Sean Kilpatrick's Anorexic Chlorine Sextoy Museum

Shane Jones Interview

2010-08-01T01:19:00.002-04:00

Shane Jones is the author of the marvelous Light Boxes, The Failure Six, A Cake Appeared and more.

SK: What cartoons or television shows did you enjoy as a child?

Shane Jones: I was really into He-Man. There's a picture of me as a child and I'm sitting with all my He-Man figures, vehicles, and even the castle gray skull. Do you remember the castle gray skull? I think you could talk into it and it made your voice sound really creepy, like Skeletor. Skeletor was such a great bad guy because he had a certain humility. He wasn't just pure evil, even though he looked the part. I wish I could think of more, but I'm a little hung over right now.

SK: What kind of toys did you play with?

Shane Jones: I think I just answered your first question with what should be my second answer. I'm really blowing this one. Ummm, I pretty much had everything. My mother bought me a new toy each week, after my weekly tap-dance lesson. Jesus, I sound like some rich kid, but I wasn't. I remember digging a massive and intricate series of trenches through the backyard for my G.I. Joe figures. It was impressive. I think I did that after my daily tea time with mother.

SK: Did you make up any games?

Shane Jones: I had an imaginary friend who I only talked to when I was going the bathroom. It was the only time he appeared, always in this one corner near the tub. I forgot his name. I'd have really long conversations with him. I remember building a tree-fort that got so big the neighbors complained. There was this one part called the "Yo Board." The Yo Board was a flimsy piece of wood spray painted orange and it said Yo in big letters. The game was you had to sit on the Yo Board and bounce up three times without it breaking. It was terrifying. It never broke. If it did break, you'd probably fall to your death.

SK: Did you have a fort?

Shane Jones: I did it again. My answer is above. I built a lot of tents out of sheets and pillows. Me and my friends had a game called Sock War where we threw balled up socks at each other. Sounds kind of lame, but it was so much fun. You can really throw a balled up sock.

SK: When did you first write?

Shane Jones: I think I was 15 and wrote a poem called "House of Hades." The last word in each line rhymed. Mostly "Dead, Head, Bed, etc." It was really dark.

SK: What books got you going back then?

Shane Jones: The earliest thing I read was Emily Dickinson, which lead me into a bunch of poetry. I had a really strong reaction to Anne Sexton. I still do. I read her poems and they were so wild, so vulnerable and just insanely creative. I loved her. I'd read her poems and try to create the same kind of raw feeling.

SK: Did you like school?

Shane Jones: No. I never liked school. I was so average at everything it was depressing. I actually finished 200 out of 400 in my graduating high school class. I always finished exactly in the middle of everything. In gym class, they'd put me with the shitty players for basketball, or flag football, and I'd be the best. Then they'd move me to the really good kids, and I'd be the worst. Always in the middle. Insanely average. I think I'm saying the word "insane" a lot in these questions.

SK: Have you ever been lost somewhere?

Shane Jones: Is this a philosophical question? Or like, actually lost somewhere. I feel like a lost person most of the time. I don't even know what I'll do after I'm done typing this email.

SK: What kind of secrets were there then?

Shane Jones: Well, I'm a secretive person. I hide things. I can be sneaky. This is something I've tried to work on, because I'm married, and no one wants to be with someone like that. The worst secret, when I was a kid, was when I stole one of my mother's rings. I don't even know why I stole it. She couldn't find it and I never told her. I just kept the ring and looked at it a lot. It was a terrible and great secret that I had it.

SK: Was your recent tour fun?

Shane Jones: Lots of fun. I got to meet some freaks. The turn-out was pretty low in most cities, but that's okay. Just the idea that someone would take the time to come see me read is really flattering, even a little uncomfortable. I would do it again, for sure, but not anytime soon. I only did like 7 readings, in six cities, and was exhausted.

SK: What please more about the novel you're finishing now?

Shane Jones: I recently finished a draft of a novel. It's much longer than Light Boxes and more messy and dreamy and violent. It's a more dense and challenging book compared to Light Boxes which I think is kind of simple, but in a good way. The book deals largely with imagination and insanity versus reality, and how those things can be interchangeable.

SK: Doesn't Adam Robinson bleed beautifully?

Shane Jones: He does. I saw him punch a poem once and his fist hit a wall. His knuckles bleed this liquid of sapphires and emeralds. It was bizarre. He smiled and offered me and some others to drink his beautiful blood. No one had any.

Sam Pink Interview

2010-06-21T02:44:00.001-04:00

Sam Pink is an artist past death, his or yours, who operates blood as plays. His work is published in Unsaid, Everyday Genius, No Colony, Robot Melon, Columbia Poetry Review, Exquisite Corpse, Nano Fiction, Dogzplot and more.

SK: How much do write daily?

sam pink: anywhere from one to six hours. sometimes i'm too depressed and sometimes i'm too unfocused. i try to write when i am feeling a certain mood. i don't know what the mood is called but if you can imagine a monster made of shit doing a front flip through the air and catching a frisbee at some point during the flip, then you already know.

SK: What do you write with?

sam pink: an old laptop with microsoft word. the keyboard has had a full glass of iced tea spilled on it so some of the buttons are crunchy but i just tap them hard a few times and they eventually work. i also like to print things out and use a pen or pencil over the printed pages but printing shit is expensive so i try doing it less.

SK: When did you start?

sam pink: i think that the answer is that i started paying more attention and time to writing about four years ago, maybe five. i used to write things down on the backs of coupons whenever on break at the bagel place where formerly employed. i just thought, "that doesn't count."

SK: What got you into it?

sam pink: (in order of influence) money, cars, women, fame, drugs, weapons and paranoia.

SK: How much do you revise?

sam pink: i think that the answer to this question is that once i start something i am immediately doing something like revision. that seems true no matter what i do. once i start i'm making choices. but i think that i consider the revision process to be an amount that is a lot for me.

SK: What are you reading now?

sam pink: now there is an overlap. i read "totality and infinity" by levinas and then after that i'm now reading "writing and difference" by derrida because it has an essay about levinas in it. i tried reading "writing and difference" two other times and only enjoyed it a little. actually i would say that i did not enjoy it all, and i would go on to say that i stopped reading it the two times before. now i seem to be enjoying it more. if i am being honest, there seems to be patterns where i enjoy reading and want to do it a lot and sometimes when i don't care about reading anything. somewhere in between the books i already listed, i read "the kasahara school of nihilism" by ben brooks.

SK: Is there an influence of music on your work and what music did you grow up listening to, listen to now?

sam pink: i used to listen to music a lot while writing. now i dont. i think that music influences how i edit. i like to read the work in terms of beats and accents and that's how i decide to change word order or phrasing. as for listening to music, i wont list a bunch of bands but i like noise music a lot. i would like for the writing to reproduce the feeling of the song "burn your house down" by wolf eyes.

SK: Do you watch many movies, any movies act as influence?

sam pink: i dont watch movies very much. i have a big thing of vhs tapes like "bloodsport" and "commando" and "mr nanny" and sometimes i put those on. i dont get excited about movies for some reason.

SK: I have trouble getting into philosophy, who's the best meanest fuck in philosophy?

sam pink: i think right now, i am only interested in nietzsche and heidegger. i like nietzsche because he writes with a happy anger and his work is tonally dynamic for philosophy. i like heidegger because i haven't read anyone with thought processes like his. so it's a good combination i think and i like to let it indirectly influence what i write: nietzsche for the wild sweeping joyful negativity and heidegger for depth of thought.

SK: Your plays are amazing, do you have playwright inspirations? No one writes plays like that.

sam pink: the only playwright i truly admire is eugene o neill. his plays make me feel uncomfortable. i'm not sure about inspiration though. also, i think technically those plays (in "the self esteem holocaust comes home") aren't even plays, they're more like hybrid short stories/plays. i wasn't really interested in writing plays in terms of craft. i dont know. i recently wrote a full length play that is actually a play. it is called "willis." i have sent it out to a few places and it has been rejected by two so far. for some reason i dont see it getting published. it's ok, burger king is hiring.

SK: Are the police our friends?

sam pink: i'm not trying to be cool or whatever in saying this, but i feel genuine hatred and violence towards cops. i feel instantly violated by them. i've seriously considered attacking them when even mildly interrogated. one time i got pulled over by some cops and they started accusing me of stealing things and i hadn't so i let them check the trunk of the car i was using and they found nothing and i smiled at them and said "have a nice night officers" and one walked towards me like he was going to fight me but the other one held him back. i feel very paranoid about people controlling me and so when i see police or think about them or get asked questions by them i want to kill them or hurt them. i realize some police are probably good people or whatever but the reality to me is that only an asshole would want to be in that position. policemen (way more than policewomen) are insecure assholes with a need to exact petty power over others. i have avoided the police in almost every illegal thing i've done. it is satisfying.

SK: Do you self-mutilate?

sam pink: i used to cut myself and burn myself. i have scars on my arm. i would cut myself and lick the blood before masturbating. i think now i do it more through thinking paranoid thoughts and being negative to myself and living negatively.

SK: Have you killed an animal?

sam pink: yes when i was younger i killed a lot of animals. i killed a bunny, some frogs, some snakes, some birds, a duck (not sure if it died but i put a marble in a slingshot and hit it from very far away and it seemed hurt badly), i lit some things on fire. et cetera. it made me feel very bad to do it but i wanted to do it. i dont do it anymore and it makes me sad to think about although who knows i guess i dont care. the part in the play "the human body as a fireplace" where the two people are in the alley and the one is talking about watching his dad shoot the racoon, that part is true, and it is about me and my dad.

SK: Are there pearls in the ghetto?

sam pink: yes. and heroin. and cocaine. there are also modified AKs. there are transsexuals. near where i live there is a short lesbian with a bad sunburn and she walks around threatening people. there are also people making bird sounds to alert gangs when people walk down alleys. the pearl in the ghetto is the ovum of an HIV crackhead.

SK: What should we do to get lockjaw?

sam pink: have faith in the holy lord, whose name is in your heart and whose lightning is your hand during bad actions.

John Korn Interview

2010-05-22T07:31:00.006-04:00

John Korn is the author of Television Farm.

SK: Please tell me about I took some down with miss handsome. Where were you then? Where now?

John Korn: It starts with a feeling I guess, sadness with happy playfulness induced by memories, laughing about it, then I just started imagining this surreal universe that would illustrate the feelings. I think a lot of what I was writing then starts with a feeling that is hanging on me and then I start to imagine concrete things to illustrate it. Like if you just write you are happy, maybe that doesn't resonate, but if you can create a world that projects happiness or sadness then you have something that will let you into the strangeness or beauty of that feeling, and it hopefully will also induce thought. I mean this is what I was trying to do, and I'm not going to say if I succeeded or not. I like the process of exploring and creating it. I like junk and at the time worked with second hand junk and envisioned a sort of strange landscape with orange, red, yellowish lighting. Then I added characters that just kind of get conjured up, don't know how it happens. Miss Handsome just arrived there and I started talking like her to myself and then added her commentary. Then I liked the idea of god fucking his own creation. Not being able to control himself. Honestly, I think a lot of sketch comedy influenced that. Monty Python, Kids In The Hall. Where am I now from it? I don't know. I haven't wrote a long narrative surreal poem like that in awhile. It's something I would love to try again. I can't do it on command. You have to be writing a lot to get there. And I have not been writing as much as I was then. But fragments of stories happen like that in my head often. But they are too long for a single poem and are hard to write. I don't know where I will go, but I think you get the idea of where I would like to. To do something that is surreal, narrative, but longer. But right now I am just working on one poem at a time. Mostly snapshots of my life and things I see. That feels right at the moment.

SK: How much did you rewrite “miss handsome?”

John Korn: I wrote that awhile ago, hombre. I was still a slacker cashier. If I recall correctly I didn't rewrite it at all. It pretty much came out like that fairly quick. One night I was working in the second hand store and started amusing myself by writing it in my head because I was bored. When I got home I wrote it out. Like I said it's been awhile. But I do recall that maybe while recording it I improvised more into it while reading it on the spot and later added it into the written version.

SK: How much do you rewrite?

John Korn: It depends on the poem I guess. But mostly I edit as I go along. So, I will write a few lines and I will re-read it and if I feel I need to rewrite I will do so before proceeding. I make edits after I get to the end. Sometimes I will rearrange the order. But very rarely will I put something aside and come back and rewrite it over and over, though I have. There are always spelling errors that I never catch so in that sense I have to rewrite much.

SK: Does meaning influence you line by line or as connected thoughts before the process?

John Korn: Hmmmm. It really depends on the poem, what state I'm in. Both. None. Most times there is a small half formed idea, and as I start writing it is like a conversation and then something starts to form. I don't think I plan much before the process.

SK: Has social work brought your writing any street or jesus?

John Korn: None. I mean, I don't know. I only wrote a few poems about work so far. Working this job (with people suffering from mental illness) you meet a lot of people who have been through great discrimination and have no one and everyone thinks they are worthless so you really have to be compassionate to try and assist them. It can be inspiring to see some of them overcome it and get jobs and have a social life regardless, and heart breaking to see them drown in it. Also annoying to see them exploit it. There is a lot more responsibility involved than say when I was a slacker clerk and it changes you. I still am prone to slack but you see the consequences of it more clearly. Your daily interactions with people cover a wide spectrum of topics and can get pretty involved, both humorous and saddening and, since it is with people suffering from mental illnesses, strange. Very strange. It certainly can drag you down and make you not want to go out afterward because socially you are drained as fuck. The job also gives you a more fucked up sense of humor and in other regards gave me less social awkwardness because after you talk to a schizophrenic going through some heavy shit, other fun social interactions suddenly are not so intimidating. You really look at the world differently. So many things and I'm sure this will all come out in poems.

SK: What are you reading?

John Korn: Finished The Colorado Kid by Stephen King. Now reading Ron Androla, Daryl Rogers, Anne Sexton, some e.e. cummings, articles on the bp oil shit, Roger Ebert articles. Would like to read Neruda and some more detective novels.

SK: What reading sparked your way?

John Korn: Listening to Nick Cave, Tom Waits, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Beck. Reading Ron Androla, Stephen Dobyns, Albert Huffstickler, T. S. Elliot, Anne Sexton, Charles Bukowski, Leonard Cohen, Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Mike Boyle, Daryl Rogers, Harper Lee, S.E. Hinton, Didi Menendez, etc.

SK: Do you have any manuscripts ready?

John Korn: No! Sadly. Though I have never stopped writing poetry there was a long break and slowly working back into it. Very rusty. I have a few in my head. They have been there awhile and still excite me so I feel they will come out when ready. I'm interested in doing a series of poems that would tell a sort of non-linear story all together. I hope sooner than later. I'm lazy and get distracted and have to wait for the right artsy art shit inspiration while at the same time writing other things until it gets there.

SK: You do an amazing Elvis.(Note: half-way down.) Did you practice for “Elvis and Me?”

John Korn: No. I don't think. Been awhile. Well, I did record it over and over. I felt the impression was a little too fast. He was fat in the poem, so I wish i would have made him a little more sluggish in speech. But thank you. I feel like listening to "Polk Salad Annie" now.

SK: Do you play the harp?

John Korn: With you in fantasies.

Blake Butler Interview

2008-11-24T21:51:00.006-05:00

Blake Butler is published in The New York Tyrant, Caketrain, Black Warrior Review, Sleepingfish, Salt Hill, Ninth Letter, New Ohio Review, Fence, LIT, The Believer, Tarpaulin Sky, Pequin, Unsaid, Sir!, Action Yes, Oranges and Sardines, Alligator Juniper, DIAGRAM, Memorious, Keyhole, 11:11, Opium, Wigleaf, Quick Fiction, McSweeney’s, elimae, Juked, Underland, Eyeshot, Apocryphal Text and more.

He edits Lamination Colony, co-edits No Colony, and maintains HTMLGIANT.

Two very helpful blog posts:
Where did Lucy purchase her new vagina?
My year of submitting a book length MS to small presses

PREORDER EVER

Books:
PRETEND I AM THERE BUT VERY LITTLE (Publishing Genius)
IN THE RAPE YEAR OF THE GHETTO TODDLER THE HOUSES WILL AWAKEN (ML Press)
EVER (forthcoming, Calamari Press)
Scorch Atlas (forthcoming, Featherproof Books)

SK: Where did you grow up?

Blake Butler: I think my knees grew up in Haiti, cause I can feel them pulse. I think my neck grew up in Botswana, not sure. I think my nuts grew up in a sinkhole off the side of a barbershop where they dump the hair when they have to dump the hair. I’m pretty sure my collarbone was manufactured by sweatshop babies, children are too old, they would have had to take a bite out of the ridges, they could not have stopped themselves, because of the prize. I think my right incisor is grown up from strip clubs. I think my thumb is not grown up at all. The rest of the damn things on me, I don’t know, I lost the receipts, my mother fed them to me, I realized, when I was really little, it hurt to shit them out, I know I was assembled in Japan and shipped here in a feather purse.

SK: Is there gangbanging in Atlanta?

Blake Butler: This one street you drive down, it’s like playing Paperboy. I mean thugs are just tromping back and forth across the street, they look in through your windows, they’ll let you hit them they don’t give a fuck. I showed them my branding between my shoulderblades of Dr. Dre getting ass reamed, they leave me alone. Other streets are like right out of Thriller but you have to go out of your way to get to them, there’s a store a few miles from whiteland (they have crushed all the projects with their dickdozers) called Wigs N Beepers, I am going to apply for part time work, I need a good one.

SK: Have you gangbanged in Atlanta?

Blake Butler: Believe that. My face and dick are very bruised.

SK: How many beatings, one way or full fights, have you partaken in?

Blake Butler: I got my ass handed to me by a Lithuanian priest a couple weeks ago, he didn’t like my forearms, I was busy stroking the aphids off my goiter so I didn’t have a free hand to fight him off with, I ended up shitting all over the pavement. God I stink in the evening in that light. Once I punched a baby but no one was looking, it wasn’t a ‘fight’ but I felt really strong and ready to evolve after that one, he got his Gerber on my knuckle, it won’t come off. The last day of high school I stood up with an erection and decimated the whole damn bleachers, it was Parents Day, they had their spirit colors on, I made it bloody, the colors clashed, they would never fuck again.

SK: How much love?

Blake Butler: Someone just handed me a free sandwich, no shit.

SK: Will No Colony give people Morgellons?

Blake Butler: No Colony gave me teeth herpes, but who needs teeth when you’ve got a child? I don’t have a child so I suppose I am going soon to see a physician. I have heard reports from readers so far, and since we haven’t yet shipped out the issue I am now aware of who’s been creeping in my house at night, who claim that reading Sam Pink’s play made them vomit trinkets and vinyl siding, and after reading Michael Kimball’s novel excerpts they could no longer see their pinkies, and that page 1-120 in effect severed the gonoidal tissue, I can say with all clear discretion that No Colony, as yet, has given no one Morgellons.

SK: Does wide-scale consumption of Lamination Colony lead to hysterical gait?

Blake Butler: I guess I consume Lamination Colony more than most people and I feel a little light-headed, and there is someone camping out in America, and I know my ass is collecting itself for something massive. So, um, hmm, well, yah, yes, maybe?

SK: Why is NO ONE DOES THAT the hypocenter of my candy?

Blake Butler: They are advertising spots for the new Nelly record on the front page of Myspace today, jesus christ, that dude looks like a Moonpie turtle, someone needs to hit him with a basket of marmalade. I don’t know why you read my moronic babblings, really, are you dumb? Maybe people just like to listen to a candy cigarette burning, that’s what I feel like most days, I wake up in an ashtray early each morning and start working on collecting back the baseball cards I was supposed to come with, and yet seem to not have, not anywhere, there are 10,000 birds on my roof right this second, I know my skin is dying, right now this coffee is making me hysterical, I only just started, the room is alive.

SK: Are there bigger tastier balls alive than Gaspar Noe or David Lynch in the cinema today and which other films may have influenced your aesthetic lately and before?

Blake Butler: Noe and Lynch pretty much kill me, so I don’t know about bigger or tastier balls, though there are some other nice balls to sit on the coffee table to admire. Hmm, I really like Harmony Korine’s first two movies, Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy, the aesthetics of those, the collagist elements and the idea of each scene being its own sentence, letting the sentences then kind of collapse on one another, I really have been blown up by what he did there. I wasn’t as big a fan of Mr. Lonely, though, I think he got off drugs, I don’t do drugs really but some people maybe need them, or maybe he was tired, I liked the shots of the black kid riding the pig and Abe Lincoln spinning the basketball on his fingers. I love American Movie, Buffalo ’66, A Clockwork Orange, The Jerk, each for the worlds they create, I like films that contain themselves and yet could be considered completely open-ended in certain aspects, in the way of energy. As far as mood and aesthetic I think the two biggest influences on me in the past few years have been Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Fellini’s Satyricon. I’ve only had the balls to watch each of those once apiece (where as the films I mentioned around American Movie I’ve probably each seen more than 50 times, literally). I can remember the exact time/place/setting I watched each of those two films, and the way they implanted something in my chest, I’ve been carrying that shit around for a while now, it leaks out a little when I look hard. I also like Three Women, Freddy Got Fingered, La Soufriere, Oldboy, Magnolia, Cremaster 2 & 3, The Piano Teacher, Life of Brian, touching myself in the forehead, walking to the store.

SK: Does meaning ever impose itself over the construction of a sentence when you work?

Blake Butler: I probably don’t know the meaning of any sentence I ever wrote, at least not in the last year, I hope I don’t, I hope I can continue to have no idea what I’m doing, the minute I have some idea of what I’m doing is when I am going to stop. I like sentences I didn’t write coming through me, I am not a vessel of the lord for words but more a vessel for some dead fat labyrinthian autistic baby maybe, that would be a nice way. I think the less I can be aware of a sentence while I am writing it the more right it comes out feeling, because really I am very stupid and the more of me I can forget the better. I One, word, at, a, time.

SK: Where can I jump to get your sentences?

Blake Butler: If it wouldn’t kill me, and it would actually work, I’d put my head in the microwave, or I would eat a whole bee’s hive, or I’d slip inside the anthill that is slowly overtaking my parents’ yard, I don’t know, maybe there are more sentences there, that seems like where my sentences would be if I could go get them, or in the grease trap at the oldest Wendy’s in the Wisconsin, maybe inside my Resurrection Grandma’s nostrils, those are places to go, or you could sit inside a plastic year, you could touch yourself, distraction is the best attraction.

SK: How much of the sentence is editing?

Blake Butler: It’s hard to remember. Some sentences seem to jump out right the first time, especially seven miles deep in coffee, I don’t know, I think about 40% of my sentences now are no editing at all, I’ve been really into preserving the initial intention, what I was talking about before I had any idea what I was talking about. You find that vein, the small black one, and you kind of peel it up and out and make it realize who it is just enough for it to get angry, and then you leave it alone? But also, in the making of the text, I think cleaning up the sentences that surround the ones that came out right, this is dire, obviously, and can take many, many strikes before they get knocked into the way. So I tend to read through everything I write probably between 30 and 60 times, editing each a little less and a little less each time until I feel happy enough to stop looking. And actually, even those 40% that feel right the first time, even those, as the other sentences change around them, get knocked up and yielded, and the meter changes, so you have to go in and make sure they stay in the mind of the rhythm. I think rhythm is probably the most important tool in the creation of a sentence, you can have absolutely no intention, and the beat of it will beat it out if you are in the correct mind for this, there are ways of getting in the mind of this, most of them involve various state of sleep or nonsleep. The bed is just as much a typewriter as the typewriter is.

SK: Does rape improve a sentence?

Blake Butler: I think rape creates a sentence. 65% of my sentences are the children of rape. I think once you get them, though, once they are captured, it’s less a process of rape and more of heavy petting. Rap can definitely improve a sentence¾I’ve been biting ODB and Tupac and 3-6 as much as possible in my joints. Most mornings when I am sitting at the computer bleary trying to get amped on coffee but not so far as shaking and looking at the internet and coughing into my hand and making a mess of the desk I feel raped. I feel date-drugged and like I’m on the loveseat in the rec room with Joey, like he’s got his hand up my skirt finding the one word their on my vulva. Yeah, rape is it, some, at least.

SK: Because your innovation owns the English sentence should I try to sing instead?

Blake Butler: I have thrown up six times on the keyboard while answering your questions, are you imposing the Dick Lifter? Most all singing is throw up if you ask me, but the bad kind of throw up rather than the kind I like to stick my head in. I heard Michael Gira sing once on a replicator, he I think understands what his neck grew out of. There were babies in the street the other morning with the neighbor backing in and out and crushing their rattles, that was good singing. I’d prefer you rap, really, can you rap? Besides, you crush my dick already. We are rewriting NAKED LUNCH right now, what are we going to do with it when we’re done? Meet me on Burroughs grave, we’ll ask him about it.

SK: Who have you read lately and growing up that influenced your sentences in any way?

Blake Butler: Everything I know I learned from David Wallace, William Burroughs, and William Gass, no shit, with some extra bonus classes in the evening while there was still time to park the car. As for recent, I really like the two published novels of Eugene Marten, that guy has his full head-blood on the page, right there, gleaming. God. Um. Noy Holland’s ORBIT really ate me alive fully and with complex muscles, I don’t know how I hadn’t found that until this year, and then after I went into Frank Stanford’s THE BATTLEFIELD WHERE THE MOON SAYS I LOVE YOU, another relic I should have found back when I had my head up Ginsberg’s ass in 10th grade, so on. I also really like Michael Kimball’s new novel Dear Everybody and have considered it a tutorial each time I sit down with a Diane Williams collection, man when she gets inside it she is full on inside it and the vulva spank.

SK: In PRETEND I AM THERE BUT VERY LITTLE, or in general, to what degree does sentence structure dictate narration or vice versa?

Blake Butler: Most of the time I think sentence structure, in any of my writing, dictates about 80% of the narration. I don’t plan things, and don’t think in plot or character creation devices, it’s pretty much all about putting one word after the other, and the further I can loose myself from the thinking of the word that should come, and more putting my head under my whole arm and peeling the skin off there, the more I can do that the more I feel I’ve said something, to myself.

Daniel Borzutzky Interview

2008-10-07T20:00:00.005-04:00

Daniel Borzutzky is the author of The Ecstasy of Capitulation and Arbitrary Tales. His writings and translations are published in Action Yes, Octopus Magazine, Mississippi Review, MiPoesias, Shampoo, Coconut, McSweeney's, Typo, La Petite Zine, Conjunctions, Fence, Denver Quarterly and more.

SK: What were some of the atrocities of the CIA-funded Pinochet regime in Chile? Which Chilean writers are you translating?

Daniel Borzutzky: To your first question: The atrocities are well-documented; the murders and disappearances of thousands; brutal torture and imprisonments; forced exile and the forced separation of families. In short, the destruction of a country.

You asked about the Chilean writers I have been translating. My family comes from Chile, though I have lived in the U.S. my entire life, and for me, the translation work I have done has helped me to maintain some connection to Chile.

Earlier this year, my translation of a book called Port Trakl by contemporary Chilean Mapuche poet Jaime Luis Huenún was published by Action Books; and in 2007 the Review of Contemporary Fiction published a special issue dedicated to my translations of the fiction of Juan Emar, a mysterious, surrealist-type writer who published four books in the 1930s and who then disappeared from the Chilean scene after offending the literati of his time. Juan Emar is his pen name, which he adopted because of its homophonic resemblance to the French phrase J’en ai marre, which means, I’m fed up. Emar is a bizarre and historically important writer (Neruda called him “Our Kafka”).

I just completed a translation of a beautiful and powerful book called “Song for his Disappeared Love” by the great living Chilean poet Raul Zurita. This book is a direct engagement with the disappearances and murders of the Pinochet regime, which Zurita lived through and experienced first hand. He himself was imprisoned, and after he was arrested he stayed in Chile and wrote poetry throughout all the bloody mess of the Pinochet years. This book will be published by Action Books.

SK: Please help me understand the difficulty of jumping languages with poetry. How hard is it to translate accurately? What does an accurate translation mean? How does being a poet help? Why do I read some recent Baudelaire translations and yawn, but go back and read some of what Robert Lowell translated of Baudelaire and become sexually aroused?

Daniel Borzutzky: I think it’s very hard to translate accurately, especially when you think about accurately translating not just content, but also sound. That is, often I think a translator can come up with a pretty decent translation of meaning, but translating sound and rhythm and tone from one language to another is much trickier, and in my experience it’s a problem not to be solved with a general theory of practice, rather I handle this instead on a case-by-case basis with each poem creating its own set of issues.

In terms of technique, I’m not sure if being a poet helps or doesn’t help. And there are many great translators who don’t write their own poetry. Why are some translations better than others? Commitment, hard work, transference of tone, rhythm and intent. Mental communion. Clayton Eshleman’s translations of Cesar Vallejo, for instance, are awesome. The same poems translated by Robert Bly and James Wright lack the power and force of the Eshleman version.

SK: What is your approach to the idea of meaning in poetry and the useful or (as I prefer to say) cancerous affects of most literary criticism? I mean criticism that doesn’t involve things like chemical castration.

Daniel Borzutzky: I am pro-criticism. We could use more criticism. Good criticism. Perhaps we could use less book reviews that are really plot summaries or long blurbs.

I’m not sure what you mean by the idea of meaning in poetry. I guess my approach is a literal one. The poem means what it says, says what it means.

SK: Do you envision an old trumpet stuffed with hair and gagging limp sounds when people use the word scatological as a reference to something beneath themselves?

Daniel Borzutzky: You’re leading the witness.

SK: Who are you reading lately?

Daniel Borzutzky: Marguerite Duras, Raul Zurita, Helene Cixous, Clarice Lispector, and student essays.

SK: Your first book Arbitrary Tales (from Triple Press) is stabbed full of poetic prose whereas each sentence perpetuated big embolisms as I read it. Is this a desired effect?

Daniel Borzutzky: Thank you for using the word stabbed. That’s quite a compliment.

SK: Did you know or meet Faruk Ulay in Turkey?

Daniel Borzutzky: No.

C. Allen Rearick Interview

2008-05-11T21:47:00.002-04:00

C. Allen Rearick is published in Opium, Shampoo, Free Verse, Identity Theory, Mad Hatter’s Review and more. He has a new book out from Zygote in my Coffee’s Tainted Coffee Press

SK: Do you find that, upon the third syllable of an anapestic foot, how are you?

C. Allen Rearick: yes i do. by the fith foot, i find the sound of ants, under my skin, crawling away with my bootleg copy of "cool runnings" it starts to become too much. and when it's over, i'm passed out in a gondola after havin' shot up aids in my arm for the 4th time that night.

SK: Have you ever been closing the blinds and mistaken the final wane of drawn light as a forthcoming atomic blast and reopened the shades with hurried gratitude only to be disappointed because some fucking kid is just playing with his bike reflectors?

C. Allen Rearick: only on tuesdays when chickens walk the streets with protractors, lookin' to create papaer mache dolls. this angers me to no end. i want to take off my fake leg, wave it in an obtuse wayward manner and recite gallway. which always turns out to sound like benny lava snorting taco sause with a large muskrat on the snowy banks of a long day in vermont.

SK: Do sexy little binary codes within the horrible poetry at the poetry marketing scam site poetry.com, in which by processing these codes one can see the pederast-era clean beginnings of whatever youth is typing it, haunt you?

C. Allen Rearick: once, when i was five, i had a dream where i was a general in the war of 1245. horrible poetry was everywhere. it made my stomach feel like evolution was a fantastic coup in which god break-danced all night to the rhythmic sounds of euclid's geometric penis. this is hard to talk aboot. but if you read between the lines, you will find an elephant in the room. he will be placenta. he will call your mom by her christian name. we will all die under the guise of binary codes clicking a psuedo morse code under our townails as we spell check our own breath.

SK: How many animals not intended for leashing have you walked up and down the city?

C. Allen Rearick: 3. one was a man made out of chalk dust. he once spoke of unicycles as if he understood time was a e-zwider rollin' paper. such non-sence i thought. i gave him my only stapler. told 'im to celebrate kwanza when the sky becomes popcorn. eat up he told me. for tomorrow is a bible quiz which we will all fail miserabley if we don't repent and recylce our tin cans.

SK: If I am driving toward Ohio at 80mph at 7AM and it's 35 degrees outside, and a box train is sauntering West near I-75 at 15mph, starting from Dayton, will you help me burn the hair off my arms?

C. Allen Rearick: after timmy set himself on fire, we all laughed at candles. we felt like green tea leaves compressed in cow manuer. that faint smell of whey protein melting in our jaws. and this is not a love story. but a story aboot love's inability to check out library books. if ohio were real, i'd call you a liar. if dayton were a moon, i'd inject porcelin between my toes. i'd tell you to drive faster so as to catch the dung-beetles shivering like copy machines, lonely for another page out of greater cleveland's user friendly phone book. but i digress, your arms are like the sun to me. fresh daisies shaven of all leather boot straps. come to my house. we'll have a sleep over. we'll make fresh papya and masturbate eachothers' colons. 15 mph is a long time to wait for a clean shower.

SK: When was the sky replaced by sex we never had?

C. Allen Rearick: our sex was a unicorn strugglin' to walk on jello. you slapped my thigh, said you missed the way i barked out cat calls at the floor when we played twister with the radio playin' only tom jones' "invitation to a beheading". one day we will fly an airplane into the cleveland ghetto, we will crash it for the money and the fame. the grass will be freshly cut, like our eyes when we saw tiny flints recorded on ice sculptures. i want to love you more than suicide. i want to hold you till you contract pancreatic cancer. i'll put on some coffee. pour it over my goiter. i'll take a picture of it and eat the negative just to show you what it's like to be pnuematic.

SK: Do you agree that statutory rape is the only true art form?

C. Allen Rearick: statuory rape is an invention of christianity. I've heard the walls bein' tickled by the dahli lama. he is a psuedo han-solo lookin' to count sheep who only understand unscripted bible verses. the word rape is pure beauty. say it 5 times and it begins to sound like love. we are all victims eating jello-puddin' pops. giant eagle sells diapers for the elderly. how pretentious don't you think. jakdfja would make a fine lullaby. cover the dead in thick wall paper, for they will kiss ashtray lips covered in chocolate butcher knives. tell me we will be in love forever and i'll show you a man who loves nmailed postcards.

SK: Which poets advocate procreation on international cable?

C. Allen Rearick: bob duvany. jack guglem. christa mcwelling. fred batchula. dirk xertaka. beef steak. fried beans in chewbacca's beard. avail: 4am friday. cut the lawn naked. feel the way men's health makes you beautiful. charles newharder. my address book is lonely. my friends are all cowboys. put up a fence and call little girls whores. i love you t.v.

SK: Please describe your facial hair in both its current and past states since adolescence and beyond.

C. Allen Rearick: barbed wire. hand carved maple wood caccti. little trinkets that say howdy. wind up toys in an old shoe box. color me bad. empty garage sales. scooners. tick-tac-toe. nickle plated 45s. red engines that once were mauve. listen, this is the essence of everything...blow, blow, blow. pop, pop, pop. smile. my coffee is cold.

Crawdad Nelson Interview

2007-12-27T01:51:00.000-05:00

Crawdad Nelson is a journalist and writer based in Sacramento, CA. Recent publications include: New Hampshire Review, Susurrus, Poetry Now, Rattlesnake Review, and Kerf. He has received two Pushcart nominations, and is a frequent speaker at college creative writing classes.

SK: Do you hunt or fish? Any hunting stories for us?

Crawdad Nelson: I've been hunting and fishing since I was small. Actually now that I live in Sacramento it doesn't happen that often, but I've done quite a bit of both and I'm sure the pursuit of those objects has had quite a bit of influence on the way i perceive/record impressions and which details I pick out as important.

Good hunting story, although I'm not involved: My older brother and a younger one were hunting deer in the Nevada mountains about a year ago, when the younger one, who didn't have tags or a gun, went down the road to scout for the older one, who was actually hunting. The younger one saw some deer, but knew he couldn't do anything except scare them away, and they were strolling in his direction so he had to do something. So he lay down in the dirt and let them walk up to and past him. Once they were out of sight, he got up and made it back to the older brother to let him know. Together they worked it out so the one with the bow and arrows was able to sneak up on the bucks and get his shot. You need to be pretty close to take a shot with a bow, so all the sneaking around and hiding paid off. Most places in those mountains don't have much cover.

SK: Could you tell me about writing the history of the moment?

Crawdad Nelson: writing the history of the moment is about first of all being able to distinguish the moment from all other time. How one event differs from others, as well as how it was caused and possibly the effects it will bring about. Fundamentally it's about understanding all the details. The smell, the sight, the sound, the sticky feel of the moment. Paying attention, being mindful, being aware and at the same time being open to suggestion. Above all it's about not closing down your senses because you think you've seen the real show. It's never over.

It can be exhausting to be paying 100% attention all the time but I don't see how else you can hope to see the one detail that marks the present moment as different from all others.

SK: How have literary magazines changed since you first began submitting poetry?

Crawdad Nelson: Obviously the advent of internet magazines has influenced all of small press publishing. Whereas twenty years ago I always assumed that editors had some sort of background that made their opinion worth listening to and/or respecting, anyone can see that that is not the case now.

Any jackal can start a paper zine or an internet rag and call it publication. I suppose it is, but I think people still read the old-fashioned literary magazines expecting to find better work than they can get from any old self-published or half-assed vanity web zine. Hopefully they can but the same old complaint that they are (or tend to be) stuffy and irrelevant often holds true.

Once in a while one runs into the publisher who's really picking out gems and not just publishing whatever comes along, who has criteria and is able to use them to produce a magazine that feels vital and relevant. In some ways nothing has really changed but I think there are probably quite a few more writers who think literature offers them an entree into some world of ideas. Hopefully it does but o the whole there's a lack of discipline and polish to things that doesn't improve readability. After all it should be a pleasant experience. That's what a writer is trying to accomplish, whatever their style or subject matter. Give the reader a gift, even if it hurts a little.

SK: How has freelance journalism influenced your art?

Crawdad Nelson: Freelance journalism has been an interesting way to make a few dollars as a writer. I haven't really felt comfortable being a reporter. I don't believe my temperament is suited to it. On the whole I don't think it's influenced my art much except it has forced me to sharpen both my observational skills and my ability to distill experience into the fewest possible words. There is a parallel there--the skills are absolutely complementary.

SK: Do you live off of your journalistic work? Is it possible to live off writing?

Crawdad Nelson: I don't make a living off my journalism. At times it has been a needed supplement, at other times it has been slightly more important, but it's never been steady enough work, though at times I've tried harder to make it that.

It's definitely possible to make a living as a writer, but a lot of things have to fall into order for it to happen and you have to have a certain amount of luck. Whether you create that luck or wait for it is I suppose the main thing. But at the same time I've found it important, as a poet, to be able to forget completely about whether any money is involved. that never helps me produce art.

Sometimes hunger helps produce something I can sell, but it's not really art.

SK: Should I ‘feel sentimental about the Wobblies’ like Ginsberg says? Will this make me a commie and get my ass kicked?

Crawdad Nelson: Yes, you should feel sentimental about the Wobblies. they were our last great hope, and, though they survive in some sense, what they represented in the 20s and 30s was the hope for true representative (proportional) democracy in the U.S.. Although they did have larger goals, in this country what they wanted to do was give the working man and woman, as well as those without jobs, a voice in the way things are run. Their utter defeat and ruin during the depression era was really the last gasp of the working class; since then we have been so solidly right-wing that, for instance, Spanish civil war volunteers from the U.S. were officially branded as "premature anti-fascists." You could look it up. Ginsberg was what they caled a "Red-Diaper baby" meaning his parents were part of a vital communist movement in the U.S. which of course long ago ceased to mean anything. But you should be sentimental. We had a chance, though it was gone before we were born. If that's enough to get your ass kicked, well, we live in a sad, corrupted, world and you're probably better off finding that out sooner rather than later.

SK: Could you tell me about your poem ‘Seven’ in the New Hampshire Review? To record it, did you phone them and read it over a recording device?

Crawdad Nelson: The New Hampshire Review offered everyone in that first issue a chance to call them and record their poem on some sort of website. Apparently it was permanent. i don't know, I haven't visited them in some time, but it struck me as a modern innovation making good use of existing technology to give readers a chance to hear a poet read a poem the way he intended it to be heard.

SK: Would you consider landscape and nature a recurring theme and your work? Who are some of your early literary influences?

Crawdad Nelson: Landscape and nature are two vital influences on my work. I doubt I'd have any work without them. My earliest literary influences, that is, those writers I found on my own, were people like Steinbeck and Twain. Also Vonnegut. Poetically I owe a debt to Kenneth Patchen for many reasons, but I'd say I've incorporated influences from a great variety of poets, from some I can't name but know of only through anthologies read years ago, to more common names like William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens and Laura Riding. A big part of my poetics comes out of being in a community of poets who acted like a community, in a quaint time and place about 20 years ago. No big names, but people dedicated to the craft who appreciated what I was doing at the time and offered to help. But landscape, yes. Important. Nature also, but not without thinking about how people fit into and alter it. From a rocketship they all blend into the same picture. So I've always been trying to get a meaningful perspective on how nature and people fit together.

SK: Who are you reading lately?

Crawdad Nelson: Lately I've been reading mostly science--anthropology, paleoanthropology and genetics--and history. Herodotus and Thucydides, Marcus Aurelius, Joesphus, the history of the Huns, the Mongols, etc. And Civil War stuff.

SK: As a facial hair enthusiast, I must ask about the current state of your beard, and how are you maintaining it?

Crawdad Nelson: When I met my wife she straightaway started making grooming suggestions. I had always been the sort who just let things grow wild on the face, but she thought I'd be better off clearing the cheeks at least. So therefore I shave a little circle under each eye and keep the rest trimmed. Working with the public, as I do now, this is probably a good idea. But I may go feral again at any time.

Kevin Doran Interview

2007-10-23T09:25:00.004-04:00

Kevin Doran is published at Dusie, elimae, Unpleasant Event Schedule, Sein und Werden, zafusy, etc. He is the founder of Triptych Haiku and his blog is Siberian Kiss.

SK: Could you educate me on the Triptych Haiku as a format? This is a form of haiku that you invented as well as the name of the journal you edit, am I right?

Kevin Doran: Yes. But I wouldn’t say I invented it; it’s merely an idea I gave a moniker to. Basically, triptych haiku is a form that applies a fixed cut-up technique to haiku: three haiku, one line from each, forming a new three-line ‘triptych’. As far as I’m aware, it hasn’t been done before, though it’s difficult to say I created something that could’ve been.

I was pleased with the number of people who submitted it to the journal, though I published few of them. John M. Bennett was the first person to adopt the form, and Mark Young’s Otoliths became the first venue outside of my control to publish it.

I genuinely thought I was going to be excommunicated from the haiku world, rejected at every turn, for starting the zine. When you drop a pebble into a traditionalist's pond, they get real upset about the ripples. But the feedback/reception was unanimously positive, and veterans of the form, who I thought wouldn't even submit, or approve of the editorial direction, were pleased and supportive. Though I’m sure there are still some people out there who would jam knives into my spine in a dark alley . . .

SK: What are some of your favorite types of haiku? Does anything particular about their history appeal to you? Which writers have influenced your work and how did you get into writing haikus?

Kevin Doran: The first time I properly wrote haiku/senryu -- the odd dabble aside -- I was reading the submission guidelines of Simply Haiku, and they were taking senryu on a theme, so I wrote ten or so and submitted them. That was also the first time I had haiku/senryu accepted; that was mid-2005.

My favourite types of haiku would be haiku noir, senryu, scifaiku -- anything that’s different and/or innovative. There are other short forms I enjoy reading and writing, such as gembun, tanka, and so on.

As for literary influences: to choose writers who have influenced me would be unfair in terms of adequately portraying my scope of influence, as a writer wouldn’t influence any more than what would happen on a bus journey, or what I might read on the back of a chocolate bar. I make no distinction between the two, and therefore no distinction between individual writers. So, I’m unable to answer the question in any overly defined terms.

SK: I have trouble writing haikus and, considering your accomplishments with this poetic format, (and in general) was hoping you could perhaps break down the process for me. How is a good contemporary haiku composed?

Kevin Doran: There are endless essays and articles written about haiku, and what makes a ‘good’ haiku, but it’s completely interpretative. Ultimately, a haiku/senryu should say something, and say it concisely. I could easily write five-hundred words explaining haiku, how to write it, and how to write it well, but I won’t; just read it, study it, then read it some more. Most people get taught that --and most, if not all, dictionary definitions/popular definitions merely outline that -- haiku is a short form that is a fixed tercet of five-seven-five syllables. People who don’t know any better say that Westernised haiku is a bastardised form, in not adhering to this syllable structure, but Japanese is a wildly different language, and translations of haiku into English naturally transpose into different syllable structures. The originators of the form didn’t always adhere to the five-seven-five syllable structure themselves anyway. For a lot of haijin, haiku is a lot more about content and diction than structure, and a lot of people miss that point.

SK: How is Triptych Haiku the magazine going these days? How difficult is it to edit a magazine?

Kevin Doran: Too difficult, don’t ever do it. Editing is like a slow and painful death of the soul; like stabbing it over time with a thousand toothpicks. Ninety per cent of the problem is that no-one reads or heeds the submission guidelines. The others are mostly things like amateurs who don’t know any better e-mailing three times in a week, after they’ve just had work accepted, aggressively asking about the status of their work when the issue isn’t due out for months; or being undecided about borderline work. However, the feeling of publishing work -- especially when you’ve given people a platform that virtually didn’t exist -- and giving editing suggestions that make a piece better, is great.

These days, the zine is asleep. It will stay asleep until I find a second suitable editor to co-manage it.

SK: I enjoyed the article you proposed to Bookslut that was posted on your blog Siberian Kiss. What would or will your further works of critique and journalism be like and what is your take on critical analysis?

Kevin Doran: Thanks. I guess my critiques and journalism will follow the same lines of interest that appear on my blog -- politics, poetry, music, etc -- and take any shape at all. I’ve been mentally collating critiques of poetry blogs for a few months -- perhaps I’ll start doing something in that vain? Taking my interviews to a higher platform than my blog (I’m currently interviewing bands as a journalist for my university’s student newspaper)? I’d like to incorporate poetry into my journalism more.

I think critical thinking/analysis is important. It should be encouraged more in school, though the social agendas of school don’t allow for it.

SK: Are you into John Cage’s writing or music or both or neither?

Kevin Doran: I respect his work, yes.

SK: Could you enlighten me about your music, the process of creation, the instruments used, its style and your desired goals?

Kevin Doran: The process isn’t too serious, as I just make music for fun (and upload it to MySpace and my blog): I use solely digital audio workstation software. If I wanted to get serious, I could hook-up my guitar to my laptop, use samplers (like Matina Stamatakis does) or digital recorders, etc, but I’m having fun with what I’ve been doing. I haven’t spent any more than a few days on any one song; so I don’t sweat blood over it like I would my writing.

The style is eclectic, within the scope of the purely electronic: trip hop, drum and bass, breakbeat, ambient; anything that’s interesting.

The desired goal is to have fun and be creative.

SK: Where did you obtain this frightening mask through which you read your work here?

Kevin Doran: Someone gave it to me. It was all so haphazard, actually. I’d wanted to do something a little different, and initially thought of utilising my big hood, so to speak, and perhaps using a mask. I’d been half-thinking for a while that if I was going to put it online, I’d need to continue the partial anonymity thing I have going on (by which I mean you can find photographs of me online, but you have to look for them). The night before the reading, I saw several of the same mask hanging from someone’s bookshelf. It came together nicely. I cut bigger nose holes to breathe better, and cut out the bottom to allow jaw room to speak.

I was so busy/disorganised that I didn’t pick what I was going to read until a few hours before the reading (I mistakenly read some drafts). I didn’t have time to practise with the mask on, and I wasn’t prepared for how difficult it would be to breathe in. And being a little drunk on real absinthe, and wine, didn’t help. In the video, you can see, just thirty seconds after I start reading, there’s a lengthened pause and I shift off one leg to the other; that’s me thinking, ‘Shit, I can’t breathe in this thing.’

SK: Living in the United Kingdom (I believe you’ve lived in England and Ireland at different times?), are postage fees concerning email-excluded submissions to American magazines a problem of expense or otherwise too much of a hassle?

Kevin Doran: I moved to Australia from England in 1986, back to England in 1995, then to Ireland in 1999, then back to England in 2005, where I co-lived there and in Ireland for the first year, and where I’ve lived to the present day.

Postal submissions to any country or place is too much hassle. The expense isn’t the issue: I see any postal fee as being more than rebated with the number of free contributor copies that get mailed to me from here and abroad. Electronic submissions are much more convenient.

SK: As long as I’ve been a fan of your work, I’ve also been a fan of your distinctive facial hair. Would you please describe for me your shaving methods, the history of your facial hair, and if there is a technical or personally invented name for the style in which you grow it?

Kevin Doran: Shaving usually occurs for me anywhere between two days and two months after I think, ‘I should probably shave now’. These Muslim guys thought I was Muslim once. A Muslim guy in a kebab shop asked me if I was Muslim. (Customs love me: I got belligerently questioned about what religion I am, once, and I usually get searched even when I don’t set-off the metal detector.) I think I’ve fully shaven once, possibly twice, since I was a teenager.

I’m not sure about names -- I’ve never looked into it! I know I’ve never had handlebars or a plain moustache. I’ll look into it . . . Okay, it seems I’ve had a balcarrotas, jawline beard/chinstrap beard, chin beard, circle beard, goatee, petit goatee, sideburns, balbo, short boxed beard, and a couple other slight variations that I couldn’t find names for. No, I’ve never named any of the styles -- but it’s something to think about now.

SK: Is absinthe legal in England? I’ve never had real absinthe before, can’t find it. That silly American ban because some cunt murdered his family in 1910 is messing me up. Could you tell me about absinthe, in general and perhaps a story?

Kevin Doran: Just to clarify, by ‘real absinthe’ I mean seventy to eighty per cent volume. Absinthe is legal in England, but you can generally only find the weaker absinthe. There’s a bar near here that has some, but it’s a bit vile. My brother brought the bottle I had -- Green Devil -- back from Eastern Europe, or possibly Spain. A friend who drinks it a lot more than I do says that Harrods in London is the only place nearby that sells real absinthe, though it can be ordered online.

Absinthe is a unique drink that induces a unique feeling. You don’t necessarily feel drunk, more so relaxed; and instead of spiralling into paralytic incoherency, it sharpens the senses, makes you feel clear-headed. This is due to the mix of both stimulants and sedatives in the drink.

I went to Amsterdam a couple years ago and drank some absinthe and wrote some poetry. That’s it; that’s my story . . .

Allyssa Wolf Interview

2007-08-29T20:55:00.000-04:00

Allyssa Wolf is published in fascicle, Fence, Soft Targets, GutCult, LIT, Ribot, Green Integer Review, and more.

She co-edits The Black Economy.

Her first book is Vaudeville.

SK: Jon Leon wrote a fantastic poem published in Jacket Magazine about your first book Vaudeville. If his poem is really a book review, please tell me. Was it your intention, with the poems in Vaudeville, to rid the world of literary analysis? Perhaps viral poems that would grow to maim conventional literary analysis? If so, thank you. And thank you Jean-Luc Godard and thank you.

Allyssa Wolf: I'm glad the book provoked such responses as Jon's beautiful poem-review. Everything Jon writes is a poem, some people are like that.

SK: Which, if any, films have influenced you as a writer?

Allyssa Wolf: When I was very young I used to stay up and watch horror films on this late night show called Night Owl Theater, hosted by Franz the Night Owl. Films like The Organ Grinders and Let's Scare Jessica to Death. I was in love with Vincent Price. During the same time I was obsessed with Busby Berkely type Hollywood musicals, which would play frequently on PBS. During my teenage years Godard and Lynch definitely left deep fingerprints on my brain. Hail Mary, Contempt, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet. Recently I've been influenced by Bresson's A Gentle Woman and Ma Mere, a French film based on a Bataille story. I've been watching everything by Fassbinder and Von Trier. There are many ways in which Dogville is Vaudeville, the vision of humanity and exposed staging for instance, but Vaudeville was written several years before I saw Dogville. I've just begun collaborating with Standard Schaefer on a book using the film Hiroshima, Mon Amour as an undersketch.

SK: Please tell me about writing and editing this poem?

Allyssa Wolf: I started writing parts of M, The Dancer in 2000 or 2001, during an affair I was having with an art collector in Los Angeles. He collected a lot of what I guess you could call high kitsch--paintings rendered in the way of the old masters, with themes of childhood and carnival life. Terrifying versions of innocence and fun. Very American.

Also, during this time I had a dream about riding in the back of a city bus an angel next to me with huge luminous wings. He told me I was supposed 'to hold pain' for the people in the small houses we were passing.

I did this thing with periods. I wanted to slow down time, create what seem like obstacles but could actually just be joints that bend backwards and forward, hinges. I wanted to keep time and movement mechanistic and awkward in the way that Egytian art and early film is, so I placed the periods where there would be a little jump in time, or where the body would stop into a pose--sort of like when a breakdancer freezes or when a burlesque dancer contorts her body into an unexpectedly abstract and inhuman form, either athletically or languidly, and stops for a moment for the crowd's contemplation. So, the dancer is not dancing like abandon--the foxtrot or Isabella Duncan or Grateful Dead dancers or whatall. I think versions of this idea of dancing (kinds of breakdancing or kinds of burlesque, because some burlesque is very fast shaking flesh with no grace) lends itself to a need to continually stop time during the performance and peer into the audience in suspension then begin again. These performers I'm thinking of show what it's like for them to be alive with their bodies. They have constant little deaths, constant apocalypses.

So, I had these parts and several months later I sat in on some poetry classes with Leslie Scalapino. She asked the class to write a poem using some experimental process, with John Cage as our guide. I started writing something about the backsides of my eyeballs, which she liked very much, but a couple of weeks later, when she asked us to present our process poems in class, I brought in M, The Dancer, which I had been working on instead, finished under the influence of her presence. After I read it, a lot of the class seemed impressed or touched. Leslie calmly looked over at me after everyone else had spoken and said only "You cheated." It was great. She's the troof. I always cheat when I try to do those kind of experiments, I'm more a magician-type. I tend to misdirect to get at the truth, I tend toward the future and the past, I tend to go on missions like Houdini exposing spiritualists, I tend to put my whole body into it so that my "experiment" is my experience, but that body is often remebered, or another body coming through, I don't go into my work with a scientistic attitude, that a poem will happen organically by notation of the right now, or, on the other end of the spectrum, with rigid expectations, oulipo-style, I don't think that particularly works for me, although I greatly respect some of the writing that works that way. You see, I need to confuse myself. But a few practiced motions will often set the wheel turning.

SK: You co-edit The Black Economy (And edited an issue of Effing Magazine.) Have you written many rejection letters? Would you mind composing one just for me right now?

Allyssa Wolf: Effing Magazine was largely a family affair, and the rest of the authors were gathered without submission. None of the authors sent me anything that I had to reject. Jon sent all The Black Economy rejection letters on Christmas day. It wasn't planned, but that's how it turned out. I think he signed them 'Merry Blackmas from The Black Economy'.

SK: What will the second and further issues of The Black Economy be like?

Allyssa Wolf: On the remix co-produced with Lil Jon, the false minimalism of the original beat remains, but the playground touches are replaced with cyber swooshes, making it pointless to put Daytons on the Cadillac's wheels since they're just going to fold up before the car blasts off into hyperspace. In response to the beat, the newly revitalized Alexandra 3000 takes off in such a lyrical sprint that it takes a minute for the present to catch up to the future.

SK: (This question asked in a lisp.) Which writers were early influences and who are you reading lately?

Allyssa Wolf: Early influences include Lewis Carroll, Beckett, Plath, James Wright, Pirandello, Rimbaud, Acker, Spicer--then Barthes, Scalapino, Moxley, The Frankfurt School, Vangelisti, Sorrentino, Shakespeare, Notley, Houellebecq. Lately I've been reading and re-reading all Bret Easton Ellis and Lydia Davis works. Jocelyn Saidenberg's Negativity and Philip Jenks' My first painting will be 'The Accuser' are the greatest books of poetry I've read so far this year. They're great for any year.

SK: Could you describe any plans for future poetry videos like your feature at The Continental Review?

Allyssa Wolf: Oh, I want to visually capture the real monstrousness of the poet's ego-transitions in composition. I think I did a fair job of that in the first one, where I sort of fashion modeled The Power Museum--became the visual intersection between Paris Hilton and Adorno, flickering between total seduction and total negation. I amuse myself, but am doubtful it was caught. Anyhow, I'm thinking of doing a video project where I act out different shells of the poet, a la Cindy Sherman. I mean, it's truly obscene, but not as obscene as the accidental narcissism of the hundreds of poets photographing themselves obsessively on Flickr and whatnot. But I need equiptment for the project, like a real video camera!! (I used a webcam that only films a minute at a time for the first video. And no sound.) If anyone reading this wants to help fund this project, get in touch. I've got some things in mind that will flip your wig.

SK: Are you still working on Prisoner's Cinema (or Film of Dust) and Pure Waste?

Allyssa Wolf: Yes. And also Owl's Bible and The Abstract Empire.

SK: Are Sex and The Power Museum separate manuscripts or included within the above manuscripts? Could you tell me about them, what you’re working toward, phenomenology and being on and off stage in your writing?

Allyssa Wolf: Sex and The Power Museum are part of the project Pure Waste. These books may take a long time, even though I've been working on them for some time now, I'm just beginning. Things will change. I can say that Pure Waste is heavily influenced by the ideas of The Frankfurt School. I want to ressurrect the ideas that most people think just cannot fly. I try to make fly. See if I can, because I have to do what I can to show the things I see in the world. If I don't it's dishonest, and will lead only to further feeding the machine. It's a bit antagonistic, it has to be, because these ideas are not fun and seductive in and of themselves. I try to make the antagonism and seriousness like I said said fly tho, so we can take off, a bit like Suicide (Alan Vega's Suicide), I think. Owl's Bible is like an illuminated manuscript--I listen over and over to Joan Baez' Silver Dagger in preparation--cold passionate ascending stair. The Abstract Empire is prose, fiction. Prisoner's Cinema, I don't know, what I began with seems like a real disaster to me right now. All that up there, well, I would like to do something that is experimental in the real sense, in real time, but I'm not sure if I can make it work for me, because I have such an aversion to the philosophy that guides it. I'm not sure why I'm always thinking about a way that would be true to my 'spiritual style' to proceed with it all the time. Must be a reason.

SK: What opportunities did being in Fence Magazine bring? Much solicitation? You seem to choose publications wisely as opposed to Gatling gunning around.

Allyssa Wolf: None. I was in Fence almost eight years ago. It was important to me because it was the first time I was published, and only the second magazine I had ever sent work to. It seemed magical to be published in a literary magazine then, to be chosen, to be read. I think you're refering to my interview with Kate Greenstreet, right? I probably sound like a lunatic to say I wept because I was published in a fucking magazine. It wasn't because I was so happy that now I had a 'poetry career'! Oh boy. I just realized that it may sound like that since I was shy about explaining, and all the questions are so career-oriented. No. Two people I loved had died and one went mad in the recent preceding years. There. So it was more of a feeling that I had survived for something. That I could honor these people, that I had a reason to survive... The first magazine I sent work to was Conduit, and they rejected. I waited almost a year before I sent work out again, so gun-shy I was, and then poems were accepted to Fence, and, shortly thereafter, Ribot. I was twenty-six and had absolutely no ties to academia (I had just started college for the first time a few months before) or even any living, breathing people who were serious about literature (most of my friends were musicians or visual artists.) I had been hanging out mostly with dead authors. I felt like I was going to the pantheon in a panther party dress. I still feel the same about Ribot, not so much Fence, which I didn't know at the time would become more and more a place to excite people about their careers rather than a portal to eternity to live among the super-gods. Ha!

I only like to publish a few times a year. To be honest, there aren't many magazine that I trust. I haven't sent work to people who didn't ask for it in over two years (but for once--I recently sent something to a non-poetry magazine.) So, they are kind of choosing me, rather than that I'm making such screwd decisions. But it is happening, with the powers of mind, that I am happily attracting the editors that I do respect. Most of the people I know in poetry are or have been my editors. I don't hang out much beyond that. They are the only reason I am both here and there, since no large audience yet exists for my work.

SK: I’m ignorant(.) of the magazine Ribot. Could you tell me about them?

Allyssa Wolf: Ribot was a magazine out of Los Angeles edited by Paul Vangelisti and Uncle Bob (Robert Crosson), a poet who lived in the shed behind him. They created an imaginary institution to host it, The College of Neglected Science (CONS) and it's probably one of the greatest literary magazines of the last 50-odd years. Eight issues were published in 8-10 years, during the nineties and into the early 2000's, until Uncle Bob passed away.

SK: What was elementary school?

Allyssa Wolf: It sounded like 10cc and Wings but when I process those sounds through my memory and strip down the false elements, sounds like Syd Barrett's Opel.

I was in a Christian cult (Jehovah's Witnesses) (drum roll. cymbal.) and I didn't pledge allegiance to the flag in the morning or celebrate any holidays so it could be difficult. I was always off to the side by myself doing my own 'crafts', or reading, while the others were making glitter Santa Klauses or whatnot. My mom was really into health food, she cooked amazing things, and I actually liked vegetables better than candy. In kindergarten, when the other kids brought in cookies for treat day, my mom sent me with some carob jobs called "Goody Balls". My mom and I sometimes made dandelion stew, the neighboring city had the Tomato Festival, we went to a little old man on the farm next door to buy corn and strawberries. I went to public elemetary school in rural-suburban Ohio and there were no Black, Latino, Asian or Jewish kids that I can remember. Everyone was White, so because I didn't worship the United States and had different cultural/religious beliefs I often felt like the resident non-white un-american. I always felt I was leading a double life. Even though I was ripe for punishment, I wasn't teased more than usual by the other kids at school. I think maybe this was because I was pretty self-possessed. Maybe it was because my mother dressed me well and told me that suburbia wasn't real life. At school I would take up people that other people shunned, like a girl in my class who had thalidymyne hands (wings) and I would become a sort of protector-friend. I would have standoffs with teachers who were upset because I wouldn't salute the flag or make holiday shit. (I also had some amazing teachers. Mrs. Klein. Fifth grade. Recognize.) Once, in first grade, a teacher forced me to make a black cat for Halloween and I had nightmares for months that the Nephilim were coming for me. I was pretty good at track and gymnastics. I won a literary award in second grade which sent me to a "Young Author's Conference". In my neighborhood, I had this gang of friends. I spent all summer one summer directing and choreographing about 10 kids, boys and girls, to do a song and dance number to "There's No Business like Show Business". I preached the good news door to door. I was looking forward to the apocalypse. I'd go hunting for arrowheads (that were everywhere & also burial mounds) and go catch crawdads at the "crick". I am German, Jewish, and American Indian by birth. What else, I wore corrective shoes until sixth grade. I called them frankenstein shoes. Then, in sixth grade, I practically dropped out of school. Then, I wore non-corrective frankenstein shoes.

SK: How tall are you?

Allyssa Wolf: 50 ft

SK: How tall is Leslie Scalapino?

Allyssa Wolf: About the size of a wolverine.

SK: What kind of arm would you take up if you took up an arm (human or gun)?

Allyssa Wolf: I was just reading this in the new issue of Soft Targets: "He who does not take sides and take up arms in the time of civil war will be deprived of his right to politics, and have no part in the city."--Tiqqun Collective. I think this is true, & this is what I had in mind when Kate Greenstreet (I assume this is why you are asking me this) asked me if poetry could change the world and I said that to change the world I would take up arms.

SK: If you were going to kill someone like how you begin a poem, how would they die?

Allyssa Wolf: Heart attack following orgasm. Immediate resurrection.

Reverse Interview

Allyssa Wolf: I read in your author's bio that you were studying to be a forensic psychologist, how does that study inform your poetry, if at all?

SK: I wanted to work with people I could identify with, so I went to council the dead with photography. If you’ve seen workers assembling food at McDonald’s, you’ve seen a cold room performance. You’ve observed the demeanor with which the workers approach their subject and you’ve seen that subject manipulated by assembly, the obstruction of ribs within the meat cracked and lifted, using bolt cutters, the torso sculpted into an inside-out orange, a pigmented and cunt-like gape, the autistic weighing of everything pulled out like some first-date-bouquet in backward regurgitation, big syringes, filled with piss, holstered in the thigh’s meat, a funny makeshift table, to be recorded and sunk into the lineup’s bladder – and to know that being alive is worse, I begin to write, and, not generally withdrawing from everything fast enough, fail.

Allyssa Wolf: You seem to publish a lot of work, in a lot of places. It's completely different from my publishing practices, but I've noticed that it is particularly men who seem to spread their poetry seed as far and wide as they can, and these are authors whom I respect, so don't get me wrong--what are your thoughts on publishing?

SK: I think it might be the little toss of ejaculation men mess out in some contradictory defiance of their own self-imposed submission (consciously or not) to most things. I’m supposing that there’s a reason magazines call it submission, and here come me and others toward it like a safe neon Vegas mutilation, only to be continually, mostly, electrocuted by our unreceptive jissom, and like how dogs can be trained, but are not smart, instinct propels the repetition of this act. Submission, having nothing to do with writing the same way anal sex has nothing to do with the act of writing, is more business to me, though I do pepper my art with anal sex, and plaintively include other forms of submission and am largely ignored, probably for the best.

Allyssa Wolf: Could you tell me about your first book, which is slated to be published soon?

SK: I wanted to name it Vaudeville, and this is how I discovered your book and obsessed over your work, and immediately changed my book’s name because you used the title much better. I’ll use something less stunning to steal from. I’m just calling my book a failure for now. It’ll be on Amazon.com before 2008. Six Gallery Press.

Allyssa Wolf: I like your work because it seems very authentic to me, I'm not sure why, and I know I'm getting into some hairy territory with the word "authentic", but I feel it comes from your life's mind rather than as a simulated specimen removed for study. There seems to be a line forming waiting to get the Artaud award, and I think your work is the most reminiscent in its spiritual style, an unnameable thing. What life experience has born your work?

SK: Regrettably, I’ll never approach Artaud’s level of insane – he went so far as to become religious. His insanity was his method, and did not often impede his output. He was in The Passion of Joan of Arc. He wrote plays wherein a woman pulls a block of cheese out her cunt. He was amazing this way.

I’m barely authentic enough to hate the idea of truth and find truth only in the idea of hate. I am overly sensitive to the unprovoked hostility of every experience I have upon leaving the house. This has provided a strong obsession with the idea of the 1980’s, Dadaism, a constantly fluctuating self-sickness, facial hair enthusiasm, and a violent impatience for pragmatism, common sense, political correctness, politics, etc., especially piety. I enjoy anachronism because it is perverse. I follow a sort of disjointed lollypop idiocy. I can somewhat discern as my one originality the innate eschewal of meaning from my art and the assertion that my impression of meaning in literature is something haughty, to be avoided and stylized away from. Even Ionesco, in his essays, becomes too cerebral for me. By cerebral, I mean he was born with a brain. It’s hard for me to identify with that, though I worship his plays. If you write an amazing enough piece or even sentence, you could castrate my house with an army of jaws and I would swim in your piddle. Being in love too much, beaten, jailed, and hospitalized, helps.

Allyssa Wolf: Do you know many poets in Detroit?

SK: Very few. I don’t know if I like that or not. Sometimes great poets visit. I took a girl to see Philip Levine read and begged him to sign her over-sized breasts, so that they might shrink somewhat out of fear. I’ve been taught by great poets like Christopher Parks, Chris Tysh, and Ron Allen. I know one or two other poets. I don’t know how much I’d socialize if more poets I admire lived here. I would probably try to and end up not changing any plans for suicide. Slam poetry is very prevalent. So is AIDS.

Allyssa Wolf: Do you tell people that you meet that you’re a poet? I know I often try not to, because responses can be hostile and condescending out of academic atmospheres (& in as well, sometimes). Do you think it’s impossible to be a poet, is it an impossible thing?

SK: If I’m forced to meet someone in person, I’d rather not. Calling yourself a poet is immediate self-deprecation. If one explains oneself as a poet, one is partially masochistic. If one goes home and spends time alone working on poetry, one is largely masochistic. And if one then excels in the industry, this version of self-foreplay sometimes leads to orgasm, mostly blue balls. There is no bathtub in my house.

Allyssa Wolf: What writers brought you to write poetry?

SK: The beats lead young people into poetry very well. Some stay there with the beats, rightly molested for their own betterment and read, but never grow talent. When the child moves on in search for the beats’ influence and the influence of what came before and after and in between, the disease is irreversible. The child is stuck in the most unwelcoming industry and a good escape is the traditional poet’s suicide. I think writing is the cleanest misanthropy.

J.D. Nelson Interview

2007-07-18T03:29:00.000-04:00

J. D. Nelson (b. 1971) experiments with words and sound in his subterranean laboratory. His bizarre poems and experimental poetic texts have appeared in many small press and underground publications, both print and online. J. D. lives in Colorado, USA. Visit www.MadVerse.com for more information and links to his published work and audio recordings.

SK: Where'd you learn to mill such fine delicious?

J.D. Nelson: I studied at the Colonel Flagg School of Brain Massage, where I double-majored in Burns and Houlihan and minored in Mind Control.

SK: How hard monthly and by what methods do you satellite your beautiful Mad Verse?

J.D. Nelson: I love the Lord with all of my heart, soul, mind and strength. Like Philo Beddoe, I get down any which way I can.

SK: Some girl’s face convinces you to throw milk at a wall – is portraiture happening?

J.D. Nelson: Ye shall not eat of anything that dieth of itself: thou shalt give it unto the stranger that is in thy gates, that he may eat it; or thou mayest sell it unto an alien: for thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk.

SK: A toilet accuses you of molestation – did you get your hysterectomy at Toys R Us?

J.D. Nelson: The womb shall forget him; the worm shall feed sweetly on him; he shall be no more remembered; and wickedness shall be broken as a tree.

SK: A dog bites its own tail until gangrene sets in – is this how you make love?

J.D. Nelson: As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.

SK: Your lover has an affair with your favorite assault rifle – do you announce your candidacy for president?

J.D. Nelson: My lovers and my friends stand aloof from my sore; and my kinsmen stand afar off.

SK: Oh, a barking dog wrecked your good intentions – why is it that you prefer insecticide to all your pretty friends?

J.D. Nelson: They return at evening: they make a noise like a dog, and go round about the city.

SK: Which physicists endure anemometric digestion for machines that imitate sleep?

J.D. Nelson: It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep.

SK: What kind of rapist doesn’t own a television set?

J.D. Nelson: But if a man find a betrothed damsel in the field, and the man force her, and lie with her: then the man only that lay with her shall die.

SK: You are being chased by people with accordions – do you want to be caught?

J.D. Nelson: Mine enemies chased me sore, like a bird, without cause.

SK: Why do you make a habit of corners and excuse your tardiness with lewd photography?

J.D. Nelson: Thus thou calledst to remembrance the lewdness of thy youth, in bruising thy teats by the Egyptians for the paps of thy youth.

SK: Do large women reciting geometry in absinthe-colored bathtubs give your cigar a hernia?

J.D. Nelson: And whosoever toucheth his bed shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even.

SK: What recommends invalidating time with stochastic hotness?

J.D. Nelson: They shall be burnt with hunger, and devoured with burning heat, and with bitter destruction: I will also send the teeth of beasts upon them, with the poison of serpents of the dust.

SK: How has nanotechnology revolutionized the enema?

J.D. Nelson: Now this man purchased a field with the reward of iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out.

SK: Who bleeds first: the air or the vocalist in front of the air?

J.D. Nelson: Sing unto God, sing praises to his name: extol him that rideth upon the heavens by his name JAH, and rejoice before him.

SK: Had you lain with schools of thought, courting purposeful delusion? Did you then administer electricity to improve sub-atomic structure by testing weight?

J.D. Nelson: And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

A false balance is abomination to the LORD: but a just weight is his delight.

SK: Who pants good slither?

J.D. Nelson: Surely the serpent will bite without enchantment; and a babbler is no better.

SK: Is your behavior full of band aids?

J.D. Nelson: My wounds stink and are corrupt because of my foolishness.

Gene Morgan Interview

2007-04-02T14:11:00.000-04:00

Gene Morgan is the founder and co-editor of
Bear Parade. His site is pompadoured. His work is published in elimae, McSweeney's, Opium Magazine, The Scientific Creative Quarterly, Wrapped Up Like a Douche, and terry.

SK: Did you own a Sega or a Super Nintendo and would you mind discussing the pros and cons of each?

Gene Morgan: I owned a Super Nintendo, a Sega Genesis, and a Turbo Grafix 16. The pro of all of these consoles was that when I was young, they were a nice tool for making new friends.

My area of town was pretty mixed, racially and economically, but video games were an integral part of life for most boys, regardless of those things. So Sega or Nintendo was something to talk about with almost anyone, and it led to a lot of diverse friendships.

I still talk about games with people pretty often. It's something a lot of people do with their free time, including myself, and it's easy to talk about. I don't have a lot in common with the people I work with, so sports and video games and weather and alcohol are easy and comfortable things to talk about.

The con of most video games is that very few of them can be considered art. Most video games are just a variation of an antiquated formula, and in their repetitiveness, do not lead to any sort of personal revelation or movement. Sega and Nintendo set the standard for games that revise old formulas for profit, but even this is changing. Like books and movies, you see a lot of cliché and repetitive things, but if you look at less mainstream titles you find a lot of innovation and ideas.

SK: I'm unfamiliar with the Turbo Grafix 16. Was that one of the less popular but advanced (for the time) systems like Sega CD or Atari Jaguar?

Gene Morgan: Turbo Grafix 16 was comparable, graphically, to Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis. It was much more Japanese and didn't have the name recognition that the other two did, so it failed. I liked it. They had games like Splatterhouse, which was the first real horror game I can remember. You'd go around in a hockey mask and beat shit with a two by four.

SK: What were some of your favorite games on those early systems, going back to the original Nintendo?

Gene Morgan: I've always liked games that are different. On the original Nintendo I played a lot of the regular stuff that everyone else played, but as I got older, my tastes turned towards Japanese fetishism and weird shit. I liked anything that translated awkwardly to American culture, stuff like Mappy Land on Nintendo, which was a stupid game that consists of you, a mouse, trying to avoid cat-death so you can get presents for your mouse girlfriend, and offbeat games like Clayfighter, which was a fighting game that was done entirely in stop animation. I played a lot of games, but only the stupid ones that no one cares about stuck with me.

SK: I had a Sega Genesis. Did you ever play Comix Zone? If I remember correctly, there might have been some unique aspects to that storyline. Are there any specific games with any literary value?

Gene Morgan: In Comix Zone you could, in a way, pick your own plot movement as you went through the frames of the game's comic book. It is interesting, and very well done. I played it for the first time a few months ago on the Playstation 2 after Sega reissued a bunch of old Genesis games in a collection. There is a good literary feel to it, I guess. Like you're in a comic book.

I see a lot of promise for literary ideas in video games, but the development costs need to dramatically lower before any real risks are taken. Game developers don't take many risks on unproven or radical ideas, and the people that play video games, in general, don't read contemporary fiction or poetry. They play video games. And it's not that gamers are stupid, because most of the people that read fiction and poetry, I could argue, don't give a shit about video games either.

I think it's a good example of a greater problem with contemporary art: artists have become isolated within their own cultures. Sure, people attempt to "bring the arts together," but writers usually only care about writers, and visual artists usually only care about visual artists (unless there is money involved). And when they look to other arts, they stick to the classics and dead people.

Most of my friends in the visual arts could list maybe one living poet that isn't on Bear Parade-- and these are smart, talented people. It would also be hard for me to believe most writers could come up with a list of ten living visual artists they admire.

I think esoteric influence leads to little innovation or progress, but maybe this is a meaningless statement. The internet probably makes this concern irrelevant and stupid-sounding. If you want to know about contemporary art, type "contemporary art" into Google, and start looking. Most of it is crap mixed with very few relevant and honest things. Like anything else. The same ideas, good and bad, happen in all of the arts.

SK: Do you enjoy many plays or films? Do you have a list of favorite movies?

Gene Morgan: I like going to plays and seeing movies, but there's so much I'm open to that I don't really want to restrict myself and think of favorites. When I had a MySpace profile, I hated that part. I don't like people objectifying my tastes.

SK: Do you like / have your read Harold Pinter's plays?

Gene Morgan: I just read about Pinter on Wikipedia. I've heard his name before. People who win the Nobel Prize in Literature are alright, usually.

SK: I have this theory about David Mamet's Three Uses of the Knife, his book about writing. I think he wrote it as a monologue for a character who is an asshole. That's why he uses baseball analogies for writing. But I think he's great, and in this book he distinguishes fantastically between what is meaningless and therefore a political use of melodrama, and what he says art really is. Do you think if writing sounds good, but isn't meaningful (however subjective that word can be) it is audience manipulation instead of art? Mamet also says "Western European romance gave us Hitler, the novels of Trollope, and the American musical."

Gene Morgan: Anything that is meaningless is a failure as art. All art has meaning. If it is not art, then there is no meaning. Even ornamental art, when well done, has a place in a person's life and takes on a form of meaning for the person experiencing it. I own several pieces of what people would consider as "abstract" and "meaningless" art, but having it in my home and experiencing it for a long period of time gives it a meaning that moves beyond other work I own that is more explicit in its intentions.

The word "meaning," as you pointed out, is very subjective, so even if a work of art appears meaningless to one person, somebody else may find something that honestly resonates in that same work of art. People like David Mamet are able to pinpoint what resonates with a large number of people, and not what is necessarily more meaningful. Which may be an even greater form of audience manipulation than melodramatic, nice-sounding art, if you consider subliminally presumptive art manipulative.

SK: In what ways can art take itself too seriously, or at what point does art fail its general audience, if there is an audience?

Gene Morgan: Art fails a general audience when it becomes academic. If you are writing for an academic audience, you are writing criticism. Only a certain amount of people will take interest in whatever it is you're making, and they will apply it to what they have read before (something similar to what you have made), and they will analyze the old thing based on the experience of your new thing that is similar to the old thing and responding to the old thing. Academic art is, as far as I can grasp, a form of criticism more relevant than contemporary criticism itself.

Academic art fails a general audience in that the general audience, in terms of poetry and novels, has no reference to the old thing. Academic artists have progressed much like scientists: The general audience understands the greater intent of the work, but lacks the understanding of nuance for something like a scientific paper on AIDS to make complete sense to them. I cannot read a scientific journal and pretend to catch every reference and understand the importance of every methodology used by the scientists. It is impossible-- I took biology at a community college. So while this science is essential to my own life, I cannot begin to comprehend it completely, and this alienates me from the understanding that this knowledge would otherwise provide.

Non-academic art, which is art that can be understood with little previous knowledge (not to say that it is without reference), is based in real life experience and has less of a dependence on past structure, and more on the current state of being. It may explore the same ideas of academic art, and often does, but it is without jargon and the technical isolation from regular people who don't have their MFA in poetry. This is art that is valuable to a general audience.

SK: Do you consider any of the shows on Adult Swim literary?

Gene Morgan: I've watched every episode of Frisky Dingo. It has to be literary, somehow.

SK: How did you begin Bear Parade?

Gene Morgan: Tao Lin dared me to create a website, and I did. I made a print book for one of my events here in Houston that included a story of his, and I really started to appreciate it after about the fifth time I read it. A few months later I was chatting with him on the internet, and he brought up the fact that he hated most places that publish work electronically, and I agreed. He told me to make something, and I asked him for some poems to start things. He sent me a group of poems, expecting maybe that I would pick one, and I decided I wanted to publish the entire group. That's when I had the idea to focus on small collections rather than single works. Tao asked for fifty dollars, and I agreed to pay him. I sat down that Saturday and Sunday and thought about names for like twenty hours. Then, when I had a name, I thought about colors and design for like ten hours, made something, and then started to think about the design of Tao's book.

SK: Is there any, I don't want to say mission statement, do you think there is a way to describe the writing featured on bear parade without objectifying it? For example, I've read it generalized as minimalism or (favorably) as autistic art. Are generalizations ever useful? I blame capitalism for my question. How does one pitch bear parade to a friend in a way that humors capitalistic media advertisement, but still promotes the site?

Gene Morgan: The people on bear parade are my friends, and they influence me a lot, so it's hard for me to really say what it is they are doing without thinking it's the "best."

I think rather than describing bear parade in terms of its writing style, which is what Tao handles much more than I do, it works better for me to describe it in terms of medium. I feel like that is my focus as an "editor," and I feel more competent and will probably use less generalization if I explain it this way.

Bear parade makes sense existing on the internet-- it cannot exist anywhere else, and that is why it is successful and relevant. The people making bear parade are aware of their medium and how the audience is experiencing the work, which is something in the online literary community has had problems with, which is also why they struggle to find relevance. Print journals pay money, and print the same thing that most web journals do.

People easily dismiss the internet for that reason, but what bear parade takes into account is that people read things on the internet by certain artists, and that leads people to look into writers, and eventually people will pay for those writer's books. Bear parade is something that doesn't force the presence of itself as a governing literary body or a guardian of taste, and instead focuses on certain writers and their talents and helps them increase their exposure in a place where exposure is all that exists.

The same concept exists in music. If everyone gets mp3s cheap and easily, they will instead spend their money on band-related clothes and concerts and special edition stuff and other things that benefit the artist directly. People like supporting art and owning products, and this will not change. The only thing that will change is how people go about supporting and owning things.

SK: Would you tell me about your poem "the dark ages"?

Gene Morgan: To me, it's a poem about the inevitability of consumption, like most of my work.

I always think about the same thing when I buy something. I think about how the product I am buying is going to shape some small ecosystem of money. People that earn money, people that spend money. When I buy a product, I think about how I cannot help but contribute to the separation between the actual earth and people who live on the earth, and how this does not bother me. I usually think about how whatever I am buying probably contributes to our own inevitable extinction, and how we as humans will eventually eat ourselves. And then I buy the product anyway.

SK: In your blog, you said you work mediumly. This reminded me of something you said to me in an email that I take as great advice for submissions. It was concerning the contest you won at McSweeney's (for your piece "Birds.") You said: "I used to send mcsweeney's work on a weekly basis a few years ago, and nothing ever worked for them, so I gave up. Must have been twenty well worked pieces. And then I randomly write something in an hour as a joke, and they accept it and send me a free book."

Does a slower pace provide the freedom to not care enough to succeed, whereas getting uptight and over sending would only produce writing that wants to be published?

Gene Morgan: I think so. I would also probably modify the term "slower pace" to somehow include work that gestates for a longer period of time but may not actually be on paper. "Birds" was a piece I wrote in an hour, but I used a writing style that I had been working on for a while, and ideas that I had thought about for a long time. The uptight over-sent writing I made was usually clouded by conventional and, often times, an untruthful type of writing that isn't close to me or my actual personality.

SK: Is there any advice for dying faster than most people? I consider it a race.

Gene Morgan: Dying fast is easy, but if you want to win properly and without "fault," consider beer and cigarettes and ground red meat. They are not the quickest, but instead are the most disciplined of the available methods. Society has failed at stopping any of these man-produced things from killing people, yet no one is to blame personally for their occurrence-- So, you have the potential here to win without guilt.

SK: Do you think clichés have ever been used well in art? Out of context or as surrealist melodrama? The film Possession with Sam Neil seems to me like melodrama to such a weird and ridiculous extent that it reverses itself and turns back into art.

Gene Morgan: I think clichés can be successful; it just depends on the context.

Gwyneth Paltrow is an actress that believes in that too, and probably repeats it to herself as she starts to fall asleep at night. I picture someone like Gwyneth making a sandwich in the kitchen at one in the morning, looking over her lines and thinking:

"This line about love will make a difference in ordinary people's lives. Grey Poupon is shit compared to this organic Whole Foods mustard."

SK: Is it okay to associate one's work with an "ism" if one is aware of how wrong it is to do this, either through irony or self-conscious stupidity?

Gene Morgan: People do buy into "isms" because they are lazy and want to group things together easily and economically. If you're comfortable with showing people how lazy you are (which I am, at times), then you are probably okay with "isms." They are a useful and ugly tool for people who academically discuss sweeping and over-generalized concepts in art, and I imagine a great deal of academics are aware of this. I don't lose or gain any respect for people when they buy into this kind of mentality. It just exists, so I'm okay with it, and probably do it at times without being aware.

SK: Do you have or recommend a pompadour?

Gene Morgan: My friends all want me to get one, but I'm holding off for a few years. It's too much work for my current sleep schedule, I'd have to wake-up like an hour earlier.

SK: What is your response to the word 'morality'?

Gene Morgan: Death. I like how fragile life is, but I am scared to die. 'Mortality' makes me laugh because life is ridiculous, and makes me sad because I think about my dog dying and my girlfriend dying and me dying.

SK: Please tell me this will be available soon.

Gene Morgan: I wish. If someone wants the rights to this title, they can have it for free. I really just want to see it exist.

SK: What is your response to the word 'colander'?

Gene Morgan: uh.

SK: Are you reading anything good lately?

Gene Morgan: I've been reading "Citizen Of" by Christian Hawkey. I really enjoy his poetry sometimes. Sometimes, it is not something I can relate to at all or even enjoy, but sometimes it makes as much sense to me as my own work. I don't know a better way to explain this feeling.

SK: What is your favorite food and beer?

Gene Morgan: Hot dogs and Bud Light.

Letitia Trent Interview

2007-01-20T06:34:00.000-05:00

Letitia Trent is the co-editor of 21 Stars Review. Her work has been published in The Denver Quarterly, NOÖ Journal, Juked, MiPoesias, Stirring, 42opus, Shampoo, No Tell Motel, Pinstripe Fedora, Pebble Lake Review. She is a winner of the IBPC Poets and Writers contest, and teaches lit, as an MFA candidate, at Ohio State University.

SK: Do you breakdance?

Letitia Trent: I don't, though I have seen both Breakin' and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. I grew up in Vermont and Oklahoma, two of the only places in the United States where nobody ever breakdanced ever. Not even in 1983. It's a fact.

SK: Will you teach me to breakdance?

Letitia Trent: I will teach you how to do a plié instead, from my short-lived time as a little ballerina.

SK: If I were to say Let's Go to Bed by The Cure was the greatest song / music video ever made, would you argue with me?

Letitia Trent : I wouldn't argue. I would compliment your taste, but I would gently point out that Morrissey was making superior music during this time period and that a song called "This Charming Man" existed, with an accompanying video, and that such momentous things can't be ignored, even in the face of such obvious brilliance as "Let's Go to Bed."

SK: Are we post-modern?

Letitia Trent: I dislike that term because in a few thousand years it will cause literary critics language problems. I think we need to make things as easy as possible for future literary critics.

SK: Is your writing process arbitrary or on schedule?

Letitia Trent: Semi-arbitrary, though I do make myself write if I have gone too long without writing.

I'm not the kind of person that wakes up at four in the morning and writes for hours before breakfast. I would go insane if I tried to do that, and I would be so hungry that I might eat my pen. I feel too anxious about the day before me every morning to do something as leisurely as write. I'd be more likely to vacuum and pay bills. I like to write at night, after everything is done, and I can feel unhurried.

SK: As a poet, have you ever been categorized? For example, because your lines are concise and sharp. Would you categorize your style, your voice, in any way, or is that always a morbid idea?

Letitia Trent: I think I categorize myself as a poet. I like that poems can just look at something, or just get excited about something, or can just be fascinated by something beautiful or dirty or horrifying, and nobody has to learn anything or change anything or do anything. You don't even have to have characters in poems! It's amazing.

I think my style of writing has changed drastically in the last three years, and is still changing, so I don't feel comfortable categorizing it. I spent a summer reading Language poetry two years ago, and the last summer reading Objectivists and New York School poets, so I think all of that reading has influenced me recently, even if I don't directly try to align myself with any particular tradition. The poems I wrote before then were mostly sort of bad Plath and Wallace Stevens rip-offs. I still love both of those poets, but I've realized that there is room for most anything in a poem. That's not something that people are taught in school, that poems can include anything and do anything.

I love all those tight little seventeenth century poets too. I really want to write crazy tight little poems.

I like everything, which is also a problem, I think, because it doesn't give me a clear aesthetic or 'style'. I spend a lot of time trying to categorize my style, which probably isn't helpful.

SK: Could you tell me how, aside from writing a great poem, you went about winning best poem of the year for "Study of Absences" in the IBPC Poets and Writers contest judged by Peter Murphy?

Letitia Trent: You know, I have no idea how that happened (I won third place for the year, first place for October, just to clarify), and I didn't even learn about it until long after it was announced. I was at the Bucknell Seminar for younger poets when that came out, and nobody even notified me—I got no e-mails from anyone. I found out about it four months later while googling myself (doesn't that sound dirty?). Anyways, I'm grateful to have won third, and I still kind of like that poem. At the time I found out, I'd forgotten about the poem almost completely, and I haven't even looked at it in years. I should paste it from that IBPC site and try to re-write it, since I have no copy of it on my own anymore.

I have a lot of poems that I published pre-2004 that I have forgotten about or not looked at in years. For a while those poems made me nervous and I went on a campaign to obliterate them from existence by trying to cajole editors into deleting them. I didn't make a lot of editor friends that way, and I've realized that it's stupid to worry so much about things like that.

But I think that the best examples of my "voice" are the poems published in MiPoesias in September. The first two are the closest to what I'm doing now.

SK: What was it like to write a collaborative poem with your husband?

Letitia Trent: The Shampoo poem was written during a camping trip to Vermont . It was my idea, but surprisingly, Zach was very much up for it. We regularly write collaborative poems now, one of which is soon to be published by Mandy Laughtland's "the Teeny Tiny."

Zach is fun to write with because he isn't a poet and he doesn't read poetry or fiction—he adds this artlessness that I am completely unable to get anymore. I've been ruined by poems, so sometimes poemspeak gets into things, but Zach doesn't know poemspeak at all.

The particular Shampoo poem came about when we both decided to write about our most terrible childhood memory and then mix the lines up.

SK: My copy of your chapbook "Here, I Made This for You," has fourteen poems and is tied together with blue yarn, all of which makes me very happy. In what ways have you used your chapbook to publicize your work? Did you send it to any famous writers, for example?

Letitia Trent: I made thirty of those, many of them sprinkled with my finger blood (I didn't have a thimble), and it was incredibly fun, but they weren't much of a vehicle for greater exposure. I mean, I've met lots of cool people primarily by way of the chapbook—you, for example, and a few others—but I didn't really use it in a smart marketing way. I sent one to Ron Silliman, 'cause he has his address on his website. That's about as famous a person as my chapbook reached.

I made these books as a way to get myself away from feelings that I had to "save" good poems for publications, or that I had to be published in a "reputable" way—I wanted to make something solely for my own pleasure with the hopes that other people would like it. I think it's poisonous to get too wrapped up where things are being published or if the right people are reading your poems. Most people talk about this in terms of academia and careerism, but I think it goes in all ways—you can be worried about not being "avant" enough, that your poems aren't getting into the magazines where all the other cool kids are publishing, that your poems make too much sense…all of that is distracting and stupid.

By the way, people can still get a copy of these if they like. E-mail me at letitia.trent@gmail.com and you too can have a blood-soaked yarn-bound chapbook.

SK: You teach lit at Ohio State University. Could you tell me about your experiences there? Do pro-genocide frat boys say the word jigga? Did you meet Jon Stewart?

Letitia Trent: Ohio State is like another planet. Football=Jesus, which is still weird to me, since I'm used to Jesus being Jesus, as I am from Southern Oklahoma. My students gasped when I asked them if I should watch the Ohio State Michigan game this year. One actually said "Are you joking?" I was afraid that somebody would key my car for not loving football enough.

But I'm constantly surprised at how unlike movie frat boys real frat boys are. Of course, they are probably just keeping quiet around me because they know about my "liberal agenda."

I didn't meet Jon Stewart! I don't have cable, so I never watch The Daily Show anymore, and I ignore my school's website and e-mails, so I didn't hear about this until the week it happened. I also missed Kurt Vonnegut and Dave Eggers last year. I can't seem to get anything right.

SK: I like Sharon Olds. Do you like Sharon Olds?

Letitia Trent: I really like Satan Says and The Living and the Dead. After that, it all sort of runs together for me. But I'll never forget the bobbing penis arrow image from Satan Says. Plus, Sharon Olds proves that married people still have lots of sex, which helps me feel like a less square old married lady, and that you can write poems about babies and birth that aren't all sweetness and cooing and oh-my-god-i-made-a-person-and-now-I'll-never-be-the-same blather. I love how bloody and fluidy Sharon Olds is.

SK: Does being an editor give you nightmares?

Letitia Trent: Yes. I'm always afraid I don't know what's good and will end up making a mistake, rejecting a poem that I'll later realize (while in bed, trying to get to sleep—that's where I have all of my terrifying realizations) was brilliant, I don't trust my own judgment very well. But I'm lucky in that we have a clear aesthetic for our journal, and that helps me guide my editorial decisions.

Ultimately, I ask myself three things when I read a poem: 1. Do I want to read this poem again? Does it have something that compels me to come back to it? 2. Does this poem stay in my mind after I have read it, or does it drift off into the place where all those other mediocre but skillful poems go? 3. Does it fit our editorial preferences?

SK: Is it true that the bible is an incalculable misinterpretation, that it is really only a tepid prophecy for the coming greatness of our Lord Morrissey, former lead singer of The Smiths, and his beautiful pet Tommy gun?

Letitia Trent: Both Morrissey and Jesus saved me at different points in my life, so the answer to this is a certain yes. Jesus made me improve my grades in high school, which helped me go to college, which helped me to realize that I never actually believed in Jesus. But Morrissey is my true savior. I discovered Morrissey when I was 16 and was immediately transported to somewhere slightly south of heaven with the song "The Charming Man."

When I heard The Smiths for the first time, on a Memorex tape I found at a flea market, I thought to myself, yes, will nature make a man of me yet? And then, as the tape continued, I thought Yes, I too was bored before I even began! And then I realized that Morrissey and I were alike—we both sneered at other people for their pretensions and stupidity, but secretly wanted those very people to love us for our crooning, prescient social commentary, and beautiful cheekbones. This is the artistic temperament.

SK: If Morrissey is beyond the need for sex or gender, why does poetry exist?

Letitia Trent: You know, I've always been attracted to this idea of being beyond gender & sex. I like what Johnny Rotten says in Sid and Nancy, you know, sex is boooring Sydney , boooring. If you watch pornography in a certain state of mind, it just looks like really orange people slapping meat together. It's all very boring and repetitive and sickly depressing. And gender just scares me— girls wear nail polish and boys like guns, good girls like headbands and bad girls like fishnets, good boys like jobs and bad boys like motorcycles, etc. The idea that our behaviors are conscripted, that we can't get out of this programming, and that it might be natural, whatever that means, just terrifies me. I'd like to get beyond meat slapping and nailpolish. Morrissey's embodiment of genderless elegance and equal opportunity love sickness appeals to me. Though, of course, he wasn't beyond gender, was he? He was fascinated with gender—the male criminal type, the Oscar Wilde-esque fop, all the accoutrements of certain varieties of gender.

Maybe the desire to be beyond gender requires the constant monitoring of gendered behavior and norms. Because you never know if you're slipping back into gender unless you're vigilant about preventing it. I'll stop typing because I'm just babbling now.

Being beyond sex is another matter altogether. Sexless people, like fundamentalist Christians, for example, are the most obsessed with sex. They see it everywhere!

Poetry requires that we have a bee in our bonnets, so I guess the desire to be beyond sex and gender puts a permanent bee in one's bonnet, so poetry is bound to come out. I have no idea if I'm answering your question! ha.

SK: If you could send your hair to anyone besides, and assuming we both have already have, Morrissey, who would it be?

Letitia Trent: I need to hang on to my hair, because it is thin and yucky and barely covers my head as it is. Once I had an unfortunate pixie cut, which revealed my scalp. I'm trying to grow a long, sexy Lucie Brock-Broido or Eleni Sikelianos mane. When I die I'll donate my hair to the Poetry Foundation so it can be kept in storage with Dickinson's dress, Eliot's bowties, and Allen Ginsberg's chanting robes.

SK: Could you make five general and also preferably prejudiced statements about poetry?

Letitia Trent: 1. I like to see thinking in a poem. Poems that don't contain thinking bore me. This means I need to see evidence of a human mind humming somewhere. I don't mean that a poem needs to have an argument, or a linear structure, or even coherency in the traditional sense, but I want the sense that something is being worked out through a poem.

2. Poetry is more intimate than prose. You can own it more fully and integrate it into your life more completely. This is why I'll always be a poet first, even if I someday go on to write novels and other prosely whatnots.

3. I think you can judge a person's personality through their poetry much more accurately than you can through a person's prose. If I am annoyed by the voice, tone, or implicit attitudes in a poem, then I'm pretty sure I'll dislike the person behind the poem.

4. Discussions about the organic marriage of form and content annoy me. Here is a prejudiced comment—form should create the content. That's what formal strictures are for—to make your brain go somewhere that it can't reach on its own. This is why both OULIPO forms and traditional forms appeal to me—left to my own devices, all of my poems would be boring shit. Forms make unexpected things happen. More than anything, I want to get out of my own brain, which doesn't have anything new to tell me anymore.

5. If all of the poems in your book look and sound the same, you aren't trying hard enough.

Matina L. Stamatakis Interview

2006-12-09T20:32:00.000-05:00

Matina L. Stamatakis has been published in: zafusy, eratio, elimae, Can We Have Our Ball Back, Wicked Alice, Face Time, Down in the Dirt, The Wright Side, SP Quills, Cynic Magazine, and Albany Poets Other___. She is the editor of Venereal Kittens.

SK: May we discuss St. Kevorkian and his work?

Matina L. Stamatakis: Ah, yes. His Agnostic saintliness. When I first heard about Dr. K., it was back in ‘99 when he was charged with second-degree homicide. The media did a wonderful job portraying him as the quintessential nutcase (go figure). Many moons (and hairstyles) later, I was pondering the idea of writing a novel based around Kevorkian's work, properly entitled: Calling Dr. Love--you may be familiar with the title from KISS or, most recently, Electric Hellfire Club. Anyway, I did a bit of research, and it was a shock to find out he was not only a doctor (as we all know), but he also had hidden--or semi-hidden--talents. Why the hell am I speaking about him in the third person? Shit, he's not dead YET! Anyway, he possesses many talents. Just a couple being poetry, painting, and believe it or not, he‘s also a jazz musician. If you get a chance, check out his comical take on dieting in Slimmericks and the Demi-Diet--it’s a blast. As for his artwork, his most known work is the image featured on the cover of Acid Bath’s Paegan Terrorism Tactics. My personal favorite is The Gourmet (War), which depicts a man --in what could possibly be his Last Supper--sitting with a knife and fork in his hands, ready to eat his freshly decapitated head. It’s gruesome, yet its colorful canvas appears cartoonish and out of proportion, which is a classic example of Kevorkian’s macabre humor and artistic style--even though he will vehemently disclaim his paintings as 'art'. How modest!

As for his most serious works, which would be what he was charged for, it’s amazing how society has taken a person’s personal decision to a much more distorted level. It’s a community effort to stick its own biased morals into the mix, and play God or messenger of God. Jack had to face a strong stream of anger when he actually performed the act of voluntary euthanasia. Before that he was just a bumbling, old doctor casually working from his van (of all places), passing around little business cards to anybody who may have been interested. Hardly the man worthy of a full profiling from, say, the likes of John Douglas. Few people realize he was open about the issue, and even more fail to see him as a ‘humanitarian’.

Well, I could go on forever about St. Kevorkian, but I’d like to end this question with a quote from him that I find most interesting and really grasps his genius and intellectual depth:

"No, it's in an orifice --would you like to inspect it?"

SK: And the films of Jorg Buttgereit, but upside-down?

Matina L. Stamatakis: tihS! Tried, but got a headache. The view was nice, though. Jorg is like the closest thing to God I'd force myself into believing. Okay, maybe he's reached saint status like Doctor Death.

I'm thinking, since Broadway musicals have been reduced to shit for years since Disney took over, it is imperative they need to do a musical of Nekromantik to revive this dilapidated 'culture'. It'd be just like Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, only after Sweeny disposes of whatever's left of the corpse, Beatrice M. will come along and finish it off the proper way. My theory is, if they allow such a musical to appear on Broadway, they will be instilling educational value whilst bringing back just a hint of the sexuality that was once prevalent in that part of NY years ago. How can they go wrong? They should also do a musical of Der Todesking and Hot Love, because I have no clue what they’re about. Maybe watching ‘em upside down will help.

SK: Have you ever written a poem while standing up?

Matina L. Stamatakis: No, actually. How is it?

SK: Blood spots. Do you prefer to sit or lie down while writing a poem?

Matina L. Stamatakis: I prefer to jog in place while writing poetry. It helps circulate the blood, and it’s not a lead-in to 'pancake ass', usually caused by sitting down in one place too long.

SK: Do you use the Poet's Market cover letter format for email and paper submissions and, as an editor, is there a certain kind of cover letter that you prefer?

Matina L. Stamatakis: Never had to use a generic sample for any cover letter written thus far. Most of the magazines I submit to are a bit informal. But would definitely consider a proper cover letter if sending work to, say, Poetry magazine or Ninth Letter. Even though the thought alone makes me a bit queasy.

As for Venereal Kittens, the goal is not to be the premier, top-of-the-notch poetry magazine, because there are literally thousands out there doing the same thing and doing it well. My goal is poetry at a ‘community’ level. By this, I mean it’s highly informal, there is no deadline for submissions, no excessively long response time, and what matters most of all is it’s not a magazine but a collective. It just keeps rolling on no matter what. But I’m somewhat veering away from the point. No, cover letters are always optional, as are bios. That’s not to say I don’t place an interest in what a writer has to say in a cover letter (and, by all means, they have an option to include a cover letter with their submissions), but I’m more interested in the poetry itself. Cover letters seem like you’re just trying to convince the editor you can write. Why not let the poem do the talking?

SK: Your magazine is called Venereal Kittens. How many jealous emails have you received because of the greatness of this title?

Matina L. Stamatakis: Actually, the question should be: how many death threats have you received because of the offensiveness of this title? Hey, even bad publicity is still publicity. Isn't it? Think I'm gonna start a VK protest group. Wanna join? Let's smear the name even further! We can stand outside and picket in front of Planned Parenthood like those wacky right-wing-super-conservative-anti-abortionists. It'd be swell.

Seriously though, no death threats, no jealous rants, no free porn subscriptions, no one-night-stands. Hell, not even free topical cream samples to get rid of those nasty rashes!

SK: Please tell me about The Avant-Gardist's Dictionary?

Matina L. Stamatakis: Well, it was one of many unfinished projects that is currently collecting dust. It may be revived at a later date, but for now, I’ve run out of ideas for 'nonce' words, as I like to call them. The reason why AGD is a blog is because I felt it was important to include the 'community' in word making. Why not? I've had some wonderful nonce from various writers, and if others want to add their words, it's what makes it a unique thing. Usually the words are placed in Googlemark to ensure some kind of validity.

SK: How do you define 'postmodern'?

Matina L. Stamatakis: The typical definition of postmodern would be a display of the ‘extreme’ or ‘cutting-edge’, but I find myself tired of labels. Yet resort to them (hence Avant-Gardist) because there's really no other way to describe it. If you try to tell people who ask what kind of genre or style you fall into, it's hard to give a proper answer without pigeonholing yourself. We may as well all walk around with the titles printed on our foreheads. I think I'm going to start a label....how about...'pseudomodern'? That way we can all trick ourselves into thinking we are modernists, or maybe some anti-established literary force. It's hard to talk about it without getting a sour taste in my mouth. It’s a bit creatively and artistically repressive to think you have to cater to any one way of thinking, or any one style or literary movement. Yet, it’s comforting, in a way, to know you’re part of a group of people who share many of the views you have. Guess it’s more 'peer promising’ than, say, doing it all on your own with little or no guidance or reassurance.

I think some of it may be due to the fact that we’re taught at a young age to classify objects and even people, so it’s a naturally forming need that causes labels to be used so eagerly. But is the need really a necessity or some sick, inherent urge to belong? It’s the same thought of claiming unconventional views when the thought of ‘unconventionality‘ is in the same boat as conformist thought--it’s what it boils down to. As the adage goes, you’re unique just like every one else. Who knows? I’ll leave the categorical labeling to my sock drawer.

As for my definition of ‘postmodern’ it’s experimental work without experimental breakthrough--it kinda sits there like pus on a fresh, open sore and mingles with other pus-filled sores. Eventually, it’ll have to break away and start on a fresh sore. When that happens, It’ll be called something else.

SK: What can you tell me about your Exploded View poems? Does anything need to be said? What went in to writing these and how do you make language purr that amazingly?

Matina L. Stamatakis: Pregnant heifers with mad cow disease. Dandelions. Toenail clippings. A girl's soiled panties. Some subconscious fantasy to walk around in freshly peeled llama skins--epidermis of genocide.

SK: [MUTE] is a blog book of fifty-four of your poems. Are you shopping any book manuscripts? What are some of your favorite publishing houses and magazines that you plan to eventually hit? Are you still working on The Body: A Wasteful Gesture?

Matina L. Stamatakis: Not at the moment, but may look into it later. When I first set out to write [MUTE], there was more time spent looking into potential publishing houses. Maybe searching for a publishing house was the best diversion, but it was clearly contradictory to the idea behind why I started writing in the first place. I wrote because of a passion and nothing more. It wasn't to be seen, or even heard--though it would have been nice. When the manuscript was complete, I took a hard look at it and (like the proverbial gut feeling) knew it belonged in a blog. It works better because of the option to combine my photography with the writings in a more linear display. Having [MUTE] in book form may be harder to pull off without it becoming extremely costly for the publisher.

To answer your second question, I plan to hit 'em all, grow a big, fat, unhealthy ego, then retire somewhere in Myrtle Beach where I can take up decopage and yell at the town hoodlums, and use geriatric-speak, like: You whippersnapper. Or, throw out some obscure 18th century vulgar British slang nobody's ever heard of before. You dirty puzzle. You son of a horse coser!

Oh, and favorite magazines...hmmm...would have to say a great deal of time has been spent perusing the archives of BlazeVox, elimae, Mad Hatter's Review, eratio, Sein und Werden, H_NG_MN. To name a few. I'm too poor to actually afford copies. Good thing most can be found on the internet.

The Body: A Wasteful Gesture is another one of those unfinished (or, more accurately, never-to-be- finished) projects. In the middle of the manuscript, I began chiseling away at an idea for a full-length story, Graffiti Suitcase, loosely based on a popular Greek myth. If I told which, it would be too obvious, and the end would not be as impactful--so it's top secret for now.

SK: Your poem Love Me Nots published in elimae begins:

A war of flowers
left your palm

Do you lose time when you write? Is it like blacking out?

Matina L. Stamatakis: Quite often. It's easy to lose the sense of time when you're isolated with a pen (or a keyboard in this case). When you're alone and there's nothing to do, the baby is asleep and you just feel like masturbating--instead you write. There's always a loss of time you could have used in a much more productive way. Like filling out tax forms. PTA meetings. Jury duty. Feeding chocolate laxative bars to annoying, little mutts, hoping they shit themselves to death. All of which I've never done because I've been too busy boosting my sex appeal.

Nah, I know what I'm doing. Try hard not to end up in a stranger's bed after.

SK: Do you listen to music when you write? If so, what music?

Matina L. Stamatakis: Tried it once or twice, but wound up blocking the music out. Sometimes I listen to a song or album before I write to set the mood. It can be anything from exotica to Tuvan throat singing--so long as it's not Merzbow, which would probably send me off writing about a horse named Rectal Anarchy. Hmmm...that may not be such a bad thing.

SK: Please name your literary influences at gunpoint.

Matina L. Stamatakis: BobFlaniganDaphneGottliebCAConradMargePiercySadeHomerBlakeCohen
BurgessKafkaCamusPlathPoeBurroughsKeatsVoltaireWildeMasoch, etc.

SK: Do you consider yourself a language poet? What is language poetry to you?

Matina L. Stamatakis: There go those pesky, little labels! Sure, there are certain elements in my own writings that give way to language poetry, but it's not something I would consider myself, per se. I tend to look at poetry in uncomplicated terms. Meaning, I do not pick away at something so inherently present and beautiful (for lack of a better epithet) in order to adapt or understand poetry in more complex terms. I'm not averse to the idea of taking this route in the future. But, at present, tend to place less stress on the importance of finding a home or proper title for my poetry which still needs room to grow.

SK: Do you become nervous in crowded areas?

Matina L. Stamatakis: Any public area brings a live-wire of nerviness. That's one reason why I don't write performance-based poetry. Shitty voice. Salty hands. Overactive bladder. It's no good being in the middle of a passionate, pour-your-heart-out poem when you suddenly get the urge to piss, and say "oops, gotta go, gotta go, gotta go, go, go". Then you'll be known as that-girl-who-never-finished-her-poem-because-she-pissed-herself-repeatedly. It's much easier to piss yourself alone, and do it with some sort of integrity intact. By the way, this is just a hypothetical situation. But I do see it as a foreseeable occasion, and am trying to take preventive steps.

SK: Have you ever been stung by a bee?

Matina L. Stamatakis: Yes, those vicious bastards.

SK: Have you broken any bones, yours or anyone else's?

Matina L. Stamatakis: No bones broken, but would like to break someone else's bones in the future if ever the opportunity should arise.

SK: How many weapons do you own?

Matina L. Stamatakis: Considering the fact that virtually everything can be used as a weapon, the numbers are astounding, and should not be placed below 1,000.

But a good follow-up question would be: What's your favorite weapon? To which I'd have to say, without even the slightest hesitation, a turkey baster.

SK: How many scars do you have?

Matina L. Stamatakis: Presently? Not enough.

SK: Do you drink?

Matina L. Stamatakis: Alcohol, no. I'm a cheap date. Usually it only takes one beer to get drunk--so I don't.

SK: Do you enjoy hurting people physically or mentally or both or neither?

Matina L. Stamatakis: A part of me wants to say neither. But the other part knows, deep down, it'd be nice to do both and get some degree of pleasure out of it. Maybe that's why I read Sade. He wrote about things I'd only dream of doing. But some things are best left at that. Fantasies.

SK: Do you lean toward nihilism or misanthropy?

Matina L. Stamatakis: Nihilism is not really my forte. It's good if it's used as a means to provoke a social uprising, but it wouldn't work nowadays because people are more content (at least it seems that way) with letting the assholes rule. It seems like there's a strong sense of security, or people unwilling to stretch out of their own skins, shake things up, bring on anarchy as a means for change--be it political or social. Maybe it's a sense of indifference, and the you're damned if you do--damned if you don't attitude. Nihilism, like I said ealier, wouldn't work so much today because of the strong materialism needs we possess, and the need to be governed. It just doesn't seem plausible, and it's much easier to give in. Now, I don't believe that one should give in completely. There needs to be some sense of identity or small uprising amidst the bumbling, brainless cattle.

I used to be a misanthropic bitch. Now I'm not so sure. It depends on the day. For instance, if I have a downright shitty day at work, I make a secret pledge to hate the rest of humanity and hope they all die horribly painful deaths. It usually passes when I go home, and realize only certain people need to die horribly painful deaths. The rest just need to die of old age (which can be a curse in itself).

SK: Do enough poets commit suicide?

Matina L. Stamatakis: No. But they should consider suicide as a means of selling future manuscripts for heaps of dough. It's a great marketing tool. I'd recommend it to anyone looking for a way to give their writing career a good boost. Don't know why they don't cover this in the Writer's Market--it's truly baffling.

SK: Do enough interviewers commit suicide?

Matina L. Stamatakis: Yes. They're killing themselves at an alarming rate. Probably because of interviewees like myself.

SK: How many houses have you lived in?

Matina L. Stamatakis: Can't remember--still not housebroken, though. There I go pissing in the stairwell again.

Chewing on my owner's moth-eaten penny loafers.

SK: Is the sky a joke the trees are telling badly?

Matina L. Stamatakis: The sky is a tree badly telling a joke.

SK: How many sit-ups can you perform?

Matina L. Stamatakis: Way out of shape. Maybe one with a struggle.

SK: Have you ever used a firework to murder a small animal or many insects?

Matina L. Stamatakis: As a child, I used a magnifying glass on a hot summer day to burn a small ant to death.

Also did some science experiment with a segmented worm, where I poured hydrogen peroxide on its cuts and all the brown crap bubbled out of it. Had not experimented on animals, though. Any you recommend?

SK: Do you paint your fingernails with anything unusual?

Matina L. Stamatakis: Donkey semen (which is also good for the complexion)

SK: Do you re-write? To what degree do you re-write your poems?

Matina L. Stamatakis: Used to extensively, but realized it's a waste because when you re-write your works so much, they kind of lose the spontaneity they once had. Now I'm less concerned with re-writes. They're usually done when I have a good piece going, but one or two words or a stanza is pissing me off to the point where I have to be picky and overly critical. Honestly, if it comes to that, the poem gets scrapped and I take the salvageable parts and mix them into another poem later on.

SK: Have you ever cried after writing a poem?

Matina L. Stamatakis: No. What's it like?

SK: It feels political. Do you think poetry will exist in twenty years?

Matina L. Stamatakis: That's like asking me if the world will still be around in twenty years. Crap--hope not because I'm looking forward to Armageddon.

Brian Howe Interview

2006-11-05T23:43:00.000-05:00

Brian Howe is published or forthcoming in: McSweeney's, Octopus Magazine, Fascicle, Soft Targets, MiPo, Melancholia’s Tremulous Dreadlocks, Eratio, GutCult, Word For/ Word and more.

SK: Have you ever made another poet cry?

Brian Howe: I'll tell you three stories. They could very well all be apocryphal, though one might be true.

I once made Tony Tost cry. He was on a seven-day juice fast and I came to his house and blended up some T-Bone steaks, drank them down right in front of him, then bit his beard until he agreed to call me "Mommy."

I once made Gabe Gudding cry. He was feeling sad and I sent him a song by Life Without Buildings, the very pinnacle of "bands who broke up before they had time to tarnish their legacy". The song is called "Sorrow" and it is very beautiful. It makes you feel sad in that way that feels very good.

I once made Billy Collins cry. I came to him as an apparition in a dream, rattling chains and saying in a spooky voice, "I AM THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN POETRY...."

SK: Are you going to make me cry?

Brian Howe: Shut the fuck up you sissy.

(note: The following questions interpreted through profound sobs.)

SK: You said, "...don't resort to clusters of self-negating dangling modifiers like 90% of the 'post-avants.'" Could you elaborate on this?

Brian Howe: Well I run the risk of sounding self-righteous here, but I have a strong aversion to poetic language that strives to be adventurous simply by being obscure. All I mean is that writing sentences with subjects and absent verbs or verbs and absent subjects, or just breaking up language into little fragments for the hell of it, isn't very exciting to me if the language doesn't sparkle with music and portent. This might seem hypocritical when you look at my poetry; I'm willing to acknowledge that. All I can say in my defense is that my poetics is heavily governed by process, and that I'm very concerned with the musicality of the language. But I might well be guilty of the very sin I decry, as is so often the case -- dark mirrors and all that...

SK: Would you please show me a large dangling modifier, yours or anybody else's?

Brian Howe: not safe for work

SK: Do you write much literary critical analysis? I don't think I saw any on your blog Slatherpuss but I did see some cool pictures there and quotes for your upcoming chapbook Guitar Smash from Atlanta's 3rdness press.

Brian Howe: I do dabble in book reviews, although they tend to me more general-readership things than hardcore critical analysis. Book reviews are more time-consuming than music reviews, plus I love books enormously and worry about doing too many book reviews, making books "work" the same way that music now often feels like "work" to me (I write a fuck of a lot of music crit, you have to to make a living at it). I used to review fiction I liked for About.com -- David Foster Wallace, Stephen Millhauser, Richard Price, Nicholson Baker -- but they didn't pay anything besides free books and I had to give it up. I've written exactly one poetry book review, of David Mieklejohn's Effing chap Plots (good book), for GutCult. While it was a fine experience, I decided that I didn't want to write poetry reviews -- I'd rather just write poetry, and anyway, at a certain level the whole nepotistic "I'll review your chap if you review mine" thing seems a bit icky to me. I also write about music-related books for Paste -- I just wrote about an academic study of Japanese hip-hop that was pretty fascinating.

SK: Jon Leon, who's written reviews for Jacket Magazine, gave Guitar Smash a positive review and referred to your writing style as "Science Future" and went on to say your work "pushes the boundaries of what a poem can be by assimilating technology, sampling, and repetition to transcend and skirt categorizations like modern, post, and avant." Tell me about Science Future. The poet is removed from the poem?

Brian Howe: I liked Jon's review; he cut right to the heart of the thing, although I'd expect no less from Jon. He's a sharpie, he is. Science Future is Jon's term so I can't talk about that directly, although the Futurist implications ( i.e. the Italian Futurists) of the book are spot-on. When I began working my current process, F7, which predominantly involves using MS Word's spellchecker to make poems in a variety of ways (but which also uses a lot of other technological mediations -- everything I've published in the past couple years is part of this process), I had lots of lofty ideas about removing the author from the work and creating poems outside of any human agency. In the beginning the poems were very process oriented, governed strictly by serial, chance, and patterned operations, delimited by firm boundaries, and I was probably closer to doing what I thought I was doing then. But I soon came to realize that I was all over the damn poems, regardless of how hard I tried to get out of them, and over time I began to use the process more loosely and intuitively, attempting to craft poems that would be interesting even if you had no knowledge of the concept and honing in on what made the poems interesting -- the tension between the machine's algorithms and my fallible human will. GUITAR SMASH, it should be noted, doesn't use the F7 process at all -- I used it to showcase F7 byproducts that used Google sculpting, online translators, text databases, and the MS Word thesaurus function to make poems. The poems in GUITAR SMASH are some of the most troublesome, anti-poetic works that have emanated from the process, sort of a ground-clearing. The two or three chapbooks and the full length manuscript I'm shopping around now will be more focused.

SK: Who, or what, or which magazines do you feel represent good post-avant and also post-modern work and what is avant garde and post-modernist these days?

Brian Howe: Whoa. I should say that I use terms like "post-avant" with scare quotes; it actually has very little currency to me. So post-avant doesn't have enough currency to define, while postmodern has too much -- every since recorded media made sound preservable and manipulable and communications technolgies advanced to the point where local boundaries became essentially meaningless, we've been sliding headlong into postmodernism, this constant re-configuration of manipulable bits of the past, and it's like the proverbial asking a fish to define water. The avant-garde is also by nature undefinable -- the avant-garde isn't a style (although many mistake it for one). If something can be defined, it's been codified, and the avant-garde by nature cannot be codified. So the avant-garde is any cultural product that disrupts the cultural matrix (this isn't necessarily a politically revolutionary action, it can be purely aesthetic), it can manifest in any form as long as it's not definable by current standards and that it is truly disruptive, not emulating disruptive elements of the past. Publications I like, to answer the other part of your question, include Fascicle, Fence (sometimes), MiPo, Jacket, Soft Targets, No, and many others...

SK: You write music reviews for Pitchfork Media.com. Can I ask if you appreciate 80s music in a way that's somewhat but not entirely ironic and if anyone appreciates 80s music in a way that isn't entirely ironic do you think this person is mentally stable?

Brian Howe: When you say '80s music I'm assuming you mean big-budget synth pop, which I can appreciate for its audacity but am not especially into at the moment (right now I'm mostly drawn to noise / sound art / drone stuff, although in my stereo in heavy rotation you'll find the new Yo La Tengo, White Magic, and Ludacris's Green-Lantern-helmed Pre-Release Therapy mix tape). But I know a great many very intelligent people who loves '80s music in an entirely unironic way, although entirely un-nostalgic is another story. As for myself, I prefer music from the future, unless it's Leonard Cohen.

SK: Why are you more handsome than I am? Your Myspace page is great. What is going on there?

Brian Howe: I can't respond to that fully because I don't know what you look like; therefore, I can't be sure of the validity of your claim. All that's certain is yes, I am very handsome, and if I am in fact more handsome than you, it's likely due to my tight girl jeans and asymmetrical haircut. I only have a Myspace page because some people seem to hate email and only communicate through Myspace, so they can get in touch with me there, but I haven't updated it in a very long time. What's going on is two things -- on one level, I'm always drawn to language of an incantatory nature -- I love the cadences of massed words. That's just text I mined from a database. On another, it's something of a dig at Myspace pages -- everyone lists their interests in film, literature and music in an attempt to distinguish themselves from the herd, and everyone winds up putting down the same stuff, and anyway seeming really flat, as people, as if a list of interests in cultural products can define who someone is. So if you look at a bunch of people's Myspace pages it just starts to look like meaningless babble. I just cut to the chase.

SK: You were part of the MiPOesias Reading Series in early October. Please tell me about your experiences in New York?

Brian Howe: A fairly detailed, if somewhat elliptical, account of my trip to New York can be found here here. Also some pictures here. I should mention that I've gotten really lazy about updating my blog -- I'm sure some of the links are out of date (Behrle's probably changed his domain name five times since I last updated), and that I mainly use it as a record of things I'm doing poetically. I'd like to spend more time posting in depth about various things, but it just doesn't fit into my life right now. In fine though, I love New York City. I try to make it up there at least a couple times a year, and I have a tentative plan to move there by the time I'm 30 (giving me about two and half more years to tie things up in North Carolina). At least this has been my plan, although at the moment I wouldn't dream of leaving for a city -- I'm spending a lot of time with friends I love play music in the country and until that peters out, I'm sitting tight.

SK: Are you a fan of John Giorno? He's the only other person I can think of right now who also did poetic voice modification performances.

Brian Howe: I'm afraid I had to Google John Giorno, but the stuff I'm checking out on Ubu right now seems awfully neat. Thanks for turning me on. If my voice modification performances have a primary influence, it's Steve Reich and the tape loop work he did in the 1960s -- things like "It's Gonna Rain" and "Come Out." In these pieces Reich takes very simple vocal snippets and brings them, ever so gradually, in and out of phase. He commits other acts of violence and trickery upon them as well. The language becomes completely abstract -- it sheds meaning and becomes pure rhythmic sound, like the ocean, or rain. Yet they remain loaded with meaning, since the samples Reich uses for these pieces are from, respectively, a fire-and-brimstone preacher and a civil rights protester. As I mentioned before I'm interested in incantatory language, not to mention the mystical and unfathomable qualities of repetitive sound, and appropriation and re-use, and fractals and circumscribed chaos; Reich's work combines all these and dovetails directly with my interests. I use a digital sampler for mine, and I'm still working on ways to integrate loops more seamlessly and more meaningfully in my readings.

SK: You have an upcoming reading event in Chapel Hill with Tony Tost and others. Is there a healthy lit scene in Chapel Hill, NC.? Do healthy lit scenes exist? Are you friends with Tony Tost or Gabe Gudding? If I asked either of them for an interview would they punch me in the face? Will you punch me in the face?

Brian Howe: North Carolina is chock-a-block with amazing poets; I feel very lucky to live here. I mean, within an hour's drive I've got Tony Tost and Ken Rumble and Randall Williams and Chris Vitiello and Patrick Herron and Todd Sandvik and Chris Salerno and Tessa Jospeh and on and on and on ... Ken Rumble's Lucifer Poetics email list was crucial in bringing these people together. Lucipo used to be a really tight unit -- it was a listserv, but we were also all friends who had parties and went on reading tours and whatnot. After a period of dispersal and tension, Lucipo is showing signs of being reinvigorated (as a local group of poets, not a national email list) and I couldn't be happier about it. The reading I just organized at Nightlight was almost all Lucipo people. I don't know Gabe very well, to answer that question, but I am friends with Tony -- unfortunately, he was sick the night of the reading and had to cancel. I'm certain neither Gabe nor Tony would punch you in the face if you asked them for interviews; they're both friendly guys. I would also not punch you in the face, unless you tried to touch my earlobes, which I have a thing about. I actually haven't punched anyone in the face since I was in Austria in 2002. It was four in the morning and my friend and I had been drinking absinthe at a bar, we were walking back to the woman we were staying with's apartment, and we simply decided it would be fun to punch each other in the face. There's a picture of me showing off my busted lip and him with a gash under his eye; I can show it to you if you want. We were so young and full of promise, then. At any rate, the reading was filmed and should be on YouTube soon, if you wanna get a look at some crazy NC poets.

SK: Do you ever think poetry is just another show business and calling it anything else is like trying to force a small hat on something with antlers?

Brian Howe: Poetry can be show business, like anything can, if you let it. Sometimes it feels that way, when I'm shopping around chapbooks or arguing with relative strangers on email lists. But sitting in front of the computer in a rapturous stupor, cleaving language into smithereens and working it over with technological mediations, doesn't feel much like show business to me -- it's too beautiful and futile. But come to think of it, trying to force a small hat onto something with antlers seems like a pretty good definition of poetry itself.

SK: What's absinthe like? I haven’t tracked any down and won’t be a confident poet until I do.

Brian Howe: I've had "absinthe" several times, but I still don't know what it's like-- I don't think I've come across any with significant wormwood content. So far in my absinthe experience, the only green fairy I've seen has been my own hungover reflection the next morning. I continue to search half-assedly.

SK: You're a member for the performance panel of The Poetics of Re-use reading/talk that will occur on Sunday, December 17th as part of the In Your Ear reading series, sponsored by DC Poetry. I like Ben Lerner a lot. Especially his hair. My question didn't show up on time.

Brian Howe: I also like Ben Lerner a lot -- his poems are full of content. The "Mean Free Path" series that appeared in Soft Targets #1 was "the tits" (that's something some people say around here to express enthusiasm). I excerpted that section on the Re-Use blog because it so aptly describes my current practice of manifesting a potentially infinite chain of reactions from one source text. I wish I had written that; perhaps Ben Lerner would be willing to part with it for a modest sum. I'm looking forward to this Re-Use thing but it's all very ambiguous right now -- it still isn't clear to me what the actual shape of the thing will be. It doesn't really matter; I'm excited to be doing anything with Adam Good and Buck Downs.

SK: You're in Soft Targets. I'm intimidated. Please say something. Maybe we can stare at each other for the rest of the interview. I need to be held.

Brian Howe: Soft Targets is really fancy, it's the best new print journal I've seen in some time, both in design and content. I'm not just saying that because I have some poems in it. Or am I? Ira's really wailing right now and it's a little hard to think, but oh, here comes the fadeout. By the way, I was going to grow half a mustache for Halloween, but I forgot and shaved a couple days before Halloween, and then I didn't have time to grow half a mustache, so I just wore fake glasses. Should you be intimidated by someone who sets for himself the simple task of growing half a mustache and winds up with just fake glasses? I don't think so Sean.

SK: Is Re-use the echo of an apocalypse that's already happened? For example, when I cut my arm and blood comes out is this just the memory of what happened in the past catching up with itself through an arbitrarily refracted light projected against some far curtain of the universe?

Brian Howe: No, that's just blood coming out of your arm. It might not be verifiably real, but it's what we get. Verifiable existence is too much to ask for anyway, we should be content to simply be perceived, and to leave a residue of the phenomenon behind. (I have said this before, somewhere.) Re-Use is not an apocalypse because nothing is destroyed -- the source remains intact while producing an endless series of transfigurations. Text is not a depleteable resource.

SK: Could you tell me about remixing your poetry? I don't think I've seen that done before.

Brian Howe: It works according to the F7 process I believe I described to you earlier. My "Foreign Letter" series, examples of which can be seen in various journals, worked like this: I constructed a poem called "Foreign Letter" by reordering scraps of text from emails an Austrian correspondent had sent to me over the years. From this text, I extrapolated a series of new texts by corrupting the original in various ways -- by reversing the words, for example, or by substituting letters according to a pattern -- and used my word processor's spellchecker to sculpt them. You can see immediately the sort of ramification that rapidly unfurls, the multiplicity that balloons out at an astonishing rate. Any of these texts can be manipulated, combined, and generally manhandled to produce new texts, and all these branching possibilities reach back to the very first text, which nevertheless seems like a starting point that one has left behind, like a little dock from which you've pushed out into the ocean of language, and which you can no longer make out from beyond the waves. I'm interested in Re-Use, especially of the technological variety, partly because it's shaped up as the dominant emergent art of the modern age -- we see it in postmodern literature and visual art, in hip-hop and electronic music, in DJ sets and noise music. It's everywhere. Anyway, readers can feel free to experiment with the process described above, as long as they are prepared to pay me royalties from any monies accrued via these experiments, which might amount to zero dollars, or negative one.

SK: We’ll Always Have Paris Hilton is an excellent sestina you wrote that was published at McSweeney's. How did you write a sestina? I would be too nervous.

Brian Howe: I got really into sestinas in my early twenties. I used to write them all the time. But what's funny is that for the first couple years that I wrote them, how the ending words actually moved, according to their pattern, didn't manifest to me-- I just sort of memorized the their placements in each stanza, which seemed really arbitrary to me; I had some sort of mental block against seeing the pattern. I don't remember which sestina I was reading when the pattern in all its elegant simplicity finally resolved to me, but I remember feeling edified and quite dense simultaneously. At any rate, the one on McSweeney's was a little different. The first six lines are all captions from photos of Paris Hilton someone had put up on a website. Knitting together the rest was painstaking-- it's all Google-sculpted, but it had to conform to the sestina's demands. Basically I googled each line, then combed the results until I found a section of text that could end with the appropriate word and be the line's counterpart in the next stanza. I did this in a sort of daze, late at night, and the final poem startled me-- frightened me, a little. I didn't like it very much, but it existed and that was my fault, so I had to own it.

SK: How do you feel about Paris Hilton?

Brian Howe: She's an easy metaphor -- an overdrawn one, even. Like school shootings, secretly gay conservatives, baristas with iPods. I don't think of her often.

SK: Should she be president of America?

Brian Howe: Do you mean "should" as in "for the greater good" or as in "would America deserve it"? There's a "yes" and "no" that slot in pretty easily there.

SK: Would you applaud if Dolemite broke Paris Hilton's cunt into something as long and red as my mother's scarf?

Brian Howe: That sounds like your poems. Can I plug your poems in this interview? Sean's interviewing me because I told him I liked his poems, everyone. Like Justin Timberlake and Timbaland, he's bringing sexy back.

SK: Can you do a handstand?

Brian Howe: I can do a headstand, I usually topple when I try to go up on my hands. But I keep trying. It's a lot like poetry.

Interview with Harvey Goldner

2006-10-19T07:48:00.000-04:00

Harvey Goldner's poetry has appeared in Chelsea, Shampoo, Puerto del Sol, Pinstripe Fedora, Rattle, Wicked Alice, Exquisite Corpse, Venereal Kittens, The Sun, The Adirondack Review, Amarillo Bay, Curious Rooms, Exhibition, 4th Street, Iota, Poetry Midwest, Pulsar, Willard & Maple, and elsewhere.

SK: Would you please tell me a story about your lesbian aunt Suzanne and her blue Bugatti?

Harvey Goldner: When I showed my lesbian Aunt Suzanne bio to my pal Eli (Richardson: fine local poet, budding novelist & wannabee hotshot decadent Hollywood screen writer), who really DOES know everything, Eli said: "Man, Bugatti never made a motorcycle, blue or otherwise, only sports cars. Change it to Ducati." And I replied: "Yes, he did. I googled him." Eli said "Bullshit."

So I re-googled Bugatti, and there on the screen was a motorcycle, headlined Bugatti. But this time I read the text. It said (something like): "While Bugatti never made a motorcycle, only sportscars, this bike has been designed by Igor Stamishcrapski (some Russian) utilizing Bugatti's design priciples." So I started to change it to Ducati, but then thought: "Since the rest of the bio is true, leave it alone. Besides, no one will know, especially no poets, except for mr. smartypants Eli." But then, my CONSCIENCE, which, like Eli, knows everything (but on a deeper level) said: "You asshole. You grew up in Memphis, not Washington State. Your family never had no summerhome. None of your relatives gave jackshit for any of the arts. And you never had a brother, and if you had had a brother, he wouldn’t have been tragic, just a slob like you, you lyin muthafukka…..etc"

SK: Did you do well in school?

Harvey Goldner: Once I changed my major from Chemistry to Eng. Lit. (C's in Chemistry & Calculus: A's in Metaphysical Poetry & Plato) I done real good: BA with honors. That was a good career move: Now, when I'm driving cab, I really enjoys thinkin bout John Donne rather than ionic transference and shit. Seriously though, it was some Brit, I believe, who put the matter of academic achievement in the proper perspective. To wit: "He was smart enough to go to college, but he wasn’t smart enough to realize that it’s a waste of time."

SK: Would you say kissing anyone is a form of self-torture?

Harvey Goldner: Self-torture? Hardly. But anyone who'd allow me to kiss 'em might have some serious masochistic issues. Sean, it's been so long since I did any nasty kissing & poking that sometimes I hangs aroun da fish stalls at the Pike Place Public Market just to remind me what IT smells like. Ah, Nostalgia.

SK: Who's your favorite serial killer?

Harvey Goldner: I aint too interested in serial killers. I find MASS MURDERERS much mo fascinatin. Lately, for some (obvious) reason, I've been focusing on Harry Truman (does Hiroshima ring a bell? Does Nagasaki ring a bell?) and Pol Pot. Both, I'm told, died peacefully in their sleep.

SK: You have a poem at Venereal Kittens named Claire Black that's broken into nineteen sonnets. Was writing in the fourteen line format difficult?

Harvey Goldner: No problem. I have 10 fingers. If I take off one shoe & one sock, that gives me 5 more digits, a total of 15. Simply subtract one toe and—voilà—14. To determine the number of sonnets in the sequence (19) is somewhat more difficult: I have to take off both shoes & socks and…

SK: The poem is wonderfully natural, how did you go about writing Claire Black and updating ye old sing-songy sonnet into something contemporary and good?

Harvey Goldner: Easy. I simply ignored all the rhyme & meter requirements of the Shakespearean sonnet, except for the concluding couplet and even that is metrically irregular. Anyone can write a rhymed couplet. Once in a while.

SK: Tell me about the 50's, please, and what can a young poet like me do to get experience?

Harvey Goldner: The 50's? Why, Sean, it was the best of times; it was the worst of times. Seriously, Sean, Janis Joplin said it best: "IT'S THE SAME FUCKING DAY, MAN." And I don't think poets or musicians (composers) need lots of experiences. Just lots of FOCUS. I mean, Rimbaud STOPPED writing at around 20. Keats dead at 25.

SK: In this article Bobby Byrd says "I hid my poetry for a long time until a friend, Harvey Goldner, started showing me his work. It was weird and berserk. I enjoyed that." I feel the same way about your work and that's why I'm a fan. Do you accept descriptions of your poetry as being insane and berserk?

Harvey Goldner: Bobby said "weird & berserk," NOT "insane & berserk." I prefer your "insane & berserk." My first job when I came to Seattle in '65 was working as an orderly on the psych-ward at King County Hospital. A co-worker friend there, John Ramm, said: "Remember, Harvey, the difference between us & them is that we have keys."

SK: Are comments like that, although complimentary, in any way harmful? I mean, will those of us who write insane poetry be stuffed into a literary ghetto and ignored forever?

Harvey Goldner: If being in a literary ghetto with William Blake, Jack Spicer, Gregory Corso, Franz Kafka, Emily Dickinson, Antonin Artaud & Sylvia Plath (& so forth) means being ignored forever, you can ignore me forever (and ever, amen).

SK: You have three chapbooks of poetry released by Seattle’s Spankstra Press: Her Bright Bottom, Memphis Jack, and American Flyer. Could you talk some about these books, if you're taking part in their promotion, how I can get a copy, and everything else about them?

Harvey Goldner: They are marvelous chapbooks, beautifully designed. I wouldn't dream of promoting them. You can purchase copies from either me (newpacificboomerang@hotmail.com ) or from Chris "Spanky" Dusterhoff, aka Mr. Rhee (spankstra@hotmail.com). Also Chris Dusterhoff (Spankstra Press) has published several chapbooks of poetry by Todd Moore (Albuquerque) which I think your readers might like.

SK: When most poets philosophize, outside of interviews, of course, do you also feel violent? Shouldn’t poets not be allowed to breathe let alone formulate opinions?

Harvey Goldner: No, not violent, usually just sad. When poets philosophize, they generally do it so badly. It probably wouldn't hurt poets too much to study Plato, Wittgenstein, and Idries Shah.

SK: Could you tell me something about writing this poem?

Harvey Goldner: For some fucking reason, I was trying to read Dante's Divine Comedy in translation. I had 4 different translations I'd picked up at the library. They all absolutely STUNK. I started thinking about terza rima, the interlocking triple rhyme that Dante used: easy in rhyme rich Italian (because inflected); impossible in rhyme poor English. Impossible? Fuck that! So I started writing A Wild Rose Romance. It took me several months (I kept quitting). Sean, I want you to promise me something: If I ever again attempt terza rima, SHOOT ME IN THE HEAD! And by the way, while Dante's comedy is more divine than mine, my comedy is funnier. To me, anyway.

SK: Roman Polanski?

Harvey Goldner: I hope he & Michael Jackson live happily ever after. In France.

SK: But don’t you think great talent should be fed any ass it wants? I’d stake anything worth loving to either of those men.

Harvey Goldner: Well, Sean, I said: "In France." I could've said: "In Leavenworth" or "In San Quentin."

SK: Who are you reading currently, and whose work will you always keep around to reread?

Havery Goldner: I'm currently reading a work in progress, Angry Orange. It's a screenplay by a Seattle pal of mine, Eli Richardson, a brilliant poet & budding, soon to bloom, novelist. When he be rich & famous, we goin t' Dinnylan.

I shall always keep my poetry around to read. When I'm depressed, my poems never fail to cheer me up.

SK: Plans for the future?

Harvey Goldner: Try to survive. One day at a time.

SK: Let's say Cormac McCarthy's The Road happens for real. No more literary magazines or printing presses. If you were safe in a nicely stocked bunker for a long time, would you continue writing?

Harvey Goldner: Safe? What planet might THAT be on? I AM in a nicely stocked bunker, and I haven't written anything in the last two months.

SK: Were you a fan of Evergreen Review at the time of its publication?

Harvey Goldner: Big fan.

SK: Did you ever submit there?

Harvey Goldner: Probably.

Four Interviews with Joy

2006-08-29T03:37:00.000-04:00

Interview One

Joy: Do you see the scar on my arm? [note - Joy in the red dress, mud, etc.]

SK: Yes, it's very beautiful.

Joy: I grew it myself at the top of a mountain. I kissed it.

Interview Two

SK: Going to cry. Trying not to. Okay. Successful. Wait. One tear.

Joy: My nose bleeds when I cry. When I apologize and cry.

Interview Three

SK: Who are you reading?

Joy: Still Pessoa.

SK: What do you think about Pessoa?

Joy: You already know.

SK: Should be written on bathroom walls?

Joy: Yes.

Interview Four

SK: Tell me about Jackson Mac Low. You told me who he is. What do you like about him? Tell me what you think.

Joy: I think I would fucking hate to write like that. He turned poetry into math back into poetry. But I know it took work and wit and I love reading it. I admire it as something I could never do. I love it.

SK: Shut up.

Interview with Miles J. Bell

2006-08-02T02:26:00.000-04:00

Miles J. Bell has been published in: Word Riot, Zygote in my Coffee, Underground Voices, Underground Window, Cherry Bleeds, Trespass, My Favorite Bullet, Remark, Meat, Instant Pussy, Defenestration, Fire, Poultry Broadside and more. He resides in England.

SK: My copy of your first book The finite beat came with a personalized heart-shaped note. Is what we have special? If so, how long before you leave me in MM/DD/YYYY format please?

Miles J. Bell: Well you WERE the first gullible punter to buy the book, Sean. From anywhere, that is; not even my 3D friends coughed up quicker. I was overwhelmed with a swell of capitalist fondness for your good self, leading to that impulsive heart-shaped note.

Sean, what we have IS special. But I’ll qualify that a little. It’s also special between me and all the other folks who bought it. And I “left you” the minute you got yourself a nicer place to live. You know I won’t associate with poets who aren’t authentic/poor/real/starving/living in a lower level of hell.

SK: In The finite beat, there's pictures of a dummy Elvis, graveyards, bums, bars. Your poem Perfect moment begins: "half an orange / an enormous pile of dogshit" Could you talk about this poem please?

Miles J. Bell: For the benefit of those people wise enough not to buy “The finite beat” – and there were many – I had better quote the poem in question:

half an orange/an enormous pile of dogshit/and a bicycle chain/on the ground/describe/a triangle/as/the green car/wheelspins/from the kerb/and the old man/looks over/his shoulder/to see/what all the/fuss/was about

This, if I remember rightly, was one of my first attempts to see if I could make a poem work emotionally without any emotive words in it.. Flat lines, minimal description. Just movements and colours and things on the ground. It is what it is, really – it’s exactly as it really happened. I feel it’s my duty, having chosen or (being compelled) to write, to have a tuned-in eye. Beauty is to be found in the strangest places and situations. The event in “Perfect moment” struck me as a pure one, even though one or two of the elements would perhaps be seen as distasteful in some quarters. I was thinking “millions of years of evolution and this is what we end up with”, which is conveyed by the old man and the “what all the fuss” line.

Then again, the poem might just be about littering, one of my pet hates. Actually it’s about nothing at all. Just a feeling. Maybe nobody got the same feeling reading it as I did from writing it. Fair enough. I’ve always said I write for myself; if other people like it that’s a bonus.

As for the photos in the book, they were taken by Jude Starkey, a friend of a friend. I only met her once. She came round to the mutual friend’s pad and laid her photos on the floor. I just picked out the ones that fitted best with the poems. The photos were in there as I had no idea how to decide on the running order for the book, so just put the poems into groups of 3 or 4, loosely-themed, and divided the groups with appropriate pictures.

SK: Who influences your style of writing?

Miles J. Bell: Bukowski, and Todd Moore, for their flat, powerful “argue with this if you dare, fucker” lines. William Carlos Williams, for the ever-tuned eye I spoke of earlier, seeing beauty in the ordinary & mundane. Raymond Carver, for his honesty and his ability to stand the reader right beside him in the scene. And there’s other, less-well known writers, such as S.A. Griffin, who is a great guy as well as a great poet. Also there’s William Taylor Jr, whose capturing of late night stillness and sadness is second-to-none, and John Dorsey, who spins lovely ever-moving webs of words that somehow hang together. These last two guys in particular make we want to throw everything else aside and write. I got Bill’s “Everything is burning” and Dorsey’s “Outlaw’s Prayer” through the mail on the same day last April; I’d written nothing in 4 or 5 weeks and after reading these I wrote my epic poem “Icarus Rex” over a single weekend, 1100 words or so, not that I think length equates with quality. Thankfully neither does my wife. But you were talking style, and I’ve wandered dizzily into inspirations…

Sometimes I find a new writer, and I’ve already done something in a similar vein, despite never having read them before. When I posted my poem “House of cards” on MySpace, someone told me I’d “written a Brautigan”, even though I’d never heard of him at that point. The same with Neruda; even though it’s a different language, I found I’d written poems similar in feel to his when I first read him. Which seems to indicate that there are an infinite number of poems to write, but a finite number of styles to write them in.

SK: What is your style of writing?

Miles J. Bell: I’m not sure. I must have a style, or more accurately a voice, that is uniquely mine; people have said as much. For a long time I’ve been trying to ensure that there’s atmosphere in my writing, some kind of feeling. Emotive might be the word I’m after. Maybe evocative. I try to put the reader in the scene. I’m wry when I’m being funny, sarcastic most of the rest of the time, maybe a touch wistful. If I can get the same atmosphere and evocative qualities in a poem that, say, exists in the song “Boys of Summer” or “Holes” by Mercury Rev, I’ll be happy with that.

I’ve also stopped for the most part editing after the event. It was a conscious decision; a big part of how I communicate in conversation is my tendency to come out with witty one liners, unrehearsed. I laugh at my own jokes, as it’s the first time I’ve heard them. So I decided to leave poems as they come out. Sometimes a word or two will get changed, often the line breaks will be pulled about, but mainly I write a poem at home longhand, type it up at work, and that’s how it stays. Not the most textbook way, but one I’ve accepted is true to who I am.

SK: Do you have one style or do you jump styles?

Miles J. Bell: I jump around according to what works for the subject of the writing, or how I feel at that particular moment. As I said, I’m very impulsive, so I’ll have an idea or maybe a line I want to build on, and I’ll pick a way of getting that emotional content in there using whichever style I need to best accomplish that. Some of my poems change styles halfway through, or have a stanza in prose poetry with the rest free verse. I would always reserve the right to change style, tack, etc, whenever I want. And I think I’m getting better at knowing how to write, when.

With writing, I’m not sure you can learn to write. I think you can or you can’t. But what you can learn is how best to express your point, be it lyrics, poems, prose, essays, etc. I wrote songs for 20 years before trying poetry 2 ½ years ago. I would love to be an essayist, but I haven’t learned how to do it yet.

SK: Do you believe in having influences?

Miles J. Bell: It’s not whether you believe in having them. It’s just a fact. You have influences. Deal with them.

When I met Todd Moore recently, and saw him read, I went home and wrote maybe 15 poems in 2 days; I was fired up and full of inspiration. The first few were very similar in style to his, but by the end of that batch I’d written my way out of it, and had returned to my own style somewhat, albeit with elements of his style in there. Like the Borg, assimilating other cultures. It’s good to add things to my repertoire, so that when I am looking for the style in which to tackle a problem a poem is setting me, I have a greater range to call on. Like an old bluesman travelling around, picking up different riffs as he goes and blending them with his own.

SK: Do you want to be liked?

Miles J. Bell: Of course. It’s why I send these words out into the world, for whatever fate awaits. It’s all propaganda for an ego, anyway, and that’s copyfuckingrighted too, for a future collection, so nobody had better steal it.

I’ve always said I write poetry for other people; if I like it myself it’s a bonus.

SK: Are poetry magazines in the US different from the ones in England (where you live)?

Miles J. Bell: Very much so. UK poetry magazines seem more stuffy, middle-class, safe, in my opinion, with the odd exception, like “Fire”. US magazines; well, I know there’s a good deal of arty crap there, too, but there are some real gems. When I first signed up to MySpace I had been mailing out poems to all the UK journals I could find, with very little success. Of course some of the reason for all those lovely rejections was the quality of the poetry – I’d only just started out, after all. But I’m pretty sure even my best, most recent stuff wouldn’t get into some of these publications in a million years. Anyway, I chanced upon C. Allen Rearick, who pointed me in the direction of several fine small press mags, like Remark, Zygote in my Coffee, Underground Voices, etc, and suddenly the rejections began to turn to acceptances.

I think the difference between the poetry worlds of our respective countries, Sean, is that poetry has always been the preserve of the well-educated, middle-class over here. Not much tradition of the young or working class writing anything much at all until rock and roll happened. Even Lennon was a fairly well-off kid.

The poetry reading where I met Todd Moore had a few poets reading besides him. And they were dreadful. One girl, a pretty thing whose name I immediately forgot, read an interminable piece involving carrots. She was distraught about them, in fact. She sighed, cried, did all the acting you might expect to see in the theatre. It was embarrassing. I wanted to shout “use the language to convey your distress, love, not your body”, but I’m polite. But the thing was, the mostly-younger-than-me audience lapped this shit up. Hence, I lean towards the US for my poetry culture. I’m not dismissing the hundreds of years of poetry from this green and pleasant land. Oh, wait, fuck it, I guess I am. Gimme a few cans of Grolsch and a Buk collection and I’m as happy as a dog with two dicks.

There’s much more of an acceptance of the mere fact of being a poet in the US, certainly in some circles. It’s more rebellious, more outlaw. Part of the American myth of the rebel. Pioneers, etc. There’s more scope for that kind of style and that kind of straightforward honesty to exist in writing over your side of the ocean. Steinbeck, Kerouac, Fante, Bukowski, McCullers, even Springsteen, might not all have been working class. The point is they WRITE like they are. Or they write about the disaffected, the downtrodden, the expendable, without trace of voyeurism. Over here, you tell people - even those in an alternative or underground scene - that you’re a poet, and they laugh. Straight away. Perhaps nervously. The don’t know what poetry is, even. All they remember is being taught about wandering lonely as a fucking cloud or whatever at school. So many people bought “The finite beat” because myself or Luke, my publisher and great friend, bullied or charmed them into it. Most came back saying, “it’s GOOD, actually”. Hopefully they’ll find their own way into poetry, and if I kick started that, then I couldn’t be more pleased and proud.

SK: Has any general failure or personal suffering helped your writing?

Miles J. Bell: Just the general failure to let the world wash over me, a failure to let it pass me by unregarded and unrecorded.

There must be a reason I have to write, maybe it’s that most people I know have left town, I haven’t anyone much to shout my stupid theories to these days. I am a communicator by nature. The Poem is the only way I can really still do it. Is that suffering? I‘m not comfortable hanging that tag on it. Plus, reinventing yourself is a fascinating thing. All the folks I know in the US know only what I’ve told them, and what they’ve read of what I’ve written. Hardly anyone I talk to on a regular basis knew me before I was a poet. It’s like a forgotten me, in some ways.

SK: When you met Todd Moore, did he have a beard?

Miles J. Bell: No, but he had an impish glint in his eyes. A true legend, in my opinion. And listening to him read was to be transported.

SK: Are you for occasional adjectives?

Miles J. Bell: Surely. Depends how I feel. Sometimes you don’t need them – they can get in the way of the feel or the meaning of the poem. It’s good on occasion to leave the reader to do the colouring in. But as I keep saying, I’m impulsive; I invoke the right of U-Turn. I can be prone to adjectivitis, so I try to be careful in my choices. Using an inappropriate or pretentious adjective is the worst kind of twattery.

SK: How stupid is the name of my blog on a scale from 1 to cliche?

Miles J. Bell: It’s a lovely name, for what it is. More accurately, for WHOSE it is. It’s very Kilpatrickian. Again, I’ll copyright that word.

SK: Do you also think people who discuss meaning in poetry are cunts?

Miles J. Bell: No. After all, you made me discuss “Perfect moment” earlier in the interview. Let people discuss whatever the hell they want. Some poems need talking about for the things you might have missed. But I do think you should be able to “get” a poem, or at least the core of what it’s about, without having it explained, if it’s meant to be about anything at all. Poems should not be elitist, or wilfully dense or obtuse. I don’t see much value in having to have an English Lit degree behind you before you can grasp a poem.

SK: Would you fuck Mary Oliver?

Miles J. Bell: I’m afraid I had to do a Google image search. I presume she’s a poet. The answer is no, not while dogs still run in the street. No offence meant to Mary, or indeed street walking mutts. Ah fuck it, let’s say yes, I would. Did I mention how impulsive I am? She looks like a game old dear at least, and maybe she has an excellent line in home-made pastries for after.

SK: Your second book Icarus Rex is a fourteen page poem about, would it be fair to say, cities, or your city, city-life, the middle-class? S.A. Griffin composed the lovely cover. Could you talk about this and the lovely cover?

Miles J. Bell: Well, Icarus Rex is presented as a long poem, but is really several small ones running on from one another. It contains a fair amount of snapshots of my town. It all came from a crisis of confidence, if that’s an accurate description of my state of mind. I’d written nothing for a while, and was beginning to wonder if I even wanted to start again. Mainly because the people I saw every day, in their viciousness, with their spines and tongues and idiocy, couldn’t give a tin shit for reading anything but the t.v. guide. So the question was: who am I writing for? My poetry pals? The drunk twenty-somethings who would punch me in a post-pub taxi rank?

Eventually of course I realised that I write for myself, because not to write would be awful, much worse than writing anyway no matter how few people ever read it. So the Icarus Rex title comes from that. Icarus knew the risks, said “fuck it”, and flew anyway, ignoring his elders (or his fear) no matter what the outcome. A few minutes in the sun is worth almost anything.

The cover was knocked up by S.A. Griffin, who more than anyone has given me advice and help whenever I’ve asked. I just asked him to do a cover, sent him the poem, and he did this great collage. Not sure how to talk about the cover. I just see the great hand in there, middle finger as the tower of Babel or something. He must have had something in mind, but I let him do as he pleased. It was a favour he did for me, in exchange for a copy of the poem, so I could hardly start dictating what I wanted the cover to be. I’d have done it myself if I thought it possible, but I’m not great in that field.

SK: What are you working on now?

Miles J. Bell: A few things, maybe too many at once, but I get impatient and want the world NOW!

The main thing is getting the Underground goes Underground book finished. I’ve collected 1 poem each from about 35 fantastic underground poets, the poem they consider their best, and I’m putting them in a simple chap, which will then be buried inside a vacuum flask somewhere in the UK. A poetry capsule, if you like, so that after the apocalypse, future people or aliens might find it and think that maybe the world wasn’t populated exclusively by murderous, greedy savages. A copy of the book will go to each contributor, and maybe 1 to each of the 10 biggest arts/lit magazines in the US and UK. It’s not about the money, it’s about bringing some of these overlooked poets to people’s attention, if it’s possible.

Besides this, I have three manuscripts under consideration by three different publishers. I’d love to be in a position where I had collections out regularly for the next 9 months or year. Give me time to build up stock for the next thing.

SK: Have you been in a bar fight?

Miles J. Bell: No. I’m a writer, not a fighter. The whole thing is just so…tiresome. I’ve done lots of things in bars; fallen asleep, shit myself, thrown drinks over people, thrown up, become inconsolable with grief, but a fight, well, it isn’t really me. Plus, there are four reasons why I’ve never had any bother in bars: 1) I don’t make enemies, really, and am never aggressive, only either friendly or disinterested; 2) I virtually never go out anymore, kind of goes against my “recluse” tag; 3) When I DID used to go out, there were always 1 or 2 of my pals who although nice fellows, they were definitely not men to mess with; 4) I’m quite a big boy myself.

There was one time I remember where it was close. The Barge was the pub we all used to go to in our late teens/early twenties. A real canal barge, full of goths, and punks and assorted odd folk, like my bunch, who didn’t fit anywhere else. The weirdo pub, as it was known by the rest of town. One evening a huge gang of lads came down the steps. Dressers, they were known as, the kind of young guys who wore designer clothes and liked to fight. The leader, this guy called Pete, had an awesome reputation for violence. And he was looking for one of ours, a drunk called Daz, who owed him money for dope or something. Everybody tensed as the dressers took positions around the pub and this Pete confronted Daz. It was like West Side Story, except with no dancing. Pete gave Daz a little tap on the cheek, and all the Barge regulars got ready. Hands tightened around pint glasses and bottles. You could smell the potential for an imminent and terrible battle. Then I spotted one of their number I’d been at school with, we got talking about old teachers and suddenly all their bunch were talking to all our bunch while Pete did his macho thing and Daz quickly borrowed money to pay him. It was all a big show I suppose, the army backing up their general, but nothing came of it in the end, and they never came back. Two different subcultures staying away from each other, which was for the best.

SK: I try to write my idea of what characters in the film Gummo would enjoy, if they read. Do you ever write for someone else? If you wanted to write something that would get the attention of any character in literature or film, which character would it be?

Miles J. Bell: I never write for anyone else. Not consciously, at least. I do decide which type of poem goes best to which publication, but I guess everyone does that.

If I had to write to get the attention of some character, then I would love to write a poem for Jones, the black doorman in “A confederacy of dunces”. He’s my favourite fictitious character, apart from Dr Perry Cox from Scrubs. And I would love to write a screenplay for the character Withnail, from “Withnail & I”, so he could become famous and movie stars could be fun again.

Interview with Noah Cicero

2006-07-06T13:04:00.000-04:00

Noah Cicero is the author four books and an upcoming zombie screenplay. He’s an editor for 3 AM Magazine and has been published in Identity Theory, Nth Position, Retort, Reflections, The Surface, New Horizon, Brittle Star, Poindexter, AnotheRealm, Ygdrasil, Grundle Ink, Crimson Feet, Newtopia, Subterranean Quarterly, Black Ice, etc.

SK: Reading your blog and in other interviews - I think you have a very realistic and detailed understanding of how the publishing industry works, independent and otherwise. I read where you calculated about McSweeney's books, how even that level of success doesn't pay off too huge

Noah Cicero: I don't think us young writers have a chance like Kerouac or Norman Mailer to become stars like they did. From what I can tell, and I'm not going on level of talent or what professors most often critique, but purely fame and sells. That generation of Kerouac, Mailer, Updike, Bukowski, Burroughs, etc generation, writers who came out in the fifties generation. That kind of fame where a character on a sitcom can make a joke using one of their names and at least half the audience members get it and laugh are gone. I can't really think of any writers that came out after the 70s you could do that with.

Couldn’t imagine a joke about Dave Eggers or David Foster Wallace on Everybody Loves Raymond. Everyone would just stare at the screen wondering what the hell was just said or thinking that a new character was being added to the show.

This whole not famous not making big money writer thing seemed to have started 30 years ago and it just took awhile before people started admitting it to themselves, and then saying it out loud in a public space.

I think maybe it is possible for a writer to get a book published and make some money. But I don't think unless they write a book every year and every second book gets a movie deal they are going to be able to retire off it. But I don't think the way things are going anyone in their twenties and thirties should expect to retire off the job they have right now. I'm 25, if i live 80 years, i'm going to last till 2060. By the time I would reach 80 we are going to run out of oil, have some severe global warming issues, and this outsourcing thing doesn't seem to be stopping anytime soon. And if another Republican steals another eight years dude there are so many more things to worry about than getting a book published. When gas prices hit ten dollars a gallon, no one is going to be thinking about literature then.

SK: for an author. Why do so many writers think they can live off their writing? They can't. We can't. We're fucked, right?

Noah Cicero: Most authors today have graduated from college. And if you have graduated there is always somewhere you can get a job. If a person with a college education with a major in English shows up at a Denny's. They can apply to be manager and make 30 G a year. If you show up at a factory, work well for six months, and have a college education in Painting, they will make you foremen after six months. Somebody might work harder than that guy, but they got the college education so that person goes up. If you wanna get a loan owning a pizza shop and you have a history major and go to the bank to get a loan. They will throw one at you. You worked in a pizza shop for twenty years, they might not get it. The biggest part to an employer concerning a college degree is that this human has the ability to show up for long periods of time to the same building.

No one writes for longer than 4 hours at a time, you have time to write if you have a job. Jim Chapman works forty hours a week and he has produced a book every two years for the last 15 or 20. I don't mind the idea of writers having jobs, getting a book published, getting a check thrown at them for 1,000 to 5,000 dollars. A lot of people do things like that, people who make furniture after work, people who raise cows and sell the milk to their friends, people who make clothes, i know a person who sells animal urns online, there's a lot of people in Ohio that have small cornfields, they sell corn in the fall.

I think it would be cool if there were a bunch of writers that worked and wrote. Instead of a writer getting millions and sitting around. Not working makes a person go nuts. I went a year without working when i wrote Burning Babies and The Condemned. I went nuts. You lose connection with reality. You end up being 80 writing a book about terrorism. End up in a Calvin Klein ad. End up writing a 3,000 page biography of Flaubert. If they would have been working I don't think they would have done those deranged things. You give someone with an overactive imagination like a writer years to sit around and stare at walls, they gonna go nuts. Writers are like children, we have imagination, what happens when you leave a kid alone to do nothing. They end up sticking their tongue in a light socket.

SK: You have two books available through Amazon (and other places), The Human War from Fugue State Press and The Condemned from Six Gallery Press. There was some trouble with Burning Babies, but it's to be released soon? Harvey Pekar digs Burning Babies. Did you send him a copy? How involved are you in promoting your books as far as press packets and general promotion?

Noah Cicero: Harvey Pekar got a copy through the publisher that didn't publish Burning Babies. It was the only thing he did.

I talked to Pekar on the phone. he was nice. We didn't have a long conversation. he said he liked it.

Burning Babies is coming out through the people that run the valve blog, also through the future of the book project, but printed by parlor press. Scott Eric Kaufman got hit by a car, so it is coming out later than expected, like in the fall I think. It will be released a year later than it was supposed to be. This is life though.

A company in England is looking at my books right now. Maybe they will publish them, maybe they won't. I got into Dazed and Confused in England, and I'm one of the co-editors of 3am. England likes me. my homeland doesn't care if I live or die. I think they want me to die. They would prefer that I was dead. Maud Newton wants my head cut off and stuck on a pike.

I'm promoting my books through blogs, interviews, etc. The publisher makes the press packet. I'm going to ride to northeast ohio and sell books at concerts. I sit at a table, i get a piece of paper and write on it, "FUCK, now that i got your attention would you like to buy a book?" It works sometimes. I sit there and get drunk while doing this. A band plays I don't listen. It is always some emo crap, usually some asshole singing. At least three people come up to me and tell me that they write. That is usually horrifying. Usually I ask them what they read, and they respond, "I don't read, I think it distorts my creative vision." Those people should die. Like be taken out and shot in the street.

SK: You have an e-book coming soon from bear parade Would you tease me about it just a little? Writing it, what it's about, the set-up. What's it called?

Noah Cicero: It is called Transmissions from Noah X to Tao X. It is about how i have lots of friends that I've never met. I speak to Tao all the time. But Tao doesn't really exist to me. It is like he lives on a submarine at the bottom of the ocean. I have conversated with many people over the past three years. but never met any of them except for Jim Chapman. This is the information age. We have friends, but nobody knows what anybody smells like. If my car breaks, I cannot call Tao Lin or Jim Chapman or RIchard Greyson or Lee Rourke to pick me up. I am stranded on the side of the road. I die there, maggots and possums eat me.

SK: Your books are written in "sentegraphs." This is a beautiful word. Did you coin this word?

Noah Cicero: No, I was like we have to call them something to my girlfriend Bernice Mullins one day. I was like, "paratences", and she was like, "No, Sentegraphs." I liked because it sounded like Cenobites from the Hellraiser movies.

SK: Does anyone else write books in sentegraphs?

Noah Cicero: Beckett's plays look like they are in sentegraphs, like you look at a page of Waiting For Godot and it reads like that. Very quick, a lot of panic. I want panic, i feel panic all the time. I want it to be like Whitman, how if you read it out loud, you’re just going faster and faster and faster until you start screaming it and going nuts. I was drinking a beer with this girl once and was reading Whitman out loud for fun in like 01 and by the end of it i caught myself really belting it out. Then i saw a bio show on Whitman and it talked about he based it off of Italian Operas. But I don't know anything about italian operas. If I was trying to imitate any kind of musical sound, it would Jimi Hendrix's Machine Gun.

SK: Your books read very quickly, go down the page like I'm running and someone is behind me running just as fast and punching the back of my skull and it feels good. It's not minimalism, or is it, or is it stripping the language harder than minimalism?

Noah Cicero: I want the reader to feel panic. I feel panic all the time. I think everyone does. The Century of Anxiety didn't end, it just got worst. Maybe this is the Century of Panic. Everyone i meet seems to be in a state of anxiety, everyone is like, "Fuck I don't want to do this. This is horrible, somebody somewhere please make it stop." Nobody wants to live in a world of commercials and marketing, you can't do anything in america without having marketing forced on you. You go into a bathroom, buy a condom, look up some lyrics, buy a TV, go to the movies for twenty minutes they have commercials. You gotta work at some job that doesn't pay shit. You wanna make good money, you gotta work your way and sell your soul for 50 Gs a year. You gotta go to school, you gotta vote, you gotta wear clothes, you gotta wear these clothes, you gotta read these books, watch these movies, believe these ideals, drive this car, have this furniture. People don't have identities anymore, they have marketing niches. That is hell. It is insane what humans tell themselves they have to do to live in this world. People don't understand something about humans. That if nature didn't do it. They did it to themselves. People tell other people to wear this, to think that, to do that, and other people let them be told what to do.

Tao in his new EEEE EEE EEEE writes in it. It can be addicting to write in sentegraphs. It is fun. It is like writing an instant message conversation or actually like talking to someone, telling a story. I think it has economy to it. I like writing where the writer focuses on economy. On never wasting a word. Not filling in what shit looks like, what people look like, like i hate it when a writer is, "He has brown hair, a greek noise, acne scars, and pale blotchy skin tone." I want to the character in the story to be anyone I want. If the character reminds me of my cousin, when i imagine the story the character will be my cousin. I want people to see themselves in the story, to see the people i know. I don't want the story to be outside themselves. I want them in it. I want them to imagine the scenery, their faces, how it is working. The point of a book, is not for you the writer to have fun imagining but for the reader.

SK: When did you know you were going to be a writer? Some of your influences?

Noah Cicero: I'm not a writer, I'm a pizza boy. Pizza delivery pays the bills. That's what I am. When I wanted to write books, when i was like 16. I started writing poetry in school.

Beckett and Proust are the main influences for The Human War. I wanted a short terse style that was confessional, but not confessional where i have people feel sorry for me, I wanted to be like Proust where you saw the world through someone else's eyes. There are two kinds of first person writing, you have Knut Hamsun, Kerouac, Proust, Bukowski, Jean Rhys, in which everyone line is a line that comes from the first person character. You have another more academic first person like Glamorama which is, some lines are from the first person, but there are lines that are basic description. I liked the first one. I like reading the mind of someone else. It is a real escape to not only be placed into new scenery, but dropped into someone's brain.

For Burning Babies two short stories influenced me heavily Turkeyneck Morning from Hot Water Music by Bukowski. And Old Man at The Bridge by Hemingway. Those two stories have no magic. They give it to you real. Those two stories are like when you are sitting there and someone comes into the room and says, "Did you hear about Joe, He got drunk at the mall and security had to mace him. (then the details.)" And you sit there real sad after wondering what happened to Joe, what is wrong with this world, and you hope no one gives you anymore news like that for at least a week, because it is just too depressing. I can imagine Hemingway sitting there at a bar, and a soldier comes in, sips his drink and tells Hemingway about the old guy at the bridge. I can imagine Bukowski sitting at the bar and the woman from Turkeyneck Morning comes in, cries, and tells the story to Bukowski.

For The Condemned, the last part Civilization Kathy Acker influenced me on that, but not really, mostly Acker tells a person, "Do what you want, do exactly whatever the fuck you want." Sartre's Marxism influenced me on a lot of the ideas displayed in the story.

Grat Kink was influenced by Junky. Junky was written because of new laws concerning drugs that didn't make any sense. And now there are new laws concerning strip clubs that don't make any sense and the whole republican anti-sex thing, and i want to write and show that weird sex is normal. That the people who have weird or kinky sex are people and not monsters. In the fifties they portrayed drug addicts as evil monsters, something non-human. But Burroughs showed in Junky, they aren't monsters, but people that had generally bad lives who took up drugs. I don't think a lot of people who like kinky sex had generally bad lives, they just have this thing they want to do, and they like to do it. Kinky sex doesn't harm anyone.

For The Warrior, that didn’t really have influences. That story had to be told, that's all about that.

SK: Do you have a routine? For writing? Submissions? What are your cover letters like, all business? Are you submitting now, plans on that? Places in mind?

Noah Cicero: I write a couple times a year. Usually in the spring and the fall. My cover letters depending if I know the person are different. If i write one to someone i don't know than it is professional. If i write one to someone i know, then i will joke around in it.

SK: You write about strippers, pregnant strippers, strip clubs, whores, not in a dramatic way, philosophical maybe, compassionately? Sartre. An understanding of class and society. Could you tell me about the non-affirmed life? These are people you know. How much of your work is autobiography?

Noah Cicero: Strippers are poor people. Servers are poor people. Most factory workers are poor people. Drug dealers are poor people. Cooks are poor people. These are jobs that poor people work. Strippers are like black people. Most people hate them. The republicans hate them, the liberals hate them, upper class women call them hoe bags and white trash. A lot of men of all classes think they are hoe bags and think they are immoral. My girlfriend is a stripper, she goes to college, she says when she was in group talks in college everybody liked her and took her opinion seriously until she announced she was a stripper, then they shunned her. Strippers and whores are shunned by the world. Most strippers date black guys. Black people and bikers are the lovers of strippers mostly. Because black people and bikers are shunned and hated like strippers are. People who have prejudices against strippers usually have never even met one, just like the people who have prejudices against black people. Most strippers, love to be naked, are nymphomaniacs, just love being sexy. They were like that before they were dancers. It is a really good job for someone who loves to be sexy in their twenties.

Concerning whores, I've met some hardcore whores in my life. One woman drives around in a mini-van sucking dick everywhere. The woman seemed built for it. People don’t understand, a pretty woman can make good money dancing, she can work at a club dancing never having to touch a guy, never having to have a guy touch her, the girl chooses where she works. If a female is doing tricks on the street, she has chosen that. There are two types of Youngstown whores: There are the whores that will fuck anybody. Usually they are on hard drugs of some sort.

And there are whores that are strippers that have a couple of men they do privates for. They have selected the men based on personality, kindness, and how much money they have.

This all causes for weirdness in strip joints. i think people let themselves go in a strip joint. In the youngstown area the strip clubs are where you can a white trash dude with a mullet sitting next a big black guy with cornroles have a conversation. You are both there to enjoy the girls, they have a unity, they learn that they are similar, that they aren't THE OTHER.

Last night at Club Pink where my girl works. A really muscular black guy got up on the stage when the night was over, stripped down into his briefs and did poll tricks. Everybody was laughing, the girls were laughing, i was laughing, it was a good time. One the dancers ran up and helped him dance, she was going nuts, some goofy white girl.

There is an older bartender that works there on the weekends, she was a dancer for 20 years and has been working strip clubs for around 25. For a tip after she gives me a drink, I show her my ass. She laughs, i laugh, it is all good.

Strip clubs are fun, strip clubs are about sex. People love sex, they love sex because it is dumb. It is like Led Zepplin, Led Zepplin is pointless, it is fun, the lyrics mean absolutely nothing, the riffs rule. That is what strip clubs are like, they are freedom from the complexities of life. There is nothing complex about a woman standing there in front of you naked. That is the marketing, that is the show, a stripper can't have Lebron james stand next to her and advertise. You don't have to think, "Should I look this up on stripperhistory.com.

Depressing things happen in strip clubs though, like pregnant strippers on coke, yesterday a stripper was found dead on the side of the street of a drug overdose. A stripper is on crack. Dancers go to the pen. But these are poor people things. There is always a pregnant woman working at a fast food restaurant way after the time a white collar woman would have left her job. Servers always get beat up by their boyfriends. Cooks and servers always do drugs. I was a pizza boy at Papa John's, three of the guys that worked there had been to jail and the pen.

My writing is not totally autobiographical. It is always based in personal experience, or if they story is told about someone else. I saw it personally. I think most people have very eventful lives. And if they write about it intelligently and with some thought about it, it can make a good story. There are colorful people everywhere, weird shit happens to us all the time, we do weird shit all the time. You don't need to write about world war 2. There are enough books written about world war 2 from people that lived through it. There doesn't need to be anymore.

I have some sort of social anxiety disorder. I want to announce that in this interview. I have social anxiety disorder. I'm having anxiety right now. I write long blog posts, then delete them. I can't talk in person to anyone unless i'm drunk. My girlfriend has social anxiety disorder too, we loath ourselves together. We sit all night and say, "Do you like me?" The other goes, "Yes, I love you." Then three minutes the one that said i love you goes, "Do you like me, I'm poop. I know I'm poop, no one could like me." This goes on for hours, it has gone on for years, we started long before we met each other. We are never convinced anyone actually likes us. We never say, "Do you love me?" No, it is like. "Do you like me." "I want to know, do you still like me." There is no cause for the sentence, it is pure psychosis. It has nothing to do with the other. I think that is what I write about. People interacting with other, but what they are doing to the other person, has nothing to do with them. Humans are motivated mostly by what the learned before they were ten. Sartre's biography The Words only goes until he was ten. He was saying, 'That is enough, every reaction or revolution i do for now, begins there. Life is like a restaurant menu. You get one when you're by the time you're 12. It could be Denny's, Olive Garden, Spago. but is a menu. A menu has like twenty choices on it. You have to pick in the confine of those choices. You must pick. Sometimes people try to get new menus, my brother he grew up working class like me, mother factory worker, daddy butcher. He works at private member country club as caddy for ten years, thinks he can become rich, thinks like Babbitt. Thinks the big boys will let him in. They don't, he ends up making 40 G a year hating Mexicans voting for Bush. I don't speak to him, I don't speak to my family. That wasn't in the menu. People deny their natures in this culture. I don't believe in a genetic nature, like you are born to be an asshole, or vote this way or that, or steal, or drink, or fuck a certain gender, I don't believe in that. But I do believe that after ten people usually have some sort of concrete nature. My brother is a republican, a republican is someone that is fucked, but they are still a nazi and should be fought. But here is my point, Erskine Caldwell showed this in This Very Earth with Chism. My brother's nature is ride motorcycles, drink beer, and own sweet V8 Cameros. That is what he was like before he finished college and this whole Bush business. He was a nice guy. he was normal. There was nothing wrong with him. But now he is caught up with hating Mexicans and liberals, and all kinds of deranged shit. His mind is full of these ideas about Chinese take-overs and Iran. A lot of republicans and racists are like that. They live their lives, they walk around, have favorite likes and dislikes, enjoy four wheelers, shooting beer cans and pumpkins with shot guns, smoking weed. But now, they all nuts. I think that is what fascism is, the government and media working together trying to get a normal bunch of people living their lives to think about deranged shit like Mexicans, homosexuals, and Iran. Like seriously, what does some hick in Ohio or Nebraska who spends their days riding motorcycles, fixing their cameros have to do with Iran? Nothing. Fascism convinces people that when they are fishing together on a boat in the middle of a peaceful lake that they should be talking about Iran. Fascism is not murder to me, murder comes way after. Fascism is spending millions of dollars to manipulate some poor hard working four wheeler loving human being that they should care about hating some other person. I said i didn't think homosexuality was genetic. I don't. I'm an existentialist, existence precedes essence. I think it is a choice made so early in childhood that it isn't really a choice. I think gay men are made by bad fathers, children don't know what sex they are until they are about 6 or 7. From every homosexual man I've ever met the same situation took place, the father beat them before they were 6, and after the beating, the mother would hold them and take of them. That created a oneness with the mother. They thought they were female. Or the female prototype. I don't believe in a female or male, that is stupid, it is just prototypes. People who say men and women are different are stupid. I've never seen a woman do a behavior a man didn't, and visa versa. When a man or woman says, "I don't understand the other gender." That is dumb, most people unless they are insane, work like clockwork. Humans are predictable, if humans weren't predictable you couldn't have the DSM-IV, detective shows, character development, and car salesmen. I want to keep talking about homosexuality. I don't think anyone is really straight or gay either. There are men i'm attracted to, I would fuck a good amount of men. Nowadays a lot of men if they aren't an asshole will admit that. Go up to any man and say it like this, "If you were in prison, and you had your choice of one cell mate, who would you pick?" It never fails, they always pick somebody. I would fuck ryan phillippe. A young Al Pacino, i could get on that shit. A lot of poor men have sex with other men, but not like the father thing i stated above, usually because of incest and prison. There is a lot of incest in America. A lot more than people think or want to admit. This whole culture is very complex to me, with all this four wheelers, homosexuality, incest, fishing, and Iran. I want to talk about human nature though. Like my brother and other people. People get married nowadays, why do they do that? For thousands of years people got married because the parents were exchanging property, called a Dowry. Marriage is based off of property. There was no marriage or pairing-relationships until the advent of private property. Actually humans beings didn't realize that women got pregnant by sex until the advent of agriculture.

People just used to fuck anybody they wanted. tribes still today unfucked with by civilization, their holidays are sex orgies. Also homosexuality is common in the tribes. Or to say it so it makes sense, getting it on with your gender for some fun goes on. Before private property nobody got married. Then they figured out that babies came from sex. So men got married to women, to make sure their property would go with their blood line. That is the origins of marriage. Then parents started trading goods and using their children to get shit. That lasted to like the 1800s. Then people started getting married to have sex when parents stopped trading goats for their children. Now people can have sex before marriage. Then why get married? Nobody knows. Where is Ryan Phillippe i need some cock.

SK: Me too. Do you rewrite?

Noah Cicero: I go through it a couple of times, deleting a little, adding a little.

SK: The sentegraphs are paced maybe like cinematic cuts? Timing. Do you edit much, or does it happen naturally?

Noah Cicero: Yeah, i talk like that. I didn't learn to talk until i was 5. My parents never spoke to me. The government put me in speech lessons. The school thought I was retarded when they first encountered me. They held me back in kindergarten. They gave me an IQ, found out i was normal, i had no brain problems. It was just that my parents never went near me. So they sent me to a speech therapist, and had me work with a tutor for years for an hour a day at the school. Then i had to go to a learning center when i was in third through fifth grade. Two strange things happen concerning reading and writing when i was little. When i was in kindergarten the class was reading together, some simple dumb kid's book. The teacher makes the class stop and says, "Noah, stop trying to read, you're messing up the class." I remember that very vividly. I think all this writing i still do today, is trying to prove to that class i can read. That i am so good at reading i can get books published. Also another thing happened: I finally did learn how to write and read a little and I wrote this Dinosaur poem with my tutor. It was good she thought so she had me read it to the class and the other kids said, "Noah, you were so dumb three years ago, but that was a pretty good poem." They said it like that too. Everyone called me stupid and dumb constantly. i spent large sections of my childhood crying. I think that was the only thing i got positive reinforcement for when i was little, was writing. It is part of my menu, writing implies positive reinforcement. Chapman said that the english language does not come naturally to me. It almost seems like English is a second language. My father who basically raised me, my mother was at work and too high off of pain killers to ever speak. my father is a second generation italian/sicilian. He talks like English is a second language, he grew up with people speaking italian all around him, and italian speaking people trying to talk English. So between not learning how to talk until i was 5 and my dad's fucked version of English it came out weird. Another thing that added to it is the italian-american's way of communicating. An Italian American uses their hands a lot. Predicates become hand motions. Like i feel very at home when speaking to another italian american in person. I can just say, "It was like (hand motion)." or, "She was like (hand motion). or, "This is going (hand motion).

SK: Hypothetically, you're teaching a creative writing class. We're sitting in our desks, well-groomed and tanned, and you come into the class. What happens? How would you teach? What would you tell us to try and not try, read and avoid?

Noah Cicero: Hmm, I don't know. i would ask them what their philosophical agenda was. That if they believed in anything. I assume most would say something stupid, just recite the latest issue of Harper's. I would tell them to leave. Two people would be left. I would drive them around town to seedy places, and make them write stories about it. I would have them read selected parts of Being and Nothingness, The Second Sex, Pimp by Iceberg Slim, The Fugitive by Marcel Proust, Waiting for Godot, Revolutionary Road and watch the movie The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

SK: You're working on a script for a zombie film? What are some films you like a lot? Zombie and otherwise?

Noah Cicero: I tried writing a zombie film. I failed. I cannot write a movie. I've tried twice, i always put in too much dialogue. A movie shouldn't have much dialogue. A movie should tell it's story in images and like seven thousand scenes. I've never been good at making up seven thousand scenes involving characters. I'm not good at plots, I think that's why I work so hard on the style of the language, to compensate for my lack of plot structure.

I wrote it as a small book though. When it is done being line-edited I'm going to post it on a blog and let everyone read it for free. I had a lot of fun writing it. It is short, only 50 pages long, so if anyone wants to read it they can.

I like The Devil's Rejects: It is a total attack on the manichean way of thinking. It has a lot of great shots, great images, funny scenes, great dialogue. It is just a great ride.

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly: An existential masterpiece. I like that movie so much. It has these sad existential characters living, dying, shooting each other, dealing with their family members underneath these huge skies. At the end with The Contest Leone shows the theory of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, the essence of capitalism into one scene. Instead of sharing the gold, they decide to kill other.

SK: What do you think about adult swim?

Noah Cicero: I like Aqua Teen Hunger Force: Total 50s European Absurdism. Total Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet. The job of Absurdist writing is to show how absurd and irrational a culture's behavior is. Aqua Teen Hunger Force does it great. I like that it makes humans into fast food products, kind of saying, "Look you americans aren't even human anymore, all you are is products." It is the personification of capitalism, man becomes commodity. You have three commodities running around doing stupid shit. It is great show.

I think that Ben Stiller Vince Vaughn clique thinks they are doing Absurdism, but they aren't. They do have irrational characters doing stupid shit. But their characters are just parodies, they aren't even satirical. When Will Farrel runs down the street naked, there is nothing satirical about that, nothing absurd. It is just a dumb fart joke. I like a good fart joke now and then, but fart jokes for two hours straight gets on my nerves. I don't know how anyone can stand to watch that shit.

I think the Becketts and Ionesco's of today are working for Adult Swim. The type of person that wants to show the irrational absurd behaviors of a culture, have chosen the medium of cartoon.

Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou are both Absurdist. That scene when Pagoda stabs Royal was awesome.

America is entering its Absurdist Stage of Art. In the fifties you had imitators like Albee. But this is American. This came about naturally.

The fact that Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Wes Anderson movies exist in America and came about naturally, proves that America is in a state of insanity. That Our Way of Life doesn't make sense. Without statistics, harper's, and a Noam Chomsky book, one can watch those shows and think, "Something is kind of wrong."

SK: How are we killing John Updike today?

Noah Cicero: I've read one story by John Updike. It was stupid and pointless. It was the A & P, "By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag " That is such a bad line. "Feathers smoothed", fuck that is dumb. "on these long white prima donna legs", wow, maybe you should add more useless adjectives. He spends the whole thing describing what they are wearing. Could someone tell me what they story could possibly be about.

I think what John Updike is pissed about most is that no young writers are talking about him. Writers survive because younger writers bring them up and site them as influences. Young writers are still talking about Kerouac, Bukowski, Mailer, Rhys, etc. The beatniks talks about Rimbaud, Whitman, Proust, Basho, etc. The experimentalists mention Lawence Stern and Acker. We found out about dead writers by reading interviews from living ones, and if they mention them in their book. No one is citing Updike as an influence. Nobody young looks at Updike as a hero. Updike comes from a generation of great writers, Kerouac, Bukowski, Thompson, Yates, Heller, Salinger, Plath, Genet, Beckett, Sartre, De Beauvoir, a lot of great writers came out of the fifties and sixties. But he bullshit compared to them. I can't think of anyone who sites him, can you? John Updike is Pete Townsend, Pete Townsend you could tell grew up thinking he was going to be the best guitarist there ever was. Then Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Stevie Ray Vaughn took a shit on his head. He's a pop writer, not a literary writer. You know that voice in movies, when a character in a movie writes, and some of it gets read in the movie. It sounds like Updike. He writes in that silly literary voice. Where you describe stupid shit and have four million adjectives and adverbs, and say things like, "it was like a boxer after a hard fought battle." That voice in wonder boys the movie, when they start reading that kid's shit. It sounds like Updike. As they read it, I thought, "Wow, that kid is a bad writer." To me bad writing is when a writer needs to use a thousand words when they only need a 100 to get the point across. The point of language is to communicate. And if it takes you a 1000 words to communicate what could be said in a 100, then you don't know how to communicate. And if you don't how to communicate then you shouldn't be a writer.

I just looked at his bio, this quote is on it, "The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the soul's very life."

What does that even mean? That doesn't make any sense. The grain of circumstance, what the fuck is that? Perversity is what, The soul's very life? Sit down John Updike, be quiet, hope you die quickly before your books go out of print. Which will happen a week after anyway.

Things like homosexuality, female male prototypes, strip clubs, marriage as we know it today, etc. These institutions are all because of Christianity and private-ownership. Before private-ownership and religion humans didn't need marriage, assigned sexual roles, prototypes and strip clubs. Humans just fucked each other and lived. You got your job in the tribe depending upon your size and skill, not on your gender. Like in a strip club, a girl makes 20 dollars off one lap dance, off of 4 minutes of time she makes 20 dollars. Now, that doesn't make sense. An uneducated person who is doing basically nothing gets a lot of money. So you have to ask why, and when something doesn't make sense it always has to do with the mystical. She gets paid that much because in America nakedness is taboo. What is taboo, mystic crap. If it were not for their taboo of nakedness and sex, there would be no strippers, of course there would be no religion also. But our economic system is run off of mysticism. Back in the day the level of importance in the tribe came from how magic you could do. Back in the day before private-ownership we had a matriarchy, where woman controlled the tribes. Women were the main producers of magic, they turned animal skin and animals into food. While the men just hit animals with objects to make them not move anymore. And there is the shaman or witch doctor who knows how to make plants heal people. It works the same way today, Bernice noticed this while we were eating at Chili's. The minor who gets the paid the least, then the trucker gets paid a little more, the factory worker gets paid a little more than that, then the engineer who turns whatever was mined into something gets paid the most. I won't mention the owner of the business in this because ownership on that grand of a scale is pure absurd mysticism. I understand ownership in terms of, those are my socks because they don't fit anyone else in the house. Or this is my bar because no one else felt like putting a sport's bar on this street. But for a single human to own a mass enterprise with 1000s of employees and they are reaping profits just because they own the machines and the building is absurd.

Christianity has two main things they try to capitalize on, sex and death. They don't want anybody fucking, and they don’t want anybody dying into nothingness. Religion tries to control them so much because sex and death cannot be owned. You cannot not own a sex act like a cup or a shoe, you cannot own death like a cup or a shoe. Religion is the fear of non-ownership. Religion is about ownership, God owns men, men own women, women own children, all humans own the earth and animals. Some asshole might go, "What about Jesus?" jesus said cut your eye if you look at another person and get horny besides your wife. That is ownership, that is fear of freedom.

After what I just said, someone could call me a Marxist. I'm fine with that. This is what I believe. A government should be a kind of Maintenance Coordinator. A government should be like a janitor of the people. The government should make sure we have good roads, stop signs, stop lights, schools, police, etc. But a government should be the people, not separate from the people. Our government is separate from the people, our government is not a government but corporations buying things they want. If our government was of the people, just an extension of the population, we would have national health care, because that would benefit all the people. I'm not a utopian, i don't believe that humans are ever going to be that nice to each other in a modern world, I don't think humans were meant to be trapped in a concrete, digital, working 40 hour a week world. Humans spent the majority of their history on this planet walking around in fields eating berries, it seems like a fluke that civilization even occurred when you compare that humans have been 120,000 years and they didn't start a civilization until 5,000 years ago. it seems like it was a fluke that a human figured out that plants could be grown in rows and harvested. It doesn't seem like it should have happened. That a silly wild animal, a bipedal that lived for over 100,000 years doing nothing but fucking and eating berries and drinking out of streams was meant to live like this. I don't think the human will ever fully adapt to civilization, but if we want to have billions of humans on the earth, we are going to have to live like this.

So I think that a government, since it is supposed to be of the people, should take of its people or the phrase should be 'taking care of each other', not allow mass equality, not allow if it can afford it some to get sick and get bad treatment, while others get good treatment. There are things everyone needs that is basically one brand, water, heat, fire trucks, health care, ambulance rides, police, shelter, electricity, and I'm adding microsoft windows. Everybody needs these things, they should be owned by the people, they should be cheap, if not free, and no single human should be getting rich off something everyone needs. Getting rich off of something that a person needs or they will die is sick to me. A heart surgeon that makes 100s of thousands dollars a year is sick to me. That is like bribery. "So you pay me 80,000 dollars or die, ha ha ha." Bill Gates says to businesses, "Either you buy my program or you can't compete, you die ha ha ha." Or Bill Gates says to a school, "You buy my program or your students can't compete ha ha ha." Do you get what i'm saying now. If our government was of the people by the people for the people it would not operate like it does. I don't care if someone owns a sock factory or some fast food restaurants, but there should be a percentage rate to how people are paid. That the owners of a business must pay their employees a percent of profits, not by the hour. Say you have a Papa Johns and a pizza hut. Both places are paying their employees 5.15 an hour. They both have about the same amount of employees, pizza hut makes 3,000 more dollars a month. But both employees are still getting paid the same, that is absurd. another thing that is absurd, is NASA, our government spends billions, we shouldn't be looking at stars if there is even one person that is even remotely having a bad day in America.

Tao Lin is right when talks about abstractions. Marriage is an abstraction, ownership is an abstraction, homosexuality is an abstraction. You can't point at marriage, you can point at people getting married but you can't point at marriage. You can point at two men fucking, but you can't point at homosexuality. You can't bind people together in an abstraction. You can't make people work their lives away for a millionaire they will never meet for an abstraction. But we do, and the only way we can do is through manipulation. And i suppose that is what it really is. A human being is really only a collection of manipulations, they get something from the outside, decide if they want to be manipulated by it or not, then if they do, they replicate the behavior. They manipulate themselves, and attempt to manipulate others, and work endlessly trying to maintain and fortify the walls of their manipulations. This sounds strange The Confederacy of Dunces is a good novel showing how humans manipulate and get manipulated. Everyone in that novel manipulates and gets manipulated, you can see why Toole killed himself.

Interview with Mike Young

2006-06-29T03:57:00.000-04:00

Mike Young edits NOÖ Journal.

Mike Young’s poems and short stories have been published in Opium Magazine, Pindeldyboz, 3AM Magazine, The 2River View, Juked, elimae, Prose Ax, Word Riot and more. His story in Word Riot was a 2005 storySouth Notable Story.

Mike Young is twenty years old and lives in Oregon.

SK: In what way are literary magazines fucking up and in what way are writers fucking up these days, would you say?

Mike Young: Literary magazines have too many covers with flowers and decrepit architecture. Though these are college reviews and journals, which is pretty much okay, since they don't pretend against themselves. If you live in a college town and want literary fiction to read, it's good to have these journals. I guess. I don't know. People retreat into languorous fluff under the excuse that the television has stolen the loud and weird. This may be true. I'm still young, trying to write loud and weird stories and poems, still trying to think why I don't write for cinema or TV.

Something about imagination and language. Literary magazines and writers don't just need more imagination and language -- they need stuff that will attract and nurture a world "sapped" of imagination and language. Like when Dick Cheney can't think of anything more clever to say than "fuck off" -- that's bad. I think. I don't think "sapped" is right. I think people are taught that they're lacking language or that our language is crude, and that's not true. Everything is gallant.

Places like Tin House or A Public Forum make me more sad than some flaccid North Dakota Southwest Quarterly Technical Conservatory Review. The NDSQTCRs of the world are love affairs, for the most part, however lily-limbed, nostalgia-obsessed and ignorant of poor people they remain. Places like Tin House are rich and should therefore devote themselves to reacquainting mainstream readers with literature. Since I know plenty of mainstream readers who've never heard of Tin House, I say they're not doing very well. NPR listeners have heard of Tin House and Billy Collins. They're not mainstream people. Poor people don't know Tin House. Dale Earnhardt fans don't know Tin House. But maybe that's the fault of poor people, since all poor people are ugly and smell like used loofahs.

Oh, and most literary journals should be free. Make them ugly if you have to. If we were to cut every American three-car garage into a sane one-car garage, we could make literary journals free, more would read language into life, and people would lead more considerate lives. Does anyone make a living from literary journals? If so, they should get jobs feeding and teaching people in Tanzania and Zimbabwe.

When Chekov wrote about real people, real people liked him. The real people I know read science fiction and romance and don't want to hear how shitty their lives are. They probably have a point.

SK: Do you like McSweeney's? I like Amanda Davis. Have you read her?

Mike Young: Some of McSweeney's I like, the funny stuff. They're too expensive, but McSweeneys.net is cool, and that whole clique is a gateway into literature for plenty of young people, I think. I like it when they try without trying, when they're breezy and whizzybang -- when they're too indignant or squeal too much, it sounds like Richie Rich lecturing his teddy bears. Okay, okay, duh: not all McSweeney's people are the same. Lots are cool and I would love to buy them lunch -- or have them buy me a plane.

Amanda Davis: I have read her stories on the internet, in magazines, and in places like Best New American Voices 2001. I have not read her novel. She makes things sound lofty and speaks as though her heart is something like "shorn." I like when the magical elements of her story sneak in some humor, like when fat folks float in the sky and stuff.

I don't want to say too much about my opinion of her, cuz she died too young. Anyone that dies too young -- who cares what I think? There are sad arms and hands that still miss her, even when I play my friend Hans's Yahama keyboard, even earlier when I saw lightning graze a truck and said "cool!" She is still an everything and a sigh to many, many people.

Thus: fuck me for saying anything about her, you know?

SK: Could you describe the history of NOÖ Journal? What it's all about? Plans for the magazine's future? Is it pronounced "new"? What does the title mean?

Mike Young: NOÖ Journal got conceived when Kyle Peterson and I were driving back from JJ Lewis Nichol's theatre workshop in Yreka, CA. This was around the 2004 elections. We talked about how Siskiyou County, with its zany hippies and get-ir-done rednecks, exemplified the political "tension" in this country. We talked about the Chico News and Review, how cool it is. We said we should start a magazine that allowed politically disparate people to talk with one another, a public forum. I don't know if that really works. I really hope so. If nothing else, I hope that written commentary can still tweak people.

I suggested we include poetry and fiction. Some local, some not-so -- I had just started exploring literary journals through the internet. We said let's do it. We cooked things up and put out the first issue in July of 2005. Kyle came up with NOÖ. It means "mind" in Greek. It's from Tellihard's "noosphere" philosophy, which is basically the evolution of humans to a state of pure mental consideration. I think. A few months ago, I found out that it's pronounced "no-oh" like, oh no we don't have an o. But I still call it "new" -- puns are the sheezy.

Two things are important for NOÖ: being free and being a paper magazine that people can pick up in coffee shops, indie bookstores, laundromats, etc. I like the idea of NOÖ getting read among strangers. Anything read while around strangers -- I don't know, it does something, it says we are all made of words, let's not hate each other.

We want to make the magazine a little better every four issues. A higher page count was our first step. Maybe next will be a color cover, bigger distribution, something. It's hard because we're funded through our pockets and the donations of others. But we're hawk-eyed with dedication and will not burn out, promise.

I love NOÖ because it's allowed me to connect with tons of amazing writers and people. We've published Pulitzer Prize nominees and seventeen-year old Canadians. We send a copy every issue to a kid in Redding who loves it, I think. Stuff like that makes me go yes, okay, yes, we're alright.

SK: The Bad Poetry (the "o" in "Poetry has a heart) series is you and three other writers. Someone pays two dollars and receives a poem. When you travel, do you plan to compose the poems on the spot? Or do you collaborate and send it through an email later?

Mike Young: When I travel is a delicate subject right now. I don't have a lot of money. But I will try to travel nonetheless, somewhere, somehow.

We compose bad poems on the spot, no collaboration through email or anything. Like those fair booths where people paint your face.

The gimmick is this: you donate two dollars and get a "bad" poem for a receipt, so that we can continue printing "good" poetry in the magazine for free. Sometimes people like their bad poems and say "Hey! That wasn't so bad!" So we say, "Great! Buy another one!"

Right now it's me, Bryan Coffelt, Kasey Mohammad and Tao Lin. More writers soon? I don't know. There are some folks in California whom I may ask to join up, since I can travel to California pretty easily. No hints. Stay tuned.

SK: How do you go about submitting? What's the most interesting reply you've had?

Mike Young: Usually around 4AM, I jerk up from my nightly quilting work and get quite distraught that I have not published anything for some time. So I check out this text file of plausible places and plausible submissions, and I ignore it, instead emailing every editor I've ever known or will know with seven thousand pages worth of work. This work is formatted as Commander Keen saved games. Everyone loves it and feeds me ice cream. I'm like "we're on the internet, how did you get the --" and they're like "shhh" then together we're all "ice cream!" Coca-Cola filmed the process for a commercial. I am played by Shaq.

The most interesting reply I ever had was an invitation to go pole vaulting in France. Unfortunately, the message was in French, so I had no idea what it said. Only later, after watching the television show about my life, did I figure it out. I burned that computer, ate it with collard greens and lemons, and snagged a new computer from an Australian dwarf vendor. He sold me a defunct dwarf, so the computer was gratis.

SK: Who are your influences and what are some of your favorite books? And what are you reading now?

Mike Young: Hmm. Chic answers require something obscure or pop culture oriented, right? I don't know. I don't know who's looking over my shoulder when I write. I do feel, when I write, that everything I've ever read is in the room with me, arms crossed, making sure I don't regurgitate clichés or steal ideas.

People who talk to me change me, like Tao or Bryan or birds or free phonographs.

Here are some people, though: Thomas Pynchon, Denis Johnson, Frank Stanford, Leonard Cohen, James Tate, Dorianne Laux, Jeff Mangum, Ray Carver, Emmanuel Levinas, David Berman, John Cheever, Kenneth Koch, Ron Padgett, Sandra Cisneros, and so forth. It's hard to make a list -- not just the fact of picking only a few, but the pressure to forget about all those old Nickelodeon shows and M.E. Kerr books and Joseph Wambaugh cop books. Or the country songs. I musn't mention the country songs.

Right now: I just finished a Charles Baxter story collection and Martin Amis's _Dead Babies_. Yes, Amis is an asshole. I'm reading poetry by Joshua Clover, Juliana Spahr and Tony Tost. Fiction - not sure what to read. Something will lacerate me and then I'll have no choice. Little known fact: books are actually spears.

SK: What percentage of contemporary poets are physically attractive?

Mike Young: I just image googled "contemporary poets." Here is what I found:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13028/13028-h/images/image157.png

http://www.rangewriter.org/jacksammon.JPG

http://www.peteredwards.net/images/DSC00742.jpg

http://www.bsu.edu/classes/koontz/barnwood/pic/barnlone.jpg

SK: A lot of serious writers are on MySpace. It's a useful publicity tool and meeting place for writers. Is it ok that we're on MySpace?

Mike Young: I think it's totally okay. But I'm with MySpace not as a "serious writer" -- my account is mostly for my personal life, I guess. A lot of my peers define themselves in public. It's a new self-identity process, one that's sort of dangerous: consider sexual predators. But quite cool too: consider the bravery of declaring yourself gay or transgender or whatever at fifteen. People rag on MySpace for stupid shit. No one believes they really have seven thousand friends; it's not classic "friendship," it's more like a watered-down Sanskrit namaste. A concerted exchange of acknowledgment.

In other words: MySpace, sure, why not, sure.

SK: Do you think poetry has advanced beyond movements, zeitgeists, manifestos? Like The Beats or whoever? The Black Mountain gang.

Mike Young: No, not really. The Flarf-list. The A-Tonalists. The School of Quietude. The New Formalists. Bay Area Poetics. New Sincerity. KaBLoW! Every poetry message board: The Alsop Review, Desert Moon, etc. Some movements are jokes, but still. Lots of people buy into regions and feudal kingdoms. There are too many poets not to generate that sort of social construction. Poets want to talk to poets. Didn't Longfellow and them have their Dante gang? Everybody likes treehouses and poets are no exception.

SK: This is a stupid question, but can a writer write well if he hasn't suffered enough?

Mike Young: No, that's a gnarly and substantial question. I don't know. If you're really suffering enough, I mean Enough Enough, then you don't really have time to write, right? You're too busy dying. I think it's dumb to help people out of mud by jumping in with them, and I think it may be dumb to ever assume you can save (or even salve) the suffering through writing. I mean -- I don't know. I don't know if it's dumb.

I believe in the human capacity for empathy. All those nouns -- human, capacity, empathy -- have substance to me, fit like splinters. I totally believe that I *can* try to feel for the suffering, reduce pain and suffering. Not only that, but it's pretty much a strident human duty.

Through writing? When I read something and go yes, yes, yes, everything is less alone now, then okay. That's good. I used to read Beautiful Losers and Crying of Lot 49 and Allen Ginsberg in high school and go out to the mall and think "wow, these really are people, people! people!" - and what else gets you doing that besides the right story or poem, the right language?

SK: Your story Ten Gallon Bucket of Fries was published at Word Riot and picked as a 2005 storySouth Notable Story. Is there a Southern influence on your work? Southern authors? Also, are drugs ever an influence while you write? Can substance abuse give a writer some reach or is that a romantic idea?

Mike Young: Lately, more of a Southern influence, sure. I used to hate the South, used to say vague things about Faulkner being "high South" or something, used to think the South unfairly dominated American mythology. I was dumb. Barry Hannah, Frank Stanford, Conrad Aiken, the Flannster (for her characters and sharp eye, not the Original Sin nonsense), Eudora Welty, Bobbie Ann Mason out of Kentucky, photographers like William Eggleston, bands like The Legendary Shack Shakers or the Elephant Six crowd from Ruston, LA and Athens, GA -- all of those make me thrum and flutter.

One of my grandfathers was a carpenter from Kentucky, the other an English professor from New England. I never knew them, but well, there you go.

As far as drugs, I don't know. Here's something: one night, this guy came in where I was hanging out. He gobbles mushrooms and smokes pot, well-known druggie "punk" -- etc. That night, he had two 40s taped to his hands and called himself Edward Fortyhands. He proceeded to explain the universe in terms of his three fingers, which twirled around each other. Like the universe came from three orbiting balls or something? At various times in the past, these three fingers had also explained racism, World War Two, and folk music.

People took pictures of the scene, but I didn't see anything beautiful come out of him.

In all fairness: one time we sang Simon and Garfunkel songs together. I think he was half-sober. It went well. I can't escape my diabolical need to be fair.

SK: Could you tell me about your experiences running an open mic poetry reading before it was closed down? You've been involved in some theater?

Mike Young: Haha, it got closed down because the bar that hosted it turned into a sports bar. We're trying to start it again.

We had a good time. Over the weeks, we got loons, acoustic guitar noodling, teary going-away parties for hippies, Jewish prophets, native African dancers, The Highclass Hobo Society, poets in poodle skirts, kickass Morrissey covers, an art lecture, jokes about Star Trek, stories about pirates, stories about Mr. T and Chuck Norris, poems about hamburgers and poems about the ins-and-outs of being a gay gothic Mexican (no shit).

I would "advise people" to have open mics in strange places and prep for the worst and never attempt to save face.

I used to do theatre and improv. Improv taught me to never attempt to save face, to hassle people while winking, and theatre taught me to bitch about crowds changing night to night. Um, it helped me perform words with all of my heart juices. To mesh my "poetry" with my "theatre" -- I don't know. It makes me giggle, makes me -- proud, almost, if I can say that without sounding stupid.

SK: Do you think poetry can be taught? Would you teach poetry? What would a class taught by Prof. Young be like? Okay, I'm walking into the classroom, taking a seat, looking at you dreamily.

Mike Young: The idea behind "to teach poetry" needs clarification, I think. It's not the same as "here is the quadratic equation, here is practice, now you know it." There is no poetry equation. It's more like teaching people to love how language and people work together, how one comes from the other and so on. It's teaching people to read more poetry. It's teaching people what James Dickey said, something like "talk to everybody not there as if they were."

Kasey Mohammad says "Poetry is thinking rhythm."

In my class, we would start with infinite time. Then a question: is our own internal emotional chemistry important enough to warrant un-ironic clichés, allusions, and grandeur? The answer would be no, no it is not. We would write about other people. We would write to hook those who care too much about things, emo kids, people who say "goddamn" until they cry. We would write using crazy language, clunky language. We would try to make skittish language, brutal language, all language beautiful. We would read tons of poetry. We would encourage people to never lug in any "sacred" pieces. We would encourage people to make others cry and laugh, then to urgently fuck with everything that worked, because that is how the world works. Things make us cry and laugh that are fake, malleable. We would learn that great poetry is somehow no longer malleable, and that this is something of a miracle, if you're into that sort of thing. We would learn to reject the first six words we write for the seventh, until we've trained ourselves to sense the right word. We'd read ideas about poetry, we'd learn that poetry has a history and a responsibility -- in that vein we would read prose-on-poetry from Stein, Jack Spicer, Auden, Pound, Rilke, Wordsworth, Frank O'Hara, Charles Olson, Bruce Andrews, Frost, WCW, Baraka, Charles Bernstein, d.a levy, Ange Mlinko, a billion blogs. John Ashbery says "Make it sweet again!" We would make fun of NPR, Billy Collins and Dana Gioia, make fun of people mercilessly. We would fuck the image of silk-lily Romantic and fuck the image of Modernist critic and fuck the image of fake poor Beat and fuck the image of drunk Bukowski slobs and fuck exclusionary L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E nonsense and fuck every image until we all had new ones. Poetry is the eternal fuck.

We would all start blogs and start writing poetry everywhere and finding poetry everywhere.

Our poetry class would be in a new place every week, definitely once in a carnival, once in an airplane, once on the moon.

Okay, scale back: we would eat blueberry-cinnamon-coffee cake and worry ourselves to death.

SK: Could you tell me about your poem Play Monsters With Rubber Bands?

Mike Young: The first two stanzas are things I saw and changed to sound cool. Tried to make them true in the ways we believe sometimes in capital letters, true how we want the world to resemble cartoons. The last stanza, I got worried about all that. Then I had the last thought, of hearing snow on the neck. Maybe I want to hear snow on my neck? Maybe I think it's amazing I can write that and have it happen?

I don't worry much about making "sense" in poetry -- right sense, clever sense. I just want to make amazing sense. It's the only way to get noticed in a crowded subway. It's the only way, in a world of huge shouts and shitstorms, that I am able to feel honest about writing poetry.

Louis Simpson has a nice poem about chicken broth and German girls that mentions "snow falling down the necks of lovers." I read it after I wrote the Play Monsters poem and went hehe, wow, hmm.

SK: Plans for the future as far as writing, submissions, manuscripts? Mr. Young, I salute you, thank you for the interview.

Mike Young: I'm waiting on a bunch of submissions. I don't have a real job right now and feel sleazy. Anyone reading this: please tell everyone to accept my stories and poems. But if you believe in prayer, pray for the discovery of renewable resources and the discovery of a human government that accommodates their benevolent and practical dispersal.

Sean, I feel guilty that I didn't ask you any questions, and everybody else has. I talk too much. You remind me of a well-twisted William Saroyan, who rocks like a NASA space camp. I don't give a shit to show off what I've read or something. I just want people to read these authors, because I think they're good and filling.

Sean, who are you worried about? End with a little about one friend for whom you're worried or sad, and other people will care about them. Maybe it's best for us to care so hard that we're not sure what's real or what's funny.

SK: Thank you. Saroyan is great. I dunno. When I try to say bleak things, they’re clown-bleak. I think my writing is clown-work. Also, I write angry because I become too attached to some people in rare instances, so I write with hatred, jealousy, my umbrella sags, I play a ukulele and drip tears. I hate everyone now that I’ve ever been personally close to, or intimate with - always an unreachable too-sane and wise disgust on their part - and have only a kind of vain glee at the idea of hurt in anyone’s direction. Forgive me, sir, I have been so viciously over-breastfed that I still sneeze up big plates of yogurt every morning. Honk.

Interview with Tao Lin

2006-05-24T03:46:00.000-04:00

Tao Lin is the author of four books (in various stages of release and discussed below). His poems and short stories have appeared in The Mississippi Review, The Cincinnati Review, Other Voices, Fourteen Hills, Pindeldyboz, Punk Planet, many more.

This is the first work of Tao Lin’s that I read.

Christmas by Tao Lin

His blog / site – reader of depressing books has 50,000 hits and rises around 200 every day.

SK: I would like to start this interview by discussing Jean Rhys and dead infants and from there branch out into subjects less sexually exciting. Jean Rhys said that she didn't want to use any stunts in her writing. I think I just used a stunt to open this interview. What are some of the dangers of showing off, as a writer, and by that I mean, I suppose, all flash without substance, a sort of common and easy trap for a writer to fall into and is there any simple method of avoiding this, any advice you can think of, on how not to become false - an echo of everyone's sold out books and ideologies? I ask because I haven't read many writers who sidestep this shortcoming as well as you do both in your work and the way you review and talk about writing. Also, can any clichés or idioms ever be used skillfully enough to be forgivable? One more, could you name a few writers dead or alive (I want to first put myself on this list of guilty, though not worth mentioning) guilty of tired, haughty, and half-assed prose or poesy and why?

Tao Lin: I don't know what people mean when they talk about 'stunts' in writing. I think it's a cliché to talk about 'stunts'; also to say things like that one writer is good because their stories are character-driven, or something, which is something people always say when they try to explain why they like a certain writer.

I don't know what it means to 'show-off.' All of writing intended to have more readers than oneself is 'showing-off.' (It's the same with the word 'cynical.' Calling someone cynical, to me, is like calling a rock a rock. The definition of cynical is that people do things for themselves. It just depends on how many illusions you want to have; with no illusions it is obvious and factual that people do things for themselves.) It just depends on what your definition of 'showing-off' is.

Almost all panel discussions, interviews, and book reviews, from what I've read, is just a matter of semantics. I went to a PEN / Believer event and it had five famous writers talking about politics. It was interminable to me. Everyone loved it, I think. It was a half hour discussion about semantics, though the word semantics was never used. It was interminable. Like one of those discussions in middle school, high school, and college where everyone finally agrees that 'it's both nature and nurture' and where the next day the same argument begins and everyone finally agrees, again, that 'it's both nature and nurture.'

If they had not used the word 'politics' but used concrete specifics like, 'let's talk about what difference it makes on the reader's actions in the real world immediately after he or she reads a story where the characters are labeled 'chinese' in contrast to a story where the character's place of birth is not specified' then it would have been a different discussion than the one that started in middle school and ends, from what I've seen and read, with death, and begins again with other people.

I also don't know what 'tired,' 'haughty,' or 'half-assed' means when applied to prose. If you use clichés and idioms then you can be 'forgiven,' I guess, but I'm not sure by who. I don't think you can go to jail for using clichés and idioms. If you use abstractions then I think the only way I can answer you is if you have created a context and a goal in order to define your abstraction. Like a computer would need to know what X is if you wanted it to solve for X in XYZ = XXX or something.

How not to become an echo of everyone's sold out books and ideologies? I'm not sure what 'sold out' means there. Or 'echo.' I seem like an asshole right now for not answering your questions directly, but really I am being honest when I say I don't know what these words, 'sold out,' 'tired,' 'haughty,' 'stunts,' 'dangers,' means unless you give me a context and a temporary goal in life.

SK: How many hours a day do you spend writing?

Tao Lin: When I wrote the stories in BED I wrote them pretty much one after another. I was in college. Each story took about a month. (After each was finished I kept editing sometimes like eight months after, every month or so, after each rejection or after each acceptance.) I only went to classes and wrote the stories. I just broke up with a girlfriend and we had mutual friends and I alienated all of them so that was very good for my writing. I wrote or thought about the stories for seven or eight hours a day usually. I would lay in my room at night thinking about the story I was currently working on, and writing things on it. When I wrote the poetry collection it was easier. I stared at each poem. I spent a lot of time getting it in order. I stared at it a lot. When I had a job I wrote maybe three or four hours a day. I always write. Life is stupid. I schedule other things around writing mostly. I always go to work very tired and without sleep and functioning at the shittiest functioning level possible, and then drink coffee before writing. When I say 'write,' I mean edit I think. 95% of the time is editing. No one knows what the word 'editing' means though. When I stare at the screen and change a word I don't know if that's called editing or writing. 'Editing' is like the word 'Politics.' Someone should get another PEN / The Believer panel together. Five famous writers can discuss the semantics of the word 'Editing.'

I just read what I typed and a lot of it isn't true really. I don't want to correct things. I'll just add that probably 80% of the time I say I'm writing or editing I'm really reading or writing email, chatting on gmail or AIM, or drawing things with microsoft paint; or listening to music or reading the internet.

SK: What lit are you currently reading?

Tao Lin: I am reading Gould by Stephen Dixon, American Purgatorio by John Haskell, and I just read Twelve by Nick McDonnell.

I don't know why I am reading those books. I think I'm reading Stephen Dixon because he is easy to read and funny. The John Haskell so far is like Lydia Davis but with Pop Psychology and I think I'm reading it to know what not to do while editing my novel. Twelve was easy to read and funny. I like Nick McDonnell. He is detached, he does not judge, his prose is easy to understand and mostly without abstractions. This shows to me that he and I would get along in real life. I think I read it because I stole it from the library and it had been in my room for about three months.

SK: How do you write in a public library with people near you?

Tao Lin: I listen to music. Sometimes I see this kid here I used to hang out with and he sits next to me and reads my novel to me off the computer screen. It makes me feel like an asshole, which is true. It makes writing seem as stupid as everything else, like collecting baseball cards. Someone should sit next to Salman Rushdie reading his novel off his screen to him. I should do that. I tell the kid to go away usually if he keeps reading my novel off the screen to me in a mocking voice. He says, "I hate you." I say, "Oh." And he goes away. Sometimes he'll show me a book and say, "You might like this." I always say, "I doubt it." He always says after that, "You won't like it." I try to sit in the corners. When I see someone I know I put my hand to the side of my forehead to hide my face.

SK: Your site’s first birthday is coming up. What should I get it?

Tao Lin: You know how old my site is. How do you know this? Get it a vegan coffee soy ice cream cake with blueberries and strawberries in it. Thank you.

SK: I've stalked through your whole blog. When you talk about your novel, do you mean the one that begins: People got impatient that year. They wanted things now. They wanted to learn Japanese without having to do any work— or do you mean Ezra Kire? When you say your novel is fucked, what do you mean?

Tao Lin: Yes, that novel. It doesn't begin there anymore. I was being cute. That beginning is very cute. Or maybe not. I don't know. I cut like 20,000 words of things that I had edited for a long time.

I did Ezra Kire for this thing that paid me $200 to do it. It's not really a novel. It's for $200. People think I'm retarded. Sometimes I refer to myself as 'The retarded one' when identifying myself among the other writers that one of my publishers publishes. Nabokov would call me retarded, I believe. Or maybe 'cute.' I don't know. I feel like a retarded asshole. I always talk shit about Nabokov for some reason. I just typed then deleted about 200 words and put this sentence here instead.

When I say 'fucked' I mean 'fucked.' The definition of 'fucked' is 'fucked.'

SK: You have twenty-two alternating chapters of a great novel called Hamster written with Noah Cicero. It's been awhile since an update. I hope this project hasn't finished? Or is it complete?

Hamster is finished. No one cares.

It was fun to write it. It was fun between Noah and I. I know I had fun and Noah had fun. I had fun reading his chapters and he had fun reading my chapters. No one else cares. This is fine. It was fun to write it. I may read it again some day and that will be fun and nice.

SK: Some people think Ellen Kennedy is a pseudonym that you've created. We both know Ellen and we know that she's a living person who eats blueberries and is, I would say, an amazingly natural and gifted poet. What is Hikikomori ? Has anyone put up the necessary large amount of money for The Very Retarded Giant Moth?

Tao Lin: Hikikomori is a novel by Hikikomori. In Japan children who feel alienated stay in their rooms for fifteen years instead of joining gangs. They are called Hikikomori. It means 'Shut-in.' Some people join gangs. In Japan they lay awake for 16 hour staring at the ceiling and at 3 a.m. walk quietly to the store to buy fermented soy beans very afraid.

No one has bought our books. No one will ever buy our books. The moth children's book has a moth orgy in it. That isn't suitable for kids.

SK: I think that's suitable for kids.

Tao Lin: So do I.

SK: Fucked is fucked is a good name for a blog.

Tao Lin: Maud Hamster is a good name for a blog.

SK: What music do you listen to when you write?

Tao Lin: I've been listening to the same music for like five years. I listen to Blacktop Cadence, The Weakerthans, The Broadways, The Lawrence Arms, Randy, Neva Dinova, Mirah, Satanic Surfers, Rilo Kiley, Rainer Maria, NOFX, No-Ca$h, Morning Glory, Propagandhi, Hot Water Music. NOFX is very good for writing for some reason. It is catchy. I think that's why. If something is catchy and the lyrics aren't melodramatic then it makes me happy which allows me to concentrate better, I think. I don't know. No-Ca$h is very good for writing, for me. The Arrogant Sons of Bitches also. Most of these bands are catchy and energetic and fast with very depressing and sarcastic lyrics either screamed or sung in a monotone.

SK: Do you refuse to buy label big company music?

Tao Lin: Yeah, I guess. Read elsewhere on my blog to find out why. Though you can also read elsewhere on my blog to find out why it doesn't matter anyway if I do or not. My blog has everything. It's smarter than I am.

SK: Are there any films that you enjoy, that you would like to name, that escape an excessive amount of clichés and melodrama?

Tao Lin: No. I can't think of any movie I really, really like.

SK: Have you read Daniil Kharms?

Tao Lin: No.

SK: Do you like Ted Berrigan?

Tao Lin: Haven't read.

SK: Is it okay to ask your opinion about Bukowski?

Tao Lin: Yes. I like him I guess. I have read Hot Water Music and some other things. Any time the writing is simple, uses short sentences, little abstractions, is not melodramatic, is fun, and has no rhetoric or clichéd language, I will like it.

SK: What are the five top novels and five top poems? We'll have a panel to decide.

Tao Lin: I don't know. Some novels I like are Good Morning, Midnight, Chilly Scenes of Winter, The End of The Story, and The Quick and The Dead. I like Burning Babies by Noah Cicero. I will read Burning Babies again in a bathtub eating grapes when it comes out, then lay in bed at 4 p.m. very awake with the covers up to my chin staring at the ceiling. There aren't many books I like very much.

SK: Have you ever used violence on an interviewer?

Tao Lin: No one has interviewed me in real life before.

SK: You have a contest winning book of poems being released in October by Action Books called you are a little bit happier than I am, which can be preordered by contacting you. How much will you participate in the promotion of your books?

Tao Lin: I don't know. I used to care a lot about that. Now I don't know. I just want the money from it. There are about three or four people who after they read the books I write I don't care anymore about the book. I would like these three or four people to read the book. After they read the book the book feels useless to me except for making money or creating situations where I can make money; or getting good reviews from 'important' people so that I can have more authority to talk shit about, say, Salman Rushdie. I think if I win the Nobel Prize, The Pulitzer Prize, and a few National Book Awards people will pay attention to me when I say that Salman Rushdie likes baseball more than writing.

These three or four people change over time, I guess.

SK: I mean, will you be sending some review copies to newspapers and magazines and authors yourself or will the Action Books do most of that?

Tao Lin: I don't know. I want to do everything myself in the future, if I have money. I don't want to have to put the publisher's catalogue in the back of the book. Or have their logo there, or have the barcode there. Or have that copyright page there. Writers should be allowed to design their own books, no matter how shitty it ends up looking, or how small the font is. The design is part of the book. If the font is large then it has a different effect on the reader. If a different word is used in a poem it has a different effect on the reader. I designed my book using Microsoft Word and the design was rejected. Now I care less about the book. I hope I did not alienate my publishers by typing that. It's a declarative sentence with only facts, so it shouldn't offend anyone.

SK: Action Books published Lara Glenum. I think your work is very different from hers, but you're both my favorites right now. Have you read her?

Tao Lin: Yes I have read Lara Glenum. The other Action Books books are very different than mine, yes. You can target my book to depressed teenagers. You can advertise in K-Mart, if you want, I don't know; just take out all the "Fuck"s and replace them with "Freak"s or whatever. You can't really advertise Lara Glenum in a suburban shopping mall next to, say, Hot Topic. You could do that with my book. If you are a depressed teenager and you see the title, You Are A Little Bit Happier Than I Am, you will buy the book. You will listen to Bright Eyes then go home and read my book. Maybe Action Books is using my book to make money (or to get mainstream attention) in order to fund more Lara Glenums or get more Lara Glenums more attention from depressed teenagers. I hope no one is offended by what I just typed. I don't know why anyone would be offended by that. I don't know. I don't know why Action Books likes my book if it is so different from their other books. So I just made a hypothesis. No one should be offended.

SK: I heard an audio recording of your poem I Want to Kill my Literary Agent. I said to Ellen that that's how I imagined your voice would sound. Ellen reads your poems out loud quite well, like how they're written. I don't think I could read one of your poems out loud because I am stuck on that celtic Yeats chanting boom schoolmaster way of reading that so many poets are stuck on. I'm trying to say your voice is distinct on the page, and when recorded, but I don't know how to. May I ask about voice in poetry in general?

Tao Lin: The poem is called "I Am About To Kill My Literary Agent." Todd Zuniga, who published the recording, also called it the wrong title (in a Gothamist interview).

When I read my poetry I do it in a monotone. I sound bored, tired, and depressed; and like I don't want to be there. Why shouldn't I? That is what the poetry is about. Bored, tired, depressed; don't want to be there. That is also how I sound in real life, pretty much, if you try to talk to me. When I read my poetry I try to give each word the same inflection and tone, which is to have no inflection or tone. If there is inflection or tone, that to me is like using dialogue verbs, in fiction, that are anything but "Said." I don't like it. If you use inflections or speak in anything that sounds like a human being, rather than a kind robot, you are putting demands on the listener. If you say, "I love you," you are taking away someone else's freedom. The same if you use inflections when reading poetry in the kgb bar. You are taking away someone else's freedom. You are forcing them to react because you are saying, "I am trying to make you react to my existence." If you read in a monotone and never say things like, "I love you," then you are like a rock or a tree. You are not taking away anyone else's freedom. This is why people like rocks and trees, I think.

SK: (I’m sorry, my mind was here) What is a literary agent? How did you get one? Is one needed? They cost?

Tao Lin: They try to sell what you wrote to editors. I got one by emailing him. I emailed other people too. Curtis Sittenfeld's agent was going to represent me but I went with the other one. If I went with Curtis Sittenfeld's agent I might be rich right now. I also would not have written a poetry collection probably. I don't have an agent anymore. Read my blog to find out what happened.

For my story-collection, BED, Melville House solicited me, then I sent it, then they called me, about five months later, and I went to Hoboken and met Dennis Loy Johnson, and he gave me $1000, which I spent in about a month having no job. The story-collection will come out in Spring, 2007, about 12 months from now. It will sell four hundred copies and I will receive four or five emails telling me that my characters need to change their situation instead of laying in bed depressed all the time. I already alienated Maud Newton and all those people, and most MFA students read Maud Newton to find out what books to read. And only MFA students would read a short-story collection published by Melville House by a 22-year-old. And I forgot to make all my characters asians with identity crisis'. Four hundred copies.

Agents don't cost money. They only make money if they sell what you wrote. They make 15% usually.

My agent before I told him I didn't need an agent anymore probably spent more than $300 on postage and printing on me.

SK: How do you do submissions? Ever say anything personal or is it like a form submission? Do you write "submission" in the subject line in all capitals? Do you ever blindly submit? Simultaneously? Do you make more paper submissions or more email submissions?

Tao Lin: I used to follow the rules. If a place said no simultaneous, then I did not. If a place said they only take first serial rights then I did not send out a story already accepted elsewhere. Now I open my chapbook and my file of poems, I copy and paste stories and poems, paste them in the email, write that my name is Tao Lin and that I am submitting, and email the thing. I am trying to do this more. I've just begun this new way of submitting, which is to not keep track and just keep doing it without thinking. I want to change literary magazines. I want ten places to accept the same poem or story then get very angry and not be able to sleep at night. Then I want to say, "You are doing a non-profit magazine and you are very angry and won't get any sleep tonight because a different non-profit magazine is publishing the same story that you are publishing. Please slit my throat for me. I am a horrible person."

SK: How do you know when something is ready to be sent out?

Tao Lin: I usually send things out before I am completely satisfied with it. When it's accepted I tell the editor I want to send them a new draft. Then I work on the thing very hard for a few days and then send that. I think this is because the last revisions to get it so I'm completely satisfied can only be done after I know the thing will actually be published (I need that motivation, or something). No, that is not true. I don't know.

SK: What, when, and where was your first published writing? How old were you? How old were you when you started writing?

Tao Lin: I don't remember. Maybe uber.nu. I don't think that site exists anymore. I think I was 19. I think I started writing when I was 18 or 19. I took a creative writing class the first semester in college. That was when I first wrote pretty much. Now I am 22 and enjoy talking shit about Salman Rushdie and Nabokov, have written a poem called "Hot Amoeba Ass," and am working on a novel called, "Eeeee Eee Eeee."

SK: I don't think many store owners will read this. You shoplift. Have you ever been grabbed or harassed or physically beaten or chased? In general? Mugged in New York? Is personal loss or general personal horror and suffering ever not beneficial for a writer if they're still writing? Have you ever had writer's block?

Tao Lin: No. I am careful not to get caught. I've never gotten caught. You have to be retarded I think to get caught. No one has mugged me either. You have to be retarded to be mugged also.

I don't know what is beneficial for a writer. Beneficial for what? For the writer? Or for the people who want to writer to suffer so that miserable stories and poems can be written so the reader can read those when depressed and feel a little better? Or for the writer who needs to be miserable for a while so he or she can write a miserable book that will get him or her money to be less miserable? Or for the writer whose misery has nothing to do with money and so cannot be helped anymore? This last sentence describes the writer who is 'Fucked,' I think.

Writer's block. I don't know. You have to be more specific. Refer to my answer to your first set of questions. "Writer's block" sounds like a topic at the next PEN / The Believer event.

SK: Is writing stupid?

Tao Lin: I don't know. If it is it's because everything is stupid. Either everything is stupid or nothing is stupid. Some people will say 'stupid' is an abstraction. And read this answer with a very serious expression and then be very angry for the rest of the day and write me an anonymous email using an anonymous email service thing so that I won't be able to respond to their email calling me an idiot. That really happened.

SK: Is there a use for writing-workshops other than as a kind of depressive social gathering?

Tao Lin: Yes. You see who else is sitting there thinking that everyone is stupid and that is your friend. You can also go there and be sarcastic and make jokes about Jhumpa Lahiri and talk about the themes in Jhumpa Lahiri and Flannery O' Connor and use big words sarcastically. Everyone will believe you are being very serious.

SK: Donald Barthelme? Butter?

Tao Lin: I don't know. I don't like Barthelme.

SK: You have a chapbook of prose Today The Sky is Blue and White with Bright Blue Spots and a Small Pale Moon and I Will Destroy Our Relationship Today coming out this summer from Future Tense Publishing. In one of the stories a family of robbers leaves two business cards. In another story, a husband and wife agree they have cancer and that their pet iguana has cancer. Do you prefer writing shorter absurd pieces or longer autobiographical ones? Is absurd the right word? Is there a right word?

Tao Lin: All the stories in BED which Melville House is publishing are longer ones where you can tell I'm trying to get into Best American Short Stories or the O'Henry Prize Anthology. They all have themes and you can read what the themes are because I typed them there. Not all, but most. Lorrie Moore does this thing where she repeats original images or words throughout the story. In 'Willing' she repeats the word 'Willing.' It's the author repeating the word, not the characters. She is in control. In 'Terrific Mother' it has the repeating spider images, and the mood. It has a mood, or something. I don't know. Other writers don't do this really. I did it in most of the stories in BED. Because I read Lorrie Moore a lot then and didn't like anyone else's short stories. I can read Lorrie Moore short stories more times than other people's. Lorrie Moore doesn't give her stories titles that are clichés, like 'Swept Away,' or whatever, then make that the theme. She creates new things and makes that the theme. When I say 'theme' I don't know what that means. Maybe it means 'mood' or something. 'Swept Away' is a story by Alice Munro or T.C. Boyle, I forget which.

The ones in the chapbook when I'm writing them I feel that I'm 'screwing around.' I could sit in a ten million dollar mansion eating blueberries and drinking ten thousand dollar cups of coffee and have someone I like be in love with me and be in very good health and be very happy all the time... and would be able to 'screw around,' and write things like Barthelme writes or what most of the stories in the chapbook are. I couldn't write the stories in BED under the same conditions. That's the difference I think. The stories in BED I could only write if I was very not happy, did not have friends, didn't talk to anyone, didn't have a full-time job, and lived somewhere where I didn't see people that often.

SK: You are the co-editor of bear parade. Your first e-book of poems is published there. The rejection letters are unique in that you send song lyrics or offer an informative, compared to most sites, kind and personalized response. What is bear parade looking for? I glimpsed a short paragraph about that on bear parade's blog, but I think it disappeared. If someone is not retarded and reads through your blog, I think they would at least have an idea. But I need to ask you. I've read through your blog.

Tao Lin: Gene Morgan designs it and created it. I just read submissions and talk to Gene sometimes. And try to promote it sometimes. I can't say what Gene is looking for because I'm not Gene.

I would publish things that are like what is already published on Bear Parade. I don't want variety.

I like when the writer uses words that I can actually understand. And when the meaning is on the word level, instead of the phrase level, which all idioms and 'sayings' are (on the phrase level). It doesn't matter what the subject matter is. If the tone is sarcastic, self-mocking, self-conscious, able to joke about anything, is not melodramatic about anything, then I will like it probably.

SK: Retardation is in my blood, the condition, like I don't have an ethnicity. I just fill in retard instead of a color or origin. Should I write a memoir about being a retard? How famous would I be?

Tao Lin: Yes, write a memoir about being a retard. I don't know if retards can read. The parents of retards can read I think.

SK: Is the design of bear parade and some of your work inspired by adult swim, or do you watch adult swim on television, or do you watch television at all? I ask because vacuum cleaners, bears, robots, zombies, ninjas, pirates, seem to be a theme with adult swim and some contemporary artists. Is there a name for this or is it stupid to ask?

Tao Lin: Gene Morgan designs it. I don't watch TV. I don't read either that much. I don't watch many movies. I don't like reading anymore. I only read the same books repeatedly. If I read something new it's because of outside forces that make me read it, or it's because someone I know wrote it and I want to try to learn what they think about me by reading their book. Or I want to learn more about them. I don't know. I don't know why I read, or do anything. You can tell I'm confused if you read my writing. I'm confident that I am confused. Most of the time I lay facedown or on my side on my bed listening to music. Sometimes after I shower I sit on my bed and play drums on my bed and my legs with my hands for a long time. I read my own writing a lot. Sometimes I will read something I wrote before and I will feel better, like it's someone else that wrote it, and I can relate to them. This isn't 'insane.' Because it is true that someone else wrote it. Things in different places in time are the same as things in different places in space. That seems to make sense, so I accept it. I don't know.

SK: How fucked is this interview?

Tao Lin: I don't know. Please add 'I don't know' between every sentence I typed.

Interviews

2006-05-11T21:34:00.001-04:00

Interviews coming. Authors who have had work featured in such great mags as: Word Riot, The Mississippi Review, Opium Magazine

Grand opening

2006-05-01T20:35:00.000-04:00

I believe in joy.