kinda consider myself "a Portlander, in a sense". the move out here has had a significant impact.


4. WHERE ARE YOU GOING??

it's unclear right now. i plan to live in several more cities over the next decade, but i need to do a bit of research and also figure some things out, which is why i'm moving from Portland back to Lincoln for a while. my "ultimate goal" is to (instead of getting married and having kids and a "career" that i'm supposed to be fulfilled by) make a commune for poets to live together and rely on each other for emotional support like a family and spend their free time writing and doing poetry stuff. i'm excited about the possibility of EVERY ASPECT OF HOMELIFE being related in some way to poetry. i imagine (probably naively) that if 4-8 poets were living in a house together that would automatically happen. "here guys, we're having poetry soup for supper and afterward we're gonna do the poetry dishes. sweet poetry dreams!!"


in "anything is possible dreamworld" this would be some semi-remote subsistence farming situation and would last forever. but realistically, some iteration of this will happen in some town with a decent cost-of-living within the next couple of years and then i'll figure out something else i want to do, or continue working towards the unattainable farm thing. i found out that it's hard without thunderstorms, so i want to live in places that have them.

5. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON USING A LIFE TIME TO BE REMEMBERED?

this sounds like it's asking about whether or not i want to purposefully "do some work that lives beyond me" to the degree that i'm willing to allocate a considerable amount of my lifeforce to making sure something of me will exist when i'm dead. if that's the question, the answer is no, i'm not too worried about what will happen when i'm dead. i really want to be a good person while i'm alive, and i want to help people become better, but i'm not interested in "leaving my name" on anything, really. and furthermore i would advise anyone to concentrate on the work they do, on making sure they get satisfaction out of doing the work, rather than putting a bunch of time and pain and loneliness into something for years on end specifically in the hopes of some post-death pay off. i'm scoffing at the idea of post-death pay off, but maybe i'm actually just being selfish. no, i don't think i'm being more selfish than someone who is gearing everything towards being remembered.


it does make me sad to think that there is no way Mayakovsky knows how hard i cried during the April 12th-April 14th 1930 section of his biography compiled by Wiktor Woroszylski. i want to believe that he gets something for that, something for moving me 82 years after he stopped breathing forever. it's a nice thought but i don't think it's worth the risk to tear yourself apart during life. not that we're going to stop tearing ourselves apart during life anyways.

6. HOW DO YOU THINK WRITING HAS AFFECTED YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH OTHER HUMANS??

it is how i get around being bad at talking in most situations. and there is a multilayered history of my writing interactions (i won't go into the whole thing here, but i'll try to provide an overview). my first two loves were basically pen-pals (one for three years; the other for something like two years, but we still talk and are friends and see each other). they were both guys that i met once in real life through some common friend or acquaintance and then proceeded to have an emotionally dense correspondence, with occasional later real-world meetings. my most serious and longterm "normal" relationship was first built on a foundation of facebook messages and msn chats. i don't think i do very well with "making first impressions" a lot of the time, so when i have recourse to writing myself, i can build interactions instead of being marked "awkward" and forgotten. also, becoming a fully functioning human in the "computer age" or whatever is kind of great for me, since "chatting" is now a thing that is closer to "writing" (which i'm not bad at) than to "talking" (which i am sort of bad at, generally). then of course there are the relationships that have been built around poetry, based on a shared membership in the category of "writer" or "poet". in the past 4 years, these make up the majority of my new, lasting friendships. what i've been trying to say up to now is that, since high school, writing is in one way or another responsible for nearly all of the relationships i have with other humans. once i learned that it could actually be used as a way to find people, i have found it easier to build relationships with more humans.


a sidenote is that as my brain works now, there is a certain degree of "filtering" or "testing" new interactions based on willingness to engage with semi-non-functional modes of using language. whereas, when i was a kid, i just stayed locked up until somebody forced me to communicate with them, i now send out my own type of communication to sort of echolocate people who i might be already suited to communicate with. this tactic became available to me after i joined a "writing community" at school and got serious. it just speeds things up.


also i had a sort of breakthrough with my mom in the last two years. after lots of conversations and some key glimpses into my recent writing support group, i think she now has a really good grasp on what my "being a poet" means, and that has deepened our already good relationship considerably.



7. WHY DO YOU ENJOY WRITING COLLABORATORY POEMS AND SUCH AND HOW DOES
THAT HELP YOU AS A WRITER ON YOUR OWN?

serious, successful collaborations are relatively new for me, which is one reason to like doing them. newness. i guess me and rachael and paul did some collaborations with goog docs starting in december of 2010, and since then i've written the bulk of my present catalogue (including both collabo and independent poems), pointing to the fact that developing writing relationships seems to make me an infinitely more productive writer. one of the things i like most is being the remixer. i have enjoyed collaging in different mediums for a long time, and this really comes in handy when i'm ripping apart and re-gluing some mass of text. as you know, paul can really generate some mountains of text. he's like an ermine farm of poetry. i thoroughly enjoy skinning all that text and making coats and furniture. with rachael, although we haven't collaborated as much, i like going back and forth over a poem, hammering at each other's stylistic habits. she'll bust mine and i'll bust hers and i think we end up with something that we like because neither of us would have stood for our regular solo poems being edited the way we allow ourselves to edit each other when we make something together. it gets us out of ourselves by forcing us into each other's thoughts.


that's one of the beauties of collaborating, maybe the most beautiful beauty: it lays all of someone else's tools next to your tools, and you can just go crazy. like, i can use all of your surgical instruments ON TOP of the diesel mechanic's toolbox i've been using. with these two sets of implements we can really massacre some text. and also, it's a hands-on training for me. i might just pocket some scalpels and use them on my machines later, on my own.

overall i really enjoy the idea that i am giving up this (what i now view as) weird claim to my thoughts and words. collaborating has made me think differently (and i think much more productively) about authorship and responsibility and cooperation. WE ARE ALL COLLABORATING ON CULTURE AND THE ECONOMY ALL THE TIME!! WEIRD!!



8. WHAT IS ONE THING DIFFERENT AND ONE THING THE SAME BETWEEN PEOPLE
IN PORTLAND AND PEOPLE IN LINCOLN?

this is a hard question, because i am not some man-about-town here and i wasn't there either.


people that i was around in Lincoln and people i am around in Portland have a similar way of "creating identities out of a list of activities". i like this thing, it's concrete and meaningful. it's good when people think of themselves as being made up of the things they do, whatever those things are. and i think that there is a similar willingness to be that, instead of saying or aspiring in bogus ways. people in Portland might be slightly more committed to intellectualism and connoisseurism.


more generally:


Lincoln and Portland share this movement, this population shiftiness. in Lincoln it's because of UNL and in Portland it's because ""EVERYTHING IS BETTER IN PORTLAND"" so people continue to move here.


a major difference is that there is a greater variety of "types" in Portland than in Lincoln. it seems to me like more of everything is tolerated here, so there are like, 27 subcultures as opposed to what seems like 3 or 4 subcultures in Lincoln. or 1.


also everyone i've met in portland is an expert in at least one genre of film. i guess this ties in with the "types" thing.


9. HOW MANY OCEANS HAVE YOU "BEEN IN"?

atlantic and pacific. i only got in to my knees in the atlantic.


10. IF YOU HAD TO CHOOSE ONE OCEAN FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE WHICH
OCEAN WOULD IT BE AND WHY??

the indian ocean seems like it touches all kinds of things that i want to know more about. it seems like the best ocean most likely because it isn't frozen and i haven't already been to it.



11. HAVE YOU SEEN THE MOVIE DRIVE? AND IF YES, HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT
THE MAIN CHARACTER PLAYED BY R. GOSLING NOT HAVING A NAME IN THE
MOVIE?

yes, i saw drive. i didn't have any problem with him not having a name, partially because his jacket was his name. also, "driver" is as good a name as any. like titles of poems, a name is just something you use to differentiate one thing from another, and it's good if it comes naturally and doesn't act like a sneaky way to throw in some extra info without doing any real work. like if his name would have been "jesus" i would have ROLLED MY EYES.



12. SAY SOMETHING ABOUT NAMES.

i really love names and talking about names. i've mentioned this to a few people but i used to be really into finding baby names i liked. i have a favorites list on babynames.com that, can be dated to the end of high school because of the login email. i'm not actually planning to have children but i still like thinking about what i would name a kid. i also like to name things i own. Maud is my typewriter. even though i've only ridden it maybe four times and its tires are shot and i will never ride it again, my bike's greeness seemed to qualify it for a name: Doyle. i hated my name for a long time because it is so common and there were three amandas in my 7th grade choir.



13. WHAT ARE A FEW THINGS YOU WOULD LIKE TO DO OVER THE NEXT 5 YEARS?

the simple, preliminary commune is definitely on my mind for the near-future. i'm also starting to get really excited about figuring out whether or not sp ce could be made into a non-profit, and if not, i would like to devise something that could. i want to start teaching myself how to teach. i think this will involve convincing people to participate in a discussion group of some kind (attached to a writer's group, or not, i don't know yet) where everybody takes turns giving presentations on something they are interested in that they researched. when i get a job in Lincoln, i want it to have something to do with education, whether it's working with kids or adults.


i would also like to get some kind of certified skill. i've thought about getting an offset printer operator certificate. this seems like the most likely and most useful option if i'm going to continue with book arts. maybe i could wind up being the small printer who small presses like to work with. i imagine that being pretty awesome. i've thought about getting some kind of hand-skill certificate, you know like plumbing or mechanics, because i like to use my hands but i don't know how good i would be at that kind of thing.


it's possible that i will apply to graduate schools again in the next 5 years. the point of this next year or two is to figure out if that would be necessary for me and what field i would go into. my sister-in-law is trying to do this 14 month master's in teaching program for people with degrees that aren't in education, and that sounds cool. then there are the MFA options: poetry or bookarts or both? regardless, i need to keep making work to find out what i want to invest money in learning, or if i need to do that.




14. WHAT IS THE BEST THING YOU HAVE READ IN THE PAST MONTH?

i have spent a lot of the past month reading "the life of mayakovsky" (mentioned above) and it was like he was alive during that whole time, which was pretty wonderful. this was true even more than when i read "night wraps the sky" (a newer introduction to Mayakovsky's life and work that is fantastic and includes a lot of excerpts found also in "the life". the editor of that recommended "the life" for people who wanted more to read, and by the end of "night wraps" i did want more) last spring. similarly though, he died again when i read about the gunshot, and how the girl who was trying to live her own life and still take care of him heard it upon leaving his apartment, and her knees gave. i wish there had been more whole poems. now i just have to get a book of the poems.



15. ANSWER THESE THREE: 1. PULP OR NO PULP? 2. CHUNKY PB OR CREAMY PB?
3. PETER GABRIEL OR PHIL COLLINS?

1. no pulp
2. creamy
3. peter gabriel



16. WHAT DOES POETRY MEAN TO YOU?

jesus christ. this is going to have to be a summary. it's kind of on topic, that curse. the reason that it is kind of on topic is that poetry in a way is a kind of like god i guess, to me. what i mean is that it functions in a way that is similar to how i thought of god when i was younger and still traditionally spiritual. i've never been an evangelizer. i've always been a doubter and an arguer and an analyzer, and i have always ripped what i need out of discussions about god and left a lot up for dispute. but i have also always liked having something to talk to or ask questions of. i actually think poetry can realistically replace god in probably most sentences about god. there are whacko poets and self-righteous poets and literal interpretation poets and uneducated mystic poets and rational poets and loving universalist poets and all that the same as there are those types of religious people.


as far as i'm concerned, poetry is not poems that people have written (though that is part of the process). it is a formless mass of information that i can't interpret or maybe can't even see, but i have moments of feeling some kind of movement working through me and mining out realizations. it works but i don't really know how. studying it and practicing it makes me feel like i'm getting better at it. talking to other people who study it and practice it can be illuminating. basing my life around it is a kind of risk, but it's also how i am allowed to get around and through life. i think this is how a lot of people feel about god, and i have just transferred most of my godfeelings to poetry.



this might be bullshit, though. i'm willing to admit that upfront.