His poems “magical morning,” “more,” “pillow” and “arrival” appear in the fiftieth issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the poems “magical morning,” “more,” “pillow” and “arrival.”
A: These poems are such an odd sampler platter! It feels a bit like someone is holding a tray of mozzarella sticks beside a teacup of ayahuasca beside a prosthetic leg. What an odd meal! Thank you for showing them some love.
“magical morning” is a speaker trapped with their strange and violent intrusive thoughts. The voice feels masculine to me. I’d say it’s a man witness to another man’s love and admiration of a cat. Why does this unsettle the speaker so? Why is this threatening? Is it because speaker can’t show the same sort of love and affection? Because of his loneliness, isolation? Whatever the case, his mind is off and running, and the first place it goes is grotesque violence. The speaker is not a violent man. Actually, the opposite, even his violent thoughts make him ashamed, make him feel he must make amends for them. But then when he tries to (secretly) compensate for his violent thoughts, his intrusive thoughts become even more wildly violent. So where did the impulses come from originally? Is it something primordial? Something cultural? There’s something strange and scary and also funny about them.
“more” came from some floating thought, some voice saying something like, “the more you want, the more you have dreamed of in this world, the more you ultimately lose.” Speaker is chasing that idea. Every thought leads to loss. The shepherd loses their sheep. The person with love loses their sixteen souls. To try and touch something leads to being numb and tangled. But then, it’s not an unhealthy mind, at least I don’t think. I think to lose desire, to renounce desire, is unhealthy. So they’re looking to claim their desires, no matter the barbs they’re going to feel. Either path seems a little depressing though, no?
Oh “pillow” this one is meant to be part of a series. The series starts out with a mother offering some advice, “if you want something done right, you do it yourself.” But then the advice takes a scary turn. The thing I was thinking about here was depictions of post-apocalyptic cannibalism, a mother encouraging her children to go ahead and eat a murdered person’s body. This is a mother who is ride-or-die, fiercely loyal no matter the cost. She is going to put meat on her child’s plate if she has to throw a stone at a neighbor’s head to do it. But in this scenario, the scene is not post-apocalyptic. It’s a child who is caring for a sick man. Still, the mother has the same post-apocalyptic cannibal attitude. “Slice this man’s December off, and get on with your life.”
“arrival” is maybe my favorite of all these poems. The most personal. I was writing with a lovely person, the nonfiction writer and poet Noam Dorr, at Western Washington University where we work together. He had just brought my family the most delicious sauerkraut in the world. I told him I was working on writing a sort of everyday spell. Something that I could say that would help me cast off the work thoughts that keep spinning long after work is supposed to be over. Something that I could say to help me reorient the mind, remind myself that my day does not begin at work, it really begins when I return home, and I’m back with my family. That was the goal, to say it upon returning home, and have those work thoughts “close like an incomprehensible dream.” And upon getting to the dinner table with my family, greeting the most meaningful part of my life with more humor and energy. So it’s something of an experimental everyday spell I’m trying on myself! I’ll let you know how it goes . . .
Q: How do these poems compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?
A: These poems are pretty different in content and vibe (at least I think so) though they were written around the same time. There’s something in all of them about recovering from an unsettling sentiment. Trying to recover. Throwing some ideas at the wall.
The poems I’ve been writing lately are so oddly populated with creatures. Donkeys and witches and moths and dogsharks and ghoul-headed lambs. I’m not really sure what is happening here. Also a lot of speakers getting lost in a fog or a trance or some foggy woods . . .
Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting?
A: So many folks doing innovative thrilling work at a level higher than I will ever dream or know or achieve. Maria Bamford. Allie Brosh. Raphael Bob-Waksberg. Anne Sexton. Diane Seuss. Tomaž Šalamun. Réka Nyitrai. There are a couple songs that have recently really inspired me. A haunting and beautiful spell-like song by Loma called “Black Willow” And Daniel Norgren’s song that is a dialogue between parent and child, “Why May I Not Go Out and Climb the Trees.”
Q: I’m curious in how both poems and songs have influenced your work. How important is music in the way you compose lines?
A: It’s such a great question, because I’m sometimes unaware of the way my ear is leading the poem. Ok, what comes to mind for me. I tend to compose a line to be short. They’re sometimes a sort of impulsive declaration. Like a rock coming down hard and fast against a piece of high-carbon steel. Something like a song lyric. Will this shoot sparks or not? One line is trying to hold the heat and light of the previous line, so it’s often using some of the same kindling. Maybe it’s the repetition of a sound. Maybe it’s a slant rhyme.
I’ll also say that with some poems, I am trying to get back to the joy I had when I was fifteen and playing in a garage band. Hearing what my distorted guitar sounded like striking against / dissolving into another distorted guitar. There is a little of the same impulse there, thinking, what will I sound like today? What if I turn this up really loud?
Q: With your full-length debut, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?
A: I was going to say that these new ones are really weird to me, and I seem to be preoccupied with existential dread and murder and suicide and dreams of horses with big erections. But saying that aloud, I realize, o that’s not weird for me at all. The new visions and obsessions are also the old visions and obsessions.
One freedom I’ve been feeling though, and again, maybe this is not so new, is I feel a new freedom to let myself leap in and out of the surreal. One moment the vision will seem concrete and tight to me, and then it’s a leap into rabid dog flesh and a head of ash. I’m not sure what this is. As I get older, my old memories feel fuzzier, more dreamlike to me.
Q: Do you see a connection between memory and your engagement with the surreal?
A: Yes, definitely. Sometimes I’m looking to recapture and wander through a feeling I haven’t experienced in a long time. I feel a little bit like the Ghostbusters trying to do this, channel the feeling, bait, it, stand in awe of it, contain it, observe it, almost like I’m trying to put a ghost in the Containment Unit. I guess the equivalent for me is I have to be careful not to let these old feelings run too rampant in my body. I have a gut feeling there’s something dangerous about some of them.
For example, there’s this old memory I have of sitting in the middle of this grass field at an elementary school I attended. But in the memory I’m older, maybe 19, and I’m waiting in this field for hours, watching the sun go down. And I get kind of scared, because in the back of the school’s grass field, there was a chain-linked fence, the only thing containing some unchecked wildlife back there, not sure, probably just some raccoons? Anyhow, my young brain was a little worried of being near there in the dark.
When trying to recapture the feeling of being in that dark field, all kinds of strange wildlife emerges in the written work. Sometimes it’s a talking fox with a really large head. Sometimes it’s a moth that’s made of a kind of cream. The line in the poem is something like, “moth mad cream flummoxed under the moon.”
Ok, I haven’t answered your question very well. I think for me, the connection between memory and the engagement with the surreal is a number of self-destructive thoughts I had, some I still have, and a sort of knowing these thoughts are very natural and unnatural. They feel like a visitation from a creature both very natural and unnatural, like a talking fox or a bit of cream that has taught itself to flap around like a moth.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: I just reread Ben Niespodziany’s book No Farther Than the End of the Street over the summer. Every time I read it, I come out with a new favorite poem. This time, it was his poem “Neighbor” where the characters go to a funeral and the ghost is there, it’s funny and also ominous. Ben is a wonderful friend, person, collaborator, and I’ve asked him to come talk with poetry students I’ve worked with, and I know from talking with him that the reading and creation of poetry is an everyday ritual. When feeling artistically drained I go back to his advice to “read 5 poems in the morning.” Or, “put on a Jon Hopkins song and just start writing.” Or, “find a poem you love and respond to it, line by line.” And I imagine Ben creating poems the way that some folks practice prayer, making time and space for it no matter what. I feel like this energy touches me when I read his book. The poems are short, funny, often strange, surreal, and taste good in mouth if you read them aloud. After I’ve read five of them, I often have the sensation that I’ve refueled.
O and I just want to say I loved the poems in TOUCH THE DONKEY 50. Especially those by Elena Zhang and Jason Heroux, but really everyone in the issue was inspiring.
Since becoming a parent, and since getting older, the time and energy to read and write has gotten smaller. But I have found reading with my kids can be highly inspiring and reenergizing. And I love books by Jillian Tamaki, Daniel Handler, Laura Knetzger, Aron Nels Steinke, Raina Telgemeier, Wolf Erlbruch, Kazu Kibuishi, Angela Johnson, Ben Hatke, Mo Willems, Mac Barnett, Dav Pilkey, Roald Dahl, so many more . . .
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