Read­ing THE DRUNK SONNETS (pub­lished by Magic Heli­copter Press) makes me want to sit on Daniel Bailey’s lap, take the whis­key bottle from his hand, put it down on the table, grab his face between my palms, squeeze his cheeks and mouth into a fish pout and stare at his irises for a really long time until I find out what’s behind them or he sheep­ishly tries to smile and shifts beneath me.

I don’t know whether that makes you want to read THE DRUNK SONNETS too, but it should. Come on, I know your soul is like a dry town, devoid of intox­ic­ated pas­sion and plagued by inhib­i­tion. Don’t you want a lucid moment of con­nec­tion for fuck’s sake?

I am obvi­ously too plastered and maudlin (only in hon­our of the book, of course, I don’t habitu­ally drink on the job much) to con­vey the win­some heart and boozy wit of this poetry col­lec­tion, so let’s just ask Danny some ques­tions and you can fall in gin-soaked love with him — I mean his poetry — yourself.

AS: Hi Dan Bailey, how’s school?

DB: school is for fools. i want to encour­age any kids that read this inter­view to drop out of school and hop on a train. you don’t need edu­ca­tion and you don’t need a family.

AS: Do you have a girl­friend at school yet? and if so, is it because you ensnared her with your awe­some poetic ways?

DB: nope. i’ve never tried using my poetry to woo hot babes. usu­ally, i rely on my yodel­ing, which might be a mistake.

AS: Whose idea was the DRUNK blog and are all the son­nets in THE DRUNK SONNETS from the DRUNK blog? Or if not, what is the rela­tion­ship between that and this?

DB: the DRUNK blog was star­ted by me and kendra grant malone. kendra and i wrote a col­lab­or­at­ive chap­book of DRUNK poems (still unpub­lished) and then decided to start the blog and we invited other poets to join in. we mainly invited friends.

all the son­nets have been on the DRUNK blog at one point or another, but i took most of them down after mike young said he wanted to pub­lish the son­nets as a book.

i guess THE DRUNK SONNETS is sort of a spinoff of the DRUNK blog. it’s a frasier to the drunk blog’s cheers.

“if i want to wear a coat made from uni­corn fur, then i will.”

AS: What do you usu­ally drink and where do you get it and do you think there is a prob­lem with people who drink alone and do you have a pre­ferred hangover cure or pre-emptor?

DB: i usu­ally drink cheap bour­bon or beer (either ipa’s or reg­u­lar pale ales and some­times pbr or vari­ous forties when i feel like keepin’ it real). some­times i drink gin. i buy those alco­hols at liquor stores. when i go to bars i some­times wear a back­pack and bring a bottle of whis­key into the bar so i can drink cheap. some­times, friends buy me drinks.

drink­ing alone is socially frowned upon. i think it’s because drink­ing is seen as a social activ­ity. if you do it alone it’s like you have a dirty secret, like you may as well be doing heroin or some­thing. i ima­gine farm­ers or people liv­ing in the coun­try a long time ago drink­ing at home by them­selves because they are isol­ated, but at least when i do it i’m not doing it in front of my kids or some­thing, which seems a little weird and irre­spons­ible. i don’t think it’s a prob­lem for people to drink alone, as long as they’re not get­ting com­pletely shit-faced and shirk­ing duties like school­work or not show­ing up to work or not doing whatever it is that they value or have com­mit­ted them­selves to doing. i don’t want to imply that that’s evil, but na na na. hav­ing a few beers after work or class or whatever can be a nice thing.

for some reason, caf­feine tends to cure my hangovers. i don’t usu­ally get hangovers, though.

AS: What would you say to ass­wads who might say that these aren’t really son­nets and they are also not really drunk, nor were you your­self drunk at the time of writing?

DB: it’s not a big deal to me that these are not tech­nic­ally son­nets. it’s just a title, sort of a joke title, but at the same time i hope that these poems cap­ture the spirit of the son­net even if they don’t fol­low all the con­straints of the form. all the son­nets are 14 lines, which was my main reason for writ­ing the son­nets. i felt worn out after work­ing on longer poems. the son­net gave me the chance to really focus on what each poem deman­ded. get­ting it all out in 14 lines is a tough thing to do, which is prob­ably why i ended up writ­ing an entire book of these poems instead of a poem or two. i had so much in me at the time that i didn’t know what to do with. hav­ing 54 poems in which to pour all my emo­tions and ideas worked bet­ter than hav­ing lar­ger, sloppy buck­ets of poems. for some reason, i’m ima­gin­ing the son­nets as dixie cups con­tain­ing some potent thing, care­fully poured out of a water cooler at an office or some­thing. whereas if i had tried longer poems it would have been like put­ting the con­tents of a baby pool into 5 or 6 pint glasses.

and going back to call­ing them son­nets when they don’t meet all the require­ments of son­netry: i called them son­nets, so that’s what they are. i could’ve made up a word to replace son­nets. i could’ve called them pee­l­imps and then the book would be THE DRUNK PEELIMPS but i didn’t do that. i called them son­nets, and i don’t think that is some­thing that any­one can try to take away from the poems. i’d like to think that i was respect­ful of the form and what it means to write a son­net when writ­ing the book.

the son­nets them­selves are not drunk. they are words, and words can­not be drunk. i was drunk when i wrote the words. no ass­wad can say oth­er­wise. they weren’t there. my brother can vouch for me. i don’t know how easy he is to reach though. he lives in japan right now.

i was sober when i did edits to the poems.

“the things i said are things that are true to the voice that came out of me and etched itself into the poems”

AS: Are you now or have you ever been depressed?

DB: i have been depressed, but i’m not right now. it comes and it goes.

AS: Nat­alie Port­man, really? not like Zooey Deschanel or Chloe Sev­igny or some­thing? Christina Appleg­ate maybe? How do you feel about older women, Danny?

DB: for some reason, i couldn’t think of writ­ing about any­body but nat­alie port­man. nat­alie port­man is a qt and has a sexy voice. i’m not ashamed of the answer i gave sam pink.

i hope every inter­viewer i ever talk to gives me the oppor­tun­ity to talk about nat­alie port­man. that could be my thing. maybe nat­alie port­man will google her­self and dis­cover me and all that stuff i said can really happen.

the only zooey deschanel movie i’ve seen is elf, so i can’t really judge deschanel because i spent most of the movie try­ing to under­stand why people enjoy will fer­rell movies.

chloe sev­igny is awe­some in everything. i’m a huge har­mony kor­ine fan, so a chloe sev­igny crush is a nat­ural con­sequence of that.

i had to google christina appleg­ate. she doesn’t seem like my kind of woman, though it’s pretty cool that her first film role was in a movie called Jaws of Satan.

older women are pretty cool. most of the older women i’ve met have seemed more “down to earth” than younger women, like they’ve exper­i­enced more and under­stand it’s point­less to worry about so many things that the younger women still worry about. this applies to guys that i know who are older too. it makes me feel ok about get­ting older, like maybe dif­fi­cult things will become easier to deal with, like it will be easier to stop wor­ry­ing so much and enjoy life a little. i also ima­gine that i’ll have enough money to live com­fort­ably, like i might be able to afford a pet were­wolf or a hot tub filled with wild cherry pepsi. i would allow nat­alie port­man or chloe sev­igny or older women to use my wild cherry pepsi hot tub, but i would make sure to lock up the were­wolf when they came over to my pad.

“i like to think of poetry as an art form that can be badass, that people can read and feel the same way as how they feel after listen­ing to slayer or something.”

AS: Do you ever think about whether what you write is real or sur­real? Do those words mean any­thing in rela­tion to you?

DB: yes and yes. i think i write things that are real and sur­real at the same time. i like the sur­real. i like the dark. i like the weird. i’m in a non­fic­tion work­shop right now, and it’s so hard to write for that class because i want to jump off into unreal­ity. i don’t want to live in my past or the past of oth­ers. i’d rather see an exist­ence that isn’t, but is because i made it that way, an exist­ence that can be equally as fucked and just as beau­ti­ful, but where i say how it is, where i let everything come to being through my fin­gers on keys. if i want to wear a coat made from uni­corn fur, then i will. everything is real if you make it. and dreams can be the most real exper­i­ences in life. i rarely exper­i­ence situ­ations in real life that are half as intense as what i exper­i­ence in my dreams, and that’s what the sur­real does for me. it gives the dream stay­ing power. there it is.

i want to say stu­pid things. stu­pid things are more real than real things for me.

i like to think of the sur­real in rela­tion to the heart, the very human, very real emo­tional exper­i­ence that is con­stantly hap­pen­ing inside of us every moment that we are alive.

AS: Name some things you love (poets, girls, bands, whatever).

DB: 10 inan­im­ate objects that i love:
rocks
for­eign cur­rency
you­tube videos of deep sea life
things that feel weird when you touch them
flash­lights
statues of ele­phants
water foun­tains
old churches (the build­ings, not the insti­tu­tions)
knives
skateboards  

Por­trait of the poet’s cute ass

AS: Your writ­ing makes me feel tender towards you and I think there’s a fine line between ten­der­ness and aggres­sion, espe­cially for men. Was it ever a prob­lem being a sens­it­ive sort of poet boy in Indi­ana? Have you ever had to be a closet poet? Did you rip your jeans, listen to punk and snarl and pick fights so people wouldn’t fuck with you, or am I pro­ject­ing again?

DB: i don’t know if i’ve ever been a “sens­it­ive poet.” i like to smash things as much as the next badass.

to answer your spe­cific examples: i’ve ripped jeans, but only on acci­dent. i’ve listened to punk (still do). i’ve only ever tried to start fights while very drunk. maybe you’re pro­ject­ing. i don’t know.

i like to think of poetry as an art form that can be badass, that people can read and feel the same way as how they feel after listen­ing to slayer or some­thing. it doesn’t have to be a prac­tice of hyper-sensitive people.

AS: I struggle with humor in my writ­ing. Is humor some­thing you ever think about when writ­ing or are you nat­ur­ally funny or did I just totally insult you?

DB: i don’t know. i like jokes. i wish i could be a comedian. i for­get who, but there is a comedian who has a joke that goes some­thing like, “if one of my jokes fails, i just tell the audi­ence that it’s a poem.”

i think poetry has the poten­tial for great com­edy and great heart­break within a single line, and that’s a thing that i love, the space where the two overlap.

also, i’m nat­ur­ally funny. jk (see what i mean? i was KIDDING. THAT WAS A JOKE).

AS: If I were Nat­alie Stu­pid Port­man and you could only write one sen­tence to me to make me fall in hope­less love with you, what would it be?

DB: i would say, “hey, nat­alie stu­pid port­man, what’s up?”

AS: Do you think jeal­ousy is an attract­ive trait? (You know, more the kooky than the mur­der­ous kind.)

DB: not really, though i think jeal­ousy is a nat­ural thing for people to feel at times, so whatever.

AS: Who is ‘you’ and ‘we’ in your poetry? Is it me? Don’t lie, Dan. It’s totally me. Right?

DB: well, i if i said the “you” is you (which it is), then i would have no reason to ever pub­lish a poem again. i would just send all my poems to you and that would be that. the “we” is who­ever me and the “you” is (you).

AS: In some of the son­nets, I feel like shit is very pro­clam­at­ory. Like I can almost see you with one hand over your chest and the other out­stretched, pro­claim­ing, Shakespeare style. Is that weird?

DB: shakespeare is part of the reason i wrote so many son­nets, so that makes sense. i ori­gin­ally inten­ded to write as many son­nets as shakespeare wrote. i stopped about a hun­dred short. i don’t think i’ve ever read a poem with a hand over my chest (though, maybe i should do that from now on).

Por­trait of the poet eat­ing mac ‘n’ cheese, drink­ing
wild cherry pepsi and read­ing at home

AS: Are you ever embar­rassed or ashamed by the sin­cer­ity in your writ­ing? Like do you think about me read­ing it right now and cringe know­ing that I saw some­thing from inside your body and that I can now make a judge­ment upon it?

DB: i’m never embar­rassed or ashamed by sin­cer­ity. i think sin­cer­ity should be a given in art of any form. i can appre­ci­ate irony, but irony doesn’t stick to the walls of my heart the way that sin­cer­ity does. ima­gine if daniel john­ston had writ­ten a bunch of ironic pop songs instead of Songs of Pain. i feel like i’ve been affected in a pos­it­ive man­ner because of daniel johnston’s unabashed sin­cer­ity. in fact, i don’t know if i would’ve had the cour­age to write some­thing like THE DRUNK SONNETS without see­ing that it’s ok to be vul­ner­able and sin­cere in art with daniel john­ston as an example of that.

so no, i don’t feel embar­rassed or ashamed. i’ll admit to feel­ing a little nervous that people might cre­ate an image of me in their heads as always being the per­son in the poems, always drunk and without fil­ter. i guess, i fear what my par­ents would think of me after read­ing the poems, with the pro­fan­ity and some com­ments on reli­gion. i don’t want to ali­en­ate anyone.

but i don’t feel embar­rassed by the things i’ve said in the poems, because the things i said are things that are true to the voice that came out of me and etched itself into the poems. the poems come first. the poet (me) is not the import­ant thing here. and i feel like that’s the most import­ant thing that i’ve said in this inter­view. and i really hope that point comes across so i’ll say it again. in fact, i’ll give that point its own para­graph, all caps.

THE POEM IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE POET OR THE IMAGE OF THE POET.

AS: What does it feel like to be loved?

DB: like if every follicle of hair on your body sud­denly begins to leak color that falls onto the floor as tiny shards of glass and you are stand­ing in an incred­ibly, intensely hot oven, and you are wear­ing ice skates.

• Visit Daniel’s blog
• Buy THE DRUNK SONNETS
• Browse Magic Helicopter’s cata­logue
• Photo (top) of Daniel Bailey by Gena Mohwish

Ani Smith writes piffle and tumbles. She knows you can see right through her ploy to inter­view cute boys and get into their chaps.