Tyler Joseph Wiseman

Better known as "The Poet."

"Courting the muse is a full life job." T.J. Wiseman

by Aurora Antonovic ~

Question: Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Answer: My name is Tyler Joseph Wiseman, and I am known affluently as "The Poet" in San Diego and elsewhere. I've hitchhiked over 65k miles in the past 8 years, with 46 states covered, all the while subsisting on my poetry through the recitation and sale of hand crafted works. I've been nationally featured on the NBC Nightly News at the City Lights 50th Anniversary in 2003, am a survivor of the 9-11 aftermath, and generally am still breathing and chewing dust infrequently. I was the character basis of the Book 'Fight Club,' am an orphan, love animals, including the people variety, and generally supplant my days with poetry and futile pursuits.

Question: How did you begin writing poetry?

Answer: When I was a tender lad, my father gave me a Richard Brautigan book which catalyzed my purpose. The kind of writing that he offered, first best thought, with it's unapologetic nature and pastoral debauch was a immediate charm to me. Jim Morrison also aided these ends, for who doesn't dote genius.

Question: What was your first poetic experience?

Answer: Opening my eyes, naturally. Our vision begins the audio visual aspect of our interpretational efforts, and thus, the poetry which spoke in those simple primaries became my first art and entertainment. Courting the muse is a full life job.

Question: What and who have your poetic influences been?

Answer: Well, I'm endeavouring to be as diverse as possible with these things. One exceptional contemporary I've utterly admired is Richard Vallance, the prolific Canadian Sonneteer, Sharon Olds is great too, Bakura, Louise Gluck are some others. I endeavor to read poets in their home towns, ergo, I've read Bukowski in LA, Ferlinghetti and many others in the City Lights upper deck, W.C. Williams in Buffalo, Dylan in Woodstock, Hughes in Harlem, amongst others. For European poets, I get my fill from the Columbia Press and Norton Anthology. I really fall in for a lot of the old Brits, of course, the Lake Poets, Tennyson.

Question: What does poetry do for you?

Answer: Feeds me, keeps me warm, keeps me drunk to obscene degrees, gratifies me in ways no woman ever could.

Question: Do you prefer to read, or to write, poetry?

Answer: Writing is definitely up there more than reading. Still, when I read a good poem, it's the same flush, and I'm inspired anew.

Question: Gustave Flaubert said, " Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry." Do you concur with this?

Answer: All coherent thought is a mathematical scale, all language is based upon the timing of vocal patterns, all writing is metered to it's degree. Poetry itself tends to be an implied principle in geometrics, because we build it from the earth which we see and absorb, and make our structure to refine the _expression. Indeed, because we work all the more attentively at the mathematics.

Question: Besides poetry, what other creative endeavours do you partake in?

Answer: Not as much as I would like, I draw a bit, mostly I'm immersed in poetry, watching videos, or playing stupid little games which serve no ends at all. I want to paint, to take pictures, to create a child! Alas, I'm poor, and getting a bit lackadaisical lately. Might be time for a real job to allow for these things.

Question: And what do you hope the future holds for you?

Answer: School, beautiful women, good beer. I plan on moving to a cult ranch and grow avocados, maybe out to route 66 after that, piss across Arizona. Maybe I'll not get anywhere, maybe I'll die. Life’s too full of possibility to tack it. Really, I'm hoping to regain some of the meticulous nature I used to throw into my writings, but that'll be some doing too.

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