Aerial photos of Fallujah, a military map, and current photos from the battlefield of “coalition” and “insurgent” troops in action. (Quotes added to reinforce the difficulty in distinguishing one from the other at times.)

From my favorite wonk website, Cryptome

–You have five minutes on HBO, primetime, audience of millions, to do whatever you would like (song, poem, political rant, original or cover, whatever you say). How do you spend those five minutes?

Performing “DIY”, one of my poems, then walking off the stage.

–Describe a completely satisfying slam experience, as audience.

Watching Bao, from Minneapolis, in 1999 drop his last poem in a semifinal slam in favor of an amazing poem on a crumpled piece of notebook paper that turned into a declaration of love for his girlfriend.

–What’s something you learned from a teacher, however you define that, that has stayed with you?

My high school junior year English teacher, Ralph Hughes, beat into me the importance of editing my work, and took some of the hubris out of me.

–Is there a conviction you once held deeply, but later found to be misguided? What changed your belief?

A fight in that same junior year with a senior bully taught me that violence worked. I later met him in a bar when I was about 22 and he literally ran from me, and it took me a week to figure out why, as I could only dimly recall why I knew him. Taught me the beginnings of a lesson in how scarring this could be for all involved.

–Which is worse: to be inflexibly and mercilessly sure you’re right, or to be open-minded but not very passionate? Elaborate.

I am the latter. I used to be the former. I hold with the belief that neither is particularly useful, but that the former at least stands a chance of being right, while the latter gets nothing done. Ask a Democrat this year.

–What’s the coolest—not the most meaningful or the deepest or the wisest, but the COOLEST—thing you ever did?

Wow.

Smoked a joint with Jerry Garcia in 1979; got drunk with the Replacements more than once; and took the mike from Ian MacKaye once to scream lyrics into at a Fugazi show;

but I gotta go with:

meeting Frank Sinatra, and not asking for his autograph.

Failure

I always wanted to write the one
definitive poem that
defined me well enough that I
could just sit back afterward and
watch the truth roll in.

Twenty years later and I keep trying,
no matter how little I have changed.
You’d think I’d have done it by now,
but no; still, I keep at it as if the next one
will really do the trick.

There’s a point coming where I will
have to admit that every new poem is
a failure, a testament
to the ineffectiveness of
the previous one.

Still, it’s like biting on tinfoil
sometimes to write a poem over and over again,
as if I might be able to get past it this time —
the blinding, the surprise that
there is still something to feel.