Interview with Tyrone Williams                     (page 4)

JMW: I wonder if you could discuss how you came to poetry. What were the first poems you wrote and read? How long did it take you to put c.c. together and how long until you found a publisher? Who do you cite as your primary influences?

TW: Miss Horn—Durfee Junior High School, 1969-72 in Detroit. She had us doing "creative writing," and I wrote a few short stories that she liked, and since she was a young cute teacher, I'm sure I responded to her encouragement with hormones raging...But I guess it was my high school friend and neighbor, Anthony Luffboro, who really got me going. We wrote poems as a kind of friendly competition—we were our only audience. When we got to college—we both entered Wayne State University—we dropped the back-and-forth writing but we both continued writing on our own. From my sophomore year on I entered the WSU English Department's annual contest—the Tompkins Award—and lost every year—until my senior year. That year I won first prize, and a French poem I'd written won second prize in the French Department. Thrilled by my coup, I organized a reading in the student center building, putting up flyers announcing "my" debut reading. I'd secured a large room in the building for my fans. In attendance—my mother, one of my sisters and my girlfriend. That was 1977....

I began writing the poems that comprised c.c. around 1999—the same year I completed my first residency at Djerassi (though nothing I wrote there made it in the book) and met my wife on my way back to Cincinnati. I wrote the bulk of c.c. in 2000 and the beginning of 2001. I sent it to Wesleyan and Chax early that year and got warm responses from Suzanna Tamminen (Wesleyan) and Charles Alexander—both said it deserved publication but they couldn't do anything with it. In June 2001 I was thumbing through the latest issue of Poets & Writers and came across an interview with the editors of two small presses in San Francisco, Mary Burger and Jocelyn Saidenberg. I'd never heard of them or the presses but, on a lark, sent it to both. Jocelyn called me in December 2001 with the good news, the same week the wife of a close friend called to tell me he'd attempted suicide; they too, as it turns out, lived in San Francisco...

Influences: my first influences were not necessarily poets, at least not consciously. When I was in junior and high school and college I loved French literature in translation—Rabelais, Racine, Baudelaire—probably because like most teens I was enamored of Poe (I read of his influence on the Symbolists). But there's no question that the Black Arts Movement had a tremendous impact on me—though the figure I was told to emulate was fellow Michigander Robert Hayden (Phil Levine came later). I sent my first poems and manuscripts to Dudley Randall and Broadside Press, then Haki Mahabuhti and Third World Press—in fact, every black press that I knew of (Lotus Press—Naomi Long Madgett) got my work—all to no avail...But to return to influences...I was a Creem Magazine fanatic and loved Robert Christgau and Lester Bangs—given all the music criticism I wrote for the college paper (pop, disco, r& b, punk, rock, primarily) that has to be cited as a major influence. And since I was initially a chemistry major, the sciences in general—especially subatomic physics—were and are important influences. Poets? Too many to name, but in college I started reading on my own Susan Howe (thanks to Charles Baxter who thought I would like her work), Alice Fulton, Chris Tysh, Barett Watten, Frank O'Hara, etc. Of course, I had all the Hoyt Fuller, Amiri Baraka, Stephen Henderson, etc. anthologies, magazines and chapbooks—most of which I lost along the way. Today I read everyone from Carl Phillips, Donald Revell, Kevin Young, and Elizabeth Alexander to Claudia Rankine, Erica Hunt, Taylor Brady, and Rob Halpern religiously. And I'm a huge Celan, Trakl, and Radnoti fan, too...