Dylan Krieger - Heady sound-based unabashed blasphemy. Kick in the dick, pathogenic poetry sure to infect society with exactly the offense it needs

Dylan Krieger, Giving Godhead, Delete Press, 2017.

“If a girl, a virus, a horned animal, milkweed, an exchange of cash for dirty looks, the near-rhyme of greed to death, the names of all brutes, and a shroud in which was wrapped the erect ascendant all met in an ovum and, lodged deep in the earth’s core, fused into a supernova. If, from that long ago time until this very moment—perhaps even into the future—that supernova were listening in on us, her grave canal located such that she were overexposed to US American politicovangelizing, all at once began to speak: this is what she says.” – Danielle Pafunda

“Dylan Krieger is an expert assassin with the messianic fervor of a deconstructed goth-girl, a rogue priestess exorcising and excoriating our tricked-out ‘apocalypse fetish,’ dealing out death-blows ‘quid pro blow.’ These poems are erratic/erotic receivers channeling bad transmissions from our ‘edenic pandemic’—the media clusterfuck, body-as-clickbait, that gaslights women into being their own terror portals. Here unfettered receivership, masochism, and degradation are served as the ultimate limit experience, the euphoria of the self-detonating female body that ejects its own organs so that the whole Christ-addled misfire that is our masculinist moral world ‘might splat.’” —Lara Glenum

“‘… a part of me is always eating part of you…’ This word-drunk, ‘son-drunk’ book of ecstatic technology doesn’t just profane the sacred but also – the much less common – sacralizes the profane, the grotesque, the body in all of its troubling, intoxicating, ruinous splendor. These highly skilled, outrageous poems move at a breakneck speed.” —Johannes Göransson

“Heady sound-based unabashed blasphemy. Kick in the dick, pathogenic poetry sure to infect society with exactly the offense it needs.” —Vincent Cellucci

As its suggestively punning title implies, Giving Godhead is a volume of poetry that challenges the boundary between the sacred and the obscene by conflating biblical images of “holy” acquiescence with sexually deviant forms of submission characteristic of BDSM roleplaying. This conflation of saintly and sinful acts of submission naturally centers around a meditation on Christ’s Passion, emphasizing the paradoxical way in which the Christian savior’s simultaneous authority and obedience fashions him into a heteronormative archetype of both masculine dominance and feminine submission, despite his own supposed celibacy. However, the manuscript ultimately looks beyond individual biblical narratives to illustrate their central commonalities and even interchangeability, locating echoes of Christ’s violent subjugation in Torahdic plagues, exiles, and burnt offerings alike. Similarly, this guiding principle of conflation or interchangeability extends also to Giving Godhead’s richly musical aesthetic, which features dense wordplay and double entendres in order to demonstrate the inevitable sensual trans-figurations of a “word made flesh” merely to be “broken and bruised for our iniquities.” In this way, Giving Godhead rewrites the foundational narratives of biblical mythology in light of contemporary gender and social theory, namely by portraying humanity’s relationship with a monolithic deity as the primordial paradigm of an imbalanced and abusive power dynamic. - Abstract from Giving Godhead – Dylan Krieger – LSU Master's Theses (2015).

In this new age of the carnivalesque, understatement might be a greater currency than overstatement. So if I say that Dylan Krieger’s “Giving Godhead” will be the best collection of poetry to appear in English in 2017, you can trust the understatement, aside from the casual assertion of prophecy. Seamlessly mixing the religious with the obscene, determined to create a new form of the grotesque that marries autobiography to personal and national trauma, Krieger’s book is easily among the most inventive and successfully performative works to appear in living memory.

Krieger’s title and her dedication to “all god’s / little trauma children” seem to indicate a specific trauma at the heart of this collection, although it is never addressed directly. Rather, it haunts the entire collection, as the inherited God of both Judaism and Christianity becomes (as the Marquis de Sade once wrote) a being defined by the inherent violence of his son’s conception. The father who sent “down out of Heaven this respectable part of himself” embodies an act of violation and generation at once, and in the logic of both Sade and Krieger thus partakes of those things we have come most to treasure and to fear — on the one hand, the bread and the wine, communion and transubstantiation; on the other hand, violent intercession, assault and rape. Each shares a part of the other’s reality. In a more conventional narrative sequence, even a sequence of poems, this interpenetration would acquire sequence and evolution. In Krieger’s collection, by contrast, it acquires a new poetics rooted in the recent rise of the Gurlesque movement, with its dramatic wordplay growing out of fury, sexual violence and paradoxical self-assurance.

The first section, “Quid Pro Blow,” makes the case that drives the collection — roughly, “You abused me” (and the entire first section reads the “you” on both macro- and micro-scales) “so watch what I do to you.” But if the primal wound to the speaker here is physical and psychic, she is not out for physical revenge. Rather, she takes on a kind of underground Zohar meditation, as in the poem “rectifire”:

WHAT JUST GOD
WOULD PLANT A
LANDMINE IN THE
GARDEN IN THE
FIRST PLACE???

Then she goes further, wondering if what some of us might quaintly call “original sin” in fact invokes a “surprise, surprise: forced consent isn’t anyone’s crime but the fire’s / hanging right above our heads.” The Fall here is perpetual forced consent from birth; rape is one consequence. The problem with rape in “Giving Godhead” is that, unlike the “forced consent” of being human, rape won’t stop giving: the “rape dreams” she cites (in “swaddling plot”) lead to an anxiety of influence when God, unable to bear the burden of his story, creates the Flood and simultaneously sets in motion the motion in which “the Old Testicles always give rise to the New.”

Rape dreams, by a variety of names, haunt the first section of the book: In “biblical umbilical,” when the narrator tries from childhood to imagine a cord back to the divine, she learns in the end “no one’s guarded by — an angel but a bomb.” The shift in scale here is clearly intentional, as the poem foreshadows the expansion in the second part of the book from individuals and dreams toward the larger problem of human lineage, set partly in the language of 20th-century analytic philosophy. The third section explodes that larger problem with its conclusions about the impossibility of conjuring any legitimate answer to the First Question: “Why?”

Krieger’s poetry echoes her earlier academic scholarship on the Gurlesque — a movement that, according to Arielle Greenberg, “was born between about 1960 and 1982 (it was a long labor)” and that came into focus in Greenberg and Lara Glenum’s 2010 anthology, “Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics.” The Riot Grrrl scene was loosely connected, but so were “elements from Sesame Street childhoods, Goth, punk, grunge and ballet class,” Greenberg explains in her introduction. Artifice and camp (“from cosmos to cosmetics,” as the poet and critic Daniel Tiffany has written, in a phrase Glenum quotes in her own introduction to the anthology) — anything that might be anti-objectified or hyper-objectified in protest, anything that might be re-embraced as a claim to power rather than submission, anything that might have roots in fear and contamination and nevertheless be nurtured into a celebration of resistance — became part of the movement. But one sentence near the end of Glenum’s introduction is of particular interest when it comes to “Giving Godhead”: “Gurlesque poets,” she writes, “owe a great deal to Emily Dickinson, the original Goth girl.”

Above all, “Giving Godhead” makes an implicit case that, if Dickinson had been able to turn her rage at the mysteries of the world outward and also invited the sea to follow her inside, she would have blown the lid on creation as a direct precursor to Dylan Krieger. Krieger’s lack of a direct precursor, despite the abundant literary, religious and philosophical references embedded in the ingenious wordplay of her collection, is part of what makes “Giving Godhead” completely remarkable. Not sui generis — the rape dreams came from somewhere. But the places where they go in this book are places I have never seen any poet go before. “Giving Godhead” blows several giant craters out through the walls of our inherited and now somewhat cowed Western selves. It is a bomb with an angel behind it. - Thomas Simmons 

So you missed Allen Ginsberg’s oral-earthquake “Howl” at Six Galleries in SFO on Friday, October 6, 1955. Stop lamenting. “Howl”’s heir is at your fingertips. NOW. It’s by Dylan W. Krieger.

          Dylan W. Krieger’s February 2017 Giving Godhead, from Delete Press, is such a City Lights oral performance on the page that you might be forgiven—if anyone is forgiven for anything in Giving Godhead, which is not always clear—for thinking that you had heard the “new” Ginsberg. But Ginsberg himself surely would have trouble with this proto-nostalgic reverence, for who would the “new” Ginsberg be? Certainly not anyone who sounded “like” Ginsberg. The new Ginsberg would somehow have to do the old one better, would have to re-map the territory. This is what Giving Godhead does. If Krieger is quickly becoming the oracle of a generation (and her dreamland trash will be out from Saint Julian Press in time for AWP in February 2018), Giving Godhead is a manifesto that invokes Ginsberg while owing nothing aside from history to him. 

         If you order a copy of Giving Godhead, you will receive a paperback with a color/black-and-white cover of a dead, carbuncled body praying, an apparently-live tongue being dissected, perfect fingernails on hideously contorted fingers, and a skull cut open at the back to reveal nothing but crumpled paper. You will also find an epigraph from the Marquis de Sade and, most moving, a dedication to “all god’s/ little trauma children/ lonely kneeling/ molested & infected/ for they shall/ inherit his girth./” By the time you get to the first section of the book, “Quid pro Blow,” you know you are holding as much a manifesto as Ginsberg ever managed, but altered radically by gender, generation, and method: the narrator of this collection has gathered all of Ginsberg’s mouthy assertions into that great ball of a question, the “why virus,” aimed directly at the nature of creation and its fundamentalist interpretations and seriously injured along the way by a body that can be at once itself and its opposite, the embodiment of extreme pleasure and the site of extreme unsought hell. Though the poem “why’s virus” doesn’t come till page 55, near the end of the collection, its traumatized and fierce voice undergirds the entire book. This voice doesn’t need to inherit an “earth”: it needs to inherit a “girth” equivalent to God’s failed presence, His failure to save, to rescue. There. That’s the truth. For those of us who know and read this book as a balm of truth, that’s the truth. And Krieger gets it, over, and over, in a collection that opens and closes with a deracination of syntax and a fury that reminds us—if we needed reminding—that a deep and foolish complacency lies at the heart of the principle of a “JUST GOD” who would PLANT A LANDMINE IN THE GARDEN IN THE FIRST PLACE??? (“rectifier,” p. 15). 

         At first glance, Giving Godhead looks a little as if someone had given Emily Dickinson Adderall—lots of em-dashes, short lines, long long lines that don’t in fact sound like Ginsberg, nearly every conceivable variant on poetic form. Ironically, the one poem that most “looks” like a poem, “why’s virus,” also contains both the most deeply moving, earnest child’s moment and the most potent “note to the self.” If you are raised to be devoutly religious but have the propensity at every moment to ask “why,” questioning becomes a virus—which is to say, you become a disease to the converted—and the “why”’s never stop, in part because—behind those questions—you realize that you, little mortal kid that you are, are actually kinder, more loving, and more just than the God you are being taught to worship, and worshipping a Creator who is inferior to ordinary you is obscene: yet that is what happens, day after day. “note to the self: roar to the world: the lord is just another dirty bird” (“why’s virus,” p. 55). But roaring doesn’t mean you’re not already infected, and part of that “infection” is sexuality: no better example in the experience of being human than such intense, private pleasure as a young child discovering her body but also intense pain and shock at what others inflict. Sexual trauma and divine betrayal are the two harmonic vibrations beneath all of Giving Godhead, and though no specific moment of violation is named (though “quid pro blow,” about forced oral sex, is about as graphic as one could get), the narrator spells it out in “apostles anonymous” (p. 53): on the one hand she is such a spiritual failure that her only purpose is to await the inevitable rape (and “rape dreams” appear in “in media rape” (p 14), “scaredy creature” (p. 19), “swaddling plot” (p. 21), and “automessiah” (p. 24); on the other hand, in her fury at her unasked-for and untenable position she has become de facto a force to be reckoned with, one who in the absence of a just God is entirely capable, if need be, of inheriting God’s “girth.” 

         Krieger is a scholar of Latin and 20th-century analytic philosophy as well as a poet--Giving Godhead won the Robert Penn Warren Prize for best MFA thesis at Louisiana State University in 2015—and it’s worth studying her curriculum vitae at dylankrieger.com for its abundance of prior publications, a number of them “academic” articles that presage her future work. Krieger’s engagement with the “Gurlesque,” via Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg’s 2010 anthology Gurlesque, is useful as a reminder that defiance is not a one-note performance (and Krieger’s interest here centers as much on contemporary visual performance art as it does on literature). Defiance embraces the “grotesque,” including the improbable orifices and excretions of the body, re-defining the body as necessary with humor and wit; defiance embraces pleasure at the bodily and emotional sites of historically masculocentric dominance; definance embraces the “riot-grrrl” within the interpretable text of the secretly wounded. Krieger’s work shows its debt to the “Gurlesque.” 

         But in retrospect—as with queer Ginsberg—nothing really in the past could prepare the world for the prophetic paradigm ofGiving Godhead. If—veering sharply for a moment away from Krieger’s text—Harold Bloom’s brilliant redactor J, whom Bloom renders female, had for a night muted her wounds to sleep with the ancient poet-warrior David, who himself exceeded his creator, the result, lost in the dust of history, would have been a new and outraged heaven and a new and outraged earth. In our new time, not 1955 but 2017, that result is the new howl, Giving Godhead. - Thomas Simmons

Far Cry

A far cry from full tide. A far cry from curtain & cord. A fist full of quick tinsel. A fuck ton of lost fur. He said ‘are you wearing spurs?’ I said ‘no, but I’ve a belt made of blacksmiths.’ Yes, all the blacksmiths I have blown. All the blacksmiths I have heated up/hammered/burst/beaten into gold. They are a hoard of a thousand horses, mounting fire in the dust. They flagellate their bellies to burlap, they scrape their fat faces to fringe. I mean to say I pricked them with a nasty nettle, or, I packed in their pistols with clay. Either way, they are made to push up my marina body. Either way, I am full of mad boats. They are walked on by the far cries of the drowning in the harbor towns. They are burnt by the search lights in the bay. There is a prize in my navel for the one who swallows the largest electric eel. There is a button. A kettle. A basket of bruised fruit. There is a locket with a picture of a peasant penetrating a lighthouse, his hind haunch to the sea, in the shadow of a fish-filled wave.

BOTTOM FEEDER
by Dylan Krieger

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but nowadays your garbled barbles never tasted better. no matter how much your bog moss makes love to the gutter, you still wonder what’s next once you ditch the catfish trap house, with all its iridescent claws a-clash. not everybody can handle a bottom feeder’s garbage trundle, but me? i’m of another puddle. the ones who’d rather eat their demons than leave them to their own diseases. the ones who never lost that most primeval thanatoxic fever. with one foot on the cantilever and the other streaming dirty needles, i pull myself up from the river by my peaty skin and shingles, dripping maladapted tadpoles and the urge to binge on roadside litter, because under every dumpster baby is a mother too tired to keep treading water, and a smoke signal for all the subaqueous fathers who taught her what the thunder said was not for her to ponder, who fed her ageless algae to the alligators just to watch her botched face flounder

designated hitler

Dylan Krieger

never trust a pitcher who refuses to hit his fair share, whether fair or foul, or else you’ll end up whispering your wedding vows to the outfield, cleaning up after the septic run-on sentence of your body—fainting spells, blood-caked toenails, rose-gold swellings jetting pus around the five-pointed star of your breast. different from the rest, he told you the story of how he became designated hitter in college, adopted a fake name you remember (perhaps wrongly) as tucker, and somehow mustered the guts to face each pitch stone-cold sober—swearing off the devil’s water, leafy greens and LS-dream fodder, not to mention children’s tylenol, atenalol, pain relievers one and all. that’s the kind of teetotaling ragdoll i would have let tattoo my forearm come fall, had the lager not robbed me of my faith in man and god. that’s the happy-go-lucky glad-hander who threw the first pitch in the dirt, so it wouldn’t hurt as much when its stitching ripped apart and left the earth

Poetry/Fiction

“the hole that cannot hold you” & “noble roman.” Xavier Review, forthcoming.
“the war of all against all.” Neighborhood Anthology, forthcoming.
“gateway dick.” Fine Print issue 6, Summer 2017. 

“babes taste better,” “patient full of porch lights,” “medical fetishist,” “tell the protesters i 

    have been their kind,” & “the moon howls back.” Nine Mile Magazine vol. 4, no. 2, Spring 

    2017.

“bottom feeder.” Cleaver Magazine issue 18, Spring 2017. 

“cesarean vegetarian.” Phoebe issue 46.2, Spring 2017.

“designated hitler” & “infanticide in outer space.” concīs, Spring 2017.

“spring broke half a nation-state away.” (b)OINK, Spring 2017.

"swampman,” philosophical zombie,” “the problem of sunrise,” & “zeno’s     paradox(es).” Seneca Review, Spring 2017.

“fake barns” and “the distracted driver.” Midwest Review, Spring 2017.
“the suicidal idealist,” “quantum immortality,” “the violinist,” “the veil of ignorance,” & “trolley problem.” Reality Beach, Winter 2017.
"the floating man,” “teletransportation,” & “ship of theseus.” Coffin Corner, Spring 2017.

“swampman,” philosophical zombie,” “the problem of sunrise,” & “zeno’s paradox(es).”    Seneca Review, Spring 2017.

“msg heard round the world.” moss trill, Fall 2016.

“the cave,” “brain in a vat,” & “mary’s room.” glitterMOB, Summer 2016.

“refusing to talk under torture” & “ammo montage.” Coup d’Etat, Summer 2016.

“draw one // pick again” & “slinged hero reunites w/ emergency blanketed boo.” Mojo ,     Summer 2016.

“millennial masochist” & “sorry not sorry.” Cloud Rodeo, Spring 2016

"bomb countdown." Maintenant, Spring 2016.

“plantation nation.” Reality Hands, Spring 2016. 

"hero's last-second super-strength." Jam Tarts, Spring 2016.

"god complex." Witch Craft, Spring 2016.

“stakeout the stakeout” & "torch the place & watch it burn." Inklette, Spring 2016.

“absence knows best.” No Assholes, Winter 2016.

“briefcase full o’ $$$” & “cryptic phone call," & "firing gun at nothing while screaming." THAT  Literary Review, Spring 2016.

"automatomic," "over[h]eating," "money / talk," "submissive's song," & "belting." Atrocity  Exhibition, Winter 2016.

"sympathy pill" & "etc. etc." Unlikely Stories, Winter 2016.

"who's to tell," "fucked up firsts," & alphabentitus." Alien Mouth, Winter 2016.

"tiny facial lacerations." Coup d'Etat, Winter 2016.

"no hard line" & "headless rain." Local Nomad, Winter 2016.

“hero tied up w/ buzz saw moving toward junk” & "I see right through you to the real you  who is also see-through." Rogue Agent,    Winter 2016. 

“far cry.” Quarterly West, Fall 2015. 

“un-cudgel.” Fine Print, Fall 2015. 

“X-machine, “the tundran,” & “visit station.” Gobbet, Fall 2015. 

“borderline,” “ghost porn,” & “committed.” Unlikely Stories, Summer 2015. 

“a ritual feeding // in need of meter,” “canticle cannibal,” “how a godhead cums // to  earn his stripes,” “ménage à trinity,” &  “swaddling     plot.” Tenderloin, Summer 2015. 

“[R]AM.” Psychopomp, Spring 2015. 

“in media rape” & “bad news, new world order.” Juked, Spring 2015. 

“Agateophobia” & “original schism.” Deluge, Spring 2015. 

“biblical umbilical.” Small Po[r]tions, Winter 2015. 

“why’s virus.” So and So, Winter 2015. 

“Cultures” & “rite hype.” la fovea, Fall 2014. 

“automessiah” & “sacred sucre.” Crab Fat, Fall 2014. 

“Acarophobia” & “peri-.” Foothill, vol. 4.1, Fall 2014. 

“saint drain.” Birds of Lace’s “30 x Lace,” Spring 2014. 

“Phobiaphile 1-4” & “fuck white space.” Smoking Glue Gun vol. 7, Fall 2013. 

“Filled.” The Lost Piece, Spring 2012. 

“Profit,” “O Tell, Motel,” & “Art de Miss.” Re:Visions, Spring 2011. 

“Stream” & “Big City Street.” 3 Cup Morning, Summer 2007. 

Essays

"Bridging Divides & Transgressing Boundaries in Morani Kornberg-Weiss's Dear Darwish." New Delta Review, Fall/Winter 2014.

“Morrettian ‘Abstract Models’ for Poetry Analysis.” Jacket 2, Fall 2014.
“Secrets, Secretions, and Sorcery in Tracey McTague’s Super Natural.” HTMLGIANT, Spring 2014.
“Girls, Gimmick, and Gore: The Echo of Feminist Performance Art in the Emerging ‘Gurlesque.’” Through Gendered Lenses,         Spring 2012.
“Real ID: A Make-Believe Solution.” Fresh Writing, Spring 2009. 

forthcoming from Saint Julian Press, dreamland trash (66 pp.) is a book of poems centered on the stigmatized and/or criminalized margins of American society—particularly drug culture, queer culture, hookup culture, internet culture, conspiracy theories, mental illness, and the anxieties that accompany our conscious complicity in impending self-extinction. The method of its composition is largely collage, drawing snippets of text from overheard bar chatter, hallucinogenic rants, alien abduction documentaries, government documents, and YouTube’s often nonsensical automatic captioning software. As a result, the book ultimately presents a fractured post-apocalyptic vision of American culture that prioritizes substances and resources over human ties and still willfully and woefully denies the inevitable consequences of climate change even under the ominous skies of an increasingly shadowy military-industrial complex.

no ledge left to love

no ledge left to love (65 pp.) is a full-length prose poetry project that reimagines and challenges the frameworks of Western philosophical thought experiments, especially with respect to gender, moral certitude, and diachronic identity. Each poem focuses on a different thought experiment in analytical philosophy, from Plato’s allegory of the cave to Nagel’s spider in a urinal. Recognizing that Western philosophy—like all academic disciplines—has been largely dominated by wealthy cis straight white men, no ledge attempts to dismantle the reductive binaries and disembodied logic of the analytical philosophical vernacular, emphasizing instead the rich physicality and potent mutability of the bodies required to convey its lofty ideas. 

Re:ACTION!

Re:ACTION! (90 pp.) catalogs and satirizes the action-packed scenes we have watched evolve into a sort of American mythology of violence between the forces of good and evil. In these lyrical and narrative poems written collaboratively with Vincent Cellucci, we approach the well-worn subjects as general scenarios rather than trivializing them by name-dropping individual films. Titles include "briefcase full o' $$$," “firing gun at nothing while screaming,” "bomb countdown," "lone witness' incomprehensible last words," "torch the place & watch it burn," and "hanging from cliff // stepping on fingertips", and “human shield.” We think these tropes are very symptomatic of our escapist and violence-saturated culture. Contemporary social issues present in the manuscript include our national preoccupation with war and addiction, xenophobic villainizing of the "other," the presence of a police state, sexualized depictions of physical domination, and the persistence of reductive gender stereotypes in Hollywood blockbusters. 

We believe this text will have a broader market base than other poetry publications since it appeals to pop cultural studies and film lovers everywhere. We are looking for a press to actively support this project and help us reach a wide audience.

the mother wart

the mother wart (70 pp.) is a book of prose poems loosely based around the tenets of the Church of Euthanasia, whose only commandment--for both ethical and practical reasons--is "thou shalt not breed." Looking beyond the movement's environmental and social goals, the mother wart delves into an autobiographical meditation on early memories and associations with motherhood, childbirth, infancy, and female sexuality, emphasizing the importance of early childhood trauma in the decision to abstain from having children of one's own. In its thick fog of sound play, close-set cycles of internal rhyme evoke a nursery rhyme starting to spin off-kilter, a grade-school chant turned violent and unpredictable. This is the version of the fairy tale in which the witch wins. But here, the witch is also mother, the origins of life transformed into a sign of virus (the wart). The grotesque, therefore, figures heavily throughout these poems, especially in the sense of Mary Russo's The Female Grotesque, which points out the pregnant female body constitutes the epitome of the human form as a site of volatile and irrepressible change--traversing that rare region between revulsion and attraction, in which the two at last appear not so opposed after all, but rather the respective poles of a dividing line that in fact comes full circle if followed far and fearlessly enough. 

DeWitt Brinson: Take a word for a form of genitalia and write a brief history of it as if it were apart of a royal family.

Dylan Krieger: If ‘cunny’ were royalty she’d be rock ‘n’ roll royalty. None of that inbred Grand Duchess shit. Or maybe she’s a pagan nature goddess, one with the earth because she comes from a long line of terms for ‘rabbit hole.’ She’s happy with the rabbits coming in and out of her. But she resents, like her step-sister ‘sheath,’ being named for an empty space defined by what fills it, so she kills off all the undressed peasants filling her land and replaces them with retractable pillars of trance-inducing dildo fog.

DB: What do you do when you have trouble with writing?

Dylan Krieger: Lately I’ve developed a very specific solution to this problem. To wit: I watch YouTube videos (usually about some niche conspiracy theory or another) with the auto-generated closed captions on. The most inventive or nonsensical of the resulting phrases make their way into my poem, but the connective tissue I still supply myself.

DB: Think of a happy childhood memory. What is one of your favorite poems and where were you when you first read it?

Dylan Krieger: One of my favorite poems is still Plath’s “Daddy,” echoes of whose rhymey cheekiness can certainly be heard in my own work. I was homeschooled all the way through high school, so I’m sure I first read it at my parents’ kitchen table, probably around 9th grade. The irony is that, despite its simple children’s-book rhymes, the poem depicts a decidedly unhappy childhood, and I think that’s what attracted me. I’ve always adored the creeptastic chemical reaction between a poem’s music and its underlying mythos

 

DB: Take a deep breath. Now scream while writing until you run out of scream.

Dylan Krieger: FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKTHEWHIRLEDINALLITSOCEANICATTACKZONEZZZZZZ

DB: What are some of the ways you’ve imagined yourself dying?

Dylan Krieger: I’m always either drowning or in a car accident. My car is normally the only place I feel free to scream (except for just now), so I spend a disproportionate amount of time there. Add to that the overall frequency of fatal car accidents in the US, and chances are…

DB: Did you have any imaginary friends? If so, who? If not, why weren’t you more popular in your imagination?

Dylan Krieger: All my friends are imaginary. My imagination is the milieu in which I am most popular, for sure. But since I base a lot of my creative output on real-life input (see q. 2), all of my imaginary friends are basically subversive caricatures of people I actually know. For example, there’s this coked-out version of my mom I sometimes like to ask grown-up gatekeeper questions like how many exemptions I can claim on my taxes.

DB: How does the way you think of yourself differ from how you want other people to think of you??

Dylan Krieger: I fear I’m rather scatterbrained and live by no clear moral code. But as long as other people don’t judge, I’m alright with them finding out. (Trouble is, they usually do.)

DB: What are the differences and similarities between good and bad poems?

Dylan Krieger: I often joke that the only difference between a good and bad poem is its unapologeticness, also known as its don’t-give-a-fuck-ness. Little secret: I used to be an angsty punk kid, and I still put a high premium on art that’s loud, brash, and in-your-face rather than “pretty.” I also just get bored really easily, so I favor the punchy, the raunchy, the violent, and the depraved. Of course I’m well aware there’s lots of good poetry that doesn’t fit that description, but it tends to put me to sleep before I can reflect much on its deeper merits.

DB: What’s the last thing you argued about? Please describe it as if it were an argument between two kittens.

Dylan Krieger: Napping arrangements. Basically Vince & I were some scruffy tabbies who had just gotten attacked by this big ugly bulldog called Cyclobenzaprine, and we both wanted to sleep in this one nook of the Cat Palace but we couldn’t both fit. Luckily we were too zonked to clash claws, but later I guilted him for not caring about my happiness enough to back down sooner.

 

DB: Take a minute or two to recall some great sex you’ve had. Now describe your writing.

Dylan Krieger: Conveniently, I’m unable to describe my writing without thinking of great sex. Ha. But seriously: poetry is highly musical for me, and hence highly sensual, physical, carnal. There was a time when I wrote a lot of homophonic translation, but even my best attempts at “pure” sound poetry were no more fulfilling than a really hot one-night-stand. Now, when I challenge myself to infuse the same dense sound play with some near-coherent meaning, the result is much closer to those third-date consummation butterflies everybody’s always cocooning for. - http://www.tender-loin.com/krieger_interview.html

Dylan Krieger is a pile of false eyelashes growing algae in south Louisiana. She lives in a little cottage with a catfish and her demons and sunlights as a trade mag editor. Her first book, Giving Godhead, is forthcoming in 2017 from Delete Press. Her other poetry projects include a collaborative satire of big-budget action movies, a collage of automatic captions from alien abduction documentaries, and (mostly recently) an irreverent reimagining of philosophical thought experiments. Find more of her work at www.dylankrieger.com.

Dylan Krieger is a transistor radio picking up alien frequencies in south Louisiana. She lives in the back of a little brick house with a feline reincarnation of Catherine the Great, sings harmonies incessantly to every song she hears, and sunlights as a trade mag editor.