Buck Downs has lately been posting poetry on Instagram under the handle @thesomethingfornothing, but he has been writing poetry longer than Instagram has been distributing it. He has been gracious enough to use the old email to have this conversation with J-T Kelly. Kelly in italics.
money transfer
he got a pay cut
hell he got
'em all cut
Buck, you put poems on stickers, often without your name on them, sometimes with your IG handle. You record poems on voicemail and give out the number so people can call and hear your voice in the middle of the night. (I presume it's your voice. I presume everyone calls in the middle of the night like I do.) You put poems on Instagram. You self-publish books of poetry. You have traditionally published books and chapbooks of poetry. You do readings in person. WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO DO TO US!? Ahem. I think I mean: Buck, what is poetry, what's its value, what does it do, that it's good and fun to put it on a button, to surprise people with it, to put it in places we don't expect it to be? What do you consider yourself to be doing when you creatively insert poetry into the cracks in our parking lot lives?
It’s really more of what I’m trying to do to me, first, before I ever get to anyone else.
There are stories to tell about each piece of the practice, the postcards and chapbooks and other printed pieces -- practices I shorthand as “author-published ephemera” -- and the stickers & feed and voicemails that have gotten more of my attention in the last 4-5 years.
That part starts, I guess, with having two poetry practices that were at loggerheads with each other. I had a folio of poems & drafts and such -- things that I was writing and sending out, hoping to get published, and generally not making any progress. I was also stealing time at work to type up short improvisations on postcards & mailing them off to friends like Brett Evans and Greg Fuchs. The first practice was boring and frustrating, especially when the awesome fun of the second was living on the same desk. So I quit sending out poems for like seven years. Nobody noticed, which confirmed that I made a good choice.
Everything after has followed that pattern, mostly -- thinking of people I know and using the plain old stuff around me, instead of waiting for some stranger to do the publishing and distribution to make me look good.
Each piece of the practice takes its shape from the circumstances of my living at the time. Later on, I was a fully-employed person with a range of commitments and relationships, like anyone. Questions of available time and energy started to become urgent because it felt like the poetry was at risk of getting squeezed out. I had to make some changes to my art to fit it into my hours and days.
That was a long time ago, and conditions have changed. But the issue is still pertinent. Time and energy, cash and care, finite resources. A question like “what does it do” doesn’t occur to me as often as “what do I have”.
I think about that for you, too. Any writer would like to dominate the time and energy of a reader for hours and even days. I can’t help but think that’s much less cool, on either side, than us bookworms take for granted that it is. I have a day to get through, and you do too.
I had to sit down and think about "dominate" for a while. That jives with my experience, but I had not put my finger on it. It reminds me of something my wife says. "Before there were museums, there was art. Then we created museums and put art in them, and it was weird. Finally, we started making art meant to be put in a museum." The ever-present megalomania. May we each find a way to escape it.
Who do you read, Buck? Do you read a lot of poetry? Do you read Studs Terkel? Some of your short poems remind me of W.C. Fields:
Fields:
Q: Hey, Mister. Why do you drink gin in the morning?
A: So I can shave.
Downs:
I have developed
a trick knee
I do not much
like this trick
David Shapiro ended his last book of poetry with a poem talking about all the people who he says "actually wrote my poems." Who writes your poems? What books do you hand to your friends? Whose ideas have captivated you?
Do I read a lot? it's hard to say -- I've been reading to myself as a daily habit for something like 56 years. It adds up. Things that are worth doing, you hit it a lick every day, any chance you get.
They say you spend the first half of your life building a sense of who you are and the second half dismantling it. I think I may be hip deep in the project of stripping my life out for parts. Do I do anything I did? Not if I can stand to get rid of it, I don't.
*Do I read* vs. *Did I read*. Yeah, like any of us I have thumbed my way through a zillion pages of American Literature. Would I recommend that to a young person?
My experience is that you do have to wade through gallons and gallons of simply common shit just to find out what the deal is. I had to go through stuff like Studs Terkel to get to Barbara Barg, or it seems in retrospect to have gone that way. One reason I can't cut it as a teacher is I would not foist The Good War on you, and then say, here's Obeying the Chemicals. You should just read Obeying the Chemicals. Reading Walker Percy and John Kennedy Toole may have set the table for reading Robert Plunket and Ottessa Moshfegh, but let me be clear: I do not under any circumstances recommend that you spend any time reading Walker Percy or John Kennedy Toole.
So yes, I have read a lot of books, and I recommend few of them. It's inescapable that people will give you frivolously bad advice on what to read or not. I would like not to be another old fart whining about how nobody reads Brecht anymore when I can't go a week without seeing a fellow geezer name-check the guy.
My one true poetry professor ever, Andrei, has a poem about a chef who opens a French restaurant in Amish country, "a people notorious for liking their own cooking". I am poetry Amish, I guess. The work is a thoroughly eccentric synthesis of more than I can remember, and I wouldn't tell you even if I could. Trade secret.
Buck, I would like to follow up on Obeying the Chemicals. Could you talk some about what you like about it? Also, how do you think learning happens? You mentioned your "one true poetry teacher." How do you think teaching happens? How is it that we read and listen and are changed, if we are changed, and how do we then become able to write something we couldn't write before?
There's a lot to say about Obeying the Chemicals. My part is that it requires nothing from you, and that the more you try to bring to it, the less you will see of it. For the most astute and well-informed readers, it does not exist and is not even bad literature; it is not literature at all, despite that it is unmistakably poetry, and great poetry.
There's a novel by William Melvin Kelley called A Different Drummer (1962) that I happened to read this summer and which does this too, in its own way. Points of congruence to previous literature seem to be there, but that is finally an illusion or a demand that I brought with me, and does not exist. I can't say that I liked the book very much when I was done, but it is unabashed in its autonomy, its indifference to whatever I might think of it, and that is something I find brilliant and special.
You owe a special debt in life to the people who teach you to read. In my case, that debt is owed to my two sisters, Julie and Cherie, and my Mom. They got tired of reading to me and made me a self-directed reader at an early age. As a result, much of my first ten years of formal schooling was teachers sending me to the library to read while they taught other kids their ABCs. In 10th Grade, Esther Hughes made our class do something no teacher had done before: we had to go to a bookstore and buy a book, rather than rely on the resources of the Broward County Public School System. The book was The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, a shrewd choice.
I'll skip ahead, to Baton Rouge in the late '80s; over the course of a year, Dre made it clear that I was a jerk and a bully and would never make it as a poet (he was not wrong). Then he advised me that I should switch from the PhD. track to the MFA track and become a creative writing instructor like him. Cognitive dissonance, or Ponzi scheme, you be the judge. Either way, eighteen consecutive years in school, it was time for a change.
And that is when my education began, and that is the point to be found in all this if there is one. Education is what happens when you leave school, and the great teachers are the amateurs and the workers you find off-campus. That's been my experience. Your mileage may vary.
Buck, thanks again for doing this interview with me. I'd like to ask you to bring us in for a close. Would you share with us one of the poems from your latest release, Recreational Vehicle?
Recreational Vehicle is a dear little friend who sat homeless on the shelf for a neat 30 years. I did not have the skills and could not attract the resources I needed to give it a home at the time, and so it waited for me to catch up.
2024 has been devoted in large part to a valedictory exercise; reviewing the work, 1993-2023, and getting it all into a common completed format. I have wondered from time to time, "what would done look like?" and in a few more months I may have a specific answer.
A year is a long time to spend in the
hallway, closing one door and reaching for the next. Finishing that little book
and setting it forth as part of that exercise is my private joy and
compensation.
high off smoked crushed-
up roach parts and paprika
na na na na me & Bobby McGee
sleep is called for
and coffee will be served
A native of Jones County, Miss., Buck Downs divides his time between Ellisville and Washington, DC. He is the author of several books of poetry, most recently NICE NOSE (Buck Downs Dot Com). His poems have also appeared as a series of author-published ephemera – postcards, stickers, buttons, voicemails, and other forms — where the ephemeral stands in for the impermanence of being and acts as a catalyst for human contact.
J-T Kelly is the author of the chapbook Like Now (CCCP/Subpress, 2023). His poetry appears in The Denver Quarterly (upcoming), Bad Lilies, and elsewhere. He is an innkeeper in Indianapolis.