The Complete Story of a Modern Poet

(Ringing)

Hello.

What’s up?

What’s going on?

How are you?

Doing good. How are you?

Doing good. I’m trying to … There we go, cool.

Are you recording?

Yeah, I am. I don’t have to start immediately …

It’s all good.

We can ease into it or whatever, but I might as well record it anyways. What were you saying you needed to clean? Some storm windows?

Yeah, we just painted our house and it took way longer than we thought. My brother-in-law is a house painter, so he did it, which is cool, but we ran out of money. So the storm windows that fit on top of the regular windows didn’t get painted. My wife and I decided to do them ourselves, and now it’s getting cold so we gotta get ‘em in soon. And there’s this mildewy stuff on them, so I’m scrubbing them and then I can paint over it.

You’re in Glens Falls, right?

Glens Falls, yeah.

And that is north of Albany?

Yeah. Albany would be the biggest city near us, which, I just looked at the population yesterday, and it’s under 100,000 people. So, it’s not that big.

Where you live?

No, Albany. My town is under 14,000. We’re a good 45 minutes north of Albany. My wife is from here, so we have lots of family, which makes it work. This is all new to me. I was in New York City for 16 years. I never thought I’d be cleaning storm windows and painting stuff.

You never thought you’d be so domesticated?

We’re just so rural. I always figured we’d just stay in the city, but then COVID happened, and it just made sense. I like it up here for a lot of reasons, but it’s been a very big adjustment.

Where are you from originally?

Chicago. From a suburb called Wilmette. The Chicago “L” train ended a couple blocks from my house. So we always had access to the city. So, even though it was suburban, it was like we were in the city all the time. It was really great. I loved growing up there.

How old are you?

36.

Did you grow up skating?

Yeah, I skated a ton. I wasn’t very good. I’m still not very good, and I’ve given up hope of ever being good. My best friend was amazing. It was pure joy for him, and I’d encourage him to send videos to get sponsored, but he just wanted to skate. I was always trying to capture him skating whether it was with a video camera or taking photos. I still like watching skate videos, and when I moved to New York, I’d skate all the time with friends, and we’d be at spots that I felt like I couldn’t touch, so I’d just sit in on the session hanging out. So I don’t want to mischaracterize my role as a “true skater.” There’s no footage of me anywhere. But I love it. I love the culture, and I still like to pay attention to it.

What took you to New York?

I got into NYU and fell in love with poetry there. I didn’t really know New York in the way I do now. A lot of people were hell bent on getting to New York to be a part of everything happening there. I didn’t know anything that was happening there. I just went because my good friend got in at NYU early, and we thought it’d be cool to room together. Because of his early acceptance, we got first pick on dorms and everything. I just kind of rode his coattails, and it worked out. I met more people when I got there, and one of the first people I met, Adam Abada, was big into skating and he took me to the Brooklyn Banks on my first day in New York. I could not believe it. I was like, ‘this is real? You’ve got to be kidding me?’ They were so much bigger in person. I always thought, ‘oh, I could do something there.’ And then I saw it and was like, ‘fuck no, I’m not doing anything here.’ So that was fun. I was at NYU and got into poetry halfway through college. I graduated in 2009 when there were no jobs. I remember interviewing, and it was tough. So I went to grad school at The New School for poetry.

Do you think skating has informed (or influenced) your poetry in any way?

In the way I think of a collection of poetry, yes. It’s like the nature of skate media. It’s clips. They’re just like poems. There’ll be lines in there. There’ll be single tricks. There’ll be fun, throwaway hijinx. That’s like a collection. There’s no linear through line. The through line is the author. In the same way, it’d be the skater or the crew in the video you’re watching. I think about that all the time with poetry collections. You don’t have to tie it together literally. You can make it feel like a skate video with an ender and a sweet intro with shit thrown in to break it up. I do think watching skate videos has had an unbelievable impact on my poetry. Especially when putting a book together, like we’ve just both gone through separately, looking at it through that lens. I wonder how other poets even approach it, having not had that background.

“I do think watching skate videos has had an unbelievable impact on my poetry.”

Wow. Yeah, that’s a crazy way to look at it. My initial response is that I want to say I relate but I’d really have to think on that. I love that perspective though.

I like to look at skate videos for inspiration. If I see a cool move—not a skate move, but a cinematic/editing move—I think, ‘oh, how can I capture that same feeling by putting two different poems together?’ One specific example I watch all the time is “John’s Vid”, the Johnny Wilson video. The first part is Cyrus Bennett, and it starts with this ethereal soundtrack from a movie, a song by the artist Mica Levi. It’s so eerie and was shot during COVID, so no one’s around. And it’s just like a mini part, then it stops, and then the rest of Cyrus’ part continues for another two minutes or so. The whole time I’m thinking, ‘oh man, that was the coolest ... is it just one song? one part?’ Then you have the opposite end of the spectrum, which is Marc Johnson or someone, and they have like a 15-minute part with like 3 songs in it. But yeah, I watch that Cyrus part, and I’m just like, ‘man, that transition is amazing.’ It’s so eerie, then it just comes to life.

Yeah, I know exactly what video you’re talking about. The last probably 10 years or so, I’ve been very into that whole crew. 917, Limosine, etc.

I’ve always heavily watched that New York crew, and it all started from watching the Johnny Wilson ...

His original Vimeo HD videos?

Yeah, that’s like the total vibe, and I just think they nailed it. That’s the coolest stuff.

Yeah, I agree. Let’s take it way back to bring us back to focus. What was your childhood like? Were you into reading or writing?

An early formative memory for me was my dad, as I feel many dads did, had a lot of spare electronics laying around. Back when people were always assembling their own computers before Macs were popular. There were old keyboards and stuff in drawers and bins. I remember my dad gave me an old keyboard. I was like 5 or 6, and I just loved the sound that it made. It was one of those old school keyboards with the deep clicks, and I would just sit there and press the buttons. I loved the sound and it made me feel like an adult. Like I was being productive sitting there pressing these buttons with this deep satisfying click sound. So, there was that, and I also read a lot. I was always encouraged to read a lot, and I liked it just fine.

Encouraged by who?

My parents and also the school system I was in placed a particularly heavy importance on reading and writing. I learned as I got older that those were curriculum decisions, and they just wanted everyone to be able to read and write. So, in that regard, I had a pretty good education by default. I always gravitated more towards math and science because I felt good at it, but in high school I took a creative writing class as an elective. It was a fun, senior-year kind of thing. I remember there was a seminar day, and we were able to do workshops. They had this guy come in who’d written a book. He wrote a novella. His name was Barth Landor and his book was titled, A Week in Winter. It was about refugees in Europe, and I read it because I remember thinking, ‘oh, he’s just a guy like you and me.’ I had never seen a real author before. I realized you don’t have to be Stephen King or R.L. Stein or something. You can just be a person that’s written a book. He came, spoke, and I read his book. It was totally over my head at the time, but I remember thinking it had a beautiful cover and great prose. Then, that summer, I had a job working at the movie theater. I was doing the popcorn and noticed Barth Landor come in to see March of the Penguins or something like that. On his way out, I stopped him and told him that he had spoken to my class and that I read his book and liked it. He looked so taken aback about being recognized and pleasantly startled, and it stuck in my head that authors are just regular people.

“ ... it stuck in my head that authors are just regular people.”

So you ended up in New York at NYU to study writing? Who was your friend that you followed there?

No, I actually went to NYU originally to study pre-med because it just seemed like the direction my life was headed in. I went there because of my friend Mike Baron. He lives in LA now, but he went to NYU for music. Back in high school, we played in a lot of bands together. I’m not super musical in the traditional sense, but we listened to punk rock stuff and just wanted to make noise together.

What did you play?

I’d play whatever was handed to me, but mostly bass. I liked the sound it made. We’d pass around instruments mid-song or find old drum machines someone’s brother had to make noises with. We were all sort of multi-instrumentalists, and Chicago was really fun at the time. Musically, there was a lot going on, and it seemed exciting. We’d go to a lot of shows and play a lot of music. I never seriously pursued music or had intentions of doing so, but my friend Mike really wanted to do music. So that’s what he went to NYU for, and he knew that’s where he wanted to be. So, I say I didn’t really know what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go, but Mike did, so I followed him. He has pursued it ever since.

What were some bands you guys were into at the time?

We loved bands like Tortoise. There were a lot of us, and we all wanted to switch instruments and experiment.

So you’re in New York for pre-med studies originally ... When did it switch to writing?

My junior year I did a semester abroad in Paris and took a poetry workshop by accident. I thought it was fiction writing, but it turned out to be a poetry class. When I walked in and they announced it was a poetry class, I was like, ‘fuck, I messed up’, because I had no experience at all with poetry. I thought poetry was what they taught you in high school when you analyzed themes and wrote in meter, etc. I stuck with it, though, and sat through the first class. When I wrote my first poem, I thought, ‘oh wow, this is amazing. I can just do whatever I want. This is great.’ And the teacher was really encouraging. In my mind at the time, he seemed more traditional, but he was always trying to reign me in. Immediately I knew this was it. I’d badger him all the time, like, ‘what else? Is there anyone that writes like this? Who are they?’ And he’d try his best to guide me. His name was Jeffrey Greene, but I have not kept in touch with him as much as I’d like to. He really had a big impact on me.

“When I wrote my first poem, I thought, ‘oh wow, this is amazing. I can just do whatever I want. This is great.’”

What year was this?

2007. And Paris is a very tech-averse country in general, so there was no internet in my tiny little room. So I have no internet, I don’t know anyone, and I don’t speak French. It was a little NYU program at an already existing university in Paris. So I just felt like I had no idea what was going on, and I’d just read poetry in my tiny little room all the time. I’d go to the one English bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, and they had writing workshops there on the weekends. Poetry was all I wanted to do, but it was also kind of all that I could do. That and drink a lot. Which was not fun. And, looking back, it was also not good for me.

Who were you hanging out with when you’d go out drinking?

No one. Just myself.

Were you drinking wine?

No. I resisted the whole French thing. I’d go drink Jack Daniels and just be as American as possible. Not in an annoying way, but in an I-miss-home kind of way.

Do you remember the arrondissement you’d hang out in?

16, I believe. You could drop me in Paris and I could walk there on autopilot.

Are you a geographically inclined person?

No, I wouldn’t say that. But this was in 2007 before I had a smartphone, so I had a pocket map that I’d pull out every day to look at until I didn’t need it anymore. I just knew eventually.

OK, so in Paris, when you’re studying abroad, you accidentally take a writing workshop class ... Are you still doing your other program requirements as well?

Yeah, only 1 out of the four classes is writing. I was still doing science requirements for the other classes. Looking back at it, I met some really cool writers that I still keep in touch with. For example, there was one woman named Harriet Alida Lye, a Canadian writer. We were there at the same time but from different schools. We were both just getting into it and going to the Shakespeare and Company workshops. She has published a couple novels. I think that’s really cool, and I’m proud of her.

When you were there, you were reading a lot of poetry ... Who were some of the poets you were reading, and how were you discovering them? Was your professor recommending poets to you?

I had an Allen Ginsberg collection, although I'm not sure I understood it at the time. James Tate’s prose poems were pretty easy to find at the time. I loved Return to the City of White Donkeys. Those two stick out to me. I also read Infinite Jest at the time.

When you were in Paris?

Yeah, which kind of woke me up to the fact that people were writing major works today. Not everything was old like Salinger or Hemingway. He was a guy that was working right now, so that was exciting to me to learn about an active contemporary community.

Tell me a little about your transition back to New York after your time abroad.

It felt really exciting, like the seed had been planted. I knew now that there were people doing it today and I should find what else there is out there. I went to the Brooklyn Book Festival in 2008. not knowing anyone else into writing. I was there all day for all 3 days, and was just trying to find everything I could get into. I saw Tao Lin read from Shoplifting from American Apparel and thought, ‘that’s it, that’s exactly what writing should be like.’ And that book to me is still one of the greatest books ever written. I remember sitting around the book festival, and he walked by, and I wanted to say something to him, but I couldn’t. I was so blown away by his writing.

“I saw Tao Lin read from Shoplifting from American Apparel and thought, ‘that’s it, that’s exactly what writing should be like.’”

So, at this time, everything is happening in real life. You weren’t even super on the internet or anything, really?

No, not at all. I don’t even think Twitter had really picked up yet. I might have just joined. And, at that time, I got really into Blogspot, which gave me a path forward. I found a community of people around my age who were making work right now. They weren’t writing and sitting around waiting to submit it to journals. They were just doing it. That to me was extremely appealing and liberating. It was really fun.

When Tao Lin walked by at the festival, did you ever end up speaking to him?

No, not at that time. My apartment was by the Whole Foods on Houston, and I’d go sit on the second floor there. It was open seating, and I’d sit there with a coffee reading or writing, and I’d see him pass by, but I still didn’t know what to say or do.

You’d just kind of hang out there?

Yeah. I saw Alex Olson there once too. And I saw the Gonz there once.

I was about to ask if you’ve ever had any Gonz sightings.

The best one was when I saw him in a Modell’s Sporting Goods. He was with his kid going up the escalator as I was going down. We locked eyes, and I could tell that he knew that I knew who he was. He was with his kid, though, so I never said anything. I’d see him riding his bike around all the time too.

I want to talk about these early New York days and the original alt-lit scene. Were you a part of this first scene? Were you friends with Tao Lin at that time?

I felt like I was a little late, or at least not a part of the first wave of a lot of this stuff. I think I officially met Tao through Matthew Rohrer, who was a poetry teacher of mine. Matthew Rohrer showed me so much. He is one of my favorite poets, if not my favorite.

Your teacher, Matthew?

Yeah, Matthew Rohrer. He was a bit older but knew Tao through Bear Parade. Tao had published some of Matthew’s work on Bear Parade. Matthew invited Tao to our class as a guest lecturer.

When you were a student?

Yeah. I was in that class and we had just read Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for class. I think Matthew kind of keyed in on how important the book was to me, even though other students liked the book too. But I was particularly enthusiastic about it, and, in retrospect, I wonder if Matthew Rohrer brought him in so that I could get a chance to talk to him. I remember asking him questions, talking with him, and thinking now that he knew my face I could say ‘hi’ at readings without introductions. At the time, it seemed like a lot of people wanted stuff from him. I remember it being a huge “validating” thing to get your blog linked on someone else’s blog back then. I think people wanted that from him.

But yeah, we started hanging out some. I also met David Fishkind, who was a freshman at NYU when I was a senior. He seemed to be more plugged in socially than I was. He and Zachary German were good friends, who were good friends with Tao and Miles Ross. At the time, I thought Miles Ross had some of the best writing on Muumuu House. Miles also skated, so we skated together a few times and got to know each other a little bit.

Whether it was at readings or just around, I would see Tao all the time. We both worked in the basement at Bobst Library, so we’d see each other a lot there and say what’s up in passing.

As far as the first wave of the scene, HTMLGIANT had been around for a while, and I don’t remember reading it much until Blake invited me to be a contributor. This was during Christmas, 2009. It had been around and very popular before that, though. When I started contributing, I had no idea what I was doing, people hated my stuff, and my posts sucked. I just didn’t really have anything to say, but I wanted to have something to say. I was just saying random bullshit, and so I don’t remember that time fondly at all.

People were literally hating on shit you were posting? Hateful comments and stuff?

Yeah, totally.

Oh, wow. I’m not super familiar with HTMLGIANT, but it was created by Blake Butler, yeah?

Yeah, Blake Butler and Gene Morgan.

OK, so when you say you were invited to be a contributor, does that just mean you were posting your writing on there? They were soliciting writing from you, basically?

Yeah, I mean, they were really cool about how they ran it. It was a WordPress site, and they’d invite you to be a contributor. That was your admin level. Then you could do whatever you wanted. They’d say, ‘go post away.’ It was mostly commentary on the literary scene at the time. Occasionally there’d be actual poems posted, but a lot of it was just banter. And I just couldn’t hang. I didn’t have any banter. I could write, but I didn’t want to blog. I never knew what to say in a blog post. So I just wasn’t a great fit, but Blake was really cool. We had just followed each other on Twitter, and that’s how we struck up a friendship. His tweets were just so funny at the time. I think he was an all-time great Twitter poster in the early days.

My time at HTMLGIANT all culminated when I was at The New School and we’d come back from winter break. This was right after they made me a contributor. In my workshop at The New School, my teacher posed the question, ‘what did you work on? You’ve been off for a month, now we’re back. What’ve you been working on over the break?’ And everyone was like, ‘I didn’t really write anything,’ or, ‘I wish I’d written more,’ or, ‘I was too busy to write.’ And I just couldn’t believe it. I was like, ‘we’re paying $30,000 to be here. We’re not going to make a living off poetry, but you can’t even be bothered to do it? In your own time?’ So, I just transcribed everything everyone said and posted it on HTMLGIANT without any names. There were no names. There was no identifying anyone specifically, but it blew up. Roxanne Gay eviscerated me in the comments saying, ‘I cannot believe you would betray the trust of your workshop. Workshop is a sacred place and you should be kicked out of the school.’ And the guy who ran The New School’s program found me and made me take it down.

Holy shit. What year was this?

2010.

And this was when you were in your MFA program?

Yeah, and that was my big one. My big post. No one supported me except for Blake. Blake emailed me when it was just comment after comment after comment and basically said, this is amazing. This is perfect.

Damn, that’s awesome.

Meanwhile, I have no friends. It felt crazy, but at the same time I was like, ‘wait, hold on. If I back up, it is crazy that no one wrote. Like, I’m not insane here. All these people want to be writers but they can’t be bothered to actually write?’ They all seemed to need a prompt, but there’s no prompt in the real world. I always had a bit of disdain about MFA programs for this. There were a lot of kids in there who just needed a prompt, a deadline, or a grade attached to it. I thought, ‘that’s not what it’s about.’ It all just felt so perverted—where art comes from. So, I’ll stand by that post all day. I don’t care what anyone says.

“‘ ... All these people want to be writers but they can’t be bothered to actually write?’”

Obviously that post doesn’t exist anymore, right?

Yeah, it’s gone. They made me take it down.

That’s crazy.

It was just all so weird to me. There are a few people from my MFA program who’re lifelong friends now, but it felt like most people there weren’t writers, and it just blew my mind. I could not understand it. They needed someone else to tell them they were a writer. They had all these aspirations of what an end product could be like, but no motivation to do it. They couldn’t be motivated to write without the validation of someone saying, ‘we’ll publish you.’ There was no ambition to do it yourself. They failed to realize that people making those decisions are just people too.

Or that they don’t have to do it. That they can work outside of the very narrow academia mindset. And I think, like, I’ve talked to some other people in writing about this, and there’s something we all have in common. At least the people I gravitate towards, we all have a background in do-it-yourself activities, whether it be skateboarding or punk music.

From a very early age, it’s like, you’re supposed to do it yourself. That’s the way to do it.

“ ... you’re supposed to do it yourself. That’s the way to do it.”

Yeah.

It’s a bad thing to get the seal of approval from the powers that be.

Yeah, I feel you. As I’m learning more about the online writing scene, I’m noticing that there are multiple avenues and ways to go about it, but I appreciate it when I see people doing it themselves, i.e., small presses and just making books, chapbooks, etc.

Yeah. And I don’t know if this is just nostalgia or what, but I feel like that time of people doing it themselves was fertile. They were trying different stuff. My friend Adam, who runs Publishing Genius, we’ve been in touch quite a bit because we’re working on this book, but we were talking recently about how he was involved with HTMLGIANT earlier on, and he was just lamenting how people used to just do more, like online readings—someone would just go live on whatever platform was being used at the time. It’d be a Friday night, and everyone would just be hanging out. Or how everyone realized you could just publish poems in Amazon review boxes. They’d just pick a random Amazon product and everyone would just spam it with their poetry.

“They’d just pick a random Amazon product and everyone would just spam it with their poetry.”

Damn, that’s so cool.

And that energy just didn’t really translate to the Instagram era so much.

Yeah. That’s cool though.

I sometimes think if I had been born 20 years earlier, I don’t know if I would’ve ever been writing because I’ve always had the tools of a blog or Twitter to connect with people. Before the internet, I would’ve never thought to find other people.

But I want to say something again about that DIY ethic/mentality. I feel like when you meet people that share in that at a young age, you just know they’re going to turn out OK. A lot of people I grew up with and am still in touch with, they’re all still doing the same things they set out to do. There’s something authentic about that and hard to replicate. I just felt like I’d find more people like that when I got to The New School, and it just wasn’t like that. Yeah, there were people who kind of liked to write, but they didn’t have that deeper framework for what it is to be creative.

What years were you in your MFA?

Um, 2010 to 2013. I took a year off from 2011 to 2012 because my dad passed away at the end of the 2011 school year. So I just moved home to Chicago and spent a year at home before coming back to NYC.

Damn. Sorry to hear that. Did you say he passed in 2011 or 2012?

Yeah, it was in May of 2011.

Oh, wow. My sister passed away in May of 2011. Probably around the same time. That’s crazy. It made me sort of pause and reevaluate things.

Yeah, yeah. It was very unexpected. He hadn’t been sick or anything. And that was coming off that winter when I’d called my classmates out. So I stayed home and worked odd jobs. I wrote as soon as I woke up until I went to sleep. I was reading and writing feverishly.

What were you writing at the time?

I was writing poetry with this sense of urgency. I thought, ‘if he could die suddenly, so could I. I have to do this right now. This book has to come out now.’ But it wasn’t any good. (laughs) Out of that whole year, I maybe got one poem that lasted and made it into an actual book. So, as hard as I was going, there was this frantic, anxious quality to it that wasn’t good for the act. It didn’t create good art. But during that time, I did set an intention that this is what I’m doing now. There was no going back. I felt like I’d already done that, but now writing poetry just felt necessary or something.

“ ... writing poetry just felt necessary ...”

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it sounds like at the time it was a very necessary form of expression and maybe also grieving, you know? So it became, or it felt, necessary ... Would you say that?

I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure it out.

Yeah.

Especially now that I’m a father. It’s come back a lot this past year.

Mhm. I bet.

And I’m trying to understand it all. There was no outward grieving. One moment he was there. I got a call. He’s passed. I went back to Chicago for the funeral, but I never saw him. You know, there was no last conversation. I was still in school and wasn’t settled as an adult yet. So it just felt like, this is just what happens. People die and they’re gone. So I don’t know. It certainly was an expression of grief, but I don’t know if it was that healthy of me to think that way. I don’t know. Maybe there could have been a better way for me to process it outwardly instead of so inwardly and being like, ‘I need to publish a book of poetry.’ Which like, who cares?

Regardless, you return to NY to finish your MFA, yeah? How’re you feeling at the time? It sounds like you had this desire to write a book. I’m assuming you hadn’t written any books yet at the time, right?

No, I had self-published some short chapbooks. But in my head I thought, ‘I have to finish a book and get it published as soon as I graduate so I can get a job teaching. I need to be accepted.’ I thought of no other path career wise. It felt like when school ends, I’m fucked because I have to enter the real world. And the only way I get to be a poet in the real world is by teaching. In between NYU and The New School, I’d done some temp jobs in offices and I was so unhappy and miserable. I thought, ‘that can’t be my life. I can’t do that.’ So I did not finish a book. When I got back to The New School, my second year there—technically my third, but second curriculum wise—things really came together writing wise. I wrote some poems that I was really proud of. It felt like things clicked for a moment. I had a good stretch of writing and the start of a book. I thought, ‘OK, I’m getting there. I just need more time.’ Then I graduated and didn’t know what to do. I was walking dogs. That’s what I did as a job throughout my time at The New School. It was great creatively because you’re alone all day, but I was barely making ends meet. It was cool, though, going into people’s houses and seeing how they live. It felt endlessly generative. I’d play these little games all day. Like, ‘let’s write one line every hour on the hour for the whole time I’m at this house.’ Or, ‘let’s see if I can write a poem during this one hour or on this walk with this dog.’ Every once in a while, I’d get to do dog sitting. So I’d spend a weekend at a much nicer apartment than mine, and it’d feel like a vacation, like a little writing retreat.

“I’d play these little games all day. Like, ‘let’s write one line every hour on the hour for the whole time I’m at this house.’”

That sounds nice.

Yeah, it was great. But I graduated and was doing everything I could to put a poetry book together, and at some point just thought, ‘I just have to get a job. This isn’t working.’

I actually remember there was a weekend that HTMLGIANT was doing a writing retreat in New Orleans. They made enough money on ads to rent a big house, but we just had to get ourselves there. So I was able to do that, but my car got towed while I was gone. And when I got back, that next weekend, I spilled a glass of whiskey all over my laptop and it shorted out.

So, I was down a plane ticket, a car tow, and a laptop, all in quick succession. I had to get a real job.

What was the job?

It was several months later until I’d actually get one, but I remember thinking, ‘OK, I can’t write poetry all day. I have to send out resumes.’ I worked at a health insurance company as a writer. I thought, ‘my life is ending. I’m in an office doing the exact thing I said I wouldn’t do.’ But at the time, I had no other option. I had nothing and was penniless, so I took the job, and it ended up being totally fine. The job was to write, so I’m just in front of a computer with a Word document open all day. They don’t tell me what to do as long as I finish all the work I’m assigned. I’m stuck in a chair 8 hours a day. I can write whatever I want. I started writing a lot of prose because a poem would look obvious. But I thought, ‘if I write in paragraphs, no one’s going to know.’ I also thought, ‘wait a second, this is fine. This works. They’ll pay me. I like the people I work with. They’re all funny.’ So I’ve just worked office jobs ever since.

Was the job in Manhattan?

Yeah, it was on Wall Street. The actual Wall Street. Not the idea of Wall Street.

Oh, wow.

It was hilarious to ride the subway and see all the traders.

Did you have to dress super nice? Suit and tie?

Yeah, just khakis, though. No tie or anything.

So this was 2014, yeah?

Yeah, exactly.

In 2014, I want to say there was a story of yours on Muumuu House recounting a party or a reading or something ... Do you know which one I’m talking about?

Was it the Justin Taylor one?

Maybe … Yeah, yeah. That’s the one.

It’s “Four Times I’ve Interacted with Justin Taylor In Real Life.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don’t remember when that came out. I feel like it might have been earlier. That was the first thing I had published with Tao because we had seen Justin Taylor.

Justin Taylor was a very popular writer at the time, and he was in NY. I don’t think he still lives in NY. He was roommates with Miles Ross at one point. He was always at parties. He was successful.

That’s why I’m thinking of parties, yeah. The piece recounts a party or reading.

Yeah, there were parties. I think I saw Tao in the library, mostly.

So this is when you were still a student at NYU?

I would still go there after I graduated. I maintained an alumni relationship with the library, so I’d always go there for like a whole decade. I remember talking to Tao down there, and together we decided I should write “Four Times I’ve Interacted with Justin Taylor In Real Life” and publish it. I wanted to interview Justin Taylor for Electric Literature at the time. I had read his story collection and was really into interviewing people. I thought, ‘I get to learn so much. I get to publish a thing. It helps them out. It helps me out.’ But he canceled the interview after that. He was really upset.

After the publication at Muumuu House?

Yeah.

Wow … You really upset a lot of people with your writing. (laughs)

I was just stirring shit up. I didn’t mean to.

I love that. That’s funny.

It just seemed like he took himself so seriously. I think that’s why the piece worked. It sort of deflated that self image.

Yeah, the piece is very serious. The prose style reminds me of Kmart realism. Are you familiar with that term?

Yeah, I haven’t heard that in forever.

A lot of early Tao Lin reminds me of Kmart realism. For example, Shoplifting from American Apparel and Richard Yates.

Yeah, Shoplifting from American Apparel is one of my favorites. I remember reading that and thinking, ‘this is the way to write.’ The energy of reading Shoplifting from American Apparel is what I want to do with poetry. I always felt like you could call that book poetry. That’s the fun of it. I loved how short it was and how it looked on the small pages. I thought, ‘why isn’t every book like this? This is how every book should be.’

Chronologically speaking, we are really close here to the time where some of the first poems in Fudge are timestamped. At this time, were you writing and submitting a lot online?

Writing, yes. Submitting, no. My first book, Cats and Dogs, came out in 2014 as I was starting office work.

Is that book about your dog walking job?

No, I just liked the title and thought it’d be cool. That was the book I was hoping would save me from office work. I knew it was a pipe dream, but I thought, ‘once I have a book maybe people will hire me to be a poet.’ I also thought, ‘maybe it’ll be a runaway success, and I’ll never have to work again.’ But it came out, Blake wrote about it on Vice, and my friend Zach Baker wrote a review for it for a website called Monster Children. The publisher was in California. I never met him, but we spoke on the phone. It felt like the book existed, but I had no proof it was really there. It was hard to know if anyone read it. I never did any readings or anything and didn’t really know what to do once I had a book. I’m learning now how important all that stuff is so that people notice you have a book. It’s besides the point of writing, but I’m realizing how important it all is.

After that book, a press from Ohio called Monster House Press asked me to make the book Todd with them. I worked with a publisher named Rose Zinnia. It was a collective, really, but I worked with Rose, mostly. They pretty much gave me carte blanche to write whatever book I wanted. They approached me before I had the book finished. So that was maybe the best thing to come out of Cats and Dogs. They just wanted to do a book together. I felt very liberated to do whatever I wanted. That’s why that book has a bunch of collages in it. I felt like I had things figured out, and it was a step up in confidence. I thought, ‘a lot of people do a first book, now I’m doing a second book. I can keep doing this. Yeah, I might not know what I’m doing and, yeah, the writing might suck. But at least I know it’s coming, and I can stick with whatever project I have in mind.’

There’s a long poem at the end of that book (Todd) that is collaged from blurbs. All from books I had. It took me a long time to write that. It took years and years. I remember trying to write it in my MFA program and everyone telling me it was impossible and that I’d never be able to do it. But I did it. I look at it now and still can’t believe it. Honestly, I thought, ‘if I can do that, I can do anything.’

“I remember trying to write it in my MFA program and everyone telling me it was impossible and that I’d never be able to do it. But I did it. I look at it now and still can’t believe it. Honestly, I thought, ‘if I can do that, I can do anything.’”

All that to say, I feel like that all broke open the way I think about writing. I felt like I could do whatever I wanted because Monster House said that I could. So with $50,000, I thought, ‘I have two books now. I know enough people in small press land. I have the confidence in my own writing that it doesn’t matter what anyone else likes.’ Like, if no one wanted to publish $50,000, I would just do it myself and say, ‘it’s legit because I spent tons of time on it and I’m proud of it.’ You know what I mean? I’ve always found a way out of submitting to places for approval. I feel like I figured something out with Todd and $50,000. I get excited thinking about it. And now it’s like, I did it again with Fudge. It’s such a big collection of a long time period.

How did Fudge come to be? Did Adam reach out to you?

No, it was kind of a pandemic project. I didn’t like that $50,000 came out in February of 2020 because we had plans—no, wait—it must have come out a little earlier than that, but we had plans to do some readings and stuff, and all the sudden we couldn’t go anywhere or do anything. So I just immediately thought, ‘what am I going to do next?’

I felt like I had nothing to say because every day it felt unfathomable to write anything new. So I decided to just start collecting pieces. I had the NBA league pass one, the photoshop instructor one, and “Hollow Points.” I thought, ‘there’s some way I can put these together and flesh it all out with new stuff.’

All I could write after the first few months of the pandemic were the really short ones. It almost felt like a retrospective. I have stuff that hasn’t been published in a book before, how can I tie in some new stuff? In my mind, “The Last Poem” was written as a capstone to give the book an ending.

“The Last Poem” is on your website, but you knew it’d be the ending to your book? The last poem in your book?

Yeah. I got into publishing on my website because I didn’t want to submit to places.

I love your website. I love the reading experience on there.

I just know how I want it to look. Yeah, I could give them to an editor, but they may not present/publish it the way I want it. They may put it all on one page, but I want you to click through it.

Yeah, it’s like turning a page.

Exactly. And it’s a lot of work, and it’s really annoying to thread all the pages together and make sure the order is right. But that’s the benefit of doing it that way. It looks the way I want it to look.

Yup. Do it yourself.

If someone reaches out to me for a contribution, I always try to do that first. But if I have something I’m proud of and ready to share, and I know how I want it to appear, I’d rather just do it myself.

Yeah, I like that. That’s cool … So let’s reflect on your growth as a person through the time that is represented in Fudge. It’s roughly over a span of 5 years, from 2016 to 2021. You were still in NYC this whole time, yeah?

Yeah. I had moved into my own apartment. I had a studio apartment in Brooklyn and had moved out of a situation where I had 2 to 3 other roommates, depending on the time. That felt like a big personal leap. I thought, ‘I've made it if I can have my own place in NYC.’ That was very exciting and liberating. I just felt like a total boss. That was in August of 2016.

“I just felt like a total boss.”

Then Trump got elected, and that was really weird and bizarre. People were crying in the streets and stuff. We can laugh about it in hindsight, and it may seem like cringy behavior now, but it really felt like there was a big shift in the world. It was hard to get away from that. It was hard to write at that time.

I, like so many other people, was glued to the news. I thought, ‘what crazy thing is going to happen next? What does all of this mean?’ I was reading a lot of nonfiction about society. The poems “Hollow Points” and the NBA poem remind me of this time. It felt like my poetry was coming out of a pressure cooker. I just couldn’t think about the news anymore or deal with it. Instead these poems would come out of me. It was like a release.

I was also working on $50,000 a lot at the time and had switched jobs but to another job where I’m stuck in front of a computer all day so I was just ordering, cutting, and pasting these lines. I spent so much time doing this out of boredom rather than real inspiration. I would become so blind to it. It didn’t mean anything. So I’d go off and write a “Hollow Points” type of poem. I was so sick of the news and arranging $50,000 lines that didn’t mean anything to me anymore. Writing this other thing felt really exciting.

Why is “Hollow Points” time-stamped September 11th?

Oh, it’s just the day I wrote most of the notes that would become those poems. No real significance. I had just spent that day walking around the city from the Whole Foods in Union Square to the Whole Foods on Houston.

And $50,000 is a collage of all these single lines of poetry you wrote?

Yeah, more or less.

Wow.

It felt like way more time copying and pasting than actually writing.

Were any of these lines written when you were walking dogs?

Yeah, there must’ve been.

There’s a real brevity to your poetry that feels urgent to the reader. At least to me. I’ve never been able to pick up one of your books and not read it all in one sitting. I was wondering if that resonates with you at all and if that informs your writing process at all?

I do like short books in general. I do like books that can be finished. They’re like little buddies. So there’s that. That is intentional. Also, I like to keep it moving. It’s not that I don’t like a book that sits down, but it’s hard for me in the editing process to justify something that doesn’t get you to the next thing. That feels innate more than a choice, though. That’s just how it’s gotta go. I don’t want it to get boring to read. I want to get you to the next moment. The payoff. As fun as it is to watch Gino push, I’m not that type of writer. I don’t have the confidence in myself or something. I found this way and it works for me. I tell myself this little mantra, ‘you don’t necessarily have to write a poem if you’re writing poetry.’ I feel like $50,000 really broke that idea open for me. I don’t have to write a perfect poem on each page. I can just get you along, like, there’s a nugget of poetry in that line that’ll get you to the next line.

“You don’t necessarily have to write a poem if you’re writing poetry”

Wow, yeah.

When I came out of my MFA program, I was having trouble writing a poem that didn’t feel forced or follow the setup of: this happened, then this happened, and then the payoff. That formula just got so stale. So I felt like I could just string you along and there’s no payoff, but also, it’s not boring. That’s what I’ve been into.

Damn. Yeah, that’s great. Are you a notes guy? Do things just hit you and you have to write them down?

I do love those spontaneous moments of notes. I use the notes app. I keep a running file. I also use Google Docs. And I try to keep a Moleskin journal on me. I strategically place notebooks around my house so I’m never too far away from one. I prefer writing by hand. I get distracted so easily on a phone, which kills the spontaneity of it. I do like the moments that are captured to feel pure in that moment of being in a life rather than separate. I’ve tried the whole wake-up-and-sit-at-a-computer-for-uninterrupted-blocks-of-writing, but it doesn’t feel like there’s any life in it.

Lately, I’ve had some luck with writing on my 10-minute walk home from dropping off my daughter at daycare. Those 10 minutes feel worth way more to me than 10 hours of sitting in front of a computer. I’ll take one good line over an infinite number of bad lines.

“I’ll take one good line over an infinite number of bad lines.”

The hard, boring part is the-sitting-in-front-of-the-computer part. Just rearranging line after line after line. Trying to make sure something exciting happens. A lot gets left on the cutting room floor, as they say.

Yeah, Fudge feels so similar to this process, but with collections of poems rather than lines of poetry. I’m excited for people to read Fudge and I’m excited to read what’s next. Thank you so much for your time, Andrew, and talking with me for almost 2 hours in your basement while you clean storm windows.

Of course. Thanks, MD.

(Andrew disappears)

Fudge is available from Publishing Genius.