Andy Trebing: Black Metal, "The South" + the poem = "Survival Sites," and more on how "innocence survives to be lost further still."

Italics = me, etc.
the rest = Andy, etc.

Concerning a more permanent pursuit, i.e. your poems—

As an entrance, can you discuss how the title of your manuscript, “On the Impermanent Way,” brackets the figures and metaphors and narratives contained within the book?

I’m calling the mss “On the Impermanent Way,” which is a misappropriation of railroad terminology. The permanent way of a railroad is that which lasts—the gravel bed, the iron/steel bits. It’s such an evocative term that I had to have it, or at least its symbolic opposite. I don’t buy permanence, and the sadness in my work comes from an expectation that all will be lost. Well, that and the fact that I have a sadness condition.

So “On the Impermanent Way” functions in two ways to frame the material within. First, it is a kind of treatise on the subject of impermanence. Second, it is a recognition of my path as a person.

Here’s “Survival Sites (IV)” (Sorry about the poor formatting everyone. The two stanzas are supposed to be in justified prose blocks, but I’ve preserved his enjambments, so everyone knows. Sorry again!):

Caught thinking that we have
begun to drop away, that Seattle,
Maui, Chicago and Baghdad
have—like updrafts—caught us
momentarily: burning paper from
the miswired Chinese lantern of
those close Tennessee midnights,
edges still flickering, a crawling
rim of heat, before the weight of
our own used fuel carries us
ashes down

caught thinking our forged
family is made of blindly
glowing creatures from the
darkest waters, rushing into
focus, just as soon gone, my
memory a camera collapsing in
the depth, I am asked to make a
toast, and fail.

While reading your manuscript, I couldn’t shake the sincere sense that your poems often read as a mind caught in a sort of liminal transition; like, your poems float as nearly narrative as they are nearly lyrical. They’re like a bookmark between where obituaries quiet and prefaces find paths that are over grown and incomplete and begin hacking away. I’m thinking of poems like the “Survival Sites” series (especially IV), the epistolary poems, and how many of these poems seem to gesture at guilt, even anger, you’re experiencing over (y)our inability to fix or carry the broken, and that some – both people and moments – simply must be left in the past. a) How important, for you, is it that your poems actively struggle against these myriad inevitabilities (almost clichés) and resignations? b) Do you feel like this is, in some way(s), an involuntary function of poems and/or their poets?

Here’s a broad statement: I write poetry to make sense of the pleasure/suffering of living. Metaphor is usually the only way I can make sense of that dichotomy, so poetry is the natural vehicle. Outside of that, I have little use for writing it or reading it. I can find ways to justify that proclamation in the poems I love—even the ones that have nothing to do with that subject. I don’t think all of mine are about that, for that matter. That’s just why I do it. So yeah, when Katie Ford says (in “Largeness Like a Hand Over a Mouth”) “When you lift one, they all begin to lift,” I have a sense that our shared experiences of being alive allow us to experience poetry about the writer’s specific thing in such a way that renders it universal. At least, that’s what I think is cool about poems. That and the psychological music.

How, if it does, can my thoughts from and your answer to the previous question be applied to the following poem, “12/9/80”:

We are conducting an experiment
regarding the suspension threshold
of milk for Nestle Quik powder,
both of us scooping mound after mound
from the maw of the tin box. If you dip
the spoon just right, the milk coats the sweet
brown powder then peels away with satisfying
slowness. Our influence on the world
is limited to these glasses of confection.
You wear something pink and Chewbacca’s
on my shirt. Soon we will leave
for school.

First we will discover your mother
sobbing in front of the TV. Dazed and swollen,
she begins to tell us what crazy is. I wonder
if you—a year older—understand any of it
as my blue Keds sink into the grey
shag. Every grownup I see today looks
stunned, just like her. There is more quiet
time in school but a radio plays The Beatles
in the portable during recess. There is no
dodgeball since it rains all day. Or now it seems
that it rained all day.

From withinside a Culture that pursues the deepening innovation and permeation of the ever isolating hand-held device, along with other forms and devices that constitute our First World techno-persona of the individual, can the epistolary poem be understood as a subversive form, almost inherently avant-garde, per se? If so, in what ways specifically?

“12/9/80” has that first image/metaphor that really says the poem’s point long before the 2nd stanza humps its leg. Adding the Quik to the milk is satisfying because it is slow and transformative. The waves that rippled though my life from that very day remain powerful. The loss of my innocence remains incomplete. That’s why people like that poem, I think. It speaks to the way innocence survives to be lost further still.

In your email back to me, you wrote, “I'm also working on a collaboration with Hanna Andrews [author of a / long / division, forthcoming from Tilt Press, and co-founding editor of Switchback Books, http://www.switchbackbooks.com/] starting from Einstein's life and work (with some intentionally poor translation) that appears to be at least a chap-length, exploring emotional terrain that neither of us has really explored before.” Could and/or would you like to discuss this project? How is it different from your own work? What shape is this “terrain” assuming? What else?

I think it began as a common interest in Einstein’s personality/persona, but really has become a project of pretty intense soul-searching. I speak only for my part in it when I say that it accesses my sadness in a way that I have not previously been able to do. Also, she’s doing something poetic about our perceptions that I don’t think anyone else does. I think—and hopefully she won’t disagree—that it’s about experience and communication. It’s an exciting project for me.


Bukowski & other Influences—

The poem, “Fight and Fuck, Fight and Fuck,” from your previously mentioned manuscript, reads as follows:

If Bukowski just
once had said the bottles
lined up were lovely

For a nineteen year-old hayseed, he, along with Kathy Acker and a couple other fiction writers later on, changed my perceptions of what literature could be and achieve. I think, however, we are often meant to feel embarrassed if he as a writer and/or a person(a) has been or is important to us, like we’re indulging a vulgar cliché. I have a Bukowski tattoo, but find I barely read him anymore. Without his work thresholding for me, I certainly wouldn’t be writing now. In your email to me, you mention that “Fight and Fuck, Fight and Fuck” “appears late in the mss because I want it to be clear that I enjoy upending my heroes.” Why, other than simple punk ethos, is this concept important for you? Based on your answer, how is this poem a high proof distillation of your own ethos concerning idol worship?

“Fight and Fuck, Fight and Fuck” works for me in these two ways: it subverts the established idea of Bukowski along with airing my academic disdain for him. I mean, he’s no master technician of the written word, but come on, he’s a good writer. And he didn’t eschew beauty. I think he gets a bum rap. But I take bum raps as par for the course. The indignity awarded him suits him fine, I think. That’s way number one. The other thing it does is piss on the established haiku convention of image=meaning. Right, Bukowski’s bottles are an image of refraction, consumption, idleness, altered-statedness. They’re also a primary source of his meaning and his suffering. When I use “if…just once,” I’m negating the meaning I want the image to have as a reader…I’m trying to render it meaningless outside of the context of Bukowski’s page. It just wouldn’t make for a good haiku, and therefore makes for a really good haiku.

Suck it, Schrodinger

Not meaning to speak for you here, but as someone who holds forth a progressive mindset, how do you reconcile Bukowski’s seemingly involuntary (and I don’t use this word as a subtle excusing, not even close) invocations of misogyny and other forms of bigotry and stereotyping?

Y’know, voluntary or not, Bukowski’s pig-itude works in much the same way that thug rap verses work. It exposes us to the ugly. I think it’s great. I don’t excuse him for it—he wouldn’t want me to anyway—and I don’t embrace it. But yeah, I stayed up all night in Holly Fenner’s room and read her roommate’s copy of The Last Night of the Earth Poems and it shaped me in a way I can’t easily identify.

Ok, in the interest of transitioning away from Bukowski, I loved what you wrote about Allen Ginsberg: “[Bukowski] is among my early influences for sure, as is Ginsberg, another name one isn't supposed to drop. Ginsberg is probably the biggest name in my ‘reasons I write poems’ list -- "Cosmopolitan Greetings" -- came at the perfect time for me.” Why was Ginsberg such a big influence for you personally, perhaps in ways he might not’ve been for others? Also, could you extend those thoughts to say more about why Ginsberg is on the not-to-be-name-dropped list, as you recognize it? (Yea, I suppose we should mutually dedicate this segment to Tony Trijilio, eh.) Also, by way of explication or just pure gushing, why was “Cosmopolitan Greeting” such an important poem for you?

Ginsberg I can speak about more precisely…I think. I read “America” and “Supermarket in California” in high school, the same year I first read “The Hollow Men” and discovered Lou Reed’s New York. I guess there’s as valuable a roadmap to my poetry as any.

Oh, wait: hi, Tony!

Anyway, Ginsberg’s poetry means so much to me because his confessional approach coupled with the sincere outrage hit all the right notes. Even though I rarely read him anymore, I do believe in the power of his vision—a term I use sparingly but which Ginsberg certainly has earned. While I think we all agree that his powers fluctuated wildly, his last poems are as powerful as any I’ve read from end-of-life writers. Writing is such a narcissistic act of WILL that it really humbles me to see the way Ginsberg documented every last humiliation life handed him. That’s an act of generosity few could match.

But let’s do talk about “Cosmopolitan Greetings” for a minute. Have you seen the Jenny Holzer exhibit at MCA? This poem reminds me of her work. Disconnected “truisms” rather than “truths.” I think the King of May is speaking to the world here. There’s a lot of good advice in the poem, and when I first read it I was in the middle of figuring out how to be a lyricist, not a poet. But it haunted me and forced me to change the way I wrote, the way I thought. I mean, this poem does enough mindfucking for a lifetime, if you’re into that. But it isn’t for the seasoned reader/writer in the sense that it is heavily didactic.

But Aaron, just imagine what the world would be like if we all “noticed what we notice!”

I would certainly list the work of Carla Harryman, Samuel Beckett, Mary Ann Samyn, William Wordsworth, Brenda Hillman, WCW, Lisa Fishman, Arielle Greenberg, and George Oppen as huge influences on my own voice and ambitions for my poetics. I would recommend them to anyone. Recently, Danielle Pafunda’s Pretty Young Thing has become significant for me in ways that surprise me, too (her lines and their caesuras are so involved and enveloping). You mentioned that you’re into Graham Foust right now. Other than him, who else are you reading that we should be and why?

On reading, I’ve been doing some research on the many versions of Medea for a project that I’ve long mulled over. But for pleasure, yes, Graham Foust. Such economy! And to hear him read is a revelation if you’ve seen his poems. I like that about poetry and aspire to be the sort of writer who reads aloud in a way that changes the idea you had of a poem previously. Otherwise, C.D. Wright is a major inspiration to me. We’ve talked briefly about her before. But I haven’t been reading much poetry lately.

I have been reading a bit of Debord, as well as some others on the subject of Psychogeography. I left that word out of my earlier treatment of The South because I’m not sure where I fall—do I think I can exploit my experiences that way or do I think my experiences exploit me? Not sure. Also, not entirely coherent. I think the Situationists would appreciate that.

And then, I’ve been reading Batman books. The best writer right now! Grant Morrison. Y’know, he wrote The Invisibles and The Filth, both terrific titles. Also, go read Brian Wood’s DMZ and Local. I sort of want to write and draw my own comic someday but I haven’t found the story to tell yet.


Punk Rock (is dead. Long live USBM. Pls [sic] to subtract the fascism. – writes Andy, just off from this subhead, in his answers email.) as Political and Poetic(s) Influence—

I started buying Metallica tapes when I was in third grade and stumbled on from there. You mentioned The Dead Kennedys Frankenchrist to me. Why was/is this such an important record for you, personally and politically? For you, what other records exist in a similar vein of influence and impact? How and why?

Frankenchrist changed it all for me. Before I got it, I was listening to metal and HxCx shit—all loud fast rules type stuff. The DKs had meaning and a different sound. Just as fast but without the distortion, just as discordant but somehow funnier. “This Could Be Anywhere” gets me off every. single. time. I hear it. Brecht from D.R.I. also made sense to me. I think now, there must be tons of great, important, relevant bands out there that are only known in their little scenes. Maybe on MySpace, too. Those bands will be minor legends like F.U.C.T. was in Nashville when I was a kid. I think that information and ideas are now more accessible, so Punk may ironically be more underground than ever.

I think occasionally bands will break through and make a little money while exposing kids to actual ideas. More often they won’t. Ideas rarely make for good commodity. Long live punk rock.

Often, what becomes important to me about certain records by certain bands is how their lyricists craft associative leaps, through both metaphor and analogy, and how they are just able imagine images for themselves: Alien Lanes (et. al.) by Guided by Voices, anything by Ian Curtis, Relationship of Command by At the Drive in, The Blood Brothers, etc. Also, I respond deeply to how certain types of bands and composers craft/mirror landscapes: Godspeed! You Black Emperor, Mono, Maserati, Pelican’s City of Echoes, Nakano, Unwound, lots of Animal Collective, Mogwai (especially their score for Zidane, un portrait du 21e siècle), If these Trees Could Talk, Mare Vitalis by The Appleseed Cast, Wendy Carlos, and on and on. Much is made of what poets can learn from the craft of fiction, for example; however, especially in early workshops (and I agree with this distinction), much effort is exerted to separate the poet’s lyric from, say, a lyricist’s lyrics. If anything can be, what can we as poets take from lyric writers? What lyricists are important to you and why? If any are, how do you maintain a positive distinction between the genres in such a way that affords learning, some kind of intellectual exchange, reciprocity? Also, what should we be listening to that we might not be?

I was serious before about American black metal. American black metal doesn’t usually have the theatric make up and cartoony Satanism of Norwegian metal, and tends to come from working-class nihilism. Lately bands like Nachtmystium, Wolves in the Throne Room and Samothrace have really gotten to me. If you’re a person who enjoys abrasive music, those bands are spectacular.

Lyrically I just want bands who either aren’t stupid or, failing that, whose lyrics I can’t decipher. Either way. I’m also enjoying some instrumental bands—you and I talked about Pelican—Red Sparowes are great, I think, and both This Will Destroy You and the incredible Russian Circles are doing cool and idiosyncratic instrumental ‘scapes. Now that I’ve typed that, I really want to emphasize Russian Circles. They’re boss. I’m finding that lyrical content more often gets in the way of my enjoyment of the experience of music. That’s new for me. I’d always been a lyrics hound until recently.

If you feel that there is something awry at all, what the fuck has happened to punk rock? I mean, this is a difficult question for me, because I struggle to answer it without sounding jaded or producing generic, overly reductive stock-shelf responses, like “well, you see” followed by “fucking major labels.” But, if you’ve ever been in a serious punk band or had friends who were in one, you know full well that, if you’re/they’re good enough, that fucking crossroads is out there somewhere: either start making a full-time living on the band, maybe be forced to replace some vital members, or break-up. Majors become an unnerving reality, a necessary ambition, good or bad. What do you think? Does punk still hold honest subversive potential or just palpable market potential?

Seriously, since we both came up in punk the culture as well as punk the music, I feel like we should both defend and excoriate. Punk music sucks, kids don’t know shit, and nobody cares anyway. Having said that—hey, little nihilist fag in the football town! HEY! Start a band!


The South—(In the following section, Andy answered all my questions with one encompassing answer. So, my four questions, if you can call them that, precede his one long answer. Enjoy.)

I’ve lived all over the place, but West Virginia tugs at me, relentlessly. I can’t explain it, as there is not much in the way of a “capital-F-future” there for me. Can you identify with what I can only really describe as sentiment?

The Jeff Foxworthy’s of the world aside, I do feel like “The South” is a state of mind, as much as anything else. Duh, right? I have this idea that, wherever you find yourself in the South, well friend, settle in, cause you cain’t get no further “South” than the patch of grass yer standin’ on. If your childhood was like so many of ours, growing up a punk rock kid in the South, throughout the 80s and early 90s, was no fucking joke. Did you have a hard time dealing with coming into your own under such traditionalist worldviews? How did it contribute to your own political/social/artistic mindset?

Coming from West Virginia’s coalfields along the Elk River down in an Appalachian valley has a huge impact on my poetry, particularly my thesis manuscript. My friends who are still living back home talk about WVs landscape with a powerful urgency. We’re even defensive at times, and I often feel myself longing for home. Figuratively or otherwise, has Tennessee’s landscape had any sort of impact on your work?

Two of my best friends, Rebecca and Evan Fedorko, just had their first child, Cormac Benjamin. Before and during the early parts of Becca’s pregnancy, they were talking about leaving West Virginia, getting out cause of all that makes living in WV super difficult (too myriad to delve into here). While I was visiting them last Christmas, Evan revealed to me, half in jest but really more in complete seriousness, that they had decided to remain in WV, quite permanently at that. He said to me, and I’ll never forget this, “How could I allow my kid to be born anywhere other than West Virginia. I mean, what the fuck would be talk about? We wouldn’t have anything in common, for god’s sake.” Could and should a strong sense of American regionalism be perceived as a positive method for furthering how we as a Culture are increasingly coming to cherish “diversity” at deeper and deeper cultural levels? What I mean to say is, for people like us, what happens when we, and this country, lose a sense of “The South?” Could anything positive come out of losing how we understand and recognize ourselves regionally, as a both a Culture and a “Country?” As a Culture, do/can we gain any-thing, per se, if we allow ourselves, purposefully or naturally, unnoticed, to lose how we form Identities through recognitions of regionalisms, colloquialisms, and any other idiosyncratic mile markers? Yeah, this one got a touch out of hand, sorry. Haha, give it go though, if ya want.

It seems like any issues of identity/identity-poetics stem from just the same sort of rumination: what happens when we lose a sense of “The South?”

What I think about losing The South (let’s discard the scare quotes—The South is real, is present) is: GOOD. But to be more honest about it, my answer would be: GOOD/BAD. I can see your friend Evan’s point, and I think you’d agree that there’s a significance to being a Southern Boy even when I’ll sometimes piss on the concept. But I think we’re all becoming (for better and worse) less provincial.
As a state of mind, I’m still in The South. You pinned me earlier in these questions when you said that I carry my past with me as guilt and as anger, and probably most importantly as present. Part of that is that I can never fix the problems I have had/still have and part of it is that my very identity is tied to the events I describe (not always faithfully). My South, it’s nothing like Faulkner’s or McCullers or Percy’s…except, goddammit, when it is. Those writers knew nothing of flophouses, latchkey divorcee pads and endless highways the way I do, but I identify with them on grounds of atmosphere. And I’d wager that it wouldn’t take a person long in honest conversation with me to see that I’m still very much The South.
I think, though, that we’re all losing our provincialism if we want to or not. And that’s a great thing. I’ll wax optimistic here: I just returned from a road trip to see Obama’s inauguration. It was really a terrific event. On the way there I thought about being bused across Nashville to attend a black school in 5th and 6th grades and how formative that experience was for me. I thought about my friends’ kids and how they’ll now grow up in a world where a black man could always be president. There’s one rend in the bloody cloth of The South that pleases me greatly.
Having said that, I love being Southern. I love the food, the vocal cadences, the music (the folk music, I mean), the knowledge of terrain that seems lacking in people I meet from elsewhere. I don’t want to lose it. I don’t want Rebecca’s and Evan’s kid to grow up without it.
It’s like I have an allegiance to it—like a battered wife. Is that exaggeration?
Nope, just Southern rhetoric, y’all.


I’ve really enjoyed this. Thank you for asking interesting questions. I’d love to continue this conversation anywhere, any time. Until then, friend.

A.

Andy Trebing: though he still speaks fluent Tennessee, Andy Trebing works in Chicago, where he lives with a lovely lady, a cat and a dog called Chickenwing. He has a poem forthcoming in The Concher, which comes with chocolate.