The UTD Mercury

Phillip Pardi will read his work and sign copies of his first book, "Meditations on Rising and Falling," at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 23 in the McDermott Library.

Philip Pardi Director of College Writing at Bard College, will read his work and sign copies of his first book, "Meditations on Rising and Falling," at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 23 in the McDermott Suite. "Meditations" was a winner of the 2008 Brittingham Prize in Poetry. For more answers from Pardi, go to www.utdmercury.com.

Was there a particular poem that sparked your interest in poetry?

When I was in high school, we read William Blake. I think that was the first time I felt like poetry reached inside and grabbed me. For one thing, he was dealing with such big issues, practically redefining good and evil, angel and devil. For another, it was incredibly vivid.

I got the feeling that, when he closed his eyes, he saw the things he was writing about. So there was this powerful combination of looking within and looking without, a vision on the inside and an engagement with the cosmos. I wrote a lot of terrible poetry trying to be like him.

You worked as a human rights activist in El Salvador. How do experiences shape your poetry?

I came back from El Salvador with a lot of questions - good and useful questions. I'd seen some terrible things, and I'd heard about even worse things. I visited the sites of massacres - often years after the events - and, after the outrage, I felt really confused about what it even means to be a human being. I mean, if humans can do this, then what are we? I also saw some incredibly beautiful moments and met folks who had done truly heroic acts. So we are that, too, or we can be that. It was tremendously humbling.

In poetry I found a place to ask questions and worry about them. I always knew where the plays were going, but with poems, I don't know a thing beforehand. The poem is the result of the investigation.

Why is it important for students to study poetry?

It's fun, for one thing. We don't get to play in sandboxes as grownups, and playing with language is a nice compensation. Beyond that, the world is in bad shape. We simply move too fast. We do things without understanding the consequences of our actions. We do things without really thinking about the impact on others or on the planet. We do things because everyone does them or because we think it's always been done this way. We follow our egos rather than our instincts for compassion.

Against all this, poetry invites us to slow down, to enter into the complexity of things, into the subtlety of things. Poetry can feed the part of us that wants to resist the fast-paced and simplistic voices in our culture. It can remind us of what it means to be human. I don't think poetry has a monopoly on all this, and I know that not all poets would agree with this, but for me it is one place we can go for perspective.

How do your write?

I get up early each morning and sneak down to my office while everyone is still asleep. And then I just write. I might follow the first thought in my head, or I might glance back at things I've written before and use one as a starting point. Often times I'm trying to understand something, trying to figure something out.

The main thing for me is to write often. If I do that, a part of my brain - or something - gets in the habit of going to that place where language and thinking and feeling and perception are milling around, just hanging out. It's as if there's a voice there, a conversation that I can hear and even join if I can just quiet the chatter coming from everywhere else. So I try to be even quieter than that quiet place, and to listen.

What is the difference between reading poetry on the page and hearing it read?

People often tell me that they understand a poem better after hearing it at a reading. And I know that I often read new poems at readings because I want to hear them, to sound them out, to throw them into the air and see if they will fly. But some poems seem to inhabit the page especially well. Maybe both reading and hearing poems bring out different aspects of the poem itself, and different poems will flourish in different ways.

Where are you from, originally?

I was born in New York, but we moved around a lot because of my father's job. I went to college in Boston, to graduate school in Austin, and now I live in the mountains in New York State.

What are you working on right now?

I've been fascinated for some time with Chinese poets of long ago, roughly a thousand years ago. There is a kind of contemplation and reverence there that nevertheless isn't blind to the world and its pain. I've been working on a long poem that takes up the challenge of meditating on the landscape around me while being mindful of the world at large. Maybe I'm still trying to be William Blake.

What do poets do for fun?

I suspect there are two kinds of poets in the world: those who spend their weekends watching football games and those who spend their weekends reading Wittgenstein. One person's fun is another person's bafflement, you know? Personally, I like to watch football and read Wittgenstein during the commercials.

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