Ask the Author: Wess Mongo Jolley
[Roxane Gay / October 1st, 2009 / Interviews ]Wess Mongo Jolley not only writes haiku, he is a tireless supporter of the spoken word community. We talk about IndieFeed, the glories of Vermont and the poet in all of us.
1. You curate IndieFeed, a great spoken word podcast. How did that project come about?
Thanks for asking that up front! I often think of myself as a “poetry promoter”, as much as I think of myself as a poet. The IFPP has been my first love for a lot of years now.
Basically, it came about because of a guy named Chris MacDonald, who started IndieFeed as a promotional avenue for independent musicians a half dozen years ago. I became a fan of the work he was doing with his several channels of music podcasts, back in about 2005, and it struck me that the idea could work just as well for poetry as for music. I approached Chris with the idea, and he gave me the support to run with it.
The basic idea is to take a single performance piece, and put it out to the world as a single-serving podcast, followed by commentary and guidance for the audience, so if they like the work they’re hearing, they will know where to go to find out more. Hopefully, that means that the listeners will visit the poet’s website, see where they are touring, buy their CDs and books, and otherwise help the poet earn a living with their art.
It’s a simple idea, but almost four years, 225+ poets, and over 600 shows later, we’re still going strong. We’ve had about 3.5 million downloads, and each episode is now eventually heard by around 5,000 people. The poets tell me it really helps their work get out into the world, and build a fan base. The website for the show is at http://performancepoetry.indiefeed.com, and you can subscribe in the iTunes music store by searching for the word “poetry” and looking in the podcasting section.
2. Your also involved in the The Performance Poetry Preservation Project. Tell us about that project and where it’s at.
Wow, I wish I could report it is further along than it is, but right now, it’s still a dream, a passion, and an unfunded project. My professional background is in records and information management, and especially digital records management and preservation, and the P4 is a way to apply all I know about these topics to help make sure our recorded heritage of performance poetry is not lost.
The basic idea of the P4 is that the history of the spoken word movement is being written and *recorded* right now, in hundreds of venues, slams, coffee houses, and living rooms across the country. Digital technology has made recording poetry easier than ever, but without care and attention, digital recordings are very likely to disappear. Hardware and software standards change, recording media ages and goes bad, and tons of amazing work is in danger of being lost in the digital deluge. The idea behind the P4 is to create an institutionally supported repository for digital recordings of poetry and spoken word. This repository would then allow venues and individuals to make “deposits” of digital recordings, and the Project (under the auspices of a University, a non-profit, or other reputable organization) would take the responsibility to catalog, preserve, and provide access to those recordings.
Anyone who is interested in the P4 idea should check out the proposal I have at http://mongopoet.com/p4.htm. I’d especilaly encourage anyone who has a few hundred thousand dollars they don’t know what to do with to check it out. I can send a PayPal link. {:{)}
3. Your doppelgangbanger haikus are clever and hilarious. How did this piece come about? Do you enjoy being inappropriate?
Thanks! It’s funny to me that this piece is seeing the light of day, because I’m sure every poet has had the experience after writing something where they say, “Okay, well, *that* is pretty much unpublishable!”
The genesis for the poem is a phenomenon that nearly every gay man can tell you about: Gay male couples that look like twins. I’ve been fascinated for a long time with the tendency (certainly not universal, but noticeable!) for gay men to find lovers who look like themselves. Years ago I was talking about this with someone, who admitted that, yes indeed, he was “his own type”, and (literally) jerking off in a mirror was one of his favorite things. It got me thinking about what would happen if this guy was a mad scientist who was able to clone himself, and where would that lead. I had a whole erotic short story in my head at one point, and how it ever ended up as a series of ten haikus is still a bit of a mystery to me.
As to being inappropriate, yeah, I guess I do like it. I have a few pieces with titles similar to this one. And although I don’t think it’s particulary useful for writers to be shocking simply for the sake of being shocking, I’d balance that with the idea that it’s a writer’s job to tread on toes and challenge assumptions (especially our own). You never know what a boundary is, and if it is worthy of respect, until you cross it and glance back. It’s the job of the artist to poke away at those edges and encourage new borders to be drawn.
4. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Northern Kingdom of Vermont. What do you love most about living there?
Oh, Vermont is beautiful and amazing, and I’ve lived here since 1994. It’s funny that you should ask this, though, because I’ve spent most of my life trying to find more and more rural places to live. Right now my partner and I live on a 65 acre spread on the top of a mountain, at the end of a five mile dirt road, in the-middle-of-nowhere Vermont. I’ve lived in cabins in the woods for years at a shot, and have always loved being immersed in nature. And Vermont is bucolic and beautiful and inspirational every single day.
But the funny thing about my own particular mid-life crisis is that I’m now obsessed with urban life. I spend a month or so each year in Manhattan, living in flop houses and rented rooms in the East Village. And I find it to be the most artistically stimulating environment I’ve ever known. I used to be the Dickensonian poet that wrote under a tree on the bucolic mountaintop. Now I’m the crusty Bukowski guy writing in the Starbucks off Union Square. Go figure.
5. What is your writing process?
I’m an obsessive journal writer, and have been off and on since I was a teenager. With over 5,000 pages under my belt, I’m a huge believer in uncensored, uncontrolled, stream-of-consciousness writing. I do most of my writing on buses and in the aforementioned coffee shops, in almost unreadably messy longhand. I use a Bic medium point four color pen and college-ruled sheets, and I can sometimes write for hours, until my hand starts to cramp. Looking back later, I find that 95% or more of it is self-indulgent, poorly written, whiny-ass bullshit. But that other 5% gets transcribed into my computer.
I’m a huge Ginsberg fanatic, and I wish I could report that I follow his “first thought, best thought” mantra. But the truth is that I revise things dozens and dozens of times. My process is to print out all the things I’m working on, and then revise them in longhand with that same four-color pen. Once the page is such a mess that I can’t read it anymore, I transcribe it into the computer again as a new version, print it, and start another round. Eventually some stuff finds stability. Usually around half. The other stuff is pretty much abandoned.
6. Are we all poets?
Hah! You’ve been to my website (http://mongopoet.com)! That main photo is from a guy who was taking pictures in Central Park one day, where I was writing (note the journal and the four-color pen). This guy handed me a drawing pad and said to write anything I wanted in answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life?” Without thinking I wrote “Finding Your Voice – We Are All Poets”.
It sounds trite but yeah, I do believe that we are all poets–at least, potentially. I love to listen to conversations on the bus or in restaurants, because musicality and beauty is so inherent in every word we speak. Ginsberg found his voice when he took what he thought were just rambling prose journal entries, and start line-breaking them, and found there was incredible power hidden in those ramblings. I especially love listening to conversations in languages I don’t speak, because I hear rhythms and juxtaposed sounds connected directly to the emotional content of the speakers. Accents and dialects are delicious. Even profanity can be graceful. New York is like a buffet of voices to me.
So, maybe, rather than saying, “we’re all poets” it would be more accurate to say “everything is poetry”. At least, if we open our ears to it.
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