Tommy Pico, JUNK

Frenching with a mouthful of M&M’s dunno if I feel polluted

or into it – the lights go low across the multiplex Temple of

canoodling and Junk food A collision of corn dog bites and

chunky salsa to achieve a spiritual escape velocity Why am I in

this cup holder? B/c yr bubbly, dummy But I feel squeeze cheese

uneasy In Fagootland coupling is at best delicate precarious &

rarefied Eggshells At worst, a snipe hunt Love in the time of

climate change Should I be nervous? No, it’s too dark in here

for that There’s light and ascreen & our moon faces, reflecting

This is an epic, dummy Get yr muse Hail Janet Jackson, patron

saint of Eternal Utility but Selective Relevance I whisper Feed-

back, feedback into the bedding Usually when you gag it’s bc

something needs to come out So it strikes me as funny ha ha

funny to gag while trying to stuff someone’s whole Junk in

Brooklyn poet Tommy Pico’s third poetry title is the book-length accumulation/epic JUNK (Portland OR/Brooklyn NY: Tin House, 2018), following on the heels of IRL (Birds LLC, 2016) [see my review of such here] and Nature Poem (Tin House Books, 2017) [see my review of such here]. In JUNK, Pico’s lyrics move at the speed of thought, from point to point, furthering and accumulating and intricately-wrapped in observation and a sharp wit. JUNK exists as cultural critique, meditation and examination via a language that revels in making the familiar strange, twisting and turning, and including a legion of references, from Cindy Crawford and another #BadSelfie to the Indian Removal Act and Japanese Internment Camps, reveling in a perspective that is energized, politically aware and impossibly contemporary. Throughout the poem, Pico utilizes “junk” as tether, mantra, throwaway and a series of central images, set as a core to the swirling poem that surrounds. “This is where // you come to lose yrself and This is where I feel extra jagged / Junk not immediately useful but I’m still someone I can’t stop // lookin at ppl’s Junk generally so u can imagine how hard it is / at the gym [.]” In keeping with his previous work, the language of JUNK leans into a language of short-form, utilizing the language of text messages, composing a poetry that lives and breathes in an age of social media hashtags and abbreviations. Why, one wonders, aren’t more writing with this language with which so many communicate?

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 (small press) questions with Emily Brandt on No, Dear

No, Dear Mission Statement:
No, Dear aims to bring together the voices of New York City poets who might not otherwise be in dialogue: both emerging and established poets from diverse backgrounds who are living and writing in New York City’s five boroughs. We aspire to disrupt a field that has historically privileged white patriarchal perspectives by building a publication and communal/critical dialogue that strives to be largely representative of women-identified poets, and poets of color and of all gender orientations.

Emily Brandt is a cofounding editor of No, Dear, Web Acquisitions Editor for VIDA, and the author of three chapbooks. Her poems have recently appeared in LitHub, The Recluse, and Washington Square Review.

When did No, Dear first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?
No, Dear started in 2008, and at that time, our goal was just to publish poems coming out of a workshop the original editing team was a part of. That goal quickly evolved to learning about and supporting an ever-expanding circle of poets. Because we have only always published NYC writers, our launch readings have always been and continue to be spaces for poets to get to know and celebrate each other. The poets we publish are our greatest collaborators. We now publish dialogues between issue poets, and host readings co-curated with the poets we publish. We’ve also invited many poets we’ve published to guest edit issues or to submit chapbooks. We are interested in fostering genuine community in a time and place that moves so quickly that community time and space can be a challenge.

What first brought you to publishing?
I wrote and distributed a small newspaper when I was 8, which was significant among my stuffed animal tribe. As an early/mid-adolescent, I was into zine culture, which taught me the art of doing what you need to do and saying what you need to say. As a late-adolescent, I interned for the Favorite Poem Project, which taught me something about the many different roles poetry plays for people. Later, I got into No, Dear.

What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?
We can take more risks than big-house publishers, and support more emerging and subversive voices. Small publishing needs to be true to the people who are participating, via writing and reading, in the community. No need to replicate what’s on the shelves at the B&N.

What do you see your press doing that no one else is?
We only publish New York City poets, bringing them together for launch readings, collaboratively curated readings, online dialogues, and more. Focusing on just the local community allows us to build more bridges amongst poets in person.

What do you see as the most effective way to get new books out into the world?
Plan a really good launch and publicize it well. For ND/SA, our runs are small enough that we don’t need to do a ton of work to sell out. We put our efforts to a big launch, some targeted publicity work (reviews/social media), collaborating with the author and their community, and developing and maintaining relationships with our fantastic local bookshops.

How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?
It depends! For issues, a light touch, for sure. The editorial team and I will sometimes recommend a tweak, but generally publish poems as they are submitted. For chapbooks, it depends on the manuscript. Sometimes we’ll publish it almost as is, and other times we do several rounds of pretty deep revision suggestions. I prefer to publish work that feels polished but not too sheen, and sometimes an editorial eye is needed to get there. I dislike an overcooked poem, so would sooner overlook a few spots with potential for more than push a writer to go into high-sheen revision. That can fuck up a good poem.

How do your books get distributed? What are your usual print runs?
We sell our chapbooks and issues three ways: at launch and other readings, via our website, and at local bookstores, including McNally Jackson, Housing Works, Greenlight, Berl’s, and Quimby’s. We also have subscribers to whom we send issues. At this point, we print 150 copies of each new issue and 100 copies of chapbooks.

How many other people are involved with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?
For issues, we usually have at least three editors at the table - Alex Cuff and I have usually been two of those people. We’ve had a wonderful range of founding and guest editors over the years, and are thrilled to now have t’ai freedom ford on board as an editor. For chapbooks, we collaborate with Jen Hyde from Small Anchor. I always learn so much from working with a team of editors -- it’s important to hear other perspectives and have your own perspectives challenged. I’ve definitely become a sharper and more engaged reader over the last decade. The only setback is time -- the editing conversations we have are amazing and for me, the most valuable, fascinating part of the process. However, the more voices at the table, the more time spent discussing the poems. That’s a good thing! But also, time is sometimes hard for humans. As for production, most of layout and production falls on the editorial team, but we collaborate with artists for cover images, and welcome help from production volunteers. (Call me!)

How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?
It’s great reading so much emerging/new work, to balance all the published (new and old) work that I read in books and journals. Seeing everything that comes through makes me even more aware of content and style trends and the ways in which different writers handle those things. I get a clearer sense for myself of what works and doesn’t in a poem, and in what ways what I’m writing may be in conversation with something larger.

How do you approach the idea of publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and bpNichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the whole question as irrelevant?
Do what feels right to you. I have poems in early No, Dears, at a time when our goal was just to publish writing from our workshop and surrounding community. That made sense at the time. I haven’t self-published anything in a long time now, and don’t know that I would again. But I don’t think much of that matters.

What, as a publisher, are you most proud of accomplishing? What do you think people have overlooked about your publications? What is your biggest frustration?
We’ve been doing this for ten years, and it still feels exciting! That longevity is something I’m really proud of. We’ve published so many amazing writers over the last decade, and for some were among their first publications. There’s so many different steps to the process and not all of it is fun or easy, so sometimes I get frustrated with how much time and unpaid labor is necessary to make this all happen.

Who were your early publishing models when starting out?
In 2008, I remember looking at Birdsong, edited by a collective including Tommy Pico, and that gave me hope for making a worthwhile DIY print publication. In the early days, some folks at Ugly Ducking Presse gave me invaluable production advice - at a time when I had no idea how to do anything besides make a scissors-and-glue-and-photocopy zine.

Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?
We do! And we are really interested in good poems that have something to say. Pretty simple. One tip to writers looking to submit: we publish very slim issues, and as such, only print one or a few long poems in any given issue. So unless a long (more than a page) poem is really a perfect fit for the issue, we’re probably not going to take it. We used to limit submissions to 40 lines each poem, but we do like to print the occasional long piece. That said, 40 lines is a good limit to keep in mind.

Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.
Our REPUBLIC (#19) issue: our first post-Trump publication.

Our BLACK POETS SPEAK OUT (#18) issue: the brilliant Mahogany L. Browne used this issue to showcase work from #BlackPoetsSpeakOut, even including a few non-NYC writers.

Chia-Lun Chang’s One Day We Become Whites: after a dozen reads, I still can’t keep up with this chapbook.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;

Tommy Pico, IRL

Regret is a gift

that keeps on giving I

think it was Sontag

or Sonic the Hedgehog

who said just dash dodge

weave faster than you

can think n there’s no

time to shame spiral

Crushing

on Muse—whose

even slight squint bursts

me into high July—

while dialing,

essentially, a trick.

This is my argument:

Muse crashes into

the edges of my nights,

isn’t crushing,

doesn’t love me,

doesn’t have his shit

together (tho neither,

frankly, do I) but yanks

me n my hand onto the dance

floor til tilt-a-whirl Goes on

like land, just accum-

ulating in my eyes.

“[A] sweaty, summertime poem composed like a long text message” is how the back cover describes Brooklyn, New York poet and editor Tommy Pico’s first full-length poetry title, IRL (Birds, LLC, 2016). There is something very clear in the text as to why Pico was named by Flavorwire as one of their “50 Writers You Need to See Read Live,” a kind of breathless, insistent energy and rush, demanding every bit of your attention. Composed closer to the staccato-shorthand of text messaging than the lyric, Pico’s IRL is lively, pulsing and sassy, writing out a long poem that speaks of history and language, pop culture idols and icons, and a heritage that includes his rhetorical declaration, spawned from, it would seem, his background as a member of the Kumeyaay nation: “I survive seven generations / into a post-apocalyptic America / that started 1492. Maybe / you’ll live too?” Pico’s book-length poem reads as incredible immediate, seemingly composed via texts from his (ie: the narrator’s) shared apartment, writing out everything and anything, a busy chatter quickly turning from the seemingly mundane to an almost divine clarity and back in a blink, writing: “America / reclines undying I want America / to know who is still dying / for its sins. I want America taken / alive w/ all my names. I have cocks / in my eyes and songs / in my stars and so Yeah, / I fucking hate you / for wanting to die. / And hate myself  for thinking / it might be for the best.” This is a rich and confident text by a poet worth paying attention to; his writing demands it.

Boundaries

aren’t cages. Meter

is a fine flute.

But maybe nobody wants

to hear you. Maybe

you are just an asshole.