“Screenplay for an Unrealizable Film”: A Conversation with Mark DuCharme

This interview is a conversation between Mark DuCharme and Operating System founder / managing editor, Lynne DeSilva-Johnson — it appears in the archival backmatter of his forthcoming 2018 book with The OS, We, The Monstrous. An excerpt appears online at Dispatches from the Poetry Wars.

Greetings comrade! Thank you for talking to us about your process today. Can you introduce yourself, in a way that you would choose?

I am a poet, an adjunct English professor at a community college, and an activist for faculty equity. I live in Boulder, am the author of a number of volumes of poetry including The Unfinished: Books I-VI (2013), & hold an MFA from The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. And I absolutely hate beginning a lot of sentences with I! In fact, I think bios are overrated. The life is generally not as interesting as the work — unless either your work is particularly boring or your name is Arthur Rimbaud or Arthur Cravan. My name is not Arthur. But what do you think?

Why are you a poet/writer/artist?

I don’t think anyone (and especially someone who did not grow up well off) becomes a poet except out of a need to do so. I mean, it’s not like choosing to become a doctor or plumber: it’s impractical, perhaps glaringly so. But there’s something beautiful & magical about inviting poetry into one’s life. It is, or can be, a means through which one sees and encounters the world in previously unimaginable ways. Also, meeting other poets is usually pretty cool. I can’t understand why everyone else doesn’t do it.

When did you decide you were a poet/writer/artist (and/or: do you feel comfortable calling yourself a poet/writer/artist, what other titles or affiliations do you prefer/feel are more accurate)?

I knew that I must become an artist of some kind as a child. At first, I wasn’t sure what kind. I was always a good expository writer in school, and one day, as a teenager, I was walking down Woodward Avenue in my hometown of Birmingham, Michigan with some friends, and we passed the Maximus & Company bookstore, which had just opened. (A great place, incidentally, run by poet Paul Lichter, which I would always visit when I returned to Birmingham to visit my mom. Among the volumes I bought there is Ted Berrigan’s wonderful, and wonderfully titled, Nothing for You, which, except for The Sonnets, is still my favorite Berrigan book.) In the storefront window that afternoon, the word POETRY was written in large letters. I looked across the street at it, and one of my friends quipped, “he’s a poet.” It felt right. I have never looked back.

What’s a “poet” (or “writer” or “artist”) anyway?

Someone who writes poems. If you don’t write poems, you can’t call yourself a poet. This is something, by the way, that my first good creative writing teacher, Ken Mikolowski at the University of Michigan, said; I didn’t come up with it, but I agree with him. I would add that a poet is, hopefully, someone whose poems do not suck.

What do you see as your cultural and social role (in the literary / artistic / creative community and beyond)?

One tries to write good poems and to neither bore oneself nor the reader. That is a valid cultural role in itself. Beyond that, I have been an editor & publisher (of photocopied micro-zines and better-produced chapbooks) and a reading series organizer. I am not currently doing anything of that sort, though I’ve thought about starting some sort of online journal. Maybe someday. However, I hasten to add that I am also a teacher, and while I don’t currently teach creative writing, I feel that what I do is important (and time-consuming!) cultural work.

Talk about the process or instinct to move these poems (or your work in general) as independent entities into a body of work. How and why did this happen? Have you had this intention for a while? What encouraged and/or confounded this (or a book, in general) coming together? Was it a struggle?

In the summer of 2016, right around the time of the Republican National Convention (which is referenced in the text), I got the idea that maybe it would be interesting to write a “screenplay for an unrealizable film” — a work of indeterminate genre, as I conceived of it then. I had been writing almost exclusively what I call writing projects (my version of the serial poem, a term coined by Jack Spicer) for about a decade, and I felt it might be good to do something a little different. And I didn’t have any idea what such a work would look like or if I could write it! (I had tried, unsuccessfully, to write a work of poet’s theater when I was in my 20s.) So the whole thing was an experiment. I wrote a little bit of it that summer, but it was a “backburner” project at that point. Some of what I wrote then didn’t end up making it into the final manuscript.

Then, something I didn’t anticipate ended up happening: Donald Trump won the presidential election. I felt, as I’m sure you did, a mixture of despair and outrage and shocked incredulity. I was utterly horrified. The first thing I think I wrote then — though I may also have been working to an extent on We, the Monstrous while I was writing this — was a sequence of poems called “American Dirge,” none of which have yet been published. The tone of that sequence is essentially mournful, reflecting my initial shock & despair. At some point, the mourning if not the other feelings dropped away, & my attention turned to what became We, the Monstrous. I developed a working title, White Noise vs. The Final Girl, and I started more seriously to try to develop this work. I even told some friends I was working on it. By June — just less than a year after I had gotten the vague, initial idea — I had the completed and revised manuscript, which I then submitted to you.

What formal structures or other constrictive practices (if any) do you use in the creation of your work?

I don’t tend to use constrictive practices (e.g., Oulipian procedures). I write intuitively. I have written sometimes in poetic forms, though. I have one sestina that I still very much like (“A World,” in my 2002 book Cosmopolitan Tremble). I have “Two Villanelles” in my book Answer (2011). I have written acrostics, and I seem to be good at pantoums.

Have certain teachers or instructive environments, or readings/writings/work of other creative people informed the way you work/write?

I am going to interpret this question as being about influence and lineage. Many poets’ work has informed my practice, and there are many poets whose work I admire. I am always reading different poets, though I also reread those whose work is especially important to me. Frank O’Hara was an early, important influence. Thus, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and later Joseph Ceravolo became key influences as well. Other poets whose work I admire and have been informed by include (in no particular order) Clark Coolidge, César Vallejo, Pierre Reverdy, John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Alice Notley, Gertrude Stein, Guillaume Apollinaire, Emily Dickinson, Barbara Guest, Lorine Niedecker, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Jack Spicer, Jackson Mac Low, Bernadette Mayer, Stephen Rodefer, Michael Gizzi, George Oppen, Mina Loy, William Carlos Williams, Maureen Owen, Anselm Hollo — I could go on.

Speaking of monikers, what does your title represent? How was it generated? Talk about the way you titled the book, and how your process of naming (individual pieces, sections, etc) influences you and/or colors your work specifically.

I decided that I didn’t want to use White Noise vs. The Final Girl, which had been the working title during most of the writing process, because I felt it simplified the issues the work addresses & perhaps gave away a key plot development which takes place in the long final scene of Act III. Therefore, I needed another title. Titles for books can be a sticky point for me, or they can come very easily — it just depends. In this case, once I rejected the working title, I don’t recall it being a long or arduous process to come up with another I thought better represented this work. Though the phrase itself doesn’t appear in the text, We, the Monstrous comes from an exchange between my protagonist Platonesse (speaking here as She) and Béranger (speaking here as He):

HE: The oppressors do not change.

They remain an image of the monstrous.

SHE: No, they are an image of

Ourselves — of what humanity,

Our species,

Is capable of doing.

Humans behave inhumanly,

Inhumanely, instinctively, & then define

Ourselves, a species, as

The opposite of all our actions.

Obviously, when I wrote We, the Monstrous I was thinking a lot about how so many American voters could have voted for a man who represented so clearly, in my mind, a renewal of hatred, prejudice, class privilege (thinly disguised as populism), misogyny and racism — a figure who seemed and still seems to threaten fascism, and who, politics aside, is so obviously unfit for the highest office in the land that he constitutes a public danger. But my notion of the inhumanity of humans also stems from my knowledge of the historical Romans, the Crusades, “witch” burnings, American slavery, the Trail of Tears, the rise of the KKK, early & violent repression of union organizing, the Holocaust (among other genocides), lynchings in the American south, US militarism & interventions, etc. The term “monster,” incidentally, also appears in my “American Dirge” sequence, mentioned earlier.

What does this particular work represent to you, as indicative of your method/creative practice, as indicative of your history, as indicative of your mission/intentions/hopes/plans?

Despite its subtitle, I very much consider We, the Monstrous a poem at least as much as a dramatic work. I currently have no plans to write another dramatic work. Right now, I am working on a collection of poems.

What does this book DO (as much as what it says or contains)?

Hopefully, it achieves both its poetic and political aims.

What would be the best possible outcome for this book? What might it do in the world, and how will its presence as an object facilitate your creative role in your community and beyond? What are your hopes for this book, and for your practice?

The best possible outcome for this book would be to find readers, to make them think, to make them feel, and to change the way they may encounter/ interact with the political/ poetic landscape, however defined. More specifically, another best possible outcome would be to aid & inspire the current resistance to this abomination of an administration, this rampant kleptocracy, this oligarchy de luxe. In terms of my role in my community, I’d love to do a staged reading if I could cast all the roles. If anyone reading this lives in Colorado and wants to play Platonesse or knows someone who would be a good Platonesse, contact me. I would also be open to staged readings or productions of the work in other parts of the country.

Let’s talk a little bit about the role of poetics and creative community in social activism, in particular in what I call “Civil Rights 2.0,” which has remained immediately present all around us in the time leading up to this series’ publication. I’d be curious to hear some thoughts on the challenges we face in speaking and publishing across lines of race, age, privilege, social/cultural background, and sexuality within the community, vs. the dangers of remaining and producing in isolated “silos.”

Well, poetry is a “silo,” isn’t it? And I don’t mean just “avant-garde” poetry, so called, of which I consider my body of work a part, but even that mundane, sometimes maudlin poetry promoted by Ted Kooser and others that is supposed to be the sort of poetry that will finally appeal to the majority of readers(!), if only the more vital and interesting, but (necessarily) challenging, poetry would just get out of the way. (And what’s next: glossy regional poetry anthologies in the check-out aisles?)

There are the “silos” of progressive, liberal, conservative and reactionary politics, there is the poetry silo, and then there are the silos you refer to. As writers whose identities are defined in privileged way(s) — in any of the ways you mention — it is incumbent on us to check our privilege at the door. There is no single recipe for doing this, and no one can claim perfection in that regard, but as humans we have to try. And the most important thing we can do, I think, is support others of differing backgrounds/ statuses, be genuine, and listen rather than doing all the speaking.

Look, we all live in silos of one kind or another. As a poet, I live in my head. But, just like you don’t stay in your room all day, hopefully, it need not be a question of where you “live” so much as whether you go out, & where.

Get off Facebook and other social media, which, other than cliques, are probably the biggest “silos” of all. I am on FB, but I try, not always successfully, to limit my time there. Get out in the community (ironic for me to say, because I’m such an introvert). Move outside your comfort zone, & question your assumptions. Challenge bullshit when you hear it, especially in real life. Do not think that online forums “count” as real life. Question authority, as one used to say, & be not docile. Read a lot & inform yourself. Be aware of what is going on in your community, even if you cannot always attend everything. Attend what you can, & do what you can. If you teach, do not be didactic, but try to provoke students to think in ways they might not have expected. Be a real human being; be considerate & kind. Cultivate empathy & compassion — so lacking in these crazy times! These things are all part of being a poet.

Is there anything else we should have asked, or that you want to share?

Thank you!

Mark DuCharme is the author of several volumes of poetry, ranging from chapbooks and pamphlets to book-length collections to his magnum opus, The Unfinished: Books I-VI (2013). Most recently, Counter Fluencies 1- 20 appeared as part of the print journal The Lune (2017). We, the Monstrous is part of The Operating System’s 2018 chapbook “class.” His poetry has appeared widely in such publications as Big Bridge, Bombay Gin, Caliban Online, Colorado Review, Mantis, New American Writing, OR, Pallaksch Pallaksch, Shiny, Talisman, and Vanitas. He has been a recipient of the Neodata Endowment in Literature and the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry. He lives in Boulder, Colorado and is an adjunct English professor at a community college.