I’d Shoot a LAke

JUSTIN GRADIN: I can be in a San Francisco hotel room, just writing poems and ideas. I’ll get some drinks, put on fucking Family Feud or whatever, and it’s this weird little chaos. I’m not at home, and I never watch TV, but there's some weird thing on TV. It's a good way to get to know a certain time period. It reflects back where you are in the world, watching these commercials. It's weird that way, and you pick up little phrases, almost like sifting through trash. You're writing a poem. You're watching some terrible TV show, and you hear something, and it's like, "That's nice. I could steal that line from a toothpaste commercial."

AARON BERRY DAVIS: It's interesting that you've been collaging because that makes the poems sort of a collage too.

Totally, yes. I've never really done cut-ups or anything like that. But I think just hearing things is a great source of material. I was at the airport once, and these two guys are behind me. They're talking pretty loud. You can't not hear them because they've got these booming voices. One guy goes, "Man, that duck was so good last night," then the other guy goes, "What? I don't eat duck." Then the other guy goes, "Neither do I." Like, what is this conversation? It was great.

They're like, "Fuck, who are you again?"

Yes. Like, “What? You said the duck was great.” But you don’t eat it and the other guy also doesn't eat it. It's such a great thing to hear. Then you're sitting on the airplane trying to solve the riddle of what these guys did in the evening.

Do you feel that the speaker in these poems is you, or do you feel that it's somebody else?

I think a lot of times it's me, but sometimes I feel like I'm writing it from someone else’s perspective. Sometimes it would be like hearing someone and thinking about them and talking to them. There's one poem in there that ends with—it's absurd—but it ends with, "Leslie, come home, we miss you."

I love that poem.

I had heard someone talking, and I couldn't really hear what they were saying, and it just sounded like gibberish. Then at the end, they were like, "Come home, we love you." I was like, "What? Did you just say that?"

And when that comes at the end of the poem, it gives it such gravity. The tone shifts entirely.

It's like a horror. All of a sudden, you're like, "What happened? What does all this have to do with your disappearance? Please, come home!" A lot of the poems are like that, an oral collage or reference type of thing. Like, making a character out of Hamburger Helper or whatever. Generally, when I'm making art, I don't want to use any kind of reference. I don't want to do that. I don't want to reference Coca-Cola. I don't want to do that stuff. But I find in poetry, it hits way harder if you use something that you don't have to describe. You just put in Hamburger Helper, and everyone knows exactly what you're talking about. You're writing a poem about a dead kid, and you're talking about Casper the Friendly Ghost. Everyone knows about Casper. Everyone has their own relationship to Casper the Friendly Ghost. It's funny. I think it's one of the only places in art where I don't mind referencing that stuff.

It’s like these characters and brands have almost become like Jungian archetypes in that way, where they have a universal and a personal meaning to everyone. The Hamburger Helper is our shadow.

And I like the idea of using those characters also because most people don't know poets, but they'll know those. They don't need to be well-read to get the concept.

But, sometimes, literary people are scandalized by references because they think it’s low.

Yes, because it's so lowbrow. I think lowbrow is a good thing. I think too much pretension will ruin art. You gotta also understand who you're writing for, I think. Several years ago, Hamburger Helper did this thing where they hired a bunch of rappers from St. Louis—they just found them on SoundCloud or something—and they put out a Hamburger Helper trap album. The cover is the Hamburger Helper glove dripping with gold. It's got a parental advisory sticker on it. One of the songs is “I'm in Love with the Glove,” or, “She's in Love with the Glove,” or something. They're all referencing Hamburger Helper, but they're still trying to sound cool. To me, that's one of the best rap albums ever. It's really hard to find. I think you can only find it on YouTube now and it’s not even all the songs. I might've downloaded it, but I love that kind of shit. The idea of these trap rappers getting all this money from Hamburger Helper. It's like, “What did you rap about? Hamburger Helper.” It's just perfect.

This is maybe a strange question, so if you don't have an answer for it, I understand. It's the question that I think about a lot when I'm reading anything, but I thought about a lot specifically here because I did think that it was notable in these poems. They have this interesting quality of being very rooted in this moment, while simultaneously feeling like they could have been written any time over the past thirty years. They aren't dependent on the Internet. They aren't Instagram poems. So you can read them in this moment and relate to them very easily, but you could go back to 1996 and have that same experience.

What's funny about that is the title of the book came from when I was fourteen years old. I found an old notebook, and it said, “Write a book of poems titled Pissing in the Fountain of Youth.” I was like, "Great." I looked through it, and there were almost no poems. There were just a couple of notes. Then I found another notebook, and there were a bunch of notes, and a bunch of half-done poems. Some of them I tried to include because I wanted it to be this weird collaboration between myself now and myself then. So I sent all these poems in, and a lot of them from the '90s made it in. Very few made it in as exactly as they were. A lot of them I reworked because they just weren't there. There are some that just went in as-is, and then there are a lot that were an idea where I was like, "Oh, I was trying to say this."

That's funny you say that because I also don't ever love referencing TikTok or any kind of modern stuff. Even when I was in high school and I was in photography class, I didn't want anyone to have tattoos in my photos because I thought it would date them. Of course, I have tattoos now. I like tattoos. But when I'm doing photography, I want someone without tattoos. So it's the same way for poems to me. You have to be careful with it.

And references to certain brands do stand the test of time. They have this life, in a way, at least in our minds. It's honestly kind of the foundation for the idea of memes. Like, this thing that lives and exists in your brain and has its own real-world and commercial connotations, but then has a completely different life when it gets lodged in there.

I feel like putting that kind of stuff in poems is the easy way to cut through to an image quickly. It’s like a painting. You're just trying to get someone to see something with words in a certain way. You want to cut through and make some point, so you go, "Oh, Ronald McDonald on a crucifix." Everyone goes, "I know Ronald." You just get that image, instead of some random clown man, which doesn't hit as hard.

You bring up Ronald McDonald, which brings this to my brain: Did you see he sang the national anthem?

No, but I would love to. He did? Where?

A baseball game, I think.

Damn, that's good for him. [laughs] I bet he has the voice of an angel.

He has a beautiful, operatic voice. And those are the moments in our culture that I think this collection captures really well—moments where the profanity of our modern existence brushes up against something that is an eternal ideal. Not that the national anthem is this eternal ideal, but it is reaching for that. It wants to be that. In American terms, it's like having Ronald McDonald officiate Mass.

[laughter]

Exactly. Which is beautiful. Which is absolutely beautiful. Why not bring it there? Why not bring it that far?

Are you interested in the ways that the sacred and the profane brush up against each other?

Yes, completely. I love absurdism. Then, as a reaction, I love bewilderment. I think they just go so well together. These days, almost everything seems so abstract and bizarre. I'm finding myself bewildered at almost everything. Then I have to catch myself going, "No, okay, this is what this is. This is a man slow dancing with a dog in a parking lot, and he's on rollerblades," which I actually saw. It's beautiful. It's absolutely beautiful, but you would never wake up and think you're going to see that. Then you see it, and it changes your life. It doesn't just make your day better. It changes your life. Ten years from now, I'm going to remember that guy and his fucking dog slow dancing on rollerblades.

And the poems seem mostly concerned with those small windows into brief moments of beauty like that. It’s very modern to feel like you’re living your life in the general and not in the specific. Like, if you took a flight—if you went to LAX and bought any flight to any American city—your experience of landing, getting out into the airport, it would look and feel the same. Even getting out of the airport, it would pretty much look the same. You see all the same stores, all the same chains, all the same shit. It’s only in these small moments, when you talk to somebody or even just listen to somebody talk, that your experience will become very specific very quickly.

I love that stuff. I've met so many strange people just because I sit and listen to them. Even last night, I went to Bird's down the street because this bar wasn't open. It was sunny, and I was like, “I'll have a patio drink.” So I had a drink, and then I went inside and this guy came over. He was like, "Hey, can I ask you a question?" And he starts asking me if I know Keith Haring, if I know who John Waters is, and all this stuff. Then all of a sudden, he's like, "Oh, can I brush your hair?" I'm like, "Sure." So then the guy's combing my hair, and he's like, "I live around the corner."

He had a brush on him?

He was doing it with his fingers. So then he goes, "I live around the corner, you should come home with me." I said, "No, I'm here just having a drink." Then he tries to kiss me, and he goes, "How old are you?" I said, "How old are you?" He's pretty old. He was in his 60s. [laughs] I never go to that bar. It was such a weird interaction. I'm like, of course, the time I come here, this is the interaction I have. It was the most specific experience. It wasn’t like, oh, this beautiful woman came over and asked to comb my hair and invited me over. It was this old guy. It was great. That’s the kind of stuff that’s interesting to me.

Because that’s something you’ll remember. I think we're all grasping at the hope and the desire for memory, and that we've almost gone too far into this idea of collective memory. When something truly individual happens, something that's really a specific experience, it feels so completely novel in a good way.

That's a good point. I think I'm all about the individual experience. I want to experience the strangest possible stuff. Then if you write about it in, not a generic, but in a loose-enough way, I think people can relate to it.

Which brings up another thing: All of the poems are first-person.

I think they are, yes.

Which is interesting to me, because writers sometimes like to remove themselves. But this collection is firmly like, "Buckle in, you're with me now."

Which is crazy because I've always removed myself from everything. Even when I played music, I was the drummer. I was like, "Put me in the back." I never really want to be up front. Never really want to have anything be about me. When I make visual art, it's never really about me. For some reason with poetry, again, it's like, no. It's got to be this individual experience that I'm having and figuring out a way of writing about this in a way that's relatable to other people, but also funny.

Some people have been like, "Oh, these don't seem serious.” But it is serious. I think people get humor mixed up. They think if something's funny, then it's not also sad or anything else. 

I think that people do have a hard time holding two emotions at the same time.

True. Then what happens with my work is everyone goes, "Oh, this is just totally irreverent." But I'm not just mocking things.

Also, can irreverence exist without reverence? You can't be subversive or transgressive if you don't believe in things. That’s the only way you can subvert those beliefs.

100%. You have to know those things well to subvert them. It's like, Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. A friend of mine from Japan used to say, "Why do you like living in the city? It's so shitty. It's loud, and it looks bad, and there's crime." He goes, "I want to live in a country where the water is beautiful," and all this stuff. I said, "Yes, but all of that crime and gunk and everything—that's the information. That's the stuff that fuels everything I'm doing." If I went into nature for too long, I think I would try to shoot a lake or something.

I need the chaotic world. I need Ronald McDonald singing the national anthem. To me, that's more important than going on a hike.

There's so many people that disagree vehemently with both of us here, but stillness isn't honest to the human experience in the same way as chaos. Have you read Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O'Hara?

No.

In that poem, he says something like, "I can't relax unless there's a subway handy or some other sign that people don't totally regret life." I feel the same way. It's funny—in LA where people love to do city hikes. People love to be like, "Let's go do Runyon," where you get to be halfway between nature and the city. But I don't even like to be halfway, honestly. I don't even want to do the Runyon hike. Never ask me to do that. I'll go to a park, and I'll sit with you.

Yes, and have some beers or something like that.

I do need signs that people don't totally regret life.

Me too. And there's signs everywhere. You could go into the woods and dig holes for a bathroom, or you could just go out and listen to a band and walk into a tower of cubicles that have been designed to hold you.

Do you think your writing is informed from your days touring with bands?

Yes, probably, because when you're in a van for ten hours, you're just in your own head. There's times where everyone's talking, and it's fun and stuff, but there's so many times where you're just in your own head. For me, I'd always be writing stuff down, just even journaling about the night before or whatever was happening that day. I've always sought out bizarre experiences. A lot of times when people go like, "Oh, that's a bad idea," I'm always like, "I'm going to do it." I'm going to take the risk because I just feel like it'll be worth it somehow. 

I saw a guy screaming at a plant. It was a hanging plant from an awning of a store. He's like, "You think today's bad? Just wait until fucking tomorrow. Tomorrow's going to be worse." [laughs]

Setting it straight with the plant.

It was flowers. It was just flowers hanging there. He was looking at it, and he walked away so mad. I was like, "What did these flowers do to this man?" It was crazy because just slowing down and watching him do that, it totally changed my day. It made me think of those flowers. I went by the next day. The flowers were still there. He didn't kill them. I didn't see him there.

Were they having a worse day, though?

They seemed like they were having a similar— Actually, they were having a better day because he wasn't there. Just all that kind of stuff, that's weird city stuff. You see it, and it is fantastic.

Of course. I think there are personalities where it's hard to feel completely alive when you just are sitting with the silence and with yourself. I’m definitely one of them. Where I went to college, it was so quiet and rural.

No distractions, and you could just think about schoolwork.

So you have to make distractions then. That's the thing. I think I was more ill-behaved than I would have been in a city.

When I was in a small town as a kid, me and my friends all had Mohawks and stuff. We were all punks. We were like, "Oh, let's go out," and we'd steal a car. We did all this stuff. Then later we go into the city, and there's this other punk that we know. He's at a play with his grandmother. We're like, "Oh, that's what the kids in the city are doing? Going out and being cultured?"

How long were you working on these poems? 

It was quick. It was probably—and some of the poems were fragments from years ago when I was a kid—but probably it was like a month of writing. Probably one month. That's all I did for that month was just wake up and look at poems and think about poems.

Do you resent the idea that good art can't happen quickly?

I think it can. I think it should, almost, too.

Especially with poetry where there's such an immediacy to it.

There's an immediacy to it, but there's also a thing that I've witnessed a lot of artists and people do, which is take too much time. Then once too much time has passed, they become extremely precious about it. It's grown into this thing that they can't fuck with too much, whereas if you work a little bit quicker, you can be like, "No, this is what's going to happen. We got to chop this." I feel like you can get there faster. The other thing, too, is that a lot of people I know who give it too much time, they eventually just move on to a different project.

Then they have all these just half-developed things. For me, I'm very obsessive. When I’m like, “Okay, I want to do a collection of poetry,” then that's what's going to happen. That's all I can think about. I'm not going to make a painting. I've got to do all these poems until everything's done. Then once that's done, I can move on to the next project. I’m just 100% focused on one thing until it's done. Luckily for me, that was about a month. So now I can move on.

How do you know when something's done?

That's a good question. For me, it's always just a feeling. 100%, it's a feeling.

That’s interesting. I was thinking recently that, sometimes, fiction writers, or really great writers of any medium that are working in a narrative form, can lose the tension and immediacy by their final draft. The tension being, I suppose, when your head and your head are at odds with each other. More frequently, I see poets able to hold onto that tension and immediacy. Do you think that's part of why you feel that you don't want to go back to your poems too much? You don’t want to lose the immediacy?

I don't know, actually. I will go back to poems sometimes, and find something more. But I do love the immediacy of things. I do love a lot of stream of consciousness. I think a lot of times when you're working out something, and you're working it out loud, sometimes you'll come to that weird part where all of a sudden something else comes out of it because you're thinking, thinking, thinking. You're sounding it all out, and then all of a sudden, oh, you say something that doesn't even make any sense, but it's the idea or the thing that actually brings the whole piece closure.

It's so abstract to someone because you can't really see it. It might be just a fraction of the thing, but you feel exposed to the fraction of it. I love stuff like that. I think going back and rewriting too many times is good, in a sense, when you have something, an idea, that you can't quite get there and so you just keep it on file. You revisit it here and there. But I think the best poems are the ones that just immediately come out.

I think the ones that come out strong are usually the ones that don't take as much. It's like that song “Hotel California.” They said that song took them ten years or something like that. I'm like, "God, that thing is poisoned. It's horrible. This is the worst song I've ever fucking heard."

[laughs] I was just listening to that song and realized for the first time that he’s singing in a Patois. It's like a reggae song.

It's so bad.

PISSING IN THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH AVAILABLE NOW

JUSTIN GRADIN is a multidisciplinary artist. He has two graphic novels published with Fantagraphics, and his poetry has been published with Mercy Flush and Tough Poets Review.

AARON BERRY DAVIS is a writer and editor for Midcult*.