probably going to read everything now.

i just read i am rainbow by michael hessel-mial (i spelled your name wrong on twitter and for that and absolutely nothing else i am sorry), a poetry series located at//on//in pangur ban party. i think, after hearing michael read in a coffee shop in baltimore this past tuesday as part of steve roggenbuck and poncho peligroso's irl poetry tour, my heart (or something?) has fallen in love with his poetry. the first two in the series, 'this poem is pissed at other poems' and 'phone sex' are obvious favorites, but even his cheeky short poems in the series like 'emily dickinson poem' seem really wonderful. i really appreciated getting to see michael read his handwritten 'sexy poems' from a marble composition notebook during the tour. i like to imagine this comparative lit phD candidate scribbling everything furiously like this and shouting it aloud whether or not an audience is present as witness.

tangentially (hehe), i am wondering why i have not yet read every single series available to my eyes and my brain at pangur ban party. i've been 'aware' and 'appreciative' of pangur ban party and dj berndt since i started gettin in2 dat lit scene via let people poems. i've read my friend shaun gannon's short fiction there and 'i'm finna start all conversations like this from now until forever' by sasha fletcher and dan bailey and various bits and pieces of other things by other folks there. this is not enough. getting started on reading everything immediately.

things i've read today after waking up an hour ago.

1. james duncan's blog post about a million bears.

i enjoy james's voice a lot. in writing and out loud (hehe) (stacey teague's memeplex lolz). he writes well about humans and emotions and sadness in a way that does not make me want to throw up or run away. he makes me think about the things i thought about when i was 15 a lot, not because i think of him as a child but because he seems to still be tapped into that. in a kind of thoughtful, expansive way.

2. everything about death on antipobros.

i read stacey's poem about ideas for poems. i immediately opened a word document because it made me want to write a poem. i got distracted by the rest of the poem and then james's poems and then stacey and james's sad songs and stacey's macro. i read all the comments about james's poems and thought, i feel this way about james's poems too. i didn't add any comments because it felt nice to just watch. i felt strongly that i wanted to make my own death playlist and not post it anywhere. i felt strongly that i wanted to listen to sad music and feel sad like the antipobros. i thought about how it's funny that it's winter there and how i'm usually sad during the winter and wondered if now i'm going to be sad during the summer and happy during the winter because my friends are across the world from me. thinking about my friends being across the world from me made me feel sad. i wondered what jackson was going to post for the death topic. someone on tv said 'death'.

3. m kitchell's new chapbook 'i don't feel and it feels great'.

the photograph on the 'cover' makes me feel calm. the tone is different than i would have expected. feel a little despondent that 'he' isn't having tons of sex. everyone is loving venn diagrams right now. think about naked men jerking off and feel a little good about that. mike kitchell staring hard at me or anyone else in a room where i am seems really nice in a non-sexual way. in middle/high school i used to fantasize often about a vampire coming in through my window to kiss me and have sex with me. 'mike' talking about wanting to fuck ghosts reminds me of that. i think 'fabricate that shit' when 'he' talks about dramatic effect and wonder mildly whether it is (fabricated) or not, knowing it doesn't really matter poetically but that it might matter on a human level. think about drinking tecates in college park and feel connected. feel like the last five sentences on the second to last page are 'relatable'. i hate the word 'relatable'. i have been taught to hate the idea 'relatable'. wrote all of this while reading m's chapbook.

should revise the title to 'two hours' now but i'm not going to.

Here is an interview I conducted with myself regarding DOWN.

How was DOWN conceived?

Ras. Mashramani and I knew we wanted to start a site together.  The original plan, conceived by Ras., was a site for apocalyptic literature—ours, and others.  But after the rapture, and the advent of Mike Kitchell’s powerful chapbook Arrebato, this theme seemed overplayed.  We sat on it for a while, until one day Ras. asked me if I’d want to collaborate on an erotica site.  I said yes.  Sexuality seemed to run through our poetry, the poetry we’d already posted or submitted to sites like Let People Poems, New Wave Vomit and others.  One of the first things I noticed and admired about Ras.’s poetry was her easy handling of sexual themes and tones.  I can only assume she felt the same, or similarly, about my writing.

After the big decision had been made, we got to work on the details.  I was sitting on my friend’s couch one night when I came up with the name for the website—DOWN—which seemed good to me and to Ras. based on the diversity of things the word ‘down’ could refer to, both containing sexual connotations and not.  The capital letters added a little something special.  It wasn’t long before Jackson Nieuwland created the first ‘DOWN macros,’ which we’ve since used as promotion, that helped me really start to visualize the site.

What was your intention for the site?

Our aim is and always has been to create a good space for poetry that fits a certain niche that often gets overlooked or intentionally skipped over by ‘respectable’ poets and writers.  Poets haven’t been known to shy away from sexual or romantic themes, but at the same time, they’re rarely ‘allowed’ to be sexually explicit.  Bukowski did it, a lot of Spanish-speaking writers are doing it (see Chronos (Loves) Kairos or Tenían Veinte Años y Estaban Locos for examples.) Personally, I think sex, in all its forms, can be seen as poetic—whether it’s pretty or loving or just plain dirty.

How do erotic poems fit with your personal brand or lifestyle?

If you had told me six months ago that I would be spending the summer writing 30+ poems sweepingly categorized as ‘erotica,’ I would have laughed.  I mean, you probably could have convinced me, because it would have seemed like something I would be capable of doing.  But erotic poetry wasn’t on my radar then.  Writing poetry in general wasn’t really on my radar then.  ‘In real life’, I’m an MFA candidate and soon-to-be lecturer at the University of Maryland, and my concentration is fiction.  Six months ago, I would have told you I’d be spending my summer writing a novella (which I’ve also been doing).  Six months ago, I didn’t know who Steve Roggenbuck, Ana C, Blake Butler, Frank Hinton or even Ras. Mashramani were.  I would be lying if I said Tao Lin had been more than a blip on my radar.  My AWP experience in late January barely skirted things like the Lit Party.  I was only just hearing about the online lit scene from Shaun Gannon.  Now, I don’t think anything plays a larger part in my daily life.

As has been publicized, I’m not one to favor public displays of emotion.  Some might call this cold.  Some might see that as conducive to writing about love from a purely physical aspect.  Probably not too many DOWN readers would suspect me of being a romantic—when in reality, I’m one of those saps who runs around grinning and saying things like ‘I love love’ when I fall into it.

So why write it?

Plain and simple, erotica is fun to write.  Most—if not every—adult readers today can relate to these topics.  Overwhelmingly, my friends ‘in real life’ tell me how glad they are to have access to this, because I’m saying everything they wish they had the balls to talk about.  So yes, many people I know can relate—but only some have shown their approval for erotica as poetry.  I find that realistic, and fine with me.  I think some people probably see it as tacky, some don’t find it serious enough.  Some have—with both positive and negative intentions—referred to it as ‘poetry’s version of porn’.

As of right now, my name probably seems fairly synonymous with DOWN in the lit community.  Some lovely articles (by Beach Sloth, Lit Gossip) have even surfaced to this effect, and I appreciate and welcome this attention.  But it seems worth mentioning that erotic poetry is hardly the 'only kind' of writing I do.  Not only has poetry been generally less comfortable a medium for me than fiction, I’ve been working on fiction for far longer.  It feels doubtful to me that all of my subsequent projects will center around the same theme as DOWN.  It feels doubtful that all my future internet writing will even be poetry. So um, stay tuned!

What does the future hold for DOWN?

Ras. and I will continue posting until the first day of autumn, September 23.  At this point, we’ll open up a satellite lit mag (name forthcoming) geared toward submissions from any and all other writers.  A fair amount of interest in submitting has already been expressed, and we’re looking forward to this project when the time arrives.  Ras. and I also intend to create a print version of DOWN from our collective work.  But for now, we’ll just stick to making your summer a little bit hotter, as promised ;)