interview with michael borth

Michael Borth can be a difficult man to locate sometimes -- he never stays in the same place for very long, and keeps far away from social media. Which is one of the reasons why it was so fulfilling to finally sit down and ask him some questions about his upcoming book, DFL release #003, The World Dreamer.


Nicholas Clemente: It's interesting that I had you pegged at first as a "theory guy." I think it might be because of the way you approach images in your work: everything is fractured and incomplete, or complete yet juxtaposed against half a dozen unlike things. At the risk of asking a stupid question, are there any other influences you can point to (mystical, chemical, aesthetic, anecdotal) that might account for this?

Michael Borth: I thought that was interesting too. It’s always or never good to come off as more well-read than you actually are. I wouldn’t know where to start with theory. Derrida? Barthes? At best, I could appreciate the book design. 

What you’re speaking of comes directly from the constant mutation of the world as refracted by the triumphant disaster of selfhood. And vice versa. The line between outer and inner experience is tenuous, if it exists at all. It’s finding that line, dissolving that line. Sometimes you can make your aesthetic kingdom. Sometimes you’re open to the vagaries. Open to it all. The archways of the river. Space Ghost Coast to Coast. The perceiver changes in the midst of perception. Perception itself can be cyclical and waning. 

Philosophy and mysticism helped with this, by way of the Beats probably. The Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads, Dhammapada, and Tao Te Ching were revelations. But first it was song lyrics, specifically Cedric Bixler-Zavala of At The Drive-In, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Green Day, Pearl Jam, Fugazi, even Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” riding over the train tracks with my father, looking at the cassette page. 

The verse may also be a reaction to years and years of novel-reading and -writing. What affected me remains slight: McCarthy, Céline, Ferrante, Ballard, The Double, To The White Sea, Visions of Cody, Dispatches, and Dhalgren. In deep time, my mother read to me from The Berkut, that first powerful imagistic transmission – a man applying the make-up of his own disguise, on a train. Most artistic influences should be intuited, if you’ve planted them in time correctly. 

What I’ve come to appreciate recently are all those Catholic prayers and rhythms from childhood. I visited the Book of Job during lockdown and was amazed. Why do you need theory when you can just bitch at God? 

Poetry itself I couldn’t access till my late twenties, when I finally relaxed, stopped solving for x, and admitted life was completely incomprehensible. It did not tend toward conclusion and narrative, but a flow of arising sense-objects, mysterious winds of vaguely humorous and melancholic synesthesia: the traversal of connective ruins. Jack Gilbert. Olds. Auden in my Lisbon rental, with my girlfriend, The Woman of Scars. Merwin. Ashbery. Berryman in my Clinton Hill tomb. Dante and his flying rag. Homer and his hungry bellies. Of course, I did read Eliot and Bukowksi as a boy. I was in the suburbs after all, deer hung from trees. It was mandatory. 

NC: It's interesting you mention At The Drive-In, because I was planning to ask you about them eventually, and not just because you name drop them specifically in the book. I'm more curious about the influence of music on your work in a more gestalt sense. In certain poems I can see the echoes of Bixler-Zavala (or "Cedric," as my friends and I used to call him in high school, as if he were one of our buddies), but I wonder if the influence goes deeper than that. I'm speaking here about your time as a musician, playing in bands, going on tour. For myself, who experienced it strictly as a passive observer, the east coast DIY basement scene played a huge part in my aesthetic "training," though it was something I certainly didn't think of at the time, and something that I still don't think I've understood fully today.

MB: We used to sit around and get stoned and argue about At The Drive-In lyrics. Dark bedrooms. Vodka from the freezer. Big jugs of Carlo Rossi. White Vaya on the turntable. We were obsessed with that band. 

Mr. Bixler-Zavala’s lyrics could not be figured out. He made worlds, places, landscapes you felt privileged to enter. The lyrics were tenements of consciousness points and this practice would feel more real, more true, with time, as long as I stopped trying to figure everything out, as long as I surrendered my bodymind as this yang-decoder. 

There were science-fiction paintings and then arcades, New Orleans and the night that lit up scarecrow plots. Manga, machines, numbers, stars, heliotropes, it was so freeing, so threatening, it was beautiful and lush in the word-architecture. You were on earth and you were in another cosmos, you saw how dreams were made, of bits and pieces, of this and that, and how the world is made in kind. It made East Bay punk bands seem a little ridiculous. 

And how strange it was, to be reminded of Mr. Bixler-Zavala’s lyrics about 15 years later, when I would read The Tibetan Book of The Dead in some miserable café. If we look at my life chronologically, you could say The Tibetan Book of The Dead is a collage of At The Drive-In lyrics, cut with god knows what else, maybe Dragon Ball Z. If you can’t think like this, then poetry is useless for you, and I pity you. 

The DIY punk scene was fun until it wasn’t, but I’m saturated with it, of course, and so’s my liver, but my gratitude is now attaining a rosy hue. The more you learn about the world, the more you see the DIY ethic as fundamental to almost every aspect of creation, as you yourself are reminding me, thankfully. From The Blood Babies of Savannah to the Elon Musks of Palo Alto. But I’m sure many people from that specific scene are asking themselves, Was it about music or was it about beer? Well, both. Neither. It was more a deranged mating ritual sponsored by Colt 45. 

Music itself helps you lose the burden of meaning. You don’t ask what a great riff means. Why do you ask it of a line of poetry? Lyric writing is a fun practice, elastic but unforgiving, you have to convey a lot with a little, you begin to trust the imagery and sounds, you learn compression and economy. This is why I have no interest in meter or limit and why unbroken long lines remain erotic: my conspiracy against the indent. I feel I’ve done my time. Also, music is highly social, and musicians are mostly pathetic. It’s a long exercise in exhaustion. We’re now killing ourselves with constant music. You begin to appreciate what is commonly called “silence.” That may be the true purpose of music.  

NC:  Each separate section of this book has its own themes, its own rhythms, its own metabolism, even if the subject matter across all four tends to be very fluid when it comes to things like time and space. Did you approach each section with a certain intentionality, or is the unity a product of the place and time you were in at the moment when you wrote them?

MB: A specific environment and its rituals and events can conjure different pasts, different perspectives, different futures, different realities. I see what arises, I see what I see arising, I direct, I wait, I remind myself that I have no idea what I’m doing and I’m the luckiest man in the world because I navigate eternity by charge. One manuscript is alien and remote. One is romantic and somehow geological. One is a wilderness. What is making itself noticed? What is she trying to tell you and have you prioritized her, or have you let your petty cravings get in the way? The poet urinates on statistics and newspapers and huffs the fumes to belly-snake in the parhelion gardens of Venus. Anything else is putrid, journalism, history. 

When I first seriously started writing these things I was in São Paulo, in a massive rental, surrounded by paintings of naked men. The previous renter was an opera singer and a descendent of the Broncks, as in The Bronx, where I was born. There was a lone bottle of cachaça on the grand table, almost no natural light, the traffic shook the entire place, the neighborhood was covered in human shit, there were political rumblings. 

I was convinced I was going to die in Brazil, and here was my first taste of the eternal corridor. I began to write these hyper-crystallized missives, everything lent itself to language, fused with it, and if you think language is a prison you’re a moron. Language teaches you The Total Language. Dreaming teaches you The Total Dream. Combine them. We do not live on a planet or in some convoluted universe, but through a dream language. This is our location.

When I was ready, she allowed me to see this. In São Paulo, by her grace, I was in a world I had created as a boy, remembering the maps of once-fictitious cities I had drawn and kept in my desk, I was given beautiful women, red flowers of the metal loft, everything was easy at the periphery of oblivion. It was cultivated relaxation as unwavering concentration. I was dying. I had been dead and I was now alive. I was finally walking the dream I created as I walked. The time wound was healed completely, suffering was transmuted, paradise reigned. She gave me everything then. She doesn’t always. And that’s when I must evaluate my offerings.

NC: Say more about suburbia. I ask this for two reasons. Firstly because, as you mentioned, there is a sort of "suburban canon" of literature we were forced to work with since we were not clued in culturally to anything better. Secondly because of the sense of place in your work. For my part, I do everything I can to distance myself from my upbringing "outside the city," instead fabricating for myself a persona as a streetwise cosmopolitan. Which is why it is so pleasantly surprising to recognize, in your work, sometimes by name and sometimes more obliquely, specific landmarks from the town we grew up in. You no longer have any family ties to the place -- I wonder why you revisit it so often in your work, especially because of the expat lifestyle you have adopted since leaving.

MB: In two generations you can make an American brat. That’s the promise of suburbia. And for a large piece of the world, it’s a damn good one. 

To further summarize the suburban vestibule, reeking of marijuana smoke and the cologne of ambivalent father [Saturn Devouring His Son], the rising pancake-smoke of the long-suffering self-replicating mother [Pietà], allow me to offer a caption: “Holy fools hatch baby to learn they only ever wanted two things: 1) the love of their own parents, and 2) money. Baby learns God is his only keeper.” [I’ve always preferred Ganesha throwing his tusk at the moon.] 

The entire endeavor is marketed as being about the children, as in won’t somebody please think of them, but it’s really about how the children make the adults feel. We were created to serve the pyramid of inferior death. Failing to make the adults feel good, we strove to make them feel bad, until everyone involved got cancer, an autoimmune disorder, diabetes, and/or a neurotic addiction. It’s amusing how that got reversed: the adults were the moody teenagers, and we were dying to make them happy! 

Having said that, my utter hatred of the embodied experience began quite early, prior to womb and biomatrix, way before I adopted Nirvana angst. A Buddhist once told me I’m a demigod who’s going backwards in births – I wholeheartedly agree. There was always the feeling of “Not this cesspool again. Not this heavy lead dimension of errands, desire, bankers, licorice candy, passwords, arms, and wondrous decay. Fuck. I got born.” And there is nothing wrong with this instinct, it’s merely at odds with culturally sanctioned work, with the real and service economies, with population-juicing for your specific macro-family so things can be made, sold, and exploded, including and especially people. This instinct also led to mopping floors. I find it all vampiric and bizarre. A fractal of incarceration. 

The genital and oral gravities, combined with the great energy and resource harvester of the cultural machine-organism [the demiurge], is a fairly difficult (non-)foe. Which is why I am not and could never be a true anti-natalist [can you be anti-pollen?]. Though that was certainly a bowlfellow as we smoked cheap opium in the woods by the high school, ordered research chemicals off the internet, and watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. As such, it was physically and spiritually impossible to be surprised by either Columbine or 9/11. Or the recent plague. Or the growing realization that the Catholic church was, among other things, a pedophilia ring.  

This is a notion that cannot be entertained anywhere, but especially in the United States: birth is not a favor. Of course, maybe it is, I don’t know shit about dick, but guilt – institutionalized emotional debt – is a great way to get people slaving, fighting, and sucking, especially if you weaken all of their organs and repeat a dozen mantras, including IT COULD BE WORSE. Being is the first intoxication of the pure witness. One could even say being makes the pure witness. They make each other, un/fortunately. 

When young, you build your magic circle, your sanctuary is your tortoise shell, you network with dead misanthropes, drug addicts, and mystics. The atmosphere is increasingly ominous and absurd. It’s a Dumb and Dumber sleepover in the mansion of a child pornographer. You do not experience love, but the pangs of survival. You dream of escape, by money, by artistic aura, by cred. You dream of finally becoming real. [“If you think you’re the reincarnation of Jack Kerouac, you’re already gone.”] You maybe even dream of the big city. You read James Baldwin’s Another Country and fantasize about the urban sex paradise, where the races mingle, where the music rages. You promptly move to Bedford-Stuyvesant and become a dishwasher.  

With time, I’ve been able to forge a tenderness for the town, for the mini-cult of the family enforced by hormones, alcohol, cinema, sugar, sodium, and pure need. Maximum judgement. Maximum forgiveness. The region itself is sacred. The Hudson River is a meridian of ghosts, with tuliptree canoes on the water. To know that river may well be worth this unfortunate entry. 

The town returns to me and I return to it because of nostalgia and affection, because there’s the urge of solving, because I have not yet escaped the memory palace. People hang around emotionally charged entities because they think something will be fixed or disclosed. Nothing will. It’s possible nothing is broken. Another coarse pill. I am positive I could achieve true presence, whereby the town would be deleted completely, in every sense, and this cursed diaphragm would go with it. I’m just lazy. The past is a habit and the world is one too. I’ve only recently begun to digest my expat years. I’ve only ever been the enemy of the time weapon. They can't put me anywhere. They've tried. 


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