"Lately I’ve been thinking
that everything falls into two
categories: that which is bacon,
and that which is not bacon.
It’s said that pigs will eat their masters
if they fall in the sty.
Damn right we will.
"The terms of my sentence are clear, writes this guy who wrote this book about himself. Even if our selves are fictions, I believe in Jeremy Schmall and in the good his work does as it watches the world getting uglier and the people sadder. He drops us exactly where we are, and it’s lethal and absurd and worst of all, going according to plan. At least he brought snacks." — Mark Bibbins
"Jeremy Schmall is the bioluminescent pancake maker behind the radical operation that calls itself The Agriculture Reader. If you haven’t read an issue of AGR, you’re going to want to do that. Jeremy Schmall & the Cult of Comfort, published by X-ing Books, is a 99-page collection with 48 poems. The book is supremely beautiful, like all of the objects from X-ing. And it’s tiny, which is awesome, because you’ll want to carry this book around with you, and throw it at people, and cause major social disruptions with it by your side, and hang out in the park afterwards, maybe with a couple beers, making funny faces in the dark.
Eloquently reckless, irreverent, and wired with the kind of imaginative wattage that sets even the most seasoned book thug on their MFA-ed ass, the poems in this book touch on everything from Super Mario Bros. to fingerbanging to the Myth of America. Here’s the second poem in the book, “If I have to read another poem”:
about a New England winter
I will break your goddamn teacup,
I said, and wanted to add “ta-daa.”
Or so I thought.
Then an elderly woman
punched me square in the gut.
Why?
The fuck you care why?
she said.
That’s how this book feels, and who doesn’t want to be a glutton for this kind of punishment? And there are other things: warmth, loneliness, anger, confusion, restlessness, and everything else. Open the book up anywhere and you’ll find something worth reading out loud to your friends. Such sustained high volume and lack of decorum can be traced to Schmall’s mastery of the full frontal assault. These poems open in midst of some physical, intellectual, or emotional misunderstanding that is associatively triangulated around for the rest of the poem, often veering into moments of hilarity and grief, and always leading to a moment that is equal parts epiphany and broken femur. And don’t plan on catching your breath. No. You shouldn’t be too comfortable. These poems resist passivity, which is good for poetry, and good for your heart.
In the headache it’s hard to even find tacos.
Nobody is watching
or somebody is always watching
but either way I’m terrified.
If you kill the goose, the goose is dead.
If you eat the sandwich, you absorb its life.
But put the pancake down.
I’m not sure what I should be feeling, and it’s exhilarating. These lines remind me of an epigraph from Heather Christle that appears in Mike Young’s We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough where she says, “Bewilderment is the new New Sincerity.” Bewilderment = wonder = awe = compassion = your soul is leaking all over the floor and it’s time to call your friends over and dance in it. There were moments reading this book when I wanted to run outside and start yelling, or jump over a car, or, like happened once in San Francisco, push some major electronics out of a second-story window. I felt invigorated. Not that there isn’t a tinge of callousness in places, but it seems more than appropriate in comparison to the actions of our great leaders. And in reaction to those leaders, this book carries a serious threat, and an even more serious optimism.
Be wary. Do not sacrifice
your solemnity to match the public mood.
Our miracles are always damaged
by the people & threatened by the empire
& willingly foregone for the hallucination
of total security. It is time
to understand true wealth.
Because what else are we doing here?
I’m asking.
Jeremy Schmall just asked you a question, and if you want to answer him, you’ll find his email address in the middle of a poem on page 96 of Jeremy Schmall & the Cult of Comfort. I can vouch for its validity, because the first thing I did after I read it was send a message to him. This is our exchange:
Hi Jeremy.
I’m reviewing The Cult of Comfort for HTMLGiant. Out of sheer curiosity I had to make sure the email address that pops up in the book is actually yours because I think that kind of frankness says a lot about the book as a whole. I guess that’s it.
Yours,
Nick
*****
Hello, friend.
Thanks for the email. Hope you’re enjoying the book. Looking forward to seeing the review. Let me know if you have any questions about it.
Also, are you at Akron? I grew up in Dayton…
Yrs,
Jeremy
Pretty straightforward. But isn’t it nice, behind all our deflections and screens, to pick up a book and talk to someone? Regardless of whether it’s the Jeremy Schmall of the book’s title, or some other, much larger Jeremy Schmall from the wilds of Ohio, he makes me, through this book, feel maimed, which is some pretty close contact, and “only the maimed really understand beauty.”" - Nick Sturm
"The suburbs have no Ovid. Simply being seen as in the running for that honor may be risky for a literary reputation. An obituary for John Updike in the L.A. Times mentioned that he was often called “the poet laureate of the suburbs.” Then, the rest of the obituary insisted that Updike was far more than a mere chronicler of neighborly adultery in comfortable surroundings.
Yet anti-suburb prejudice is a suburban pose, since genuine flâneurs and boulevardiers are not that common in the American colleges that sustain most poets. Urban mystification of putting-green lawns and ranch houses would be a bit perverse, and greater rewards follow from clear poetic insight into suburban rituals. That is provided by Jeremy Schmall in The Cult of Comfort, and as he puts it:
It’s not that our culture needs
clarity in our poems,
we need clarity in our poets.
(“It’s About Waking Up”)
Schmall’s clarity sometimes begins with his titles, notably “The City is Ugly.” There he proposes that in the city:
The women are ugly.
The men are ugly. & my hands
smell like rotting chicken.
Ugliness in this book often comes from the work of hands and days. Fisticuffs are comically abundant. In various poems, a dog, horse, bear and whale are threatened with a “punch.” Even the handshake, which one might expect to be benign, is often a sign of an ambivalent agreement, contract, or gesture. “A Limp Handshake” is about a mountaintop tryst that ends in a:
Wet trumpet blast
to ruin the morning.
My trumpet.
Your morning.
Elsewhere, the handshake is more like the energetic detached appendage of the Addams family’s Cousin It: “I put a handshake in the old lady’s purse/ in search of hard candy.” If ordinarily a “handshake deal” signifies strong informal trust based on a notion of community, in The Cult of Comfort, fakery and betrayal of trust are leitmotifs. This landscape is not the suburban-sinister ground of Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet, but it is a place of dangers referred to obliquely, and denied whenever possible.
Evil is instead comfortably ensconced as background, as in poems like “In the Middle Distance,” below in nearly its entirety:
Overgrowth breeding
condoms beside the street.
Clear bottle filled with urine
beside the vending machine.
Fingernail scars down the face.
Because HIGH SCHOOL CHEERLEADER
Ex-girlfriend through shattered monocle.
Self-loathing in a convex mirror.
Five knuckles atop a red onion.
The allusion to Ashbery turns us away from self-reflection and the multiple perspectives of the fun-house mirror. Schmall presents a nasty equation of scene and sexual assault, hands reduced to punching knuckles.
The Cult of Comfort even toys with a “handmade” look in the format of its own manufacture. It is a full-length book in 4X6 chapbook format. Such artifice, a term whose connotations include the “wily” handcraft, skillfully and strategically designed, is in accord with the rapid shifts in perspective in many of the poems; in one poem, one of the worst suburban nightmares–a plane crash–is seen from the point of view of a rescue-worker, an onlooker observing news media onlookers, and a crash survivor, and the strange comforts and consolations of the suburbs are noted wryly. But someone thinks to be grateful for them:
…Trains crawl
under the city all night
& almost no one thinks to thank them.
…Oh, but it’s swell. The chopsticks
included & the can of Coke
are delightful. The lake bottom
like warm tongues between my toes." - Robert Clark
“Welcome to the age of triage,” writes Jeremy Schmall. “Enjoy the pickles and keep the glass jar / for loose change.” I pulled these lines from somewhere near the middle of this book I love, called Jeremy Schmall and the Cult of Comfort, which is brand-new this Funbruary from X-ing Books. Now before we go any further you may as well know that Schmall’s a close friend, so if you’re the kind of person who gets all worked up about people speaking well of their friends, you might as well stop here. If, however, you believe—as I do—that subjectivity is a valid angle of approach to art (more honest yet than a lot of what passes as objectivity) then let’s talk about this Little Yellow Book with the radioactive smiley face on the cover, and the author’s own name in its title.
Jeremy Schmall and the Cult of Comfort is a dark, weird, smart, raucous, grimly hilarious collection. Not a howl but a growl—maybe from the throat, maybe from the stomach, maybe both. These quick and dirty open-faced poems take the familiar things of life—cubicles and calorie counts; shopping malls and booze—and remind us how strange they are; how strange we are for craving them, for having created them in the first place. “The police don’t want to work today / just as badly as you and your administrator. / The wife that once found me charming / now rarely finds me at all.” Individual poems are untitled but the book is broken into sections with names like “Tumbler full of imitation crab meat” and “Dog in a hot tub.” Schmall makes it safe for us to savor the fundamental obscenity of existence. In his warm arms we are free to laugh until we cry.
But to end on my carefully confected little blurb-line is hardly in the spirit of The Cult of Comfort, so instead here’s the complete text of a short poem which kind of showcases all the stuff I’ve been talking about, and also contains shout-outs to a perhaps unlikely pair of poetical forebears. One’s John Ashbery. Bonus points if you get the other without googling.
In the middle distance
a half derelict
subdivision. The wet pavement.
Overgrowth breeding
condoms beside the street.
Clear bottle filled with urine
beside the vending machine.
Fingernail scars down the face.
Because HIGH SCHOOL CHEARLEADER.
Ex-girlfriend through shattered monocle.
Self-loathing in a convex mirror.
Five knuckles atop a red onion. " - Justin Taylor
Excerpt:
Andrew Jackson
finished off the Creek Indian
civilization after fighting beside them.
Why Andrew?
& he puts his finger in my nose.
To the gods goes my excess asparagus,
linoleum tabletop & coffee-bruised newspaper.
I say the mountain’s not coming.
I say “the traffic,” and shrug.
There’s just not enough Vaseline
for the whole room.
I do apologize.
If the presentation never ends maybe
I can keep this laser pointer.
Rabbit under truck tire
by the high school
already cold.
Socks up to my teeth.
Electric drill to the avocado.
Striped wallpaper behind a plastic folding chair.
It’s certainly not always the case
that infidels will stalk the dumb hallways
rimming the family manor
but we’d like to believe
our cheap picture frames & outdated
electronics are at least worth stealing.
There is an exercise inside everyone’s skull
that forces them to stop slathering
lotion on their hands and wonder
what we can’t know until next March.
The assignment now is to ruin the face
of your opponent with a grapefruit spoon.
There’s a certain trick to remaining
calm while a grizzly claws
through the meat under your ribcage
but no one’s ever lived to tell it.
Jeremy Schmall, Open Correspondence from the Senator, X-ing Books, 2008.
"March 25
My Fellow Countrymen,
I have had so many pancakes this morning. Blueberry pancakes, and cinnamon pancakes, and sourdough pancakes, all covered in syrup. And five cups of coffee. The disparity between my breakfast and yours is alarming. I am also better looking.
Your senator,
The Senator"
"A satirical, faux-archive of a fictional senator's bizarre open correspondence to a variety of recipients: his constituents, other senators, media members, the president, & "weird guy"; topics of interest include breakfast, public hazards, Carl Weathers as Superman, blimps, and national security—all dashed off with self-aggrandizing jingoistic bombast.
The Senator wishes to publicly deny any association with that unpatriotic scoundrel, Jeremy Schmall, who played
no role whatsoever in the writing, compiling, or disseminating of these letters, my letters, which are of the highest possible national value."
"Jeremy Schmall’s Open Correspondence from the Senator, also from X-ing, seems to have a similar, tired-of-being-sold-to raison d’être. The collection, presented in the form of a standard-size manila folder embossed with a squawking eagle, contains satirical letters from “The Senator” printed on officially jingoistic letterhead. It’s a curious experience, considering this chapbook. My initial fear upon receiving it was that the over-the-top presentation, replete with yellow Post-it notes and a flap label featuring the author’s name and the ISBN, signaled a project that had given primacy to its concept, at the expense of its execution. But I am perhaps getting ahead of myself.
The Senator, an alternatively venal, loopy, horny nincompoop, is a sort of golem composed of parts from, say, drunk Richard Nixon, as recently portrayed by Frank Langella (“I shot an old lady’s poodle once”); George W. Bush at his most articulate (“I have been in the bathtub for three straight hours… The water was super hot and now I feel, like, kind of dizzy”); Robert Byrd at his most awake/alive (“My question for you is, how did you get such a nice tan? Have you always tanned easily?”); Donald Rumsfeld at his most lyrical/inane/glib (“Look, the universe is a dark pit we all writhe about in until we’re mercifully clutched out by death… But be a man about it. Or woman. I believe in equal rights and all that”); and the common representation of our elected and appointed officials as power-addled incompetents with a bustier-wearing skeleton or two in the “man-size” safe (“I did not sleep with your wife. It was most likely my evil twin”).
The first poem/letter, a brief missive about pancakes and the Senator’s supremacy in matters of physical attractiveness, entertainingly establishes his unhinged bona fides. He’s a regular nut, all right, typing up off-the-wall letters about casting Carl Weathers as Superman, pouring orange juice into all the cups in his house, and peeping on his neighbor while wearing a bathrobe, from the vantage point of her front lawn. Through the twenty-one letters in this chapbook, he’s revealed to be the following: crushing on the President, antagonistic toward those brighter than him, a policy lightweight, jingoistic, corrupt, and, overall, a moron with the attention span of a small child (“Ooh, my macaroni is ready”).
Living somewhere in the intersection of multiple, overlapping genres (political satire, comedy writing, poetry, prose, epistolary, dramatic monologue), the poems/letters live or die on the richness and fullness of the characterization of the Senator and lean heavily on their attempts at comedy for traction. It’s not exactly that the book is just spinning its wheels or that the Senator’s character isn’t fully realized; it’s more that the realization, even if pulled off masterfully, doesn’t promise enough in terms of freshness or new territory. The Senator’s battiness, incompetence, and lack of self-awareness—we might have seen it all coming.
Schmall’s skill as a poet does bring something to the table—whether it’s new or more in line with the politico-comedic zeitgeist, à la Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, is open to debate. In the end, although the letters are often fun (and funny) to read, and successful as poems of some kind—especially the letters in which the Senator’s delirium is given free rein—on balance, our long-in-the-tooth Senator is a bit toothless as an agent of satire. Without a few major tweaks to his platform, his chances of reelection seem slim." - David Sewell
Jeremy Schmall: Hello Reckoning
"Jeremy Schmall is a poet and the editor of the Agriculture Reader. His first collection of poems, Jeremy Schmall and the Cult of Comfort is a strange little book that epitomizes the beauties of small press publishing. Designed by the good folks of X-ing Books, Schmall’s book encapsulates a vision of the world that is terrifying, hilarious, pathetic, and touching. Jeremy Schmall and the Cult of Comfort offers what all good poetry offers its readers plus a bonus round of design that is both integral and catalytic to the poems it enfolds. During the course of our interview we talked about his association with X-ing, turkey sandwiches, Mark Bibbins, and the value of precise imagery in poems.
Can you talk a little about the production of Jeremy Schmall & the Cult of Comfort. It feels totally unique to me in terms of its interior and exterior design. How did the final product come about?
- The design of the book came entirely from Amy Mees and Mark Wagner. It actually was the same process as with the Agriculture Reader, where I pass them a word document, and just get out of their way and let them do whatever they want. I’m always astounded at what they produce, and in this case I was especially pleased with the result. As for the physical production, the covers are letter-pressed. We bribed a small group (using pizza and beer) to come over to the studio one night and do all the manual handwork on the book-scoring and cutting the covers, then folding and gluing them onto the text blocks. We also made a bunch of sweet buttons, most of which got nabbed at AWP. Maybe we’ll make more.
You also work with X-ing Books to produce your journal the Agriculture Reader. Can you tell us what the entity X-ing Books is, and how it functions? How has your relationship with X-ing developed and continue to evolve?
- X-ing (Books/Design/Art) is the designer Amy Mees and the book artist Mark Wagner. They don’t really have any kind of production schedule or anything. They just like making books, and every now and again they decide to put one out.
I was introduced to Mark Wagner by Jen Benka, who was a classmate of mine at the New School. I was trying to put together the first issue of Agriculture Reader at the time, and didn’t have the very first idea what I was doing, especially in terms of the physical production of it. So I went to Jen, just completely desperate and a little hopeless. Jen-who is pure light, maybe the kindest person on the planet-introduced me to Mark. It was a fortuitous meeting. He asked me to provide the text for an artist book shortly after called The Slapdown, and he helped me get through my rather clumsy efforts at getting out the first issue of AGR. Eventually, I think with the third issue, Amy said to me, “Jeremy, just let us do it,” regarding the design and construction of the magazine, and obviously I wasn’t going to argue with that. Over the years we’ve become better collaborators, and also better friends. Mark is actually in the final stages of putting out another artist book that I supplied the text for called “Mr. Handshake’s Last Gasp.” The design is totally insane. The text is letter-pressed on these hand-bound one-dollar bills, plus there’s a slip case and a bunch of other crazy fine art details.
You edited the first couple Ag Readers yourself, and then in the 3rd issue, Justin Taylor, an esteemed editor in his own right, came on board. How did the addition of Justin affect the trajectory of the journal?
- It was obviously huge having Justin on board, and really expanded the scope of the journal, especially as regards the fiction we publish. But Justin actually had a lot of input with the first and second issues in an unofficial capacity. We were going to a lot of readings together then, and always talking about what we liked-and didn’t like-in the literary world, so it just made perfect sense to show him the work I was considering. He also helped out a ton with the physical production of both issues. Shortly after the second issue came out, I invited him to formally co-edit it with me, and he agreed.
The poems in Cult of Comfort have this balance of scathing cultural critique and empathy that always seems aimed outwards at the world and the reader. Can you estimate where this impulse came from or how it developed into a collection?
- My approach toward the writing of CC was to see if I could write a group of poems that had a consistent voice and thematic pull-through. I had mainly written one-off poems in the past, and they would typically be a kind of misery catalog related to how I “felt” at the time. I grew tired of doing that and so I wanted to try something different.
The ways in which poets use humor in their work has been on my mind recently. It occurred to me that humor in your poems is applied to soften the blow, so to speak, of some of the more incisive cultural criticisms the poems make. Do you feel like this is an accurate assessment?
- I’ve had a few people tell me they found the book humorous and that’s great to hear because I was really worried I’d created something that was just incredibly grim and pessimistic, or even just simply unpleasant. I can’t really say that I was using humor to do anything in particular, but if that’s how it ends up functioning that works for me.
Another thing that struck me about the collection is that many of the poems are almost lists of observations where what is being looked at is often more important than how the observer feels about what he’s seeing. If this is even true, can you speak to how it contributes to the overall aesthetic of CC?
- I think I just like specific images, especially as a way to keep a poem grounded. It’s easy to get carried away writing vague abstractions and produce something that is almost totally meaningless. When I feel like I’m doing that I tend to gravitate toward something specific, like a turkey sandwich, to provide some kind of anchor and which inevitably helps me (and hopefully the reader) better understand what’s happening in the poem.
I love the idea that the act of seeing and or presenting clear images in a poem somehow “helps” both poet and reader, as if something that’s envisioned in the world of your poems is stable vision of the unstable reality that surrounds us.
- In this sense, I think Williams was 100% correct in saying “No ideas but in things.” It’s like how there’s no such thing as an objective reality beyond our perceptions because we automatically inscribe ourselves onto the things we observe. I have never seen a person or thing without accidentally making some trivial pre-emptive judgment about them, which ultimately just relates back to me. It’s pre-conscious, I think. The self and the world are entirely intertwined. You can’t just have an image of a cheeseburger sitting on a table, for example, and have it mean nothing. It means something, and what it means will vary somewhat from person to person, and vary wildly from culture to culture.
There’s a lot of food throughout CC (pancakes, beer, sandwiches, imitation crab meat) and I was thinking it had something to do with the idea that so much of culture can be summed up by singular food items and or the idea that food can be hilarious all on its own. Is food an important aspect of the collection?
- Food is an important part of life! Actually, I think this relates a lot to the previous question. Food serves as an excellent anchor, both in poems and in life. Now, I don’t love food. I tend to think of it as a burden, like taking medicine. It’s something with how I’m wired. If I go too long without eating, I just feel awful. I can’t make decisions. I start to panic. And then I eat a turkey sandwich and suddenly everything’s fine. The thing with food, though, is in a lot of ways it’s the only thing that matters. I mean matters in the sense that it’s a requirement for life. It’s the primary need, the omni-source. And yet so few of us actually work to produce it. Why? What are we producing instead, and how could that possibly qualify us to “deserve” food?
That question, or at least its spirit, seems like one of the central aspects of the poems in CC. It reminds me of the persona that develops throughout the collection: a sort of amiable everyman who is sensitive and attuned to the world without loosing critical distance. To me this persona is really what holds all the poems in synchronicity. Do you feel like this is an accurate judgment and if so, how do you see this persona in relation to your self? Is it completely constructed or is it more of a natural expression of your self and your concerns?
- That’s a good question, and reminds me of something Zizek writes about regarding the self. He says something to the effect that there is no one true self. Not only do we put on a mask for the world, we also put on a mask for ourselves. The true self, then, requires a “parallax view” to see, as it’s actually multiple, contradictory selves held in suspension. I’m not sure if that really answers your question.
This is sort of a non sequitur, but you and I were both students of Mark Bibbins (whose hilarious blurb is featured on the back of CC). I was wondering if you feel like some of Marks scathing wit rubbed off on you, or at least if you feel like being in his classes and then becoming his friend has influenced your work?
- It’s hard to imagine that someone as kind and generous and smart as Mark can really exist in this world. His poems and his critiques of my poems have of course had an influence on me, but what’s made the deeper impression is observing how he treats people. Not to say Mark is a saint (see: scathing wit), but truly I’ve never been around anyone as open-hearted and welcoming and sincerely GOOD as he is. Don’t cross him, though-you’ll get cut.
Can you talk about other influences that went into CC, especially non-poetic ones (poetic ones are ok, too)?
JS: The bodega on Dean Street and Franklin. Prospect Park. Bill Evans. Simpler Times beer. The Bachelor. Glengarry Glen Ross. Thumping bass from downstairs (noon-3AM). Broken glass. The Corner Bistro. Student loans. Frank & Dee. Loud noises. Jason Molina. David Thomas Broughton.
I still have your copy of The Cow by Ariana Reines. Do you want it back?
- Legally, I believe you’re entitled to squatter’s rights at this point." - Interview by Ben Mirov
Interview by Vanessa Miller
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