1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book, Our Pornography & other disaster songs, came out into the world in 2019 and didn't immediately blow open all the locked doors or give me a backstage pass to the scene, but it did feel real good. I got the email letting me know it won the Slope Editions Book Prize on my classroom computer in between classes at the community college where I was teaching outside of Kansas City. I mostly swallowed my joy and taught some stuff, but it was a big deal to me. Ocean Vuong, who selected the manuscript, wrote a really generous introduction and I got to do my official book release reading at a Rodney Dangerfield-themed bar in Portland, OR with some badass writers. So, even though the world shut down within a year, I call it a win. This second book, Birth Center in Corporate Woods, feels like it's on the other side of a fat gulf. In between the two, COVID hit, I had a kid, my partner's been transitioning, we moved to Des Moines, and that's all bled in--at least in roundabout ways--to the more recent work. Though the first book was ostensibly a book-length poem and this one has discrete pieces, the new stuff feels more cohesive. They both blend personal, capital, pop cultural, but Birth Center seems to show more breadth and accidental daring. Recency bias exists, but it still seems more like an album to me.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I got my dead grandpa's old desk when I was, like, eleven, and it seemed wrong that it was empty. Its thin little skeletal drawers. I started writing little things on some notecards and keeping them in there, like newspaper people in movies with their papers and such. I mean, I have a desk. So I had this idea of being a writer early. I was mostly a sketcher, though, into high school, then it was almost a sort of synesthesia. I kept sketch diaries for years and years and image slowly gave way to words. My eyes retreated. A Shakespeare class in high school gave me the sonnets (at the time, I moved into our damp basement, acquired my best friend Josh's sister's yellow bed frame, and wrote Sonnet 60 on the side). When I started college as a visual artist, a class on attention introduced me to Schuyler. In my first poetry workshop at a now-extinct liberal arts school in St. Louis, I got Alan Dugan. Angie Estes and Kathy Fagan came and read at that school. The more I heard people writing about kicking rocks down the road or ducks walking into bars or trees as slo-mo explosions, the more my elliptical, faux song lyric, compulsive notes seemed like they might have family.
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?
3 (though I'm really answering 4 too). I try not to/can't successfully do projects™ very often. I've had a couple of exceptions with my first chapbook (a book of letters) and an elegy project for my dad, but mostly I can't compel myself to write to a theme or singular idea without boring myself into a torpor in an unpleasant way. I tried writing to Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, but it was shitty. I invented a form, the Birdy-Lou, and tried to write a bunch, but it went flat fast. I'll probably keep challenging myself with projects and then swiftly failing, but about all of my work that, well, works slowly congeals. Scraps accumulate and I edit toward one poem. Poems accumulate and I start to pair them off. I rewrite by hand, over and over, forcing myself to see if it sticks. Eighty lines will whittle themselves down to eight and repeat. The eights add up and echoes start to emerge and after the bunches of poems turn to bunches of bunches, I'll print the whole mess off, spread it on the floor, and start editing for a manuscript.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Readings have become important to me. Maybe it's my experience as a musician and/or a teacher, but it feels more real, alive, fragile when received in person. My droll, boringly Midwestern voice is pretty close to my internalized narrator's, but the poems feel different. So, yes: I enjoy readings. And I enjoy reading with other people. Some folks I've read with many times; most I'm reading with for the first time. It's humbling and electric to be in a space and of a voice.
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?
As with subject matter, a lot of the theoretical concerns I surely use seep in without being explicitly invited. I've thought a lot about apostrophe and the construction of the mutable "I." The inherent postmodern distrust of clean meaning making is there. Werner Herzog's definition of poetry as "ecstatic truth" haunts them. As does a sense of the uncanny and the sublime, which I think can actually swallow the reflexive skepticism and turn it into something more generative. A cultural studies conflation of the high/low and the formal/informal (there all along in haiku, Eliot, Niedecker's amazing calendars) is a constant whisper.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I'm loath to make any broad proclamations about the role of anyone, but I'm tempted to think about comedians/fools and all that. Right now, though, especially in the Trump era and its clear goal of censorship through pre-compliance and the chilling effect aimed at media companies, law firms, institutions of higher education, etc., a writer's ability to tell it slant, (Write it!) like disaster, etc. can be a real call to action. Maybe we have less to lose (no one reads poetry), but there's a freedom in that. In teaching Danez Smith, Brenda Hillman's "Describing Tattoos to a Cop," Rankine's Just Us, or Valeria Lusielli's Lost Children Archive, I feel the writer's ability to both distill and complicate things (topics/events/humanity) that have become so watery and boringly, lucratively provocative in social media's sad realms.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
My editors have been blessedly hands-off, making sure the named people in my poems won't sue and going over consistency and sentence-level concerns, but they seem to trust that I've spent way too much time on every little phrase and punctuation choice to casually suggest reworking things to taste. I, honestly, love it when people come at my work, scalpels or flamethrowers in hand, but haven't had much wrasslin' from the presses.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Ed Roberson said lots of amazing things, but a throwaway line about finding good readers outside of school has turned out to be invaluable. I don't have the trading pages at a bar scene I did for years, but I find myself today with three pieces from friends awaiting some feedback and some pieces of my own to send away soon. I haven't been in a real workshop in—counts rings in trunk—thirteen years, but I know who I'll show my stuff to. Runner-up: "Never trust a man in a blue trench coat / Never drive a car when you're dead."
10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
This is where I'm old. My son wakes me up at 5:45 - 6:05, throwing Slothy the sloth and Fluffy the stingray onto our bed. My writing used to be done chronically, if never on schedule, but now it's purely opportunistic, running trickles of lines until they pool. I occasionally get a schedule (stop by GT in Des Moines on Monday nights after teaching my prison evening class and work on edits for an hour), or a habit (I started spreading out on the floor by the record player at night when everyone else went to sleep), but I'm feeling the need to get official (I have a new challenge/drawing restraint/party with my pal and great poet, Philip Schaefer: we're to write one new line each day, starting next week).
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Honestly, sometimes it's so insultingly simple as just being, like, "It's poetry night." I might need to bump sleep, grading, some plans, but I see it's been too long and just claim some time. Having a notebook handy after much driving and erring always on the side of "this is probably stupid, but..." help a lot too. For me, it's never about inspiration or intention but just dumb time management.
12 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?
When our little dude was even littler, we went full Raising Arizona. I grew and then shaved down to a Nicolas Cage mustache. With a Holly Hunter nightgown and some alternative Huggies, we could turn to the left and get our pictures taken as one.
13 - 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?
Driving and being in unfamiliar "comfy" places (e.g. a Vrbo cabin or in someone's kitchen) can influence a tone. Subtitles on films--even silenced English-language stuff, minimally creepy eavesdropping, and, of course, music all do things.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I've been affected by the difficult men I love (Denis Johnson, Jack Spicer) and have some constants (Alice Notley, Larry Levis, Jean Valentine) but tend to spend more time with a rotation of three of four books I'll take with me as a group, reading them together until trading them in for a new mix. Right now, it's Natalie Shapero, Bernadette Mayer, John Berger, and a book of historical film criticism I'm kind of reading for a class. Lots of fiction and lots of records end up being important as they stick with me on whatever I'm doing.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Maybe act.
16 - 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?
If I hadn't ended up wherever I'm at, there were some interesting paths pointing off in other directions. I've worked as a film projectionist, a line cook, a veterinary technician, and was in some bands that were having fun, but maybe I'd work for the USPS.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I still play music and keep a pile of collage materials, but writing seemed to take over--maybe in part--because it's free and always there, my writing voice is better than my singing voice, and I, you know, like it.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just saw One Battle after Another and Train Dreams within a week of each other and like them both and, this last year, I finally read Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers and it just overwhelmed me. Like, it has a physical effect on me six months after finishing it.
19 - What are you currently working on?
I've started gathering a bunch of the stray sections and finished short pieces I've been slowly popping out over the last year or two and looking at it all together. (Post-)COVID, Trump-era cultural context is probably obvious, but it's delightfully all over the place. After hacking away the clear nopes, it's at forty-ish pages, but half of those will probably go live with a nice family upstate, on a farm, with lots of room to run around and no such thing as death.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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