kicking your ass

PUT OFF

The exhibit about lungs at the defunct health museum
Reeked of cold french fry worms smashed at a greasy bag bottom,
Between posters of charred tissue and rubber prop organs
Saying hey, look how your father is going to die someday
And I gagged.
The foam blocks forming human hearts gave a rigid grin of dust-clogged cracks,
Holding a cute tray of outdated phobia pamphlets.
The volunteers smoking at the door didn’t flinch,
Just waved the bloated breeze of salt and mildew backwards, inside.
Some sort of trick question stuck, I figured on purpose.
Would I still get a kids’ meal on the way home,
Nostrils twisted by fast food in formaldehyde?
I did but it’s been lost in my sinuses ever since,
Dreams of antique brown dessert cases unlocked with a fork
That disintegrate into foul fire alarms in my mouth.
When I realize I’m asleep, I wish for anything
With a quieter taste.

Noll Griffin is a visual artist, writer, and musician based in Berlin, Germany. His poetry has appeared in The Purposeful Mayonnaise, The Wild Word, and Reap Thrill among others. You can find him on Instagram at @nollprints or on Tumblr/Twitter/Bluesky under @nollthere.

This week, kicking your ass welcomes to the literary beatdown, Kat Giordano, who has a new poetry book out or something. It looks like this:

We talked about it. And many other things. It’s formatted as an interview. The kind with questions and answers. It looks like this:

Thumbsucker opens with the line “I don’t know what you people want.” Quite an antagonistic way to start a collection of poetry. Why do you hate your audience?

I don’t hate them.

No?

It’s a kind of half-endearing exasperation, like when I give a new stuffed toy to my dog (whom I would kill and/or die for but who is, inherently, due to being a dog, a little shit) and she immediately runs into the bedroom and destroys it and throws the stuffing all over the room and then I have to clean it up. You can’t really be mad or feel resentment, because they can’t help it. They’re doomed to go into a poetry collection, even one written by me (bless their hearts!), with a certain set of expectations, the way my dog is doomed to activate her otherwise deeply-repressed instinct to maim and kill small game whenever I hand her a stuffed animal to “play” with.

So, what you’re saying is that readers are little shits.

In fact, it’s difficult for me to imagine someone opening up a book of poetry and not needing to get their legs a little bit at first, so to speak. There’s so much baggage you have to shake off, even for the most well-read person, even in the best of circumstances, to just read and appreciate a poem for what it is and not project all of your expectations/hopes/fears about what poetry is (don’t ask me) or what you hope poetry might do for you (most likely nothing). With that in mind, it’s better to set the tone early. Rip the bandaid off.

I like this. A poetics built around reader’s and the poem’s discomfort and suspicion of the other. 

There’s this poem I love by one of my favorite (and, in my opinion, not nearly widely-read enough) poets, Stephen Dunn, called “Poem For People That Are Understandably Too Busy To Read Poetry,” and it’s a lot less antagonistic than “Real Art,” the opener to Thumbsucker, but it assumes an audience that doesn’t know how they got there. One of my favorite passages, toward the end (but not the closing of the poem, which I won’t spoil) is as follows:

But don’t give anything for this poem.
It doesn’t expect much. It will never say more
than listening can explain.
Just keep it in your attache case
or in your house. And if you’re not asleep
by now, or bored beyond sense,
the poem wants you to laugh. Laugh at
yourself, laugh at this poem, at all poetry.

…and I guess I just think that’s a kickass way to meet poetry and to meet a reader: halfway, sure, but not without a little skepticism, or in my case hostility.

The title, Thumbsucker, evokes naivete, childishness, maybe even an unwillingness to grow up. Why does the past hold a grip on these poems?

The past holds a grip on these poems because of an overcorrection. A large part of my life has been spent trying to repress this part of me that wants to be adored and doted on and who feels entitled to some probably impossible level of unconditional love and care and consideration. But the thing is that denying the very human impulse to seek out these things doesn’t actually make you humble or more likely to attain them. It just makes you behave in ways that make you look like an asshole.

Is that the motivating factor in writing Thumbsucker—a need to be paid attention to? A need to be adored? A hostility?

All of the above.

A triple threat, then.

But it’s not so much that these things were a motivating factor in writing this collection specifically but that they’re a motivating factor to all of my writing. I think there’s a version of me in some other universe who felt seen and heard and understood enough, frequently enough, earlier in life and thus never developed this constant nagging impulse to share and be known and get attention, and if those impulses didn’t exist, I probably wouldn’t have written any book at all, let alone this one.

How do you approach putting a book together if the poems arise from similar places?  

My approach to writing poetry collections thus far has basically been to just write a bunch of poems and then the throughline emerges later, once there are enough of them. And in this case, I ultimately found that the throughline was me grappling with this very concept, trying to be upfront about the need to be paid attention to and adored. I already see different themes emerging in the poetry I’ve written since, even if the impulse behind the writing of them is (largely) the same.

Some could say that this drive for attention and adoration is unhealthy. Sinful, even.

There are so many people who would be better off just admitting that they want more attention, that they’re angry that they’re not getting enough attention, that they’re bitter because the attention is going to someone who they think has suffered for it less or is otherwise less deserving. If you refuse to do this, if you reject these very normal, very human desires in favor of some cloying performance of humility, people sniff it out after a while. Because your inner child, that little baby who didn’t get enough emotional validation from mom and dad (for example…), is bored of the little corner of your mind where you’ve cuffed it to an exposed pipe and now it’s throwing handfuls of its shit all over the room.

Wait, that’s the premise of my Saw/Boss Baby crossover fanfic.

What were we talking about? Oh yeah, so I finally untethered my ugly, red-faced baby from the basement and now it’s throwing its shit all over the room. It has a lot to say and a lot of lost time to make up for. I just realized I worked so hard to express what is essentially just a shittier (literally) version of the “inner child” phenomenon that pop psychology has already been chewing on for a couple decades.

Tell me, what does your inner child see when they look at this?

An angry pig. See below:

Very interesting. And what is it about the unstoppable crawl of time that terrifies you?

I’m not answering that question, because I don’t think I should have to answer that question to someone who is older than me.

Not that much older. We’re basically the same age, really, in a geologic sense of time.

…

So, the book traffics in a confessional mode, both in the poetic tradition, but also in the Catholic sense. These poems create space where the speaker(s) are allowed to reveal and unburden themselves of their transgressions. What is it about this mode that you find appealing?

Hoooo boy I am grinning like a Cheshire cat right now, you have no idea. I’m going to answer this kind of methodically, in parts…

The book traffics in a confessional mode, both in the poetic tradition, but also in the Catholic sense.

[raised Roman Catholic voice] Those are separate things?

These poems create space where the speaker(s) are allowed to reveal and unburden themselves of their transgressions.

Reveal? Yes. Unburden? …Check back.

What is it about this mode that you find appealing, and why do you think it’s acceptable to implicate the reader in the sins of your poetry?

[raised Roman Catholic voi—] I’m a little bit of an exhibitionist.

Not just in the sense that I want to air my dirty laundry to the “masses” (the roughly 43 people who will actually read my poetry collection)—

Hold up. 43 readers? Those are rookie numbers. Let’s try to get that number up to 44. Who do you think needs to read this book and what will Thumbsucker do to kick their ass?

I don’t think you were asking me to name a specific person so much as “make up a guy,” but I’m going to name a specific person (or people) rather than make up a guy.

Yes! Kick their real, non-fictional ass, Kat!

A few years ago, I basically lost an entire group of friends at once during one of those breakups that feels like a bitter divorce.

Juicy. Go on.

A lot of the poetry in Thumbsucker (“Playing The Hits,” “Tracing The Hole,” “Friends,” “Bloodletting…,” “The Queen of Drag”—even the title poem alludes to some of those memories) is me trying to make sense of those relationships, the sudden loss of which fucked me up for a very long time and left me feeling like a marooned un-person without context. Having to re-learn how to get close to people again was not easy for me, and I was surprised by how difficult it was. After all, I’d been spoiled. I’d had one of those sitcom-type friend groups where you could just walk into someone’s apartment randomly and be welcomed with open arms, where you never had to “make plans,” because you always had some vague sense of what you were doing and who you were doing it with. It was such a magical, love-filled time in my life that felt like it ended abruptly, and too soon. And because we were all young and not emotionally available with each other unless we were drinking, I don’t feel like I ever truly expressed what they—and that time—meant to me.

So, if there were some way to get those people to read this collection, or at least those poems, and watch me struggle with those feelings but ultimately land at some kind of wistful reverence for everything that group of friends represented to me… well, I guess it wouldn’t improve their lives, but it would give some weird combination of vindication and closure. I guess it’s a self-serving exercise all the way down. I don’t think these people even think of me enough to “stalk” me online, but in case you’re here reading right now… well, read the damn book.

Sorry, I tuned out. Why do you want to implicate these readers in the sins of your poetry?

I want to let people in on the deeply humiliating process of trying to understand what the hell I am, abstractly, and whether I’m “doing this right.” It’s not (just) that I get a thrill out of letting the world in on my sexual proclivities and my gender angst and that weird dream I had one time about having a threesome at what appeared to be an adultified Scholastic book fair.

I think the Catholic Church would consider that a sin.  

All of those tiny admissions are just incremental steps in some broader, more pathological endeavor to figure out what The Thing is—you know?

I do know. John Carpenter’s 1983 classic film The Thing starring Kurt Russell, Keith David, Walter Brimley, et al.

The Thing that I feel all the time, a gnawing, this breathing and mutating thing that I wish so badly I could open up a robe and expose like a questionable mole. The kind of thing you can biopsy and get a definitive answer about. And I know The Thing isn’t just one thing.

Well, no, it’s not one Thing. The Thing got a prequel in 2011 by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, though, the original film was inspired 1951’s film The Thing from Another World, which was based on John W. Campbell’s novella Who Goes There. That’s at least, what, four Things?

I think I know deep down that The Thing can never actually be expressed or shown to anyone, but I have this gambler’s mind about it, you know? Like, sure, I’ll never be able to touch it, because it’s not something words can touch, but if I just draw another outline—an even tighter one this time—around everything in my life that is not The Thing, maybe it’ll reveal itself in the negative space. I know it won’t happen. I know it’s not possible. But I must. And it feels better when you watch. I don’t even care if you like it.

Let’s get real. What’s your least favorite poem in this collection?

“Questions,” hands-down.

Kick that poem’s ass, Kat!

I actually still love most of the stuff in here, authentically, which is impressive considering how many times I’ve had to read these poems over the last ~year or so and how many more, better poems I’ve written since this batch was locked in. But “Questions” bothers me in part because I think it’s one of the oldest ones in the collection and in part because I have never been 100% convinced it belonged in the collection but just left it in there for some reason. I think it could have easily been in Tell Me You’ve Earned It instead, given the subject matter. But because it wasn’t engaging with The End of a Relationship in that same like, unhinged ass way that the other poems in Tell Me did, I left it out, and it made it into this collection. Not to mention the fact that, in my opinion, the emotional conclusions it comes to are a little too “easy,” like it feels purely narrative rather than truly reflective or like it’s using the personal as a way to grasp at some more expansive (if still mostly personal) emotional truth. Sorry if this is somebody’s favorite poem in the collection, I guess, but I know it isn’t. If I were putting this book together again, it would be cut.

What’s your ideal experience when reading a poem? What do you want to get out of it?

I’ve sat on this question for a minute trying to find something less cliche to say, but unfortunately I am still stuck on the very vibeless answer of “I want it to make me feel something.” Which is so…you know.

We call that answer the poet’s cop-out.

But it’s true! I don’t read poetry for some utilitarian purpose, even in an emotional sense. I read poetry because it has, in my opinion, a unique capacity to illustrate how impotent language is in the face of the things that make us feel the most desperate to use it. So, I like when a poem about love ultimately demonstrates that writing a poem about love is like trying to slice through a loaf of bread like a toothpick. I like when a poem about grief ultimately demonstrates that there’s nothing you can say about grief, because if you could just say it, then you wouldn’t be writing the poem. Like the best poems exist because they are impossible, and they often are written out of some delusional optimism that this time, it will be possible, that it will serve the purpose it needs to serve, that you’ll be able to say the thing you need to say, only to fall short again and then persist as, like a monument to that falling-short. That’s how writing a good poem feels to me, too, so I guess it’s really the same experience. You start out convinced you’re going to really say The Thing this time, and of course you don’t, because you can’t, because nobody can, but by the end you don’t care anyway.

Purchase a copy of Thumbsucker here.

Kat Giordano was born in Philadelphia and it’s been downhill ever since. Their most recent poetry collection Thumbsucker came out in April with Malarkey Books. They tweet at @giordkat. Kat is very cool. You like them.