Interview w/ Spencer Madsen

Here, I have posted a second interview, with Spencer Madsen, that I have done for my project on flarf poetry, asking about stylistic diversity in flarf, his influences, and popular culture references, amongst other things.

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Do you find that flarf/internet poetry allows for a fair degree of stylistic diversity?

Yeah, I’d say so. Flarf and internet poetry, like most things, are good and clever sometimes. Flarf to me feels fun. I’m not sure what exactly is meant by internet poetry. I think enough people have written on the ‘democratization of poetry’ via the internet, I don’t need to talk about that. What I’m interested in, regarding the relationship of poetry and the internet, is an unprecedented type of interaction between people that can only occur on the internet. Writers of ‘internet poetry’ have said that their work could take place in any period, that the medium makes little difference. I disagree with this; I believe that the internet can catalyze relationships, frame interaction uniquely, allow for an expedited repartee with references to internet-culture specific themes and forms of expression, and facilitate a distanced mediation that does away with the mundane aspects of routine life and emphasizes the vulnerable things we think. I don’t think I could engage in an interaction remotely similar to that I have on tinychat, gchat, message boards, facebook, twitter, etc, through anything but these platforms. 

Much of your poetry seems to follow a ‘train-of-thought’ format; to what extent would you argue that more pretentious lexis detracts from the expressive element of poetry?

I remember Poncho writing an essay discussing this. I enjoy academic poetry a lot. The act of deconstructing a poem can be very rewarding. For me, this process and overall style of poetry is distinct from the sort I tend to write. I’ve always felt it fair to dub my poems enjambed prose, and not at all a detraction. The enjambment, to me, makes reading more pleasant: the space between words isn’t just emphatic, it’s nicer to look at. Although I compiled the majority of my work into a physical book, everything in it was originally intended to be read online. Staring at a brick of text against a luminescent white background isn’t an enjoyable way to read anything, and I keep that in mind whenever I write online.

Who and what inspires you to write and be interested in flarf/internet poetry?

The majority of a million bears was written before I was aware of any sort of online community of poets. My brother designed a small internet magazine a while back called NoRobot.org (now defunct) that he and I and some of his friends edited. I would post poems on that site and publicize them on facebook. One day Steve friended me, then Poncho, who complimented me in the friend request message on my poems. This was before Steve came out with i am like october when i am dead. My poetry was influenced then, initially, by Tao Lin alone, though I’d been a fan of Teasdale and Dickinson in school. I read cognitive behavioral therapy and eee eeeee eeee and shoplifting from american apparel  and you are a little bit happier than i am and began writing somewhere after one of those books what much later became a good portion of a million bears. Now I feel influenced by everyone in the community. 

In what elements of your work do you think your influences are most reverent?

If reverence for influences are strongest in any single element of my work it is in the vulnerability and blunt anxiety I employ in a lot of poems. I grew up listening to stand up comedians, have always been a reader of novels and sometimes poetry, I studied acting from a young age and attended a performing arts high school for four years. I’ve always been fascinated by issues of time, anxiety, depression, failure, loneliness, and the rest, and how each aforementioned medium explores them. These issues are all commonalities between people, and understanding them is essential to understanding what it means to be human. I work hard not to shy away from putting out thoughts that ring with frightening insecurity. Those thoughts interest me most, and I admire those whose work is centered around them most, too.

‘a million bears’ seems to have a sense of continuity to it; do you think this reflects an element of flarf that enables the prolific nature of flarf/internet poets?

a million bears is structured chronologically. Even the pages of tweets, save those of Kanye West and 50 Cent, fit in timeline with the staggered poems. I wanted the book to read as one long poem with natural breaks, where the author and reader both make necessary use of a walk outside. I wanted the reader to feel as engaged with the text as I did as the writer, and I felt that page numbers, table of contents, titles and other organizing tools would detract from an emotional arch I tried to achieve. In writing the thoughts recessed in my mind, I hoped it would affect the reader into almost thinking the writing was a transcriptive record of their own mind and emotions, that they could relate to the text as directly as I do. This seems grandiose, I hope it’s clear that I’m describing what I wanted, not what I achieved. 

Do you think flarf is sustainable as a poetical movement to the extent of continuing to be able to evolve at the rate it has been?

It’s hard to gauge how contained our community of internet writers really is. People make all sorts of distinctions: HTML Giant seems to be pretty widely read and occasionally I’ll see our relevancy there, which to me points toward a widening of boundaries. I went on an okcupid date with a girl who not only heard of Steve but had his first chapbook in her bag. It’s exciting when it appears that we’re not just writing for each other. So when talking about the growth of flarf, or speculating on the longevity of it, it’s really hard to say. How insular is our usage of it? The flarf that I see on facebook to me is a creative, often absurd way to have fun with each other, and to lay claim to a sort of communication on facebook that’s far from a status updates announcing one’s trip to the vet or some polemic link to an article. Flarf can be commentary, drawing attention to the blatant tactics of advertising. It can satirize pop culture by listing the amount of misspelled pages devoted to Justin Bieber. To me, flarf is graffiti. 

When reading/writing/interpreting poetry, to what degree do you feel the poet’s meaning is important if opposed with the reader’s interpretation? 

I find that the poet’s intention and the reader’s understanding are pretty consistent on the internet. William Carlos Williams’ The Red Wheelbarrow can engage a classroom for days over the intended meaning of the slight, succinct poem. For most of the internet’s poetry, as far as intention goes: I don’t think there’s much to debate. The conversation to be had around much of the poetry doesn’t regard distinctions in intention, it is very often about relationships with each other, the internet, and how the two affect one another. It seems through survey of other poets that the goal isn’t to obscure meaning, it’s to make meaning more available.

You have presented certain excerpts from internet conversations as poetry; in a similar vein, do you view some spoken conversation as performance poetry of sorts?

It’s important for language to be physically (in opposition with audibly) represented on a page, so that the reader can dwell on diction, sound, form, [technical poetic terms], and thereby make the distinction between poetry and prose. Poetry emphasizes words as singular entities placed beside other bits of individual meaning that sometimes compose a greater idea, and sometimes don’t. Reading prose, specifically bad prose, gives the reader leave to trounce over words in the name of plot. The two genres of writing are not wholly distinct, and ideally prose should be read with just as much care as one reads a poem, but this attention is difficult to pay toward spoken conversation, with its complexity of interaction and speed. This doesn’t exclude spoken conversation from meaning, rather it excludes us from finding it. 

How important do you think references to elements of ‘popular’ culture are in poetry; how important do you think references to elements of ‘underground’ culture are in poetry?

Neither are distinctly important to me. I began a million bears with a retweet of Kanye West, and stagger the poems throughout the book with retweets of 50 Cent as well. To me, these tweets aren’t about the celebrity behind each, but about relief from my writing. I had some particularly heavy poems in the book, and I wanted to maintain the mix of vulnerability with humor, and found an absurdly-narcissistic tweet from a rich pop-culture icon to be adequately efficient in both comedic irony and in the organization of content. I’m not sure what would qualify as underground culture; perhaps my friends and contemporaries? I don’t, though, see any of them as underground because we readily put ourselves and our work out into the public domain, it just takes a little initiative to find us. 

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Links:

• Spencer’s Twitter
• spencermadsen.com
• Spencer’s Tumblr