Monday, April 7, 2014

The Game Belongs to Lauren Ireland

An interview and 4 poems 

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?

 











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