Russel Swensen currently teaches at Prairie View A&M University. He earned his MFA in fiction from the California Institute of the Arts and his doctorate in poetry from the University of Houston. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Black Clock, Quarterly West, Pank, Third Coast, The Destroyer, and elsewhere. In 2009 he was the recipient of the American Academy of Poets/Brazos Award. His poetry chapbook, Santa Ana, was the the winner of the Spring 2011 Black River Chapbook Contest.
His poem, "The Year in Punk," appeared in issue Fifty-One of The Collagist.
Here, interviewer Keaton Maddox talks with him about accessibility, audience, and memory.
The poem is titled “The Year in Punk,” which seems to denote a lifestyle more than a musical genre. How did this shape your development of the poem? What was your process in creating it?
I would say that my hatred of lifestyle definitely informed the poem. It’s just this like socially transmitted disease and no matter how much or how often you throw yourself off a bridge, it always flares up again [you’re glowing in the bracken water baby but no, no one ever said that’s a good thing]. Most of my process was detailed in question 3 because I’ve been answering these in reverse order like an idiot [like playing stage left in order to make it interesting, see what I mean].
I started with the title. I was writing a poem that was a review of the year in “punk.” I was rereading Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You [that book ought to be the proscribed opening for all elementary school classes ok] and thinking a lot about Lester Bang’s “Everybody’s Search for Roots (The Roots of Punk, Part I)” which it’s just this incredibly self-lacerating series of narratives [tiny little death sentences]. “Punk” becomes a vehicle for Bangs to intro his self-loathing, his Usher-like (or Rousseau-sh if you prefer) confessions which ought to bring about absolution, grace, “you’re not that bad kid” etc. The thing with the confessional model [the old one] is that one’s confession must be a full confession or no dice, no bien, you’re fucked man, you hid something and that’s the same as being found out. Structurally the poem was modeled on the notion that “if you don’t shut up I will tell you every bad thing I’ve ever done.” And no one ever shuts up man, no matter what, trust me.
So.
(but everything scares)
The poem oscillates between being hyper-accessible and ruminating on images to which the reader cannot possibly relate. For example, my favorite line is “foxes playing in the snow and someone, always someone, saying ‘those aren’t foxes, that’s your blood.’” Even after several read-throughs, unpacking this line still feels impossibly out of reach. But rather than isolating the reader, these lines form a kind of intimacy and attachment, as if we were right there along side the narrator when these events transpired. What challenges did you face in balancing these esoteric details along side the more readily discernable parts of the poem in a way that integrated your audience rather than alienating them?
If you love a girl you make foxes with her/for her. That’s what love is. I made like a million foxes for this girl Katherine Ciel and after the girl’s gone you still see foxes everywhere, that’s all. “Lil red foxes like the slowest tornadoes ever.” Anyway, it’s incredibly flattering that you believe I do establish intimacy/attachment. Because in my head the only way it could work is to mash up the reader like that fucking bumble bee you know? [won’t my mommy be so proud of me]. Reshape them into some sort of facsimile me [some I don’t know neater sweeter version of me because not me me I wouldn’t do that]. In this here cleaner greener country right? This here maiden journey version of a pretty busted up, not good and also bad, irl “Russel.” This here made of trash boy trying not to offend. It’s easy to scoff (I know) but without establishing a connection, some sense of identification, you’re gonna lose that video crowd.
Kurt Cobain once said “We don’t provoke our audience. They provoke us.” To give you some idea of where I’m at on this one, he was lying/not lying; mutual provocation yknow, like sex like conversation like meeting someone for five seconds on a bus like fucking everything. And yet, there is an audience [I can at least imagine one] and how can they not find this poem alienating? It doesn’t make sense + you’re basically drowning your readers in your um worst behavior.
So how you do you make the medicine go down easier and no you can’t hold a gun to anyone’s head [dang]. Neater, sweeter. I know it looks bad but cleaner greener and a million drowning maidens to be saved… This feels like I’m eliding the question but I think I’m trying to show that I don’t know…. There’s hmm maybe one trick and that’s intensity. Intensity is the only thing.
Because because if you create something furious or plaintive or bitter or longing [“choke to death on your Eros!” I wail from the orchestra pit, you know you hear it, I know you pretend not to] enough then you know people hold onto that. They don’t understand it [they don’t have to]. But yeah, obviously. People don’t understand shit. Not that I do, man. I love Rothko because of the force of Rothko not the meaning of. That’s what I attempt/emulate. That’s what I want. You can’t sense the thing itself but you can tell what it displaces [all poetry is in the dark] and this like negative spacing gives you an idea of shape and force [what’s pushed, what’s fallen] I mean that’s why people say something’s “moving” because at some level it doesn’t matter where we’re moved to it just matters how strongly, how fucking completely.
Write like you’re falling in love and “I will never ever forgive you” at the same time and people get it because that’s how we live. The other thing with moving see is wherever we are, it’s no good [please remove].
Just, yknow, beckon.
Despite of the poem’s title, this piece encapsulates moments from almost two decades of the narrator’s life (as we discover at the end). Everything from Nirvana to Snapchat are touched upon without any breaks or indicators that a conclusive section of time has finished. And because it works outside of chronological order, the whole thing becomes a haze of reminiscence. What role would you say time and memory play in this piece? And how did you go about discerning the order in which you wanted the events to play out?
Yeah… the “narrator” that is one fucked up dude. Glad as hell I don’t have to live in his fucked head every second of every fucking day. Like… that guy’s life sounds like being dropped down an elevator shaft [every second of every fucking day]. I’m a just wobble for a minute here thinking about the poor dude and maybe pour out some malt liquor and maybe kill myself.
I might argue that this is how memory works, particularly the memory (or concept) of a “self.” There is no order. Everything is happening at once and it has already happened but it continues to happen/detonate. My notion of myself is basically a distorted Mogwai roaring sound you know? The stage directions are just EXIT. EXIT EVERYTHING. And at the same time COME BACK. COME BACK PLEASE I NEED YOU I DIDN’T MEAN IT. We’re a devastated and impossibly beautiful confusion. FUCK YOU I LOVE YOU (for example). Being a person is (naturally) a fairly horrible thing to be but it can also be exhilarating. I mean you can accept that nothing makes sense but then you have to make sense of that which that’s pretty much the poem. You give up on the rational (because no, life does not make sense) so you have to try to love the irrational, you have to believe that if you hum the right notes in the right order someone’s head would fucking explode. You have to be- as a poet- like a 3rd grade version of yourself, you believe in magic [clap your hands], you’re still making potions out of spider webs and cleaning products, bricolage, if it’s there then you use it [put your hair in my mouth], you can make it useful and the right ingredients the right order you become invisible or learn to love yourself or play piano or whatever. That’s poetry or at least that’s this poetry. An accretion of experience and language that grows increasingly frantic in its attempts to pull its own head from the oven, to find the melody in the roar [the honey in the lion]. You don’t get to believe but you also don’t get to stop trying.
So, order or scheme, essentially desperation and fear. The right phrase- not this one maybe the next one- will fix it, has to fix it but it didn’t fix it it’s not right so you have to keep going back to the well [someone’s in there], whatever you’ve got use it, plunder your tweets, use your loved ones [esp their heads], every line of poetry you never found a place for [and you needed to], your dolls, your constant state of loss that does not, however, impinge on your fear of impending loss….
Look it’s my poem so who knows how it actually reads (the only thing you can count on is you’ll care more about your own poem than your readers which I never expect to have any) but in my mess of a head it was meant to be incantatory, a sort of fiery maze that I knew in advance I would not escape but that I still attempted to love that I attempted to address [to worship and muss].
It’s the final poem in my forthcoming book The Magic Kingdom and that’s a like “contributing factor” too. It was everything that had been excluded it was the knowledge that I’d said nothing or said it all wrong and one final attempt to scream my way out of the corner I’d painted myself into.
Beautiful, doomed things. 'Weep for what little things could make them glad' you know? And I do. I do.
“A confession of faith” even though—
I know, I know.
What are you reading these days?
Oh God, almost nothing. Matchbooks? Super bleeding down the mirror happy hour specials? Fucking twitter? (and wanting to tear my own little twittering head off like in IJ). Suicidal tinder profiles.
I was really into these pulpy mystic detective novels by Michael Gruber for a while (this idea that shamans developed a praxis for uh turning into jaguars because look dude they didn’t have tv ok? and look this shaman dude’s in Miami! He’s gonna kill everyone and why the hell not really, yeah I got pretty into that. Can’t wish enough murderous witch doctors on that fucking city). And just dumb stuff like Joseph Campbell or Charles Fort.
I moved to New York (CITY of total misery) fairly recently and turned (murderously) toward Big Unhappy But Sort Of Deliriously Cheerful Books (Adam Levin’s The Instructions, William Gaddis’s JR, Sergio de la Pava’s A Naked Singularity, David Foster Wallace of course, everything by Neal Stephenson, really, I reread it all and I liked it, lived like an invalid, why not) and just random stuff about being miserable in New York which there’s not exactly a lack of. Poetry hmmmk I really liked Melissa Broder’s Scarecrone, that book is sexy as fuck. Wanna pull that book’s hair and mess up its makeup. Matt Rasmussen’s Black Aperture is incredibly sad like living only by candlelight sad. And I mean it’s all about his brother’s suicide and the language has the consistency of cream. Glenn Shaheen, Predatory. Sort of homicidal Americana which means it’s actual Americana as opposed to whatever the fuck the term usually refers to. Thom Gunn and Craig Arnold, always. Johannes Goransson’s A New Quarantine Will Take My Place is fucking vital. Hayan Charara, all of his poems, I mean look up “Usage” or “Animals” and you’re gonna lose your composure. You’re gonna rest your forehead on an ice cold window and not for a little while, all things considered, why would you ever stop.
I can’t forget Karen Green’s Bough Down, (!!!) which it kind of seems like everyone else did. . The reception was very “I guess if you want to hear David Foster Wallace’s widow talk about losing David Foster Wallace, yeah you’ll like this.” Which is such bullshit. It’s a heartbreaking art/object/book and formally as innovative as Maggie Nelson’s Bluets or Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights. Not to mention that Green’s work is a gorgeous crazy poet-sad thing. You won’t learn jack about DFW but you can see why he’d love her (or this here version of her created by the text, if you prefer). Gotta love book-her. And if you don’t then I don’t want to talk to you, you, you.
What are you writing?
I’m working on my stand-up routine (haha). But I mean my favorite is still just looking in the mirror and saying (smugly) “now that’s a fucking joke.” [hold your applause like hold onto it and never let it go that’s my like “advice”]. Hmm. I was working on a series of poems that are ummm really weird ransom notes? Like these are some of the ways the kidnappers communicate their like demands?
missing cutlery
no hair ties anywhere not just in your apartment
a mess of hissing flies instead of a voicemail
instead of all voicemails
beautiful crutches in the corner
a life size model of los angeles in the cavity of your chest
animals carved out of butter
….
sock puppets that make you sad
a girl rocking back and forth atop the marble stairs
before falling down
…
someone telling you cicadas are living violins it hurts to play them
that’s why they sound like that
empty cans of diet coke
wherever you go
……
six white kitten that are standing on the roof of your car
when you come outside in the morning
and do not
There’s even some stuff that makes “sense” you know in the context of a bizarre cult sending you bizarre messages (as much sense as that idiot idea can make, basically. But unfortunately the poems sucked. I was writing poems for Cassie Kammerzell who I very much loved but like why would you write bad poems about a great girl. What did she ever do to you, you know? Don’t write poems about people. Also those poems sucked. I was working on a chapbook about cocaine but- shocker!- it really sucked. The research was fun I guess (10/10 wld recommend). I wrote some stuff about Gaza [we were doing a fundraiser/reading for the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund] that didn’t totally suck but didn’t live up to the occasion (like I don’t know how I’d feel about publishing poems with moral certainty) and felt a bit like grandstanding anyway. Don’t write poetry that makes you look like a good person. I mean when I read poetry like that I silently turn my back on the book like those fucking NYC cops with the mayor or someone (me) who sees a tree he hates while he’s out walking and gets stuck there all winter turning his back on the fucking tree which probably was never a real girl anyway. I don’t know. I see a tree I see Larry Levis seeing a girl in a tree. Possibly no one is reading this right now. Probably nobody made it this far. I should feel free to say anything. But I just feel exhausted and alone and “the night air feels like fire on my skin.”
Follow me on twitter follow me home and don’t don’t don’t
leave me alone