Interview:

I have to know where a poem like this comes from. Did you bring your journal to a McDonald's? Had you been reading Dante's Inferno?

I haven’t eaten at a McDonald’s since I was about eleven or twelve. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was thirteen, and, honestly, I don’t like any fast-food chains. Most fast food is objectively disgusting, right? One summer, when I was eighteen, I did take a job at a McDonald’s, however: mainly it involved flipping fries in brown, boiling vats of grease—they reuse the grease—and interacting with the public at the register. I say public and not customers because there were several folks who came in each day just to ask for a glass of water, harass someone on duty, or otherwise (how shall I put it?) show off their charming social skills. Maybe, sure, I sneaked a fry once in a while or pinched a chocolate shake after work. I was an eighteen-year-old living on my own in Chicago at the time, far from home.

So, this background probably informed my sense—which I attempted to make visceral in the piece—of how most fast-food is little better than a viscous pool of lard. When you work in a fast-food establishment, you notice how a cruddy substance hardens and infiltrates and covers everything: the counters, the walls, the grime under your fingernails. Each day, my outfits became saturated with treacle and beclagged with pinguid residues. The stains on my apron looked like someone spooged all over me. Which implied I, too, was essentially only more exudating, slubbering, plasmatic ooze myself. Y’know, a big ol’ blubbery tub of gloppy sludge that got schmucked together.

That said, Jean-Paul Sartre (as mentioned in the piece) does have a metaphysics of slime in Being and Nothingness that dovetails quite nicely with my own sensibility of our bodies’ unguent and sticky permeability. I guess there’s an element of body horror here, but I wanted to reroute this into a comic mode. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention John Waters, in movies such as Polyester and Pink Flamingos. Among other literary influences on this piece, Joe Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy is up there. The book’s a series of prose poems in the form of daily customer feedback surveys the narrator, a fast-food addict, addresses to the eponymous Wendy. The book revels in the abjectness of fast food with an over-the-top gross-out quality akin to Garbage Pail Kids. (Wait, do Garbage Pail Kids count as a literary influence?)

Anyway, I had the gall to teach Wenderoth’s book to my students one semester—they universally panned it. They were a bunch of squeamish prudes and rubes, if you ask me, who wanted things nice and normy and sanitized. Focusing on the body is always bawdy. The salaciousness of Wenderoth’s book can be a real gut-check. Perhaps it takes a certain queer wavelength to convert one’s disgust—a reversal of taste, etymologically speaking; or nauseous upchuck, I guess—into a campy or ribald humor?

For poets who want to incorporate more surreal and strange imagery into their work, what is some advice for finding those "chancy flash-in-the-pan" pictures?

To find the flash-in-the-pan images, you have to keep panning. You have to stand in the stream of consciousness, up to your tits if need be, feeling the chill wash over you. Strain all the grit that sputters by. There’s plenty of dirt and fool’s gold, but sometimes a genuine little nugget will pop up amid the nugatory debris. Hitting on a compelling image is chancy because you need to take a chance, but also because it depends on a bit of blind luck. You want to sift down into the grain of experience, into the scurrilous and pebbly runt matter, the whole mottled dreadful slurry of it.

And once you have hold of that tiny if aurific treasure, swallow it down into your guts, let it irritate your innards, and slowly, painfully accrete a nacreous residue around it. Part will coagulate and encrust, part will filter through your bloodstream, changing your very chemical composition. Eventually, you wedge a knife in and pry it out of your system, slurp down the rest, and set it among quivering goldleaf, chalcedony, and jasper.

Or to shift metaphors once again, try to capture not the thing but the texture of a thing, smearing the paint on with a slapdash impasto at times. Rashly slopping it on and scraping it back, revealing the energy and tempo of the brushwork, the thickness and material. The result allows us to see the image as well as the action of creating it. An image is static, but action is life. Images must move, change, transform. One step beyond a Jackson Pollock in this regard is Rauschenberg’s “Mud Muse” in which the canvas is replaced by a filtrated terrarium, bubbling up with earthy splutters and unspooling gluey plops: it’s both a kinetic, chthonic soup gargling with a ruckus of primordial uck and a vibratory sepulcher—an open pit eager to digest us.

Images are like molting glowworms, their reactive juices producing bioluminescent webs in their larviform stage that catch other cave-dwelling critters and fungoid spores.

Thick description, in the anthropological sense, can be used to ontologize. The striking—the stricken—image does double work, not as a symbol exactly which is merely a conventionalized stand-in, but as the embodiment of a worldview: a paradigm by which the possibilities of thinking unfolds. The “deep” image is a paragon that frames how we interpret our senses.

“Odd that a thing is most itself when likened,” Richard Wilbur declares in his poem “Lying.” There’s an elusive putting-off, a deferral, to the best description, too. Perhaps reality is Medusa-like, and we must see it through a kind of metaphorical refraction or miss seeing it at all, in the way that most daily activity gropes forward dully, as rough-and-ready as it is ready-to-hand.

Two of my predilections when cultivating images are using both leaps and logic. Leaps are associations, the circuit breakers over which electricity flows. You can juxtapose images and allow the reader to close the gaps between them. By logic I mean pushing the impulse behind an image further, unfurling it into something like an epic simile where the image—which was once peripheral to the story—takes centerstage. You push to see how far an analogy can go until it breaks down or until it brokers its own terms, becoming its own center of gravity.

An image I can’t shake recently is the brahminy blind snake I discovered in my house behind a foyer door a few days ago. It was blackish and wormlike, smaller than my pointer finger, and about as thick as pencil lead. I had no idea what it was. I poked it. It squiggled. I jumped back. It wriggled a little more. I tried to smash it with an old shoe. It undulated wildly, a skitterish flibbertigibbet writhing in pain. I had to smash it several times before it’d die. Only then did I look it up, to discover that it was, in fact, a harmless tiny reptile that seeks darkness under the leaf-litter and soil. They’re completely parthenogenic, so it would have been female. More than just a creepy-crawly that gave me the heebie-jeebies, the flailing thing was a body thrashing in mortal agony. I was blinder to it than it was to me.

The sinuous curves of its death throes were a sublime dance. As Virginia Woolf says in “Death of a Moth,” “It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life… and had set it dancing and zigzagging... Thus displayed, one could not get over the strangeness of it.” Strangeness is what I seek in an image. Strangeness, paradoxically, doesn’t estrange us: it enlarges us, connecting us to the other, dissolving the fuzzy borders by which we assume we’re made tractable and intact, when we’re really, all of us, slippery, slimy, squirming, spurious, and astray.

I suspect many readers may be asking themselves is this poetry? It's longer, unlineated, and narrative. Personally, I struggle to uphold binary genre distinctions, but how do you think through this piece in relation to poetry?

I’ll try flipping this question on its head. A lot of contemporary poetry has done away with meter, rhyme, and form. It’s not even particularly lyrical; it’s more frequently chatty or plainspoken. It eschews overt figurative language. No epic similes here, no rhetorical flourishes. Such poetry works—if it works at all—by compression, by imagery, by shifts in tone from confessional sincerity to cosmic irony. One of the last remnants of traditional poetic figuration is the line break: but, absent any attention to meter or syllabics, this too often results in mere surface-level appearance. It’s poetry because, well, it looks like poetry: bite-sized morsels of randomly chopped-up prose. Poetry, I might claim, has been evacuated of its substance and stratagems, rendered synonymous with its discernable format, reduced to its simulacrum—to packaging.

Many poems are more pared down than Hemingway or Carver stories. Maybe we are so distrustful of poetry that we kill our babies and content ourselves with the dregs of dirty bathwater. I’m not sure because I, for one, really enjoy meter, rhyme, and form; they are, at heart, ways to cultivate greater playfulness. The linguistic resources of poetry root us in the sounds and corporeality of the medium. I like sentences that turn loop-de-loops and risk a bit of hoopla. I delight in a shameful indulgence of lyric excess. I want lines that are as fugitive as they are effulgent. Much of my own work, in contrast to the regnant style du jour, probably looks lush and baroque and old-fangled. In this regard, I’m reminded of James Wright and Mark Strand who disguised a Petrarchan sonnet and a sestina, respectively, in block-shaped prose poems, thereby disarming the reader against any expectation of—any nascent resistance to—the flights of fancy associated with poetic forms. Frankly, maybe you can get away with employing more poetic techniques under the cover of prose. “Poetry” can be a pejorative, when used in the pie-in-the-sky “I, too, dislike it” sense of the term, and many writers run so far away from verse, blenching at the whiff of anything the least bit “poety,” that they nearly desert the field.

I would be ok labeling this piece flash fiction, too, and it might even warrant the appellation of speculative essay. Depends on my mood. Its hybridity allows the reader to apply the lens of different generic conventions: genre is often mutually constitutive, a byproduct of both what’s in a text and what the reader brings to it during the process of interpretation. Also, the context a piece is surrounded by can impact the appearance of genre—John D’Agata repositions many would-be poems in his anthology The Next American Essay, for example, where they emerge, retrofitted, as experiments in nonfiction. Genres are spongy and porous, sporous and protean. They flux and flimmer, now dark—now bright, like the colors in Albers’s “Homage to the Square,” an accessory of whatever frames them.

But you asked, why is this piece poetry? I think it’s poetry in the way that all literature is poetry. It pays attention to its own representations, it helps us perceive the deep texture of experience, and it ignites imaginative pleasure, among other things. At least, that’s my hope. The language in it is more amped up, more devious, I would posit, than the language of many pieces denominated as poetry today. “McSlime” is part of my collection Whispering Gallery that just came out from DUMBO Press. Whispering Gallery contains an assortment of short lyric prose, variously flash fiction, prose poetry, speculative essays, or closet drama; too, there’s hermit crabs and ad hockery, one-offs and knock-offs, nonce genres and whatchamacallits eluding all nuanced prescriptions mixed in for good measure. To unsettle genre in this way—to unsettle any readymade categories by which we apprehend our world—is ironically an attribute of poetry. Poetry, in this wider sense, helps foster a passionate susceptibility toward other modes of being. It should probably make us uncomfortable sometimes since it can scramble or derange the predetermined lineation of zones and taxonomies that map out our workaday environment. It can substitute for that quotidian grid of fenced-off illusions a hallucinatory, incendiary ecstasy.