TM: Does any living poet employ vernacular speech as
cunningly as you do?
RSG: Naw.
TM: Has anyone done so since Shakespeare or Chaucer?
RSG: Burns and Swinburne.
TM: How would you describe your personal relationship
with all four of those poets?
RSG: Very close. I channel them nightly on A&E.
TM: Given your blinding speed and heroic physique, you
could have made a fortune playing ball. What on earth
prompted you to pursue so unremunerative a career as
poet?
RSG: I was reared in the bayou, croaking Cajun to my
only friends, the frogs. I thought mastering the
English language was a loftier goal than fame or fortune. I was dead
wrong.
TM: With the possible exception of Tim Steele, you are
the strictest formalist of my generation, yet in your
famous cento you rhyme:
“bare, ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang,”
and “an aged man is but a paltry thing.”
Do those lines really rhyme in southeast Texas?
RSG: Whup you upside they head, ma cher.
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