Last year I dreamed that one-by-one Ravi's friends approached me to point out that he was rich. My response was "You mean that cheapskate?" followed by anecdotal evidence of a time he failed to pony up cash when it was desperately needed. It was one of those repeating loop dreams, new friend, exact same conversation. But maybe those dream friends were on to something because in April I dreamed that Ravi took me to India to show me a fantastic mansion made almost entirely of glass that his father engineered and built--not only do I consistently dream of poets, as you can discern from my Shafer Hall dream, sometimes I dream of poets' fathers too. Anyway, Ravi really wanted me to be impressed with this spectacle, but I was tired and just wanted to check my e-mail. When I went inside my father was there which surprised me cause he's not the kind of guy who'd take a trip to India. I was concerned what my father would eat since he's a picky eater.
Ravi Shankar is Associate Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Central Connecticut State University and the founding editor of the international online journal of the arts, Drunken Boat. He has published a book of poems, Instrumentality (Cherry Grove), named a finalist for the 2005 Connecticut Book Awards, and with Reb Livingston, a collaborative chapbook, Wanton Textiles (No Tell Books, 2006). He has appeared as a commentator on NPR, BBC and Wesleyan Radio and read his work in many places, including the Asia Society, St. Mark's Poetry Project and the National Arts Club. He currently serves on the Advisory Council for the Connecticut Center for the Book and along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he edited Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond (W.W Norton & Co.).
Reb: Your most recent books are Wanton Textiles (co-written with me) and Language for a New Century (co-edited with Tina Change and Nathalie Handal). Why do you get so much help putting together books? Wallace Stevens didn't make books with lady poets. Why can't you be more like Wallace Stevens?
Ravi: Well, for starters, Wallace Stevens couldn’t hold his liquor and at holiday parties at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, would mouth off to his officemates, then get his secretary to type up his subsequent letters of apology. I also can’t hold my liquor but I’m very rarely invited to office parties anymore and remember the sound of patent leather loafers on a broadloom with hushed reverence. Unlike Uncle Wally, when I was lurking behind the potted plants and sneaking phone calls from a branflake-colored cubicle, I was a member of a vast, intercontinental art movement never appropriately written about or even properly acknowledged: temp art (circa 1995-2002), that is poems and art made by those subversive workers hired on a temporary basis from pilfered company supplies and scanned, xeroxed and faxed out to fellow temp artists similarly making collages of Post-it Notes, scotch tape and white out, secretly sticking it to the man. Like Mon Oncle, I believed even back then that style is not something applied but something that permeates.
I offer that up as evidence that my collaborative drive is not gender-based, though clearly I must be something of a masochist to work with so many strong women. Poor Ravi, a friend once quipped, he has more wives than he knows what to do with it, but I resisted that analysis, which smelled vaguely of pickled misogyny and envy; rather, say I’m lazier than a three toed sloth on a Lunesta bender (or rather a one-legged man in a percoset-addled haze; but more on that later), that I’m stirred into motion by other minds, am a natural exquisite corpse, filmmaker on a set of words, conjoiner and confabulator both. I’ve written collaborations with Jim Daniels, Monica de la Torré, Vernon Frazer, Camille Dungy, Terri Witek, Sean Thomas Dougherty, among others.
Who’d Wallace Stevens collaborate with? Besides Ernest Hemingway’s fist? The thin men of Haddam, unfortunately, were not really his friends.