The Lightning Room with Tommy Pico

–Interview by Diana Clarke

Sing, O Internet, of the poems of Tommy “Teebs” Pico, who wrote “from IRL” and then talked about it on the blog.

1. “from IRL” seems to take as formal inspiration both epic poetry and internet diction. Can you talk about holding those two seemingly disparate influences together?

The idea first came to me after reading “Tape for the Turn of the Year” by A.R. Ammons, a book length poem written originally on one long piece of calculator printing tape. In it’s confines Ammons occasionally employed abbreviations that seemed a sort of proto-texting. I thought, what if I wrote a book length poem that could be sent as one long text message—a poem confined by the frame of the smart phone screen, but open to the shifting grammatical non-rules of texting, internet slang, typos, auto-corrects, etc. I guess holding Epic and Internet together, in my mind, had to do with wholly committing to them both and seeing where they led me.

2. I loved the idea of Muse as “finally giving me / what I want.” The traditional source of inspiration having her own power, deciding when and how much. What is your relationship to inspiration like?

I’m most inspired by conversations I have with people, with art and writing, with myself, with imaginary detractors, with what I should have said to that dumb guy in class ten years ago lol. I think my relationship to inspiration is partially about learning how to listen to what people/art/things are really saying to me, and figuring out how to translate that into writing.

3. Have you seen Mallory Ortberg’s texts from Jane Eyre? Your speaker’s conversations with the Muse reminded me of that series. What do you think it is about texting that allows us to take down big cultural ideas and powers? Is that power true to texting outside of a poem or “literary form”?

I’m not sure? I mean texts are by their nature taken down, so maybe it’s that the multiplicity of conversations—some of them profound, some ridiculous, some completely garbage, some sexy—happen in tandem with each other and mix and stay (chat history). So they become part of the writer’s output, creative or not.

4. You get at so much in the title, “from IRL.” The idea of real life as a place from which dispatches can be sent or reports made. The idea of making reality strange, making poems from the ordinary, the digital bleeding into the daily, becoming it. How do you experience the effects of ordinary technologies (smartphones, etc) in your own life and thinking, and reading maybe?

I play so much Bubble Mania that when I close my eyes I see strings of glowing orbs everywhere. Also in general I encounter new poems and poets almost exclusively on my phone and laptop, I check on old favorites, and make poetry mixtapes & interview poets on my tumblr. Also I have a lot of artist & writer pen pals that I keep up with on email and twitter. So it’s helped me not only access new work, but also gives me a means to connect with other writers and let them know how much their works means to me.

5. Oh! That last line of your piece—”Never tell / a secret to a river.” I loved the recurring r-sounds, the sonic experience of rushing water, and the implied reference to being “connected to nature” or not, from earlier in the poem. “from IRL” also contains a kind of pop cultural river, listing “…Nigerian school girls, gay marriage,/Gaza, Kim Kardashian…” Isn’t a poem a kind of river? A telling of secrets? Can the news be as natural as water?

I would say the news is kind of a flood, in the sense that it’s composed of natural elements but doesn’t ever turn down. Poems can for sure be like a river, IRL in particular because of its length and flow–the final count is just over 80 pages. Also rivers, like poems, really echo. The secret you tell a river travels and bounces and you lose control of who hears it.

6. You also make a sound dis/association around the word Indian—”NDN”—which I read as a kind of queering of the term. Does that make sense, or resonate with your intentions?

NDN is kind of a hashtag term, like IRL or OMG but is not an acronym–which is one of the things that I think makes it exciting. It’s relation to the sound of the word “Indian” I didn’t think of so much as a queering as a really smart reclamation of the term. It becomes something almost unrecognizable to non-Indian audiences. I’ve had some readers imply that I should change it, because the audience might be confused or put off. But I have faith in people’s ability to Google!