Oni Buchanan holds a B.A. in English from the University of Virginia and an M.F.A. in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first book of poems, What Animal, won the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series competition and was published in 2003. Her poems are featured in several anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2004 and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, and have been published in many journals including Conduit, Columbia Poetry Review, La Petite Zine, and the Colorado Review. In addition, she received her Master’s degree in piano performance from the New England Conservatory of Music and is the recipient of numerous music awards and scholarships.
What was your favorite book and band in high school?
Edward Gorey's Amphigorey, and for music, The Pixies, The Cure, The Smiths, Jane's Addiction, the Indigo Girls, and Nirvana.
First car?
1984 Toyota Camry (cream-colored)
Which crowd did you hang out with in high school?
I had friends in all of the crowds, and was therefore pretty much a member of none of the crowds. In 9th and 10th grade, I did have a small group of friends who all had code names. Later I went to a different high school and my friends were all visual artists, poets, musicians, and/or architects, except for my friends who were amazing athletes, computer engineers, or members of the boys' dorm rap group "the B Mob." Also one electric guitarist who would take these incredible solos with his guitar behind his back. And an outdoorsman/blacksmith who lived with his family in a glorified treehouse.
First job? Favorite job?
First jobs: Camp counselor. Soon thereafter, a face painter at Hershey Park.
Favorite job: My friend Jay's job on a Honey Glazed Ham assembly line, where he torched honey-ed hams with some kind of blow torch, I assume to "glaze" them. Also he worked inside a refrigerated ham truck as part of this same job. Ham is a terrible substance.
Favorite book now?
John Cage's Silence, maybe. Anything by Beckett. I'm still waiting to meet my favorite book.
What's new on your iPod (or phonograph)?
A recording of a Rapa Nui/Catholic mass I heard on Easter Island, with the service in Spanish and the singing in Rapa Nui. Also a CD of the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson piano trio playing music by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Arvo Pärt, Leon Kirchner, and Stanley Silverman.
What's the best movie you've seen of late?
Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee)
What are you working on these days?
Villa Lobos's piece "Rudepoema," Beethoven and Haydn piano trios, a ridiculously long list of prisoner's constraint words that probably already exists on the internet, new poems.
Anything coming out soon?
New poems coming out in Seneca Review, Conduit, three candles journal, Dragonfire, and Forklift, Ohio; three kinetic poems just installed on the Conduit website; "Poetry in Piano" concerts this spring in CA, MA, NY, OH, GA, VA, NJ, PA...
What are you reading that's fun (or devastating)?
Recently read or currently reading: Beckett's End Game, Anna Akhmatova Selected Poems, Scottish murder ballads, Arthur Waley's Chinese poetry translations, Mallarme's Un Coup de Des (the original poem and as many translations as I can find), Sappho.
What's your favorite exercise?
Star jumps are extremely fun, even though they were originally devised for humiliation. Whiffleball on the beach, though it's not much exercise... Maybe tennis is my favorite, lately. Another fun exercise comes in bursts and only happens on different stages while rehearsing for piano concerts--namely starting crouched back in the wings, then charging toward the stage and leaping forward head first to throw myself onstage like an unstoppable torpedo.
What's your favorite piece of clothing?
As many green things layered on top of one another as possible.
What are some of your guilty pleasures?
Logic puzzles. Working out simple mathematical patterns regarding how to eat grapefruits, and amazing others by accurately predicting which wedge will be the last to be eaten in any given pattern on any given grapefruit.
Favorite recipe?
Zucchini corn casserole. Also I have been really wanting lately to replicate a camp recipe called "Pot of Gold" in which you wrap big chunks of cheese in bisquick and drop them into tomato soup.
What's on your desk?
My mom sent me bottles of lavender and peppermint oil to sniff. Also stacks of poetry drafts. State quarters I've been collecting. A tiny smiling pig drawn with blue ink on a table napkin. A four-leaf clover token a woman in Crozet, Virginia gave me for good luck. A letter from Berlin with a polar bear stamp. One piece of twine whose origin I don't recall. Finger puppets of a llama and an alpaca that my husband purchased for me at a flea market in Portland, Oregon to celebrate our creation of two terrible puns referring to the end of time and these closely related mammals' involvement in it: "Alpacalypse" and "Llamageddon."
Crest or Colgate?
Colgate
Boca or Morningstar sausages?
Definitely Boca
Stones or Beatles?
Beatles
Porn name (first pet's name + first street you lived on)?
Nibbles Twin Oaks
October 19, 2006
Quickie interview #2: Oni Buchanan
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17 comments:
I want to make the Pot of Gold! And I'm wearing a lot of green today, but not in layers as it is too muggy on the streets of Greenwich Village.
The ham story is horrifying. Anything with torches and pig meat feeds my nightmares. Thanks!
Are the Scottish murder ballads fun or devastating? And to whom?
I tried leaving this once already, but it didn't seem to take, so here it is again, I hope it isn't posted twice or I will be covered in shame:
I have to come out in support of ham, ham is delicious. even though I sometimes draw little piggies and dream about pretty beribboned piggies coming to give me good news. Seriously, sometimes ham saves lives.
Good work cleverly and creatively answering so many "what's your favorite" questions, that kind of question always freezes me in my tracks.
Colgate and Beatles were totally the right answers. A+.
A pig roast at Indian Echo caverns sounds like more fun than blow-torching carcasses but what do I know? I only wear brown and prefer banjo & yodeling. Could you predict which square of a dark chocolate bar will be eaten last? or how quickly it will disappear if left on the kitchen table?
As the ham-worker in questions I feel I must correct a few things. I did not actually work with the blow-torches; my job was to receive the recently blow-torched ham and then scrape off anything that looked gross with a special ham-scraping implement. Besides ham-scraping and ham-squatting (that is, sitting in the ham truck) I also had to bring hams from the in-store freezer to the front of the store for customers, and then wipe away any semi-congealed puddles of ham juice that had formed on the racks that held the hams. This was as close as I got to the front of the store--when the hundreds of high-school and colleges students applied to work there over the winter we were divided into two groups based on appearance and the attractive kids went up front and the deformed and misshapen went to the back. Oh, and we were paid in ham by-products (which, weirdly enough, are as good as cash in northern Virginia).
Ham by-products are also as good as cash in Hamtramck, Michigan.
And in Needham, Mass.
in chicago we trade hot dogs for favors...but they're all-beef and come with tomatoes, cucumbers, relish & celery salt.
I'm currently preparing a monograph on the deceptively simple supply/demand economic interactions between the towns of Needham and Gotham.
sdw, I'm glad at least that you're not trading hot dogs for flavor.
Somebody stop me!
I am laughing out loud. so is my roommate.
needham
kelly
that's right, i need ham! more ham! someone give me ham! ham i am said sam i am! and green eggs.
this is all very painful.
Oni, your attitude toward ham appears to concur with the climate of opinion where I live, only a few short hours from Effingham, IL.
Your new CD is beautiful. I listen every afternoon over and over. I love your selections. You make them come alive.
We all like ham and got ham out here on the west coast. We don't need anymore ham. Ham inspired the naming of the city of Disney and the Angels....Anaham as it was once called.
Keep up the really great work!
this conversation is very interesting, but i think what we all want to talk about here is not the interview or what was said in it, but rather about how delicious and semi-nutritious ham is. also the fact that being a ham-slinger does sound fun.
fun facts about ham:
1: you can make your clothing entirely from ham! try it some rainy afternoon with the kids. pork bonnets are especially fashionable during spring months.
2. ham, originally called 'lunchmeat of the gods' by Schopenhauer, can be used to power a jet airplane, and is actually more efficient than gasoline.
3. though the process may seem horrific to an outsider, turning pigs into ham is beneficial to their health. pigs will eventually wither away and die painful deaths from a myriad of natural causes; turning them to ham prevents this from occurring and also makes them much tastier.
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