Bill, when did you start writing?

In junior high school. We called it junior high school then, not middle school. I was in West Virginia, and I started writing poetry to impress girls.

How did that work out for you?

There is no group of people more singularly unimpressed with the poetry of junior high school boys than junior high school girls. It was devastating. At the same time, though, I was developing my visual art skills, and I did find that girls would sit still and let me draw them. And when it got to the point that my drawings actually looked like the girl I was drawing, I’m embarrassed to say that I probably did get a couple of dates out of that.

So you've always written poetry?

Yeah. One thing I like about poetry is that you can always say what you mean. When writing prose, I’m finding ways to make it work, to flow together. It's not nearly so much like a brainstorming process.

So you do write prose?

Yeah, I've written science fiction in particular. The thing I like about poetry is that I can just say the first thing that comes to my mind. It still has all the primal energy associated with it. It's in my mind, and it's not really thought out; it's spontaneous. I've written songs to. I've found when writing a song, or something like that, that sometimes the rhythm will dictate the words, but it's not a conscious process, or at least, it's not the part of the brain that speaks. It'll be cooking back in my brain for a while, but it won't be a conscious thing.

There's a song out, I believe it's by a group called Train, about this girl that just got back from Jupiter. Well, when I first heard that rhythm, I was in Wal-Mart, and I really, really liked it, so I wrote a poem based around that rhythm. But it's an entirely unconscious thing.

It's like when you're driving, how you know every part of your car and everything that's going on around you. If someone hits your right rear fender, you know it instantly, even if you don't see it, you can feel directly where it happened. Poetry has that sort of expansion. It expands your body image to include the whole universe. In a lot of ways it's a very out-of-control process. A pivotal moment in my poetry was when I realized that there are patterns in that process, although it's not conscious. I think that was the point when I started writing poetry that other people would want to read.

Now, when I'm writing prose, it's much more of a refining process. It's much more contrived. It's more controlled. Because when you’re working with a piece of prose, because it’s so long, you need a common consistency within the piece. I’m not saying it can’t be primitive, but it’s a much more linear process when you’re putting it together; it can’t be assembled all at once. When I write poetry, it’s like working with watercolors. When you’re working with watercolors, you can’t put two colors on top of each other. You have to put the right color in the right place first. Working with prose is a lot more like working with acrylics. If you make a mistake in acrylics you can always paint over it, you can go back and touch it up. It’s interesting to me that the first thing we give children to work with is watercolors, and that’s probably the hardest medium to work in. I’m not sure if the purpose is to give them something that’s cheap or break them of all artistic ambition.

Apparently, I wrote my first poem at three years old. I was in my mom's car, and it was the day before payday. And I said to her, day before payday, not a penny to spend, wait 'til tomorrow and we'll eat again.

How else has your writing changed over the years?

When I first started writing poetry, I needed to get everything out. It was like a catharsis. I had all these angry things and loving things I needed to say. Basically, the focus was me, I wanted to get me out. Because I was doing this at a fairly early age, I was pretty much focused on that, but by the time I hit college I sort of exhausted that. Now when I'm writing, my purpose is to elicit a response from the reader. The focus has totally shifted 180 degrees from me to the person who's reading. I actually had a time when I was doing a reading and a young teenager asked me, "What were you feeling when you wrote that poem?" And I said that it doesn't matter. The truth is that I couldn't remember. I asked him, "What did you feel when I read this poem?" And that was the whole point. It was no longer so much about what I felt when I was writing the poem, but the way he felt when he heard it.

What did he say in reply?

He was flabbergasted. He couldn’t comprehend that it was about him. His ultimate reaction was to ask how he was supposed to know what I meant by the poem. He felt I was putting him on the spot, because he wanted to analyze the poem, and get the underlying structure of it, so that he could feel that he understood the poem. But the understanding of a poem comes in the first microsecond when you hear the words a person is speaking. Analysis is all well and good, but it's not going to help you understand a poem.

Do you do reads often?

Yes, as often as I can.

Why?

I’m not sure I can come up with a good answer to that. I don't know. I also do theatre; I act and I write. I also do performance art. We've done four performance art pieces that I've written. In the most recent one, I knew the poetry was good because the stage hands and actors were using phrases out of the work in normal conversation.

Now, that's how I knew the poetry was good. I knew we had a good show when the teenagers came down at the end of the show and they were vibrating, they were literally standing there shaking they were so excited. There was this one girl, a pretty good friend of mine; this is a very tough woman, she’s got enough metal in her ears to keep her from going through and airport. And she was crying. She was saying how beautiful it was. So when you get that kind of reaction from people, that’s the best thing in the world. Better than drugs, better than power, it's really the neatest thing in the world. And I really, really like it. I really like that knowing something I have written has really had an impact on somebody.

Where do you do reads?

Coffee shops, Barnes and Nobles, and Greenville Tech where I work. There are a couple of good coffee shops around here where I've read. Coffee Underground, Coffee Beanery. Generally speaking, if you want to do a reading with these guys, all you have to do is call them up and say that you want to do a reading. Sometimes they have a mike, and sometimes you're just standing in a corner somewhere, but hey, it's an audience. I did a poetry reading for one guy one time, I swear to God.

So you both write and act in plays?

Yeah. Our most recent production was JB, and I had the title role.

Is that one of yours?

No, that’s Archibald MacLeish. It was a Pulitzer Prize winner back in the sixties. We have a theatre group here and the director is Neill Hance. We've historically done two plays a year, we do one Shakespeare and one play by an American author. We've been doing this for seven years. We’re getting ready to do All the Way Home, by Tad Mosel. The book was called A Death in the Family.

Is it your group associated with the school?

Yeah. At the same time, we do once of my performance art pieces. The first one we did was called Ascending Phoenix, and it was just me. It's about the moment when the phoenix hits the fire, and when it ascends.

When did you start writing performance pieces?

The first time I heard Laurie Anderson. She's best known for her music, but she also does performance art, and that's when I really came into contact with it. I think I first heard it on PBS, they used to have a show called Radio Telescope, and they did a piece that she did, and it was just fabulous. I was blown away. And I started following her work, I was totally enamored with what she was doing, and I said to myself, you know, you could do that here. It has not been what people expect from an engineer. I have a degree in biomedical engineering, a degree in adult technical education, and a degree in electrical engineering.

So who else has influenced your performance art?

Peter Gabriel. And Andy Kaufman to a certain extent. The problem with Andy Kaufman, to me, is that sometimes I can’t tell whether he’s being funny or tragic. It was always kind of difficult to watch Andy because after a while, I didn’t want to laugh, I wanted to cry. I could never really tell what he was trying to do with his performance.

But Peter Gabriel is definitely an influence. You know, if I had my perfect situation, I would love to have a large warehouse, painted totally black, and have these different pieces of art, sculptures or arrangements. And as you would approach these sculptures and arrangements, there would be a kind of conversation going on. So in some ways it would be kind of like a music video. You know, sometimes in a music video the action that you see the people doing doesn't necessarily correspond to the words to the song.

So the conversations you would hear as you approached these objects may not be specifically about these objects, but they would add another dimension to these objects. Say you had a frying pan sitting there. And what would happen is that you could have actors there, talking about things that would indirectly imply the frying pan. What they would say would not necessarily be exactly about the frying pan, but it would imply the frying pan.

And that opens up so many more possible ramifications for stuff like that, suddenly instead of a frying pan it could become a weight for a measuring scale, or it would become a weapon. Or it could become like a Zen circle, there’s just so many things you could do with it, you know?

Do you consider yourself a surrealist?

There is a certain surrealist component in everything I do. Of the surrealists, Rene Margritte was the best. Salvador Dali is an influence, certainly. And not a lot of people understand that surreal does not necessarily, I mean, I actually know what the word means. Surreal actually means above reality. It’s like a snow cone without the ice. All that’s left is the juice, and the juice is extremely intense.

Do you consider yourself a punster?

Yes. Only when it’s working right. The very interesting things about puns is that it's one of the few art forms in which you judge how successful you are by how much you make other people groan.

What other visual artists influence you?

All of the surrealists. Some of the dada people, but a lot of the times I just didn’t get it. I guess I wasn’t supposed to get it with dada. More recently there's been Andy Warhol. And definitely Roger Dean. He did the album covers for Yes, and a lot of cyberpunk things, I mean, it was pre-cyberpunk but it was cyberpunk. He did those sorts of organic cyborg-type creatures.

My favorite author is Roger Zelazny. His science fiction is very much like Roger Dean's art. All of this is pre-cyberpunk but it was actually laying the groundwork for William Gibson.

What other authors are you fond of?

Phillip K. Dick. Robert Heinlein, when I was a kid. William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Poul Anderson. As far as poetry, I really enjoy Marge Piercy. She's a god, as far as I'm concerned. I would like to hope that my meter and style is similar to hers. I actually had someone get back to me, I recently had a science fiction story in Quantum Muse, I had someone read it and write to me and say that Zelazny has died, and now there was someone else to carry on the tradition. I also had a kid in Jakarta, Indonesia get in touch with me the week before last. She was assigned one of my poems for analysis, so she got in touch with me. We had a fabulous conversation.

What sort of plays do you write?

Science fiction. The performance art pieces are not science fiction, but the plays are. I’ve written five plays, and four performance art pieces. You wouldn’t think SF would work in the theatre, but as long as they don’t have to shoot the gun, you don’t need the special effects.

Who performs them?

Different colleges. And we've had a couple of performances of my plays at other schools.

What’s it like seeing other people interpret your work like that?

Well, in performance art, I have people interpreting my work also. The plays are kind of like prose and the performance art is kind of like poetry. But the only performance art presentation I was in by myself was the first one, other than that one, I've always been managing other people. It adds a whole new dimension to your work, when someone else is interpreting it. When they have to go on stage and do the part you've written, it alters it. Inevitably. And it always alters it in a way that's just fascinating.

So you really enjoy that?

Oh yeah. I’ve never really had a negative experience associated with it. I've had negative experiences with a reading or something when it wasn’t necessarily well received by the audience, but I’ve never had a bad experience with someone else interpreting my work. My director asked me if it bothers me that they don't always get it, that the actors don't always get it. But I’ve had people, there was this one poem I wrote for this one guy called Evan. The name of the poem was Evan's Poem. And he didn’t get it. And he did the poem, on stage, but he didn't get it at all. So that was a very surreal moment. But no, that doesn’t bother me, because when an actor does a piece that I’ve written, even they can't really get everything in it, because they’re not the audience. They can’t see it when they’re performing it. You know, so much of what comes across is not only the words, but the way that the actors move and the expressions they're making. And not only that, but the audience comes in with all sorts of parameters in place. So once you get those filters in place, if you have 27 people, you have 27 people seeing 27 different things. Everyone filters information, you could not exist, especially in this information age, if you did not filter the information coming in to you.

The effect for me is that it's like a symphony. If you have one person watching something, it’s like a solo, so when you get 27 people watching and 27 different interpretations it’s symphonic, it's much more organic.

Do you have any anecdotes from doing reads you’re fond of?

Yes. There was a contest. Now, I always think that poetry contests are bogus to begin with, because poetry, like music, has such a wide spectrum; how can you really say one piece is better than another piece? Anyway, there was a reading at Barnes and Nobles that I was going to, and they had a contest. The first reader was a woman dressed as a nun doing a comedy bit on the Bi-Lo center, she was making fun of the grocery store. The second guy said he was a woman in the body of a man and he had poetry about that. The third one was a teenage girl with poetry about her dog. I figured I had no chance.

Who won?

I did. But I figured I had no chance, because my poetry is normal. My poetry tends to be more accessible to the population, and I figured that just would not go with the people who were judging, I figured they would go with the more bizarre, the more attention-getting stuff.

So you were raised on the eastern half of the planet?

Yes.

Which part?

Well, it’s a circle. It’s a sphere. The point that I’m making with that is that while I was raised in West Virginia, the Eastern part is the Chinese mindset, the Eastern mindset. And although I'm very Western in some ways, I'm very Eastern in others. For instance, dragons. To the Chinese, the dragons can be a very wise and very primal force. To the Western mind, the dragon is a hoarder, and it’s destructive. So in that way I would be very Eastern. I've actually gotten into pun wars with Buddhists. Wanna hear my favorite Buddhist pun?

Sure.

Is nothing sacred?