Duane Locke Interview

What do you do for a living?

Nothing.

I always hated using my intelligence to make a profit for the stupid who have the power. My highest income is from my paintings, usually bought at high prices by college professors. Photography brings in some money, but not much. People have not become educated or sensitive enough to see the supreme beauty in the trash that I find in alleys and photograph. Poetry brings in very little money, except when I publish in American Poetry Review, or other honored and respected inferior publications.

• Who are your favorite artists?


My favorite current poets are Steve Barfield, Alan Britt, Paul Roth, Jeff Royce and Scott Toler. From the near and far past: Andrew Marvell, William Blake, Federico Garcia Lorca, Karl Krolow, Yannos Ritsos, and the Surrealists. As for painters, Alessandro Magnasco, Jacopo Bassano, and Jan Vermeer.

• What influences you to write about/how you do?

I write for the same reason as did Artaud, to get out of hell. The human race has turned this beautiful and exciting earth into an ugly and dull hell. I write as I do because I love words, words so often hated by the popular mind.

• Where do you see the underground writing scene in 25 years?

Since today the underground is really the ordinary and commonplace, I look for a change. Poets can only stand so much quotidian writing. I see in the future, the birth of intense and complex poets who will disdain the tepidity so prevalent in current poetry and struggle to create more enriched and intense verbal expressions. This poets will be sensitive to the radical singularity of the concrete particular and eschew universals and absolutes. These new poets will recognize that the "language men really speak" is a language of empty signifiers and a false signified, and will invent a linguistic reality That is engendered from the radical singularity of the concrete particular.

• from cait - re-enact your wildest fantasy that you haven’t carried out yet - and tell us about one that you have carried out that you didn’t want anyone to know about – til now.-------be Xplicit

What a strange question. I have no concern for fantasies. I want realities. I am aware that an overwhelming majority of mankind live by fantasies and speak a language that refers to fantasies. I want to do something almost impossible, experience the real.. People's conceptualizing mind destroy the real.