Two people, eight cups of coffee, one conversation made of a thousand smaller ones. You are meeting us in the middle and nowhere near the end. Pull up a chair and try not to interrupt. Better yet, sit about two feet away and pretend you’re not listening.
MY: Mike Young, fiction and poetry editor of NOÖ Journal
SF: Me, Fringes
* * * * * *
MY: I tried to talk about Kanye West the other day in this way, remembering the whole Katrina telethon thing, how I really admired that, though he may be a pretty flawed dude.
SF: I think Kanye is as flawed as the rest of us, but he speaks his mind over the bravado.
MY: I agree. He is very honest, but he’s also aware that this honesty is what’s making him popular. I don’t know if you can “use” your honesty, or if that’s ridiculously complicated. Do you sort of see what I mean? He’s aware that his shtick is different than a lot of popular hip-hop, the self-aggrandizement thing, but does that mean he really is brutally frank? Or is that frankness calculated, just another cynical choice to sell records with him in a bearsuit? I don’t know. One thing I remember on the Kanye conversation: self-doubt. Huge displays of self-doubt. That sort of zeroes in on it. Can you exploit your own self-doubt to amass popularity? That seems crazy. But it seems like what he does some of the time.
SF: Purposefully or just because he can?
MY: Purposefully. Like, can you actually think this: “Hmm, I am going to tap into my self-doubt now because that’s what my image is.”
SF: The cynic in me tells me it’s all calculated. But not many people are that smart. Perhaps he is the exception over the rule.
MY: Exactly! But, if it is, I almost admire that ability to self-divide. To keep your self-doubt fresh and ignorant of the way in which you’re exploiting it to make people think you’re their secret voices come alive.
SF: This is exactly what writing is.
MY: True. Maybe it’s also what being crazy is?
SF: Do you ever hear “the voices”?
MY: I wish they were tangible sound waves. Most of the time, just sudden thoughts. Jack Spicer said that poets were antennas for picking up the radio transmissions from the Other. Sometimes I feel like the Other is living inside me, like a houseguest you’ve known since childhood but know nothing about. Suddenly he or she shows up sitting in the living room and says something, then she gets up and leaves again. Or she comes in when you’re cooking and puts something in where you didn’t expect it. When I am writing and think things, this is what it feels like.
SF: My voice is a man. From another century, maybe? But in his forties.
MY: I can’t tell, honestly. Sometimes it’s just a confirmation engine. We audition a billion thoughts, right? And very few of them win a part. The other day I was thinking about breakfast and rain, and had one of those things: driving to breakfast in the rain. It’s great. It’s one of the things I find most beautiful. So then I thought of this sentence: “We drive to breakfast in the rain.” And something in me was like “yep, yep, that’s a good one.” But I probably thought of a Jupiter-worth of other things that slushed through me and left no twang or twinge of their presence.
SF: I found something you wrote in comments on someone’s blog: “Oregon smells lost in October. I am writing a song about corduroy, stolen dump trucks, and the jump from a bridge at dawn.”
Did you finish this?
MY: Haha, yes. Yes, I did. I am always practicing writing. Even when I comment on people’s blogs. This is a little obnoxious, maybe. It’s an exercise but also an effort to entertain. One time somebody yelled at me that it’s hard to hold a conversation with this; it feels like being “talked to” rather than “talking with.” It’s a skittish thing, this need to be performative. Like a “dance so fast they can’t see you” kind of thing. Maybe.
SF: How many in your “writers circle” have you met in person?
MY: I like to think of it as a “writer’s trapezoid.” I have many other groups of people with whom I form shapes and contain things.
SF: How many in the trapezoid, then.
MY: How many sides does a trapezoid have?
SF (Googling): Trapezoids have exactly one pair of opposite sides that are parallel. I have no idea what that means.
MY: I found it. Four. How boring. It sounds more exciting than that. Who would you consider to be part of my writer’s circle? Do I appear to be part of a writer’s circle? I’m confused about this.
SF: Well, starting with Bad Poetry… tao lin and Kasey Mohammad…
MY: I agree, it feels like I am, but I don’t know. I know my friends Bryan Coffelt, Jordaan Mason and Jessica Rowan in person. They are awesome poets. Most others I’ve never met. Sean Kilpatrick, tao…I met a lot of people on Zoetrope.com.
SF: I don’t like identifying myself with a group. Sounds like you don’t either.
MY: Well, Kasey Mohammad posted this big thing a while back about the difference between “friends” and “community,” and I sort of agree with what he said. I can’t remember what he said. But I remember it sounded very astute.
SF: What did you agree with that you remember?
MY: Mostly that friendship develops out of community. How do you make friends in total isolation? That doesn’t even make sense. The isolation of the individual in an internet community is an illusion. Or dumb. Even though you sit isolated on your gronky couch or whatever, in your pajamas, everyone is still real. The Others are still real and therefore enabling you to exist as a community member. So no friendships come without community.
I’ve been meeting people over the telephone wires and befriending them for a while now. A lot of people feel weird about folks they talk to over the internet, but I’ve basically grown up making these kind of friends. So the people I’ve met via blogs, Zoetrope, or all the way back to people I used to meet on music message boards or whatever — they are tangible. I mean, I can’t go to Denny’s with them. We can’t make spaghetti together. But they bolster and console me.
You may live in the foggy wilds, but with the internet, people still see you and you them. There are a lot of things friendship is useful for. Keeping you from getting too lonely is maybe the most important, and I think internet friends do that as well as anybody.
SF: NOÖ Journal went live today. Are you allowed to choose any favorite published submissions?
MY: If I were to choose a favorite submission, a giraffe would invade my home and form a barbecue restaraunt inside of my bedroom. This would suck because I keep large things like pianos in my bedroom. Wouldn’t it be terrible if you had a giraffe teaching you piano? I am a self-taught guitarist and pianist for this reason. Fear of zoo animal invasion. Because you would have to feed them. Even if they were running their restaraunt, for giraffes are notorious tight-asses. You would have to be like, “How many pancakes do you want, Mr. Giraffe?” Then they would sit in a bathrobe when you got home at three and wring their giraffe hands. And you would be like, “I don’t have a chimney now. You killed my roof, giraffe. Wait, how did you put on a bathrobe.”
That said: all the pieces this swing around make me too excited. They all have lovely submission stories. I grabbed Jessica’s poem off her blog. Sean submitted a shorter version of his poem, and I coaxed him into the longer one. Antonios’s story went through me a couple times before I finally realized that it makes a heart earthquake: it makes an earthquake in your heart. The concept behind Jennifer L. Knox’s poem is hilarious and wise. And, in this real world of ours, I have met, smiled at, and shared bouts of mutual numbness with the characters from Claudia Smith’s and Ricky Garni’s stories.
So, yeah, a bit hard to choose. And I don’t have a chimney. In case somebody wanted to live there or something.
SF: Which reminds me…I went trolling for a list of your publications and I was excited to find them all in one place. You know the cliché: It was hard for me to choose a favorite. Gun to my head, I’d choose your three recent elimae poems . I wanted to use “I feel like a Clydesdale/watching NASCAR/in a nice bathtub” as my blog tagline, but I didn’t want to get sued or something.
MY: Thanks for digging those poems. You may totally use that line as your blog tagline, but only if you really use it. I think that would be silly and glorious. It took me a long time to write “Nothing is Interminable Right Now.” But I am very stable with the result. I never want to change it when I look at it. Unlike a lot of my stuff. The more time you spend on a piece, the more sick you get of it, which translates somehow into confidence in the finality of that piece. I like the way the brain operates this trapdoor. From listless disgust to rock-solid faith.
I want to interrupt to tell Mike that I am usually stuck in listless disgust, that I have yet to experience rock-solid faith in my own writing. But I remember this interview is not about me and who cares anyway? I remind myself to stop by the liquor store on the way home.
MY: My first decent published piece was Irvin Hammers a Cat House, which appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly. Some active third person voice controls that story, and I wish I could use it again. Maybe it was Sherwood Anderson who said how you forget everything from story to story. The interview included with “Irvin” is kind of silly. On my part. Randall asks good questions, but I sound very pompous and make jokes about Don DeLillo. Only people who like to talk of their tenures and their verandas make jokes about Don DeLillo.
Note to self: Google Don DeLillo before the week is over.
MY: Tonight I argued with a girl about German chocolate cake. It was great fun and devoid of pomp. Earlier I attended an art gallery opening and met some of my friends. One friend wore a kilt, while another wore a shirt that said “LOVE IS FOR LOSERS!” We also wore normal things too, like socks. Lots of other people in attendence had mustaches and wrinkled tans. Somebody had a fairy crown and wanted to be Miranda July or something. She moved around like Alka-Seltzer and ate a lot of people with her eyes. One of my friends said, “It’s the copper in the etching,” and a rich old woman with Buddy Holly glasses said “mmmmm.” Neither one of them knew what was going on. Real parachutes accompanied an art exhibit about flying. The parachutes sort of sat there. They didn’t say much.
Do you like German chocolate cake?
SF: I very much like German chocolate cake. I do not like it when people think they are making a chocolate cake German by simply mixing coconut into a glazey icing. That’s disrespectful and I don’t stand for it.
MY: Agreed. Coconut for its own sake is sort of pathetic. What do you put in coffee? I put honey and cinnamon.
SF: Your honey and cinnamon combo sounds healthful. Mine will kill you: two flavored creams, preferably hazelnut, and about two or three sugar packets. Real sugar, not those yellow, blue or pink paks. Sometimes Kahlua, but in that case, I skip the cream. And, yes, totally agreed: coconut on its own has no reason to be here.
Someone at the next table working on her mommyblog grunts in disagreement as she pretends to be listening only to her iPod and the tapping of her laptop keyboard as she “writes” about the color and texture of Nathan Junior’s morning poop. We ignore her for two obvious reasons.
SF: Why do you think National Public Radio is middle America’s primary source of information about American poets? If it weren’t for Michelle Norris, I would have never heard of Billy Collins or Donald Hall. You can tell me; it won’t hurt my feelings: does this make me as uneducated and dorky as the guy wearing tube socks and sandals sorting through discarded lottery tickets at the Kwik-E-Mart?
MY: NPR is okay where it is. It could be telling me how to hate people or build bombs from coconuts and couch stuffing. Maybe someone like me should maintain perspective. Not everyone is comfortable with the internet, which is how I get my cultural products. Not everyone digs the treehouse culture of places like MySpace. Many think it’s just for fourteen-year old girls. Hey, not everyone is comfortable with DIY culture, let alone the internet’s DIY nature. Danah Boyd is a sociologist who explains people like me so I don’t have to.
It’s never dorky to hunger for intelligent sources of art, I don’t think. Don’t worry about NPR being cool or uncool.
Maybe I just think it’s lame when people stop at NPR and let the fashion of NPR soak and define them. Then they call themselves CULTURED, like a scout badge or something. Cultured isn’t something you become and stop. Cultured means you are always seeking and supporting and parsing what people attempt to do with their ridiculous conciousness. NPR tries, I think. Didn’t Andrei Codrescu have a show on there? Don’t they do stuff on books like Hairstyles of the Damned? Well, wait. That’s a pretty conservative book, idea-wise. Still. I don’t mind it. Their voices are ridiculous, of course, to my hopelessly cynical ears, but I’m pretty sure the world will end in sixty years, so what do I know?
The guy from Okkervil River heard about Neil Young’s anti-war album–maybe the most NPR-culture thing ever, Neil Young doing an anti-war album in 2006–and got mad. He was like “Sure I hate Bush, but as an artist, what’s with that? What’s the deal with massaging the beliefs you already hold?” To me that’s something about art being more than transient and topical. Anyway, he wrote a song called The President Is Dead. It’s about what he would feel like if our president died. When you hear Okkervil River’s “sound,” you are almost certain it’s a 2006 song from a probably-liberal emo-ish band. But it’s a song like “Damn, the president died. I don’t know what to feel about that. Or how I’ll feel in thirty years.” It’s a very honest song and, lo and behold, strides toward the “universal.” Or at least something that will work long after the drudgery of the Bush era ends.
If the world is still here! Ha ha ha. Peak oil jokes. Fun for the kids in the room. Any kids? Any?
If there are kids in the room, they are not answering. For them, peak oil jokes are so last Friday. Mike and I order two more coffees and cry silently for kangaroos and all other marsupials.
SF: Can you name your contemporary influences on your writing? How about childhood influences? Musicians, poets, writers, teachers…anybody, really. (My 12th grade English teacher remains one of my primary influences and I’m sure she’s never published a word)
MY: Oh boy. Too many for me to understand. If I could shut things out and dilute my influences, maybe I would. There are hundreds of voices in my pores. I often feel like I’m in a room with all the people I’ve ever read and enjoyed, them sort of hanging on my shoulder the way I used to watch my father play his NASCAR computer game.
Recent reads: Joseph Ceravolo, William Kitteridge’s short stories, Lorrie Moore, D’J Pancake (brilliant, died all young-like), a few of Tennesse Williams’s “experimental” and “lesser” plays … Hmm. Steve Scafidi wrote a great poem called “The Bee of Was.” Major Jackson.
Everything I need to know came not from kindergarten but from Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers. The summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I think. Even beyond the writing, it has some serious instruction. Everyone might want to read it. Then see what I mean. Yikes. Beautiful.
I steal tunes from the Saturday morning country and rock videos I watched as a child, and I steal lyrics from the perils of my lost friends.
SF: Tell me about Bad Poetry. Can you write a bad poem here on the spot? Or does it take a few days? My hunch is that your Bad Poetry is better than half the allegedly good stuff floating in the poetsphere.
MY: Sometimes when people donate and get a bad poem, they will say “Hey! This isn’t bad.” To which we say: “Great! Buy another one!” And then they laugh and waggle their finger at us and stomp away, leaving us very poor and often cold. I got the idea for a Bad Poetry fundraising project over the holidays last year. At its inception it included grandoise plans of touring the country and sprinkling the masses with awful poetry. These plans have since been scaled back, due to the contents of my pockets, which include a lot of lint and few precious metals. Kasey, tao and Bryan have all come up with stellar terrible poems on the spot. Kasey wrote one about Johnny Cash in terza rima. Tao wrote one about ennui. One time I wrote a sonnet for a dude named Ryan who wanted a poem about how wonderful he was. Here is a sonnet about harmonica boxes:
What fits inside a cardboard organ box,
an organ fit to spray the mouthy blow?
What balladeers and inmates in their blocks
conspire with spit to make the sadness grow?
What awful screeching weasel whine is this
I hear from men with grease beneath their nails?
It is the baleful cry of bears inside our lips!
Who pound against their confines like a hail!
For gods did trap them there in o’ur flesh
when they by err did trample on a hive.
The gods who flock to bees like girls to Depp
said bears would live inside our pores of slime.
Yet bears do long to bail from chap and spit
and flee to where the organs barely fit.
I’m not sure what that sonnet means. I think it’s saying that bears live inside of our lips but they want to live in harmonica boxes or something. But it’s bad! It’s awful. See? Who wouldn’t want to give $2 to a good cause when they get something like that in return? It’s a deal like a thing of radiance.
SF: I’d pay $5 because of the Johnny Depp reference. References to perfect people should cost extra. And the harmonica boxes…well, I admit to not having a poetry-praising vocabulary. I will do my part instead by auctioning off one of your $2 poems in the support the writing community fundraising spirit. You, Kasey and Tao send me some Bad Poetry and we’ll start the bidding at five bucks and see what comes of it. Either I’ll have to mail you a five dollar bill or we’ll raise a million dollars. One or the other. I wonder if eBay takes poems as auction items. Didn’t it sell a piece of toast with a picture of the virgin Mary on it one time?
MY: This isn’t a bad idea at all. There are a lot of poets active on eBay and on other more specialized sites like etsy. The gift economy is where it’s at. We will have to orchestrate and try this eBay Bad Poetry thing. Soon I hope to live in complete harmony with eBay, all facets of my life acquired and available via its magic. Dick Cheney will adopt me as a demonstration of how eBay helps the economy. I will become an economy. China will supply me goods and debt while I vomit capital investment. But for now I have to go bake some avocados.
Many thanks for the chat, Erica! You are a splendid person and a lovely blogger. Let’s pretend it’s snowing when we leave.
Mike Young has pieces currently appearing in elimae, Storyglossia and the print edition of Juked, as well as upcoming pieces in FRiGG and an anthology of new fiction, Avery. He lives and blogs in Ashland, Oregon.
NOÖ [five] is live today.
[11 comments on one of my favorite blog interviews ever]
