Peter Anderson: Where'd you grow up?

Thaddeus Conti: I like to think I'm still growing up, but well I grew up basically at my grandparents' house in Hog Alley in Old Metairie, Greater New Orleans.

PA: Who are you reading right now?

TC: We've kind of been having poetry readings at David [Rowe]'s house, and at my house, and at Joseph [Bienvenu]'s house, informal readings, where we just pick up a book and say look check this out. Actually, I can't tell you what book or collection is really working on me--definitely the Yale Younger Poets [Series Book] by [Alan] Dugan, that is something I'm trying to get through. What has hurt me recently is [something] that I haven't written that somebody has been able to express more than me and I just have to give accolades to, and it was a Neruda poem , and it just really killed me; it just sent me reeling, you know, that I didn't do it.

PA: Stole the words off your tongue.

TC: He did more than that; he said everything you think of when you think of a woman. He's a man's man; he definitely said what I never had the chance to say, and I could copy the poem and memorize it and recite it at poetry readings and that wouldn't be a bad idea. It was so good, the only reason I didn't read it the other night [was] there were like four fourteen year old girls in the audience, and I didn't want to ruin their world.

PA: You mentioned the other day how you didn't want to be a poet limited to a particular region. Can you expand on that?

TC: When I say something [such as] 'the city,' I think this city, so then why say New Orleans when I could say the city and let it be for other people to grasp. The problem with that, where it led me, is to a place [of] making up new words that would not be grasped. But at first I was looking to be understood, completely understood, and now I could really give a damn about whether I'm understood or not.

PA: Let's talk about your word coinages. You use words like "shamanibalistic" and "antiquasi fornitado" in some of your poems. Are these words a way of reaching out, a way to capture something?

TC: Sometimes it just comes out like that, and sometimes when it's coming out, I'm still twisting it and forming it. I think, what do I want to say? The emotion is almost undefinable; it's like an exorcise [sic]. When you give yourself an emotion, you have an emotion- you've had like a post traumatic thing happen- well they want you to think of that and think how's that make your body feel and what does that look like, what shape is that emotion what color is that to make it more real so you can like understand yourself a little more. Well that's what we're trying to do with writing: we're trying to pull that emotion past a shape, past a color- we're trying to do all that at once and we just want somebody else to say, I may not know how you came to this but I understand and I really think it's beautiful. But I guess making up the words is like I don't always know the right words, and one guy said when I was reading one [of the poems], "is that a real word?" I said, "Well, yeah, to me it is." I just thought he was a square, man, because it was like, "Don't you understand? Don't you ever have a feeling that you can't process? I mean if you don't, I feel sorry for you." If you can put a price on everything that ever happened to you and you can account for every little thing, then where's the mystery, where's the magic, where's the myth, where's all that stuff? And as much as words are black and white, once you intimate them, it's a whole new world: it gives birth to the word.