What, like Iâm not going to make a dick joke about Tommy Picoâs new collection of poetry just because he won the prestigious Whiting Award this year? Please. Making phenomenal dick jokes in the marbled halls of poetry is one of the reasons Pico has come so farâwell, making dick jokes and writing hysterically funny, nervy poems about the life and loves of Teebs, a queer Native American persona just trying to avoid being assaulted while holding hands with somebody in country thatâs openly hostile to his being.
In Junk, Pico's third book-length poem (but his second book with Tin House), he somehow piles on more soundplay and wordplay than he did in IRL and Nature Poem. Though the language feels denser, the poem speeds right along. The callbacks and pop culture references come faster, and heâll start new sentences in the middle of lines, as if he can't help but interrupt himself as he tries to track the lightning storm of jokes and associations and pithy phrases sparking off in his head.
But he has kept the self-deprecating one-liners coming, as this indicative passage proves: âyou know how some ppl are workaholics / Well I'm an alcoholic Today's jaw lick click clocks sops the // syrup leaking from my mores I mean pores One more time / plz can I ride plz just one more time I have the tightest pink-// est purse Sorry clutch Let's play a game called sociopath, or / gay man...â
In addition to reading from the book at his Seattle launch on Tuesday (tomorrow!), Pico and a bunch of Seattle writersâCivic Poet Anastacia Renee and fiction writer Willie Fitzgerald, to name a fewâwill play a game of show and tell. Participants will hold up a hunk of junk and tell the story of why theyâve held onto it for so long.
To give you a taste, and to avoid compromising my critical reputation any more than it already has been (Pico and I are friends), we sat down to talk about his new book and to play a game of show and tell. I was amazed by how much he was able to divine about my life from my junk.
***
Tommy Pico: The scary thing about having a new book is how it follows. You know that horror movie, It Follows?
Rich Smith: The one about STDs? Yes.
Yes. Itâs kind of like that, but itâs a book, and it follows me everywhere I go. When people ask me to sign it, it mortifies me.
Do you feel ashamed about IRL or Nature Poem?
[He shakes his head up and down and goes red.]
How can you feel that way? They were such good books!
â¨I wish I knew. I talk about it in therapy all the time, and I talk about it on [Food 4 Thot], and I talk about it with my friends. I would like to be my biggest fan, I would love to feel proud, but thatâs not how I feel. After I finish something, it feels like a piping hot blob of feces that Iâm just handing over.
Gross.
Itâs disgusting!
You're saying writing is like excrement.
It is like excrement! Itâs something that came out of my body, like sausage or something. I donâtâŚI thought the feeling would alleviate with the more experience and success and acclaim that I got, but itâs only getting worse. That feeling propels me to keep writing, though.
What, why?
First of all because I donât get that postpartum feeling. Second of all because as long as Iâm working on something new, the last thing I wrote doesnât feel like it sticks to me as much.
Hence your new book, Junk. This started as a âzine, right? â¨
I wrote it in 2016. The 'zine was the basic structure, but then I had to fill it out with other things. Same thing with Nature Poem, which was a 'zine before it was ever a book, too.
And IRL was a Tumblr before it was a book.
Yeah. Bringing all the tools of the trade, you know what I mean?
I do.
The thing is, I got stuck while writing the manuscript of Junk because the first half of it was dealing with a breakup, with someone dumping me. But that event only sustained half of the book. I couldnât get any more pages out of it because I had processed the feeling. But then a year after that breakup I had to breakup with somebody. I was on the other side of the table, and so the second half of the book is more or less me letting down somebody whose greatest fault was that he liked me.
You define and re-define the word âjunkâ a lot in the book. Could you give me some of its multivalent meanings?
Well, I was raised in a thrift store. That was one of my motherâs jobs as a kid, so I just kinda grew up around junk. We didnât have money, but I could take stuff from the thrift store. So I spent a lot of time imbuing my junk with personality. A lot of kids do that. They make inanimate objects into breathable companions.
Yeah.
I also think of junk as a thing thatâs being repurposed. Not just an object, but perhaps a person getting fired. What happens when you get fired or broken up with or you lose your apartment? You lose your sense of stability. And so that liminality is part of it. I just name that space âjunk.â
Okay, I get that.
The book is also talking to Garbage, by A.R. Ammons. In Garbage I think one of the theses of that book is what society does with elders in the United States and in the Westâitâs like theyâve outlived their usefulness and youâre just waiting to throw them away. Writing this book in my mid-30s, I obviously didnât feel like I was garbage, but I did feel like I was in a transition state. And so I named that state "junk."
At 30 the country starts to crumple you up into a ball, and you were starting to feel that pressure?
Yeah, but it was more like I was an end table in a hallway, and now Iâm going to be a conversation piece in the living room. So itâs more about repurposing.
Oh, okay, yeah, thatâs better than being crumpled.
And, of course, dicks. Somebodyâs junk.
Right, sure.
Thereâs a lot of sex in the book.
Yeah.
And also the personality of the country as it was switching over. I finished the book between mid-November and mid-January. It was after the election but before the inauguration. So it was during a period of being broken up with by Democracy in a weird way, knowing that there was something dangerous bubbling but it hadnât happened yet. So that was part of it, too.
Oy.
I was also thinking about the idea of trying to find a solace in not having a utility. Utility strikes me as a state of anxiety, like youâre trying to be in Beast Mode all the time. But I'm asking if there can be solace in just being.
Just being on a shelf.
And just not having to perform, or not having to be a pooper scooper. Maybe youâre just a thing, just beingâthereâs gotta be some redemption in that, too.
Or some language we can invent to allow us to feel comfortable just being junk for a while. That sounds nice.
Which is a kind of the vocabulary of self-care, which people are sort of using now. That feeling of "Iâm going to get off Twitter, I need to be by myself, I need to reconnect to something..." If youâre in a space between one utility and another, thatâs a chance to reconnect to yourself.
I was also doing the Marie Kondo method while writing the book.
The what?
â¨â¨The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up.
Oh yeah, I remember that book.
I was getting rid of a lot of stuff. Itâs an interesting metaphor for editing. Youâre singling lines out and saying âDoes this spark joy?" Itâs something to ask of long poetry in particular. âDoes this add something, or is it just accumulative?â
Do you have a piece of junk that sticks to you? Something thatâs not just accumulative?
â¨â¨I do. I was with someone who had a bracelet. Symbolically when we started dating I started wearing the bracelet.
What did it look like?
It was a rounded silver crescent. It looked really good, and it looked great on me. And I love silvery jewelry.
I took it from him and put it on my wrist and said jokingly, "See, it looks so much better on me!" And he agreed. So I kept it absentmindedly. I never took it off. It felt like such a concrete piece of jewelry. It was never too ostentatious, it was very plain, and it fit with everything. I kind of took to it.
Did he like the bracelet?
Hm. I think he acquired this bracelet after coming out. It was sad because this person wasnât necessarily comfortable in his queerness. And it wasâmaybe Iâm giving it too much weightâbut maybe it was a symbol to him as well, a symbol of his burgeoning sexuality, or at least his ability to talk about it. And as a person whoâs never been in the closet, and someone who is very very comfortable with my sexuality and gender, as an access to queerness I think that was attractive to him.
We adhered to each other. We were so physically attracted to each other. I have never, ever in my entire life dated anybody else who I just wanted to touch all the time as much as I wanted to touch him.
But our traumas were inversely incompatible. About touching and not being touched, about being vocal versus being quiet. You couldnât have had two traumas that were more incompatible with each other.
Your insecurities and securities conflicted with each other.
Yeah. And I think he overpromised but underdelivered. The thing is, making out with guys and having sex with them is different than being in a relationship with them. Iâm not sure if he wanted to be in a homosexual relationship. But because we were so attracted to each other, it just went way too deep way too fast, and in the middle of it he was like, âOh my god I donât know what Iâve gotten myself into,â and he pulled away. And that was heartbreaking.
Man.
But I had absorbed the bracelet. And I forgot to give it back to him. But we were already broken up. And it ended messily. I had no interest in talking to him, and he had no interest in talking to me, either. But somehow the bracelet had gotten caught in my bag. Itâs the greatest bag of all time.
Prove it.
Itâs got this strap, and itâs got all these handles, and itâs incredibly versatile. In the subway when it gets really crowded I can wear it over my shoulder. If Iâm raveling a lot I can let it dangle. When itâs a business casual situation I can hold it by the handles.
This is a great bag.
Somehow the bracelet got into the lining of the bag. I donât know how. Iâve searched the entire thing for the hole that it slipped through. Now itâs at the bottom of my bag. So this token of my relationship is with me all the time.
And I'm not interested in traveling without my bag. Iâm not interested in getting a new bag. Thatâs my bag. I like that bag. And in fact, symbolically, thereâs something to be learned from this relationship. We have not reconciled. And so itâs partially me reminding myself of this time.
What does it remind you of?
When a relationship doesnât work out, and you both tried, then youâre not responsible for the failure. I think thatâs the lesson I learned from this time. And thatâs maybe the solace of having the bracelet on me at all times. Itâs something I canât wear.
Damn.
And itâs only something that I know about! Itâs kind of like him. He wasnât comfortable being seen, and so part of him is always going to be hidden in a compartment of mine.
Are you ever going to get rid of it?
I would have to gut the bag in order to get rid of it, and Iâm not interested in doing that. And Iâm not so hyped to wear it that it seems like a sane alternative. And there are times when I completely forget about it. I forget about him and I forget about the bracelet. Other times I remember very keenly. And I think thatâs okay.
When do you remember itâs in there?
Usually when Iâm searching for something at the bottom of my bag. My hand will graze it, and I touch it, and depending on what Iâm looking for it feels like a pen or something, but then I realize itâs his bracelet.
Do you ever go into the bag just to touch it? â¨
I suppose I have, but maybe absentmindedly.
You donât touch it to remember him?
I guess not really. Itâs not a touchstone. Itâs just in the walls of your house or whatever. Itâs just there. But itâs not lost on me that thereâs a token of a relationship that nobody else knew about or had access to that is there always.
Want to play a game?
Sure.
Iâm going to put a piece of my junk that I have kept on the table, and you tell me why you think I kept it.
Okay!
This does not look like something you bought at a store.
It is not.
It is not clean. So it suggests that it was discarded, and it looks like itâs been in a state of discardment for a while.
Yeah.
So I imagine that this was something you saw while on a date with somebody.
That checks out.
So, letâs see. Sometimes people keep momentos out of obligation. We call those people hoarders. Sometimes itâs to memorialize a person who is no longer there. Sometimes it is to remember a date.
Iâll give you a hint. I kept this to remember a day, so youâre on the right track with the whole date thing.
Were you hiking?
â¨â¨I was.
Was thisâŚwas this hikeâŚparticularly arduous?
â¨â¨Yes! It was a very hard hike!
Was thereâŚmaybe not a near-death situation, but was there some kind of desperation? â¨â¨
There was.
And by the resourcefulness of you and this other person, did you all save each other from a near death situation? Or was itâŚthe exacerbation of an argument that made it into a near-death situation?
â¨â¨Hah! It was the first thing you said, but at this point I think the story becomes too peculiar for anyone to properly divine.
Thereâs a hike called Humpback Mountain. Thereâs a lot of quartz in the mountain. People dig for it underneath the trees with shovels. While we were walking foolishly off trail, we stumbled across a father/son digging team. The son looked like he was going to kill 19 people when he grew up. One of those blank-faced murder teens. He had a weird affect. Anyway, we asked this pair what theyâre doing, and the murder teen held up this piece of quartz and said he was digging for quartz. Then he offered the rock up to me. I took it because I didn't know I was supposed to do. If you keep the gift of a murder teen, will he use it as an It Follows kind of homing beacon that will lead him back to my apartment in Seattle? At the same time, it could be a ward against the murder teen, and heâs giving it to me to try to protect me from himself. But also I keep it to remember a lovely but strenuous hike with that person I was with.
Hahah, okay.
But itâs remarkable to me that you were such a sleuth! You were able to look at this quartz and get pretty close.
After writing this book I feel like I did gain some affinity for the things that others look over. Being surrounded by your junk can be an insulation from the world, but itâs also a way to be surrounded by your own world. Not just as a proxy for a memory, but also as a way to show that you have lived and done things and been places. Iâm not just talking about souvenirs. A souvenir is a type of junk, but not all junk is a souvenir.
The nature poets will often say we store our memories in the landscape or store our memories in the junk so we can move on with our lives. Do you feel that way about junk at all?
Itâs kind of like mnemonic, yeah. Like how people use the internet. People can store stuff there and selectively review it whenever they want. The problem is you donât usually end up going back to it. Thatâs how junk drawers develop. Now you have all these things youâre afraid of letting go of for fear of losing that thing forever. Thatâs how hoarding stuff. Why have you kept this quartz?
Iâm not superstitious in an organized way, but I guess I was so in love with the idea of not knowing what to do with the gift of a murder teen, I kept it to remind me of the moment.
The moment and all its intricacies! You store its intricacies in that rock so you donât actually have to remember it. Seeing it allows you to recall of these little details you don't just walk around thinking about. And thatâs one of the theses of this book. Junk has the best stories for that reason. It allows you to store a fragment of your memory in something.
Junk does have the best stories!
Iâm working with my publisher on a podcast this summer. It's inspired by the book. I go into different peoplesâ homes and we talk about their junk. Each episode will end with me reading a section of the book. So look out for that!