Mike Young is a boy with a persimmon-shaped heart who lives in Cali­for­nia and likes words like cher­imoya. He co-edits NOÖ Journal and Magic Heli­copter Press and a full-length book of his poetry, We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough, is forth­com­ing in 2010 from Pub­lish­ing Genius.

But the reason I begged an inter­view is that his recent chap­book, MC Oroville’s Answer­ing Machine, made me home­sick, an unex­pec­ted yet wel­come side effect for an Amer­ican expat. MC O, set in Oroville, Cali­for­nia, will show you the wild, lesser known side of Amer­ica — a side that I obvi­ously favor — through a cast of funny (in both the ‘ha ha’ and ‘queer’ senses) char­ac­ters who illus­trate the unlikely things people choose to care about, the wacky, beau­ti­ful and cruel things we do to each other, and the sim­ul­tan­eously amaz­ing and mundane ways we pass the time. Mike once sum­mar­ized it for me as “viol­ent, BBQ sauce prose poems” and he made me so hungry I felt like bit­ing his lip.

“A lot of the ‘char­ac­ters’ or people in MC O think of God as this dude they’ve only ever seen on a bill­board, a pic­ture of him and some text: BRB. DON’T DO ANYTHING I WOULDN’T DO.”

AS: MC Oroville’s Answer­ing Machine to me felt like West Coast, Sunday after­noon BBQ, music blast­ing, friends act­ing stu­pid on sub­urban back­yard beers (prob­ably at the house with the coolest par­ents), lanky girls in jean miniskirts and dirty blond hair that smells like char­coal smoke and tell the truth: you owned a skate­board, huh?

MY: Guilty as rolled. First an orange banana skate­board and then some­thing with a wolf on the bot­tom of it. You’re also right about the girls, plus or minus a few tat­toos. Some of my friends drove rice rock­ets, and some walked home in their PE shirts to play online MMOR­PGs. Daniel owned an antique saber from the Span­ish armada. His van, which was green, could go and some­times stop. I don’t think Oroville counts as the sub­urbs. Some­times the heat feels like the inside of a pasta lid. One day Kevin was late for soc­cer prac­tice because he had to clean up all the peaches that had spilled off the can­nery trucks. Out­side play prac­tice, Sandra grabbed my hands and said they looked really soft. She was one of the people I was sup­posed to kiss in the play. I’m not sure I ever hung out at the house with the coolest par­ents, but think maybe about sit­ting Indian style in the gravel of a jungle gym and drink­ing Key­stone, talk­ing maybe about dead people on and around the levee. Maybe six or seven people from my gradu­at­ing class went to uni­ver­sity. Some went to com­munity col­lege. Most got jobs or joined the mil­it­ary. A lot of times I was wor­ried about not hav­ing a nice rain­coat, or hav­ing to take the bus, or bring­ing tiny sand­wiches on pum­per­nickel instead of buy­ing pizza and put­ting ranch dress­ing on it, but one day I real­ized that the shirt I’d bought for $0.50 at the thrift store made me look like Gideon Yago from MTV. Since then I’ve been a major asshole. Then again, I remem­ber one day in junior high where Dustin took his shirt off on the bus and punched his own brother. Ash­ley always wanted me to sing Amer­ican Pie. We always want our local myth­o­logy right there on the top of the lake, so we can skip a rock over it and see how it flutters.

MC Oroville is a real per­son, though MC Oroville’s
Answer­ing Machine is not biographical.

AS: What exactly influ­enced MC Oroville? I feel like I want to know, but I also feel like that ques­tion is com­pletely unori­ginal. Answer it only if you really feel it and\or you want to make me feel bet­ter about myself.

MY: Gummo and Eminem. Alan Jack­son and Flarf. The whole thing sort of star­ted out with me writ­ing blog posts about Oroville because I missed all my friends in Ash­land, Ore­gon, most of whom I liked bet­ter than the people in Oroville, or the con­cepts I’d made of my friends in Ash­land, which I liked bet­ter, my ima­gin­ary bet­ter friends who are always yodel­ing or shav­ing right bey­ond wherever I’m fuck­ing things up at the moment. Wait­ing for any bus/people on any bus. D’J Pan­cake and Frank Stan­ford. Tom Waits and B.H. Fairchild. The Kath­leen Edwards song ‘Six O’Clock News’. Sun­set, which in the foot­hills of North­ern Cali­for­nia is a blind horse with a yel­low tongue. Dogs that swim for no reason. All those Hmong kids who hung out by them­selves at lunch, whom I played soc­cer with, who always talked in a lan­guage that wasn’t for any­body else. It’s hard not to won­der about every­body all the time. One time, I think the after­noon before the Super Bowl, it was drizz­ling and I was out try­ing to take pic­tures for pho­to­graphy class. I walked by the park with the memorial train engine in the middle of it. This couple was there, not talk­ing. The guy had a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. He kept rub­bing his elbow. The woman would sort of lick her fin­gers and then twist her hair. I should’ve taken a pic­ture of them, but I felt like an asshole. If your life is a slow go-kart crash, if your life is a man who hides inside the bath­room at the Army Sur­plus Store, if your life is try­ing to get a ride from any­body at the laun­dro­mat, then, I don’t know, there is such a thing as being lonely and cop­ing with it by pre­tend­ing you are actu­ally in a movie with all lonely people ever.

The real people of Oroville.

AS: Some ref­er­ences in MC O made me think, a) What is the fas­cin­a­tion with The Home Depot, dude? and b) Does Mike Young believe in God?

MY: Home Depot, the round­about, the Indian health care cen­ter: things come to town on the wings of pub­lic fund­ing and eli­cit hanker­ing. You’ve got to stare at some­thing. You’ve got to have a say, a hand on your hip, a grumpy hock. You’ve got to defy col­lect­ive will at least a gasp. I have always wondered about the motiv­a­tion of say­ing some­thing about some­thing you weren’t asked about. I like to hear those people very much, the ones who weren’t asked. A lot of the “char­ac­ters” or people in MC O think of God as this dude they’ve only ever seen on a bill­board, a pic­ture of him and some text: BRB. DON’T DO ANYTHING I WOULDN’T DO. What a lot of saw­dust that is. God is just some little guy with a shot­gun col­lec­tion and all the cheat codes. If there’s a design to any­thing, it’s some­body on the lam, run­ning away with their arms full and shit spill­ing off. When it’s April and finally done snow­ing and I walk to the bus, sure: I’d like very much to believe someone is play­ing patty­cake with the sky. But I get the feel­ing that feel­ing is it. I think I’ll prob­ably leave town with a bad cough more often than I’ll thank God for anything.

“When I kill myself, I’m gonna swal­low a hammer.”

AS: You’re also a musi­cian and while your poems aren’t rhymes, they are often so per­fectly melodi­ous they make me want to shake my ass. What sort of dis­tinc­tion do you draw between song lyr­ics and poetry?

MY: Songs are bet­ter for auto­bi­o­graphy, for some reason. If there is some really true thing I’d like to say over and over again, then songs are bet­ter for that, too. Poems are good for mean­ing lots of dif­fer­ent things at the same time. With a poem, your head can sit there on the lan­guage. All that said, it’s true that I’m not inter­ested, usu­ally, in lan­guage that doesn’t have a sense of melody, a sense of sound glop. Very oppos­ite from Robert Gren­ier: I love speech. And I love say­ing moon­bat and mak­ing a moon­bat hap­pen to a cer­tain part of your brain. I love a lot of lan­guage the­ory, but most of the stuff that’s pop­u­lar with so-called lan­guage poets doesn’t seem very up on cog­nit­ive sci­ence. I like pop hooks and cog­nit­ive science.

AS: How do you feel about everyone’s poetry right now, in gen­eral? Recom­mend me some shit you love.

MY: Here are some names: Johannes Görans­son, Heather Christle, Nat­alie Lyalin, Dobby Gib­son, Kevin Dav­ies, Katie Degentesh, Jen­nifer L. Knox, Mat­thew Dick­man, the poem Ter­minal Moraine by Steve Healey. Any­thing by Daniel Bailey, of course, whose book THE DRUNK SONNETS, I’m put­ting out in Octo­ber. I think poetry’s healthy as ever, healthy as Catul­lus, healthy as Del­more Schwartz. As a reader, I think I am very greedy. I like poetry that respects both the slip­per­i­ness and the sig­ni­fic­ance of lan­guage, both the solem­nity and absurdity of any­thing we do. I like when poems change sub­jects a lot. I like ideas and canyon fire. Give me a poem that can ollie without spill­ing any­thing. I like laugh­ing and feel­ing a sort of inside-out-sigh, like expand­ing in all dir­ec­tions at once, sweetly and hopelessly.

AS: Do you cringe when called a poet?

MY: No. I like to write poems. Poets are people who write poems. That’s all it is. People who have so much “humil­ity” or “mod­esty” that they want to kill them­selves with a grapefruit spoon: not very fun to have in the car. When I kill myself, I’m gonna swal­low a ham­mer. Fuck false humil­ity. People can call me whatever they want. Maybe except when I’m wear­ing a cow­boy hat.

AS: Why don’t you and Daniel Bailey update Hick­ory Ass­bags any­more? I loved that shit.

MY: Thanks! And good ques­tion. We should do more. I’ll put the word out.

“Like you’re not allowed to have sex with a per­son until you both can look at each other and crack up without hav­ing to say any­thing at all.”

AS: I’m camera-shy so I very much admire (read: mas­turb­ate to) your video clips, like the read­ings you did for Noo Journal’s Rad Poetry fun­draiser, for example. How import­ant is the per­form­ance aspect for you? are you a ham? an exhib­i­tion­ist? do you talk a lot dur­ing sex? Examples welcome.

MY: I think I’m a ham and an exhib­i­tion­ist, yeah. Both those things. But I hate to talk dur­ing sex! Is that weird? I like to pre­tend sex auto­mat­ic­ally con­fers tele­pathy. Like you’re not allowed to have sex with a per­son until you both can look at each other and crack up without hav­ing to say any­thing at all. I think that’s imma­ture of me, or overly romantic or some­thing. Any­way, per­form­ance gets you a lot closer to whomever. Since pretty much everything I do writing-wise tries to con­nect with another human being, per­form­ance is good because it puts that writ­ing a lot closer to those human beings. I think that’s a relief. When I get to read poems or sing songs in front of people, instead of in front of my stove, I feel very relieved, and that relief makes me feel warm and enter­tain­ing. I under­stand writ­ing things just for your­self, stuff you don’t show any­body, but I think many people who claim that writ­ing for oth­ers is some­how less “pure” or less “from the heart” mis­un­der­stand the urge to con­nect with other people, or under­es­tim­ate the abil­ity of lan­guage to make that hap­pen. Whatever. I like to make people laugh. And more! I like to give people sounds they want to answer with other sounds.

Gave Ani good times. Repeatedly.

AS: To sell me your book, you sent me a poem with a per­son­al­ized note. Besides want­ing to fuck me (obvi­ously!), you seem to be con­scious, eth­ical, self-aware. Your pro­mo­tion — either for your­self or the writers you pub­lish through Magic Heli­copter Press and Noo Journal — never leaves a bad taste. In other words, I feel like you wouldn’t give our first-born to papa Satan in order to get a novel pub­lished unless we’re talk­ing Dan Brown-style rak­ing it in. Is this some­thing you think about, like do you have a per­sonal code of ethics?

MY: Thanks, I’m glad you think that. Pro­mo­tional eth­ics is some­thing I worry about a lot, yeah. I worry about com­ing off with a hair gel kind of taste. It’s tricky. I want to share the things I like with people, and the more people I share that stuff with, the bet­ter I feel. My per­sonal code of eth­ics is prob­ably to respect the alter­ity and unknow­ab­il­ity of the Other and to try to love the fact that I will never under­stand another per­son and to love the pro­cess of try­ing to under­stand them. Some­where along there comes the pro­cess of shar­ing and the awe­some­ness of people respond­ing pos­it­ively to this shar­ing. Still, when you want people to like what you do, you never really believe any­one likes what you do. So I try to just make sure everybody’s hav­ing fun.

AS: In a pil­low fight for the title of Ani’s favor­ite poet / lit­er­ary sex sym­bol between you and fel­low <HTMLGIANT> alum, Sam Pink, who would win and how?

MY: Sam’s a tough mother­fucker. We’d hug it out, though. We’d neither one of us want to hurt a good pil­low, yo.

AS: I get gang­sta while edit­ing. Like I’m all, who does this sen­tence think it is? Imma cut a bitch! Do you ever shit talk things that can’t talk back, like sen­tences, food, pets, your cock maybe? Call him Lil’ Mikey? No?

MY: When I played ten­nis in high school, some­times I would get so mad that I would go crazy and scream shit that I didn’t hear myself scream­ing. It’s hard to describe. Like I would get so mad that words would just come out, and then I’d have to ask my team­mates, who’d be laugh­ing, what I just said. It was stuff like “Ass suck fuck snitch!” Or “Truck suck­ing fuck knocker!” These are bad examples because my sub­con­scious rage is, without a doubt, way bet­ter than my inter­view wit.

AS: What sort of drugs do you have to do for the energy to pub­lish books, a journal, write, make music, blog, take pic­tures, do read­ings and on and on? Dot you have a ‘day job’? (Tell me, it’s okay. I prom­ise not to call you there.)

MY: Right now, I go to grad school, where I teach either fresh­man com­pos­i­tion or cre­at­ive writ­ing, depend­ing on the semester. The last two sum­mers I’ve taught twelve-year-olds at a sum­mer camp, which is a lot of fun but way more work than teach­ing at a col­lege level. All that foursquare sweat, yo. My drugs involve a lot of walk­ing around and not watch­ing TV. Also I don’t go to the gym because I burn a lot of cal­or­ies by invol­un­tar­ily wig­gling my foot with intense anxious energy at all wak­ing times.

Ani is pre­tend­ing this ded­ic­a­tion was accom­pan­ied by a) an offer to pub­lish
her ‘poetry manu­script’ and b) an engage­ment rock the size of a meteor.

AS: Being a pro inter­viewer, I like to end all my inter­views with an exist­en­tial type ques­tion. But I’m sort of ummm, busy, re-watching the love song you ded­ic­ated to me-me-and-only-me! and I can’t think of one right now. What exist­en­tial ques­tion do you ask your­self most often and what is your usual answer?

MY: “Is this okay?” and “I don’t know, prob­ably not.”

Ani Smith reads, writes and looks at the pretty pic­tures, but can more often be found hav­ing lengthy, inap­pro­pri­ate day­dreams involving her inter­view subjects.