Introducing Scout Kamper-Hinson: Trust Us, he has "IT"

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

All right, this is Brenda with Let's Wine with Brendan Stacy, and we have a special guest with us today. We have Scout. He is um aspiring author, and um we've gotten the opportunity to read some of his poetry, and we're very excited to have him here.

SPEAKER_02 0:13

To have him here is like a dream come true. Because to me, this is a kid who he has it after getting to know him for two hours. Do you see that? Definitely, definitely, definitely. Scout, you're gonna be, I'm getting your autograph before you leave today. In case you just dump me on the side of the street and never come back and be on our podcast. I'm getting your autograph. We're not blowing smoke, we know things. You know, I have a history of knowing things about things, and so does she. Anywho, I will let you talk eventually, but first we're gonna talk about you like you're not here. So he's not bounding gag, I swear. But anyway, it is like do you know what an it factor is? Do you know what that means?

SPEAKER_00 1:01

No, not really.

SPEAKER_01 1:03

It that means it means other people can see something in you that maybe you don't see in yourself, but it's there.

SPEAKER_02 1:11

You have desire, you have dreams, you can see that in you just having dinner with you tonight. Yes, just talking to you and reading your poetry, definitely. Do you understand what that means?

SPEAKER_00 1:22

I hope it works out. I do have a desire and I do have dreams. So are your big dreams in writing? Definitely. That's my only dream.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

Okay, so and you're in school right now for that too.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

I am. I go to online school, Vermont College of Fine Arts. Nothing wrong with writing. Get to stay at home, make money, spend less money on school, and still learn the same stuff. It's all subjective, anyways.

SPEAKER_03 1:44

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 1:44

Yeah, my only dream is writing success. I have no other It took me a long time to get rid of the dream of complete fame, you know, like just stardom.

SPEAKER_03 1:54

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

But yeah, I I've I've I sequestered that desire, and my only desire is to be writing a claim, it's is to have a claim in writing and to have success as a writer, whatever that means, regardless of financial or economic. Any sort of gain other than just the political understanding that Scout Camper Henson is a good writer. That's all I want.

SPEAKER_02 2:14

I get that. I want people to recognize it. And your personality, the way you look, the way you look at people, the way you just looked at me right now. It's like you know, like I feel like you have it, you have everything. You got a Clark Gable look going on. No, but it's not because he's beautiful. It's because he's I'm beautiful? It's because he's interesting. Right. And it's because he is smart. He's an it kid. He is an it kid.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

Brenda has intelligent questions I asked you, so well, I don't know how intelligent they are, but I was wondering, are most of most of the things you write about, are they your own experiences?

SPEAKER_00 3:02

Yes and no.

SPEAKER_01 3:04

Yes and no. I know you gave us a folder. Were some of those um school assignments kind of things?

SPEAKER_00 3:09

Well, for that, so for the Vermont College of Fine Arts, it's all self-based curriculum. So it's technically all a school assignment and all not a school assignment.

SPEAKER_03 3:18

All right.

SPEAKER_00 3:18

But there is probably about 30 in here, 30 out of the like what, a hundred I gave you that were from before VCFA that are just on my own.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

Because I saw that some of them don't fit in the same, they don't have the same feeling as the other ones. So I thought, oh, these are school assignments.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

Well, let me say this. So my poetry, I I'm working on a manuscript right now because at the end I'm graduating in the May, in May of this year.

SPEAKER_01 3:43

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

And for the end of the for the graduation, they want all students to have a small manuscript of their work. And for this manuscript, I've decided to base it on just poems about me. So I do have a good chunk of poetry that's just Scout and what his life is. But I think I have three sects of poetry. So one of the sect is sex poetry.

SPEAKER_01 4:03

And just like read some of that.

SPEAKER_00 4:05

Raunchiness and the I feel like it's it's intrinsically American. The the ideal of sex as a pedestal that one can step on for spiritual enlightenment.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

Okay, I got it. I got that.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

It's not just an experience that one can feel, it's like a way to become something more through sex. So that's one of my forms of poetry. One of them is scout as a human. How have I, as a writer, evolved and what does that mean in my own writing? And the other is vampires. I write a lot about vampires. I like vampires. I don't know if I have any vampire stuff in here. I do. I do, wonderfully. So yeah, when I started at this at VCFA, I was like, I want to write a collection of poetry just about vampires and how vampires interact with people and specifically the victim mindset of the person that the vampire is pursuing.

SPEAKER_03 4:56

Right.

SPEAKER_00 4:57

And how you're either you feel like you're the prey, or you feel like you're the person that's wanted, or you feel like the person that's fulfilling a need, or you feel like the person that is being extorted, and just how there's so many different emotional responses to the idea of somebody needs you for their life. So those are the three versions of my poetry. And when I write, when I sit down to write a poem, I'm in one of those three modes at all times when I'm writing a poem.

SPEAKER_02 5:25

I know. I'm like what? Because that is way deeper and it's fabulous. And again, it boy. And then I'm just what I know. I know.

SPEAKER_01 5:42

I'm getting your signature before you leave the house today. Okay. And one of the questions I wanted to ask, because I've kind of dabbled in writing myself, how do you feel about AI?

SPEAKER_00 5:50

Uh, the best answer is nervous because it's such a frontier. So, right when I graduated from undergrad at the University of South Carolina, I got a job with Outlier AI, which is an online program, an online job program where they give you, I guess, fabricated, is the best word to say, fabricated AI prompts and responses where it's test, they're testing AI to see how it would respond. And then me as the reviewer, I choose to either validate or invalidate the response. So, right when I finished my degree in English, my first job was like, is AI good enough at understanding the written language that I just studied? So because of that, I definitely see the frontier of AI and I see that it's quickly evolving and expanding. I only worked there for about three months, and in those three months, I moved from just looking at written responses to then looking at audio responses from AI to then looking at both at both audio and visual response. And it's like, okay, even though the content is the same, I'm seeing an evolution of just the technological and electronic side of AI, even more than just the linguistic understanding of it. So that was kind of scary. So yeah, I'm just nervous about it, and I'm nervous about the fact that it can become so indecipherable. What's what I'm really scared about is the lack of teaching, the lack of uh what's the word?

SPEAKER_02 7:16

Knowledge.

SPEAKER_00 7:17

Yeah, I guess knowledge. The lack of knowledge about it. It's like, how am I gonna teach the future generation about this? I mean, you you give a five-year-old a phone, they're not gonna know what's artificial intelligence and what's not. It's not even about, oh, is my poem mine? Is my poem an AI poem? It's like the future of the entire human race does not it there's a chance they will never be able to understand the difference between artificial intelligence created stuff and human-created stuff. Very scary is extremely scary. But from just a writing standpoint, me personally, I feel very confident in my own work. Because I've written poetry with AI a few times, and it's just there's no comparison between something that I can write and something that a computer can write because the only thing a computer can do is follow a formula. And the expression of writing is when you understand and you dissect a formula and then you're able to deviate from it in specific points and you're able to highlight your deviation specifically to the reader. And the reason that's powerful is because the reader can understand where you have deviated from the formula. On the flip side, what's scary is that in the future people won't be able to understand the deviations because all they see is the formula itself. All they see is artificial intelligence creating writing based on the Shakespearean iambic sonnet. Oh, every single poem must be an iambic sonnet because that's what AI says. That is that's the scary part. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:42

No, it is. It's taking our resources. AI can't have our power.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

I know. Plus, even people who are, you know, it takes away people who are truly talented. I feel like it takes away from artists and writers and poets and Yeah. I mean, it's doing it's got me kind of in a slump. I mean, if it wasn't for this podcast, you know, I I don't know if I would continue. I have outlines up there and poetry up there, and I don't know how much further I would take it.

SPEAKER_00 9:24

It's very discouraging to see a computer create a complete body of work in 30 seconds and not see the gallons of water and the the watts of energy that it's wasting just to do that. And then be like, well, it would take me at least two weeks just to be able to create this outline and write and turn this outline into a draft, and then turn that draft into a final draft, and then edit that final draft. And seeing the difference in time is scary. Yeah, it's hard to see time as a resource compared to water or energy, even though they are the same. And that that is the true difference between artificial intelligence anything and human created anything. It's that we are exchanging the resource of time with the resource of water and energy. It's a sort of economic gain. You can quantify economically water and energy, but you cannot economically quantify time in the same way as you can quantify water and energy.

SPEAKER_01 10:21

You're right. That's deep. Touching you'd be good. When you are writing and creating, which you have created some really good work. I was just curious because I thought about ordering a free write. It's uh, you know, it keeps you away from the internet. It's kind of like a word processor. And I mean, when you write, are you just doing your own thing on a computer or are you tempted to use the internet? See, I I try to stay away from that, but I research everything. So it's kind of I need it nearby, but I will still write things by hand and then convert to the computer.

SPEAKER_00 10:52

Yeah. I'll go a little in depth into this. So I want to get into Scrivener, which is like a screenwriting program. Everybody at VCFA is like, use Scrivener if you want to write novels. Well, I don't write novels, first off, but maybe I want to write a novel, right?

SPEAKER_02 11:08

I know, you have shit to talk about now.

SPEAKER_00 11:13

So I need to get into Scrivener. Uh other than that, I I have a typewriter at home. So I got this badass typewriter for$12 at a thrift store. How neat is that? And it was broken, and all I had to do was flip one switch and it started working. So that was awesome. So I have a nice typewriter at home. And when I'm feeling real manual, I get on the typewriter.

SPEAKER_01 11:33

Oh, yeah. I love the click of a typewriter.

SPEAKER_00 11:35

Yeah, it's nice. And the hum, the constant hum, it's like when you get bored, instead of looking around, you just listen to the hum. And then you keep on typing. And that's really good. So I've written a lot of short stories on the typewriter. If I'm in a short story mood, I'll write on the typewriter for sure. And then poetry, if I have to hit a deadline, which barely happens, but if I'm looking up submissions and I see that there's a submission for a specific day, and I need to hit a deadline for that submission, and it's like, this is poetry specifically about gothic love in the southeast. Okay, I'm gonna sit down on my computer, write that on my word processors to get it done.

SPEAKER_03 12:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:11

Otherwise, I usually write first on my notebook. I always walk around with the notebook. I learned that actually from I just I used to be really into stand-up comedy like three years ago. And every stand-up comedian is like.

SPEAKER_02 12:23

Do you love Jerry Seinfeld?

unknown 12:24

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 12:24

I love it. I love Jerry Seinfeld. I love all Seinfeld. I really like uh the Mr. Show. I like Bob Odenkirk and David Cross. They're hilarious. And then most SNL is good. I like 2000s to 2012. 2000 to 2012 S NL is. Yeah, it's all in the past. I don't uh there's nothing recent that I'm like, yeah, it's doesn't seem like a sneak to one start. Zach Galifanakis? Yeah, he's funny.

SPEAKER_02 12:53

I like though, you know, bubbles. I love it.

SPEAKER_00 12:55

Yeah, I've got to do it.

SPEAKER_02 12:59

Yeah. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:01

But yeah, when I have to write down, when I have to sit down and hit a deadline either for that or for a packet, which is for my college, we have to send in six to eight poems every single month. So I have a packet due what? Four days or fourteen.

SPEAKER_02 13:16

Have you written any?

SPEAKER_00 13:17

I have four out of seven poems. So I'll probably have to do a little sit-down and can one be about us? It might be.

SPEAKER_02 13:23

Uh-oh. I know.

SPEAKER_00 13:26

It probably will be. This is a a very intriguing and enticing experience. All-encompassing.

SPEAKER_02 13:33

Thank you. I know. Our studio, it is a vibe, right? Yeah. I mean.

SPEAKER_00 13:39

It's good.

SPEAKER_01 13:40

We want to talk about, yeah. I don't know. Anything you want to tell us or read, or we would love to hear a poll.

SPEAKER_00 13:46

So yeah. I sit down. I if I have a deadline, I write on the computer. Otherwise, I go notebook, revision on the piece of paper. I really like annotation, and I want in the future, eventually, to have a book of poetry published with annotations on each page. Because I think the biggest hurdle for poetry is rereading the poem. Nobody wants to reread a poem, you know? Because when you read fiction, you only have to read it once. You read the page and you go to the next page. With poetry, in order to unlock the full experience, you have to read the, you have to reread the poem and you have to understand how the beginning interacts with the end and how the middle interacts with how the beginning interacts with the end. There's multiple parts to each poem because rather than trying to convey a narrative, it's using each word artistically to create an image. So by adding annotations to my poetry, I've I believe that I can lead or guide the reader into understanding how I, as the writer, have created the poem. And that will help them understand my process as well as the image that I'm trying the final image I'm trying to create.

SPEAKER_01 14:56

It's amazing. Are you a fan, Brenda? Yes. I will be buying.

SPEAKER_00 15:01

That was my first idea. That's so much work. So right now, what I'm doing is just shrinking everything down because I just have so much work. I mean, I wish I could say I'm prolific. I'm I'm I'm semi-prolific with my work because I just have a lot of it, but I don't have so much that it's crazy. I don't have an archive yet, you know?

SPEAKER_01 15:19

Well, you're getting there.

SPEAKER_00 15:20

I'm getting there. I can't wait to have an archive. Then I just go back. What did I write eight years ago? So yeah, I'm excited to do that. And I really like working on the annotations and then seeing how my annotations move between each draft. I'm definitely a multi-draft writer. There's this, I don't know who said it. But there's this, there's some poet, and he said that all poets are either foxes or hedgehogs. And hedgehogs, they exist in their own space and they do the same thing over and over again. So a hedgehog, he wakes up and he goes and gets food, and he goes and gets water, he goes to the bathroom, he goes to sleep, and he's covered in his spines and he does what he needs to do, and that's it. And the fox, he wakes up and he's cunning, and he looks around, he's like, What am I gonna do today? He's gonna hunt.

SPEAKER_03 16:04

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 16:05

Am I gonna get a rabbit today? Am I gonna get a squirrel today? Am I gonna get a bird today? Am I gonna eat bugs today? Am I just gonna drink water today? What part of the woods am I gonna go to? So I see myself more of a more of a fox. I think I explore and I do a lot of different themes and genres throughout all my work.

SPEAKER_03 16:21

Right.

SPEAKER_00 16:21

And I think that's because my voice as a poet is not distinctly linked to a specific experience or time in my life. So, I mean, James Joyce is not a poet, but James Joyce as a writer, he's very linked to Ireland as a byproduct of the United Kingdom coming in and trying to take over Ireland. He needs it's about Ireland nationalism. Every single story and every single poem and everything everything about James Joyce is the nationalist identity of Ireland. That's just what it is. That's James Joyce at all times. And then there's other poets, other writers, and it's like Rilke or let me think of another one. I was gonna say Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald is definitely a hedgehog. Hemingway. Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway, these people they write in different modes, different stories, different narratives, everything. And it's really interesting to see how they work compared to the the hedgehog. And it's like there is a very distinct difference between a fox and a hedgehog. So I feel like with my poetry, I'm always trying to expand and explore. I don't know where I started with that point. But that's okay.

SPEAKER_02 17:38

That's okay. It's okay. It's our podcast. But damn, I know. I'm just sitting here like from the computer.

SPEAKER_00 17:49

I usually spend about an hour and a half on a poem, and after an hour and a half, I look at the clock and I'm like, all right, let me stop. And then I give myself about a week of time because there are very specific nitpicks that you can get in when you get into poetry, and it's like, this vowel sound is wrong, or I used a feminine sound on the third syllable of this line, but I used a feminine sound on the fifth syllable of this line when I should have been using a masculine sound because I wanted to alter them because the What the fuck? The name of these the purpose of these two lines was different, and I only want to use one consonant here, but I should use two. And then when you reread the poem two weeks later, you're like, that doesn't matter. Because the reader is different than the writer, especially in poetry. So the process can get difficult, but I will say, yeah, I I try and go, I try and start in a physical mode and then move it to digital. And I try and stay off of the internet and I try and stay from researching anything because I feel like it uh takes away from my process as a person, my process as an individual. And it's not because the research is I don't know what to say, but damning. It's not that the research is damning to me as a researcher, it's because every single piece of written language in the world has rhetoric attached to it. Every single thing has been written by another person.

SPEAKER_02 19:13

Because I've said generic words and Brennan's like, well, we have to research has that been used before. But when you say words like sassy, of course those words have been used before. It's hard to come up with the let's be classy.

SPEAKER_01 19:28

You know what I mean? I know what she's saying. She had written down sassy and classy. And I feel like some things are probably out there copyrighted. That's what you're the one that screamed at me I couldn't say Super Bowl. Well, that's a thing. That is a thing. Yeah, that's a thing. It's a big game.

SPEAKER_02 19:43

Really?

SPEAKER_01 19:44

It's a big game. Yeah. And we have copyright work, yes, on a trivia question. You can't say it, it is actually copyrighted. So that's my fear. You know, there's things we're like, I just don't want to get hit with a big fine. I mean, that's my thing. I'm scared.

SPEAKER_02 19:57

But who says we should be sassy, not classy? I don't know. Do you agree after spending the night with us? Or do you think we're a little classy?

SPEAKER_00 20:05

Well, based off this, y'all are both sassy and classy.

SPEAKER_02 20:09

Yes. Okay, he knows us.

SPEAKER_00 20:11

But something interesting about it is that like at one certain point in just American history, sassy and classy meant the same thing. And now sassy and sassy and classy are different things. So you have to take a with every single thing you read, you have to take context in. And that's why it's number one, exhausting to read, and number two, important to understand the context within not only you live, but the context within which every single piece of literature and writing that author lived. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 20:41

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 20:41

Thirty years ago, Sassy and Classy had a fundamentally different connotation than they do now.

SPEAKER_01 20:49

Thirty years ago, I had a shirt from Benetton that said Sanson Clapsy on it, and I'm wondering if they copyrighted it. That's why I'm thinking, are we allowed to say that? I know it's stupid. I mean, it's probably stupid.

SPEAKER_02 21:03

It's not stupid. And I know you're the smart one, and I'm not like, Listen, I'm the fear. Don't you feel like that as a writer and as an author, you just want to let it all hang out?

SPEAKER_00 21:15

Yeah, but then you face the the question, who wants to read me letting it all hang out? Why can't they just let it all hang out themselves?

SPEAKER_01 21:24

Well, if they did, you'd be out of a job.

SPEAKER_00 21:26

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 21:27

True. I mean, really.

SPEAKER_00 21:29

Just hope they don't wake up to it. That is the ultimate question. Why am I a creator? Why do I matter not matter more, but why does my voice need to be projected? Should other people listen to me.

SPEAKER_02 21:42

Because you have it. You have something people want.

SPEAKER_00 21:45

I hope so.

SPEAKER_01 21:46

Even if they don't, there's something in you, and I've felt it before where there's something in there that you just have to get out. Whether you just put it on paper and tuck it away for yourself or actually try to create with it, or that's the big thing. Because my mind is on.

SPEAKER_00 21:58

You have something so Important in your body that you have to get it out on paper for yourself. Because that's like a creative exigence that has no exterior motivation. Right. It's me as a human individual saying, I have to get this out into the world and look at it. Just to be able to understand it. It's so mind-boggling to me that I can't even realize what it is unless it's on paper for me to just stare at over and over again. Because at the end of the day, like the visual sense is stronger than anything in the mind. Your imagination is vast and great and amazing, but it's not one of the five senses. Your five senses are not, none of your five senses are just imagination.

SPEAKER_02 22:43

I never thought of that.

SPEAKER_00 22:44

That's something really important to think about as the purpose for your uh existence as a creator.

SPEAKER_01 22:51

That's deep. That's very not nap. I have to apologize to Camille, Curry, and Christina for what they will find in my Google Doc after I'm dead.

SPEAKER_00 23:05

Okay, well, I have this poem prepared.

SPEAKER_01 23:07

Okay, let's hear it. We would love to hear it. Please.

SPEAKER_00 23:11

I chose this poem number one because Brenda asked who Andrew was, which is funny. So I said Andrew's this guy from Baltimore. It doesn't really matter where he's from, because I met him in Colorado. He's just some freak. He's a pervert. Everyone's a pervert, let's be honest.

SPEAKER_01 23:26

How are you? How we pretty much. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 23:30

But what's important, what's important about this now, my current purpose for this, is that I recently was looking at the Criterion Collection. I have a Criterion Collection subscription. I don't know what that means. It's it's it's movies fancy. It's fancy classy movies. Yeah, it's the classy movie subscription. So the Criterion Collection has a new uh what's it called? I guess selection. A new selection of movies that has come out, and it's called the Yearning Selection. And inside of that was my own private Idaho. And that's specifically about queer yearning. And I watched that movie because it has Keanu Reeves in it. Keanu Reeves is a good actor.

SPEAKER_01 24:09

Love him.

SPEAKER_00 24:10

Keanu Reeves is a good actor. He has good hair, he has a good body, he is really good of mind delivery. And I've heard a lot about it, and I've listened to the B-52 song. I mean, everything, right? Private Idaho. Mm-hmm. So I watched that movie and I was thinking a lot about it, and I watched this other movie like what, two years ago? And it was just called Queer. And it has Gosh, what's his name? Do you guys know Daniel Craig, who plays the new James Bond. Yeah. It's Daniel Craig and then Drew Starkey, who is in Outer Banks, and it's a William Burroughs-based movie. So William Burroughs was just this bizarro freak writer from like what in the 1940s? He like he seriously like shot his wife in the head. He was trying to play William Tell, you know, with like the apple, and he missed and shot her in the head. And instead of going to court, he immigrated to Morocco and became an expatriate and never came back to America. And he just wrote a bunch of stories in Morocco. Like he wrote a bunch of stories. He wrote something called like the blind-sided notebooks, I think. And then he wrote Naked Lunch, which is his most famous. So this movie, Queer, has Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey, and it's about William S. Burroughs, and it's about how being queer means it doesn't mean you're homosexual, it doesn't mean you're lesbian, it doesn't mean you're gay. It means that you're disembodied. And that the conventional contemporary understanding of a body is man and woman coming together, making children. That's the purpose of life. And being queer is just anything else. I I exist to create, I exist to live, I exist to do anything. It's just it's anything that's not, I exist to find a mate that's not the other gender and have children. And that's what being queer is. And I thought that was a really interesting story. And the allegory in that movie is how drug use, because William Burrows is like a heroin addict. No, I think he's an opium addict. What he's some hard drug addict. It's how queerness can exist in finding purpose through drugs, or how queerness can exist in finding purpose through creation. So the young person, Drew Starkey, he finds purpose in creation. And the old person, Daniel Craig, he finds purpose through drug use. And these are two different versions of queer people who find purpose outside of procreation. And I watched My Own Private Idaho, this was only like two weeks ago. I wrote this poem a long time ago. I wrote this poem, I think about a year ago. It may have been 10 months ago, 10 or 11 months ago. And I was watching My Own Private Idaho and I was thinking, wow, this movie is extremely similar to Queer, but it's specifically about male prostitution. So in my own private Idaho, both River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, they exist in this sort of semi-realm between living on the streets and living a conventional life. And while Keanu Reeves' character, he's born into wealth, and his dad is the mayor of the city, and he he's guaranteed to get money. He is reaching into the male prostitution life as a form of fund. River Phoenix instead has been born into this extremely rural life where there's nothing except for a farm. And he's using male prostitution as a way to get out of the farm. So they both don't have to be male prostitutes, but they choose to be as a form of understanding for themselves because their own private lives are not fulfilling enough. And I felt like that is an example of being queer. They're queer to their own upbringings. Right. So this poem, it's a inverse poem, which is a very simple form where you find another poem and you just invert it. You invert every single word. This is an inverse poem of Moving Forward by Alex Dimitrov, who is a New York poet. He's like, he's only in like his 40s or 50s. He's not ancient or anything.

SPEAKER_02 28:12

We're not ancient.

SPEAKER_00 28:14

Alex Dimitrov, you wrote this book. It's called Love and Other Poems. I think it was released in like 2007. It was a it's a good collection. Queerness as a version of disembodiment from contemporary culture versus specific homosexuality. And both the movie Queer and the movie My Own Private Idaho have to do with the understanding of queerness as disembodiment and the understanding of love as something that is deeper than a simple disfiguration of the heteronormative understanding of love.

SPEAKER_02 28:49

First of all, I'm a fan. I love this. Love, love, love.

SPEAKER_00 28:54

I mean, just love is an emotion more than an experience. And I think the heteronormative understanding of love is the experience at procreation. And I think specifically that's dangerous because it invites the understanding that you can't love somebody unless you have a child with them. But that's not that's not the reality.

SPEAKER_02 29:20

It's not. No.

SPEAKER_00 29:22

19 million hundred thousand stories tell you that's not the reality. That's right. You can love somebody and then you can stop loving them, or you can not love them and then you can love them.

SPEAKER_02 29:32

But if you have a child with them, you have to love them.

SPEAKER_00 29:34

And you can love them and then have a child with them and then hate them and then leave them, and then you can then you can still love them. Or you can hate them and then you can love them and you can never come back. No. There's a million ways to love. And the heter the heteronormative conventional understanding of love is that it's a very singular understanding. And in the current context of queerness, I feel like queerness is just anything that's not that. Because in in the reality, queerness as a definition is just being different. Queerness is not being homosexual or being lesbian. It's nothing else than just being different.

SPEAKER_02 30:10

Aaron Ross Powell Why do people not know that? Why is that not a knowledge? Is it because of people like me who are my age who don't understand is that the real truth? Is that it's really the lack of knowledge. Is it the lack of knowledge?

SPEAKER_00 30:27

It's it's a lack of knowledge, and and you can't fault the person themselves because there's so many things happening in the world at all times. Any individual human has infinite streams of attention that they can attend to. You can't fault them. Me personally, I can't fault or get angry at any person for not understanding the intricacies of love specifically, because there's so many different channels of attention that are constantly feeding at a person. You have to deal with work, you have to deal with personal life, you have to deal with your private life. That's three separate things that don't even have to do with love. Like, there's so many things in my private life alone that have nothing to do with love at all. But they're all real. And they're still real, and love on its own is still real, and love in itself can be expanded into so many things. So I think it's a dangerous thing specifically because when you see that normal when you feel that normality is widespread across your community, you lose the understanding that differences are enriching and important to your own human understanding of the world.

SPEAKER_01 31:42

Right.

SPEAKER_00 31:42

So if everybody's the same, then there's nothing new happening, and it's it's dangerous. Without change, you have a very quick possibility of death. If if everything's the same over and over and over again, okay, nothing new is happening. Yeah. If every single thing is if it's all the same over and over again, then nobody's being born. Nobody's dying. It's just the same people being alive every single day over and over again, and that doesn't happen. And I think that's a very scary and sad yet true understanding of humanity because it's really easy to latch on to a specific time and a specific day and a specific feeling and believe that that's correct. And then we're all fucked. And then we're all fucked. Because you don't want to move on to the next day. Yeah. You don't want to move on to the next week, even though you have to.

SPEAKER_01 32:39

And hate change.

SPEAKER_00 32:40

Yeah. And even though you do move on to the next week, you're still like, well, one week ago was so much better. Can I just go back to that week? But that week, one baby wasn't born, one person didn't die. It's so many, it's so many small intricacies that are happening. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 32:59

I never always said the world would be boring if we were all the same, but I feel like you understand it more than the average person would.

SPEAKER_02 33:05

In being so young, where do you think this knowledge and this depth came from in you?

SPEAKER_00 33:13

A whole lot of thinking. A whole lot of thinking. You didn't have nothing to know except think, like Yeah, I was a real introvert from a child. I think at about elementary school till what, seventh grade, I was I was definitely just the guy's guy, you know, just hanging out, having fun, having a blast. And then my mom got real drunk and tried to kill my dad, and then they hated each other from that point on.

SPEAKER_02 33:40

That'll do it.

SPEAKER_00 33:41

That'll do it. Won't it? Won't it? And from that point on, I was like, okay, well, my parents loved each other for 11 years, and then after one night, they hated each other from that point on. What is the purpose of love? What is the purpose of creation?

SPEAKER_01 33:55

That can seem to do it though. I mean, one certain instant.

SPEAKER_00 33:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:58

I mean, instants in life can change every direction. One moment, boom, one moment can change everything.

SPEAKER_00 34:06

Forever. I definitely agree with that. And that's what's scary about it because you can stick to your beliefs and understanding for life, and then your life changes, and there's no point in sticking to those those beliefs or understandings. Because the life that you were sticking to doesn't exist anymore. So now you have to change every single thing. And that's when it gets really dangerous because as you change your understanding of the world, you have to abandon everything else you knew and start again. And when you start new, you're a naive. Just that's just the understanding of starting again. You have naivety because you don't understand things, and because there are things that you haven't interacted with before.

SPEAKER_02 34:52

Why did this happen to me? Why do I deserve this? Right. I feel like that's like you're speaking to the craft.

SPEAKER_00 34:59

And you don't get that until you do it once or twice or three times over again. And there are many things in life that you can't do two or three times over again. And that's the true danger of being a human being. Yeah. Okay. All right. I'm gonna read my poem. Anyways, so this poem is based on My Own Private Idaho.

SPEAKER_03 35:20

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 35:21

This is an inverse poem of Moving Forward by Alex Dimitrov, who wrote this in, I think it's a 2007 publication, Love and Other Poems. He wrote this about the movie My Own Private Idaho and about how River Phoenix is searching for love not as an escape from the world, but as a reciprocated emotion. Because the only time he's ever felt love is his mother giving him love without him giving it back because he is he's a narcoleptic, and as a sleeping child, he was never able to give love back to his mother. Or as a male prostitute, he he never received love back from the people that paid him money. He only received love as a form of economic income. So this is queerness through the lens of love as a non-reciprocated emotion. And this is an inverse of that, which means that not that love is a reciprocated emotion, but the opposite side of the love. So the person giving the money or the mother giving the love to the sleeping child, how they feel. That's kind of what I was trying to feel with this poem. Okay. Moving forward. Inside the flat of the three-story walk-up, I am in the shower with Andrew during hot water hours, binge drinking. We are thinking about never being born. I think I am never going to be famous. He thinks today is the peak of our lives. If you die, I think, closing my eyes in his face. I cannot see him staring through the water. It will just be another day. It would be closer to a landslide, I think. And I think there would be so much rubble. I tell off and stare at him dripping in the water. The way forward is alone, I think. Asleep without the frenzy between our bodies. In bed I try to keep his pants on with mine, but I think I want to feel him hitting, cutting, taking me out. I pretend I am anywhere other than here, atop this dignified mountain of self-worth. Without the mountain it is him and me, him seeing me. If this is really you, he says, kissing parts of my body, then I already have my best. He already has my best. Stonewalled against his doughy body. So the poem ends at a sort of I feel like you got an emotional rating. I definitely feel like. I feel emotion now because it's uh it's a sort of anti-climax. It's a kind of you never reach what you're looking for.

SPEAKER_03 38:06

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 38:07

And I wrote this poem before I watched the movie. I wrote this poem just based off the other poem without watching the movie and without understanding the idea of queerness as a sort of I guess income. River Phoenix is not intrinsically gay. He's just using his body to gain money because he finds no other way. And I I was unable to capture that in this poem. But what I did capture was the understanding that when you're searching for a mate or when you're searching for somebody that loves you, you want somebody that sees your body and sees you emotionally without any lens behind it. And I do get emotional when thinking about that because it it's a sort of I don't know what the opposite of blind is. I guess it's just a it's just a sort of clarity when you find somebody that sees you exactly as you are. Because you look at so many people and you talk to so many people and interact with them, and they're trying so hard to impart their vision onto you and to make sure that they're your friend and make sure that they love you and make sure that they have ended their conversation in good relations. That when you find somebody that is just specifically trying to see who you are and understand if you can interact with them, you kind of just melt at the moment. You melt at the reality that another human being is willing to listen to you. Rather connect. Yeah. Find a connection is extremely difficult.

SPEAKER_02 39:35

Then we all want to connect.

SPEAKER_00 39:37

That's it. I agree. So yeah, this poem. I I personally feel that this poem is a failure. I think it's a good poem. I think it's a strong poem and it reads well. Failure? But I feel like it's a failure because I'm trying to express an understanding of queerness that has not fully been expressed. And instead, I'm I I've I've flowered on a different topic. I've flowered on the topic of connection rather than queerness as a disembodiment of American culture.

SPEAKER_02 40:07

Aaron Powell W what do you want to say different than what this poem says? Like today.

SPEAKER_00 40:12

Like today, I would like to say that specifically Andrew is Andrew as the male suitor, as the male opposite, is searching for something different than me or me as the speaker, and that being queer is um a choice of individualism.

SPEAKER_02 40:37

What would you say if you saw Andrew today?

SPEAKER_00 40:41

Sorry. I'd say sorry for trying so hard, because this poem is it is trying too hard. And you can tell that at the end, he already has my best stonewalled against his doughy body. The speaker of this poem is is telling the reader that this is my best. But that's just not true. The speaker can do better, the speaker will do better. Point and purpose of queerness, which I've slowly started to understand, is that it's individualism as a concept of living. It's not individualism as a single point of joy and pride, and then you go back to being in a relationship. It's just I'm an individual for my entire life. I'm an individual and I love another individual, and that's it. But it's never a conjoining. The the understanding of queerness is that it's different than a conjoining of souls, because the contemporary understanding of love is that two people who are lost and confused in the world have to come together and they're two forever. And it and those two become one. No, those two become two that are together. Right. And that's what I'm trying to understand in this poem. So that's why I say it's a failure, because at the end, it is that the speaker themselves has conceded to the reality that they must be absorbed into the other person.

SPEAKER_03 42:08

Right.

SPEAKER_00 42:08

And turn themselves into one. Now, that being said, I think the poem is very strong because just because of that, because it showcases and represents the tragedy of finding love without understanding the purpose of the self. And if you can't understand your individual philosophy and your individual persona, you will never be able to understand the love that you deserve. Which is extremely depressing, but it's a reality that not just a lot of Americans, a lot of humans throughout the entire world face. So that's why I wanted to read today because I feel like it's super interesting that I found a poem written by another person, and that person wrote that poem based off of a movie written by Gus Van Sant. So Gus Van Sant wrote wrote a whole movie screenplay, and then Alex Dimitrov wrote a whole poem, and then I took that whole poem, I inversed it upside down, and then I wrote that poem. And then at the end of all that, through three separate systems, I still wasn't able to find a successful poem just because of how intricate and inexplicable the queer experience is, because it's not about homosexuality, it's not about lesbianism, it's about finding purpose as an individual who needs the clarity of themselves rather than the clarity of love with another human.

SPEAKER_02 43:33

It's so deep, it's like I know what to say. I miss the pivot. I'm like, can this man just keep talking? But unfortunately, we have to laugh.

SPEAKER_00 43:46

I just keep on rambling them so.

SPEAKER_02 43:49

We we can't look away. We want you to come back.

SPEAKER_00 43:54

I mean I would like to come and talk about my sex poetry because Brenda said she's interested in it.

SPEAKER_02 44:00

I am. She is. I mean, it's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 44:03

And yeah, that poetry, it's more about the physical experience. So when you're writing, one of my biggest I don't know what to say other than turn-on, but one of my biggest turn-ons in poetry slash writing is just the possibility of orgasm. How close can you get to orgasm simply by writing words? You know?

SPEAKER_02 44:24

Brenda, you've been there and done that.

SPEAKER_00 44:27

It's an interesting experience to like slowly reach up to that and be like, what word is gonna, what word is gonna topple me over, you know, break my eardrums, make my make my legs finally shiver. And it's an interesting feeling because that word and that experience is different than the word that it would be three hours later, three days later, because the human experience is so You're a lucky girl. The human experience is so specifically plotted and so minute that you can't graph it onto a singular scale. So while this poem that I just read is about me as a poet, my other raunchy sex poetry is about the experience of sexual orgasm itself as a mode of enlightenment rather than this experience of writing as a mode of enlightenment.

SPEAKER_03 45:24

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 45:25

But I still found some sort of release from it. So I think that's really interesting.

SPEAKER_02 45:31

Mm-hmm. Definitely. I think you're interested. I know. Can we just record forever? Can we keep you? I wish and your girlfriend.

SPEAKER_01 45:41

But we do have to wrap up. I know. We'll have to wrap up. I know, I'm sorry, but I mean, if you came back for another one, I know what the way our listeners are. I know when they hear sex poems, they're probably gonna listen in for the oh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:57

I mean, you're dealing with middle-aged women who I mean, we used to want things. You know, I mean Yeah, I don't know. I know you don't know, but anyway, I have enjoyed having you here. I know fabulous.

SPEAKER_01 46:13

Be honest with you, this is better than I thought it would be. I mean, I didn't know you. I read your poetry, and I thought, okay, he's passionate, he's deep, but you also speak very well. Thank you. It's not just the writing, it goes beyond that.

SPEAKER_00 46:27

I try really hard to speak well because I told you some people don't think I do.

SPEAKER_02 46:32

I know. I told you with this kid, and he's super interesting. Whatever it is, you have it. I'm buying. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:40

We're we're all in. We're buying. I mean, what you have just in this folder here could make a book. Yeah, you could self-publish that, even if you didn't want to take the time to, you know, start sending it around to publishers.

SPEAKER_00 46:52

I hope I hope so, yeah. I guess speaking to the future. So just speaking candidly to this podcast, I have about 230 poems in total. I think about 60 of them could make a good collection. I have 70 poems that are split between sex and vampire. That's whatever. I'll do that later. But I have 60 good poems that I'm trying to revise right now about me as a person.

SPEAKER_03 47:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 47:16

And I think that's a good beginning to me as a writer. So within the next, what, six to twelve months, I do want to have a revised, strong, prolific collection of poetry that represents me as a writer that I want to have out. We're right. Yeah, yeah, we're I hope it'll I don't have a title, I don't have a publisher, I don't have nothing, but I hope it'll be read.

SPEAKER_02 47:41

Let's do this again. Oh no. And I'm ready. See, you can't take your eyes off of him, right? Right. That that means he has it. He's got it. Thank you. So I guess that's a wrap.

SPEAKER_00 47:55

Yeah, we have to say it. That's a wrap.

SPEAKER_02 47:58

All right. Thank you for listening to Let's Wine with Brendan Stacy.