Mukul:  Denis, would you please start with the tale of your childhood, schooling and college education with reference to the background against which you emerged as a creative writer? I have seen you dabble in various modes of expression such as haiku, poems, tanka and fiction. Which one do you feel most comfortable at and why?

Denis: I was born in Iowa farm country in a town that still had hitching posts for horses-it's values and attitudes are still with me. For most of the Fifties, I lived in Japan; in Tokyo, I attended Narimasu School. It had been the diplomatic corp's children's school before the war. So, I learned English and Japanese at the same time and I had the opportunity to attend Kabuki and Noh, to see the best in bonsai, ikebana, and other arts. Although I have lost facility with Japanese over the years, those school years comprised my childhood and were formative. My appreciation of Japanese aesthetics underlies my interest in Japanese short form poetry.

I began writing when I came to Baltimore in 1960 and had my first poem published that year. My early work was pretty run of the mill, but a few poems rose above the others and have been kept. Everything else I wrote in the 1960s, I have thrown out, including a couple of bad novels. I got serious about writing in college (Towson University), got some stories and poems published, and eventually became the literary mag editor for the school. I learned editing from some real pros, which has been a valuable skill since. This period in my writing culminated in my self-published chapbook, Port of Call and Other Poems, a run of 300 copies. It was in college that I made a practice of writing in every sort of form. Free verse was already very popular, but I like the challenge of writing under constraints. I believe the pressure of constraints against free flowing imagination makes for a creative dialectic in which new things can come into being.

I never wrote fiction after college. I was a fan of Lawrence Durrell and totally overwhelmed by his mastery of language. On the other hand, I went on to a government post where I wrote vast amounts of extremely technical legal documents and supporting analyses, for thirty years. My poetry had a little resurgence in the late 70s, otherwise, I stayed with technical writing. But, a few years before retirement from the government, I returned to poetry with renewed determination. Although I wrote free and formal verse, I quickly began to specialize in haiku and, later, tanka. I think I am drawn to these forms, not only because of my upbringing in Japan, but because of my decades of technical writing in which the placement of a comma could ruin lives. I developed a taste for very precise writing that had a (for me) novel element of ambiguity. Today, I think in haiku and tanka terms and writing them is a natural act of expression, albeit still very challenging to do well.

Mukul: Photography and poetry have become common pursuits of many creative writers these days. What can be the reason for it? How do you manage time for writing poetry, haiku, tanka, fiction, editing e-journals, traveling around and photography? How do you strike balance between family life and your involvement with all these?

Denis: The internet and desktop publishing revolutions have brought photography to a new place where computer manipulation of photographs is a commonplace skill. Even though I was always a camera bug and later graduated from New York Institute of Photography, I was not thinking in terms of illustrating poetry until I began seeing haiga (haiku with artwork) on the web. This is an exploding area in haiku circles and will, I think, continue to be insofar as popular consumption of poetry is greatly eased by the sugar of graphic arts. There are a few people around who are doing genuinely new things with graphics and poetry; a fine development, I think.

Managing time has never been easy nor will be, for me. I am impatient and tend to work very fast, so, I do manage to get a few things done. But, I always feel that I am weeks behind on everything. So how do I manage? Being retired now helps tremendously, but daily life still has its continuing demands. My wife, Deborah, is apparently infinitely patient and that helps a lot.

Mukul: I have been a reader of your poems on Magnapoets. What I have found in you is a penchant for writing in various styles. What inspired you for this? You have also created three new poetic forms. Would you tell us how you created them and what necessitated you to create them?

Denis: Well, as I mentioned, there was a conscious decision to write in multiple forms because there are skills that cannot be learned except through practice. A professional free verse poet may not have to rhyme verses, but would be a poor poet if he could not. Discipline is good for artists, poets included. The disciplined can move on to freedom, whereas the undisciplined must settle for anarchy.

My three forms, yes, why indeed did I create them? Two were meant to provide formal analogues for haiku. One is a seventeen syllable couplet (the crystalline) and the other is a shortened cinquain (the cinqku). Although I don't write either often any more, some other poets have taken these balls and run with them; they are writing some fine poetry. Myself, I returned to classical haiku tercets. The third form is a different story. I have always had an interest in what is called "sacred geometry." Two related formulas are the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Mean ratio. I combined two mirrored Fibonaccis bracketing a Golden Mean cinquain to create the form called Nautilus. Every nautilus I have written has been snapped up for publication. There really is some magic in those classical proportions. I am keeping the nautilus in my toolbox.

Mukul: Looking back in your life as a creative writer, what do you think to have gained so far? What do you think is the most rewarding thing about writing and what is the most distressing thing? You have also taught creative writing in John Hopkins University. Would you tell us a little about your experience of teaching creative writing?

Denis: What have I gained? Certainly not anything tangible. I write because I must; it is how I am wired. So, what I have gained is the release of a multitude of angels and demons from my mind, the ones that really wanted out. Life as a poet is improving because it seems to be more angels than demons these days. The reward in writing is seeing something new-creative satisfaction. Nowadays, I am reaping some other rewards, i.e., camaraderie with other poets and editors, the enjoyment of shared interests, intellectual stimulation from dealing with folks all around the world. The only thing about writing that distresses me is the sure knowledge that I will never get it all out and on paper. The poet as Sisyphus resonates for me.

I taught creative writing in a Johns Hopkins University program called the Free University. The experience of teaching undergraduates and graduate students writing was surprising in that they had plenty of technical knowledge already. Most everything you might read in a How To Write book, they were already on top of. Their concern was universally, what to write about? They expected there to be a formula for devising poetry and fiction, a formula that would tell the writer what to write about. Of course, they were just voicing the universal poetic search for the Muse. And, of course, they were young and inexperienced, but that plight stays with us. How to avoid the hackneyed? How to avoid writing the predictable? The answer is to look within and listen. Everyone has a story to tell. Just sit in a bar one night and you'll find that out. But folks have this threshold problem with writing, where they say to themselves: OK, I want to write something, something brilliant. And nothing comes. But you can bet that when they are talking to friends, loved ones, etc., there are subjects on which they open up and blossom. Voila! The material is the muse. Poetry, no matter how clever, on a subject the poet does not care about just lies there, dead on the page. So, I told them to wait for it and that, when the Muse arrives, they may have reason to be careful what they wish for. After that experience, I wrote A Poet's Anthem (posted to Magnapoets in June) which includes this stanza:

Blessed be those who
                wake up sweating in the January night
               and scribble with erasable bics
               on the cracking window shades
              dreams of fox fire and neon streets that breathe.

Mukul: Do you have any schedule for writing and reading? I have read about some poets who claim that they write certain number of poems a day. Do you have any such flow so as to claim to write certain number of poems a day? Is there any piece you love to call your signature piece?

Denis: Absolutely not. Bless all poets who can write on schedule. I can't. I carry a Moleskin notebook and pens everywhere I go. I write on restaurant place mats and napkins, on anything I can grab when the noises in my head want to become real; if need be, on the palm of my hand (it washes up!). A large proportion of poems get tossed out as stillborn. I don't keep them around to torture, generally speaking. So, my production is not high in an absolute sense. On the other hand, the poems that make it past the first re-reading have a very high chance of being published. A good poem, I may revise for years.

I don't have a signature piece. The sonnet, The Brink at Logan Pond, I liked enough to make it the title poem of my book of formal and free verse. But the qualities, or merits, of poems vary so widely that comparing them is, for me, impossible. Some come right out of my heart, like this favorite of mine, a haiku on one line:

her small coffin carried through windrows of tattered petals

Perhaps a good poem to end on is this little haiku:

        poems
       written in dust
       a windy day