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.
