onald Revell is certainly no stranger to poetry. He is the author of eight collections of poetry and has been awarded many accolades, including the PEN Center USA West award, the Gertrude Stein Award, the Shestack Prize, a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has also taught poetry at many universities, including the University of Utah, where he is currently a professor of English. All of these achievements, however, have not gone to his head.

Listening to Revell read his poetry last Sunday at the Greater Salt Lake Book Festival brought to mind the way that words have the potential to become as substantial as the things they represent. The way a poet's experience carries out just so can kindle experiences in an audience. The atmosphere at the reading was very informal and allowed a certain tangible reality to flourish. Revell sat cross-legged atop a counter and was quite discursive and chatty. I greatly enjoyed the expressive collection of poetry that was read from Arcady, one of Revell's earlier collections of poetry. It made me feel happy and full, like I had just eaten a friendly meal in a foreign country.

Revell's most recently published poetry collection, My Mojave, is devoted to a world of joy and sadness, ugliness and beauty, and man and nature.

RED: Why is poetry important?

Revell: Poetry is important because it is the only effective treatment for the disease known as language. To put it another way, poetry is a backfire lit to extinguish the menacing conflagration of words, words, words. Poetry champions presence in a world disfigured by representation.

RED: When and why did you start writing poetry?

Revell: I began writing poems in high school, hoping to impress a particular young lady. She wasn't impressed, but by the time she made that sad fact clear to me, I'd acquired the habit…and the joy…of poetry.

RED: What is your relationship to writing now as opposed to when you started?

Revell: When I was younger, I had what I now realize is the mistaken notion that poetry is a form of self-expression and, too, of communication. In recent years, I've been given to realize that poetry is a behavior of thought, a consequence of perception.

RED: What is your creative process?

Revell: My process is very fast. A phrase or cadence will come into my head and, if it proves persistent or dear, I put a sheet of paper into my typewriter and start fiddling on the keys. It's almost always done in an hour, and I almost never revise.

RED: Who are your favorite poets?

Revell: My favorite poets are Robert Creeley, John Ashbery and Ronald Johnson.
hayley@red-mag.com