Drew Charles Kalbach is a poet and student. I had a class with him my last semester at School, with the teacher I shared with Jackee. This, however, was a different class, one not attended by Jackee. But Jackee and Drew knew each other; she would talk about him to me. When she talked about him to me I didn’t really make the connection that she was talking about the guy who made very prescient / hilarious comments in class. When I moved to Seattle and began talking to Jackee about our digital press, she told me that her friend ‘Drew’ would probably into it. It was then that I contacted Drew for the first time out of class, and read his poems, which made me want to stop writing when I considered that he was like a Sophomore or something and had already published extensively. I think Drew may be the one that told Jackee, “give up if you aren’t published by 23″. Well hell.
Anyway, as y’all might know already the press thing didn’t happen but I did get him to submit some poems as well as a third person bio to RPP, and decided to interview him when he sent me a tweet or something (I don’t remember and sort of tried to find the tweet but couldn’t really so I gave up) saying I should interview him.
Rub Paw Press: So, Drew. Tell me about yourself.
Drew: I don’t know what to say. I go to college and I write poems. I’m eating gummy bears and watching speed skating and there’s a leak in my bedroom wall right now. It’s hard to describe yourself sometimes.
Is it harder to describe yourself right now that it usually is? Does this have anything to do with the leak in your wall? Why is there a leak in your wall?
It’s hard generalizing about myself. It’s never accurate. People can’t accurately describe themselves without outside help. I don’t know; it’s a pain in the ass is all.
As for the leak.
I have no idea why it exists. It’s this little stream of water that runs down my wall and into the floorboards and warps them. So far it hasn’t done any actual damage. Mostly just annoying. But it’s in the shape of an inverted cross, which is unsettling. The landlord had someone shovel our roof so it stopped for the time being.
Oh yeah! Did you get snowed in or anything? Is it chaos in the streets of Philly?
We got about two or three feet I guess. I was amazed though. Nothing shut down. People still wandered the streets, even in the blizzard conditions. It was great. Walking down the middle of a usually-busy street covered in snow and random people with shovels feels post-apocalyptic and great. One guy I found dropped his keys in the snow. He was frantically brushing around for them. I helped him for a minute. We didn’t find them, I felt bad for him. That story seemed so much more interesting at the time.
Sounds really really shitty. Wonder what happened to his keys.
There’s two feet of snow out there. Some cat probably burrowed down and ate them. The cats around here eat anything.
Are there a lot of cats out there? Are you living in North Philly?
Yeah I’m in North Philly. Plenty of strays, they’re all frightening, I want to capture one and name it Beatrice and keep it in our basement but I hate cats and won’t..
Hahah. How does your education equip you for the job?
What job, catching cats?
Sure.
It doesn’t. I don’t learn practical things as an English major. All I learn is that ‘Beatrice’ is a Dante reference which is useless in real life situations unless you’re trying to impress people. Which I am.
Hmm.
I probably shouldn’t shit on being an English major. I’m not, it’s just, I’m very aware of the difficulties of studying literature with regards to assimilating into the workforce. I love Capitalism and can’t wait to be a worker.
What are you planning on doing? This is your last year, right?
No I still have another year. I plan on getting an MFA and hopefully some school will hire me to teach their students how to write the words in correct order, it’s my dream.
Sounds sweet. Brb.
Yeah it would be a sweet gig. Molding young minds into creating their feelings into words through my methods. Ok.
Back. I used to think that I would do that
What happened?
Not sure if I read or write enough. I think of the folks over at HTMLGiant for example and feel outclassed. Also. Not sure if I believe in MFA anymore. Don’t know. It’s a commitment issue.
I understand that. I feel those things too, but I’m pretty set in what I want to do and can’t imagine finding something else. I’m awful at finding jobs so I feel like I would fit in with the academia. HTMLGiant used to be much less intimidating, more irreverent and fun but it changed. Not necessarily a bad change, just a lean toward the more serious I think.
When did that happen?
I don’t know, it was pretty gradual. Started out with just a few contributors then exploded in popularity and here we are. But I’m glad it exists, it’s a really good ‘hub’ for small presses and small press discussion.
Speaking of which. Sort of. What are you working on right now?
A few things. I recently finished a manuscript I’m calling BURLY. BURLY is weird, it’s a weird length, I have no idea what to do with it but it’s done. I wrote maybe 80% of a novella based on a poetry sequence I wrote a few months ago, I haven’t had any desire to work on it lately though, so we’ll see where that goes. Two other poetry manuscripts are coming along. Just constantly churning out the poems, revising, etc.
Would you like to share any?
Sure. I’ll paste some things from BURLY. Also: the last section from BURLY is posted on www.pangurbanparty.com and is called NATIONAL MOVEMENT. Here are three poems from BURLY in the order they appear
PUBERTY AS SELF-EXPRESSION
My hands full of cancer
and you in my cuticles
with a chainsaw.
Kelsey,
I tied myself to your high school’s boiler.
The stench of melted rubber and
acne is lodged in my crotch.
You dig in my gut with a trench-shovel.
You shotgun
my car like a jockey.
The doors we lay on,
the knobs we slob and slave and rot
leave in the morning.
Sometimes you are a bathroom
in a bathroom suit,
sometimes you are the gunk between tiles
wrapped in a towel.
Sometimes you are a pair of undeveloped
voiceboxes and stained sweaters
marinating in a sink of dirty dishes.
WHY HE SHUTS DOORS, WHY HE OPENS
I smell trashcans and barbiturates.
*
The lacy bra locked under
your deskspace
strangles
his legs like a horse.
*
Horus opens doors.
Horus opens Doris
for the rest of us.
*
His sporting teams touch each other
with love letters.
*
I am a mammal standing over an orifice
waiting for water to flush.
*
I want the hallway
open and giggling with echoes
of less dramatic forms of shellfish.
INTERVIEW WITH KELSEY’S DOORMAN
Q: Your feet are tied to a tiger. Do you run?
A: My toes are digging into his fur.
Q: Are you the prince of your own parietal?
A: I have glass in my diaphragm and it is difficult to balance without laughing. In short, I have no lobes to speak of, no curdled grey cheese to rot with.
Q: Do your body parts fit? Can she smell them? Will you get tired of interchangeable legs and dried dirty scalps? Should you?
A: Kelsey watches me breathe sulfur in my shower.
Awesome!
Thanks
What would you describe as your greatest achievement to date?
I really don’t know. My chapbook with dogzplot.com‘s chapbook series was really exciting for me, I was really happy. Barry Graham put that out and he’s great. I was excited to get THEATER on Scantily Clad Press’s site, there’s some good stuff on there. I don’t know. I have a series coming out with www.linelinelineline.com soon that I’m excited about. I’m excited about everything apparently.
That’s very exciting!
Fuck
What?
Nothing; got logged off for a moment I think. What’s the last thing you typed?
I like exclamation marks, I tried to use them in some poems but they felt really weird and wrong and I had to kill them. But Christine Schutt uses them really well in ‘A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer’.
Ah. I didn’t get that. Yeah. They are very powerful. I think it changes the tone greatly. I feel like there’s like a chortle or giggle at the end of a sentence that’s punctuated with ‘!’
That’s an interesting way of looking at it. Chortle, good word, I don’t know. Exclamation marks always make me think of cheerleaders thrown into the air waving their pom-poms really fast and screaming about football, which can be really powerful if you drop the cheerleader but that seems hard to do.
What is? Dropping the cheerleader?
That was a really unnecessarily complex metaphor. The cheerleader is the cliché aspect of the exclamation mark. The idea is, you want to retain all that waving and shaking and screaming without the cliché. So you need to acknowledge it almost, embrace it, let it hit the ground and go with it. I can’t do that, but some people can.
Is that what you are trying to do?
No I gave up on that, I couldn’t do it. I killed all my exclamation marks. BURLY was full of them for awhile but not anymore.
Oh no!
Exactly, but you need more nudity to really underscore it. Nudity goes well with an exclamation mark.
Nudity in the way that you write?
BURLY has a lot of nudity in it, but I don’t think explicitly. Then again I had to get rid of the exclamation marks so maybe I’m totally wrong and nudity is boring after all.
What is nudity for you? What is it to be nude?
Bodily nudity, lacking in clothing. The literal nudity. But also the way in which people treat nudity is interesting, the way in which people think of nudity. But mostly, I think nudity is just funny.
That’s funny. I did not know you meant nudity literally as in “people without clothing”. Maybe because you were talking about literary nudity. Rather, I thought you were talking about some kind of literary nudity but you were talking about nudity literally. I need to get my head out of my ass. Next question.
It’s ok. This interview will get so many hits just from the mention of nudity in any context. Win win.
NUDE ; TEEN ; SEX ; NUDE
YOUNG TEEN NUDE BOOBS BREASTS
BREASTS SPILLING OUT INTO THE STREET LIKE HAIL ; TEEN ; TITS ; GAY ; STRAIGHT ; MMF
BBW ORAL ORAL ORAL. I think that covers most fetishes?
I think we missed cuckold / CTB / CFNM / ATM / S&M / BDSM / N’SYNC
HENTAI TENTACLE-MONSTER TENTACLES SCHOOL GIRL RAPE
DRUNK PARTY COEDS
My favorite. I ACCIDENTALLY saw one of those co-ed party porn videos, where the girl has sex with the guy in a big crowd of drunk college kids, and I always wondered what that crowd was thinking. I mean literally, the thoughts in their head. ‘Man this is hot.’ ‘I wish I had a camera.’ ‘I wonder what time it is.’ ‘She looks like my sister, this rules.’
That is a good question. Here is another: How do you handle criticism?
I welcome it, I need it. Criticism helps me a lot. I mean, I know what I aim for in any given poem but the way in which others view any given poem is radically different from the way I view it. So to get a feel for how something comes across, I need criticism. I don’t have many ‘readers’ for my work before I finish it, though I wish I did.
Hm. I have one more question for you I guess. What is the toughest part of your job?
Job being as a writer of words?
Sure. Whichever job you care most about.
I guess in theory my job is being a student. Hardest part of being a student: focus. I lack focus. As a writer, I think the hardest part is networking, making contacts and friends and sending my work out. I’m awful at finding the right place for my work, I just don’t know where to send it, what places are open and looking. I need to make more friends I guess. Who knows.
Have you heard of Spooky Boyfriend?
Yeah I’ve seen some stuff on there, I like it. I actually have meant to send stuff there in the past.
They seem pretty neat
A good aesthetic I think, similar to Robot Melon in some respects.
I haven’t heard of them. I will check them out.
It’s good; you’ll like it.
Sweet.
Done?
Yeah I guess.
previous interviews
