Bad Artist Statement #5: Hera Lindsay Bird
Hera Lindsay Bird and I discuss everything being embarrassing, online shitstorms, not writing poetry, and the impulse to make art.
Hera Lindsay Bird is a poet from Auckland, New Zealand. Her first collection Hera Lindsay Bird and second Pamper Me to Hell & Back possibly did or didn’t go viral. Hera has been interviewed in VICE, i-D, and The Guardian. I’ve read Hera’s poems for years and often laugh reading them. Her poems remind me what it’s like to be maladjusted and overly online.
We spoke about everything being embarrassing, online shitstorms, not writing poetry, and the impulse to make art.
Paul Dalla Rosa: Okay, I can hear you now. This is good.
Hera Lindsay Bird: I only woke up like an hour ago so I'm not at my most cognitively buff whatever that is.
PDR: That's how I feel. I didn't sleep last night but I've had a lot of caffeine and it's making me feel charged.
HLB: Yeah.
PDR: I won't start with like compliments because I think that always fucks up an interview but I was happy when you said yes to this.
HLB: I don't usually do stuff like this anymore because I haven't produced anything for such a long time and am trying to scrub my name off the internet until I make something new, but I read your interview with Chelsea and I was like, oh yeah, you seem cool and normal.
PDR: I laughed at what you said in our emails when you were like, "I fluctuate constantly back and forth between thinking all self-disclosure is hideous and embarrassing and should be illegal and wanting to do more." That was funny. I think being a writer now is really weird and bizarre, especially being so online. I mean almost all of it has nothing to do with your work whatsoever. I don't mean that as in your work, but I mean, me, any writer.
HLB: Yeah and like, I get the impulse. I’m parasitically interested in people's biographies and, you know, horrible Twitter meltdowns. But I also recognise that it’s totally counterproductive to writing anything. I think Patricia Lockwood does Twitter really well; reading Patricia Lockwood's tweets never make me less interested in reading her books because I guess they come from exactly the same aesthetic place, like it just seems like a continuation of her novels.
PDR: I agree with that. The novel and then her LRB diary or her criticism, everything is sort of the same. Or no, not the same, but it seems artfully chosen or curated.
HLB: Yes, it's like from the old school of Twitter where everyone was doing a kind of elaborate performance art. Like I love Mark Leidner as well and his tweets are exactly the same like, you could be thumbing through his book of aphorisms.
PDR: Yeah, some people really elevate it, especially when Twitter was in the state of constraint, the 240 characters. I really like the Tao Lin and Mira Gonzalez book of tweets. Sometimes I want to tweet their tweets and see if anyone notices.
HLB: But then you can read some like really incredible writer complaining about stupid shit online. Maybe some people have a stronger internal fourth-wall, but I always find myself believing less in that writer’s fictional world.
PDR: I feel that. When you're dealing with a writer or you're dealing with their work, hopefully it's the result of all of this effort or genius or inspiration or whatever, their intellectual faculties being at their sharpest. And then, you know, a great writer will just be awful online. And it does strip away some intangible quality or excitement that I might have for someone’s work. I can’t say it doesn’t.
HLB: It's like, I love P.G. Wodehouse and I've read all of his biographies. I'm obsessed with Shirley Jackson. I've read everything that's biographically available but if I was able to watch her tweet in real time while reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle, I think I wouldn't be able to believe the fictional conceit of the book in the same way.
PDR: That's true. I worry about that and then I just… it's not even that I find self-disclosure embarrassing, like tweeting a tweet, but I get this overwhelming feeling that everything is embarrassing.
HLB: Yeah. I have a Twitter where I just like, lurk and read stuff because I enjoy the scandals and articles I'd never otherwise have access to. But I also don't want to participate.
PDR: No, that makes sense. I have a weird thing with that because it's like I'm a faggot so to a certain extent I love gossip and I love drama. It’s a stereotype but I do. I really, really do. There's an art to it. I love reading writers' journals or, you know, roman à clef novels where it's very obvious that certain characters are lightly fictionalised famous people and it's sort of bitching about them. I mean there's great literature built on gossip. Truman Capote’s conversational portraits, anything by Eve Babitz. Maybe the gossip is just bad now or its gossip without art, maybe it’s the acceleration of them, the pace, but I'm at a stage with these online dramas like the kidney story or whatever where I just don't care.
HLB: It's definitely just endlessly activating the dopamine lever. I mean I will obsessively read all of the discourse and be simultaneously bored by it, which makes me think that it's similar to the online gambling impulse or those jewel match games.
PDR: Yeah, I think that's right. I have this thing where I see those articles or exposès and then the like shitstorm afterwards, all of these people, you know, sharing a story, commenting, doing whatever. And often I find everyone seems to act as if each one is this big morality play or is about ethics, these deeper questions. But it's like, no, it's just we live in a scandal society and it's a scandal. And if you want to read it and eat popcorn or something, go for it, but be honest about the impulse.
HLB: Yeah, totally. It's like Russell Crowe being fed to the lions every day.
PDR: Yeah. We live in a celebrity society but weirdly the celebrities are now just everyone. Post-celebrity maybe. You don't have to be celebrity or have really done anything, but you can have an exposé or what seems like the entire internet's attention for a day. And the justifications for why it occurs often seem so disingenuous.
HLB: Yeah, it's like if everyone was sitting in gladiator times coming up with like psuedo-ethical reasons for why the lions are bad, but they're just lions. They're just straight up eating people.
PDR: Maybe gladiator fights would be more productive to society at this stage, or at least more upfront. These interviews often come out like quite a while after they're recorded so I generally kind of try and stay away from takes, but did you see that poetry tweet debacle?
HLB: Yes, I did, I did. Brutal.
PDR: It was pretty brutal. For reference, the poetry editor of a journal in the States tweeted something along the lines of no one cares about poems, something to that effect, and then there was a shitstorm and the journal released a public statement that they were parting ways. I thought about it rereading your poems, it's like, I think maybe even the first poem in Hera Lindsay Bird talks about poetry being like wetting yourself and then being stuck in your own urine.
HLB: Yeah, I know. Thank God the time at which I was chronically tweeting was over half a decade ago and nobody cared. But like, yeah, I definitely had that same thought. I mean, they were curating a poetry journal which is a different scenario. But no wonder Chelsey Minnis never does interviews. All of her poems are a version of that tweet but in the most sexy and deranged Chelsey Minnis way.
PDR: Yeah, I also thought of a poem by my favourite poet Patrizia Cavalli.
HLB: Oh I don't know her.
PDR: She's an Italian poet and she has a really great poem, which I think was in her first collection from the 70s, but the entire poem is:
Someone told me
of course my poems
won't change the world.
I say yes of course
my poems
won't change the world.
That's the entire poem. Well, her poem is in Italian, that's the translation from Gini Alhadeff. Like you said it's not the first time a poet has said something like that.
HLB: Of course.
PDR: The internet, and it's not just the internet, but it does this weird thing where the polarity becomes so charged everything collapses. So it's like people will be talking about this tweet from an editor of a literary journal as if it's like they're tweeting at the Whitney board for a member manufacturing tear gas. Then everyone releases public statements. It’s just wild to me.
HLB: Obviously I would not be a poet if I didn't think poetry was important or it had changed my life in some meaningful way. But nobody wants to hear you talk about that. I think that's why there were so many like anti-poem poems in my book because the way that poetry gets introduced and talked about at schools and institutions or whatever just feels like missionaries handing out raisins on Halloween There's nothing that makes me drawn to something less than someone insisting upon what a culturally essential medium it is. It's like yeah, sure, but do we really need to constantly say that?
PDR: I feel the same with short stories and fiction. There's an insecurity to it but I also think sometimes that has actually got more to do with like a market force where there's a campaign to try to get people to buy books or read books or make them relevant. But it often happens in way that doesn't ever seem to talk about what's exciting in a specific work, or what makes it alive. More and more books seem to take on the status of fetish objects that innately radiate culture or goodness or whatever. I don't like that.
HLB: Well, ultimately it's counterproductive as well because it's like, what's the point of the conversation? Is it to get people who are not into poetry into poetry because imo that’s not a great strategy. Or is it to affirm the egos of the people who already clearly believe and participate in this world? Who's it for? Why are we talking like this?
PDR: Yeah. So I guess my question, which is that if we can say poetry doesn't matter, though it does matter, it's sort of like an ironic and sentimental statement at the same time… Why do you write poems? I don't mean that as an attack. You could ask the same question of why I write short stories.
HLB: Well, I've kind of stopped. It's funny to answer that question as someone who hasn't written a poem in quite a long time. I struggle with it. I'm not a voracious reader of contemporary poetry. In fact I can't remember the last time I bought a poetry book. There are some poetry books that I return to and reread but it's this narrow little stock collection. I'll reread David Berman's Actual Air and Mark Leidner and Chelsey Minnis books. But I'm actually trying to write in some other mediums at the moment, because I think maybe I got so burnt out on that question. I don't think I'd know how to answer it until I was ready to write another book of poetry.
PDR: There's a philosopher Bifo who has this sustained argument that he writes about poetry as being key to breaking free of the world we live in. That it can break semiocapitalism or at least the frame of mind it produces. And sometimes that strikes me as naive or utopian but other times it makes sense to me because he writes that the problem with everything at the moment is that everyone sort of thinks like a computer or in terms of financialization, whereas poetry disrupts that chain of signification or can make you think about something new or think in ways that you don't in your everyday life. That's its potential. I quite like that thought but I couldn’t think about that and try and write a poem. I do think your poems at times do that though.
HLB: Yeah, it's interesting, like I agree that poetry can absolutely do that. But as soon as my poetry book came out, I just couldn't write any poetry anymore. And I think part of it is feeling like I was becoming part of an economy. That's a stupid way of phrasing it but I often get asked to do commissions and stuff and I've made some bad work over the years to pay the bills. But it's a terrible way to write and I don't know how to get that original feeling back. But I'm happy enough changing genres. I've gone back to a world in which I don't exist, which is the best feeling possible. I interviewed Mark Leidner a while ago and he said something really similar. I asked, why did you stop writing poetry? He was like, ‘after I published that one book, the stakes were too high and I had to switch in order to feel invisible again,’ which I totally understand. Anyway, he said it like ten times more eloquently than that, but I think that was the general sentiment.
PDR: And so with your books, I guess your relation to poetry changed. Do you think it changed because your book really exploded? I sort of remember there was a time when you went viral.
HLB: I don't know if that ‘virality’ was real. You know, it didn't feel real to me at the time. And I think maybe people who look at page view numbers might be like, ‘well, it was shared more than whatever we posted last Friday.’ But I feel like that it was also a cynical, marketing statement and I don't know if it really had any actual relation to reality or whether it was just empty hyperbole.
PDR: The language of press releases has gotten into everything.
HLB: Maybe some people thrive on that kind of thing, but for me it has not been helpful or productive.
PDR: Yeah, I think some people do thrive on it. They really love it. I don’t think I do but I don't necessarily have a judgement on people who do. What's it like looking back on the books now with distance?
HLB: It's like, when I wrote my book I wanted to do the anti-poetry thing, to build on that Chelsey Minnis, Janet Jackson celebrity aesthetic. Now it’s become this dominant mode, and I'm kind of embarrassed of that. But it felt different at the time I was doing it, and now it's history. You don't know what you're participating in until you can reflect back on that moment. Like self-titling my first book. It felt like a radically different thing to do at the time. And now I wish I could take it back. Sometimes. Maybe not.
PDR: But in a way, maybe you were a part of producing that change. Not single-handedly. But I do think there's an element where the work you're doing will kind of all filter down and what was new at a time, you know, won't feel as new later, but that doesn't change it. Like I was rereading your first book last night, and actually, a thought that came to my mind was like, Oh, Hera's poems don't really date. I mean it's not that many years. But that can be really rare.
HLB: There's a lot of stuff that I would edit out now. But I think that's normal. You can't hold on to everything until you're seventy-five years old, unless you're one of those people who can hold onto everything until you're seventy-five, in which case, mad respect to you, but I’m not that kind of writer. “Monica” won’t make sense in 2090. I want to be read in my own lifetime.
PDR: I guess the question, why do you write, could be applied, maybe to the creation of art.
HLB: Well I read mainly for entertainment. So most of my reading is genre fiction, or crime novels or heavy dragon fantasy books. I'm also a kid's literature specialist, so I read lots of that. Because my dad read to us constantly as kids there must be some level of nostalgia or comfort associated with reading that I don't get out of other mediums. But the other thing I think is also true is there's something about the singular perspective of having access to one person's brain that’s missing for me in other more collaborative formats. Like a television show is ultimately collaborative, even if you're a real auteur, and one person is writing the script and micromanaging the direction, acting style, everything. I like having access to the pure undiluted consciousness of one person, which I feel like is something that no other art form really gives me
PDR: Yeah and without that sort of collaboration, just being alone with one other mind, one vision.
HLB: I've always been interested in that question of what it feels like to be another person. And to me, fiction and writing comes the closest to being able to answer that in a meaningful way or in a way that is understandable to me. I love Elizabeth Strout, I'm obsessed with Elizabeth Strout. I thought the TV adaptation of Olive Kitteridge was amazing too. But reading that book was a window into a life I would never have access to otherwise. So I think it's curiosity or voyeurism - just tell me what it feels like to be alive.
PDR: I think I'm drawn to it in a similar way. Though in creating stuff slightly different. I really love a line in one of your poems. I think of it often while writing. ‘The only reason for poetry is to have a meadow in which to burn yourself alive in.’
HLB: I can't remember which poem that's from. Wait, I think that's “Speech Time”.
PDR: Yeah, that's the one. But I think that's how I sort of find my own writing or any kind of artistic impulse, which is it's sort of like me attempting to reach some kind of animating force, finding something that can combust, which is ultimately about being alive.
HLB: Yeah, I was talking to someone about this the other night. I know plenty of socially adept people who are also wonderful writers. But that feels alien to me. I feel part of wanting to write is the psychological impulse to communicate with other people and not really being able to do that in the way I want. So you have to kind of construct this elaborate facade in which to do it, with hyper precision and intentionality. I think some of it is like having something to say, but not being able to think of what it is until three days after the conversation is over.
PDR: Yeah and trying to figure things out or process them in a way that's not as linear as like solving a problem or a riddle, but trying to understand or make sense of life. I mean you can never actually solve it but there's something in the attempt.
HLB: The other thing is I've moved away from confessional writing. When I was writing that first book I was in the right place in my life to write the confessional poetry book, but the older I get the less interested I am in my own problems, hang-ups, issues, anxieties. I find myself moving further away from consciously addressing those in fiction. I watched Step Brothers again the other night, which has got to be one of my favourite movies of all time and I was like, I want to dedicate my life to making something as dumb and funny as Step Brothers.
PDR: I’m getting bored of myself too, dealing with myself and my own ego. I think a lot about entertainment as well, which is that, you know, I do think it is a thing where I want my work to be funny or engaging or somehow, you know, have a higher register, which is still enjoyable and fun. Reaching towards Step Brothers doesn't seem to me a stupid way of doing that.
HLB: I always have these two modes of reading. If I'm in crisis or going through something, I want to read something that speaks to that moment. It's almost the same impulse as reading relationship advice columns on reddit. Pulling more stuff into the feedback loop. But I'm also increasingly drawn to escapism. Obviously many of the best works of art straddle both worlds but I’m still trying to find my place on the spectrum.
PDR: So what’s next?
HLB: I’m working on a couple of different genre fiction things, which I have no idea how to write, and may or may not ever finish. I don’t like to talk too much about works in progress, because it always gives me a premature dopamine rush and makes me lazy about completing things. But don’t worry, it’s not autofiction or a nuanced and sensitive collection of personal essays. I’ll probably return to poetry one day, when I’ve changed enough as a person to not feel like I’m doing an empty parody of my first collection. Until then, I’m thoroughly enjoying not knowing what the hell I’m doing. It’s the only way to write.
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