At least at this moment – I don’t live by guiding artistic principles. One year I believe X and the next I believe Y. I don’t think because I went to X University that I am part of some “tradition.” I don’t think because I said something in an interview last year that I need be held to that; or because I once published A in my magazine, I need to appreciate his/her work any longer. Like Carruth, again, wrote, “Reality is chaos. Let’s not kid ourselves; art cannot order it.” Guiding principles being art-like, in that somebody made the things out of [nothing] in order to express [something], guiding principles cannot order life nor can they order art. I laugh, then, at the notion of present-day “schools” – even, I suppose, at the ones that would claim me (I think there are a few – no matter). I think artists that unite under a banner during their time are presumptuous, as if history will automatically recognize them for they’ve banded. As if history will overlook the weakness of their craft, or the banality of their writing/painting/sculpting, because they made that bold and democratic statement to Come Together as one unit, one team, fighting a good fight. It seems as if most movements were thus named sometime afterward. And, really, nobody really knows what’s going on in poetry anymore, so I recommend we let history sift it all out and see what’s left standing. I’ll tell you what, the work of Franz Wright will remain standing for all of eternity. Someone like Graham Foust, that stuff will remain in the bowl, too. However, a lot of this other stuff, it strikes me, will fall off the counter and onto the floor and get licked into the black doglike maw of forgotten. Likely my own writing. I don’t think I’m any great shakes – I’m as normal as it gets, a kid from southern New Hampshire. My early memory of walking through the woods (1.5 acres) in my back yard with my mother and my brother – I must have been 4 – to a meadow where there was a century-old graveyard is one of the beautiful moments of my life. That is as poetic as it gets and I’m comfortable with having been there. I can’t try to emulate that moment, or a moment like my children being born, because I’m not an opportunist. I’ll accept that I was fated to live the moment and to have it escape forever; I don’t pretend language and image can recapture that. I’m as normal as it gets – I want to watch three NFL football games every Sunday, not read Derrida. And even things that are considered normal by poets are just too complicated. I don’t “blog,” I don’t like “schmoozing,” and I don’t look at my undergraduate students with disdain. I like them a lot, and for the people they are, not for the commodities they promise to be. One of them, Jim, has great parties and regales us with tales of some mysterious mathematics tract he’s been writing for 27 years or something. He also has a lot of working class friends from greater Buffalo, the kind of people a lot of the “liberal” artists I know claim to like, but would never hang around with when really given the chance. How do I know this? Because I’ve seen the look of discomfort on their faces, having some guy with bad teeth and a high school education, tops, talking to them about anything other than ______________. See, these dudes like motorboats and cooking barbecued chicken. Anyway, I hate pretentious people and that’s why I like Jim – because he isn’t. That’s why I’m turned off by most writers I’ve met – they are. So I avoid hanging out with most writers. I will engage their writing but am usually disappointed – I don’t want theory, I don’t want bullshit. Look, I know what they’re trying to do – I went to grad school, too, you know. But I don’t buy any of it. I want art like Ronchamp by Le Corbusier, or Adolph Gottlieb’s Blast series – essential, stripped, and SOULFUL TO ANYONE WHO LOOKS AT IT. Whether it comes from the X “school” or the Y “school” doesn’t mean shit to me – I just want it. I try to create it. I want to digest and create art that doesn’t exclude, digest and create art that eradicates its maker. I don’t want “monumental” art, per se; the tiniest moment can endure and can be so original so as to live as a grand statement beyond and outside and apart from the person responsible for it. I think of “every day the bucket a-go a-well / but one day, the bottom a-go drop out” by Bob Marley. That is like Ronchamp rendered in words – I can’t think of another lyric that simultaneously exudes so many emotions and reports on so much experience. But in poetry, again, we have our Wrights and Fousts and a few others. Then there is a large field where a bunch of people play – all they do is play – and over in a corner, there are the “studious” ones not playing but really staring at things like crickets and leaves and clouds. I daresay I’d rather read their work, and would find more value in their work, and that I admire them more than the easy playing romping ones. I suppose I aspire to be like that. Whether I come close is not for me to determine. Carruth: “One reason for the mediocrity, one among others, is the loss of a sense of measure” – not poetic measure, but figurative measure, things like study and pondering and deliberation. Give me a writer so obviously lost in thought and intoxicated by language, regardless of his “affiliation” with a “school,” – and “Lord” give me the power to be one of these writers – instead of the affable buffoon who knows all the jokes. This is Who I Am, and What Crosses My Mind, at this particular moment, and now the tape recorder will be stopped.

—Ethan Paquin

selections from MY THIEVES