Hey Check Check; Mike Young Agreed to Be My First Post Cool
From Vouched Online, Tyler Gobble. This month, Mike Young, who he Vouched a little while back, is here to spend some time with us. He bets this will be fun.
Post 1 From Vouched Contributor Tyler Gobble, on Author Mike Young
I’m real stoked to be here. Smalldoggies Magazine is pushing in good directions as is the stuff Christopher started with Vouched, and I’m honored to be able to tag along. I love the posts that I’m able to do at Vouched Online, providing links and brief commentary on online pieces I love. However, sometimes I just wanna go on and on and on more and more and more about this great stuff. Once a month, I’m cutting loose, reviewing books, interviewing people, providing extra writing, etc etc etc. This month, Mike Young, who I Vouched a little while back, is here to spend some time with us. I bet this will be fun.
1. Hey Mike, I just finished We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough and I must say I got real stoked. The voice: definite, fun, and witty, pushed me deep into caring about this book (more on this later with a review). Can you talk a little about this book and how it came to be?
Thanks, man. I like “definite.” Nowadays one of the things I like to think about with poems is the idea of just saying a lot of true things. Or true lines, I mean. Tony Hoagland says that saying true things is somehow antithetical to linguistic play, which I guess means he’s never played charades. When you can’t think of what to say next, put a true line. And then thinking about the line as a unit, thinking about a reader’s attention to a line as a kind of tiny suspenseful captivity, and how to mess with that. But that’s these days. The poems in All Good are from as far back as 2005, I think. There are a lot of different stabs and whirls in there. Maybe the poems fit together like a kitchen where someone doesn’t really know what they want to make, just how they want things to taste, so the kitchen’s filled with all these gadgets — bread-makers, peelers, dehumidifiers. All these different machines and smells. Maybe nowadays my kitchen is cleaner? But I like clutter. I feel calm with clutter. One way to sum up All Good is to say that it’s a bunch of poems concerned with the kind of talking that tricks feelings into vividness. Like you make a joke, which you and someone else both know feels funny, but neither of you can explain why. Which means you can’t explain your connection, but your connection exists. Jokes are just the easiest example. I think there are ways of talking like this for all kinds of feelings. Maybe the book is a book of poems about how talking should be a way to let someone live inside your feelings. But it isn’t. But it is a kind of an invitation.
2. Now, I would love to hear about this new project of yours with the responses, like the ones I vouched that were in Kill Author. Can you please explain this series?
I thought of these questions: “What’s the strongest thing you’ve ever felt? What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever felt?” First I was going to actually ask people. Make some sort of Post Secret website. But I am a lazy blabbermouth. Eventually it got more fun just to make up new responses by myself. Obviously there is no strangest/strongest. It’s whatever feels strangest/strongest in the moment. Kind of opposite to the above, I like the idea of someone going “You know what I mean?” really desperately, and someone else just shaking their head. What I’m reminded of is how my family always had this joke before Christmas about a bag of presents nobody could open. Like a bag where everybody stored their presents pre-25th, so nobody could get out what they were giving other people, to wrap or whatever, because they would inevitably see a gift meant for them. Sometimes I think everybody’s feelings are in a bag like that.
3. I certainly see the We’re All Good voice in these new ones, but something also seems fresh and more varied, as compared to the poems in your book. Obviously, the structural differences change the feel a little. However, I also sense that the voice is more mature, more confident. Am I crazy? How do you feel these pieces differ from/compare to the poems in your book?
Well, I am copping a different voice. Something kind of like a reformed turnpike bully. Actually, I don’t think I’m doing a good job with the variety of voices in the responses project. It sort of feels like they’ve all got the same tattoo. Some of them are a little different. But I think there’s a common one that sort of does this aggressive thing with his shoulders. Like All Good is about not dwelling in a non-explanatory space with definite connections and this response project is kind of like explaining why there’s no connection until your explanation turns to grease.
4. The other day, on HTMLGIANT (on which you are a contributor), Blake Butler asked, “What do you think are the 5 top online magazines, based on content, prestige, and design?” I found this list question really intriguing. Yeah, lists can be super lame, but what’s wrong in thinking about this, as a place to enlighten and discuss? I was wondering if you would like to share your side. What journals are on your list and why?
Here are some multiples of five off the top of my head. Five online journals that I have read regularly for a long time and always admire: elimae, Juked, FRiGG, Octopus, No Tell Motel. Five online journals that are a little newer that feel exciting: Jellyfish, notnostrums, The Collagist, killauthor, Glitterpony. Five online journals where I don’t always read everything but I enjoy what I do read: DIAGRAM, Lamination Colony, PANK, Coconut, Shampoo. One online journal I think everybody should read that doesn’t come out often enough for people to remember it: Alice Blue Review. I also think the journal I co-edit, NOÖ, is pretty cool, the way I think the leaves outside my bedroom window change colors in a good way.
5. Now, I was hoping you’d do my job for me today. On Vouched Online, we do blog posts about recent writing that we really dig, usually accompanied by some brief commentary. What is something you read lately online that you want to vouch and why?
I didn’t read Shya Scanlon’s novel Forecast when it was first serialized across forty-two online journals/blogs, but the impending release of Forecast in physical book form sent me curiously scrounging, and I really liked what I read. I also like this poem “Soliloquy in a Split Screen Freeze Frame” by Micah Bateman in juked. The poem says we are more beautiful alone and then talks about that. I like when poems have ideas. I want to crinkle the earlier thing I said about saying a true thing, because what I meant is in the saying, not the thing. A true thing is something that true-says. It doesn’t have to be be true. Be who? I like thinking about how language comports truth, and I like bizarrely firm declarative statements like “We are more beautiful alone.” Some of what I think of as my most beautiful declarative statements come to me when I’m alone, but they only really matter when I’m not.
END INTERVIEW; THANKS MIKE
I bought Mike’s book, We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough, a few weeks back, from the Vouched Booth (!), and devoured it fast. Here are some thoughts:
Mike Young’s poems here blaze with the coolness of my best friend and the loudness of a good rock n’ roll concert. By this I mean, a tricky balance of pushing me on the edge of my seat, but still I’m like oh this is comfy.
The stretched out, repetitious two-page poem “Now You Try” showcases this idea well, I think. I mean here we go with all these variations of the phrase “[noun] has something to tell you about [another kinda related kinda not but yes we can figure it out and it’s a nice noun].” “Your porch has something to tell you about your ex-girlfriend.” Oh I don’t know if I can handle it. What is gonna come next you think? What’s the fog gonna tell you about? Your heart, but only at certain hours! (my exclamation point not Mike’s). But then it ends, all these lines and words and phrases later as all good poems do. “There’s someone here for you. Do you want me to tell them to go home?” No, I want them to sit down and read these poems that do good things to one’s self-esteem and thought processes.
I feel like these poems talk in a way that make me want to listen, like today I was reading in the library, so many things to steal my attention, babes waiting for the elevator, the smell of coffee, some guy’s headphones seeping out the Beastie Boys, but then, I see Mike’s words (in various poems) and I’m there:
If I keep feeling this way/I will have to use a lot of emoticons.
Hello 2010. I like the way he says this because I’m alive and I see all these computers and cell phones and I know this is a true statement.
How we borrowed the command for quiet/from wind, so when people say shhhh/what they want is for you to feel cold.
When I read that last line, I said, OH THAT IS LOVELY. That is an honest reaction right there. The way it’s a little funny, kinda cute, and really really true.
You’re right:/sometimes I think of my brain as a/coked out deli manager, running around/with pumpernickel and ham in a juggle,/screaming BE MORE RADICAL! at the/sandwich artists.
WHOA MAN. I know risk when I see it. I’m not much of a dare devil, I don’t like cliff edges or hallucinogenic drugs. But Mike Young pushes an envelope across the table here, like lines upon lines of other places in this book, daring me to do something, crazy like keep enjoying poetry.
Which I do. I think a book review should come out and say that. Yeah, this book was enjoyable for me.
My favorite Mike-Young-doing-his-thing moments are when his poems seem to start rolling and they won’t stop, using their words to smash things or recolor or discolor or at least disrupt life a little. I was happy to be on p. 35 of We’re All Good If They Try Hard Enough rather than in an old library.
One of my subtly favorite things about this book is that most of the poems are dedicated to someone. That is nice. We need nice poets.
REVIEW END
Nice Poet Mike was nice enough to let me share this response to the same question as the Kill Author pieces here with you:
17
Sometimes I really like those STAFF shirts. But sometimes I don’t. This is what makes me feel strange. Like do I like or don’t? Should I click like? Make a shirt about the shirts I like? Maybe I should do more research? Before you like things should you know them? Like what are they staffing? Will they build a statue of me? Do I feel more important than last week? Do you realize I stole your toothpaste? If energy is never really created or destroyed, why do we expect feelings to go any different? When you think of energy changing, do you think more of a werewolf or a costume party? Or a girl’s soccer team? Should I just ask? Do the people in the STAFF shirts feel important or helpful? Whatever they feel, aren’t they still obligated to help? Should we feel shame to want them near us? I mean, can they help me? Like right now? Who are they working for? Shouldn’t I admit the distinction between the person wearing the STAFF shirt and the shirt itself? Can I wear one? Do I turn here? Will I be on TV? Can you imagine someone being shaken as I ask these questions? Do you imagine yourself? When will I appear before everyone who knows me but whom I fail to know? Do I mean “before” or “before?” Wouldn’t it be nice to walk beside someone, khaki shorts, a dog maybe, and in silence? And the only way you know what I am thinking is by the way our hands go?
WHEW POST ONE OVER I THINK IT WAS GOOD I HOPE IT WAS GOOD FOR YOU