Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: IRL
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/tommy-pico * http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-anger-and-joy-of-a-native-american-poet-in-brooklyn * http://www.birdsllc.com/catalog/irl
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1984.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Poet.
WRITINGS
Author of the chapbook absentMINDR; contributor of poetry and other writings to a range of publications, including Guernica, Blunderbuss, [PANK], Powder Keg, Glittermob, Poetry, and BOMB.
SIDELIGHTS
Tommy Pico is a poet and writer. He has contributed poetry and other writings to a range of publications, including Guernica, Blunderbuss, [PANK], Powder Keg, Glittermob, Poetry, and BOMB. Pico is originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay Nation in California and later moved to New York City to attend college at the New School. His first chapbook, absentMINDR, was released exclusively as an app.
In an interview in Lithub, Pico talked with Ruby Brunton about advice given at poetry workshops. Pico declared that “ultimatums in poetry don’t usually sit well with me. When I hear someone say, ‘don’t put _____ in a poem,’ what I hear is, ‘I wouldn’t put ______ in a poem,’ and that’s great! By all means don’t put _____ in your damn poem, because that’s how our poetry will be different. Life is weird and dumb and restrictive, but a poem can be whatever the hell you want it to be for god’s sake. Other people will always have opinions, they’re just really none of my business. I can’t.”
IRL
Pico published IRL in 2016. Pico’s alter ego, Teebs, features at the center of this book-length poem and examines the unique quirks and challenges of a queer reservation transplant to New York City. Teebs reflects on many issues that irk him through life as he explores the city, its people, and his own identity.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly remarked that “Pico’s skillful rendering of Teebs’s coming-of-age attempts to create a cohesive identity out of his many selves.” The reviewer called IRL “entertaining, enlightening, and utterly relatable.” Writing about the book in the New Yorker, Peter Moskowitz pointed out from a conversation with the author that, “like Teebs, Pico struggles with what it means to be a Native American so far from the reservation.” Moskowitz remarked that Pico “wants his readers to feel the disjointedness of his life. With that goal in mind, Pico, in his poetry, creates unsettling juxtapositions, which can have a comic or a dramatic effect—or, most often, some combination of the two.” Moskowitz recalled listening to Pico read a section near the end of the book at a public reading. Moskowitz mentioned that “it feels like a happy ending. But after hearing Pico talk about his two lives—about the pain of not being able to fully inhabit either, reconciling the two only in his poetry—it becomes clear that the last section is less about love than it is about the past and the recognition that it will never leave him.”
In a review in Lambda Literary, Christopher Soto revealed: “In the first twenty pages of IRL I had already cried and laughed. The emotional range of Pico’s work is superb.” Soto reasoned that “everywhere that the narrator in the book goes, Muse is there. Now, my thoughts turn to Lorca and conversations about Muse, the Archangel, and Duende. Where does poetry come from? Tommy Pico finds poetry everywhere, in everything. IRL is brilliant because it allows the reader to find poetry in their everyday life, too.” Reviewing the book on the Stranger Web site, Rich Smith claimed that Teebs is “hysterical,” noting that “the wordplay signals a speaker who cannot help himself. He has to make the joke. Because wordplay is pleasurable, sure, but also because it offers an agreeable pathway through the unknown.” Smith summarized that “IRL is a high-velocity ninety-eight–page long poem with several places to stop along the way and catch your breath. In classic long poem fashion, IRL begins with an invocation of the Muse, a beloved who inspires the poet’s speaker to sound off,” appending that “throughout, Pico experiments with refrain, little clusters of rhyming activity, and other forms of language play that serve to bind the poem’s many thematic elements together. Text-speak colors but doesn’t overwhelm Pico’s chatty, attitude-heavy lines. The collective effect of these choices is a feeling of immediacy—you feel as if you’re inside the head of a confidant, watching his brain spark around topics as seemingly divergent as blood quantum and salt ‘n’ vinegar chips.”
Nature Poem
In 2017 Pico published Nature Poem. In pondering whether to write a poem about nature as a Native American, Pico’s Nature Poem revolves around the troubles of conforming to identity and racial stereotypes. The lengthy poem also delves into issues of what can be considered natural human behavior. The poem incorporates history and pop culture, psychology, and drag queen karaoke nights to reflect on these questions.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly commented that in order to make “the subliminal overt, Pico reclaims power by calling out microaggressions and drawing attention to himself in the face of oppression.” In a review in Out, Les Fabian Brathwaite observed that the “book finds Pico incorporating or indirectly referencing his surroundings in freewheeling, intimate verse, while turning a humorous lens on life as a queer man.” Writing on Blogcritics, Richard Marcus insisted that “Nature Poem is a brilliantly written piece of work. While the language may be a mash-up of text abbreviations and urban slang, it not only doesn’t detract from the poem’s emotional impact, it actually increases it. Like E.E. Cummings before him, Pico has taken the vernacular of his time and turned it into high art. If you read only one book of poetry this year, make sure this is it.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
New Yorker, September 9, 2016, Peter Moskowitz, review of IRL.
Publishers Weekly, August 15, 2016, review of IRL, p. 46; May 11, 2017, review of Nature Poem.
ONLINE
Blogcritics, http://blogcritics.org/ (May 10, 2017), Richard Marcus, review of Nature Poem.
Lambda Literary, http://www.lambdaliterary.org/ (November 5, 2016), Christopher Soto, review of IRL.
Lithub, http://lithub.com/ (July 27, 2016), Ruby Brunton, author interview.
Out, https://www.out.com/ (May 11, 2017), Les Fabian Brathwaite, author interview.
Poetry Foundation Website, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ (June 9, 2017), author profile.
Stranger, http://www.thestranger.com/ (July 26, 2016), Rich Smith, review of IRL.*
Tommy Pico
Poet Details
Niqui Carter
Tommy Pico is a writer and karaoke enthusiast. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he currently lives in Brooklyn.
IRL
Publishers Weekly. 263.33 (Aug. 15, 2016): p46.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Full Text:
* IRL
Tommy Pico. Birds LLC (SPD, dist.), $18 trade paper (104p) ISBN 978-0-9914298-6-8
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Pico's brilliant, funny, and musical book-length debut finds his charming alter ego, Teebs, navigating the joys and difficulties of being a queer hipster "NDN" transplant to New York City from a California reservation. Teebs's lines channel a rush of Internet slang and emoticons, run-on ramblings and sentence fragments, and poppy lyrical bursts (All of these Adams,/ all of these Bens n them/ Benz and Rolls Royce's"). He has a laundry list of beaux with nicknames such as Big-Arms-Ugly-Face and Pompadour, but his true beloved is an artist named Muse, whose/ even slight squint bursts/ me into high July." Teebs agonizes over Muse's aloof behavior, quandaries about text messages, and the resigned admission that Museless, I'm useless." He is ambivalent about social media, denouncing the maudlin self-pitying Facebook posts of friends while praising his own cleverness: I post a pic of Pangea/ on Insta for #tbt." Though the poem exudes a summertime party atmosphere, Teebs calls out acts of homophobia as well as atrocities committed against NDNs, from their forced conversion by Spanish colonizers to the microaggressions of corporate cultural appropriation. He also invokes Gertrude Stein and Sherman Alexie as naturally as he does Beyonce. Pico's skillful rendering of Teebs's coming-of-age attempts to create, a cohesive identity out of his many selves proves to be entertaining, enlightening, and utterly relatable in the age of the smartphone. (Sept.)
PAGE-TURNER
THE ANGER AND JOY OF A NATIVE-AMERICAN POET IN BROOKLYN
By Peter Moskowitz September 9, 2016
The poet Tommy Pico.
The poet Tommy Pico.
Photograph by Niqui Carter
On a particularly hot day this August, Tommy Pico explained his approach to the work of poetry. A book-length poem he wrote, “IRL,” will come out in September, and he had been giving readings and planning events. Pico grew up on the Viejas Reservation, near San Diego. His dad was a chairman of the reservation and often told his son that he was good at his job because he didn’t like it. This is how Pico now feels about being a poet. “That’s why I’m good at reading,” Pico told me, as we rode the train from a hair appointment to his apartment, in Bushwick. “I don’t want to be the one onstage, but that’s part of the job.”
“IRL” will be published by the independent press Birds, LLC. Pico’s next book, “Nature Poem,” is scheduled for release in May, 2017, from Tin House. Pico, thirty-two, is part of the Kumeyaay nation; he has lived in New York for the past thirteen years. He told me that he uses poetry to square two identities that don’t fit together well: being a poor, queer kid from the rez, and being a pleasure-seeking, technology-addicted New Yorker who would rather chase the boys he meets on apps than think about centuries of pain passed from one generation to another. Poetry is also, he said, a way to make people understand just how hard that squaring is. He wants his readers to feel the disjointedness of his life.
With that goal in mind, Pico, in his poetry, creates unsettling juxtapositions, which can have a comic or a dramatic effect—or, most often, some combination of the two. At one point in “IRL,” he writes, “Some things can go on / forever, like looping ‘You da One’ / by Rihanna or the colonial legacy / called ‘constant Debbie Downer.’” A more solemn example comes earlier in the poem, which centers on a character called Teebs. Teebs is an exaggerated version of the author, in the tradition of Fernando Pessoa’s Álvaro de Campos or Nicki Minaj’s Roman Zolanski. When the poem begins, Teebs is texting with a few different boys, and their banter is light and funny. “If he / said ‘I’ll fuck you / Tuesday’ I would / have :-) :-) :-) If / Muse texted ‘I / want to be with you’ / I would have a / minor coronary incident, / would have to dic- / tate this from Woodhull / Medical Center.” Then Teebs is distracted from his texts, by Facebook, where people he knows have written posts about wanting to commit suicide. Teebs details some of the suicides he has known and reflects on the idea that “cultural inheritance / is generational trauma.” He decides that the people posting online don’t deserve their hurt. “Stop / fucking posting about / Klonopin, or cutting yourself / or throwing up—Save it / for a shitty poem like a normal / wretch,” Pico writes.
Like Teebs, Pico struggles with what it means to be a Native American so far from the reservation. He told me that he rarely goes back home, because he feels so much guilt for leaving in the first place. He attended Sarah Lawrence College, and for most of his time there he was convinced that he would ultimately return to the Viejas Reservation. He studied in the college’s pre-med program and wrote a senior thesis on diabetes and obesity. He wanted to go back to the reservation with a cure, or at least with new information that could help the kids he saw growing up sick. By his senior year, however, he realized that there was little that an individual doctor could do to solve the array of health problems faced by Native Americans. He began to think about just how deep the troubles on the reservation were, how rooted they were in hundreds of years of colonialism. He felt helpless, so, like many people who don’t know what to do with their lives, he moved to New York.
He got a job at a coffee shop in Williamsburg. His days became so routine, he told me, that he felt like he was floating above his own body. Mostly, he partied and pursued men that he met online. He had stopped writing poetry when he got to college and didn’t start again until a year after he moved to the city. Then, one night in the middle of the summer, he got high and wrote a four-page poem about being attracted to someone he saw on the subway. It felt good to write, Pico said. But it took him another couple of years before he felt like he could write in the way he wanted to, not just about crushes but about history and trauma.
Eventually, Pico learned how to get all the balls in the air, as he put it, and to juggle “the fucking or texting somebody” and the “three hundred years of colonial practices,” his love for the English language and the pleasures of pop culture. He began crafting poems with an eye toward destabilizing his readers and listeners, lulling them into a false sense of security with jokey lines about Grindr and take-out food, getting them to laugh in recognition until suddenly he’s talking about diabetes or the killing of Native Americans and his audience is finding out who can stop laughing the fastest. “I call it Trojan horsing,” Pico explained. “I gotta be, like, ‘This is a gift of a beautiful horse I gave you,’ and then put the drawbridge up, and it’s chaos.”
There’s an aggressiveness in this approach to writing and performing, of which Pico is perfectly aware. “I don’t have a really good relationship with my anger, because I feel like it’s unending,” he told me, sitting in his apartment. Readings provide an opportunity to express some of that anger. “I’m fucking pissed off at everyone sitting in those seats, for the most part, because none of them are Indian people.” Once the reading is over, he said, he can “put the lid back on” that anger.
On a recent Friday, he held a book-release party for “IRL” at a crowded bar near McCarren Park, in Brooklyn. There was karaoke; some of Pico’s friends read. The air conditioning was broken and the stage was lit in a deep green. Pico read from the last part of his book, in which Teebs is onstage with his friend Maud during another karaoke party. Teebs becomes overwhelmed by the thought that his singing voice is being controlled by his Native ancestors:
n then I’m like, crying
at a Beyoncé song
r u kidding me Teebs get
it together bitch My dad grows
his hair long Black waves
cascade down his back b/c knives
crop the ceremony of his
mother’s hair at the NDN boarding
school I cut mine in mourning
for the old life but I grow
my poems long.
A moment later, the boy that Teebs has been following throughout “IRL” texts back, and Teebs asks if he has an air conditioner: “he says / Yes n I just straight up / drop the mic / n Leave.” It feels like a happy ending. But after hearing Pico talk about his two lives—about the pain of not being able to fully inhabit either, reconciling the two only in his poetry—it becomes clear that the last section is less about love than it is about the past and the recognition that it will never leave him.
Peter Moskowitz is a journalist in New York.
‘IRL’ by Tommy Pico
Review by Christopher Soto
November 5, 2016
A few years ago, I invited Tommy Pico to participate in a day-long writing workshop that I wanted to host in my house (which ultimately didn’t occur). I was inspired by Bernadette Meyer’s A Midwinter Day in which she wrote a whole book of poetry in a day’s span. She was the poet (introduced to me by Rachel Zucker) who got me interested in long poems and the idea of the poetry collection as project or experiment. She let me know that not all poetry books have to be constellations of one-page long workshop poems. Not all poems can be excerpted or fit into the confines of a magazine spread. This is what Tommy Pico does. He makes the long poem popular again. He combats the MFA poet with colloquialisms and pop culture.
While reading IRL, I was trying to think about who Tommy Pico sounds like. The answer is quite simple. He sounds like Tommy Pico. He is a native (Kumeyaay) queer poet who relocated from what we call the American Southwest to New York City. I once heard Tommy Pico say that without queerness, he’s not sure whether or not he would be in New York City. I’ve heard Tommy speak about the weight he felt leaving the reservation. Once, we went to hear Sherman Alexie speak together. He told me “You have no idea, that man saved my life. His writing literally saved my life.” And this is why I know that Tommy Pico is so important. Why Tommy Pico needs to be heard. There are not many other voices like his and for a young queer kid, native kid, weirdo- I believe that Tommy Pico has the ability to save people’s lives.
Pertaining to influences, I hear in Pico’s work, it’s a strange thing to say but I feel like Tommy Pico resembles both Eileen Myles and Morgan Parker. I see the pop cultural references to Beyonce and M.I.A and Amy Winehouse and reflections on contemporary life (mentioning Grindr) which is something that is to me, emblematic of Morgan Parker’s work (contemporary references). I see contracted spelling of words like “yr” and “bc” and I think of Eileen Myles and New York School Poetry. I see a poet who values concision and precision, who does not overly stuff their work with poetic devices. Tommy Pico meanders in thought and emotional gravity. Pop culture allows Tommy Pico to address very political and grave issues, without overburdening the reader emotionally. Pop culture allows Pico to write about “When cultural inheritance / is generational trauma / hunted by governments / by Spain, by Mexico, by the United / States, by pathogens by / black mold in shitty mobile / homes…”
In the first twenty pages of IRL I had already cried and laughed. The emotional range of Pico’s work is superb. He writes, “In college I met a Whitney / as in the museum / n I’m like Whitney like / Houston? Money is not a- / mused.” His work makes me giggle then blows my mind. Seamlessly flowing from one thought to the next. This book is meant to be read in the summer. Pico says that he is working on different books to resemble different seasons. While reading IRL, on the train in Brooklyn this summer, I feel human, I feel seen, I feel like I’m having a conversation with the book, or rather IRL is narrating what is going on around me IRL. “If walking to the JMZ / summertime and you want / to show your legs– / take Scholes to Lorimer,/ cross to the other side of the park. / if you walk parkside, / men on the benches / will call you faggot.” IRL is the sort of book that you bring to the beach, read on the train, hug when you ‘re lonelyy. It is not a book that is easily excerpted, but rather it is best when read in whole. How beautiful that Tommy Pico has created a work of art which so closely captures what it feels like to be alive TODAY.
Now, faggotry is the last part of the book which I’d like to discuss. Much of IRL follows New York love life, different boys and dates, but most importantly- Muse. Muse embodies different forms. “Let’s call Muse a heavenly / body, in the sense that I can’t / even think about it” or “Muse is romanticized / by the idea of possession and lord / knows I can’t live unoccupied” or “the writers and artists / the musicians, my old / roommates, Muses, lost.” Everywhere that the narrator in the book goes, Muse is there. Now, my thoughts turn to Lorca and conversations about Muse, the Archangel, and Duende. Where does poetry come from? Tommy Pico finds poetry everywhere, in everything. IRL is brilliant because it allows the reader to find poetry in their everyday life, too.
IRL
By Tommy Pico
Birds LLC
Paperback, 9780991429868, 98 pp.
September 2016
- See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/11/05/irl-by-tommy-pico/#sthash.MkEsbqv8.dpuf
Tommy Pico's IRL Is Better Than the Internet
by Rich Smith • Jul 26, 2016 at 12:46 pm
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Tommy Picos poetry is hilarious, thoughtfully sassy, politically sophisticated, and loaded with language play.
In his debut book of poems, IRL, Tommy Pico filters the internet's endless feeds through poetry. NIQUI CARTER
Tommy Pico has TWO new books of poetry coming out, both from presses who typically publish very good work. First up is his first full-length book, IRL, forthcoming from Birds LLC. The second is Nature Poem, which will be published by Portland-based book purveyors, Tin House. If you are wondering whether it's weird for someone to have a second book contract signed before the first book even comes out, I can tell you that yes, yes it is a little weird. But after reading Pico's work, and after seeing him read, you get why presses are getting excited. You should be getting excited, too.
IRL is a high-velocity 98-page long poem with several places to stop along the way and catch your breath. In classic long poem fashion, IRL begins with an invocation of the Muse, a beloved who inspires the poet's speaker to sound off. Throughout, Pico experiments with refrain, little clusters of rhyming activity, and other forms of language play that serve to bind the poem's many thematic elements together. Text-speak colors but doesn't overwhelm Pico's chatty, attitude-heavy lines. The collective effect of these choices is a feeling of immediacy—you feel as if you're inside the head of a confidant, watching his brain spark around topics as seemingly divergent as blood quantum and salt 'n' vinegar chips.
The poem's speaker is off the Rez, in Brooklyn, on Grindr, and full of declarative statements about injustices related to queerness and indigenous people, philosophical queries about the redemptive possibilities of poetry, and praise for Beyoncé and Mariah.
He's also fucking hysterical, sometimes in corny, pun-based ways. I won't list one of the book's puns here, because it would be cruel. A pun alone is terrible. But a pun within the context of a poem radiates with meaning. In the case of IRL, the wordplay signals a speaker who cannot help himself. He has to make the joke. Because wordplay is pleasurable, sure, but also because it offers an agreeable pathway through the unknown. One word suggests another, for instance, and reveals some heretofore hidden idea. If you keep following the path—from phase, to moon, to mons, etc.—you might discover something about yourself and about the world around you.
(But I don't mean to oversell the pun thing. Mostly the jokes are clever, the political commentary is strong and evidence of an exasperated and reaching soul, and the level of melancholy reflection is sophisticated and self-aware.)
This Saturday, Pico is reading at Hugo House with two other indigenous poets, Seattle's Elissa Washuta and Portland's Demian DinéYazhi’. (Pico grew up on the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay Nation.) Last Sunday I called him up to talk about IRL and Nature Poem.
You seem to have some kind of nickname on the internet. Teebs?
Teebs is a name that stuck in high school. I’m sure I had a clever story for it at one point, but I don’t remember it anymore. It was something my best friends called me. But it's my familiar greeting, which is why I named my Tumblr and my zine series that.
You invoke the muse in IRL! Classic long poem technique.
When I started writing [the poem] I didn’t know what I was doing. I wrote it as a very long Tumblr post. I wanted to write something extremely long so that it would overtake the entire feed, a Tumblr post that would cascade past the traditional Tumblr attention span. You’d be scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and you could never get away from the poem. That was the initial experiment, and that’s what kept me going. As for the Muse in the very beginning—I just wanted to have a different name for this person I had a crush on.
How did the form of Tumblr influence the content of the poem?
When I started writing poems on Tumblr, I was competing with dick picks and cat gifs. I had to make my voice sharper and clearer so that after reading the first couple of words you would want to go to the next word. If I failed, you would just scroll down. So part of it was competition with the feed itself. There’s this idea that our attention spans have been watered down or erased, and part of the challenge was seeing how long I could hold someone's attention.
Did any poetry influence your turn to the long poem?
A Tape for the Turn of the Year by A.R. Ammons. He’d written the poem on a piece of adding tape. There were words that were truncated, and they seemed like a really long text message.
You said your grandmother is the last person in your family who knows Kumeyaay? Did you ever learn it?
When I was younger I learned Kumeyaay. My dad was a tribal chairman and my mom worked three jobs. A woman from one of the Kumeyaay villages stayed with us and watched me while my parents were gone. She didn’t speak English, and so I learned Spanish and Kumeyaay. I was super young, I didn’t know I was learning the language, of course. But later on I didn’t have anybody to practice with. There was a legislative push to cleanse American Indian people of their language and culture. The same policies didn’t exist in Mexico, and so the language is very much alive there.
Why do you feel as if it's important to preserve that language?
I think that—it’s a sense that I tried into impart in IRL, that there is something primordially indigenous and Kumeyaay about me that I don’t have access to any longer. [The speaker] feels as if he’s bereft of spirituality and language—that sense of absence and that sense of loss is just something you live with. But that connection to Kumeyaay, that understanding that he is of the ancient language, that can allay some of the grief. I suspect anyway, I don’t know.
In the book you mention smoking weed and talking about the idea that people are composed of the consciousnesses that came before them, and that if we’re merely descendants of those consciousnesses, then really people have known each other for hundreds of years. Are you into that notion?
I was when I wrote that. And I reconnect to that idea under the influence of herbal treats. But I’m a little bit more of a skeptic when my consciousness is unadulterated by certain things. There’s something inside of me that does believe that I owe, on a secular level, my life and my livelihood to my ancestors who wanted to survive. So I do feel like there’s a heft of people lifting me up. In that sense I can get behind the idea that consciousnesses can exist outside of their bodies. But no one idea is set in stone with me! I can learn something tomorrow that will change the way I think about something.
There’s lots of Mariah and Beyoncé in this poem. You sing their songs in Karaoke?
Depends on the mood that I’m in. If I am starting out in a relatively sober state, I might choose something safer. To ring the joint on a couple of shots and a beer, I might stunt a little bit more. I have a really flexible voice, so I can approximate singing in a lot of different styles. Right now I feel like my go-to song is “Hold On We’re Going Home.” I really like to sing, “That’s the Way Love Goes” by Janet Jackson, because that’s a song that everyone forgets they remember. Careless whisper by George Michael—that saxophone hits and everybody knows what it is.
"That's the Way Love Goes" is kind of a downer.
I don’t mind bringing it down.
When did you start singing karaoke?
I sang at church a lot when I was younger. I sang a lot until I was made aware by other people that I had a very girly-sounding voice. And it became, like—when you’re a young queer person, sometimes your voice can be a danger, your voice can expose you in ways you don’t really control. So I stopped singing. I wouldn’t raise my hand and speak in class. I got very self-conscious of my voice. It wasn’t until my mid-20s when I came back to my voice and I said, “I’m the shit. This sounds awesome.” I could get up in front of people and feel empowered by it.
How’s Nature Poem going to be different from IRL? Is it also a long poem?
It is a long poem. I see it as a sequel of sorts to IRL. The 'I' in Nature Poem, the hero of the poem, is still just trying to figure it all out. He suspects that poetry or singing or art or whatever is a thing that is waiting for him, or is an access point for a higher power or something. He’s deciding to take on the legacy of American nature poetry, and the ways in which, as an American Indian person, he doesn’t want to write a nature poem because it’s too stereotypical. So the book is about him not wanting to write a nature poem and in effect writing a nature poem.
Do you feel some sort of low-level hum of antagonization when reading a nature poem?
One of the ways I feel suspicious about nature poetry is the way in which it presents indigenous American people as though they’re part of the natural landscape, as though they’re one with the natural landscape, and that dehumanizes them. If they’re just another feature of the land, then it’s okay to mow them down like grass.
But not all nature poems have Native American people in them, right?
No, but it’s sort of that Emersonian idea of nature as this domain of purity or essential goodness. I don’t know, I don’t believe it. That's the thing the character in Nature Poem is not vibing with. He's like, "I live in a city, I give blowjobs in bathrooms, I don’t give a fuck. I’ll slap a tree across the face."
Nature Poem
Tommy Pico. Tin House, $14.95 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-1-941040-63-8
MORE BY AND ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Pico (IRL) centers his second book-length poem on the trap of conforming to identity stereotypes as he ponders his reluctance to write about nature as a Native American. This is “fodder for the noble savage/ narrative,” he writes as ignorant people ask, “do I feel more connected to nature/ bc I’m NDN.” Other similarly problematic expectations are wryly discussed: “An NDN poem must reference alcoholism, like// I started drinking again after Mike Brown and Sandra Bland and Charleston/ I felt so underwater it made no sense to keep dry.” As an extension of this dilemma, Pico poses questions about what is natural human behavior: Is it natural for a football player to assault his girlfriend? Is colonialism natural? What about the feeling one gets while listening to Beyoncé’s “Mine”? Pico’s alter-ego “Teebs” remains in constant motion, leaping from the dentist’s office to drag queen karaoke night to the movie theater: “I’m an adult I only let myself have/ candy at the movies/ so I’ve been going to the movies A LOT.” In making the subliminal overt, Pico reclaims power by calling out microaggressions and drawing attention to himself in the face of oppression, “the way the only thing more obvious than your body/ is leaving yr shirt on in the pool.” (May)
This review has been corrected. A previous version stated that the author is represented by Lauren Smythe of Inkwell, but he is no longer represented by an agent.
Book Review: ‘Nature Poem’ by Tommy Pico – An Epic Poem
Posted by: Richard Marcus 2 days ago in Book Reviews, Books, Editor Pick: Books, Editor Picks, Poetry 0 Comments
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Nature Poem, the new long form poem from Tommy Pico published by Penguin Random House is as brilliant a piece of social/cultural commentary as I’ve read in a long time. On top of that, its also as exceptional a piece of poetry you’re liable to read this year. I say piece, singular, because at first it may seem like a collection of individual poems but as you read they begin to transform into a kind of stream of conscience, Homeresque, Odysseus, trying to navigate his way through the obstructions on his way home.
However, in this instance home isn’t necessarily a tangible place – it’s more like Pico is trying to discover his place in the world as a queer positive Native American who loves living in the city and wouldn’t write a Nature Poem if you paid him. So, don’t expect any New Age like peons in praise of being one with nature or some other noble savage shit. This is urban, slick, and very much part of today’s world. He uses the language of twitter – hashtags – and the abbreviations common to text messages in his work – with none of the degradation of the language’s power you’d expect.
In fact, you’d best leave aside any and all expectations you might have about poetry, Native Americans, and anything else before you start reading this book – because nothing will be as you expect it. For someone, whose texting and twittering skills are as close to luddite as you can get without smashing phones with hammers, the short forms and short cuts in language utilized by idiom were initially a barrier.
However, Pico’s use of abbreviations became something that blended into the surroundings of his poetry. They take place in the fast pace of the urban environment where everybody is sending messages, which aren’t necessarily the same as the signals they’re sending, and the information is coming rapid fire and from all directions.
However, there is no dross in these texts. In fact the sparseness of the short form is like an emotional punch to solar plexus in places. Sharp and to the point the words catch you off guard as your mind catches up their implications a few seconds after you read them.
I can’t write a nature poem bc English is some Stockholm shit, makes me complicit in my tribe’s erasure – Why shd I give a fuck abt “poetry”? It’s a container for words like whilst, hither and tamp. It conducts something of permanent and universal interest. Poems take something like an apple, turn it into the skin, the seeds, and the core. They talk abt gravity, abt Adam, and Snow White and the stem of knowledge. To me? Apple is a NDN drag queen who dresses like a milkmaid and sings “Half Breed” by Cher
This one stanza tells me more about the state of living as a conquered/colonized person than any number of ernest political rants. How can you use the shapes and forms of the culture responsible for trying to eradicate your own to express something about yourself? Even the difference in his use of the word Apple is an interpretation defined by a cultural reference most people reading this review won’t understand.
A constant refrain running through the book is Pico’s continued argument with himself and nature about writing the dreaded “Nature Poem”. However, the more he struggles with everything about it, including the nature of their relationship and his desire to embrace his new urban landscape, the deeper he delves into his otherness – what separates him from those around him.
He might not have that spiritual relationship with the land New Age books stores promise us the indigenous people of North America are born with, but he can’t stop talking about the land his people come from. He might be in New York City but he writes about the Viejas Reservation his Kumeyaay nation lives on in California an awful lot. However, it’s in these writings that Pico best captures what’s it like to be a so-called Urban Indian. The struggle to find a place among questions like, “What’s your NATIONALITY?”….”but I know when he says NATIONALITY he’s saying you look vaguely not like a total white boy”.
Nature Poem is a brilliantly written piece of work. While the language may be a mash up of text abbreviations and urban slang, it not only doesn’t detract from the poem’s emotional impact, it actually increases it. Like e e cummings before him, Pico has taken the vernacular of his time and turned it into high art. If you read only one book of poetry this year, make sure this is it.