You recently completed your MFA at Notre Dame. What was that experience like? How was it working with Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Goransson? Will you continue to work with Action books now that you've graduated?
I loved it. I was already a huge fan of Johannes and Joyelle’s writing, so Notre Dame was pretty much the perfect situation for me. Joyelle’s energy is infectious and she got me thinking about form and formlessness in ways I hadn’t prior to the two years I spent completing my MFA. She’s always open to whatever you’re interested in writing about. If you turned in a poem that was also printed on a dried leaf stamped with hashtags and a handwritten equation related to the development of a spacecraft propulsion device, she would have feedback for you. And it would be good feedback. You would go into her office asking for a book recommendation and you would leave her office with a list of book recommendations and probably more notes for your manuscript-in-progress. Same thing goes for Johannes. I would turn in some work and he would ask, “Have you read [ ]” or “What about [ ]. No? You should read that.” It was two very beneficial years that I definitely don’t regret. And I did an obscene amount of reading while I was there, too. Plus, I’d always tinkered around with Swedish, but I don’t think I would have ever begun taking translation seriously if it wasn’t for Johannes’s encouragement. And I mean ‘seriously’ in the sense that it was something that I could do. I know a lot of writers have this bizarre theory that translating poetry or fiction is somehow lesser than strictly producing writing of their own. I just can’t relate to that. I just kind of want to engage with as many languages as possible. Like writers like Christian Hawkey and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs. Johannes was the first instructor I’d ever had that was like, ‘You should translate. You should work with the language more. Practice your translation. Read more about translation.’ Up until that point, a lot of my former instructors had only said things like, ‘Why Swedish? That doesn’t seem practical’ or ‘Have you ever been to Sweden? No? Then you probably shouldn’t be trying to translate Swedish.’ I swear the favorite pastime of humans in America has something to do with the obliteration of ambition. And each other. The word itself (“ambition”) is frequently treated as some sort of negative quality within academia. ‘I don’t know about this project, it seems rather ambitious.’ ‘You know what the problem with this paper is? It’s just too ambitious.’ It just pisses me off. Let your students be ambitious! My experience with translation has turned out really well. It gives me an opportunity to feel productive all the time. If I have writer’s block, I can translate. If translation isn’t going well, I can try writing something of my own. Translating usually gives me a ton of ideas about what the mechanics of my own language and writing are/aren’t doing. Additionally, my MFA thesis, The House of the Tree of Sores, actually ended up being written in a combination of Swedish and English. How many MFA programs would let something like that fly? From the stories I’ve heard, I’d guess not too many.
I can’t officially continue working for Action Books, no. My name will eventually disappear from the masthead. But that doesn’t mean I can’t remain a friend to Action Books!
Even though you can’t work for Action Books anymore, you’re still running Radioactive Moat and editing at Fanzine. I’d be interested to hear a bit your work on each of these publications and your philosophy on publishing in general.
Radioactive Moat has its own bi-annually published lit mag called Deluge and issue five will drop some time this fall. Eventually I would really like to publish and distribute full-length books of poetry via Radioactive Moat, but I’m currently focusing most of my energy on a job search. But, yeah, the goal of Radioactive Moat has always been to share work from both emerging and established writers. It’s a publication that celebrates radioactivity—a type of energy I grew up around in the green slime-saturated 90s. Radioactivity has been associated with elements of mutation for as long as I can remember. Radioactivity is grotesque! Is freakish! Is atypical! Is queer! Is pro-translation! Is tangled up in nature! Is a threat to the status quo! And that’s the kind of writing I’ve been sharing with readers since 2009. Radioactive Moat has been a longtime zone of corrosive flourishes! And I continue to read submissions for Deluge year-round.
Working for Fanzine has also been great. Most of all because I have the freedom to review, interview, or solicit artists of my choosing. I especially like being associated with a publication that thinks things like poetry—and even poetry-in-translation—deserve to be mentioned alongside articles on popular musicians and sports in particular. Growing up, I always noticed a hostile divide between kids who liked sports and kids who liked art. Athletic students typically thought that the students who liked art were “faggots” or something and artistic students frequently dismissed athletic students as brainless. I think what makes so many shitty parents so shitty is the fact that they devote so much time to reinforcing problematic gender norms instead of just being like, ‘Hey, you can actually do both of these things.’ I’ve met a number of successful (and unsuccessful) athletes who were also very capable of creating interesting art. Unfortunately they were painstakingly conditioned to negate their artistic qualities. They were taught to censor an important part of themselves. Probably because it wasn’t considered “manly” or “necessary” or something. So I tend to champion anything that reminds readers that art and performance can have a wider audience.
Although you've been publishing online for years, your first physical chapbook, GOAL/TENDER MEAT/TENDER has only just come out. Why did it take you so long to have something published in print and what has the process of creating this book been like?
It’s probably because I never really submit to chapbook competitions. I’m always writing with larger page counts in mind. I can’t just write one smallish series of poems. I plan things out. I map things out. For GOAL/TENDER MEAT/TENDER, I drew a lot. Sketched out what I thought the hockey uniforms might look like. Did some painting. Chapbook-sized manuscripts tend to be 15-30 pages, I think. I can’t do that. It’s too difficult for me. I can’t sit down knowing I’ll have to stop at 15 or 30. I just have to write until the initial idea or theme feels exhausted or possibly finished.
GOAL/TENDER MEAT/TENDER is actually a lyrical five act radio play, so what I sent horse less press was pretty much the second act of the full-length version of GOAL/TENDER MEAT/TENDER and it turns out they liked it. It was something that was part of something larger, but also self-contained and cohesive in its own way. So it worked out this time. Chapbooks are a cool idea because it’s something handmade. Bookbinding is its own medium in a way. I think people take that for granted. I also thought it would be really cool if my chapbook could look like a goaltender mask and the horse less press team made that happen! I really like the idea of a book cover being a mask. It makes it stop being a book cover.
GOAL/TENDER MEAT/TENDER utilizes the language of hockey to communicate the cannibalistic mating habits of the female praying mantis. The merging of insect language and locker room language and slap shots and sweat and blood and tears—I think it all results in something rather violent and kind of gay. Like most popular sports. (Makes an ass-slapping gesture.)
The poems of yours in LEFT are excerpted from a manuscript titled One Hundred Acres. What's happening with that project at the moment. Have you been shopping it around? Do you have any other projects on the go?
One Hundred Acres started as a sort of joke between me and Feng Sun Chen. I’ve always been fond of the Tardigrade (aka the “waterbear” or “moss piglet”). And me and Feng were discussing it on FB chat one day and I made a comment that was something along the lines of, ‘What if David Lynch did a Winnie the Pooh movie?’ I thought the Tardigrade was what Winnie the Pooh might look like if pushed to that extreme. Feng and I joked about co-writing our own Lynchian Winnie the Pooh adventures, but it never happened. But one day, I was incredibly bored and I was thinking about the ways Mike Kelley thinks about stuffed animals and decided that the Winnie the Pooh thing needed to happen. The Winnie the Pooh character became Who-Bear, a stuffed animal that wants to know what gender it is. Piglet became Cutlet, a puppet-like talking slab of meat with leaky orifices. Eeyore became Eyesore, a plush donkey addicted to anti-depressants. Tigger became Tyga Tyga, a stuffed tiger with Blakean qualities. Kanga and Roo became Skank-a-Roo, a tortured reality TV celebrity. Rabbit became Oxy Cotton, a sort of traitor to the other stuffed animal characters. And the child characters are just like these evil things that hate and torture stuffed animals and spend all their time playing with electronic gadgets. The only thing that’s changed about the manuscript is that many of the poems have been re-formatted as lyric poems. The tone, however, is still very Mike Kelley. Very Lee Edelman. Very Disney.
I haven’t really been shopping it around, no. However, I would send it to someone if they were interested. Poems from One Hundred Acres have appeared in LIT, Heavy Feather Review: Vacancies, Smoking Glue Gun, and now, LEFT—which looks incredible, by the way!
Currently, I’m trying to finish up an anthropogenically-minded collection of poems called Aristolachia: After Tech Lust. I think of “tech lust” as the era that humans are currently dying in. It’s a series of poems that happen during and after the Internet. The poems eventually follow an ailing human remnant’s interactions with a new species of tech-infected plant life. Think: Huysmans’s Against Nature meets Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man.
So far in this interview you’ve mentioned four full length manuscripts you’ve either written or are currently working on. That seems like a lot to me. How did you manage it? Were you working on them all at the same time? What’s your process like? Is there something specific you’re trying to achieve across all of your work?
Well, I don’t watch television. I don’t own a television. And I haven’t purchased a video game console since PS2. You could say that is my process. I mean, I’m not saying all TV is bad. I’m also not saying video games are crap because I think when it comes to artistic merit, video games are too easily dismissed. But I think those things can be toxic for writers. Video games . . . maybe less so. I think the free terrain and sprawling environments of video games can be idea-generators for poems, fiction, etc. But if I always had television and video games at my disposal, they would likely take up a lot of the time I could be spending on my writing. I binge-write the way people binge-watch a television series on Netflix. I’ll devote six to eight hours a day to writing. And, yeah, I tend to work on multiple projects at one time. For me, writer’s block becomes less of an obstacle when I know I have several things that I could be working on. Add translation to the mix and it gets really difficult to somehow not be doing something productive. I’ve also voluntarily prevented myself from upgrading to a smartphone device of whatever kind to avoid unnecessary distractions. (Though sometimes I do get curious about what I’m missing out on.) I know I’ll eventually be forced to give up my phone with the slide-out keypad and ‘upgrade’ to something that constantly monitors my consumption and my location and my conversations with friends. But, for right now, no. Just, no. I don’t need to have the internet in my pocket at all times. I don’t need the distractions. I don’t need to know which downloadable applications are currently trending. I don’t know what Snap Chat really does. I do know that many of our electronic devices—our smartphones and our pads and our tablets and our touchscreens—are made using cerium. I know that there is a nightmarishly toxic lake in Baotou of Inner Mongolia that is actually the result of cerium oxide production. I know that as long as my body inhabits a ‘technologically innovative’ America, I am most likely always inadvertently exploiting another human body somewhere else in the world just to ‘stay connected’ when I check out the goings on of my ‘news feed.’ What else can I do but try and communicate my frustration by writing? I guess that is what I’m trying to achieve, to maybe get at your last question. Life is really brief, but it appears human beings still do whatever they can to cause one another pain. I choose to write about the violence in this world because I think too many human beings are numb to it. Absolutely ignorant to it. Perhaps my drive to make the most of my present-tenseness on this planet can be seen in my desire to wrestle with the boundaries of human language (The House of the Tree of Sores), to meditate on the sexual behavior of insects (GOAL/TENDER MEAT/TENDER), to acknowledge the anthropocene as an important point of view (Aristolachia: After Tech Lust). I know it clearly sounds like I don’t lust after more technology. But I do. I’m a hypocrite. I prefer more points of view. I want American literature to be infected by more translations. I want the traditional canon to experience more disruptions. A conversation that includes more voices rather than fewer. That is my preference. Yet it is innovations in technology that have made more perspectives possible. Persons who have been previously silenced have a platform now because of the internet. Baudrillard makes less and less sense to me with each passing day. The threats and the sexual harassment and the racism that persons experience while they are using the internet is just as ‘real’ as anything else. The problem is not our technology, but the means by which our technology arrives to us. Technology simultaneously repulses and reassures me. Humankind is a remarkable dilemma. And poetry is the only way I know how to respond to it.
Do you have any 'career' or life plans moving forward from the MFA? Are you interested in teaching? More work in publishing? Or are you gonna go in an entirely different direction?
I would like to teach creative writing. But it’s an incredibly challenging time to want to do something like that. The arts are constantly being deemphasized in this country. Hell, education itself is constantly being deemphasized in America! But I guess we have men like Tom Corbett and Bobby Jindal to thank for that . . .
Featuring new work from Zoe Addison, Kyle Bella, Ryan Bender-Murphy, David Blumenshine, Megan Burns, Rachel Burns, Russell Jaffe, Drew Kalbach, Neila Mezynski, Ronnie Peltier, Michael Sikkema, Beth Towle, Nikki Wallschlaeger, and Candice Wuehle.
A little bit ago, Baby Idi and Baby Marie-Antoinette boarded an American Airlines airplane to Texas. The two baby despots were visiting the Lone Star State to see their favorite loudmouth cowboy, Rick Perry, and their beloved poetess Baby Ji Yoon.
After enjoying three bowls of Frosted Flakes with the governor, Baby Idi and Baby Marie-Antoinette made a beeline to Baby Ji Yoon's house, where she read to them from her chapbook Imma.
One of the first topics that Baby Ji Yoon touched on was powdered wigs. Baby Marie-Antoinette thinks powdered wigs are the tops since wigs can make it seem like you have hair taller than the tallest building in the world.
Following a Coca-Cola break, Baby Ji Yoon declared, "Shredded cheese is no longer necessary." This statement rubbed Baby Idi the wrong way. Baby Idi eats Kraft shredded cheese endlessly. If his favorite food went away, he doesn't know what he'd do, though it would probably end up involving hijacking a plane full of Israel citizens and holding them hostage in his country of Uganda.
"Critters gonn hate / Haters gonna hate," read Baby Ji Yoon, after a second Coca-Cola break. Both of the babies could relate to this sentiment. The Third Estate hates Baby Marie-Antoinette because they're people and she's a queen. Democracies hate Baby Idi because they're a mass of poopy mud while Baby Idi is a marvelous king who has enemies blown up in prisons.
RM SEVEN:
Poetry by Ji Yoon Lee, Cassandra Troyan, A.T. Grant, Lisa McCool-Grime, Joshua Charles, j/j hastain, Seth Oelbaum, Jane Cope, Stephen Danos, Alexis Pope, Matthew Burnside, Drew Kalbach, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, and Neila Mezynski.
Fiction by Joshua Kornreich and James Lewelling.
Featured Artist: Sam Ditch
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