Tommy Pico, Nature Poem

oh, but you don’t look very Indian is a thing ppl feel comfortable saying to me on dates.

What rhymes with, fuck off and die?

It’s hard to look “like” something most people remember as a ghost, but I understand the allure of wanting to know—

Knowledge, or its approximate artifice, is a kind of equilibrium when you feel like a flea in whiskey.

I used to read a lot of perfect poems, now I read a lot of Garbage

by A. R. Ammons

the old mysteries avail themselves of technique.

It’s disheartening

to hear someone say “there’s no magic left” bc I love that YouTube of Amy Winehouse singing “Love Is a Losing Game” at the Mercury Prize Ceremony and yesterday I overheard that Brooklyn means “Broken Land”—there aren’t many earthquakes in the city, but there’s the fault line of my head.

Pain is alienating, but blue breath breaking on a voice is the magic that makes ppl believe.

What, I learn to ask, does an NDN person look like exactly?

Many of my reviews over the past number of months have included the suggestion that I’m “late to the game” on particular books, and this would be another: Brooklyn poet Tommy Pico’s second full-length poetry title, the book-length sequence Nature Poem (Tin House Books, 2017), resting between his other collections IRL (Birds LLC, 2016) [see my review of such here] and Junk (Tin House Books, 2018) [ a book I haven’t yet seen]. Jericho Brown hits the nail entirely on the head when he writes as part of his blurb on the back cover that “Nature Poem is a book about our true nature.” Pico’s poem is smart, funny, darkly illuminating and filled with rage, turning in and back and around on itself as an essay-poem exploring identity and identity politics, sexuality and nature, love and loathing (and self-loathing), blending the lyric and lyric sentence with the shortform of text messages, pop culture, sex and the best and the worst of human behavior. He writes of drag queens and citizenship, music and visual art; he writes of dating and dates, and the pavement of Brooklyn, New York. As he writes near the beginning: “Gay me are the worst people ever // bc if they don’t want to fuck you, // you are nothing to them. // Yet they love dogs.”

Every date feels like the final date bc we always find small ways of being extremely rude to each other, like mosquito bites or deforestation

like I think I’m in an abusive relationship w/nature

then again I think I’m in an abusive relations w/myself, I whisper after pinching my squishy belly

but for reals I leave yr apt in the early train of my hangover thinking that was a weird bump like all jostled but back on the open road

Going through the collection, I’m curious as to Pico’s influences, how he got to where he is, and wonder about the reference to the late A.R. Ammons’ (1926-2001) 1993 book-length poem Garbage (reissued by Norton in 2002) early in Nature Poem, whether included as influence or simply a play on Ammons’ title. The citation for the 1993 National Book Award for Poetry writes that Garbage “is an epic of ideas: all life—not that of human beings alone, but every species—is shown to be part of an ultimate reality [.]” Whether or not Ammons is an influence or a simple reference, Pico twists this idea completely, writing an epic, but one of the day to day, from nature to human nature, including Brooklyn streets, and repeated examples of racism, colonialism and homophobia; writing a sequence of disconnects and disconnections that can’t help but be intricately linked, as the heart hurts and the author records yet another act of dismissal or erasure, and Brooklyn is broken and the earth itself burns. “’I Said What I Had to Say’: An Interview With Tommy Pico,” conducted by Tobias Carroll and posted at Vol. 1 Brooklyn on June 14, 2017, around the publication of Nature Poem, might not provide, precisely, an answer to the structural/thematic linkages between Garbage and Nature Poem, but it does offer some insight:

Your books Nature Poem and IRL were released in relatively close proximity, and excerpts of both have shown up at various journals over the last few years. Were you working on both simultaneously? Did you find that each influenced the other to some extent?

Each book kind of sprang from the preceding one. I would hit a beat that I knew I’d have to return to later but didn’t think was in the scope of the poem I was working on. For example in IRL there’s the line (paraphrasing) “I hate nature bc every poem is like poplars, and bunch grasses, and peonies and shit!” And in Nature Poem it says something like, “I used to read a lot of perfect poems, now I read a lot of garbage/ by A.R. Ammons.” My third book Junk (coming out May 2018 from Tin House) is kind of my answer to Garbage. So while the books weren’t written at the same time, they did generate the idea for the next one. And yes, when I get time I have a fourth one planned!

As the interview continues:

Throughout Nature Poem, there’s a lot of discussion of what a nature poem is and is not, and whether or not this book falls into that category. Was that a question that first led to the writing of this book?

Because I’m a Native person, there’s this stereotype that we’re reverent of nature or whatever. I wanted to mess with that, and be like camping is dumb and fuck lakes and grass sucks. Throughout my numerous repudiations, it becomes evident that it’s not “nature” I really have a problem with (I mean you will not catch me in the woods for nothing). It’s racism, colonialism, homophobia, misogyny, etc. So the “nature poem” that the book ends up becoming is naturally just me.

So while the title and initial content of Pico’s Nature Poem might suggest something along the lines of an update on New York School poet Frank O’Hara’s oft-quoted lyric “I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy” (from the title poem of O’Hara’s 1957 collection Meditations in an Emergency) but that element is almost a throw-away or a red herring; for Pico, it is simply an opening to something far larger, meaningful and complex. Pico’s casual throwaways are anything but, examples of his own meditations on his own ongoing complexity of emergencies, anxieties and conflicts, written out of the language he lives in. As Pico writes:

I can’t write a nature poem bc English is some Stockholm shit, makes me complicit in my tribe’s erasure—why shd I give a fuck abt “poetry”? It’s a container

for words like whilst and hither and tamp. It conducts something of permanent and universal interest. Poems take something like an apple, turn it into the skin, the seeds, and the core. They talk abt gravity, abt Adam, and Snow White and the stem of knowledge.

To me? Apple is a NDN drag queen who dresses like a milkmaid and sings “Half-Breed” by Cher

I wd give a wedgie to a sacred mountain and gladly piss on the grass of the park of poetic form

while no one’s lookin

I wd stroll into the china shop of grammar and shout LET’S TRASH THIS DUMP then gingerly slip out

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll [photo credit: Jason Rice] is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. His writing has been published by Bookforum, Men's Journal, Tin House, Hazlitt, and Rolling Stone. He is the author of the collection Transitory and the novel Reel. He's on Twitter at @TobiasCarroll.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

As of right now, my first book is still about a month from its release date, so I’m not sure that I can answer this in full. That said, having a book accepted for publication was a definite boost to my confidence as a writer--that sense that someone else enjoyed this work enough to commit to publishing it. I’ve also been very lucky to be working with two presses--Civil Coping Mechanisms and Rare Bird--who each have an aesthetic that I really admire.

In the last few years, I started introducing surreal or fantastical elements into my fiction after staying mostly on the realistic side of things for many years. I’d say that’s the main difference there: making use of those elements where they felt appropriate.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

In the late 1990s, I did a music zine called Eventide, which led to me doing some freelance music writing. Through a combination of the two, I met a guy who was starting a journal, small press, and literary website. He asked me if I wanted to write some fiction; I gave it a try and the habit stuck.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It varies. For something longer, I usually have an idea of how best to make it work before I start writing. Sometimes shorter pieces vary wildly from first draft to final version. (And my novel Reel went through a whole lot of false starts before I found an opening that clicks.)

4 - Where does a work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Some of my stories have begun through prompts: my story “The Wenceslas Men” began its life when I was asked to write a cosmic horror story for a reading, for one thing, Others might begin with a specific image or location (the story “Winter Montage, Hoboken Station” comes to mind). The novel I’m working on right now is somewhat fragmented in its structure, and so far, two of the pieces within it have been published on their own. And I’d like to return to the narrator of the story “New Evidence of the Kings County Sasquatch” in something new, but the one attempt I made at it didn’t really work for me.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I really enjoy doing readings. They can be incredibly useful on a very basic level–in terms of seeing how the language in a piece sounds, for one thing. And it can also be inspiring to see what other writers are doing, and getting a sense of what might be possible. There have been a few cases where hearing someone else’s story helped unblock me on something wholly unrelated that I’d been working on.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

The concerns that come up in my fiction tend to reveal themselves more after I’ve finished a story. I had a very bad experience many years ago when I tried to start with a theme first; the ensuing project ended up feeling all too heavy-handed.

As far as themes that interest me? What loneliness or solitude can do to a person is definitely one of them. It’s something that I find myself returning to repeatedly, even when I’m not entirely aware of it at first.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I do think that an awareness of political and social issues is important, as is advocacy--though the nature of that may vary from writer to writer.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I think it’s important; I’ve been lucky to have not had any serious disagreements with any of the editors I’ve worked with. I have gotten a lot of good feedback from editors, both in terms of my fiction and the nonfiction and criticism I write on a pretty regular basis.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

A few years ago, I was house-sitting for friends. In their apartment at the time was a printout of an Eleanor Roosevelt quote, which I managed to misread. I believe the actual phrase is, “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” In my mind, I read that as, “You must do the thing you cannot do,” which seemed very compelling.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short stories to the novel)? What do you see as the appeal?

There are things you can do with a short story that don’t work as well for novels: experimenting with form is one thing that comes to mind. Some stories need 10 pages to tell; some need 200.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

It varies somewhat. I freelance full-time, and sometimes finding the time in the middle of the day depends on how certain projects are going.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I try to have a couple of different projects going on at once, so that I can turn to something else if I’m blocked on another project.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

I’d like to say pines, but that’s more idealized than anything. I grew up in central New Jersey, and so there aren’t that many smells that seem all that specific to the area. Strangely, chlorine in pools does bring back memories of going swimming at the Y with my dad when I was a kid.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Music’s played a big role in a lot of my fiction. Some of the stories in Transitory were inspired by specific songs, and Reel opens at a punk show. And I studied film in college, so that’s also played a part in how I relate to storytelling. (Sometimes to a fault.)

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

So, so many. There are a host of writers who have been influential for my work–Javier Marias, Kelly Link, Warren Ellis, William Gibson, and Ralph Ellison all come to mind. But it’s also great to feel like a part of a literary community here: my friend Jason Diamond, who founded Vol.1 Brooklyn, has a memoir out later this year, and there a host of friends and writers who live nearby (Sean H. Doyle, Dolan Morgan, Natalie Eilbert, Michele Filgate, Michael J. Seidlinger, Lincoln Michel, Kyle Lucia Wu, Brian Joseph Davis, Emily Schultz, D. Foy) or further afield (Gabino Iglesias, Mairead Case, J. David Osborne, Rios de la Luz, Duncan B. Barlow, Rahawa Haile, Luke B.Goebel) who I’ve gotten to know over the years.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

More longform nonfiction; more essays.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’ve worked a whole lot of office jobs over the years, but I was always doing something creative at the same time. It’s hard to imagine myself without the urge to make….something.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I don’t think I could go through life without creating things. I studied film in college, and I think, to some extent, I still approach storytelling from that angle–but it means that I have an unlimited budget and don’t have to worry about a torrential downpour washing the set away.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I recently finished reading Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks, which evocatively described both landscapes and the way in which we talk about landscapes, which is no small feat. (And it also left me with about a half-dozen books that I need to read.) As films go–a theater near my apartment recently screened Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire. It was my third time seeing it, and this time around, the elegance with which it was made really clicked for me.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on revising a novel, tentatively titled An Apolitical Song, which focuses on a trio of friends coming of age in the 1990s hardcore scene. I’m trying to write more essays as well: it’s a form that I’d like to be more confident in writing.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;