Gregory Sherl’s most recent books include Heavy Petting (YesYes Books, 2011), Oregon Trail Is the Oregon Trail (Mud Luscious Press, 2012), and Last Night Was Worth Talking About (NAP, 2012). He can be reached at jesuis.gregory@gmail.com and blogs at gregorysherlisgregorysherl.com.

HFR: So, The Oregon Trail Is the Oregon Trail is your second book, and it differs significantly from either Heavy Petting or I Have Touched You. How would you say your focus—sense of project, compilation, completion—has changed, when it comes to working on full-lengths, having released these works, if it has changed any?

GS: This is an interesting question, because, in actuality, all of this is backwards. The first book I actually finished writing was The Oregon Trail Is the Oregon Trail, and it was also the first book I was contracted for. It just turned out to be the second book (third if we’re counting the chapbook) that was released. J.A. Tyler, an unbelievably brilliant and kind editor and mastermind behind Mud Luscious Press, put a shit-ton of stock in my work very early on, before he or anyone else probably should have. The confidence I built from the Oregon Traillove helped me grow the courage to put together Heavy Petting (parts of it were written before and after The Oregon Trail) and also write and submit I Have Touched You to the Dark Sky Chapbook Contest.

I don’t know if I am making any sense.

How I set my focus now, as opposed to before these books were released, is different purely by scope, but that might also mean intent. Everything is bigger because I am always expecting more from myself. I never sit down to write one poem. Now, it’s an entire collection. I want to write a poem about God? Better write a whole book of semi-linked poems called The Bible by Gregory Sherl (which is mostly done and looking for a publisher, by the way). I want to write a poem about Dana Scully’s pantsuits? Better start an entire collection of prose poems based around The X-Files. Might as well call it Everything Is Weird.

With The Oregon Trail being my first fleshed out book, everything since it has had some sort of thematic quality. I consider this to be a good thing and feel blessed it turned out this way. If you’ve read all (or most) of my work and then see my answer to this question, I think it’ll make sense. Even though Heavy Petting is a traditional poetry collection (and by traditional, I mean not based off a computer game), I do think most of the poems fit similar thematic elements. I also did my best grouping them into certain sections to fit the themes even better. With I Have Touched You, it’s the same thing. Regardless of whether you consider that chapbook a linked fiction collection or a group of linked prose poems (I’ve had a few discussions about this and have decided that I don’t care either way), I think it’d be easy to agree that each piece builds off the next and that the pieces mean a great deal more as a collected unit when read together than as individual pieces.

This is really long-winded. Did I answer your question?

HFR: Yes, certainly. Interesting chronology. I know you dig movies. What’s your take onExtremely Loud & Incredibly Close’s Best Picture nod? Do awards matter? What about nominations? What film would you write/direct/star in, given the opportunity?

GS: I have not seen Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, so I shouldn’t comment on its Best Picture Oscar nomination. Yes, the trailer makes the movie look like sap shit, and it might be/probably is. But the trailer also includes Tom Hanks. And Tom Hanks is Tom Hanks. In The X-Files, Mulder has a poster in his office that says I WANT TO BELIEVE. If I had an office to put a poster in, my poster would say I BELIEVE IN TOM HANKS.

If you’ve seen Big and didn’t like it, then you don’t have a soul. That’s a factual comment. I mean, shit, it says that on Wikipedia and the Bible (in that order). Wikipedia doesn’t lie.

I know we’re supposed to hate Safran Foer. I’ve never read him. And I know we’re supposed to hate Franzen (even though parts of The Corrections should make you absolutely shudder it gets so good). And I know we’re really, really supposed to hate James Franco even though when he cut his harm off in 127 Hours, I believed him. But I didn’t hear Das Racist name-drop any of them in “Sit Down, People,” so whatever, man. Shut Up, Dude.

I’m going to be run out of the indie lit community for choosing Franzen over Tao Lin, aren’t I?

Buy a copy of each of my books before you pick up that pitchfork (or read the website), okay?

Buy two copies and burn one of them.

Imagine how many more LeBron James jerseys would be in the world if people didn’t feel the need to start fires in trash cans.

There’s more to this question you were asking, right? Nominations are dumb, but I want some, sure. I want awards if they come with monies, two-car garages, more time to nap on the couch.

I would write/direct/star in any move that all the girls who ignored me in high school would go see.

I think you should title this interview “I Believe in Gregory Sherl and Gregory Believes in Tom Hanks and That Is Why Everyone Should Buy His Book About Dysentery.”

That isn’t a suggestion; I’m fucking telling you to do that.

I think this interview has taken a turn for the worse.

Hi. You look nice today.

HFR: It’s remarkable you mentioned all those other projects brewing in your previous answer. How do you track them all? Seems you never sleep, with so much to write. I am interested in your system(s) of working.

GS: Sometimes I sleep forever and sometimes I forget where I am going and I end up down the street twirling someone’s hair. I keep track of my projects through folders I keep in a green computer that is only green because of the case that snaps over it. The folders all have names and are written in all caps. Like my X-Files project is titled EVERYTHING IS WEIRD and there are like eight poems in there. Then there is a Word document that has which poems are published where. The same thing for THE BIBLE BY GREGORY SHERL, which has like over forty pages worth of poems and so on. This continues until my Adderall runs out, and my nighttime medications say, Enough. That is when I put my green computer on my dresser and sleep on an air mattress until I have to wake up and teach my students how to not use comma splices (even though I am not quite sure how to not use comma splices).

HFR: You wrote a novel(la). What is a novel(la)? What makes The Oregon Trail a novel(la)? Am I too hung up on the (la) of the thing?

GS: It is okay to be hung up on (la). Look at me telling you. I am often hung up on “La La Love You” and that has “la” in it, without the parentheses. I am actually listening to that right now. You should listen to it, and we will pretend to be in the same room, states away. Before that, it was the last five tracks of Kanye West’s Graduation. Before that, the last five tracks of Kanye West’s Graduation, again. I could repeat those lines eight more times and it would be true.

Kanye West > (la).

I am quitting poetry, becoming a mathematician.

I think a novel(la) is whatever you want it to be. Is The Oregon Trail a novel(la)? Yes. Why? Because that’s what it says on the back of the book. It probably says that on other parts of the book too, right? I think the parentheses around the (la) means it can be whatever it wants to be. That’s the beauty of Mud Luscious. It is everything and anything it wants to be whenever it wants. It is Molly Gaudry’s poetic lines and equally poetic white spaces around the lines. It is Sasha Fletcher’s clouds. It is alligators. It is apocalyptic. It is linked poems that tell a story of love and death and more love and even more death on a trail none of us have ever experienced.

The (la) means more death.

Are you hung up on death, man? You are so fucking harrowing. Let us rescue your heart. I am worried about your heart and what you keep in it.

HFR: You mentioned Kanye West, whose name carries with it some amount of swag, by popular consensus, and in his shameless self-acknowledgement of said swag. Gorilla Zoe, a rapper of equal or lesser swag value, once said, “…I’m shitting, hold your nose, / Get a Louis bag for what? / Bitch I been had swag / I got 50 thou’ cash in a brown Kroger bag.” How would you put The Oregon Trail‘s swag?

GS: The Oregon Trail is a self-deprecating mess. Still, somehow it gets laid even with its indecision, its syphilis, its consumption something awful. Always, The Oregon Trail is confused by how often it gets laid.

Swag, I drag it behind me. It’s why I wear a backpack. It’s why I wear your backpack and lady friends all at the same time.

HFR: Seth Abramson, in his review of Heavy Petting, termed your work a sort of “post-confessionalism.” He also said you’ll charm our pants off. How will you continue to charm our pants off in The Oregon Trail and in future works, like the hotly anticipated Monogamy Songs (Future Tense Books)? 

GS: I think maybe my charming poem days are done. I’m not sure. Looking back on it, Heavy Petting is an interesting book, a very young book. I love that about it. There’s an innocence in the pages. Even if you’re happier than you could ever be, that’s a feeling you can never get back. There’s also an incredible sadness, which, after finishing my newest manuscript, The Bible by Gregory Sherl, I have realized that this sadness will always be in my work. It’s an undercurrent. It’s below the foam of the waves. The difference in Heavy Petting, as opposed to my later works, is that there’s such a trust in sunlight and drawn blinds, the softness of wrists, the goodness in most.

I have always found the title incredibly fitting, this idea of adolescence, the possibility of getting more clothes off, staying stuck in the backseat. I guess I could see why Seth would call it “charming”, though I am always uncomfortable talking about my work in any accomplished or positive way.

The Oregon Trail is a different book entirely—one I don’t know if you can call charming. There are miraculous moments of love but just as many moments of breaking fingernails. Recently, there was a review of The Oregon Trail in the San Diego CityBeat. The reviewer called the book a love story, which I believe it is. But, with love, comes pain and helplessness and cold skin, a lack of soil. Charm? Maybe. Facts, nope. Dysentery, always.

So many children dying, so many snakes with syphilis.

Hey there, thanks for calling Monogamy Songs ”hotly anticipated”. Is that true or are you trying to charm me? Regardless, I’ll take it. I think about half of Monogamy Songs could be described as charming, as most beginnings are—then it just gets sad. There’s an innocence and then a viciousness and then I think everything sort of freezes. If you could pause a book, Monogamy Songs would be paused on page seventy.

Monogamy Songs is charming in the way too much Vicodin is charming. You light your cigarette and then three pills kick in and you can’t get the cigarette to your lips so it’s ashing all over the left leg of your jeans but what the fuck do you care when you’re stoned as shit?

HFR: At the Kansas River crossing, do you caulk, ford, or ferry?

GS: Always take the ferry. It costs a little, but you don’t always get the opportunity. Later on you will have to ford or caulk, watch your oxen drown or lose clothing, a spare wagon axle. Lose days because of bad weather. Sometimes there is never enough wild fruit. The thing with life is there are only so many oxen. The thing with life is there is only so much life.

HFR: Why can’t poets have agents?

GS: Because agents probably have children and children need food and diapers and remote control cars and clothing with logos so they don’t get picked on in middle school parking lots.

HFR: Book of verse you’ve been digging/anticipating? Or just books?

GS: The next poetry collection I am waiting waiting waiting for is Dorothea Lasky’s Thunderbird. Besides Hicok, she’s the only poet who writes a book that I can read in one sitting without realizing I just read the whole thing until there are no more pages and then I am angry that there are no more pages. Awe and Black Life still hold up as unbelievable heartstrings.

I pre-ordered Melissa Broder’s new book, Meat Heart, but it’s not here yet. Why isn’t it here?

Melissa, why isn’t it here?

I don’t have Ben Mirov’s Vortexts, but I’d like to. His Ghost Machine is one of my favorite word packets ever.

I am really digging Roberto Montes. He doesn’t have a book, but he should. Whenever his poems show up in journals, I get really excited. Journals, invite him around more, okay?

HFR, you should solicit him.

I’ll keep going.

I still like flip through Bob Hicok’s Words for Empty and Words for Full. His series of poems about the Virginia Tech shootings are harrowing and beautiful and extravagantly honest.

Everything Bob Hicok writes is honest. I like honesty in the poetry I read. Honesty and fucking.

Nate Slawson’s Panic Attack, USA, holy shit. That man is a river of beer.

HFR: What is the one question I didn’t ask that you think I should’ve asked and then how would anyone answer it?

GS: ”Where do you see yourself in five years?”

And Mitch Hedberg would say, “Celebrating the fifth year anniversary of you asking me this question.”

This is where, if I were a rockstar, I would drop the mic and walk off stage.

Fuck encores.

Thanks for this, Jason. It was fun.

HFR: Thank you, kind gent.

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