Gregory Lawless: First, I want to ask you about defeat. Michigan Darkness Movies, your terrific new book, may be your best book, but it is certainly
different than the others. Death Salad and O Gory Baby, for
instance, were moving and tragicomic but propelled, at times, by chaotic,
ecstatic energies, but MDM seems almost entirely devoted to the
aesthetics of incredibly small consolations bordered by glacial catastrophes.
For example, in the book’s title poem, you write, “Eventually we flatten into
the flat landscape,” which strikes me as both a specific description relevant
to the drama at hand but also a general pronouncement about what’s happening to
us. And then later in that poem, the speaker promises to provide both himself
and the reader with something “sad and beautiful” but just “for the next few
minutes.” Could you tell me 1) if I’m right, that the notion of defeat is
especially important to this book, and then 2) if not, what is the emotional/ideological
motivation of MDM?
ROOMFUL OF PORTALS
In this room are 1000 portals.
Brad Liening: Yeah, I think you’re right. I might’ve said “resignation”
but it amounts to the same thing. The gestation of the book began with that
first, title poem you mention. My son, when he was littler, misread the spine
of Michaux’s Darkness Moves as Michigan Darkness Movies, and I spent
several years just turning that phrase over in my head.
I don’t live there now but I was born and raised
in Michigan, in a small town in an area most people would consider rural; we
literally had one stoplight. I thought about all the things from growing up
that interested me, that still resided in my grown-up person. The landscape, a
river I feel particularly attached to, those obsessions peculiar to childhood,
like quicksand and grappling hooks and so forth, as well as specific incidents,
like the car accident at the center of the title poem. I started to put those
events and places and obsessions in poems, which in my mind all took place in
my hometown.
So I think that feeling of defeat or resignation
is twofold: the powerlessness we feel when we’re too young to control much of
anything, including those things of the adult world like regret and loss, and then
examining these things from my current perspective, with a certain measure of
melancholy that has crept up on me in middle age. I will say too that I miss my
hometown and its landscape with a keenness that surprises me. I imagine that
worked its way into the book.
GL: Let’s talk about movies a little bit. There
are a couple of important ways that movies, or the idea of movies, influence
the book. First, there’s both the dependence on and inadequacy of movies as a
consumer product that very occasionally rises the level of art. In “The Past
Isn’t the Past,” you write, “we go home / to watch movies / we’ve seen 100
times / in carpeted basements.” Here, movies seem like a kind like a drug
that’s slowly wearing off, a numbing agent consumed in apparent leisure amidst
larger unsettling events. We see something similar in “Church”: “We went to the
movies / to see whatever was playing that week,” in which curiosity and the prospect
of discovery are undercut by the flatness of the utterance. I know you’re
something of a horror cineaste, and a basement movie man of the first order, so
could you tell me how the wonders, repetitions, and disappointments of watching
movies influence the moods and imagery of this book?
BL: Aren’t movies wonderful and maddening? I love
them. I loved horror movies in particular from a young age, much to the
exasperation of my poor sweet parents. We’d go as a family to the video store
in town to rent VHS cassettes on the weekends, and I’d be drawn to the horror
section like a bee to a flower. I had no concept of schlock or high or low art;
I took it all at face value. I remember being fascinated by the cover of Larry
Cohen’s 1974 mutant-baby masterpiece It’s
Alive and my parents being like, “No, absolutely not.” The concept alone of
Faces of Death scared me.
This went hand in hand with my devouring of
Stephen King and Dean R. Koontz at probably too tender an age, and then I found
out about the Misfits, and so I think my aesthetic sensibility was cemented
before I could drive.
One of the things I love about horror movies is
that they both gamely fulfill genre expectations (e.g., the slasher and his
victims, which has been examined and parodied and satirized to death, as it
were, by Scream and its descendants,
but manages to rise in unique ways again and again) while also providing
studios with safe enough ROI that they allow horror filmmakers a long leash to
try new things and be creative and innovate in a way that tent pole behemoths which
much maximize revenue at all costs simply cannot. Consequently some of the most
daring, provocative, and rewarding movies are horror movies, and they famously capture
the anxieties of the age. I make no distinction here between cheap exploitation
movies and the so-called prestige, elevated horror cinema. They are different
expressions of the same DNA.
As to how all this figures into Michigan Darkness Movies…I’m sure it does
though I’m not entirely clear how. This may be a case of the poet being the
last one to know, you know? Some instances are pulled from life, like the
re-watching of certain movies that were cherished for one reason or another,
often with friends. Or how we’d literally go to the movies to see whatever was playing
that week because this was the analog, pre-internet 80s and 90s, and there
weren’t as many options as there are now. Sometimes you were entertained,
sometimes you were disappointed, and once in a great while perhaps you were
blown away and the course of your life subtly shifted.
But all those experiences with movies, the easy
comradery they engender, the sense of possibility and wonder, the sweet letdown
that comes when a film concludes because you are back to your regular benign life…these sorts of experiences were very much on my mind.
GL: The other important way[1] that
movies function in this book, imo, seems to be in how they can tell a life
story but often fail or just pretend to do so (think of just about any
Oscar-bait biopic). The three “Michigan Darkness Movies” poems begin with the
line “In the movie version of your life…” which is then undercut either by
metaphor “you are played by a ditch full of cattails and I am played by the
wind that makes you rustle,” or by some role confusion: “In the movie version
of your life, you play me and I play you.” Could you elaborate on how movies
operate as a biographical or autobiographical artform relates to your poetry?
BL: Mainly as a source of private amusement, I
think. I hope that’s not a disappointing answer.
To elaborate with respect to MDM, I was thinking about that old question of who would play you in
a movie version of your life, and how those sorts of life stories are told. It
struck me as impossible to answer beyond the most superficial manner. Our lives
are so intimately bound up with the lives of others, the landscape, fleeting
emotions and motivations which we may be only partially aware of. I was
definitely thinking of how inadequate movies are in telling a life story, how
preposterously they sometimes pretend to do so, and how crassly transactional all
that can be. Oscar-bait, indeed, the very worst kind of movie. Those
responsible should be punished.
But I considered all those things that make us who
we are and tried to fashion poems from them. At one point I made a mental list
of everything I wanted to work into poems. Ditches, cattails, deer, apple
trees, and so on. For instance in one poem the speaker says he’s played by a
potted plant. A silly line, sure. My mother has a Boston fern that grew from a
cutting of her mother’s Boston fern, and I took a cutting from my mother’s.
That plant has traveled a fair distance across the Midwest and through three
generations. And I was thinking about all these things, amused and interested
at how much emotional weight this stuff carries. It’s emotionally truer than most
biopics, but, you know, at the end of the day it’s also just a plant.
GL: There’s a certain kind of poem in this book,
for example “Roomful of Portals,” that uses terminal jokes (punchlines) as a
sort of anti-epiphany, or a qualified epiphany. I’d like to quote this poem in
entirety so people can see what I’m talking about, and because it made me
laugh, but also because it’s a common and delightful mechanism in your
emotionally overcast book. So, here’s the poem, and then, could you tell me
about this move you make and why you employ it from time to time?
In this room are 1000 portals.
Some go to silos.
Others go to the woods.
One takes you to the inside of a deer.
The inside of a deer
is hot and dark
but not bad.
The inside of a black hole
is cold and dark.
You’re nowhere in particular
and you contain everything terrible and beautiful:
Beer in zero gravity.
Burning leaves.
All your friends and
a small dog named Shadow
you’re not allowed to pet
because he’ll pee.
Others go to the woods.
One takes you to the inside of a deer.
The inside of a deer
is hot and dark
but not bad.
The inside of a black hole
is cold and dark.
You’re nowhere in particular
and you contain everything terrible and beautiful:
Beer in zero gravity.
Burning leaves.
All your friends and
a small dog named Shadow
you’re not allowed to pet
because he’ll pee.
(h/t Rejection Letters)
BL: There’s something funny about defeat. Although
I’m as guilty of this as anyone we shouldn’t take ourselves and ambitions or
experiences too seriously. A failure to appreciate what small consolations life
offers is ordinary and terrible and so the failure to appreciate something
truly awesome – like a portal or a whole roomful of them – is so stupid it’s
funny. Not learning strikes right to the heart of the human experience, I’d
say.
I’d like to add that Shadow was a real dog
belonging to a friend of mine.
GL: MDM is a political book. In the short
poem “The Enemy of My Enemy Is Not My Friend,” you write:
The billionaire begets a millionaire.
The millionaire begins plotting
to kill and eat the billionaire.
I’m on the sidelines. Then I fall
into the river and am carried away.
(h/t Apocalypse Confidential)
To unite some of the themes we were talking about
above, this poem tells a couple of different life stories: that of the billionaire
and his upstart rival, the would-be usurper millionaire, and then, at the
margins of history, the defeated speaker, who’s explicitly “on the sidelines”
but then has this hilarious exit, which is both passive and tragic. The poem as
a whole is a brutally effective microcosm. What irl events give you this
“sidelines” to falling-into-the-river feeling? And how can social calamity be so
good for your art?
BL: Oh dear. I’ll try not to get up on my soapbox
too much. Certainly billionaires and the billionaire class give me that feeling. Their very existence is
an affront to common decency and a testament to entrenched inequality. The
gruesomeness of politics and our debased, nearly psychotic discourse around it.
Climate change and its profiteers. Cops and state violence. I’m not saying anything very original
here, I realize. It’s the usual dismal litany of injustices in America. The
list goes on.
James Tate said something in an interview once
about refusing to walk around in his tears all day despite the very good
reasons one could do so (I think this was around when the abuses at Abu Ghraib
became known), and I’ve had to limit my news intake lately because I was
getting too depressed. It’s a difficult balancing act we must undertake. We
should be conscious of our world and strive to make it better in our own small
ways while refusing to be ground into dust by its ugliness and corruption. I
hope this poetry, the very smallest of ways, admittedly, is a step in that
direction. Making art is a celebratory, life-affirming act even if that art is
about terrible things. Dean Young said something like this in an interview once,
too, and I remember him saying in a workshop that we can’t give in to despair
because despair leads to silence. We can try to poke some holes through that darkness, as noted above.
I bring up Tate and Young here because I love
their work and it’s meant a lot to me over the years. I’ll take my cue from
people who are smarter and more talented than I’ll ever be.
GL: You’ve been around for a minute, publishing
poems and books for about 20 years now, and I’d like to ask you about what’s
happened in that time. Who were you influences when you started writing and
what did you want to achieve in your work when you were just starting out (in
school and shortly thereafter) and who and what influences your work now? What
do you want to do with your poetry in the years to come?
BL: I started writing in earnest in college because my
friend Chris (Hi, Chris!) lent me his copy of Russell Edson’s The Very Thing That Happens. Where he
got it, I don’t know, because I’ve not seen another copy since, but it was
illustrated with Edson’s weirdo woodcuts and it was utterly unlike anything I
was being exposed to up to that point in my life. I was an English major and
while I was a good student I was also kind of hopelessly unoriginal in my
thinking and writing (some might still say so). I would read Eliot or Dickinson
or whomever and could turn out an okay essay on it, but at the same time it
meant nothing to me. Edson, for whatever reason, struck a chord. Maybe it was
his funny darkness, his deceptively easy narratives. Whatever it was it made me
want to write.
He and Young and Tate were my touchstones for
years. And you know how it goes – you find out who the people you like read and
like, and then you read them, and so on. In that way I moved away from the
modernism I found so dry and tweedy and into stuff that felt alive and jangly,
that spoke sometimes mysteriously to me and my life. Almost to a fault I
gravitated to writing that felt funny and imaginative and wasn’t afraid to take
associative leaps and use pop culture signifiers or items and junk from a world
I recognized as akin to my own.
What I wanted to achieve when I started, I don’t
know. Validation via publishing, which is both stupid and understandable.
Mostly the urge to just write a poem that’s really good, I think, to see if I could
actually pull off that feat. That’s still a driving force.
Now I draw most of my inspiration from my friends,
people who are trying to live righteous lives, working jobs, raising their
kids, making art. There’s something electrifying about watching your peers and
buddies do cool stuff. I love picking up their books and zines. Some of my friends
are musicians and it’s awesome to witness them still making music and cranking
out basement tapes. Often this has no real relation to my poetry in that
there’s no direct correlation but it makes me excited about making art, you
know? It makes me want to stay engaged. And in terms of the years to come, I
just hope that my best work is still ahead of me.
Gregory Lawless is the author, most recently, of Dreamburgh,
Pennsylvania (Dream Horse Press, 2022).