Interview: Writer Gregory Sherl
So why the fuck are we taking ourselves so seriously?
From Vouched Contributor Tyler Gobble — Gregory Sherl; Is “Where You Were” Realer Than “What You Were Feeling?”
The Oregon Trail is the Oregon Trail by Gregory Sherl comes out rubbing its bodies, the bodies contained in the poems, the bodies contained by the game, by the idea of the game, rubs the idea of the game and of living against one another. Everywhere are bodies rubbing against bodies. In sex yes but also in death, in birthing, in a bison becoming pounds of meat rubbing against the wood of the wagon, in metaphor rubbing against reality. The Oregon Trail is the Oregon Trail is rubbing, or maybe waxing, that weird line where imagination rumbles and reality sneaks around.
With this book bouncing fresh around me, I emailed back and forth with Gregory about the book, his writing, his feelings, the online/small press world, etc. Below is that goodness.
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NAILED Q 1. Maybe it’s strange to think about the order of collection so immediately as I have, especially odd to start out an interview discussing it, yet re-reading the first poem I’m ecstatic by how perfect it is as a first poem. It hides nothing about what’s to come. The first poem is “The Oregon Trail taught me how to love” and it teaches us how to read these poems.
In my dreams we always ford the river.
In the wagon I cover you with blanketswhen you sleep. You often dream of ghosts
while I hunt bison wherever bison live.
Here we know the referential game to be the ground but what is the air is hinted then revealed:
You look better in 3D.
I touch your breasts with my fingertips.
Then I touch your breasts with my whole
hand. I swallow the idea of independence,
finding the West before the dirt was soiled
by factories that build heat-seeking missiles,
amusement parks, & chain restaurants.
So now, it’s bigger than a game, perhaps it always has been (read: growing up; read: game as metaphor always; read: how every clicksteptouch is a moment towards somewhere else). Now more than ever, it’s clear, these poems reach from, or maybe into, that windy road from past to present, sometimes resembling future, twisting nowthenwhen all in a windgust and out comes these poems, time obsolete, place kinda irrelevant as long as we/they are moving, and it’s emotion, whether it’s love or fear of death or an ox being branded.
[NAILED Actual Q 1.] So question time: how did this first poem scuttle to the front? Also, where did you feel these poems rising from?
SHERL: I am going to answer your questions backwards — I hope that is okay. Please say it’s okay.
To be honest, these poems started as a joke. I was in an MFA program that I shouldn’t have been in, surrounded by everyone taking themselves so goddamn seriously. Yes, poetry is important. Yes, poetry can be sexy and sad and say important things all at the same time; it can make your heart bigger and smaller or even make it go away and that doesn’t make any sense. It’s amazing that something can do that — but no, poetry cannot change the world (nor, do I believe, it should really attempt to).
So why the fuck are we taking ourselves so seriously?
A couple weeks before I wrote my first Oregon Trail poem, which I believe was “The Oregon is a Chinese Restaurant on Christmas Eve,” my friend sent me the original Oregon Trail computer game. I hadn’t played it in years and immediately became hooked all over again. So I was sitting in a workshop every week, reading poems that were trying to be bigger than they needed to be, and continually getting in trouble for talking about pop culture in my own work. So instead of shying away, I said fuck it.
Now there’s a book about The Oregon Trail computer game.
Back to the first part of the question: I’m not sure how “The Oregon Trail taught me how to love” made it to the front of the book but when it was time to order them, it was the only logical choice. And to be honest, I didn’t spend a lot of time on the ordering (this was also the case for Heavy Petting — when a collection is done, it’s done, and I think it is easy to let it find its natural and necessary rhythm). At the time I didn’t know why it was the logical choice, it just kind of made sense. I knew I wanted to start with something sweet. I know I wanted to start the book with tenderness.
I like the way you explained it, though. That makes way more sense. Let’s pretend I planned it because of that.
NAILED Q 2. In your writing, but also on Facebook, in e-mails, etc, you hide your depression and anxiety very little. This narrator, or you as narrator, or you as poet-man, whatever, is similar. It’s invested in this world, is interacting, killing bison, worrying about his family, thinking deep thoughts, but there is always this skepticism, well maybe pessimism, hiding over each poem. Everything is a character in this world, the clouds, the oxen, the wagon. Everything must be going. Which I guess means everything must be gone one day.
Can you talk about how those parts of your personal life played into writing these poems? Yes, I’m asking the “influence” question, but I also mean did they provide a sense of hope-accomplisment-reasontokeepchuggingalong. I mean did writing these poems make you feel better…or worse?
SHERL: I’ll be honest: Writing has never really made me happy. I can’t stop writing (I’ve tried, trust me), so I turned it into an extension of myself. Everything I’ve written has been memoir to some extent. Even if it never happened, I have probably felt it at some point and that’s how it got out of me and onto the page.
I like to talk about memoir because I find it so fascinating. What is memoir? Is it an actual event that occurred, or is it an exact emotion that happened? Is where you were realer than what you were feeling? Can a book about the Oregon Trail be a memoir if the emotions are real? How many memoirs are false because some of the emotions that were going on during that time frame were omitted?
Is being there or feeling that place more important?
I am on Adderall and I am rambling and the Heat are beating the Bulls. What am I trying to say? I don’t know.
Now the Heat and Bulls are tied.
Sometimes I am depressed, so my poem is more depressed. Sometimes I get really fucking anxious, and my poem skips around a bit, its stanzas constantly wondering if they should go somewhere else.
I don’t know if I believe writers who say they can completely remove themselves from the writing process. Or maybe I can believe them and I choose not to because I am jealous that they can.
Don’t worry, the Heat beat the Bulls.
NAILED Q 3. The other day I read part of an interview—the whole thing is in print—that Dave Eggers did with the artist David Shrigley. Those two cool dudes discuss some really fresh things concerning artistic attitudes and temperaments. When I read the following quote by Shrigley, my mind immediately went to your writing, perhaps maybe Heavy Petting more than The Oregon Trail… but still: “I’ve come to realise that the opposite of seriousness is not humour. The opposite of seriousness is incompetence. It’s somebody who isn’t really engaged with what they’re doing. And the opposite of humour is maybe sadness.”
So I started thinking about lines like “Know I’m serious, I’m wearing cargo pants” or “I want to write a sad poem. I’m not sad/I am less than sad. Negative sad.” Yes because of the obvious “serious” and “sad” references. But also, because there is a unique distinction in how they deal with the heavy shit going on.
I’m wondering. How do you feel about this quote? I’m not sure I like that last sentence, or agree with it a lot. How do you think this idea (or any idea) of seriousness/humor applies to your work?
SHERL: I’m with you in regards to not agreeing with the last line. Why couldn’t the opposite of “humour” be “contentment” or even the “mundane”. And I don’t think something has to be sad if it’s mundane. Some of my favorite things are mundane: afternoon breakfasts, holding hands, sweater weather. Maybe that doesn’t work either because we can absolutely find humor in the mundane, too.
But why does the the opposite of humor have to be a negative thing?
And couldn’t we find sadness in humor, as well? Aren’t most comedians depressed as fuck?
The first part of the quote I find interesting. Part of me really agrees with it. I have been told that I’m not serious about my writing because I joke about it or don’t take myself seriously in interviews or around other poets because I only want to talk about who’s fucking whom in a poem, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I know I’ve upset people in the past. Seriously though, people need to chill the fuck out. Maybe that’s what Shrigley is saying. I don’t think I’m incompetent in regards to writing (but who knows, maybe I am?), but I don’t take myself too seriously with it either. I work very hard, but you won’t find me in a corner of a room, stoically brooding, fingering where my cigarettes used to be.
Maybe he’s right on with that. I kind of love that.
_______ is to _______ as seriousness is to incompetence.
I would like to see everyone try that out.
NAILED Q 4. My friend Suzy just made me this awesome wall hanging thing with the Abraham Smith lines from his glorious HANK, “woe unto you too if your only lonely river of love is a pathological liar,” and I’m reading your poems and looking up at this.
I’m thinking about how this trail is a lonely river, maybe the only lonely river of love I’m on, feeding off this voice, this narrator, the trials, the triumphs.
I’m thinking how no woe to me if this is true because this voice is far from a pathological liar. Maybe a pathological sinking heart or balloon about to burst, but honesty is huge here.
I’m thinking about how the poems, both individually and as a collection, function in this winding, rushing, gushing, sometimes refreshing, sometimes overwhelming way.
I’m thinking about if you know Abraham’s work, and if not, you really should.
So anyhow, that’s a lot. So anyhow, what in the world do you think of that, any of that, none of that, some of that?
SHERL: First, I love this rambles. These rambles. This fording of a river of rambles (you didn’t lose any oxen, by the way, or children — hell, you found wild fruit, multiple orgasms inside your lover).
You say that the poems “function in this winding, rushing, gushing, sometimes refreshing, sometimes overwhelming way.” It didn’t hit me, not when I was organizing them, editing them, or even finalizing the proof for print that the poems, the book as entity, function as a human life. I found it terrifying but also interesting that I wrote a life cycle in the form a linked poetry collection without realizing it. Or is that how we actually live — mini life cycles every day and that’s why we’re always so fucking tired?
Maybe on a subconscious level we are all pathological sinking hearts?
NAILED Q 5. We both have extreme anxiety about much of life it seems. And I’m learning through therapy lately that one of the biggest triggers of my anxiety is my running mind, my associations, my remembering of language and the possible meanings.
As a reader, that’s what drew me to poetry in the first place, that focus not on the linear story or what happened, but those strange connections between the experienced and the felt. And look, now I’m finding out I can’t stop that and it’s psychologically killing me. HAHAHA.
Anyhow, I’m reading these poems and I find myself collecting more and more associations, lines that I carry with me and fling at myself and others as I fear, as I shout, as I love.
Like “Today I am selling bison thigh so I can buy/bullets before they rust, so I can shoot more bison” (p. 10) which reminds me of how even though I probably need to stay away from chasing love and wooing women and yapping yapping yapping, I can’t shut up. I’m trading in my moments of recovery and relaxation so I can pursue what’s got me so worked up in the first place, but maybe the next time will be a monumental thing, oh maybe oh maybe.
Or this: “Isn’t it weird how much world there is?” (p. 24) which is probably pretty self-explanatory as to what I’m doing with it.
I’m wondering, do you have this “problem” too? Are there certain lines from this book that stick with you? Do you find this in other work? Which ones and how do you carry them?
SHERL: We both have extreme anxiety, yes, of course, look at us being weird but not trying to be weird. I think we handle ours differently, though. Yours sounds healthier, the way you cope, and your therapist is probably right. Running minds, fuck them. How do you turn off? Can you? I would unplug myself every night and most days if that were possible.
We should be motors left mostly unattended, except we actually pay way more attention to ourselves than we should.
My anxiety is projected through my OCD, which is terrifying. Right now I am writing from a hotel room, while a very pretty girl sits on the couch to my left (the couch we fucked on the night before, fucked for hours and now my forearms are sore). Hotel rooms scare the shit out of me, so it is a really big deal that I am here right now (and says a lot about my company, which just says so much about how amazing a good woman, the one good for you, can be). See, I find hotels vicious — the possibility of touching the same things as so many other people. I know this is irrational because I go into a Starbucks and I touch a table that even more people touch. Or I go to a restaurant and use a fork that probably wasn’t cleaned as well as it could or should have been. I deal. I am dealing, but I take it out on my hands. They are so red and beaten up, scraped like I’m a schoolyard bully, but really, I’m just so fucking frightened of everything my mind comes up with all the time. All the fucking time it won’t turn off.
It sometimes turns off when I’m writing. So many people tell me how prolific I am. What they don’t realize is that I don’t want to be this prolific. I don’t want to write as much as I do. It’s just that I don’t really have a choice. It’s write and write and write or scrub my hands and scrub my hands and scrub the rest of my body after I have scrubbed my hands.
What was the question?
Lines. There is one line from The Oregon Trail that I love so much. Wait, there are two lines. They are “You are Prozac with skin” and “I want to walk in on you having sex with me.”
There is no deep meaning to why these lines mean so much to me. I just thought they were really good lines. I was proud of myself, and that doesn’t happen much.
NAILED Q 6. Have you seen the posts Nick Sturm has been doing over at We Who Are About To Die? Poem as machine, you know stemming from that old William Carlos William thing– “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.”
I think something can be said about your Oregon Trail poems acting as a machine. Maybe they’re a wagon or a trail or a wagon on a trail. Whatever. Definitely, these poems are about movement, not just in narration, but in the pop-pop of their heartgut out to the reader.
And in that first of Sturm’s post, he drops this quote:
“To know that the poem is a new form of technology and you are a bag or an owl. And so maybe you will express some confused anger or maybe you will need to repeat yourself.”
(Heather Christle, in Slope issue 26)
And I think of TOTITOT’s ability to repeat itself without seeming stale, to cry and express and feel within this “new technology” while still screeching like a wild confused animal.
What’s your whole take on this “poem as a machine” thing? Are your poems machines? Are they owls?
SHERL: My poems are indiscretion. Precipitation. My poems are angry that I had to write them.
Ask me tomorrow and I might tell you that my poems are why I didn’t die at twenty.
Ask me two days from now and I might tell you that I don’t know what the fuck poems are.
NAILED Q 7. My favorite poem from the collection is “The Oregon Trail is based on a true story.” From the middle of the book, yes, but still this poem holds the tip of the collection, this is where it exists to speak the clearest, burn the brightest, in my opinion. It seems most good linked collections have that piece that exists as a point, as a moment where the reader finds himself/herself connected most, at (close-as-possible) fullness of understanding of the voice. I have no idea here how to prove THIS IS THE POEM but I feel it with this one the most, a voice that distinctly speaks in syllables that matter, in metaphor that isn’t metaphor but really ashes bathing children, yet also Gregory Sherl you are here too.
When we burn I said. When we burn
our ashes will mix and I’ll only be you
& you will only ever be me.
So, who is this speaker, in your mind? How much is Gregory Sherl talking to us?
SHERL: If you’re reading a Gregory Sherl poem or book, whether I like it or not or if I intended for it or not, Gregory Sherl is always talking to you.
Damn, it felt lame writing about myself in the third person. I’m sorry.
I can tell you that The Oregon Trail is purely fictitious. Still, it’s rooted from personal emotions, surely. I wrote most of the book during a pretty rough patch when my OCD was so bad I could barely leave the apartment.
I wrote most of The Oregon Trail very quickly, at the same table. I don’t remember what music I was listening to.
My favorite linked collection is Ben Mirov’s Ghost Machine. That doesn’t add anything to this answer except if anyone hasn’t had the chance to read it yet, they should. Immediately.
NAILED Q 8. How do you see these poems lined up next to the ones in your first collection, Heavy Petting? Here, I’m just wondering how you look back on that first dandy collection when holding this new rad one in your hands. Critique them, compare them, praise them, talk about how you were feeling while writing them, etc. Put them on one of those scale things and tell us how it tilts, from your perspective.
SHERL: I say this a lot but I’ll go ahead and say it again here: Heavy Petting is a very young book. That is not a criticism on the work itself because I am very proud of it, and what it represents. For the most part I believe the narrator (or me, let’s be honest here) comes off very naive and at the end of the book, we witness the long fizzle during the last section, over a long series of prose poems.
Heavy Petting is a book of youth, a book of want and chance. There are pages of absolute hope in it. I’m not sure where they came from but they’re there. This book means so much to me. It shows the transition from writer to writer, and the whole presentation (the boy with the cat, the largeness of the book as object, even the font) represents an important place in my life.
The Oregon Trail seems a little more jaded, a little sadder, heavier even though it’s considerably shorter. That is not a criticism on the work itself because this is the book that gave me the courage to really jump into poetry in an almost violent way. There is no long fizzle at the end of The Oregon Trail, it just kind of explodes. Necessarily, it never lets you get too far away from it before dragging you back. Where Heavy Petting meanders, The Oregon Trail tends to leash the reader. I love that about each one.
Both books are incredibly different. Heavy Petting is full of fucking and drugs and emotions that go from love to depression.The Oregon Trail is full of fucking and the idea of death and eventually, of course, death. There is a lack of marrow in both books, but it comes from different places.
This might sound political but it’s true: I couldn’t have asked for a better first collection, and I couldn’t have asked for a better second collection.
Is there some growth from one to the other? I hope so. At least stylistically, I feel that I achieved something different between the two objects.
NAILED Q 9. Recently, I had an unfortunate, disheartening discussion with a former professor about the merits of the online/small press lit world. He sent me an email saying that I shouldnot be publishing online and with small presses, but should have my focus on bigger markets, print journals, prestigious contests. I tried explaining how poetry, the “indie lit” community, my publications, mean way more to me than filling up a CV. I tried explaining how my goals are different than his goals, and to me, publishing in these places and with these presses means more to me than trying to publish/publishing in a magazine I don’t read or giving money to enter a contest I won’t have even the slightest chance of winning (nor will I likely enjoy the winning entry). I tried explaining that this community is exactly that, a community, and without it, without helping Christopher with Vouched Books, without being able to talk to people like you, without the internet and real life relationships I’ve made through this scene, it’s quite possible that I wouldn’t be alive right now (or at least not holding it together as well, undoubtedly), and that is enough merit for me.
I get the impression that, though it can fill you with anxiety and such, this community serves a similar function for you, a place of acceptance, a place of interaction. How do you see the role of the online/small press community in your life?
SHERL: If you caught me a couple months ago, I would’ve told you that indie lit, or we can sometimes call it (though I don’t want to bunch every press into this, so I won’t) the online/small press community, was a form of lifeblood. People who understood why you and I wrote silly little poems all night instead of going out and being normal. The online/small press community helped form the voice I have today, and it opened me up to writing I would’ve never had the chance to experience.
Still, I don’t know what community can celebrate one writer texting another writer that he should “go kill himself” and then go to a party where other writers are and brag about it.
I don’t know what community can celebrate a male writer strangling a female writer and not get blacklisted or run the fuck out.
i don’t know what kind of community can celebrate blogs that nurture just as much internal hate as support.
Seems silly, who knows.
Maybe I am ungrateful, I don’t know.
What I can tell you is that I don’t agree with what your professor said. My issues are much different, and I hope they come off that way. I think the best poetry and short fiction written today is being published in small presses and online.
So keep doing what you do, Tyler. God knows I love reading it.
What I think I am trying to say is that I’m just sick of everyone being so bad to each other.
And it’s much more noticeable in a small “community”.
I don’t know.
Tyler Gobble was once a student at Ball State University, where he was President of the Writers Community. He was an intern with The Collagist and lead poetry editor of The Broken Plate, in addition to his contributions at Vouched Online. His work has appeared in Everyday Genius, Mad Swirl, and Metazen, among other places. He blogs at xforwardprogressx.blogspot.com and apologizes for the poor, high school-created url.