The Lightning Room With Tanya Olson

Welcome to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.

December interviews come courtesy of the mind of DeWitt Brinson.

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Tanya Olson’s Ain’t I Pretty Fought to get into our March Issue. Now read as Tanya beats the shit out of anyone who’d try to put Ali in a Greek box, people who can’t not buy tigers, and those who choose not to see. All this before being eaten alive by a snake-shark.

1. Your bio says you have a book coming out, but that was months ago and YesYes Books’ website says Boyishly is out. Wanna plug it?

Heck yeah! Boyishly is beautiful to look at, unsettling to read. It is an American book that asks why we see what we see, as well as what is the cost of not seeing, not being seen. I also like that it is a book that is stern but forgiving to its readers.

2. Muhammad Ali is like Plato in that he’s known as a philosopher, writer, and fighter. Do you think he should be studied in school the same way the dialogues are?

It would seem a shame to lock Ali up in academia, behind school walls. Ali needs to be free to move between worlds- schools are not good about granting the folks they focus on other understandings, so poor Ali would end up like Plato, a one trick pony (Greek, philosopher, allegory of the cave guy) instead of the beautiful complex dude he is. We need to keep the loud Ali who talked and talked alive beside the liquid Ali who hit and danced beside the Ali who is locked inside his own body, who serves as some sort of cultural touchstone. I love that all those Alis live simultaneously in the poem. Once Ali dies, I’m afraid he’ll become only the guy who used to lip with Cosell or some other similar reduction.

3.Why do you think people want wild animals as pets?

Clearly, folks who own wild animals are trying to buy something by “owning” that pet. Boyishly also has a poem How Hard It Is Not To Buy A Tiger that pokes at this idea as well. In the book, it works as the adult equivalent of children pretending to be animals. But I think kids pretending/identifying with animals is one way they learn how to be human; for adults animal identification seems a way to buy a quality they don’t possess. Ali knows trying to become something by owning that thing carries a high cost.

4. What’s the scariest animal?

I asked my nephew, Nicholas, who is 12 and sort of an expert on scary animals, and he said the honey badger “because this creature does not care about anything.” I bow to his wisdom but will also note that both large groups of birds and birds as pets make me seriously uncomfortable. If I had to, I would most like to die in the mouth of a shark; I would least like to die being constricted by any kind of squeezy snake. But Nicholas is right; creatures that do not care about anything are pretty terrifying.

5. Talk about your choice of diction. Why use “et” instead of “eat?” Why the dialectic grammar? What do hear in it that needs to be shared?

“Et” is unusual for me. I don’t really like to capture voice through spelling. “Et” though becomes necessary to have an Ali-esque rhyme- “fed up with being et up.” I do however love capturing voice through grammar. To me it seems the most accurate way to recreate a voice or a person. I love both southern and Irish grammar, sentence constructions, and vocabulary and use them a lot throughout the book. I use them because they rub against standard speech patterns. The book is about the cost of not being recognized in the world; a voice that isn’t standard reminds us of the cost of learning (or not learning)Standard English.

6. Name another poet whose book just came out. If you know of multiple then write them on tiny strips of paper and randomly pick one out of a hat or pot or any object which could be used for busking.

I can’t stop thinking about my YesYes mate Ocean Vuong’s new chapbook No, especially the way he reads the poem American Dreams, especially the way he reads the repeated line “I love my country.” As a poet, there’s a lot to aspire to in that line, that book.

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DeWitt Brinson is a poet. That guy, he does it all.