Thanks for the invitation to say something about my work. The poems in Notre Dame Review are from a manuscript called House of Song ; the title is a phrase my friends Gabe Ashman and Tim Schmitz passed along and which I further read about in Peter Occhiogrosso's The Joy of Sects (Doubleday, 1996). The "House of Song" is Zoroastrianism's afterlife paradise (as opposed to a "House of Evil" which the wicked will inhabit). For me, the idea of a house made up of music is an apt metaphor for what we try to create in any book of poetry; further,House of Song is a manuscript that looks closely at "last things," so an afterlife metaphor gives an appropriate title.

          "Pomegranate" was written to appear as parallel text on the same page with a poem called "Fever" from the same manuscript (in the spirit of John Ashbery's "Litany" or David St. John's "Study for the World's Body"). A longtime fan of Hitchcock, I first saw The Birds on its television premiere in the late 1960's and unexpectedly found much later that Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren's character) embodied some key impulses I felt lay at the center of House of Song,--chiefly, the tension between desire and detachment, the need for masks that both conceal and reveal, the pain of memory and permanence of sorrow, the search for transcendence or, at least, escape.

          Because the second section of Galileo's Banquet explores autobiographical issues in depth, I've tried to avoid these in other manuscripts and forums. Briefly, I'm an adopted child who grew up without knowledge of this fact, nor did I know that a neighbor and classmate who lived two blocks away was really my biological sister, herself raised under an assumed identity. The story only gets more baroque. I hope that Galileo's Banquet explains events intelligibly!

          Carmine, my adoptive father, died of prostate cancer in November of 2000. My adoptive mother Elizabeth died in 1977.

          Among poetry collections I've enjoyed in recent years are Mary Adams' Epistles from the Planet Photosynthesis, A.V. Christie's Nine Skies, Alfred Corn's Stake, Judith Hall's Anatomy, Errata, Richard Howard's Trappings, Andrew Hudgins' Babylon in a Jar, Josephine Jacobsen's In the Crevice of Time, J.D. McClatchy's Ten Commandments, Jane Mead's The Lord and the General Din of the World, Randall Potts' Collision Center, Lia Purpura's Stone Sky Lifting, David St. John's The Red Leaves of Night, Jane Satterfield's Shepherdess with an Automatic, Elizabeth Spires' Worldling, Arthur Vogelsang's Cities and Towns, Kevin Young's Most Way Home.

          Current listening includes Wyclef Jean's Ecleftic, P.J. Harvey's Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, The Smithsonian Folkways collection (Harry Smith, anthologist), anything by Amy Rigby, the Nick Drake anthology Time of No Reply, David Bowie's BBC sessions, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, and Attractive Nuisance, the brilliant final album from Scott Miller's underappreciated Loud Family.