[The following conforms to the chain-letter ominously known as The Next Big Thing.]
1. What is the title of
your new book?
The Problem of Boredom
in Paradise (Selected Poems by Paul Hannigan).
2. Who is the publisher
of your book?
Flim Forum Press.
Originally, Pressed Wafer offered me the chance to do a selected.
It was to be no more that 100 pages, which at the time seemed reasonable, since
I’d yet to uncover Hannigan’s unpublished ms. The Higher Slum, or the hundreds of
unpublished poems, or the unfinished novels, etc. Pressed Wafer lost interest
in my participation because I was slow to produce a ms. I suggested the
project to Matthew, even though Hannigan is not an obvious
Flim Forum poet, and expected to be turned down. Matthew asked me if I thought Hannigan’s poetry was good and
the project worth doing. I said yes. So he said yes. An act of faith I appreciate.
3. What genre does your
book fall under?
Poetry. Sub-genre, the
rescue-volume. That is, from obscurity. Hannigan has been out of print since
the late 1970s.
4. What is one sentence
from your book?
"When, as occasionally
happened, a tribesman burst into tears at his own joke, his peers would roar in
rebuke: That is not sad; this is not funny." [from “The Bush”]
5. Where did the idea
for the book come from?
From Paul Hannigan. (I
write about the origin of the selected in my introduction, but, without repeating
myself, I can offer a less flip answer than “Paul Hannigan.” When I started the Hannigan project, I did not imagine I would edit a selected; I just wanted
to know a little more about who he was. The idea of doing a book gradually
grew from that research.)
6. How long did it take
you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Not exactly applicable,
however—I began typing up poems (with
the help of my wife Amy and the choreographer Nina Joly) that might end up in a
book in 2007, shortly after I published an article about Hannigan in Open
Letters Monthly; his widow, Caroline Banks, read the article and gave me the
go-ahead (and helped fund a research trip to Georgia, where his papers reside).
7. What are your
influences for this book?
When writing my
introduction, I specifically thought of
Michel de Montaigne. John Cotter offered suggestions that helped me to
think about the book. Otherwise, and obviously, what of Hannigan’s spirit I could
pick up from his corpus, so-to-speak.
8. What else might
pique the reader’s interest?
The March issue of OpenLetters Monthly, our Paul Hannigan blog, and the article I wrote for OLM back
in 2007.
