Five Questions with Anna Moschovakis

Five Questions with __________ is an experiment with flash interviews. The series on poets continues with poet, translator, and editor (at Ugly Duckling Presse and elsewhere) Anna Moschovakis. My first entry into her work was this poem, situated as a conversation between Annabot and the Human Machine.

From Saeed Ensafi's War and Peace collection, Tehran, 2011.

Coffee and chocolate or tea and toast?

I love all my stimulants equally. (And if you don't think toast a stimulant, you don't understand jam.)

Which dream or cinematic imagery do you find more emotive, an apocalyptic desert landscape of ruin or the scene of a biblical flood?

I was born in an apocalyptic desert landscape of ruin that I also deeply love.

If you could download one skill into your brain without any effort, which would it be?

Time-management, because then I could learn the others.

Harold Norse's poem 'i heard evtushenko' protests against American writers:

I think of Antonin Artaud—

he made the French language spurt blood

raking arteries & veins

swept them clean of world shit

What North American poet makes the English language spurt blood?

For me, right now: Dodie Bellamy. But I may have peculiar notions of blood, spurting, and poetry.

Is the reported pain caused by paper cuts exaggerated?

I thought I was the only one who knew how painful they are!