Anders Carlson Wee Reading in the Finger Lakes Arts Series

okay great great hi everybody Welcome this is the uh November reading in the fingerlakes art series um tonight we have Andre Carlson we where is there he is behind behind the the table right there many of you have met him already um I'll say a few words before Anders comes up just about uh next times right uh December 15th white Rochester poet will be here uh doing his thing and then uh January um we have oh my God I'm gonna forget GNA forget their name and this is going to be terrible um a young a young person named Milo and I'm spacing their last name oh my God so sorry I'll get back to you with it U but he'll he's he's terrific he's amazing we actually discover him here in the open mic and uh is coming in to do his thing in January and then February we have Jessica quo coming in from Syracuse and in March uh Yours Truly uh has a new novel coming out and so I'm going to read from that my first and only appearance in the finger legs art series and in April you got to give yourself one right and uh in April it's Tony ly coming down from Rochester terrific poet uh whose family happens to own this opticle shop next door which is really a strange coinc but he's he's an amazing um and I think that's all I know for now I think maybe May is George perau coming in from North Carolina actually that's all I know for now so that's what's coming up guys I will send out announcements if you put your names on the uh mailing list if you're not already on I'll make sure you get announcements regularly so all right without further Ado uh I am extremely pleased to welcome Andre Caron we to the uh to the series I'm going to read a little bit of his bio and then just talk a little bit about what I know um freestyling is he put it um he's the author of the low passions another his first debut full length collection of poems an amazing book um I've had the pleasure of interviewing Anders about this book and about the last book um and and uh they're both really incredible books in conception and execution and I I urge you to to get your copies um he is the author of low passions a New York public library book group selection and dynamite which is a great little book that I have over there uh winner of the frost Place chaper competition his work has appeared in Paris review the Harvard Review BuzzFeed and a lot of other places I think this is a modest biography um Anders is as he will tell you tonight and and share some experience of he uh has been living a rather unusual existence for the past 15 years kind of Liv living off the grid um dumpster diving hopping fre a train with his brother um and sort of finding a way to be a writer that didn't involve having to have a j o so bow down to you sir um and uh he's and right now he's in California Native of Minnesota living in La um trying to sell your life story to the movies I think in a way yeah so he'll talk more about that but I give you Andre Carlson we hey everybody get this moved a little bit get this adjusted I'm a tall one so I need to can you all hear me okay at this volume yeah good yeah thank you all I'm so glad to be here thanks for the introduction geord um and I'm going to share kind of a range of of poems from The Collection disease of canes my new book just came out last month so I'm excited to be on the road and sharing some pieces with you all um I'll explain some of the narrative elements as I go along uh this first poem is called hired and it's kind of about a work and sometimes running into some strange forms of work so this one's hired the grand Dam's window rolled down but it was too dark out to see in a hand waved me over a voice asked if I wanted to make some quick cash standing right where I was standing for the next 10 minutes simple as that just stand here I said simple as that the voice said and the Hand stretched out of 20 it was weirdly humiliating doing what I was already doing like being told to act natural on camera and sensing that who you are is failing to entertain 10 minutes passed 15 20 hey i' never made so much in such little time never been so nervous doing nothing I kept needing the car to come back some sign it was over a horn a gunshot the rising pitch of oncoming Sirens I could accept I'd never know what I'd been used for but I wanted proof it was finished so that's the the first poem in the collection and uh it being called hired is kind of uh an ironic piece because the whole book is about a friendship between two young men who uh don't want to take regular employment they sort of live off the grid and dumpster dive for all their food and clothing um and they sort of see free time time as the ultimate form of freedom and so they're like pursuing that uh at at at Great length uh and as the book goes on you kind of see uh the ways in which that is like working for them uh and giving them a certain sense of freedom and ways that's like actually kind of costing them a lot um but that's kind of their lifestyle and uh the book is dedicated to my grandfather uh R Carlson he was a Lutheran pastor and it's dedicated to him because he was extremely frugal uh he grew up in Madagascar as a missionary child and didn't own shoes until he was 15 years old uh and then as an adult he maintained that frugality and all you know all the furniture in his house was from Curbside pickups and uh the first gift I remember him giving me is when I was little I had a bedroom that was like too hot in the summer and I must have been complaining about it and he found a fan in a dumpster and like fixed the wiring and then gave it to me as a gift and that was my fan and my through my childhood so I got these like early impressions of frugality from him uh and this next poem is kind of a bit of Like An Origin story for myself about that head space of extreme frugality um I'm from Northern Minnesota I don't know if do you all know where Fargo is yes so I'm from Morehead which is just like on the Minnesota side of the river but really it's basically an appendage of of Fargo uh so that's the climate for this poem You got a picture like you all know this is a northern place so like 40 wind chill uh where I grew up there we didn't wait for the school bus outside because it was too cold so you you wait inside and the bus would stop somewhere and everybody would run out uh so getting to school took a long time very extreme windshell there not not a forested area like this uh but anyway that's kind of the heads space for this poem and I got a question for you all if if you were going to take a cup and go to a soda fountain and fill the cup with each different type of soda What would you call that drink do have a name for that one or is that maybe that's more generational like my generation more you don't have a name for that well if alcohol I call a long nice tea ni tea okay yeah yeah yeah a lot of people call it suicide and where I grew up we call it a graveyard and that comes into this PO this one's called Cups hovering near the line I watch a lady order coffee and ask for a second empty cup but once she has the cup in hand she thinks better of it and leaving drops it in the trash I know about cups they're trees ground to a pulp and coated with thin skins of plastic not unlike condoms that make recycling impossible in ninth grade I kept a Subway Cup in my locker and cradled it each day at lunch beneath my coat as I trudged through Subzero winds and gusting snows to the franch sh where I blend in with the crowd who'd already ordered then step boldly toward the soda fountain which was patroled by the staff and fill my cup with Sprite Dr Pepper Mellow Yellow Cherry Coke making what we called a graveyard I had the cup so long I named him bathed him daily at the drinking fountain near the gym and I never let his lip get torn or pinched What stopped all this was Subway updating its logo instantly my cup looked old and wrong and I couldn't keep making my graveyard unless I was willing to switch to a new cup which I was and did so the capitalist in me came out anyway at the end just switch cups you know just get a new one whatever uh but yeah that's kind of a yeah piece from my childhood early early frugality early signs of my pathological frugality um so in this collection um you're following these two friends uh the speaker is basically based on myself and then uh his friend is named North and the two of them are doing all these scams where they dumpster dive for their food and clothing and then if they need some cash they'll sell some of the stuff they find in the trash in like fake moving sales they're not actually moving but they believe that moving sales are a little more exciting uh kind of like last chance to get this uh sort of thing so they're doing their little scams and that's the how the book kind of starts and they have this shared worldview um but uh their relationships to their families are really different U the speaker has uh two pastors for parents who are very loving and supportive and can provide him like a safety net if he gets into trouble with this weird lifestyle meanwhile North not only does not have a safety net but he's also providing for an alcoholic father uh so this next for uh kind of draws on those differences between the two of them and it also looks at another way that they're sort of avoiding the monetary system alog together this one's called snow it was the law you had four hours after snowfall to get your sidewalk cleared our landlord hated the chore so much he paid us five bucks per inch toward rent nor shoveled I came behind the salt that glowed in the street lights like a second snow as if we were unmaking and remaking the conditions that winter North dad disappeared again but this time North didn't bother to report it Thanksgiving passed Christmas came and went it's deep but it's easy North said one night tossing load after load over his shoulder the powder twisting in the sky and shushing against his coat each time the snow let up we poured over weather reports hoping for blizzards if it keeps up like this I said February will be free in March his dad was back in town 20 lbs later with no explanation fishing for little loans when he heard about February his Good Fortune he started leaning on North my own dad had never asked me for anything and I wondered what it would mean to know him that way the snow kept coming down what are you going to do I said Fanning cupfuls with salt on the concrete North Shrugged give him February you can't I said north lifted a shovel full and heaved it stop picturing your own dad he said by April February was spent in May North asked if his dad could move in he was much younger in person than North had made him seem we gave him a closet but soon his ship was everywhere this is temporary I kept saying without snow the rent out did us I caved and made the call my dad covered most of the summer treated the three of us to dinner I'd forgotten how embarrassing it was when he offered to pray over meals but glancing around the table I realized everyone was grateful but me so that's the first part of the book kind of getting into this um relationship between the two friends and they're kind of doing their thing um in section two of the book uh the friend North takes a seasonal job fishing in Alaska so he leaves town for the summer and that's partly to like raise funds for his dad so he's sort of forced forced into a form of responsibility and the speaker is Left Behind sort of grappling with this new loneliness um they're so isolated from the rest of the world that they're like very codependent and don't have a lot of other connections uh so the speakers kind of grappling with this loneliness and as a way of kind of filling that void he starts renting out North's bedroom as a bed and breakfast um and so he's having these guests come and stay with him and then he's cooking them meals in the morning from all the food he finds in the dumpsters but of course he's not telling them that so uh there's he's got a little thing going there and so what I'm telling you is don't stay at my bed of breakfast that's the hint I'm dropping um but that's kind of his new system to cope with this loneliness and in that section of the book you get a series of dramatic monologues from the perspectives of these guests who have come to stay at the bed and breakfast and this next poem is his first guest his name is Lou and he's in his 70s and is in town to bed on horse races you don't start at zero you start way below zero you got your gas money admission you grab a dog and a beer and hit the ATM which takes a not so small feet by the time you set eyes on horses you're down to 30 40 bucks and you haven't even placed to bet I started coming when my wife died she wouldn't marry a gambler so after her funeral was my first chance in 47 years oh I don't bet a lot of money if you don't bet a lot you can't make a lot but you can stay in it some guys they hit the pick three in the superfecta those guys are gods not me I just work the chalk and try to stay out of the red to tide me over my wife used to let me bet chocolate chips we'd watch the races on TV and place our bets in bowls she'd teased me for playing it safe loosen up she'd say then she'd put it all on here is happy to win she loved that horse she'd lose of course and go make cookies with her losses while I worked the chalk after 47 years of that it's hard to remember I'm betting real money losing real money when I win I remember I can tell you that much nah I'll never be a God but I'm still here the only God I ever met in person was my wife no [ __ ] she hit the superfecta one time filled her Bowl on four horses and named the order the exact order 1 2 3 4 and she won after we stopped shouting and cussing and jumping up and down we did a little twostep right there on the living room rug and at the end I dipped her she had red hair for miles it was beautiful so that's Lou how's everybody doing holding up okay listen to some poetry great yeah I've got a few more for you uh and then afterwards we're going to get into a little bit of a conversation piece uh so and if you have any questions we'll be more than happy to take them um so yeah hope you're having a good time with these um this book is based on my 20s and basically when I finished high school I knew I wanted to go into the Arts and in my logic that meant that I would never have any money uh because it's not a very financially Sound Decision to go into the Arts so I wanted to learn how to be more self-reliant uh and sort of scrap for myself so I went off to a series of wilderness survival schools across the country and somewhat ironically at those Wilderness schools I met a lot of anarchist kids who knew a lot about urban survival and so from those kids I learned a lot more about like modern dumpster diving techniques uh freight train hopping which I ended up doing a lot of in my 20s to travel around for free and see the country um and they had all these little scams like how to ship mail for free and stuff they were they were quite something these kids um but I learned some skills from them and then in my 20s I I lived down about $3,000 a year for that Whole Decade um dumpster diving for all my food and clothing and I I only spent money on rent and like emergencies that came up and that was kind of my lifestyle um and I would do lawn cross country trips uh one of them was a bike tour cross country uh for six months and I did that trip on $200 so that was like the kind of budget I was working with during those times and one of my tricks while traveling was was hanging out in diners and when people got up and left their meals behind I would like swoop in and eat whatever they'd left and that was one way I would travel or cheaply uh this next poem is kind of about that type of thing this one's called the family in perfect synchrony with the family rising from the booth and laughing their way toward the door I ditch my coffee on the counter and slide in where they've been I wol the father's Reuben and move to the daughter's grilled cheese I make quick work of melted milkshake shakes no looking up to see if I'm seen and although I'm counting each second it takes to pound the leftover plates at the end of it I wipe my lips with a cloth napkin and linger letting myself imagine a wife and kids gone on a trip to the bathroom hot water running as she scrubs Mrs Butterworth's from their fingers fixes their hair the waitress comes for dishes to involve in her own life to notice I don't have the right clothes the right face yes I said we're finished so this next one is something I drafted uh before the pandemic hit and then when I was putting this book together I was sort of like almost like Disturbed to feel how much it felt like it was like desting with that time period of the pandemic and kind of people's what people were forced into doing in terms of isolation and quarantining um and it made me question my own lifestyle a little bit because it felt like this was this point was about my life but it was like everyone's nightmare during the pandemic so uh but this one I hope it will resonate on that level with the pandemic stuff or or with other things in your life this one's called living alone another day of not seeing anyone but the faces on TV for company I record my impressions of celebrities and play them back but the voices don't sound like them and don't sound like me I peel in Orange and smell my hands I read portions of a mystery in different rooms to make it feel like different things are happening the longer I'm alone the smaller a could be and still console or rattle me strange to need so little but to need it so badly I step into the air conditioning of Target and ask after Brands I know they carry just to hear someone say yes all right yeah I'll do one more for you all uh thank you all so much for listening this one comes near the end of the collection and uh it's kind of an epist very letter letter style poem uh and yeah I hope you've enjoyed it and hope we have a nice conversation afterwards I know your first time first time for this yes so I hope you get to meet everybody and uh get involved yeah this one's called Lay It bear I know you're hungry for it more money more news desperate for any Laurel that parades you as happier than you know you are a car a cruise some haircut wreaking so deeply of depression no one with a nose can miss it making more each year spending more the pride of how little time you have to spare I know I embarrass you still living on expired food I find dented tuna I swirl away spending at a pace slower than a pulse slow that's what I have I'm not happy either I walk past bars where flush people drink markets where I dumpster what I eat down streets quiet enough to hush the last 10 years Parks dark enough to find Gemini lerra I don't wish you were poor I wish you were here thank you so I want to start with everybody's questions thoughts respons yeah thank you I I was amazed I guess that your ability to uh to recite your pieces like that just I find that's really remarkable thank you for that enjoyed that as a as a as one who's I guess an avid bird or a wild appreciator of wild birds I was curious about your connection if you have any comment about the loom the common Loom that's on yes I like that t-shirt thank you I was kind curious if you have any any connection to the wild yes I have a few thoughts one is if we turned off all lights in here guess what this is a glowin the- dark which is pretty cool is kind of cool pretty cool um but yeah state bird from Minnesota and that's where I'm from so the Loon and uh yeah the Loon has featured in several of my poems uh since it's such a familiar bird to me there's a great family story my parents are both from Lutheran Pastor families and there's a lake in northern Minnesota called kakona that has a shine called preachers point because back in the 50s a bunch of pastors um from the Lutheran Church all bought and built cabins there and my grandfathers were both part of that that moment um so my parents grew up going to the same Lake without ever meeting each other as kids and then later got married having met in Boston uh and later on at some point there was this story that came out where my mom was talking to my dad's brother and he was David and he was saying you know I used to go down on the dock every night in the summer and make won calls and I'm trying to get them good and then I i' get them calling back to me and he kind of explained this and then uh most of these cabins are like a quarter mile apart very close together kind of and then my mom said you know my dad so my grandpa used to go down to his dock at night at right after Sunset and do loon calls and he'd get the loons calling back to him it turned out that maybe they were just to each other the whole time anyway just a fun family lore kind of piece but yeah I love birds I love bird calls uh for sure and thank you for bringing up the recitation the the answer to it wasn't really a question I know but um it's it's not so much that I really wanted to do that when I started writing but I have dyslexia and so it's hard for me to look up and down from paper over and over again the words on the page can kind of swim and so it makes me more nervous U it's going be easy for me to lose my spot um but because I have dyslexia I've relied heavily on my ear okay uh and so once I became a poet I sort of realized that I could memorize a really large amount of language and and also when I edit my books I memorize the whole book and then and edit in my head wow yeah Remar yeah yeah for sure for sure so you Trav a lot you have a favorite place I know sounds like a cheapy question to ask yeah o favorite place um my favorite place for a for a nature setting is probably the sieras in California just incredible it's white granite slabs that like go down at 45 de angles into the water and then in night like a full moon it lights up all the white granite and it's like the most magical space and it's so good for swimming off the ground it and stuff so that's a nature place um for a country that I don't hear a lot about people saying they like that I really like bosia I thought Bosnia was a really cool place um really really interesting history really interesting religious conflicts there that they've had Wars over and you know um sort of you know a fraught history but but interesting uh and it's a beautiful landscape too very mountainous uh and friendly people yeah we were talking about this earlier that you like mountainous Landscapes yeah and desert Landscapes and you do not like subtropical Landscapes or tropical yeah yeah I don't particularly like the tropics you talk about that for a minute the benefit of my wife yeah I don't know exactly why I just think some like I react heavily to Aesthetics as an artist and for some reason the Aesthetics of the tropics like it just like doesn't really sit with me I don't feel like I should be there I'm not saying no one else should be there but uh but yeah I like desert and I like Mountain um and like Alpine Lakes probably my favorite spots you said this area R Minnesota still driving around yeah yeah for sure for sure and not where I'm from though like more like Southern or Eastern Minnesota where I'm from is a prairie landscape with a clayr soil so there's no natural trees there except on Riverbanks uh so it's very Windswept uh nothing to stop the the winds especially in the winter buffal you'll see that yeah yeah yeah I bet bual does have that off the water yeah yeah yeah totally yeah other other questions happy talk about whatever yeah this isn't very well formulated and I don't mean it to be an imping question yeah um thinking about genre such a strong memory or Memoir element in poetry you presented anyway what's your choice of poetry as a as a genre as opposed to say Pros M what does poetry do that you couldn't get from totally yeah absolutely yeah the answer to that would be the ultimate answer to that would be pretty long right like it'd be like a lot of things to consider but I mean poetry gives you the cadences the focus on Rhythm musical elements of speech uh it gives you brevity like a compression um and the kind of like kind of like implosion or like the burst that you can get U you get the silence around it like the kind of resonance of saying less and and meaning so hopefully more um you also get um the ability as a narrative writer that I am like as a narrative person you can tell a partial story but make it resonate uh you don't necessarily have to follow as much like beginning middle end or as much plot causality you can but you don't have to as much so you have certain freedoms to tell a partial story and and make it resonate in the way you want it to uh uh tell the beginning and then resonate or like just you know kind of jump in somewhere in the middle of a stream so there's kind of a certain flexibility of like metaphorical implications instead of having to follow as much like a causal plot structure um those are a few of the elements that I think of they're also since since they're compressed and they're in a Cadence you can memorize them U not me as the writer but but like people as readers you can like kind of have them with you you can like carry them around inside your body and that really appeals to me as a reader I like to like memorize poems and have them with me um so there those are a few of the things to consider but the genres aren't that important to me uh I just I happen to love the some of those Slants that poetry offers but I love writing pros and I I love reading Pros I love reading novels and short stories so you know they they each offer a slightly different flavor um but you know they're relatable to sometimes the categories get overemphasized for um monetary purposes you know for sales it's you know they need to get it a category uh so that it can be sold in a certain light uh and so some in some some ways it feels like genre becomes mainly like a capitalistic function in a way instead of as much an artistic freedom but yeah thank you yeah yeah for sure we we uh in our in in the interviews we've done we did them for two different books his first collection is 85 pages and it's about a a young man going out to the world and wanting to have all these different experiences and then the second collection is kind of this young man coming to kind of the end of that I think um or sort of the exploring the other side of his personality which is wanting to be more withdrawn wanting to be more domestic yeah it's a very domestic project and that book is Pages 82 in there oh oh is it is it really uhhuh yeah it's longer than when you read it you read it as a Word document okay that's why okay Advance um yeah it's very similar length yeah but it's it feels more compressed yeah it is it's less words by lot what you you know I asked you about that my my thought was well he's tired of the world and so the reflections brevity reflects the fact that he's tired of everything he's like no no no no no it's not that he's like I really just want to get it as compressed as I possibly could can you talk a little bit more about why you wanted what it is about compression that's to you oh for sure a few things one is it's reflecting the mentality of the speaker he's someone who doesn't want new things he wants to reuse and reuse and reimagine reinvent so the poems are relatively short and the book is relatively short and each word and each line and each kind of resonance is is working on in several different levels so you know and that's true of poetry in general you don't want a line to do one thing you want it to do like four things so you're always working on that compression as a poet and I think I was you know trying to take that to farthest as I could go um so it's reflecting the head space kind of efficiency and frugality either with the language that's like the speaker head space um I also wanted like it kind of like a like a short story mood something you could read in one setting in one in one sitting with it um and and read through the whole thing in in you know only a matter of a couple hours um and then hopefully for there to be like a lot of residents as you revisit and and spend more time with the collection um I was going to add some third thing to that that felt important to me but now I'm forgetting what it was um yeah yeah yeah yeah oh no I was I know what I was going to say I I edit with a kind of like an accordion style that's how I think of it I I write a lot of material right a lot and I and I get rid of almost everything over and over again keep doing like a push out push in so for my first book my first book took me 10 years to write the low passions and I wrot about I drafted about 1500 poems all in the same world and I used 53 of them uh so I not good at math but basically I got rid of everything I used almost nothing I kept only what was the very very very best uh and the same with disease of canes for example there's a monologue uh I read the one from Lou's perspective there's one from Oscar's perspective and for drafting that poem in Oscar's voice I drafted more than 20 monologues before getting to the one that I used in the book that are all in Oscar's voice and you know some people like really liked those some my friends really liked them and thought you know I should do a whole thing with all these Oscar poems and I said no this one's the best one not only going to use the one because it's the best and so that's kind of my my attitude is like I don't want people to read the 19 other poems that aren't quite as good I want them to read only the best ones yeah we talked about that you know when you're a poet it's kind of your fate that people if they know you at all they might know you for one two three poems and that's it you know that they might have written four or five different anthologies or collections somewhere um and so I I I asked like if you had one poem that you want wanted to be remembered for in this book which one would it be and that was your answer blue right yeah yeah at least in terms of me for like kind of for myself like that was a that was a difficult for one for me to write I like I like how it came out but like you know I read the family that about sneaking meals at diners that one took me more than five years to finish I tried and an endless amount of approaches to that poem it was much longer at one stage it was shorter at another stage it had several different titles it wanted a lot of different directions and it took me more than five years to finally find what I was looking for so yeah I work really hard on my pieces and I write a lot of material I write I write a huge amount of material and I use almost none of it yeah that's kind of my Approach one more yeah U I was just just wondering at what point would you say you were suddenly thinking of yourself U as a poet or as one who could uh uh create a line of poetry that's on my list of questions I serve you when I became a poet and what you don't know about so maybe something about your your beginning as as one interested in po I hope you'll talk in this answer I'm planning a SE about your previous sort of life life PR poetry yeah for sure yeah I'll talk about both of those things I think poetry in a lot of ways goes back to my childhood and having dyslexia and so when I was learning how to read and write I was having a lot of trouble and my parents would read aloud to me to try to help me learn and I was ashamed that I wasn't learning I knew I was supposed to be learning my friends could read you know and so they'd read me a whole page while I was sitting looking at them and then I they'd finish the page and I'd say hey I can read and then I'd recite the whole page back to them pretending I was reading off the paper U and so from an early age I started learning how to memorize large amounts of language as like a survival strategy um and then is in my family one of the ongoing jokes has always been like freat a sitcom together or something after an episode my parents or my brothers will be quoting the dialogue to each other joking about what was funny in the episode and I'll interrupt and say no that's not actually what the character said and I'll have it all memorized because I just have a brain for that um so I think the the cadences of human speech was was my first like love of language was like how people talk aloud and not not what it's like to read a book because reading books was intimidating to me and it was something I couldn't do and then even now I read slowly so it's always been like something I feel like bad at like slow a slow reader uh so it was more about the sound aloud that's what really threw me in and then I'll come I'll come back to the thing you want to talk about but then the other thing that pushed me over was I went to college at a state school in Washington State and I had a poetry teacher there who just like really brought it to life for me she was so gifted as a teacher at least for for me how she was resonating with me and it really helped open up my mind and give me a type of confidence that maybe I could have something to offer if I did my own thing and kind of didn't necessar have to like conform to what poetry is supposed to be um and when I've talked to her about that she always has this attitude of like oh you had the talent you know I didn't I didn't do anything and I really resist that because I think she really did help me find something that I I think it would have been hard for me to find without her um so that's the writing answer and then what George wanted me to talk about is uh growing up from age 10 to age 20 I was a skater a rollerblader like a trick skater like handrails and staircases like that kind like skateboarding uh and I did that every day with my brother for 10 years like training really hard and then skated professionally in my teen years uh riding for skate companies so that was my first love and if you're a skater what you're really doing is filming skating because every skater is making a skate video like that's what you're working on uh so all of my childhood was was videography thinking about cameras think about angles and thinking about what I look like from a third person perspective uh because as you're design your skate tricks how what you're thinking about is how they'll look from the camera not how they'll feel to do but how they'll look from over there and so there's a lot of like getting outside your own head head and like viewing things from different angles and stuff and I think that was really helpful for me visually once I became a wrer to like build images um and choose like distances from subject matters like how far away does it feel if you were imagining it as a camera angle um and anyway skating had a big impact on me and this is hard to talk about without getting into a whole essay but I my writing style is heavily influenced by skating and like skate culture and it it's hard to explain how that works but for me it's like um like synesthesia where people have have overlapping senses right you like you like hear colors and whatever see see music I kind of have that with skating and writing it just feels like the same thing to me and I watch I was telling George today she was asking about this I watch skate videos like every day and for me it's as if I'm reading like it it does it gives me aesthetic U influence like gives me like aesthetic ideas that I can use in writing and I don't think you can really easily explain how that works unless you just have done something that much that you can overlap them but it's skating is an endless set of Aesthetics it's just all about Aesthetics it doesn't skating doesn't even have narrative content so it's just how how it looks and the aesthetic choices going into that so it's like a very pure art form in a way free of content might be an opportunity to talk about the film you did with your brother who's also very fine poet yeah um and you know making that film and the experience of traveling doing what you did for sure yeah my brother and I uh did a a free hopping trip um we've done a lot of free hopping but we did this one trip from Minneapolis to Seattle and we wanted to make a short film about it and we tried to film it one year and like everything went wrong like we we lost all our water getting on the train because our thing exploded or water thing exploded so we were starting a 5 day cross country trip without any water and then it was like everything went wrong we had to get off a train that stopped we had to get on we switch trains like four times we had terrible weather we eventually got caught and kicked off the train in the deserts of Washington state anyway so we didn't get nearly enough footage to make the film and so then we did it all over again uh the next year and uh it ended up being really important that we' failed to do it once because on the second time when you're doing that kind of thing you have five days right and you're not near any Outlet or anything like that so we had about battery power for about three hours of filming in a course in the course of five days so we really had to know what we wanted to film and having done the whole route once before we could know what was coming so we'd be like oh there's that really cool bridge in mam North Dakota we need to be ready the second we get near that bridge get the camera on get the shot um so that was like a really fun and interesting project it was also really fun from a perspective of constraints on Art because we were in that 8x4 four box of metal and that was the only place you could be the film uh so like the constraints on what type of shot you could get were really limited and it it made a big challenge for like how to make the visuals um compelling yeah yeah anybody's interested it's called riding the Highline it's a 16 minute awardwinning short yeah we took it to we took it to a lot of film festivals and had really fun time doing the film festivals circuit won some awards yeah including here at Rochester R yeah yeah yeah any other I don't know question or yeah yeah you and then you two unrelated things did you say anything about the title disas yes absolutely yeah yeah yeah so disease of Kings is the nickname for the disease gout uh and Kings used to get it and rich people used to get it because it's from overeating and over consumption basically and in the book uh the friend North suffers from gout and he's getting he's having a series of attacks because he's overeating they they're dumpster diving for such high quantity and high quality food that he's like overeating all these meats and steaks and bacon and olive oil and stuff so he's overc consuming and he has the disease of KS from this lifestyle of dumpster diving so there's like a practical element to the title but there's obviously it's kind of Rippling out where this the irony of them being able to eat so well that they're like canes eating out of a trash um and also just kind of this idea of like the layers of disease of our of our culture and also the speaker is kind of like thinks of himself as a bit diseased in his head space um and is a pretty extreme loner which is another element of like the idea of being a king is like one of the issues with that for for the for the king themselves is there's no one else who shares the role right so you're even though it's like all this privilege you're isolated and that's kind of where the speaker is he has all this privilege in a lot of ways he's choosing this lifestyle he's not taking a job he has parents who who can support him so he has a lot of privilege but he's kind of in this place where he becomes incredibly lonely yeah yeah and then you had something yeah yeah not a question just a just a comment uh I find it interesting that you had successful Journeys through you know around the country with Freight hopping that sort of thing because uh I I just I just suspected that after back in the beat era let's say my personal experience my last cross country hit Cy was 1973 I thought after that it was like everything just it just kind of evaporated just that possibility was gone here you are you were able to uh yeah hitchhikes I've hitchhiked thousands of miles in this country and abroad and yeah fre fre top a lot you were able to do that do artistically yeah they're slowly getting rid rid of all the cars that are easily ridable on like a mile long yeah right now like on a mile long train that's going cross country uh they'll be like one or two cars that are actually a good ride and otherwise you're like totally exposed and all those cars are from the 80s and so they're slowly getting rid of them there was a Heyday in the 80s where uh the CEO of BNSF was a former train h and he like relaxed all the policies uh so there was like a little Heyday when when that was happening and since then it's been an aggressive you know attitude but it's like mainly about getting rid of everything you can ride on but that's tough because you can ride on almost anything it's just hard to stay hidden um so yeah but it's an ongoing thing I mean it's definitely still a thing yeah yeah yeah I can you talk a couple more little ones one is that's a little but talk about you talk about DST diving you mentioned it a lot um this is something that you know if you think about an average person's life like okay what do you do during your day I don't know I get up I have a cup of coffee I read my newspaper on my tablet maybe or I sit down and I have to go to work and I do this where does dumpster time fit in I know you you said you still actually do this in la la which we talk about the differences in City yeah um where does this fit into your day yeah late at night late at night yeah you want to go after stores are closed ideally U I've done it other ways sometimes like at Trader Joe's one time me and my friend um found two Trader Joe's workshirts in the dumpster and so then for a little while just almost like as a joke we'd go during the day wearing the shirts and and like look like employees so that if anyone passing by saw us we were like blending in that was kind of fun uh but mostly I go around midnight and you know go to places that are like fully shut down um and sometimes I go to a grocery store and I have to wait because the staff stays late at night you know cleaning stuff up throwing stuff away sometimes you have to kind of hang out while they're finishing around midnight U but yeah I go really late at night and then you you can decide how complicated you want your your route to be I mean there's there's dumpsters where you just get General food products like grocery stores like TR Joe's are are great places because they package almost everything so it's really easy to sort through um Whole Foods is sloppier because they don't do as as much heavy packaging just for example but then you can also dumpster dive at like factories so like uh factories that produce Outdoor Clothing or camping gear factories that produce individual products like Naked Juice or Cliff bar or you know whatever like there's factories for all these things so you can go find really Niche dumpsters too my favorite in Seattle when I was living in Washington state was the Theo Chocolate dumpster I don't know if you guys know Theo chocolate it's like a very high-end all organic Madagascar vanilla it's kind of like the best chocolate you can buy and we used to dumpster that like so we one night we got like five five gallon buckets worth and it was something like $3,000 worth of dark chocolate all in one night and we spent like the we spent the whole next year coming up with all these different ways to eat it and we were making chocolate fondue and we were giving it away to friends and like everybody's birthday was like this epic chocolate Feast um that was really fun even went so far as to take the tour of the factory because I was curious why so much gets thrown away so I took this whole tour kind of like as a SP but I didn't tell them why I was there and then near the end I very casually was like what's up with like your waist system and like what what ends up in the trash I said something like that and the the person giving the tour said well you know our flavor notes are our brand you know we're like a high-end chocolate company so if we make a batch of like the sea salt almond and it's like a little too salty or not quite salty enough it's got to go because like our our flavor note is the brand and so basically I was eating like slightly overs salted and slightly unders salted chocolate yeah yeah yeah never Incorporated any of the I mean it's wasteful Society incor any of that into yeah uh how do you mean Incorporated it like yeah for sure I would say this whole book is about it and and it's kind of going edit through story and through kind of implication it's not really like taking it on head on like hey look at the food waste problem it's more like this is just a story about two guys who are doing this this lifestyle and so the topic is there kind of implicitly but the whole time I that's kind of how I approached that but I also just published an essay in the sun magazine if people know the Sun but that that piece is looking at the same two characters but it's digging a little it's like an essay so it's digging more more into the environmental angle and kind of like the Eco issues around it um but in the in the Poetry collection it's it's just sort of there but it's I would say it's there on every page pretty much yeah yeah and last thing because it's but for me anyway um we talk we talk a lot about loneliness over the course of our our um discussions about these books and you know loneliness is a big issue for anyone who writes yeah so what role I guess does loan liness play in the work and in your writing life yeah I mean I'm a Loner I'm very introverted um for me it plays a big role in like having the energy to write is like having enough time alone uh so a lot of my days I'll write in the morning for a few hours and then I exercise all afternoon um like either hiking or rock climbing and I find that I the time at my desk is totally necessary but it's more like a grind it's like my Taurus personality like wanting to like work hard and but I think of all my good ideas while I'm exercising and so I kind of feel like every day is like I kind of climb the pump with sitting at the desk and I'm kind of grinding out the effort and then in the afternoons I like the light bulb goes on while I'm exercising and then I use those ideas I have the next day and I kind of I guess I'm saying that for this answer because I I need a lot of that Al time to be alone to kind of have my mind drift and then of course once I have poems further along I go on long walks and recite to myself you know so I need that time alone too um I don't know I think it's it's pretty essential for me in a way and I don't know what comes first the the personality or the or the art or both you know kind of both feed each other um but it's not without its complications I mean my character in this book that's basically me is definitely like hitting the wall of like how much loneliness he can take you yeah you you were taking a walk last night around Danville were you reciting to yourself no no on tour on tour when I'm reading every night it's kind of like oh anything else because I know I yeah I'm ready for the readings already so I don't want to recite right now in my spare time you know that story about wall Stevens W stev composing to himself you walk they would actually retrace the steps if you didn't like the line you a couple it's awesome well thank you all so much for listening I hope it's been fun I'd be happy to sign some books if anyone's interested in in reading the whole collection hope you might consider that um and yeah happy to hear some people are going to read right yeah yeah yeah yeah happy to hear other people read too and we'll give we'll give folks a minute or two to use bathroom sure yeah yeah let's take a little break and then we'll get to it awesome thank you all [Music] might