Frankenstein vs. the World

HI, HOW ARE YOU?

Shh, Shh.  The poem’s

here.  How white

is my t-shirt?  Do

you love Dorothea

Lasky?  Or the words

scared, Frances,

or scary?  Ashley,

I thought about you

all day.  The way

that crying starts

from inside you.  A

sparkling feeling,

a ‘broken aquarium’

(Jeni Olin). O love

I’d like to be in

your “uncertainties,”

sleep in your sweat-

shirt.  Ashley, I

like you so much.  Do

you love Dorothea

Lasky?  Everything

is always so noisy.

I’d text you, but

we’re kissing.

And my poetry secrets revealed:

“Hi, How Are You?” is a love poem. It is based on the true story of a first kiss, with a girl named Ashley Lawson. You might recognize that I took the title from the singer Daniel Johnston. Daniel’s first tape was titled Hi, How are You? (1983). Hi, How Are You? is a record I treasure, and I was listening to it quite a lot around the time I met Ashley.

Formally, “Hi, How Are You?” is made up of 47 lines. Every other line is blank. So, there are only 24 lines of words. Each line of words is enjambed, except line 43. All of the lines are short.

The lines are enjambed because I wanted the poem to feel like it was moving towards something, Ashley. I wanted the form of the poem to “embody” the movement the poem itself described — namely, Ashley and I saying goodnight to each other in the front hall of her apartment one evening after having watched Rosemary’s Baby together, and then having our first kiss. We don’t until the last line.

The lines are “double-spaced” because although I wanted the poem to feel like it was moving I also wanted the poem to feel slow and fragmented. Essentially, the poem is meant to read as a direct transcription of my own experience of a very tiny moment.

I was thinking about Marcel’s first kiss with Albertine in À la recherche du temps perdu. In his excited attention to the present, Marcel watches himself watch Albertine’s face move closer and closer toward his own, a universe of changing relations swirling around him. But Marcel immediately forgets the moment he kisses Albertine, and can later only recall successive images of her face right before their kiss, approaching his own in a series of film-like still frames.

“Hi, How Are You?” takes the form of this kind of intensive focalization.

“The poem’s here” is meant to signal the reader to the present tense. The poem takes place completely within the present tense. Earlier I had written a different poem about a break-up, and that poem was about the past tense. “How white is my t-shirt?” refers to the actual t-shirt I was wearing the night the poem is about. The shirt was the famous shirt for the Hi, How Are You? album. Because I had done my laundry that day in anticipation of my date with Ashley, my clothes were especially clean.

Things get a little weirder when the poet Dorothea Lasky appears. I love Dorothea’s poems, and I had lent Ashley a copy of her book Awe (Wave Books, 2007) during our first date. When I first read Awe I felt a broad, impersonal sense of identification with “Dorothea Lasky,” and I hoped Ashley would feel the same way. While I was writing “Hi, How Are You?” I realized that it was as much a love poem for Ashley, as it was one for Dorothea, Daniel Johnston, and the poet Jeni Olin.

All of the language in “Hi, How Are You?” is meant very literally. Certain lines in the poem are written in a kind of “naive realist” voice. A lot of “Hi, How Are You?” is about emotions. Love emotions are complex, and I have decided that the best way to write about the most complex things is usually the simplest. Additionally, it is important to me that my poems “make sense.” I mean this literally, too: I mean that I hope my poems produce sensations and affects. And it is important to me that my poems work this way just as well for other poets as for people who haven’t read a ton of literary theory.

I have often been called a poet of “sincerity.” I don’t like this description of my work. While I hate pretension, illegibility, and absolute opacity in poems, I have never thought on the other hand that it is possible for writing to be scrupulously objective or “sincere,” or to “tell the truth.” I don’t think the critiques of authenticity and of the lyric I are interesting problems that my generation has inherited. Simply, I understand my own poems as both true and not true, because I believe that whenever you write something down it becomes something else — not true anymore, fictional. Instead of sincerity, I think of my poems as a combination of ethics, personality, feelings, phenomenology, and performance.

One last thing I will say about the form of “Hi, How Are You?” is that I self-published it in my magazine Satellite Telephone last summer. In the issue the poem appeared directly after some poems by Dorothea Lasky and a long book review I wrote about Jeni Olin’s The Pill Book. In the review I wrote about a time Ashley and I had gone to see a Daniel Johnston concert at the Wonder Ballroom in Portland on Dexedrine. Formally, the magazine created a deliberate context or home for the poem, in which friendship, sadness, and emotional identifications with other people through texts, sex, and metabolism swirled around.

In October I met Dorothea Lasky and I read her “Hi, How Are You?” She liked it, and we have since become real-life friends. Ashley and I dated for a little bit, and then broke-up before I moved to Buffalo. We still send each other a lot of text messages.

Tags: love.