Some new type of sadness: Noah Cicero talks with Steve Roggenbuck.

[Noah Cicero is now a full-time contributor for We Who Are About To Die. Here he is, talking to fresh thinking ass Steve Roggenbuck (pictured) about poetry, the technocracy, disenfranchisement, and their BMIs.—Ani]

I read Steve Roggenbuck after some writers mentioned him at a party. I read Helvetica and said to myself out loud, “What the fuck is this?” I went to another get-together with writers and did some gmail chatting and kept asking, “What the fuck is this?” But I came to the conclusion it is good when someone reads something and says, “What the fuck is this?” I think there is something original in his writing, he got people talking and a lot people can’t do that with their writing. I think people are talking about it because it is different, it uses very common language and themes and has little to no meaning contained in the poem. The meaning if there is any, is contained in the reader knowing these are the messages of a mentally and emotionally disenfranchised people in their early 20s living during The Great Recession. This is some new type of sadness, the kind of sadness that may be the future of sadness, a sadness that will come from kids who grew up with computers and who have never written on a typewriter (even though I’m only 30 I wrote on an old typewriter ’til 11th grade when I got my first computer, and even after I got the computer I typed my first novel when I was 19 on a typewriter), whose music emphasized synthesizers and dancy drumbeats and not acoustic guitars or the saxophone of the jazzman. They are young and have spent their maturing years knowing that their country was and still is engaged in two wars. A world of consumerism and high debt, foreclosures and cable television. I do not know if Steve Roggenbuck will be able to provide us a novel in the future made with this new language but I’m not going to tell him not to try.

Noah Cicero: I think your poetry has something original about it. It has no meter except for maybe “pita bread is vegan” which might be iambic. No rhyme, no alliteration, no consonance, assonance, pretty much no music at all. The themes appear, to me anyway, to be concerned with the meaningless thoughts of Americans living in a technocracy. “Checking out my BMI online” seems terrible. Seems like a terrible thing to do. I’ve done it. It seems pointless and outrageous to spend one’s time on earth doing such a thing, but most of us have done it. Are you trying to point out to the audience the pointlessness of some of their behaviors?

Steve Roggenbuck: thank you noah. i have a mix of feelings toward the speakers in the book. i think you’re right that a lot of the stuff mentioned in the book is really inconsequential, and i think the poems kind of illustrate how everyone is a big dork for how excited/proud we get about pointless stuff. but then also i have really positive feelings because of the specificity of the actions, the phrasing, and the cultural references. like even if a lot of the actions in the book are pointless, the speakers feel lovable to me. this is what humans (or people like me) do, this is how we talk about it, and this is how we feel about each other and our lives. even if some of the references are unhealthy or disagreeable (one of the b-sides mentions pizza hut), it seems beautiful to me in this weird way like the book just honors experience and life and people’s interaction with culture

NC: When I try to put your style together and make sense of it, I see Ezra Pound’s Personae collection, the poems are very imagist. Are you influenced by the imagist writing?

SR: i haven’t read enough of ezra pound or other imagists to really be influenced directly by them. i have been influenced a lot by translations of japanese haiku though, which maybe has a similar emphasis on image and description without commentary. i’ve also been influenced by some of the language poets who focused on presenting series of images (ron silliman, robert grenier, lyn hejinian)

NC: You mention a lot how you write the poems, how you got the lines from gmail or text messages. Do you think that “how you create the art” is just as important as the finished product? Do you think it is important for the finished product to be able to stand alone without the backstory? Or do you personally prefer to always know the backstory of the creation?

SR: i’m interested in process, but i usually value the finished product more. conceptual writing for example, which is maybe the extreme of valuing process, is a little bit interesting to me, but for me it doesn’t successfully take the place of poetry that is really enjoyable to read. but i mean i am in support of poets doing that work. there are benefits if writing can stand alone without a backstory—like it could be posted on flyers or reblogged more easily without explanation—but i wouldn’t demand that of all poetry. i can appreciate writing without knowing the backstory though. sometimes i read tweets that i really like, and i’m not sure if the twitterer meant them to be ironic or really sincere, but i like them either way

NC: Your writing reminds me a lot of Andy Warhol and the Pop art scene. Your themes always have things everyone knows. Like “Final Destination,” everyone knows what “Final Destination” is. Now this could be construed as you trying to reach a large mass of people by having titles of things everyone knows. Because in America we are very fractured as a people. The right only watch cable shows and read books that reinforce their ideas, the left only watch shows and read books that reinforce their ideas, and the non-voters do the same. Which has led to a death of a common language in America. Are you intentionally trying to find the last remaining vestiges of America’s common language?

SR: i don’t think i’m intentionally doing that. i have some more obscure references, mostly to bands, like genghis tron, daughters, and arsonists get all the girls. i do have a particular audience in mind, mostly people with similar interests/worldview as myself. even if i referred only to widely known subjects, i think my tone would probably prevent me from attracting all kinds of people.

i’m kind of being ironic/sincere in this weird combination that i think probably won’t come across clearly or enjoyably to most people. maybe my poetry is more accessible when i am reading it aloud to people though, as my tone can come across more quickly. i’ve been thinking about switching primarily to video for my longer poems for this reason, among other reasons

NC: In a bathroom at my college on the second floor of Lincoln Hall it says, “X-Men 3 wasn’t bad.” Would you consider that a poem?

SR: my concern is less about what is actually called a “poem” and more about what is understood to be legitimate ways to share writing. anything written in a bathroom stall will probably have just as many readers as an average literary journal, maybe more if it’s a high-traffic bathroom. bathroom stall writing also has less in the way of gatekeepers, which i like, although it might also have downsides like making a janitor’s job worse. my interest is in encouraging writers to reach people in ways that are exciting and less restricted by the literary establishment

even with internet-derived contemporary poetry like flarf, usually there is a process of taking text off the internet, then putting it into a word document, and then having a university publish it. to me that suggests that text on the internet is like “lower” than literary journals, like we can’t consider something aesthetically until it is in a printed university-endorsed publication. i’m interested in shifting the attention to sources like twitter and blogs, and maybe bathroom stalls, where people can write without gatekeepers

NC: Your Tumblr [Ed note: Roggenbuck seems to have two, a personal Tumblr and Internet Poetry, whose manifesto, faithful readers will recall, we posted last month.] has these strange pictures of “internet poetry” like the phrase, “I am so” and then what comes out on the Google bar. How did you come up with the idea for that? And do you think this can exist offline? Or do you think printed books will die as history passes just like writing on papyrus or leather parchment and this is going to be the new poetry?

SR: the google autocomplete poems specifically have been submitted by other people, so i didn’t think of them. sharing screenshots of error messages and odd juxtapositions like that has been done online for a long time; i think putting the label “poetry” on it mostly suggests that readers can experience similar aesthetic enjoyment and profound ideas through these kinds of occurrences, and that poets can express these things with these methods (i think poets can learn a lot from internet culture). also i think it is an assertion that comments or tweets or wikipedia vandalism are legit ways to reach an audience

i think equivalents to internet poetry can exist offline. maybe taking photographs of odd juxtapositions of things. what i like about that kind of practice is that it seems you necessarily become more open-minded about art and writing: you arrive at a place where you’ll consider anything aesthetically or philosophically, even if it wasn’t intentional, of even if you’re the only person witnessing it. in the case of wikipedia vandalism or craigslist poems, there is an obvious IRL parallel in street art and bathroom stall writing