The Call Center Collective:

Hi Jared—

Thanks for taking the time to talk to The Call Center Collective about your wonderful new book, So Tough. Congrats on the publication! As I write this it is 50 degrees and snow-less in Minnesota in February. It’s profoundly unnerving. It’s also kinda pleasant. As I write this I am also expecting a daughter in mid-April. So I’m glad to have read So Tough and get some instructions on these big topics—accelerating climate breakdown and parenthood.

I want to start with form. So Tough is about many things, but wildfire smoke is everywhere in these pages. This book is composed mostly of untitled, unnumbered octaves that can be read as easily forward as back. It’s also a book that doesn’t seem interested in linear time. All to say—this book can be read many, many ways, which seems to me as a very smoke-y kind of book. The constituent particulates float. Can you tell us how you arrived at this shape, this form, for this book?

Jared Stanley:

Hi Andy!

Well,  So Tough kind of arrived at its form – a book-length poem in (mostly) eight-line verses – because I was desperate. In the years leading up to the year in which I wrote So Tough, the writing of a single poem of, say, 2 or 3 pages had been taking around 6 months – I was making these intricate poems, and they were really a lot of work. At the same time, I was writing what became a failed novel, which meant I was trying, diligently, to do ‘narrative time’ which I neither feel nor believe in, but I thought would be fun to try. I started to resent all the artificiality involved. Plus: Covid. That’s where the floaty, stoney, dream–apocalypse approach to time came in. So, in December 2020 I put the novel down, and in January 2021 just kind of decided to write a short poem everyday – I don’t exactly remember how they ended up as octaves – the first poem in the book is the first one I wrote, and it had eight lines, and eight is my favorite number, so I thought I’d just keep doing eight. Maybe a month into it, I remembered that the octave was kind of the first, thematic part of the sonnet. I got into the idea of delaying all the complexity and movement in the second part of the sonnet and just kind of keep on not-finishing these sonnets. That’s probably the eros of the book. Then I realized it was more of a book-length poem made of out of these verses. The book was called Fun in those days, because that seemed like great mood to go for. It didn’t end up being a fun book, but it began in a spirit of fun. Then the fires started. It was, as you say, ‘unnerving’.

Your intuition about smoke and this kind of wafting, particulate motion in the book is what I was going for, so I’m glad it’s communicating like that! At various times, I started to think of the book as either 624 one-line poems, 78 octave poems, or one single poem. In the end it became a single poem, with that all-pervading, smoky interfingered airborne feeling. I wanted to play with time so much. I even toyed with asking Saturnalia about the possibility of omitting page numbers – but that did seem a bridge too far.  

TCCC:

Hi Jared—

You know, I was just talking to a friend over this weekend about Nevada. Reno specifically. Not many people in the Midwest know what’s going on over there, in the high desert—that overly bright esoteric place. I was trying my best to explain it and wasn’t really getting anywhere until I remembered a line I think I stole from you—that Nevada essentially looks like Afghanistan. It’s strange, they got it after that.

I love how “fun” was the initial starting point for this book. Because it isn’t a fun book but there is humor and levity. There are snide asides and the kind of cracks you’d want to hear from your best friend during a boring school assembly. For sure there is a trickster spirit in these pages. It’s an approach that as a reader hade me reevaluating how other writers have written into the “apocalypse” (scare quotes because that is perhaps an imperfect word) How do you—as a writer, a dad, a mammal, a professor—think one can write about the “end times” (scare quotes because that is definitely an imperfect word)? Or put another way, how to write beautifully about ugly things? 

JS:
Despite what I said about ‘dream-apocalypse’, I don’t really think in terms of ‘end-times’ or apocalypse as a historical or temporal model. For me, it’s more about the mystical sense of something being revealed. As far as the materialist notion that time will end, or that humans are going to destroy the earth through their actions, I have my doubts. We might destroy ourselves, and we’ve certainly warped the planetary system, but I don’t fuck with the style of anthropocentrism that equates human ideologies with reality, or reality with the stable climate in which human culture (and poetry) have emerged and flourished. That’s sounds perhaps misanthropic, but I swear it’s not – I’m just not into the narrative deployment of a latent christian idea of how time operates. Sun Ra said, “It’s after the end of the world, don’t you know that yet?” He knew how to both deploy and poke holes in prophetic language.

That doesn’t change the fact that we’re seeing unbelievable and deeply frightening changes, but I’m trying to keep a metamorphic as opposed to a narrative worldview. I would just rather use my imagination and senses to attempt an engagement with what’s happening around me rather than assign the abstract, transcendent value of apocalypse to an essentially grubby enterprise: greed, domination, and toxic boredom. To mystify greed and power and boredom and by calling them ‘apocalypse’ is to rob the real of its poetry: that’s why I find ‘end times’ and apocalypse kind of offensive in the context of climate change. The next time you think of the climate change as an apocalypse, visualize the hair plugs of Elon Musk. Lew Welch knew that world from the inside: “those who can’t find anything to live for / always invent something to die for / then they want the rest of us to / die for it, too”.

That kind of informs the subjects I take on – I’m a parent, as you say, and I like life, and I think things are often hilarious and fun, and I’m so offended by the extractive and colonial attitude that passes for an economy. So a lot of the tone I take toward ‘ugly’ things, is just finding details. I like it when Ashbery writes of “the way September moves a lace / curtain to be near a pear.” – these gentle moments make me cry, not, you know, ‘my dad is an asshole’ or whatever, because that’s the kind of world I want my kid to live in – one where such observations have their own grave, complex meaning, independent of, oh I don’t know, a concern about the commercial real estate market or whatever the hell.

I just did a reading with a fantastic poet, Samira Abed – one of the poems Samira read moved through all these modes of attention and then moved outward, imagining and questioning the possibility of a Palestinian epic. Beautiful. The poem stopped and noticed and then gained scope, bringing in the big questions – I admire that courage, to swoop in close, to touch the comic, and then move on out to the horror of history and the question of how to depict it, to make a monument.

Anyway, I guess fun enters my poems as a tone I want to embody – fun is maybe a desire for lightness and elegance – to me the only attitude or approach to the broken world. Poetry is for luxuriance, the sharp awareness of the wobbliness of language, its metamorphic potential. I guess fun enters my poems as a tone I want to embody – fun is maybe a desire for lightness, a sense of elegance, an attitude or approach to the broken world.

When I think about writing in the ugliness, and what that has to do with being a father, hm – my imagination was forged in the 80s, in another dystopian moment – the post-punk, early Reagan-era. The music of that time engaged with the tension between ugliness and beauty – I was caught somewhere between “Electric Avenue” by Eddy Grant and “Poptones” by P.I.L. – each song had images of utter decay: in Grant, there’s a wonderful buoyant electro beat with anticapitalist lyrics, while in P.I.L. the sound is so grating and annoying, and the lyrics of the song are also kind of an ironic attack on smiling music – anyway, that was the sound of the world when I was little, say between 6 and 10 – That music has such an intense impact on my worldview, and still effects my imagination now.  

TCCC:

Hello again, Jared,

Sorry for the delay from the Collective—collectively we have been traveling, parenting, exhibiting, sitting near windows and thinking, etc.

Since we're on the topic of "the end" I want to turn our attention toward the last poem in your collection (Octave? Lines? Smoke-clump?). It is really something special:

A king wants to slit the clouds with his fingernail

I teach the kid to eat tubers and avoid roads

it won’t help when things get serious 

snow melts in the gaps between pavers 

we touch the ground like that, a faint scent (cool)

born in peacetime, fooled by permanence 

let’s point a phone at the planets

flies press their bodies against the valley floor

Those last two lines are really gripping—what an incredible end to a book. One thing that strikes me here, and throughout the rest of So Tough is your navigation of scale. From planets to flies—and this after a dip into permanence and end-times survival tactics. The idea of scale, along with all the aggregation of images from this collection made me realize something that was bubbling near the edge of my consciousness while reading: the idea of evil. This is an oblique way to ask a question, and certainly isn't meant as a gotcha, but what is your relationship to evil? Is all evil bad? I don't want to stray too far from the poems into morality-land but my intuition is telling me there is something of interest here. 

—with love—tccc

JS:

Oh, that’s funny. Huh, I didn’t think the evil in my heart had seeped into the book, but now that I look at it again, there are a lot of references to evil. I’m not a Christian, though I come from Christians. My grandfather was an evangelical preacher, and he was always going on about evil. It was always other people who were evil in his words. There was a problem though. The poor guy was addicted to gambling, so even though he had to project evil onto people outside the church, he also had temptations and evils he could find no place for. That pretty much destroyed him. A very gothic story.

His church, The Assemblies of God, was an ideological force behind Bush and the so-called war on terror. It’s a long story, but long before he was defrocked, he was acquainted with people like John Ashcroft, Bush’s first Secretary of State. My grandfather had nothing to do with national politics (maybe the gambling made him a liability), but there’s a certain attitude toward the world, the mania for conversion and a conviction that everyone outside the church was going to hell, that really inflected the us vs them mentality, which has never really left our culture since then. Anyway, Bush also liked to go on and on about evil – I knew that language from my grandfather, and I became obsessed. It was very murderous and dastardly of Bush – satanic, even – the way he talked of others as evil and then to project so much evil himself, wearing that look of innocent befuddlement.

At the same time, I am a child of the ‘80s Satanic Panic, with all the great and powerful metaphors of evil and lawlessness that metal, punk, and gangsta rap gifted to my generation. Eileen Myles called Mike Kelley “boyishly satanic”, and I was like that too, very childish. Petulant, attitudinal. I thank the gods below every day for metal music. It gave me a metaphorical language to escape the 1980s. How to be metaphysically bad. Later, that brought me to Blake, the proverbs of hell, energetic force, excess. I’ve always been attracted to the silliness and glamour of the left-hand path. I like evil poets a lot, because they’re all sensualists, and you know, blah blah, the body is evil. And I like the depressives of evil - Melville, most of all.

So evil is as much an aesthetic category as a moral one – being so close to a preacher, you get a sense of how stagy the performance of morality can be. My grandfather’s performances were incredible, he was a real artist in his way. That’s how I learned about the potential in the human voice. But his performance of goodness turned out to be hollow, and I could feel that terrifying emptiness, even as a small child, even as I was enthralled by the forms and tones. So, my own loss of faith and its attendant nostalgia were completely wrapped up in a sense of form and power in language – I like this formulation of David Rattray’s, that poetry ‘is the invention of a life in language’ – preaching is kind of like that, though there’s always the moral and doctrinal agenda which gets in the way. So anyway, I came to evil as part of the language system of faith – and the language of evil was of course integral to that faith. So, identifying with evil was my own attempt at self-invention. I turned away from the preachers, and let the other voices in, Ronnie James Dio, people like that.

That sense of evil, in metal music, was a balm against the really scary thing, which was nihilism. I don’t want to go too far into nuclear terror, but, you know, watch episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return or Night of the Hunter or read Benjamin Labatut. It the same nihilism that’s being weaponized now in the revenge-induced madness behind the destruction of Palestine. There’s no belief in the reality of good behind that war. None. And evil presumes good. 

But gosh, you were probably asking about poetry. The tradition I feel very lucky to have entered – The West Coast, the woozy, mystical, antinomian cold war tradition, the queers and Buddhists and refuseniks, anarcho-pacificists, the ecoterrorists and stoners. I think they assumed that the forces of disruption and irruption would always be arrayed against the organized ruling class who profit from oppression. Moloch! Their work feels, from within our clampdown-era, like a grand dream: what we could replace the idea of evil with ‘suffering’ let’s say, turn away from persecution and toward compassion? But the forces of oppression were lying in wait to co-opt disruption. Evangelicals love the language of spiritual war, of eradication. Make a desert and call it peace. And the great failure of this projection of evil is everywhere. This summer has been on average 7 degrees hotter than usual. Is that evil? No. It’s just dumb as hell.

TCCC:

dear Jared—

Our last question to you. Since you resurrected Ashbery in the conversation earlier, let's keep him in the air a little bit longer. The opening lines of his poem "The New Spirit" read "I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out, would be another, and truer. way." Where do you fall on this leaving in-ness vs. leaving out-ness and how does that show up (or not) in So Tough? Another way of asking—how do you think So Tough would've turned out if you wrote it when you were 20? 30? 

Thanks for taking the time with the collective. We're grateful for your lyric nutrient!

Mycorrhizally Yours,

TCCC

JS:

Well, that’s an unanswerable question, but I appreciate the time to think about it – I hope the book still resonates in a century, regardless of where it fits on the leave it in / take it out binary.