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] Continue reading →