The Lightning Room With Russel Swensen

Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work. Here, Simon asks Russel Swensen a series of increasingly terse questions about his magnificent poems in the April issue.

 

1. “TOURISM IS IMPORTANT” has such a restless quality to it, as if built of frantically-stacked images. I ask this a lot, but how did you construct this poem? Did you know right from the beginning it would be a series in this manner?

Ah, intention my old friend I have to come to pretend I believe in you again. But not so much really. I knew I wanted this to be sort of camera-friendly so in that sense yes, I had some idea of what it would look like [it’s like those really bad rap videos from artists who well never made it like at all but DID make a video: this is MY hood, this is my weird fucked up ice cream parlor, this is the park that makes me unspeakably sad, this is THE WEATHER except it’s personal, it was incredibly cold that day because of me, because of my friend, the cripple, etc.]. And I mean, I say this with nothing but love for those videos – series of vignettes basically that are genuinely tender because the vignettes are all there is, there’s no career, no real light: I get that. I mean, I’m a complete zero as a poet so showing a few shops in my inner city really isn’t that much of a stretch. I hope this doesn’t sound like fucking painfully white. I just have a built-in love for travelogues that are essentially testimonials – this, exactly, is where I’ve been and maybe I don’t get a chance to say it again so I’m a say it loud.

[paragraph deleted that details the writer’s difficulties with prose of which there are many, typical lines being, “I think the basic Ikea-ness of this has more to do with that” and “a stubborn refusal to give up like in a relationship, cf. “I can make this right,” “ok but like “it’s so cold in the d” you see what I’m getting at here” sic for what’s it’s worth]

I think I put this together like Nixon. He seems to be the biggest influence. That like over whiskeyed paranoid attempt at justification recorded because like you want to know exactly how awful you are: I Identify.  Listening to yourself listening to yourself and responding until even really and truly terrible things [each line I write] sound: “ok.” I construct paragraphs/stanzas along similar lines. They don’t “work” so I add one more thing.  No? I apologize, retract, and then go a bit further. How much did I get away with this time? I am recording this. So you get slogans, rebranding, corrections, you get “further attempts at the truth,” which are as shame-faced as you’d expect.  My town is full of election signs that feel actual pain. What I’m trying to say is –

[respondent is ok with preceding passage being ixnayed]

[multiple paragraphs deleted]

Still. I think most poetry these days lacks both a guiding aesthetic principle or any real moral principle. It’s just promotion. Look how good this thing I’m saying is is being said: fuck what the thing itself is. There’s no real sense that poetry is an opportunity to say great things; it’s way closer to “thanks to poetry I can write a poem; see how great I am.”  We don’t seem particularly grateful is what I’m saying – something very “shyly showing photos that show how hot my girlfriend is to other boys at the bar,” except that we’re doing this with poems.

I don’t know if this is making any sense. I don’t think I wrote a great poem or even a bad poem because yeah I’m like that too. I just hope to hell it wasn’t competent.  I hope that it represented life in a way that made life more available.

Fucking

luxury, luxury, luxury.

Here is a place you could not previously afford.  And it was always yours.  That’s poetry or poetry as I understand it.

2. Similarly, its pieces feel like little aphorisms, like the town is collectively describing itself – is the city itself the narrator here?

Only one city I’ve been to talks to itself and that’s Los Angeles (you can really hear the crying). Not an indictment btw. That’s the only city I can stand and I live in Houston, TX so you do the fucking math.  New York? The city that massages itself? Never sleeps cuz it won’t shut the fuck up? I don’t think so. I mean, this had way more to with Twin Peaks tbh.  Except I’m talking to an audience so fucked up they don’t think Twin Peaks is creepy. Like, at all. We think it’s cute. Which is extremely generational maybe. I’m not sure Lynch would ever think of his series as “delightful.” And – this is important – this is not an endorsement of kitsch. By me or anyone else.  The old unheimlich doesn’t work anymore. At least not as it was generally understood in ye olden times.  We are perfectly at home in this place where nothing makes sense and no one wants us around and we might get eaten.

We like it we dig it heck this town you’ve described can you make it real?  Can I live there? More importantly: can I die there?

Btw see how I ducked the question about who the narrator actually is?  Neat right? But ok I actually think you’re right despite what I just said. The town is asking to be paid attention to or if you want to invest in my hand-held camera video tribute super sad attempt at a testament to something idea: Something is directing your gaze

3. The intertitles of “TOURISM IS IMPORTANT” read like road signs, like this is a guided tour of a strange and self-consuming town. Is this based on anywhere you know?

Sigh. I knew this was going to come up and there’s no uh easy way to say this. Not that I mind giving credit where credit is due but this particular answer is going to sound a lot like “I’d like to thank the academy,” [except fuck the academy, obviously]. How did I come up with this town?  I didn’t. This is the equivalent of fan fiction for the incredibly creepy @NightValeRadio’s incredibly neat podcast, http://commonplacebooks.com/welcome-to-night-vale/.  I’d like to be clear as to the extent and limit of my involvement here. One, I am obviously a fourteen year old boy who wrote some poems about a show he liked.  Two, I met Jeffrey Cranor, one of the two peoples behind this genius podcast, when I was giving a reading in NYC.  Three, I have to stop here for a second because saying stuff like “oh you know the last time I was reading in NYC” makes it sound like a) I do this on the reg b) I’m a total fucking asshole and you should end me.

Like if you’re a poet those are the only options either you’re drinking alone in a lawn chair in your apartment or you’re giving a reading in New York City. Such total fucking bullshit really. Most of us can’t afford to tour and if we could we don’t have an audience that would uh make that feasible. Our spirit animal is student debt and, “you told I’m special tho.”

My spirit animal ran away.

If you see her.

I am again a spectacularly unsuccessful poet which should probably be factored into any criticism I have of poetry. “I’m not very good at this thing therefore this thing is not that good.” Maybe my mss. isn’t difficult, maybe it’s just bad, use the damn razor, arrive at the most logical conclusion in parallel slits up each of your forearms.

Anyway, I knew Jeffrey via twitter and if you’re done scoffing you can follow me there too: @scribblymouse. My bio is “like a boy to the slaughter” if that gives you any sense. Twitter has everything to do with this btw. I’m not just bringing it up in order to do so. I’d hate for you to think I’m gratuitous. I hate anyone thinking anything of me period please fucking stop it’s making my head feel like it’s full of snowballs you didn’t even bother to throw… .

[more in a similar vein]

[still more]

[and we’re back]

So ok I met Jeffrey and he was really nice at my admittedly lavishly appointed reading [thank you Black Lawrence Press] that was populated entirely by people that either remembered me being tragic on livejournal or I don’t know, I may have told a few people during CMJ that Kanye was “most definitely going to show.”  And twitter. Lots of peoples from the twitter. From this meeting a couple things happened, one of which was I wrote an episode for them [“The Subway Episode”] and btw we [meaning, they] clean Garrison Keillor’s clock. Absolutely popping my jersey here: Night Vale is like the no. 1 podcast on Itunes. They sell out shows in NYC and LA in minutes. I’m not even sure how they do it since I’m pretty sure every show ends with mass suicide. Somehow they find the strength to kill themselves daily.

This poem or really what seemed to me more like a gaggle of poems, was written in the universe they created. And that’s one of the things you have to love about Night Vale. People do this. Fan fiction, blogs, merchandise, theft, etc.  To say it’s collaborative – so far as universes go – is stretching it. They are incredibly good at what they do. But we – the lil lambs of the world that didn’t come up with this – tend to write into it or against it.  The city itself has become an idea almost independent of the broadcast, even it’s one hazily defined.

Esp. because of this actually.

I mean, this [my NV poem because I’ve noticed none of the questions here are about “Danielle” which is crazy her twitter is huge] isn’t far from a “what does Night Vale mean to me” meme sort of thing. My friend @angrycomics pitched them some merch that sold like a motherfucker (I highly recommend the multi-headed deer t-shirt). Some stuff gets taken is my point but far more is written. I fall generally speaking into the latter category.

Not for nothing: http://angry-comics.tumblr.com/image/59239188954

I’m also working with her [Jessica, @angrycomics] on a comic called, “A Child’s History Of Going Away.” So watch for that, nihilists.

Find me on tumblr and take me home.

4. What was the last place you never wanted to leave, but left anyway?

Los Angeles. Or the bar last night. What the fuck do you mean I’m scaring people there aren’t any PEOPLE here.

Ahem.

“If I’m from anywhere its Los Angeles: city with red lights hanging like christmas ornaments, coldly grateful for being there, a constant stop stop stop in your peripheral vision and a coniferous darkness- the bars and green needles you brush aside, your face luminous in the trees, hoping, always hoping to see, to finally see…. what?  You waiting there.   City of the Long Wait and the Filed Nail.  City of lipstick running down the mirror in slow rivulets: slack jawed backstage at the sheer Unlikely of it, after all this time, you’re here, you’re finally here – In the middle of the paper lantern, turning in the flame, you are the light that cannot see by the light of itself: writhe in your own delicate arms.”

I left. It’s all been shit since.

5. DIVORCE PAPERS:

Divorce is where each bird gives the other bird one of its wings and says I’m sorry that you can never fly again. I mean, why does it happen?  People have their reasons I suppose. Their own poorly formed and poorly loved stories. Narratives they mouth to one another from different sides of the same sliding glass door on the train.

Why did the vase shatter? Because that is what vases do. And I would think: us too. We are sadly flinging and flung and our fingers are thick with lacerations from picking up the shards. We just can’t let well enough alone.

We seem to think there’s a harmony that material facts are forced to sort of work themselves around. This is p weird imo. Nothing really orients itself around our hopes and fears except I suppose for uh, “us,” the increasingly fearful and suspicious.  Each of us has our own mythos, our origin stories, our pivotal moments, garishly illustrated and full of beleaguered thought balloons [“noooooooooo” I shout out, “but I loved you” she whispers and I continue to walk out of the saloon without looking back as the frame itself gradually goes black].  No matter how worldly we are we still have at least a part of us that wants to believe we are never off-screen, never peripheral.  No one is better than us, no one else is quite so painfully etched into the world’s mosaic.  It is perhaps our first fantasy [filling up the mirror one may- I suppose- see that you are separate from the world but it seems to me we arrive at nearly the opposite conclusion- everything in the frame is about Us] and after we have given up nearly every other [no, there is no meaning except for what we make, no, we cannot create meaning] we still cling to it. How desperately we populate our conceived worlds with scraps and errata.  But when I think of the self trying to stretch its membrane over each rough edge of the perceived world, aching and bleating and worn and pink and thin over each spiked bit of trash and flotsam… I feel the beginning of tenderness and not contempt.  I do not think we are fooling ourselves and yet we cannot stop from framing our own face in the center of each shot, studying the footage with Zapruder like intensity: “there, just there, that is where it happened.”  We’re up all night, each of us, trying to pretend we matter.

Except for me, right? Because I Have It All Figured Out. Except not even a little bit. Me personally I’m what I can see the least. Or I’m so trapped in my own viewing that when I think about the World I’m thinking only of myself.  Maybe all I have diagnosed is my inability to see beyond my lack of understanding.  But if that’s the case, I sure would like to.  To somehow bridge the gap between me and you, between the object and the verb. I’d like to cook you all omelets at three am and at least stop thinking so damn hard. To hold your hand. Perhaps the way out of the labyrinth is as simple as deciding it is not a labyrinth at all, it is just the world and what you choose in it.

6. Bless you, bless you, bless you.

Kiss me, Kate.

Like in a b&w movie where you can tell that it hurts.

Really though I am so sorry. Nothing turned out the way I planned.

Nothing felt as I thought it might.

Tied to a railroad spike.

By your own flaxen braid.

Or strangled. Or it happens too fast and it is either raining or it has just stopped and you see yourself in the moment so clearly.

You have to turn away.

What else can I say and who is there to say it to, if not you.

What can I possibly say to make up for all that I have said and left unsaid or said too much or too loudly?

This is about the interview what else could it be.

Yes, all of this is a way of saying.

I am that girl that only sings when no one else is around because she knows how it sounds.

Me too. Me three.

Do you know what I mean. Do you know it like an injury do you sound like a drawer full of broken tea cups every time you move too fast.

Mostly I would like to say that I am sorry. For all of this.

And *gestures vaguely* for all of that.

Thank you.

Or God bless.

This was all prose once and so was I but I got better do you think maybe someday –

*makes the sign of a man crucified by his haters*

*shrug*

Shall we?

And yes let’s and something in a wicker basket and the smell of the crushed grass.  Having both packed and forgotten to

Perhaps –

Adieu.

Here is where I’ve never been:

 

***

Simon Jacobs curates the Safety Pin Review, a wearable medium for work of fewer than 30 words. He may be found at simonajacobs.blogspot.com.