Banango Lit

Perhaps more than any other person, Shaun Gannon can truly say: I AM SHAUN GANNON. He did as much to great effect in a boisterous poem entitled…I AM SHAUN GANNON. He also co-founded letpeoplepoems.com, an open site for online poetry submissions. Good luck finding his name anywhere on the site, though: as he insists, “we are explicitly not editors, we are facilitators.” Banango interviewed Shaun Gannon about letpeoplepoems.com, IASG, alt lit, and words as magic. You can find Shaun Gannon’s writing on his website. He tweets @ciderhouserules.

Tell us about how letpeoplepoems.com came about. Are you happy with how it’s developed? Have any poems in particular struck your fancy lately? 

Let People Poems was born when DJ and i were gchatting and we thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if there was a lit site that let any person post poems. we were more interested to see what would happen if it was initiated by an anonymous source (although i screwed that up a lil bit by telling mike young and paul cunningham and mike kitchell about it beforehand). the name came up because DJ and i were not entirely sober and DJ said we could make the site ‘and let people poems’ which jumped out at my face and i was adamant about that being the name of the site. we solicited people from the internet who were more well-known than us but also seemed like they’d be willing to contribute and to our benefit they did (thank you frank, xtx, et al).

the site has developed a little bit in the way we expected; i don’t mean to poison the well or shit on our contributors, but it would be ignorant to the point of lying to pretend that every poem on there is a 10/10. that is not the point of the site; we are explicitly not editors, we are facilitators. what surprises me is that, as a whole, the quality is better than anticipated. DJ and i expected nothing but terrible angsty poems within 2-3 weeks of the site’s inception, and i believe LPP is far from that.

the first two poems that pop into my head that i remember blowing my face to pieces are fabrication by m kitchell and death benefits by russ woods. there are many other poems and consistent contributors who also really impress me and make me glad that this site was made, i am pleased overall with what is being done to that site.

Have you ever had to take any submissions down from letpeoplepoems because of offensive content, or is it 100% hands off? Do you ever get any spam submissions that are serendipitously poetic?

i have never pulled anything off of LPP and have accepted every single request to be added to the contributor list (to my knowledge - WordPress recently changed their invitations process and there were a few bugs in it at first). i’ve done very little moderating there as well; only reminding people about the no-double-post rule a couple times and encouraging more reading/discussion rather than posting incessantly when needed. since everyone posts without needed admin approval of individual posts, it’s possible for spam to be posted. i would love if someone programmed a spambot to post poems on LPP. i’d do it if i had any clue how to make a computer do a thing.

Do you think your writing, and your process of writing, would be different in a world with no Internet? How so?

my writing would have stagnated early. my first step into seriously considering poetry a primary avenue of ~expression~ was when i found russell edson and james tate’s poetry, but the second step was hopping on the internet and getting into small presses and their writers. daniel bailey and i went to the same school for undergrad, and he was an influence on my poetry, but an even bigger influence on what i read and investigated, via the internet. i would probably still be writing silly knockoff prose poems with no point were it not for the internet. i don’t think my process would change too much, besides the fact that i would get caught in the traditional MFA trap of never letting poems go and keep editing and workshopping them forever. the best thing the internet did for me was show me that people my age actually get things published, which is not something most MFA people realize could be a reality for them.

You’re elected president of Boost Industries, Inc. What’s your first step? 

i would abuse my power and run that place into the ground in a blaze of glory, because two of my biggest loves are a) watching dynasties fall and b) abusing power. if i am given power and it’s not something i find near’n’dear i will probably abuse it for my amusement. i don’t do that with LPP, though. DJ makes sure i stay a good boy.

How do you feel about the term “alt lit”? How about alt lit itself? Do you consider yourself part of it?

i think the term is acceptable. being in the academic writing world, i definitely see the small press scene as being an alternative, especially considering how these folks don’t know anything about it or care at all (which is fine, that’s their world, i don’t give a shit about the vast majority of academic poetry). i think there is a lot of incredible work coming out of alt lit, but the internet also makes it possible to be inundated with mediocre-to-terrible writing as well. i would definitely take alt lit over academic or mainstream lit, since it seems like it’s the least boring, although sometimes i think it takes itself too seriously. i would like to see more people who are more interested in entertaining, sort of like how alt comedy works.

i don’t think i have the right to say whether i’m truly in alt lit or not. i feel like that’s a label that’s ascribed rather than chosen by the individual. it’s sort of like how people are called hipsters, and anyone who self-identifies as a hipster gets laughed at. the difference is i really hate the term hipster because it means everything a person could be nowadays. in a decade it will encompass every single concrete noun and the universe will be hipster.

i suppose some of the things i do would not fly in the mainstream or academic setting, at least not without serious retooling. I AM SHAUN GANNON is entertaining to people from different worlds but i don’t foresee that being performed at AWP or at DC National Book Fest ever. it’s performance art, it’s standup comedy, it’s obnoxious ravings from a blustery idiot all in one. alt lit allows all these things and more to take the stage and receive an audience.

One of the criticisms of alt lit poetry, which you hint at, is that it’s not taken seriously or seen as legitimate. Is the question of legitimacy, and what ‘is’ or ‘isn’t’ poetry, important to ask?

everyone, and especially people who deem themselves poets, should be required to ask themselves what they consider poetry to be. i think most people would be surprised to learn they consider more things to be poetry than they would have anticipated. it is also important for them to remember that “good” and “poetry” are different terms, and not to conflate them. there is plenty of writing out there i consider to be legitimate poetry that i don’t consider to be good. 

also, i think it’s important for alt lit people to remember that if someone doesn’t like someone’s poem/body of work, that’s okay, the entire world doesn’t have the exact same tastes, there is no book or poem enjoyed by 100% of any large group. i feel like there’s a dearth of criticism in this current generation of alt lit, that people have become afraid of criticizing each other to the point where they will only do it anonymously, and that feathers are ruffled at any criticism. that is silly and possibly a reason why outsiders don’t see alt lit as legitimate as other venues.

Was the process of writing I AM SHAUN GANNON different than it was for your other poems? Was it intended to be performance art, or at least performed rather than read on paper?

I AM SHAUN GANNON was always intended to be read aloud. Daniel Bailey (the cutie who wrote The Drunk Sonnets) went to my undergrad, and assembled a moving reading where people would walk around campus and yell poetry. I didn’t have as many poems that worked well as yelling as I wanted for this reading, so I decided to write one for it. the process was originally to add as many types of language/syntax to it as possible, but quickly shifted to also include the requirement where every line must also feel true to me in some way. in my other poetry, while i usually try to write things that feels true to me, there is usually a unity of tone and/or syntax. secondly, i often consider the performance when working on a poem, but it’s never as essential in those as it is in IASG.

Why write?

i write because it is the closest thing to magic that exists. when people say that words have power, they often don’t realize it’s more literal than most think. there’s a reason that ancient cultures thought words were literally magic (consider glyphs, runes, etc). i am incapable of gaining or manipulating power in any other way, so writing is where i throw down. if magic were real, i would be a wizard instead.

This idea of words as magic seems especially borne out in I AM SHAUN GANNON. The repetition of the title line builds an increasing sense of tension and urgency as the poem progresses. Do you feel most wizard-like while performing this poem?

i feel most wizard-like the moment after performing the poem, when i’ve finished my work and there’s this slice of silence where i can feel what i’ve done. it’s the moment where i receive the audience’s subconscious reaction before i receive their explicit reaction, whatever it might be. it’s that moment, not during the applause or whathaveyou, where i learn what the audience thinks of my work.

What can we expect from Shaun Gannon in 2012? Another eponymous piece of performance art?

i’ll be finishing the second section of IASG and performing it in January, then tweaking it over the course of the year, as was the process with the first section. i’m also working on a book-long monologue called Knife Showabout selling various cutlery on a HSN-type show. selections of it will appear in Pop Serial and West Wind Review, and maybe more places, who knows. my goal is to finish the book in 2012. you can also expect me to not kill myself, if you are optimistic.