David Currie & IAN MARTIN : These Guys Get It

 

 

 

Dave: Maybe we can just do this like Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. I think the secret sauce is that we’ve known each other for a long time, our writing has been inspired by each other’s entire back catalogue, and throughout Versefest, Two for One, Riverbed, the Factory Reading Series, and we’ve been talking about jokes with increasing intensity.

IAN: Yeah, when we're at poetry events together, we're usually sitting somewhere at the back, joking and riffing off of each other. So that's kind of how the chapbook came together – we would send poems back and forth, writing and rewriting as we went, riffing off each other's ideas.

Dave: I think play is an important part of the project. Comedy writing is often done in small groups. Some of my favourite moments are sitting together and cracking wise during readings.  We're old friends - who only really hang out at readings. It's nice to have a thing. One of the things I think we have both experienced is that poetry events can be...well...self-serious. The number of times I've texted a friend "somebody throw a pie!" during a reading could single space fill its own 30 page chapbook. Once we realized that this stand up project was going to work, we immediately started thinking of ways to make it fun for as many people as possible.

I think both of our sections in the book walk the line between parody and pastiche and I think the "stage show" really mirrors that. 

IAN: I've always had a serious, depressing streak in my writing, and there's definitely a place for that. But humour makes the sad stuff go down a little easier. And people like to laugh! It brings us together. The world is full of so much sadness but sometimes it's so sad that it's kinda funny.

Our stage show came about through riffing as well. Someone comes up with an idea, and you just keep trying to escalate it until it's so ridiculous it shouldn't work, then you do it anyways. We start our reading of the chapbook by copying a darts champion's walk-on song, and we end with a Saturday Night Live outro. Then in the middle we read a bunch of weird poetry and expect to be taken seriously. Riding that line is fun, where the audience isn't sure what's a joke and what's not. The higher the tension, the better the release.

Dave: Ok, that's a fair point. There's nothing wrong with serious depressing readings. There's always an undercurrent of that (?)  in my work as well but I do think if you ask people to leave their houses there should be some effort to add something to make it feel worth it. For my money, Christine McNair is one of the best readers around. She's not exactly Conan O'Brien but she creates a definite mood – a container to hold the audience in stasis until the reading is done. A great reading, a great set, holds you every second until it drops you in a cornfield somewhere without your wallet, your house keys, your shoes, and with somebody else's iguana to take care of.

I guess we should talk about the poems. After we were going back and forth, I hadn't reread IAN's poems until we were doing final edits and I laughed out loud so many times that I couldn't believe how lucky I was to be collaborating with them. For me, IAN's poems in This Guy Gets It transport me out of time and space. IAN does such a good job of replicating the dark stage, hot spotlight feeling of a comedy club while at the same time injecting that space with a whole world of characters, structures, and philosophies. It's such a pleasure to have my poem's next to theirs.

IAN: My poems may take you out of time and space, but yours put me in every time and space at once. Dave's very first poem immediately makes the link between comedy and philosophy, this ceaseless need to observe and question and reframe things over and over and over until you understand it all, or realize that you can't. His poems draw from all these different sources, music, TV, mythology, history, and mash them together in different configurations to try and make some sense out of the bizarre, iterative project of humanity. Dave is so great at capturing what it's like to live in the present, constantly haunted by everything that came before, and dealing with the absurd amalgam of what has survived.

Also he's very funny. 

Dave: We like each other.  We also both really like the book. I'm very grateful to rob mclennan for all his help. People seem to like the book (and the roadshow) too. 

I don't want to make a big thing about this but I saw a lit mag this week say "Don't send humour." Which is in itself very funny. We're seriously starting to put together an expanded full length manuscript. We both talk a lot about how frustrating it is to send our full length M.S.s out and to not find them a home.

This project feels special, though. It feels like it might be a place to start. We're adding a bunch of new poems – we're co-writing more. In This Guy Gets It, the last poem is co-written and I honestly think it might be the funniest poem in the chapbook. We wrote it knowing the shape of the rest of the book. Right now, we're kicking around a poem without a name yet about Lady Gaga that would be great in a full book length project.

For this chapbook, I really do want to thank rob, because there can be 99 publishers in a room and 99 of them reject you – all you need is one publisher to say "fine" to change your whole life.

What do you think IAN? There can be 99...

IAN: ...sandwiches?

Dave: Sandwiches.

 

 

 

 

David Currie is not IAN MARTIN.  He is a different writer with whom IAN MARTIN is collaborating. David's work has appeared in various places – he wishes he could be more specific, but he forgot to write them down, and has been collected into six chapbooks. He is the author of no-book-books, so what are we even doing here?

  

IAN MARTIN is large and barely in charge. Their work has appeared recently in periodicities, BAD DOG Mag, Discordia Review, and Sumac Literary Magazine. IAN has published six chapbooks, most recently EVERYONE IS MY ENEMY (2022). When not writing, IAN makes small video games and complains. Visit www.ianmartin.rocks at your own risk.

Their collaborative chapbook, This Guy Gets It, appeared recently through above/ground press.

Forty-five Ottawa poets : IAN MARTIN : INSTAGRAM PORN BOTS KEEP LIKING MY POST ABOUT MY DEAD CAT

folio : Forty-five Ottawa poets

 

 

 

 

or my dear car, or my millionth selfie, or my long lost happiness, but they're mostly drawn to death, because they don't understand. bots can shut down, start to fail, but they don't die, aren't active in the process of it. i'd made my millionth joke about petit mort, but bots don't get sex either. they replicate what they're shown, same as humans, but they never get to enjoy it, twist some sort of fetish from their subjugation. i went to a show and didn't feel the transcendent power of art. i posted pictures to the net like i was programmed to. i hear the same music, see the same porn, fake the same feelings every single day. if you don't know death is there comfort in the end. when my cat died i didn't cry enough. i didn't miss him enough. a new bot reminds me of this every single day.

 

 

 

 

 

What I'm working on:

It's been kind of a rough year (see: dead cat, among other things), but I've done art when I can. I'm shopping around a full-length manuscript at the moment and letting some new material pile up behind the scenes. It's been a slow year for my writing and my other art but the horizon is looking a lot clearer lately.

 

 

 

 

IAN MARTIN is still dying. IAN’s writing has appeared recently in BAD DOG, Discordia Review, Sumac Literary Magazine, These Days, and VANITY. For poems, games, and whatever else, visit WWW.IANMARTIN.ROCKS.

IAN MARTIN : (further) short takes on the prose poem

folio : (further) short takes on the prose poem

 

 

 

 

a prose poem is like a brick, which lady gaga infamously said could build a house or sink a dead body. it’s a hefty thing. all the earthy ingredients swirl together and harden into something both unremarkable and essential. prose poems make me think of tumblr, where the “text post” format was one of the primary artforms – people would use it to write jokes, diary posts, short stories, poems, whatever – and they would all just pile up on your feed in a stack of white bricks of various heights. you had witty observations, funny diary entries, full escapist fantasy worldbuilds, experimental bits, all in one or maybe a couple of run-on paragraphs. you had people writing as personas, as themselves, as a persona and as themselves simultaneously… i would read the equivalent of a novel a day of text posts and i loved it. totally jumbled together and all over the place but you start to see connections between them, both intentional and not.

my favourite prose poems use repetition and rhythmic tricks to make up for a lack of line breaks. a brick of text can be intimidating and dense at first blush. at the same time, it’s just a paragraph. maybe two. i guess you could make a long prose poem. what i tend to like about poetry is that it’s short. surrounded by a lot of white space. given room to breathe and bleed and expand. and it’s fun sometimes to pack all of this dense complicated bloody mess into a nice neat little justified paragraph. feels like you have some sort of control over it. (shades of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s “Can’t Help Myself”.) and over time these text bricks pile up into a house. and now it’s big and solid and look at all you’ve accomplished. and with the leftover bricks you can build a little TV stand with them or throw them through a window. or whatever! they’re your bricks.

prose poems can read as more immediate, less filtered than more formatted poetry. like they sort of spilled out of you like little wet chunks of meat. i do edit and tighten my work before it goes anywhere but i guess it’s just a little trick. something that evokes an unaltered stream of consciousness. most of my prose poems are introspective and personal. it feels like a very confessional form to me. a little bundle of feelings i slip into the stream and then it’s gone. we’re trained by social media to watch a stream of little disconnected paragraphs and pick out the ones we like. all these little bricks that build up who we are and what we know. or destroy it. or just sit around unused in a construction lot while the grass grows around them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'VE LOST MY VIRGINITY BEFORE AND I'LL LOSE IT AGAIN

Death is the one transaction you can’t contest. when it happens, everyone can tell. you won’t be there to hear but they’ll gossip on how you spent it. if you paid your dues. even pre-twitter it was all about receipts. we’re ill-equipped for the ecstatic let-down of Death. we’re hung up on the origin story. how it plays to an audience. how it sells. how they remake Spiderman every fiscal year. we want new. we want more. Life is a volatile stock, a bed of spikes that bears our bodies forward. if only i’d sold at the right time, or the next right time, or the next. Death is a release but post-nut clarity’s a bitch. Big Death has a monopoly and the mom-and-pop Deaths suffer. i don’t want them to go under but i need a refund. i got the money shot but i keep needing boosters. they want new. they want more–

I BLEW MY WAD ON EPHEMERA AND I’M OUT OF OPTIONS

 

 

 

 

 

IAN MARTIN is a writer and game designer and person of interest. IAN’s work has recently appeared in Not Your Best, Touch the Donkey, Arc Poetry Magazine, canthius, Neutral Spaces and The Puritan. IAN has published six chapbooks, most recently EVERYONE IS MY ENEMY. Hang ten and ride the digital wave at [IANMARTIN.ROCKS].