THE COLLABORATIVE PROCESS OF WRITING “PORNOGRAPHY & YOU” / Anna Kreienberg & Christopher Rizzo
This collaborative interview comes from Anna Kreienberg and Christopher Rizzo, whose poem “Pornography & You” appears in H_NGM_N #17.
CR: Rather than write an essay about the composition of the poem, I had the idea to write something closer to a conversation and you’re on board?
AK: I just want it to be crushingly conversational.
CR: Absolutely. But where should we begin?
AK: Well, I think after we agreed that this poem was going to be culture as an allegory for porn, I wanted to write something just as absurd as culture. I was thinking the entire time I would write as a cracked-out Stephen Colbert, and that voice worked really nicely for what I wanted to say. Where did you begin?
CR: I began with your original phrase that had us laughing: “porn & you.” I’m pretty sure I told you that if you didn’t write the poem, then I would! When we first started writing the piece, though, I didn’t hesitate to say anything that might be considered off-putting, controversial, or even embarrassing. Most creative writing for me is improvisation and, as anyone who has done any sort of improv will tell you, you’ve just got to go for it. Hesitation is the enemy.
AK: I think that if I wrote without hesitation that we would not be in this current arrangement at all. For me, writing this took a kind of observation and planning. Like, I would see a commercial or read a ridiculous thinkpiece or generally have a bad cultural experience and then I would mull over it. Just stew with the bad cultural experience. Then I would see if I could write about it in an interesting way, and so I practiced writing about a lot of things but ended up throwing away most of it. When I was happy with a good chunk of writing, I would send it to you to add to the poem. I definitely didn’t censor anything, I was more concerned with not being entertaining.
CR: Oh, I definitely mulled over horrifying cultural experiences, especially those involving Internet culture. Reddit has literally given me grey hairs. A lot of the material that I used came from notes I made on the absurdity that happens online. When I say improv, I mean I did my research before sitting down to write. For me, the actual composition was breezy, but only because I’d prepped. I deleted bits here and there while writing, but, since we wrote the poem in a kind of call and response style, I wanted to hammer out a chunk of the poem as quickly as possible to keep the energy going. Can you believe how long it got?
AK: Those notes were helpful. Just like Freud (or was that Ginsberg?) always said, “First thought, best thought.” The iPhone notes were great little spurts of information from online to play with—I think we could’ve written a whole poem with just those. No, I can’t believe how long this thing got, it is almost insupportably large. You’ve done collaborative work before. Was this project different for you at all compared to work you’ve done with other people?
CR: Right, insupportably large. That sums up the main themes of both porn and culture in general! Damn you, innuendo! Supersize my Amurica! Anyway, this project was different from previous collaborations, sure. When I wrote Full on Jabber with Jess, for example, we wrote individual pieces in response to one another, which wound up a chapbook. I wrote Grim Little with Mark over a burger and beers at Charlie’s Kitchen in Harvard Square. What I found so interesting about our collaboration, then as well as now, was not how I would continue the poem, then send my continuation to you, and then you would send your continuation back to me, and so forth, but rather how we would read through the poem when we were together and discuss its progress. Our visceral responses to the language, as it developed into a long poem, told me that we were doing something right.
AK: Well the correct answer to that question is that you weren’t dating Jess during Full on Jabber, but I’ll settle for your response! Anyway, one of the best parts about P&Y for me was seeing how you would react, or respond to what we had written. The conversation about the poem was vital to me, because I think we need to have a continuing conversation about how weird and uncomfortable America is with its children. At least, I need to have this conversation. Did you have a goal for this poem?
CR: Ah crap, no soup for me! Seriously, the best part of the process was seeing how you would react, too, while we read over what we’d written together. And I had no expectations for the poem at all, other than us writing it. I hoped that we’d eventually find a satisfying conclusion, which I think we absolutely found. I’m really excited that H_NGM_N took a chance on publishing P&Y, since it’s absolutely NSFW. In fact, I’m so relieved that Nate, along with his fellow editors, decided to add a TW tag to the piece. Maybe they took advice from the poem itself, when you wrote that “this poem should have a massive trigger warning”?
AK: Right, because it absolutely should have a trigger warning for a whole host of triggers. We were both interested in being as honest as possible, and sometimes, unfortunately, that involves also being absurd and offensive and generally horrifying. “Horrifying” is a good word for how things are going down, in this poem and in general. This poem is scary in a lot of ways... but also really funny. Rachael texted me today about laughing out loud. The “sassy rapper” line always kills me.
CR: In a lot of ways, P&Y reminds me of The Aristocrats joke. The point is to go so far over the culturally acceptable lines that the only recourse is to laugh, if only because the writing touches upon something of the truth. Comedy and tragedy aren’t necessarily a dialectic, rather they can happen together in a stroke. Goddammit, innuendo! Go drunk, you’re home!
AK: Like Burnett said (or was it Twain?), tragedy + time = comedy. And you’re right, there’s not necessarily a dialectic, but tragedy after tragedy happening on the Internet for all of us to see ends up as the only comedy we need. Except now, no time passes. The Internet eradicates The Time. Everything is happening now, so it has to be funny now, maybe even sooner than now. It has to be funny as it happens, before it even happens, before the primordial soup of comedic writing, before time. IMO, everything must be funny in the eclipse of eternity.
CR: Hey now. I thought you said “crushingly conversational”? Thanks, Buddha Girlfriend, for keeping it 100. But you’re right, if there’s only a now that we can experience, then linear time’s kinda convenient bullshit. Sorry, Aristotle.
