If you have ever believed that buried somewhere in the throughline of your seemingly disparate taste in movies, music, video games, and television lies some deep and unknowable truth about who you are, I like poetry because it enables me to be weird in a way that fiction never did. is for you. If you just rolled your eyes at that suggestion that there’s anything deep about our consumption of pop culture, or laughed at the thought, this collection is probably for you, too.
From combining the majesty of David Attenborough’s vision of nature with the fervor of ‘90s hip hop to the most sympathetic set of Justin Bieber poems you are likely to read, Tager’s powerhouse collection explores the intensely personal through the lens of the pop cultural mixtape. A masterclass in juxtaposition, Michael B. Tager’s wild new collection (and I do mean wild), Pop Culture Poetry, had me in a chokehold.
“I had a huge crush on RuPaul when I first saw her on TV,” Mike mentioned offhandedly in recent conversations about his book, its launch, and the events he’s doing all over the place to celebrate its upcoming release. If such admissions from a self-described cishet white guy surprise you, the rest of our conversation, and Mike’s collection as a whole, has quite a bit more where that came from in store. In 500 Days of Summer, Chloë Grace Moretz’s character, Rachel, proclaims, “Just because she likes the same bizarro crap you do doesn’t mean she’s your soul mate.”
Fuck you, Rachel. After talking with Michael B. Tager about the bizarro crap we like, I’m convinced now, more than ever, that we’re soulmates.
Jacob Budenz: Juxtaposition is obviously a powerful tool in this collection, evident especially in the nature poems. Two questions here: one, can you talk a little bit about the choice to pair David Attenborough with a number of iconic rappers? Two, do any of these poems describe actual scenes from Planet Earth or other corners of Attenborough’s body of work?
Michael B. Tager: I write poetry for myself and once I have a piece I like, that’s when I work on it to make it fun for others. When I wrote the first Attenborough poem—”Fall Little Ducklings”—I envisioned my favorite (slow mo) scene in Planet Earth, when the baby ducklings jump from their tree. Since they bounced, and I was writing from Sir Attenborough’s POV, I wrote “Bounce with Me” and heard Bow Wow’s song in my head. It made me giggle, so I ran with it and created this alternate reality where David Attenborough was this 90s Hip Hop afficionado because… why the hell not? But most of the poems do directly reference particular moments. While some of the later poems in the series don’t directly reflect actual scenes, and in the last poem the whole thing morphs into vampire mythology, the kernel of it all is still (weirdly) based in reality.
I like poetry because it enables me to be weird in a way that fiction never did. When I write fiction again, I imagine the lessons I’ve learned writing these poems will translate.
JB: Is there a line or set of lines in this collection that you’d identify as its sort of heart or thesis? I’d like to say it’s “I believe nothing / if idols don’t tell me” from “Violent, Happy,” but I think that’s probably too easy.
MBT: That’s one of them, for sure. But the Jan Brady piece is the thesis, 100%. I probably hear Marcia, Marcia, Marcia in my head every single day, directed at everything. It’s such a cry for attention, but also a deflection from the self because it’s external. It’s like, take care of your own shit, Jan. Don’t worry about others, Jan. Your parents and family don’t define you, Jan.
Yes, I am in therapy, why do you ask?
JB: I’ve noticed a trend in contemporary poetry toward the hyper-personal with a tinge of the abject or the overshare (mea culpa!). With the exception of a few poems, the speakers in this poem divulge minimal personal detail, making those moments of vulnerability all the more punchy. Was this an intentional coyness? What motivated the choice?
MBT: I once thought I was going to write a lot of essays, because essays are probably my favorite thing to read. However, after writing them for a couple years and hearing over and over again that I needed to be more vulnerable, I abandoned writing them. Why? Because I hate being earnestly vulnerable. I don’t mind sharing vulnerable details, but I need to do it in my way, in person and in writing.
I think the poems are more personal than you may think, but I accept that it’s probably less than I imagine. However, it definitely is a choice to be judicious about when I drop them. I’m not into poetry-as-diary, just like I’m not into essays that are all about trauma and vulnerability. I find them too emotionally taxing and my emotions are already taxed from living in this world. I had an ex girlfriend who watched the saddest, most effed up movies possible on repeat (she owned Requiem for a Dream and watched it on repeat) because she enjoyed the catharsis of it all. Me, I go into a cycle of pain in my head whenever that happens.
That’s how I feel about my writing as well. I like a good needle drop, I believe in telling people the truth, but I want it to be sparse and deliberate. I don’t immediately unload my deepest truths to my friends, I build to that. With the poems, there’s a lot of moments of bald truth, but there’s a whole lot of moments of truth where I’m being funny about it. I’m not joking, just smiling.
JB: As both a poet and the managing editor of a press that puts out poetry collections, are there any trends in contemporary poetry you’re particularly excited about? Any you’re hoping will go away?
MBT: I dunno. I wrote the Attenborough poems because I’m so damned tired of tree poems. I love a good tree poem—I love trees and poems—but I see a lot of them. Similarly, I see a lot of body poems these days and while the body is important and should be poemed, I’m always like, “Can we be more specific? What about your body? What about your bones? Are we talking about the tibia?”
That being said, I’m not really a poetry expert at all, so trends aren’t on my radar. I think I have more fun—and possibly more success—as a poet than I ever did at fiction because I have no training in poetry at all. I never took a poetry class, never went through a workshop or anything like that. I know the basic rules because I have a lot of experience in writing and I’ve been through other classes and workshops, and I know good poetry when I see it in publishing, but as a writer, I am just having a good time.
I had the same thing with fiction, to be honest. I wanted to be a fantasy writer, but I write terrible fantasy. I don’t like the horror genre, but every horror story I wrote was snapped up immediately, because I was surprising people. I didn’t have any bad habits to unlearn, so I could just write some cool things.
JB: I appreciated how much you varied your approach to the references in this collection. On one end of the spectrum, for instance, I’d say the David Attenborough poems tap heavily into the reader’s familiarity with the songs referenced, whereas numerous poems in the Yasumi section are quite accessible without prior knowledge (I’ll confess I read this section without internet service and had to look Matsuno up later). Did you have any particular method for determining where and how and to what extent these references factored in?
MBT: They all started with pop culture. I don’t have a particularly interesting answer to this. I’d be listening to a Bjork album and think how much I liked Bjork and how defiantly weird and amazing she is and then I’d write a poem about or to Bjork. Or I’d be playing Ogre Battle and recall that it’s a video game equally inspired by the band Queen and the ethnic cleaning in Bosnia during the 1990s, which, to me, is an examplar of the art and meaning that goes into video games. Pop culture is many things, but sometimes it’s magic.
JB: Jan Brady, David Attenborough & ’90s/aughts hip-hop hits, Bjork, Taye Diggs, Lucy Liu, Yasumi Matsuno, Justin Bieber, Patrick Swayze, Whoopi Goldberg, David Hasselhoff, the industry of K-Pop, The Golden Girls—with the exception of “Ghost Stories,” each section has an anchoring reference point. What links them for you? How did you decide who got to be the North Star of each section?
MBT: The link is that I love them and they’re about me, even when they’re not about me. The Ghost Stories are a black sheep and I struggled with including them because they are such an outlier. You know, wanting things to be symmetric and follow a specific pattern/path is kind of a thing… that I don’t have to do in poetry, or really in anything. Once I realized that, “Oh hey, I can be weird and include whatever I want as long as it makes sense, and even if it doesn’t, so long as it doesn’t distract, well, fuck it!” It was a real load off my mind.
So the North Star was determined by me loving them, and the inspiration that was inspired by that. I would have loved to have had different focal points and I even tried to have them, but the poems either didn’t work and couldn’t get off the ground, or were written but wound up being cut (Carrie Brownstein, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Barry Bonds). I think I push back a little at the idea that inspiration doesn’t matter as much as perspiration in writing. Kind of like the nature/nurture question, the inspiration/perspiration split for me is somewhere around 50/50. The best writing requires a whole lot of hard work, but the pieces that start with a truly inspired spark are the better ones, you know?
JB: Between the homoerotic Taye poems and the eminence of a bunch of queer pop culture canon—Golden Girls, Bjork, Queen, Whoopi, arguably David Hasselhoff, and even the glee with which queer culture has embraced “Sure, Jan” beyond the appropriate life of a meme, etc.—I have to ask: were you interfacing with queer culture as intentionally and frequently as I was reading into it? Were you writing “for the gays,” as it were, or are we just doomed to hunt for the queer subtext whether it’s there or not? [A note from the interviewer, here, is that this particular question was handled over the phone, then revisited over drinks at the Ottobar following a chat about Mike’s forthcoming book launch. What follows is a sort of highlight reel of several conversations:]
MBT: It’s something I’ve been asked before in different ways. I read those poems (the overtly queer ones) in front of two queer people, and they both said, I have a lot of questions, Mike, this changed my perception of you. The poems about Taye Diggs, plus I wrote a slash fiction about Kyle MacLachlan. They’re not ironic or taking the piss. Sexuality is a spectrum, and I can be a cishet dude, and every so often those buttons are pressed. By and large, the majority of people I hang with are queer. My cishet contingency is pretty limited. That’s been a running theme for a while. I’ve been watching Golden Girls since I was, like, 10, and I’ve been wondering about my place in the whole thing. I don’t identify as queer in the slightest, and I’m very comfortable in that.
To answer your question, I’m not writing “for the gays.” I’m writing for me. The expectation that personal experience is generalizable. I wrote about two of my favorite movies, In the Mood for Love and Kiki’s Delivery Service. I’m not a 13-year-old, Japanese girl witch, but we all are. And I didn’t grow up in post-WWII Hong Kong, but I still see myself in them. They’re uncritically not written for Western male audiences. I would say I’m not interfacing with queer culture as intentionally. I think I’ve just been enmeshed in queer culture for the majority of my life. I hang out with artists almost exclusively, and the first time I found my tribe was theater, and there are a lot of queer people in theater. Even my other subcultures like the gym or Magic the Gathering are queer welcoming spaces.
We’ve established that Golden Girls is something I was into at 8. I would hesitate to say incidental, but more self-selecting on a subconscious level. Queen, I like their music, but I happen to really get into it because of a videogame that was inspired by Queen, and Whoopi was through Star Trek. Hasselhoff was because I’ve read so many essays about Bay Watch. There’s something in me that’s kind of attracted to figures who are very defiantly themselves. They’re just not—I don’t know any of these people, but I’ve read a lot about them—they’re just doing their thing, on their terms without caring. My favorite thing about Hasselhoff is that the first season was a total failure, and he cared so much about the show that he spent his entire fortune investing in it, and besides Seinfeld it’s the most syndicated show. Bjork and Whoopi are like, “Fuck it, I’m going to be me,” and that’s why I was drawn to them, and that might be a parallel to why the queer community has glommed onto them as well.
If you’re in Baltimore, you can catch Mike’s book launch at Ottobar on April 5th or visit his website (http://www.michaelbtager.com/) for the explosion of events to follow.
JMWW 