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by Z.G. Tomaszewski

Z.G. Tomaszewski: For beginners, who are you? Where do you hail from and what sort of things, casual聽and profound, are you interested in?

Dennis Hinrichsen: I think I鈥檓 still trying to answer that first question. We build such elaborate fictions on聽such flimsy ground and are in such constant flux, that equation always seems unfinished.聽Neruda in his poem 鈥淲e Are Many鈥� offers perhaps the best answer when he says 鈥渉e shall聽speak, not of self, but of geography.鈥� Or context. Or the many tribes we all belong to.聽

Currently, I hail from Lansing, Michigan, with stops in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Boston.聽

As for casual things, I have some reading-related guilty pleasures that include noir,聽cyberpunk, and sci-fi. I also have far too many guitars for my marginal skill set. My focus聽lately has been on writing poems. I鈥檓 still fascinated by that and how to maintain a garage聽band energy and ethos even though I鈥檝e been writing a long time.

ZGT: Tell me about your most recent project, Skin Music. What is this book all about? How聽did you come to orient it?

DH: My books take shape organically鈥擨 generally follow my interests and let one poem聽suggest another until I have an arc that hangs together. Do this for a year or two and you聽can鈥檛 help but have a pile of poems that connect in some way. The work then is to find the聽right order for those poems. This, often, can take a long time as you shuffle, reshuffle, deal聽again, drop poems out, put them back in, find a gap in the arc that requires a new poem.聽

So Skin Music arose out of a couple of years of writing in just this manner. The key was聽finding the right title for the book and then seeing both "skin" and "music" as the baseline聽motifs that I hope keep the whole thing afloat.

As for what it鈥檚 about, I think it鈥檚 about placing self in a variety of landscapes (e.g., drowning聽in a river, witnessing a flood-ravaged neighborhood, visiting my mother in the nursing home,聽playing cards with a WW II Marine who has Parkinson鈥檚) and then asking, 鈥淲hat is the聽upshot?鈥� and then working through that to some provisional understanding, or bite of聽insight and consciousness. And to do it all with sharp visuals and music.

ZGT: What were some discoveries you made in the process of writing and arranging the聽manuscript?

DH: I鈥檝e been writing a long time so most of the discoveries were made in the act of聽writing and finding things through that process. My mantra since the beginning comes from聽Marvin Bell and is simply: abandon yourself to the materials at hand. So the model has always聽been a jazz model, improvisation, and a journey to discover something new. That hasn鈥檛聽changed in 40 years.聽

What has changed is how I think about the materials. In this book I started thinking along聽creative non-fiction lines which opened up ideas I wouldn鈥檛 normally approach with a poem.聽It also offered up some prose/lyric hybrid-ish moments with a few of the poems that gave聽me another texture.

As for arranging the poems, it鈥檚 a question of pacing. There were some three to five-page poems in聽the manuscript so placing them correctly was an issue. And then handling the back and forth聽movement among couplets and triplets and un-stanza-ed poems. There is a reading rhythm聽to be found. There is upper limit on how long each section can be. And so on.聽

I go through many drafts. I print out the poems and tape them head-to-tail and then hang聽them on my wall so I can see the book unfold all at once. And then I start moving things聽around until things are locked down.

ZGT: Are there any particular poets or poems that have transformed how you write?

DH: Geoff Dyer in his nonfiction book, Zona, argues that we are most open to artistic聽influences from late teens to early twenties and that those influences never wane. For him, it was聽the sci-fi film Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky.聽

So too in my case, as I built an aesthetic bias and framework for writing poetry during the聽early seventies when I first started writing. So my source code includes all those writers who聽were moving from formal verse to free verse during that time and publishing amazing聽books: Phil Levine, James Wright, Richard Hugo, Galway Kinnell, W.S. Merwin. The essays聽of Marvin Bell were central. William Carlos Williams was central. John Cage also entered聽during these years and has always maintained his position as the wild card in the deck. Jazz聽was central too for ideas about improvisation, so Miles Davis, Coltrane, Keith Jarrett, McCoy聽Tyner et al. were all important. Cinema was central as well鈥攁ll those auteurs from the sixties聽and seventies. I鈥檝e been influenced by a great many other things over the years but they have聽mostly been refinements and embellishments to what I already had.

ZGT: What, ultimately, are you trying to say as a writer, as a human?

DH: I don鈥檛 think I have anything to say as a writer, but I sure am interested in finding聽things to say through a process that results in poems. It鈥檚 a form of play for me, or聽scratching at the cave wall trying to get the shape of the bison just right. I just try to be open聽and follow where my interests, my reading, my thinking, my experience, take me.

ZGT: So, what's next?

DH: More poems. A slight shift in focus. Still too early to say much about them.聽But I鈥檓 still hard at it.

Z.G. Tomaszewski, born in 1989, lives in Grand Rapids where he works maintenance at an old Masonic Temple and is a founding member and events coordinator of Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters and co-director of Lamp Light Music Festival. His debut book,聽, was the winner of the International Poetry Prize of 2014, chosen by Li-Young Lee and published by Hong Kong University Press, and his chapbook Mineral Whisper, composed while living in Ireland, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. New writing is forthcoming from RHINO, Green Mountains Review, and Inverness Almanac, among others.