(photo: Rose Mattrey)

Why you should know who he is: Poet Ethan Paquin is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Medaille College and the author of three books of poems: The Makeshift (Stride Publications 2002), Accumulus (Salt Publishing 2003) and The Violence (Ahsahta Press 2005). His work has been anthologized in several collections and has appeared in numeorus journals, including The Boston Review, Verse, Canadian Review of Books and Contemporary Poetry Review, for which he is contributing editor. He is founder and editor of the journal Slope (www.slope.org). This spring the New Hampshire native was named a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s prestigious William Carlos William Award.

Why do you choose to live in Buffalo? What inspires you here? “Well, I moved here to be able to get a teaching job teaching poetry. I’m a New Englander through and through, it’s in my blood, it’s my homeland and I’m obsessed with it. I write about it always, but since I’ve moved here I’ve found this region kind of wiggling its way into my soul. I think a lot about the lake actually. I’ve been using the word ‘lake’ a lot in my poems for the past few years.”

You were recently a runner-up for the William Carlos Williams Award. How does it feel to be recognized for your work? “It was a shot in the dark. For the Williams award your small press or university publisher sends off books on your behalf. Usually they don’t even tell you, it’s just done. It’s nice to be recognized, especially by a poet and thinker as important as Marjorie Wallace—she was the judge. And it was an interesting scene, the poetry society is a great, if poetically conservative, organization that seems to be getting a little more eclectic in its tastes. But, yeah, that was a real surprise.”

You’re very young. Do you find your youth factors into your poetry? “I’ve always felt old for my age. So, yeah, I’m thinking a lot about my mortality and where exactly I’m heading and what all of this is adding up to. I’m thinking a lot about my grandfather, someone I’m very close to who is kind of fading away and that is kind of living with me as I continue to write. I think about whether I’m on the right path, whether I’m good. I’m really concerned with that: being good. I’m not a religious person but goodness, and temptation, they’re both living with me.”

Do you feel you can talk about God with more freedom because you aren’t very religious? “Yeah. I’ve always been into the search. I think there’s a real integrity to the searcher. The believer doesn’t necessarily lack, but there’s beauty in the struggle of trying to find something bigger than all of this.”

What inspires you? “My main inspiration—and this is something that I think is obvious and something that I talk about all the time when asked—are the visual arts. American art history, late 19th-, early 20th-century American painters are huge factors in who I am, how I view the world and in what I write.”

In your book The Violence a lot of the poems are presented in ways that make them visually appealing. Why? “I want to try and fuse the literary and the visual arts, I want to use the page as a canvas. I want the blankness of the page and the silences and the gaps to be just as meaningful as the texts. I think silence is just as important as speech.”

You have a poem in The Violence called “Poetry Is No Cure.” Do you believe that? “I just don’t think anything is a cure. I think we’re always struggling and striving for what’s beyond where we are. Poetry or any kind of artistic expression is just a way station. That’s my big struggle—I don’t really know where I am, all I know is I’m here writing these poems. Sometimes they make me feel better, most of the time they don’t.”

Water is a recurring image in your poems. Does water have some particular significance for you? “I think in one of the poems God is being equated to a lake, which is the vast grayness that is really appealing to me. I think it’s just really metaphoric for the search. It’s an overwhelming force, but when viewed up close, there’s also something very reassuring. I think that moving here was the turning point—I move out here, there’s no mountains to write about. The things that I adhere to are the lakes, because they’re so foreign to me. The lakes out here are these foreign objects that I have to struggle with.”

Do you think that’s what poetry is to you? Trying to understand something? “Well, there’s always a search going on in my writing. What am I supposed to be doing, where am I supposed to be, what am I supposed to believe, who and what am I supposed to love. When and if I give in to temptation. Am I good? If I’m not, how do I become good?”

Do you miss New Hampshire; do you ever plan on going back? “Oh, I miss it dearly. I feel like something has been ripped from me. It’s where I need to be; it’s where everyone that I know is. I like Buffalo a lot; in fact I think it has a lot to offer. As much as I like this town, though, I can’t escape where I’m from, and, yeah, I do hope to go back someday.”

Is there anything else you want to say to our readers? “I think a lot about this city and this region, even though I’m not from here; I think this city is definitely a treasure and people need to appreciate it much more. It’d be nice to see more people taking chances in town. As an outsider who is now on the inside, the inferiority complex that people have is just really strange to me. I think this is a really great town with really great people and a very cohesive artistic community. I want to see people acknowledge that more and be prouder.”