interview with christian mcdonough

I first came across Christian McDonough's work when I received a submission called "100 Poems For D.F.L." (Part 1) (Part 2). I liked the material -- its verve, its forthrightness, a wide-eyed innocence tinged with the darkness of real insight and experience -- but I tried to tell him that it was simply too long to run on the website. He asked if I'd be willing to run them in installments then, "perhaps over the course of several months or maybe a year." He said that he  wrote them "specifically with DFL in mind," and had "no interest in placing them elsewhere." What can I say, I was charmed. Probably flattered also. But the work of running an irrelevant micro-press can be so emotionally draining at times I think I was just relieved to encounter a force of undaunted and indeed dauntless positivity.

A few months later, looking around for new projects, I asked Christian if he'd be willing to write 1,000 poems in the spirit of his "100 Poems For D.F.L." and he said he'd already been thinking about doing the same thing. Thus the Book Of A Thousand Poems was born.


Nicholas Clemente: Despite being the publisher of this book, I almost don't know where to start with it. It varies so widely in subject and tone it's almost impossible to choose an angle of approach. So I'd like to start with you, if that's alright. You are a young man (in your mid twenties, I believe?) living in what appears to be a culturally barren area of Texas and writing experimental poetry inspired in part by obscure Polish surrealists. How did this happen? 

Christian McDonough: Sure! Yes, I actually just turned 26. I’m not sure if I’d say I live in a particularly culturally barren area of Texas, I’m relatively close to a few major Texan cities, but I’ve never really been a part of any kind of group or scene in my area and I’ve very rarely met anyone near me who is interested in the same kind of art and writing as me.

I really don’t know why I ended up like this. My parents aren’t particularly interested in art, music, literature, or anything like that, and they’re not very receptive to it either. Multiple people have told me they don’t understand why I’m like this after they’ve met my family, which always makes me laugh.

I really wanted to make video games when I was younger. I loved Crash Bandicoot and Spyro, etc., but I always wished for some game with a really gripping, engaging story that would confront me and change my life in some way.  As I got older, the format changed. I wanted to be a filmmaker and started writing scripts in high school and even made a few short films, but eventually I ended up focusing on writing. Reading Borges’ Ficciones really helped to push me in that direction. I read it on the recommendation of a friend and it felt like it changed my life and moved me in some profound way. I couldn’t really say how, but it had the kind of iridescent, kaleidoscopically meaningful feeling that I always wished for in my imaginary video games. I guess that was the first time I realized just how deeply literature can affect a person.

Around that time, I learned one of my favorite filmmakers, Andrzej Zulawski, had just started working on a film adaptation of a book called Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz and I decided to check it out. That’s what got me really interested in 20th century Polish avant-garde literature, and how I found Witkacy (a contemporary of Gombrowicz), who I love so so so much. When I read his plays I felt like I was looking in a mirror and seeing everything I was and would be in the future to come.

At that point I was still more interested in filmmaking, and I tried to make some larger projects with friends of mine, but they weren’t very reliable and weren’t great influences on me. For some reasons that you’ll be aware of if you read the book, I became a lot more isolated around the time I started my undergrad. That’s when I turned to literature.

I started with short stories and plays. I just wrote them for myself really, I didn’t know of anywhere to put them and didn’t really have anyone to share them with.

As for poetry, I never really took it very seriously. I wrote poems in my free time between classes to pass the time and make me feel like I was being productive when I didn’t have time to work on larger projects. I’m constantly wanting to create more and more things, and it never really feels like I’m doing enough, so poetry helped to fill that void.

I think not taking poetry very seriously has been a great benefit to my writing it. I don’t think I could have written this big, ambitious Book Of A Thousand Poems if I had the gravity of poetry as a fine art hanging over my head. 

NC: But the unseriousness of this book is in itself its own type of seriousness, if that makes any sense. Because the unserious nature of it comes through in different ways. Some of the poems are very playful, but some are arrestingly raw and honest. That is, you are not "serious" about putting up any aesthetic walls between yourself and the reader. I like to describe the book as a map of the human mind, sort of like the way that Deleuze once described Chekhov (one of my favorite writers) as a cartographer. His work is very different from yours, but in it you get the same breadth of human experience: all the highs and lows, all the hopes and despairs, all the grandiosity and all the humiliations. This isn't really a question, I guess. I'm just trying to do better to capture the essence of this book, because I have a really hard time explaining it to people sometimes. 

CM: Yeah, I guess you could think of the “unseriousness” of the book as a kind of method. By not taking the book too seriously, I felt much more capable of not worrying about what others might think of what I’m writing. One of my goals when writing the book was to try to attain a personal freedom of expression. So there were times when writing the book I might have had an idea and then thought to myself, “oh no, I can’t say that,” for personal reasons or feeling like there was some kind of social pressure not to. But ultimately, I felt I was able to overcome all of that and say basically whatever I wanted to say. 

Also, because of that, and because of some of the intensely personal aspects of the book and the speed with which I wrote the first draft, I think of it somewhat as a kind of performance art. 

I really love reading about performance artist’s works and imagining what the internal experience of that performance might have been like. This is especially true with the performance artist Tehching Hsieh. Most of his performances weren’t really public, and were done over long periods of time, typically one year. For example, with his “Outdoor Piece,” he just didn’t go inside of anywhere for a year. And the performance wasn’t really documented in any way, he was basically just playing with his life and calling it art. This kind of work is extremely inspirational to me, in part because of the stupidity of it. There’s no real point to it, besides doing it and living it and knowing it. To me this is the essence of art and of life. It’s stupid and it’s just so stupid that it’s beautiful. So with the book, I am making something extremely grandiose and supposedly meaningful, trying to attain a real personal freedom and create something that lives and breathes in its own way, and I wrote it in these extreme states of being, finishing the first draft in less than a month, and ultimately I think the whole thing is a stupid waste of time. And it just makes me so happy. 

I’m glad you mentioned Deleuze’s idea of cartography! I was actually inspired by Guattari’s book Schizoanalytic Cartographies when making the back cover of the book. It’s meant to, at least in part, suggest a map, implying that the book is (de- & re-) “territorializing” reality in some way, at least my own reality, with me attaining that sense of freedom.

NC: Yes, absolutely. I'm glad you touched on the conceptual nature of the work, which was something I wanted to get to. I mean it's apparent even in the title of the thing -- Book Of A Thousand Poems. It's something so large that you have to take it seriously, but on the other hand it's also so large that it becomes absurd. I want to call it something like "hyper-literature," or "post-literature." It's a work of literature, but it's a conceptual object at the same time. That is, the "effect" of the book is not strictly limited to the words contained therein. Obviously I think there's literary merit in it, otherwise I would not be publishing it. But on a conceptual level it's a book that you don't even have to open to "understand," a book that acts from a distance, across a vast chasm of cultural indifference. This is a very important pivot for writers to be making, I think, in an era when the traditional forms of literature mean less and less to the zeitgeist every year. So why not have fun with it? Or rather, why not have fun writing a book which is deadly serious at the same time? Or why not pursue with deadly seriousness a project which is also just for fun? If there are no more cultural or financial rewards available to writers, what else are we supposed to do?

How did you find your way to schizoanalytic theory? What other philosophical approaches were instrumental in the conceptualization of this book?

CM: Yes! And along with that, with the conceptual nature of the work, I think we artists should be making things which are meant to alter how we are seen by those who are made aware of the work. Like with the work of Hsieh, it implies an idea of what he must have gone through and who he must be to do the art he has done. We must create ourselves, and play with ourselves, through our work. Just by writing a “Book Of A Thousand Poems,” people should judge me. They should look at me with disdain for having the gall to even attempt something so ambitious, or praise or be intimidated by me for the same reason. They should question what they can do themselves. And in writing the book (there’s quite a bit in the book which tries to reach out and connect with the reader) I also had a hope that I would inspire the reader to do the same thing. To write their own book of a thousand poems, to make something delirious and grandiose, to free themselves from any arbitrary limits and create along with me. 

I really like that idea of it being a kind of post or hyper literature. It makes sense to me. I think the book itself defies a lot of expectations for a book of poetry. Well, obviously it does, half the book isn’t even poetry. But I think, conceptually, with the book operating from a distance like you said, it makes the book even more exciting and incomprehensible when you read it. 

Nietzsche is a very big influence on me, especially Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In that work, Zarathustra is continuously trying to overcome himself, his limitations, and finding great joy in his life and each moment. And in many ways you could say Nietzsche was doing the same with each book he wrote, too. In a similar manner, through writing the BOATP, I was trying to overcome my limits and push myself to be more than I was. 

I would also say that works like the Tao Te Ching and some Zen Buddhist texts were influential. This goes along with what you were saying, about finding the serious within the lighthearted and vice-versa. With Taoism and Zen Buddhism, there’s an idea that to achieve something properly, or to reach a masterful state, or something like that, you have to let go, be one with nature, have a kind of radical acceptance of things, etc. So, from the beginning, I set out to write a work which purports itself to be the answer and end to all questions, all problems, etc. Through the absurdity of this task, I felt I was able to let go in writing the book, to write playfully and freely. I was able to allow myself a naive faith that in some way the book would answer all things, even if only with a joke.

I honestly don’t remember how I first got interested in Deleuze and Guattari’s work. I know I had been interested in Psychoanalysis for a long time before then, so it was probably a natural progression from Freud and Jung to Lacan and Zizek to Deleuze and Guattari. I do have a special interest in schizophrenia though. I used to work with schizophrenics as a mental health case manager. They were some of the most beautiful, wonderful people I’ve ever met. And there was a real kind of freedom and beauty to the way they thought at times. Of course, there was some real horror to it too. But a lot of them were very creative people who understood things about the world that not many could, and by trying to understand them and relate to them I felt like I learned a lot about life and was able to think about things in different ways. I really loved the job but I hate psychiatry, especially when it comes to antipsychotics. I won’t get into it too much here but the effects of antipsychotics and the fact that they are used as the front line of treatment for many of those with psychotic disorders is absolutely abhorrent to me and fills me with dread and anger. 

Besides Nietzsche and Schizoanalysis, the idea of philosophy generally was a pretty big influence on the book. The philosophy section of the book I think makes this especially clear, and I indirectly refer back to several major figures in the history of philosophy there. 

My understanding of philosophy is probably a bit different than most people’s though. The thing I most admire about philosophy, at least what you might call continental philosophy, are the aesthetic qualities of the writing. There are very few other forms of writing that operate the way philosophy does. Take Hegel for example, with the Phenomenology of Spirit, his dialectical way of writing, guiding the reader through different forms of consciousness or thinking and simultaneously letting the reader experience that thinking as you and him progress to some higher form of consciousness, while all the while being written in this very abstracted vocabulary which kind of forces you to embody these vague words like “Being” or “Thisness” with the full weight of their potential meaning. This is not something you’d find in any other kind of writing.

From quite early on, I think philosophy was playing games with its readers much more than people realize. The obvious example is Plato’s dialogues, which are often filled with irony and a distance from the truth. By the act of framing them as dialogues, Plato is able to distance himself from the surface-level content of the works, to present ideas which he doesn’t necessarily believe, and to build  conversations which are meant to provide a meaning between the conversation, through what is not said in the dialogue or what is obviously overlooked by the speakers. 

So what I’m saying is, I think of philosophy as a kind of aesthetic game. That’s not to say I don’t think it is genuinely meaningful and life-changing, I very much believe that it is. But the way it works, in my opinion, is through creating these frames of meaning and wordplay that create the opportunity for alternate forms of thinking. And this is an idea that informed the book in a big way. 


BUY THE BOOK OF A THOUSAND POEMS

HOME