Lauren Ireland is like a construction worker, a little older than everybody else on the crew, who's oustanding skill is a paradoxically deft touch with some counter-intuitive piece of equipment like a sledgehammer or an ax. Or a beer-gutted truck driver in their late forties who turns into a ballet dancer when paired with an eighteen-wheeler. Her poems hit you, hard, right where they're aiming. They do maximum damage there and leave surrounding areas intact. Or they take these large, unwieldy, frequently unfashionable things and make them dance.
A lot of these poems are about the infinite ways there are to feel like shit, some of which are pleasant. They're about the contradiction of having the things one is supposed to want, and finding that one does not actually want them, or enjoy them; that the happiness they seemed to offer has, in practice, played out as series of peculiar abjections. Some of these are nonsensical and some of them are ridiculous. They contain variable amounts of pain, some which can be endured, some cannot.
The entire experience is suffused with a very dark vein of humor and is very smart, delivered in the wonderfully complex voice Lauren has developed over a long period of time. Part diary, part unconcious monologue, part somebody trying to come off like Gene Tierney and/or Ghostface Killah. Jaded. Kind of a bad ass. Passing frequently through all these stages, like so many gears to a motor.
Lauren's got two new books out, Dear Lil Wayne and The Arrow. We did this interview over email in March, as AWP came and went in Seattle, where Lauren now lives.
Two
books at the same time, how did that happen?
I don’t know how even one happened. It was a marvelous coincidence—Mike Young of Magic Helicopter Press remembered some Lil Wayne poems I’d read in Amherst, MA in 2009 right around the time I submitted an MS to the Coconut Book contest. I am still reeling.
When/how
were each of them written?
Dear Lil Wayne was a project I started to make myself write at a time when I was feeling especially unfocused and sad. I began writing letters because Lil Wayne was in jail at the time, and letters just made sense—I wanted to connect somehow to an artist who is bold and alive, the opposite of how I was feeling at the time. The poems were written over nine months or so, starting in the summer of 2010.
Obligatory
question: did you in fact send them all?
I
sent some, all on postcards. Most of the postcards were from Cape
Cod, where I went that summer with a bunch of poet-friends. My
favorite postcard had a pretend shark bite taken out of it.
And
the other book?
The Arrow was written over the course of a decade, never as a manuscript, necessarily, though the poems so hang together under specific themes (such as Just Been Dumped, Isn’t Depression Funny, and I Hate My Body) and tones (wry, apologetic, angry).
How
do you work
text toward those tones?
I don't generally think of my poems thematically, but I agree that tone shapes them, however subtly. I'm not sure that I work toward those tones; it might be truer to say that I work IN those tones, writing what I feel while I feel it. I'm rueful more often than not.
Both books are directly engaged with hip hop, both in terms of direct references and, seems to me anyway, a certain swagger in the language. Am I seeing shit?
I hope you’re not just seeing shit. If it’s really there, it has to be, in part, deliberate. I think it’s my knee-jerk response to worrying that I’m coming too close to something too maudlin or romantic, or etc. It feels natural to me; it’s part of the way I really speak and think. If there is something you’d call swagger, it’s certainly a bit of a put-on, as I’m actually terrified, all the time.
Under
what circumstances do you tend to begin writing what might eventually
become a poem?
Under any, if I am lucky. I tend to gather scraps of thought or conversations or ideas or realizations or just clusters of words that may later become a poem, after they’ve germinated for long enough. I’m not a disciplined poet. I can’t sit down every day and just write. I have to feel a poem coming on, like a sneeze. Or the flu. It generally takes me a long time to amass anything manuscript-like.
Why
are there so many feelings in the poems and to what extant are they
real?
There are so many feelings in the poems because I have so many feelings—too many feelings—and all of them are very real, I am sorry to say. I have never been able to write a poem that isn’t about feelings. I don’t know why—I don’t know that I want to try. For me, the immediacy of release isn’t so important as casting that moment—that specific brand of feeling—in amber. I don’t know why that feels so good.
What
manner of technique is required for this casting in amber process,
and what is the goal?
There is no real technique or goal. I think it is a natural process for me, to link past experiences/feelings/ideas to the present. Everything feels like practice for what’s next. It feels important because my memory is terrible. I remember feelings better than actual experiences, and sometimes, poetry can function as a sort of diary for me. If I could pinpoint a goal, it would be: to write a poem. Writing is not easy for me.
Do
you think the presence of feelings in the poems, and their percieved
realness, has effected how they've been recieved?
I have wondered this myself. I don’t have a clear idea of how my poems are perceived. I have written and deleted three different answers to this question.
What else can poetry be about? And how many feelings can a reader or audience take? I think that there’s a natural tendency—in speech or in poetry—to temper painful or romantic feelings with ruefulness or humor, or to couch them altogether in metaphor. I tend toward the former, and I think that if I didn’t, there would be very little to read. It’s often one’s RESPONSE to feelings that’s the interesting part—the part that makes feelings or poems accessible or universal, the part that elicits response. Whatever that may be. Is it good? I hope it’s good. I think.
What
about New York?
Oh, god, I don’t know—it is so much more than a place to me, and maybe that is why it is such a looming figure in my poems, and why I had to leave it. Too many things happened there—I think I embarrassed myself to death and it was just time to go and use up another city (San Francisco, for example). Still, some of the people and things and places I love most are of New York, and so many wonderful things happened there, so I go back again and again. I don’t think it will ever cease to feel like another home to me, or like a place I might live again. God forbid. I hope.
Did
you feel that the city in some way compelled you to write, or to
write a certain way?
Yes,
without a doubt--setting affects my poems tremendously, and New York
felt almost anthropomorphized to me--so easy to blame it for various
embarrassments or heartbreaks. I think, though, that there's no one
way I write about it. Often, I feel tender toward it and that
(sometimes) comes through. When I lived
there, I spent a lot of time thinking there was something really
wrong with New York. Now that I am living elsewhere, I spend a lot of
time missing New York—but not wishing I was there.
How did you find the
subculture of poetry in New York and what effect might it have had on
your work?
For a long time, I found
it inclusive and inspiring and fun, until I didn’t anymore. I
can’t say whether I changed or it did—both, probably. For a long
time, it had me writing a lot. I felt inspired (for better or worse)
by the city itself, my experiences there, and by the poetry I
surrounded myself with. My reading series was a great source of
inspiration for me—I tried to select poets who were doing something
new and wonderful, or who weren’t very well-known.
Later, I couldn’t write
well at all, and had to force myself to plod through poems. That
certainly coincides with a disenchantment with the subculture, and is
a part of why I left. I think that for awhile, there was an emphasis
on fame. One being
famous from poetry. Which is besides the point. Isn’t it?
from
Dear Lil Wayne
JULY
29 2010
Dear
Lil Wayne,
Spirit
animals are bullshit but I have one—it’s a
big
huge knife. I wish I was basically made of
fists.
I wish I was dazzling and tough. I think I
might
be unlucky in love. Do you hate everything
that
isn’t on the inside? I know exactly what you
mean.
AUGUST
24 2010
Dear
Lil Wayne,
Rain
all over the rivers. and the concrete. Gentle
ozone.
Everything is sad and the feelings! Are
you
ever sorry? I am. Lately I have been sleepy
thuggin
over the lazy blankets. What makes
pain?
Stupid. In 8 million years everyone will be
dead.
At least I hope. That’ll teach them. My big
dumb
feelings spread all over. Don’t you wish
people
would quit stealing our shit? Or at least
know
who we are.
from
The Arrow
DR.
TOOTHY’S DENTAL WORLD
What
if those were all your teeth on the floor.
What
would you say if your dream came true.
You
move through the tunnels of me
you
are the toasted odor of decay.
Something
is always about to happen.
Why
are scary things sexy. Why are doctors so tall.
If
the future is a roller rink my skates are white
&
my smile is white & I am dead & I am
couples
skating to Cypress Hill.
I
FEEL HOME
for
Michael Ireland
The
boy with the fox under his shirt
Walking
alone on the lonely street
The
tidal shift, the monsters
Forgetting
what people look like
The
burning of Athens
A
future of pixels & daisies
The
night the lights went out over the snow
How
we are sexy & sad
Music
arranged in order of increasing difficulty
The
wet fireplace breathing into the room
Acanthus
as leveler of great cities
The
arbiters of smoke over cities
Are
you still alive
Energy
becoming sound
Ruins
of the stripped mine
Labradorite
calcite calcite
Terrible
indelible things
I’m
sorry I just wanted you to know
