How was the reading at St. Markss Poetry Project?
VF: It went pretty well. I used four readers to assist me in reciting the contrapuntal lines of IMPROVISATIONS. The Poetry Project didn’t have the equipment to enable me to do the performance quite the way I wanted. When I listened to the playback, I heard the imbalance between the other readers and me, but I also heard that the different readers were creating the kinds of word and sound textures I was trying to create when I wrote the poem. DG: So many writers continually submit their work to large publishing companies, but you self-publish most of your work. Do you prefer self-publishing? VF: Self-publishing is a last resort. I prefer to be published by other publishers. But I prefer being self-published to becoming a bitter old man whose wife can’t stand to live with him and who can’t stand to live with himself. In the case of IMPROVISATIONS, I chose to self-publish the complete work because I didn’t think any other press was going to want to pay what it costs to publish a book of t
