Felicia Sullivan: From your widely and wonderfully enjoyed Why Things Burn, from reading what I am asking you for when I ask you for breakfast and Why Things Burn, your style of writing is fierce, biting and unabashed. What or perhaps whom was your inspiration (s) for the collection of the poems?

As a collection, I can't say that there's a singular influence per se. The two poems you speak of have very different stories lurking behind them, although they share one thing in common: they both sound like love poems, and are, but neither was written for a particular beloved who inspired it, the way I always imagine love poems to be -- "breakfast" is a love poem for an entire group of poets from all over the country, after performing at the Albuquerque poetry festival. The inspiration for the poem "Why Things Burn" came on a night when I actually did try to learn to fire-eat -- after a poetry show in Tempe, AZ. The emcee tried to teach me how to do blow fire using a mouthful of Bacardi 151 and spitting it out over a lighter. I was a complete failure at it, and kept swallowing it, hence the first line. There are poems in the book (and even love poems) that are for an individual, or closer to the inspiration, but sometimes the flashpoint for a poem has nothing to do with what it's saying.

Felicia Sullivan: You note some of your influences are A.M. Homes, Anne Sexton and Charles Bukowski (none of these writers works can be considered “quiet”) What individual stories or works most influenced you?

DG: I'm not sure I claim them as much as influencial as inspirational. I love their work, but I think it's equally true to say I'm inspired by punk rock, coffee, and feminist theory. Which is to say, the last three probably have a more direct effect on my work. The writers who inspire me most are the writers around me at any given time, from a writing group I was in in San Francisco (Snack Blabbeth) to the women I've toured with (Sister Spit, Thea Hillman). I find that my work often ends up in dialogue with theirs. The poets who have inspired me most, I think, are poets who mix the political and the poetic -- I'm thinking here of Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan. They're the poets who make me believe that poetry is valuable, that poetry does something besides act as a sort of General Foods International Coffee moment "here i am, having deep thoughts and immortalizing this moment," -- that poetry can connect us all, help us push back from the margins if that's where we are, inscribe us into the world if we're invisible, and throw us a lifeline, if we need it.

Felicia Sullivan: You’ve received your MFA from Mills College. For those poets currently pursuing an MFA, in your honest opinion, how valuable was the degree? Do you feel the degree was an investment? An accomplishment?

I don't know how you measure value -- I know I'll be paying off what it cost me to attend grad school until I'm retirement age. I also know that I made a lot of personal sacrifices to do it (working full-time while I went to school, etc.). And it's the best gift I've ever given myself. It wasn't necessarily something I felt I needed to do professionally as much as I needed to do personally; I wanted to make a two-year commitment to my writing, to really make it the focus of my life, and that's what graduate school allowed me to do in a focused, devoted, structured way. So I do see it both as an investment and an accomplishment, but I set out to do it in a particular way. If I'd taken out a $30,000 loan to write for two years, I might have the same feeling about it, but I wanted to be in a community of writers, which a loan wouldn't have offered.

Felicia Sullivan: Many poets shy away from reading their work in public for fear it is too personal. You’ve ferociously and admirably have taken it a step further and ventured into “Hells on Heels”, the SlamAmerica tour and Sister Spit. Please relay your experiences on the tour and do you plan others?

DG: Well, let me first say that I'm not sure anything in my life is particularly interesting -- poetry, to me, is about examining the collision between the personal and the universal, looking at things we share. So when I write about being raped, for example, I don't write about it because I think it's important in particular that I was raped, but that sexual abuse is epidemic in our society -- we're talking about 25% (at least) of the female population in America. There's much work to be done to change our rape culture, and one of the gifts survivors can offer is to recognize each other, and take strength and comfort from it -- that is to say, to refuse to be victimized by it, to refuse to be ashamed. The longer we do not call rape by its name, the longer we allow this behavior to continue, the longer we stay imprisoned by our shame. It's time to give it away, give it back to the culture that made it possible.

So reading is a form of activism, as well as an incredibly powerful chance to connect with a roomful of people, to create something absolutely unique out of breath in a room. That's why I love touring -- it's also amazingly powerful to run all over the country and meet people and fall in love for 24 hours at a time and then run away and do it all over again. It's bizarre, hallucinatory, and wonderful. I've been across and back the country twice, and throughout the west coast, and spent 6 weeks on the road last summer. I'm hoping to go on the road again soon -- though right now, I just have a quick trip to the east coast planned to perform at a couple of colleges.

Felicia Sullivan: How do you feel your first collection of work varies from your second?

DG: In a nutshell: I think “Why Things Burn” is more formally sophisticated, and angrier, and I think “Pelt” is sweeter.

Felicia Sullivan: An obvious and always asked question: What is your method? Do you have a method to your writing? A routine? A ritual?

DG: Nope. I write a lot, throw out most of it, tear my hair out, try and be disciplined, revise like crazy, remind myself to stay honest, give up, start over, and do it again. I try and listen carefully to the world around me -- when I'm writing well, I feel like it's because I'm a good spy. And a lot of the time, if I'm writing a lot, I can't sleep, because my brain won't shut up. It chews on stuff, and I carry it around for a while, let it gestate, and when it's ready to come out, I transcribe it. But I'm not a "well behaved" writer in that I don't sit for an hour a day writing.

Felicia Sullivan: In closing, any brashy words or advice for aspiring poets?

DG: I think that any writer is an aspiring writer -- I mean, if you've already achieved what you set out to do, then you'd stop writing, right? I know I don't feel like I'm done yet. The conversation's only beginning...

a bit about daphne...

Daphne Gottlieb is a walking, talking, life affirming, yarn spinning dynamo. A San Francisco-based poet dedicated to the fine arts of provocation and visibility, she is the author of Why Things Burn (Soft Skull Press) and Pelt (Odd Girls Press). She has been widely published in journals and anthologies, including nerve.com, The Exquisite Corpse and Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry. She was a team semifinalist in the 1998 National Poetry Slam. Additionally, she toured coast to coast as half of engaging and thought-provoking poetry duo "Hell on Heels," and was featured on the national SlamAmerica bus tour and with notorious all-girl spoken wordsters Sister Spit. Her festival performances include SXSW, the Albuquerque Poetry Festival, and the Better Living Through Amplification Festival. Daphne's passion and eloquent determination to illuminate the darker sides of human existence have won her accolades, rave reviews and groupies galore. She lives in San Francisco, where she continues to stitch together the ivory tower and the gutter using her tongue. She is also a finalist for the lesbian poetry in the lambda lit awards.

Check out Daphne's site at: http://www.mindspring.com/~daphne.g/You can BUY her books there as well!

From 2.28.02 San Francisco Bay Guardian, Lit Section, page 10: Why do things burn? We can explain the phenomenon as a purely chemical reaction, a mixing and colliding of elements. I may not understand the language of science, but I do know that to make a fire, you need a spark. Local performance poet and former Sister Spit member Daphne Gottlieb is surely that, and Why Things Burn is a blazing inferno. From unnamed girls found dead on the Mission streets to a mother of a stillborn to little girls who learn from Barbie how to stay still when their fathers crawl into their beds at night, Gottlieb's heroines are fierce, and she tells their stories without flinching and without apology. In their voices and her own, she maps love, sex, passion and death on an electric grid that's vulnerable to blackouts but surges with a dangerous power. Though electricity can cause unexpected fires, Gottlieb knows well that the most consuming blazes are the ones we start ourselves; she admits in the title poem, "I forget the difference/between seduction/and arson." She ends with "1,000 tulips/burned to death/in Amsterdam... All night, you held my alibis/so softly/like taboos/already broken." There is no simple answer to why things burn, but Gottlieb shows what happens when they do --- and perhaps that is more important. -- Alissa Chadburn