Under the Radar

An Interview with John Sweet

John Sweet has published a new 24 page chapbook with Leaf Press titled famine. Let's have a chat with the poet.

Megaera: First off, I'd like to say the cover was rather interesting. Why did you choose it?

John Sweet: The cover was actually chosen by Ursula Vaira, the publisher. I think she did a great job. It's such a moody, dark image with a great feeling of isolation. I've had good luck with publishers choosing great covers.

M: One of the most memorable phrases from this collection is "love cannot exist without fear." Care to elaborate?

JS: It's sort of the whole "death is the mother of beauty" idea. I think that with love comes the fear of losing the object of your love. It's this fear that heightens the love and makes it that much more intense. It's a personal theory, but it works for me, and it's a great catalyst in a lot of my writing.

M: I've found your poetry to be very pessimistic, although there are occasional rays of hope amongst the rape, murder, and child abductions. Do you really have such a grim view of the world?

JS: My view of the world as a whole is pretty pessimistic. The positive stuff is in the small details, but the overall picture is fairly bleak. I believe in writing as catharsis. All the negative shit that I see/deal with every day needs to come back out, and writing is my coping mechanism. If I'm a poet and I see a story on the news about 3 and 4 year old kids getting their hands and feet chopped off with machetes by soldiers in an amputee camp somewhere in the jungles of Africa, how the hell can I NOT write about that? And who was it that thought up the idea of an amputee camp in the first place, and who was it that coined the phrase? If shouting about things like this is the most I can do, then I'm going to do an awful lot of shouting.

In person I'm a sarcastic wiseass who is frequently accused of not taking anything seriously enough, so my writing is a sort of overcompensation for that. Or vice versa. When humor does come out in my writing, a lot of it's so black it goes unrecognized. One of my earlier chapbooks was called Dead Baby Jokes, and I got more than a few angry letters about it. No one saw the absurdity of the title, which was taken from an actual joke book of the same name. Just the idea of pairing the concepts of dead babies and jokes is so brutally unfunny that it becomes funny in an absurdist sort of way. Who the hell thought up these jokes? Who put them all together in a book? Most importantly, who bought the book? A lot of people did, so that has to tell you something about the society we live in.

M: If it isn't too personal, have you experienced some great trauma that inspires your dark poetry?

JS: No, I had a pretty straightforward childhood, I think. I was a loner, read a lot, experienced the usual deaths of family & friends. Discovering punk rock in junior high opened up my eyes to the social/political aspect of the world, all of the injustices done to people in the name of politics and religion, etc etc. My earliest writing was an outgrowth of discovering the world around me, realizing that I might not actually be the center of the universe. The problem with a lot of poetry, it seems to me, is that too many poets never get to that point. Too much of what I read is self-absorbed and meaningless.

M: One of my favorite poems is "the problem." It shows that you don't take yourself that seriously. Was it meant to be a kind of self-parody?

JS: Yeah, "the problem" is my response the people who've been kind enough to point out my shortcomings as a writer over the years. Humor in writing is tough, so I don't try it too often. Every now and then, though, I need to step back and smack the hell out of whatever pretensions I've accumulated. Being a writer is bad enough, being pretentious is worse, being a pretentious writer is unforgivable.

M: Who are your influences?

JS: None of my influences are poets, actually. I admire the work of Carver, Atwood, David Kelly, Diane Wakoski, Kathryn Rantala and some others, but I make an effort to write like no one but myself.

When I first got serious about writing, part of the reason was that I couldn't find anything I liked, so I wanted to try my hand at it & see if I could come up with something that I would like as a reader. Too much of what I was reading had language that felt stiff & artificial, or it was way too polished, or it suffered from the "look at me!" syndrome. My writing began as a reaction to what I was reading (or being forced to read in classes). It was my own little personal protest.

Pollock is my biggest influence, both in his approach to his painting and the story of his life. The attitudes of the Surrealists are important, too, and the informed antagonism of the first wave of 1970s punk rock. I like to try and translate my non-literary influences into my writing. I like my poems to sound more or less the way I sound when I talk, just without so much profanity.

M: Is poetry futile?

JS: It depends on what day of the week you ask me, and what time of the day. I go back and forth on this one. None of my ideas are set in stone, and they're always fluctuating. This is why I keep writing about the same topics over and over.

Poetry is futile, I think, in the sense that it's never going to change the world. It'll never end war or famine, it'll never cure cancer. In this light, most everything is futile, so poetry shouldn't feel alone. I tend to start expecting too much from the written word, and only succeed in bumming myself out.

On the other hand, if poetry can change just ONE PERSON'S world, it's a screaming success. If I can successfully get my anger/fear/frustration onto the page and have it connect with just one other person, that's a good day, and poetry becomes an absolute necessity.

My work as a whole is incredibly contradictory. The safest thing to do is approach it one poem at a time.

M: Why did you decide on "famine" for the title?

JS: "Famine" is just one of those words with a boatload of connotations - philosophical, spiritual, physical - that it just seemed like an obvious choice for a title. It encompasses all of the ideas that I'm working with in my writing. I like it as a title for this collection because it serves as an introductory point, and then the poems can go on from there and elaborate this central idea.

Earlier this year I had a collection published titled "Enemy", which worked in a similar vein. Another great word with a myriad of meanings and connotations.

M: I find that you usually leave people more depressed than when they started reading a poem, yet I can't help seeking out your poetry anyway because it is so well written. Do you think about the effect your poetry has on its readers?

JS: I can see why "depressing" and "bleak" are such common adjectives when people describe my work, but I honestly don't see it like that. "Catahrtic" is still the word I choose. I don't make up the stories and events in my poems. They've happened, and I'm dealing with them in my own small way. I give myself and the reader a choice - is this the kind of person I would choose to be, or the kind of life I would choose to live, or would I strive for something better? If I can't change the past, then can I at least make a conscious decision to change my own future in a positive way, no matter how small?

The atrocities in my work are things I can measure myself against. If I can be a decent human being (if that's not an oxymoron), then maybe I can help my children grow up to be decent, too.

When my oldest son was born, I actually received letters from people telling me that my career as a "serious" poet was over, and that I would begin writing Hallmark verse and rhyming odes to Barney and the Teletubbies. The assumption was (and it was made by a lot of single, childless people) that having children mellowed you out, despite the number of children that go missing, are abducted, murdered, raped or all of the above every year in this country. Being a parent, if anything, has made my writing even angrier and more pissed off. How could it be any other way?

It all goes back to my "love cannot exist without fear" theory. Fear is the root of a lot of anger, and anger is at the heart of a lot of my writing. I don't always explicitly condemn the evil actions of others in my writing, but I think that it's implicit. I don't want to preach. I want to present what I have to offer and let the reader decide for him/herself if the rape of a nine month-old baby (true story) is a good or bad thing.

At best, my writing might make someone step back to look at themselves and the world around them. At worst, I'll get written off as an obsessive crackpot doom-monger. Either way, as long as the poem is honest and it speaks to me, I'll get to sleep at night.

M: Now for the toughest question: What is your favorite color?

JS: Blue. How could it ever be anything else?