the conversation: Mindy Nettifee and Jon Sands
Mindy Nettifee is trouble. She’s the author of “Sleepyhead Assassins” and the brand new “Rise of the Trust Fall” from Write Bloody Publishing (a book I nearly threw off the Brooklyn bound F train after reading the poem, “The Bent Kinetics of Memory”). Mindy’s poems thrive on saying what needs to be said. But, the world in which these poems exist is one we recognize even if we haven’t lived what she’s lived. The moments of (at times profound) sadness are always coupled with a recognition of the staggering beauty this world holds. The flip-side is also true in Mindy’s writing. She has a way of making us laugh without pulling one punch. Something we all need a little of as we wave goodbye to this winter. Here. We. Go.
JON SANDS: We’re here with Mindy Nettifee, the author of “Sleepyhead Assassins” and “Rise of the Trust Fall” and my now Whirlwind Company tour partner all over this country. Thanks for sitting down with Union Station, Mindy.
MINDY NETTIFEE: It’s a real pleasure Dr. Sands
JS: Some of the stories you tell involve detailed re-telling of sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking situations rooted in memory. “What Comes After” comes to mind. It reads as though you’ve seen and participated in nights (or strings of months) that share a quality of “ridiculousness.” How much is your artistic process tied into your every day life? Do many of these poems find their inception in the actual moment, or is it mostly a practice of recollection?
MN: I think the longer you work at writing—maybe especially with poetry, maybe not—the more it starts to literally color how you live. Or if color is the wrong word, then we have to imagine “vocabulary” as a verb. The writer in you starts vocabulary-ing everything. So that as you are living, as things happen to you, the moment describes itself to you. You are recording it, processing it in terms of its emotional texture, imagery, and metaphor; irony and ridiculousness and absurdity become brighter and more vivid. Events that participate consciously in creating symbolic imagery – political speeches, commercials, etc. – become almost unbearable.
So yes. My writing process is woven into my every day everything. But it’s not a particularly conscious process for me anymore. Thoreau wrote something like “you can not both live and utter it.” And on the one hand I find that to be true. Like maybe there is a way in which you need to choose to live your life, and get out of your head, and you have to give up putting everything into words in order to actually be present. And then again, my brain has organized itself now to write poetry. So when I’m being shouted down by a bartender, or assaulted by hummingbirds, you know. The poem is happening.
JS: Do you feel like there are times when you find out what was actually happening through the process of writing the poem?
MN: Oh definitely. But I heard on the radio recently something that made a lot of sense to me – that the more you remember something, the more you “use” a memory, the more degraded it gets. I think it was a story about amnesia on RadioLab. And I think it’s one of the unexpected perks of writing – that you get to participate wholeheartedly in this degradation in a way that gives your life meaning.
And then there’s the times when you read a poem, say, a year later, and you realize it was about something else entirely. You only thought you knew what you were writing about. I think that has to do with being in the flow, you know? Sort of writing all free-like, straight from your subconscious, which knows things you don’t know yet.
JS: What’s your process’ relationship to the facts of how things have physically occurred (as opposed to emotionally)? Do you ever find yourself changing stories to make them more honest to how something felt?
MN: I haven’t dabbled as much in magical realism as others, but I think if you need to lie to tell the truth in a poem, you know what you have to do. This occurs a lot in poems about my father, who has dabbled in some lying himself over the years, and with poems in general where I am really concerned about the “tone” of the poem. Getting the right feeling tone across is the most important thing. It’s impossible to know how successful I am at that. Mostly I find that the factual details are things I could never make up. They are so great just as they are. If your dog chews up your Janet Jackson Rhythm Nation tape the year you start your period, why fuck with that detail?
JS: In both “Sleepyhead Assassins” and “Rise of the Trust Fall” you extensively cover personal relationships with family and loved ones. What’s your process of navigating the revealing of other people’s secrets? Are those relationships ever affected? If so, how?
MN: Yeah. Several members of my family have stopped speaking to me at different times. But I think secrets – and not treasure-y, I-have-a-hidden-talent secrets, but secrets that are surrounded by some kind of shame – they are the source of most cancers. And I think having a gay father who was outed so early in my life, and watching him struggle with that—it made me despise shame and worship shamelessness. Much to the chagrin of my mother. And maybe my early obsession with poetry was about finding ways to tell the truth about things I didn’t really have words for.
My family is no different from other families in that secrets were their stock and trade for generations. Like my grandparents had sex before they were married and got pregnant, and then celebrated the wrong anniversary for the rest of their lives so no one would “do the math” and find out. That kind of dedication to false piety baffles me. And if my grandmother knew I was revealing this to a public audience of some sort, well, I’m pretty sure she’s turning in her grave.
Once a secret is out though, I think its power diminishes. My sisters might disagree. But there’s something there I clearly love to explore, and it’s not because I delight in exposing others, it’s because I really think the secret is not so secret, and not so terrible.
JS: Can you pick two artists you feel most like family/community with and tell us the story of how you met and took to each other?
MN: Let’s see. One of the poets I may have known and worked with the longest is Derrick Brown. We met at an open mic in Huntington Beach, California about 16 years ago, when I was maybe 14 or 15, and Derrick was on leave from serving in the 82nd airborne. He was the super skinny weird guy, and he did something with a guitar or a shortwave radio, and he didn’t know anyone. And I was this high school kid with a blonde pageboy, smoking cigarettes and just beginning to get my rebellion on. The poetry scene back then was filled with the most eccentric wonderful people, who were not nice, you know? But they were free. And some of them were so smart, and I fell in love with the whole damn thing.
I just realized that means I’ve known Derrick Clifford Brown more than half my life. Anyway. We hung out that night in the alleyway behind the coffeehouse, with the enormous psychic named Storme Warne and a bunch of people playing chess and smoking joints, and we were both pretty wide-eyed. We’ve been friends ever since.
JS: This is something I can picture.
MN: I am really close to Beau Sia these days, and we met for the first time on a roof top party years ago somewhere in Los Angeles. He was so quiet and like, hiding in his hoodie. For some reason that night we were the two-sober-people-at-the-party. Lots of parties have them. There was a fire pit and lots of smoke obscuring the two stars in the sky. And people kept trying to get me to drink vodka and dance to house music with them, and I had just broken up with vodka and house music. So I sat on the lawn chair next to Beau Sia, all smiling and Iowa-LBC hybrid and started asking him questions about where he grew up, and what his mom is like. These are my favorite opening questions to ask someone. And he asked me questions about how I imagined the apocolypse. Whether I thought I would survive. For the record, Beau and I have discussed this a lot over the years, I think I would survive just long enough to have a kid and die protecting it from robot dinosaurs.
JS: I only judge friends these days based on who’s going to be back to back with me when these zombie wars pop off.
MN: I’ve totally got your back during the zombie wars, and I’m not afraid to use an ax on a zombie.
JS: Done and done. I keep an eye out for friends that can turn anything into a shotgun. Hafiz said, “Good poetry makes the universe reveal a secret.” I think it starts with the author’s reveal, and the realization becomes that it is connecting to something universal. The question for me often becomes what am I not saying because I’m just not saying it, and what am I not saying because it’s a secret/risk. What is your first clue that something is asking to be revealed?
MN: I think there’s an emotional charge around it, and that’s your first clue. Maybe it’s a deep embarrassment, fear, or sudden sadness. There’s a cliff edge there out of nowhere. That’s the good stuff. I remember starting to write this poem about learning to play the piano, and it quickly turned into writing about the piano my father had to sell after he had self-destructed. And I just couldn’t bring myself to even think about the piano without getting upset. I was embarrassed I guess, that a material thing was so important to me, that its loss had hurt me so much, like what would that say about me? But then of course I finished writing it, and I realized the piano was a piano, and it was also not a piano, it was something so much bigger. Something about how we learn to love, how we struggle to keep loving after someone has hurt us, how to connect to beauty again and again no matter how much you lose.
And I think, in this way, this tangling and untangling secrets, trying to create wisdom, or discover it, or turn it into a verb and not just a thought – it’s what poetry wants from you. It’s what it gives to you. It’s about sequencing. Dyslexia is a problem with sequencing letters and numbers, but there are people who can’t sequence events in their life or emotions they feel in a way that makes sense. Poetry, the art form, if you get it right, delivers a way of sequencing all this information to create meaning in your life.
JS: What’s a poem from another author you feel like you really needed to read/hear?
MN: In the last six months it was Bob Hicok’s poem “Watchful” from his collection Words For Empty And Words For Full. It starts out about a wasp nest, and moves to a memory of a man with a prosthetic hand over his heart singing the national anthem at a ballgame, and becomes a meta poem about writing, and politics, and what we are allowed or not allowed to talk about, how freedom requires us to speak, and the ways in which the government flows into the spaces silence creates.
It healed something for me that I didn’t know was there, that has been there since we went to war in Iraq, and how traumatized I was and I think most of us were by the Bush presidency. I’m fumbling my words because it’s a thing that is difficult to talk about – how you feel about your country, how you identify or don’t identify with your role in it, how it feels to have your country go to war like we did, how helpless we felt and feel to do anything about it.
The wasp nest gets destroyed in the poem, and the wasps keep coming back to it. Bob made me want to give up writing, and start writing a lot all at once, but in a way that was braver.
JS: Do you ever write bad poems? How do you treat those?
MN: Hmmmm…. way to phrase a process-question in a new and unsettling way Jon! I rarely “write a poem” when I write, say from start to finish, though it’s been known to happen in flashes. There are a lot of notebooks filled with writing that may never make its way into a poem, or not in the way it was written. But I don’t judge what I’m writing while I’m writing it. None of it is good or bad as it’s coming out. If you have that instinct, kill it. I save my self-judgment and epic artistic insecurity- for the editing-rewriting, which is Frankenstein-ian at times — I’m sewing up different images and ideas to see if I like the monster they come alive as. Some poems never make it to the final edit. They get left behind for the moment, and maybe you find them later and perform a resurrection, or maybe they get picked over and you pull out the good stuff and put it somewhere else. The 30/30 (30 poems in 30 days) exercises have been so good for me, because the way I play the game, I’m forced to start and FINISH a poem every day, even if I feel like I’m phoning it in. It changes your process up big time. It forces you closer to yourself. I have a big sign above my desk that says “Don’t Be Cool.” And I think it applies to how to cultivate a healthy creative process that supports actual growth, and not just practice and repetition of what you already know will produce a certain result. I also just wrote a poem a month back called “Forget About Good.”
FORGET ABOUT GOOD
What we had was
The head on my shoulders was always
I waited on the phone to hear my sister was
My mother could never hold on to the feeling of looking
My writing we agreed was
The choices I made were
I finally felt safe and
The garden didn’t always thrive but it was
Christmas was never really
My dog was always trying to be
But he was also a dog, and I am my self,
and in the only photo I have left of us
we’re sitting on the steps of my father’s stolen house.
We’re looking in opposite directions.
We’re pensive, though from a distance we could appear as relaxed.
I’m wearing my Born in the USA teeshirt I hardly took off that year,
and the coat with the collar that matches his fur.
If there’s a quiet place between nostalgia and mischief,
between subject and object,
between insight and execution,
we didn’t know we were building it.
We didn’t know what kind of girl I’d grow up to be.
MINDY NETTIFEE is Pushcart Prize nominated writer and accomplished performance poet. She has competed in five National Poetry Slams, toured hundreds of venues across America and Europe, opened for indie rock acts the Cold War Kids and Meiko, and curated poetry events for the Smithsonian Project, the Visions Voices Festival, GirlFest Hawaii and more. She is the author of Sleepyhead Assassins (Moon Tide Press) and Rise of the Trust Fall (Write Bloody Press). She co-produces the Drums Inside Your Chest annual poetry concert series (drumsinsideyourchest.com) and is executive director of the nonprofit Write Now Poetry Society, a national organization working to build the audience for great poetry through education, performance, publishing and grant-making (writenowpoets.org).
JON SANDS has been a professional teaching and performing artist since 2007. His first full collection of poems The New Clean will be released this Spring from Write Bloody Publishing. Jon has performed and facilitated workshops extensively with university and arts organizations both nationally and internationally. He is the Director of Poetry Education Programming at the Positive Health Project (a syringe exchange center located in Midtown Manhattan). He also delivered the 2010 commencement address at the Bronx Academy of Letters. Jon’s work has appeared in decomP, The Millions, kill author, Suss, The Literary Bohemian, Danse Macabre, and others. He also played the lead role in the 2011 web-series “Verse: A Murder Mystery” from Rattapallax Films. He’s a recipient of the 2009 New York City-LouderARTS fellowship grant, and has represented NYC multiple times at the National Poetry Slam. He lives in Brooklyn, where he makes better tuna salad than anyone you know.