by Pete Miller

One of my only regrets about getting my MFA in Poetry from Arizona State University is graduating before Robert Krut arrived. Almost immediately, I started getting dispatches from Tempe about this guy who everyone seemed to love. Although it took a few years before finally I got to meet Bob, it only took a minute to know the reports were true. Not only was he the nicest guy ever, it was easy to bond with a fellow east coast poet who had spent just as much time as I had at our local coffee spot (too much) while processing insights on verse and life gleaned from our brilliant professors, Norman Dubie, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Jeannine Savard, and Alberto Rios.

We shared a lot in common, but what really interested me were the differences between our experiences. We may have haunted the same bars, shops, and classrooms, but it was at a different time and, as Allan Gusinger, another poet from that scene, once remarked, “Change is the word of the day forever.” The people and places Bob and I had in common were, as the Thai say, “same same but different.” It was only when I read his poems that I realized exactly how different this “same same” world can seem when Bob is your guide. In a Robert Krut poem, you can recognize the signposts of shared waking life in 21^st Century America, the circling helicopters and dive bars and roadside litter, but, much like his cinematic hero David Lynch, Bob’s genius is one of de-familiarization: crows pretend to sing, the waves in the restaurant’s mural of the ocean keep changing, and even gravity can’t be trusted. I’ve never lived in the same city at the same time as Robert Krut, but every time I’ve read one of his books, I’ve had the uncanny sensation that the dream-like world of his poems has slipped into my real world. After I’ve spent some time with Bob’s writing, I’m more alert to the strangeness of everyday objects and less certain of the reality that surrounds me, a sensation that, perhaps counterintuitively, makes everything seem even more real, brighter, more intense. To me, that effect is the mark of a great artist. I’m happy to report that Krut’s newest collection, Oh Oblivion (Codhill Press, 2025), is just as reality-altering as his four previous books. I was excited to have the opportunity to ask him some questions over email about dreaming, Los Angeles, and writing without fear. Here’s our exchange: 

Pete Miller: Bob, I really enjoyed Oh Oblivion and getting to spend some time in its strange world, disconcerting as it sometimes is. Reading it, I was reminded of how Norman Dubie compared Hieronymus Bosch to a radical preacher who tries to terrify sinners into righteousness with horrifying imagery. Like The Garden of Earthly Delights, your poems often present some pretty scary, through surreal, scenarios, including sewn-up jaws and birds that “feed on your liver.” Do you think your work is sometimes attempting to frighten the reader? Trying to warn us? If so, to what end? 

Robert Krut: Ah! Not frighten—at least that’s not my intention—but to simply show, and to hopefully connect by sharing the images. It’s as if we’re standing together and I’m leaning over to say, you see this, too, right?  and we experience it communally. I suppose some of the images can be scary, to use your word, but the goal is walk toward them together, not run away.  And as for warning people, I would never presume to have the authority to warn anyone in a poem, and that can also set up a more hierarchal position in a poem than an interactive one. There are sometimes warnings that appear in these poems, but those are pieces where the poem warning me about the world around us, what is happening, and what may be coming.

Side note: not surprisingly, I love seeing the Norman reference here. As always, his voice and advice are in the stitching of these poems.

I really appreciate that answer and it makes complete sense, especially when I consider the intimacy of so many of your poems. Even if I find some of the images “scary”, I do always feel like I’m in the company of a good guide!

Some of my favorite poems in Oh Oblivion were written in response to photography by T. Chick McClure and paintings by Linda Saccoccio. Can you talk about your approach to ekphrasis? What draws you to a work you want to write about and how do you think those pieces relate to the rest of the poems in the book? 

Their work was so invigorating while I was writing this new collection—I’m glad you liked the poems! Their work is so different: Chick is a photographer who captures very concrete, evocative moments in time, and Linda is a painter, working in abstract, bold colors. I’ve known Chick for years, and have been in awe of what he does (we have a huge piece of his framed in our home, in fact). Linda is a new friend who I met up in Santa Barbara (where I teach), whose passion for art and camaraderie really inspired me in this process. Last summer, coincidentally, I worked with both of them simultaneously, and it was a real shot in the arm for writing.  

Working with both of these artists, it was less traditional ekphrasis and more “spark sharing.” Chick would send me a photo and one image in it, or the tone of the scene, or movement of an object, would act like a fuse to start writing. Similarly, Linda sent a handful of pieces, and I would sit with each for a bit, and the way the colors played off each other, or lines overlapped, or shapes curved away from the borders would lead me to particular concepts or phrases. Some of her work led to entirely new pieces, and some helped me complete poems that had become stuck. 

I’m lucky to be a part of an upcoming book that Linda has coming out that features some of her collaborations; similarly, Chick and I are looking for ways to share our process. I’m grateful to them both.

I can’t wait to see that book! Do you have any advice for poets who want to enter into dialogue with visual art? 

Talk to your friends in the arts! You’ll be surprised how hungry people are for collaboration. Short of that, go to galleries—spend time with art and see what you connect with, and what gives you that jolt to write.

In the poem “Dancing Underwater” you write that “a dream can’/be skipped—it will always/be lived elsewhere.” I love that idea but also find it to be rather disconcerting! How does your dream life relate to, and compare with, your poems? What roles do choice and randomness play in your writing process? 

Oh, there’s definitely a lot of overlap there. That being said, I think of the bleeding of dream life into the poems as sorts of morsels that show up, or ribbons of an image that weave into the “real world” around the poems. I love that you mentioned our teachers in the intro here, because once again, one of them comes to mind: early in my grad school years, I had written a poem that was, basically, a glorified dream recap, and the incredible Beckian Fritz Goldberg (who appears in the new book’s epigraph, in fact, from one of my all-time favorite poems by any writer) said to me, “look, Bob, no one really gives a rat’s ass about someone else’s dreams.”  (In all honesty, I can’t remember if she used “rat’s ass,” “a damn,” or “a crap,” but it was something in that wonderful vein). It’s a point well taken, and I try to avoid just “writing dreams,” but instead sense how they infiltrate daily life and present that.

As for choice and randomness, they play a big role—I’d just flip the order. I’m constantly stumbling into a random image, or phrase, or group of words, and poems grow out of those frequently.  But once the larger, often amorphous shape comes into view, choices take over and over and over to edit and revise.

I can totally hear Beckian saying that! She has a way of cutting through the b.s. to encourage her students to get the core of the image and the truth of the poem, which is something you clearly learned how to do quite well.  She’s simply the best.

A lot of your poems seem to take place in a liminal space between nightmares and insomnia, trance states and sleepwalking, a zone where ghosts are common, the physical body is mutable, and a speaker demands to see the tape that “proves this all is real.” I’m curious, how has reading and writing poetry shaped your views on the nature of reality, especially the supernatural and the afterlife? 

Poetry, both in writing and reading, has entirely opened me to those spaces. When I first started reading the poems that would change my life, they showed me to watch for images, and the images beyond those, to be open to see coincidences as deliberate, and to look at the world as a mosaic of tiles from waking life, dream spaces, and the world beyond this one. “Supernatural” just becomes “natural.” I often think of it as two photo negatives in a loose stack, where they share images.

Thinking about this sort of poetry, my mind always goes to Denis Johnson. I realize that at this point it is almost clichéd for a writer of a certain age to mention his work, but it did truly change my writing life, and the way I viewed both poetry and the world around it. His poem “The Veil” continues to be the fountain for everything I love in a poem, and how I try—try—to approach writing.

That’s great. It probably won’t surprise you that Beckian introduced me to Denis Johnson in the first class I ever took from her. I love seeing how he continues to be such an influential poet.  

Some spiritual writers say that people can either rise above normal consciousness through meditation or sink below it through drugs, alcohol, or other forms of self-numbing. I’m interested to know how you’d describe your conception of oblivion. Is it a place of seductive forgetting that brings about unconscious doom? A trickster muse? A state of mind? How has your relationship to oblivion shaped your poetry? 

While I don’t want to say too much here, as I hope someone reading the book comes to their own sort of image of what it’s like to stand in that space, I will say that, to me, it is removed from the concepts of “rising above” or “sinking below”—it’s a horizontal step, not a vertical one, to a space free of those distinctions completely. In terms of how it has shaped the poems, I will say that allowing myself to exist in that space (or attempt to, at least) has often freed me to breathe, to see where the writing wants to go, to remove expectation and constraint. You mention the idea of meditation, and I suppose it is similar to that in a lot of ways, finding a place of silence, or at the very most, some low white noise or wind, to exist in for a while.

Bob, you grew up in New Jersey but have been in Southern California for as long as I’ve known you. How do you think living in L.A. has influenced your work? Who are some other poets or artists from Los Angeles whose work has shaped how you experience the city? 

I love Los Angeles. (And yes, I know there is a song about it). It’s such a misunderstood city—any time a friend or family member has an inkling to visit, I am thrilled to have them here and show them what makes it so special (much like when you were here two years ago). In terms of how it’s influenced my writing, the simple fact that so many people are involved in creative pursuits (from so many angles) here is inspiring and always sparks work.  

I was lucky, early on in moving here, to meet some people who really led me to Los Angeles writers who would become some of my favorites. My first reading in LA was through the late, great reading series Rhapdomonacy, where I met the incredible writer Wendy Ortiz. Not only is Wendy one of my favorites (check out the recent re-releases of her three books that just came out through Northwestern University Press), but following her series all those years ago, and honestly, her social media, I discovered so many of my favorite LA writers, like Sarah Maclay and Vickie Vértiz (who I am now lucky enough to teach with at UCSB).  At that same early reading, I met my friend Jerry Garcia (who we sadly lost last year) who introduced me to Lynne Thompson when he booked us both for a reading 15 years ago. She is incredible, and was recently our city’s Poet Laureate.  

Courtesy of my job being 90 miles away (literally), getting older, and some good old fashioned social awkwardness, I’m not out and about on the scene as much these days, but follow the great writing coming out of the city on the page, if not in person as much. Oh, one of my current LA favorites is someone you introduced me to through A Dozen Nothing, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo. So many great LA writers. 

Your enthusiasm for L.A. certainly rubbed off on me. Any theories as to why it’s such a great city for poetry?

Because there isn’t one “LA,” and the fact that there isn’t one kind of “LA poem,” but hundreds of unique voices, the city’s literature is infused with energy.  It’s hard to not get inspired.  

Your fellow New Jerseyan Allen Ginsberg famously wrote about “shopping for images.” Where do you seek your images? Are there any in Oh Oblivion that readers might be surprised came from real life?

Ginsberg!  My old pen pal!  I’m exaggerating a bit, but I did write him a letter in high school, and he wrote back—it’s naturally one of my prized possessions…

I seek images everywhere and try to be open to them at any given moment. There are poems in the new books, in all the books, really, that grew from images in a vestibule downtown to an emptied-out glass on my kitchen counter. Nowhere is off limits, and there isn’t a single space that doesn’t have the potential for something evocative.

In terms of a poem from the new book that may have surprising origins, the poem “Sound is Light, Light Confesses” has a buried cassette tape in the soil below the flower bushes. That grew directly out of something that happened when we were remodeling our front yard landscaping—when digging up two margins of lawn to create a walkway of flowers, we found an old photo of me, like a passport photo, from years before we lived in the house, buried in the soil. True story, and it led to the idea of old objects reappearing from the ground.

Oh my god, that would only happen to you! I would’ve screamed.

I’ve had some odd experiences like that over the years, but I still can’t quite explain that one. At least the roses that grew in there are beautiful.

Your poem “Go with Terror” describes a city where “All of the neighbors have been/watching each other through blinds/for weeks, for months”. I couldn’t help but think of the height of COVID, when, in some ways, the world became very much like a Robert Krut poem! How would say pandemic impacted your writing? 

I had been sort of fascinated by the way neighborhoods, and neighbors, interact for a while, so it was a sort of natural extension of that when those pockets of town were cutting off from each other due to necessity. In the book that came out right before the pandemic, there were actually a few poems in this area that now look oddly on-point, even though they were more about a general, spiritual, political lockdown.  

But during that period, there were definitely moments from the real world that felt like images from a poem, and some of those did wind up in pieces. The one that comes to mind immediately is the convenience store at the end of our street being closed for weeks, but someone forgot to turn off the “open” sign, so despite no signs of life, that sign just stayed lit all hours of the day and night.

By the way, fun trivia (for only us, maybe): I don’t know if you remember, but that phrase, “Go With Terror,” came from our good friend (and text-thread-mate) Eric Killough, from a conversation about technology, which of course, has nothing to do with the poem itself, but I loved the phase. Something similar happened with the poem “Too Old for New Devils” from the book, as my wonderful life partner Sarah was texting with our friend Ben—also about technology, oddly—and said she was “too old for new devils.” I suppose I was walking right into titles this time around.

Those are great titles. How often do titles come first for you? 

Rarely—I love coming up with titles, and often make lists of contenders for poems, but typically that comes afterward. Every once in a while, like in these two cases, a phrase will simply sound too perfect to not try using, and I let it act as a seed for the poem meant to develop.

One distinct characteristic of your work throughout your career is your use of second person. How should the reader think of the “you” in these poems? Is it always the same “you”? 

I’d love for the reader to think of the “you” however suits them best, of course. For me, though, I’ve finally realized that I use the second person at times where the poem seems to be speaking to me. When the first person is used, it is a more deliberate attempt from me to speak to the reader. It goes back to your very first question—if there is a poem taking a stance of “warning” or sermonizing at all, it is directed to myself in the second person, whereas a piece seeking connection, sharing, that is typically in the first person. In the writing, this tone tends to reveal itself and guide me to the choice.

The book concludes with “Oh Amnesia”, a poem that speaks against creative doubt and self-censorship, reminding poets that though the past and its ghosts are there when we need them, we don’t have to be haunted by them. Your poems utilize elements of magical realism, science fiction, mythology, film noir, and body horror in a way that oftentimes seems very removed from daily living, but I wonder, are you ever encountering your own personal ghosts in these poems? Is there a way to read these poems as insights into your own history and psychology? 

Since I have most likely rambled quite a bit in earlier responses, I’ll be more succinct here. To answer your two questions: yes, and yes.

(I’ll expand just a bit: I appreciate that you mention the use of those various genres and styles and vantage points. Honestly, I don’t know how else to make sense of the daily living you mention without all of that. How else can we get through the day without calling on all these visions?)

Good point, Bob. Once again, you’re broadening my perception of the world! 

Thanks for this opportunity to talk to you about your work. And congratulations on writing another great book.

---

Robert Krut’s latest book is Oh Oblivion (Codhill Press, 2025).  He is also the author of Watch Me Trick Ghosts, The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All on Fire (recipient of the Codhill Poetry Prize), This Is the Ocean, and The Spider Sermons. His work has appeared widely, in journals like Blackbird, Gulf Coast, Passages North, The Cimmaron Review, and more. He teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Writing Program and College of Creative Studies, and lives in Los Angeles. 
Pete Miller is the author of the chapbook Born Soap (H_NGM_N), and the microchap Midwestern Hortus Siccus (rinky dink press). Pete lives in Omaha, Nebraska where he works in homeless services. He is the co-editor of the poetry webzine A Dozen Nothing.