BWW Interviews: Multi-Talented Poet Michael Fanelli

Michael Fanelli is a multi-talented man. He writes and directs for the theater and is a film maker.

Today we will be talking to him about his poetry.

Michael will be one of the four featured readers at April 11th's ART in the Box Open Mic event.

MCL: Do you write prose or just poetry?

MF: I write poetry, fiction and drama and rarely, shopping lists. Am writing a novel about the NSA and a

talking black cat, with the battlefield being a puppet theater housed in a church basement in the middle

of a toxic waste dump in Buffalo, Wyoming-there is a place called Buffalo Wyoming. Am currently

working on an absurd version of the Civil War battle of Antietam. My fiction and drama are done to

keep my creativity busy while I'm waiting for inspiration to write poetry. I can't force poetry.

MCL: How did you get into poetry?

MF: I dabbled in fiction and drama but when I heard Whitman read by Alexander Scourby on WNYC radio in New York City I was hooked. I wrote a lot of crappy poetry in high school and college and in my

20's. I was searching for my voice. Then I wrote a poem that began "Two Rollses Royce" and I

recognized the vibration of my individual tuning fork in that phrase. Everything I write has to make

the same sound in my head or it ain't a "Fanelli". I was thirty years old then. With a some exceptions,

few poets bloom before thirty, whereas accomplished playwrights and novelists (and music composers)

under thirty are more common. (The age limit of the Yale Younger Poets series is forty.) There's

something about poetry that requires boots on the ground for a fair number of years.

ML: Some poetry influences?

MF: Whitman, Stephen Crane, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, Charles Olson, William Carlos

Williams, the other Williams, C.K., Allen Ginsberg and in my dotage, Charles Bukoski, who was as old

as I feel. Emily Dickenson wasn't bad, either.

MCL: What is it about those poets you find interesting?

MF: They experimented with form. You experience the music, the rhythm first and then you let the poem in. I like the unique ways they grab my attention and take me for a gallop.

MCL: Describe your poetry?

MF: I'm old enough to trust my instincts, so I write by feel-for better or worse. For a long time I loved my abstractions. Ashbery abstract. Now I try to be more accessibly deadpan, with magical realism thrown in.

MCL: What's the Buffalo, New York scene like?

MF: I assume you mean the poetry scene. The Buffalo art scene is incredibly rich. When I began attending poetry readings here in the '90's, venues were wide open. Open mics with a featured reader or two were the rule not the exception. I left the poetry scene for ten years to pursue writing and producing plays at Subversive Theatre Collective. When I returned, I found too many poetry events that were closed to only featured readers. I appreciate open mic events like Art In Box.

MCL: Any local poets who helped you grow?

MF: Rosemary Kothe is the Godmother of Buffalo poetry. Also the three Slipstream amigos up in Niagara

Falls-Lee Farallo, Dan Sicoli, Bob Borgatti. Dr. Gene Grabiner, whom I'm often mistaken for, though

I am much taller. Verneice Turner who has it all, including an inspired delivery. And Fred Whitehead who embodies the persona of a working poet.

MCL: Some of your favorite venues and why?

MF: The Screening Room for the good times and good spreads provided by Rosemary and Bill Koethe, the Center for Inquiry for its dignity, Dog Ears and Art In a Box for their inclusion, and the Book Corner in

Niagara Falls for the space to stretch out your legs and mind.

If you could go back in time and be a poet when would it be and why?

I'm way too heavily invested in this time and space to go anywhere else. I'd rather not have my myths

exploded by personal contact with them. Also, my grandchildren are starting to become lucid. I

wouldn't want to miss that.

MCL: Finally, promote yourself. What's going on in 2015 for you?

MF: Untitled Theater Company #61 is producing my Greenspan monologue in their Moneylab production in April in NYC. Watch for my novella, Dark Horse, about a Jimmy Griffin type mayor of Buffalo who becomes shackled to terrorist. I hope to self-publish it in the fall or spring of 2016.

Also, check out two of my videos on YouTube:

"Frog Sounds", an animation about a poetry reading that goes haywire

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hINPmupu7GU

"Proust's Revenge" a puppet movie about recondite, cannibalistic marionettes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sR5AVXejU80.

And on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/events/1585961648283947/

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