to the unfortunates, and I am one, but I don’t meet as many prostitutes as he seems to (at 3 a.m.). Nowadays I don’t write as much about the streets because I no longer live on them. My inspiration might come from stealing fruit from trees in the summer time, the end of the world, politics, my crazy friends, poverty, being a throw-away poet on ssi, synchronicity found around every corner, the magic of the everyday, the list goes on. Scot:
Why do you write?
Chris:
For my own clarity, the process of writing distills things for me, maybe I can be in the world a little easier once I’ve broken it down, it clears my head and helps me take the world and my own problems less seriously. I’d like to be able to break it all down into very short, tight sentences, but I’m not there yet.
Scot:
Unlike a lot of today’s poets, there is not much of Christopher Robin on the internet. Is this by design or failure to market?
Chris:
Well, because of a certain cartoon character who spends a lot of time trying to steal my identity, you’d have to search pretty specifically. There’s a bit on my zine, Zen Baby, a lot of reviews over the years, (though there was another book that came out with the same title, after I started publishing); and thanks to Charles P. Ries a lot of reviews on my chapbooks. But it’s true I don’t submit a lot of poetry to online publications, I still prefer print, its more tangible, feels more permanent, and I prefer it. And I don’t google myself too much, I’ve heard it can make you go blind.
Scot:
Tell us about Zen Baby. Do you take submissions or solicit?
Chris:
I started Zen Baby Zine in 2000. I’d quit drinking a few years earlier and was completely unemployable (still am, mostly). I call it the Literary Hijinks of Glorified Nobodies. It’s a bit of a literary mosh-pit, poems, continents, classes, ideas, all clashing and getting together in a mess of glue and smeared ink. I rarely solicit submissions unless I really like someone’s work and haven’t heard from them for a while. I get a lot of