Interview with Sean Kilpatrick

Sean Kilpatrick resides in Detroit, MI, maintains the interview blog The Anorexic Chlorine Sex Toy Museum, and is published or forthcoming in Triptych Haiku, Venereal Kittens, La Petite Zine, MiPoesias, Action Yes, Pindeldyboz, 5_trope, zafusy, alice blue, Word Riot, elimae, horse less review, etc.

OCULUS: Tell us a little about your studies in Forensic Photography.

SK: Seeing a corpse flipped inside out is a boring joke. There’s no threat of immediate violence, no proper fear to accompany the overly specific mutilation. All the sandwich eating doctors, rapist detectives, etc., munching their own giggles back, a lot of clinical factory workers as dead as the people they’re mocking. No one can react to a corpse around these pigs.

Here are some human jokes: A woman in a car accident thrown through the windshield commando, or her panties flew off, landed straddling the curb, skirt up. She slid up it several feet, cunt-curbed. You could give the bitch cunnilingus by licking the street. There was a hallway Death Museum encased in glass. In it, items: the skin of a man’s face that fell off, was burnt off, in the exact form of the grinning theatrical mask of comedy. A lifetime of swallowed batteries removed, during autopsy, from the stomach of a schizophrenic. Death workers yawn their proud little suckass snippets.

More artists should have their genitals splayed open against the street. Some try to live too fucking long and will even develop opinions. Others don’t have inappropriate laughter and refuse to be continuously wrong.

OCULUS: What is ‘literature’? Is literature dead? If so, who or what killed it?

SK: Literature is a state of continual decline and revision by methods that reflect decay, rigor mortis, and the loosening of one’s bowels. My aim is to progress from horrible to mediocre. Metamucil helps literature beautify your insides.

Sometimes I don’t care about literature made before Samuel Beckett was finally acknowledged or literature that exists without the blood that Nietzsche calls for, though I’m finding Nietzsche a little too optimistic. Maybe Mark Twain did kill literature. No, his moustache was beautiful. It’s true that I love too many authors and different styles to be a great writer.

I had a mistaken nightmare yesterday that a professional literary critic praised my work. I must be fucking up. I prefer making slow progress in dreams and nowhere else.

OCULUS: Which of your published poems are your favourites, and why? Tell us about your writing in general; techniques, style, theory, influences, why you write, etc.

SK: A minuscule amount of my own work is favourable. I worked for awhile on a long poem called Gangrene, parts of which are published in your lovely Triptych Haiku and also in La Petite Zine and forthcoming in LUNGFULL!

Stylistically, I am influenced by anything well done, or done wrong on purpose, anything where I sense the writer disappearing into voices or process. Serious dogma, any stance or rigid, pious statement about what literature should be, usually turns me off, though I’m beginning to see some criticism as an extension of a writer’s artifice, which is good. Our trade is to hustle artifice. You find contradictive ideological ineptitudes about truth at all the coffee shop open mics. Whatever a writer says outside of their art, the work itself is always capable of making me want to tongue them.

My hustle is I fail to understand meaning, and avoid it in my poetry, but I can love a meaningful poem, whatever that is. My personal inclinations leak in, of course, generally aimed toward the grotesque or absurd. Another personal theory is to guillotine the laureates and mainstream critics. They will never help anyone’s stature, not that I plan to succeed.

OCULUS: In your LiveJournal, Red Dirt, the poem Homage to the Marquis De Sade -- 50 Corrections for a Slow Day at Work depicts various sadistic (and highly humorous) scenes, which appear to be modern-day versions of the numeric texts found in Philosophy in the Boudoir, 120 Days of Sodom and others. Just how much has Sade been a part of your writing?

SK: Sade was read to me in the cradle, that’s why I haven’t gotten out of it yet. I try to be comical, I don’t think he tried to be, on purpose, and, like Sade, I’m literarily lazy, but his influence can’t be ignored. My life is a tiny Sade / Kafka echo, full of wrongful arrests and burnable whores.

OCULUS: What went into the poem Cut Up of Pat Clay, Amanda Shaver, Self? Have you had much success with cut-up or automatic Markov chain generators? Why/why not?

SK: I no longer disguise my lack of talent by mixing work with my betters. A good friend, Pat Clay, who should be published, helped improve my melopoeia on that one. Thank you for looking at my older work. I used an online Markov chain generator, though I forget which settings. Maybe six and eight. Burroughs, of course, is an early influence. Then I jerked off on Pound, Tzara, etc.

I care about melopoeia, or the lack thereof. I haven’t made a cut up recently, but my editing process has become more stochastic. I edit instead of polish now. I used to give myself small areas to clean. Tao Lin taught me how to edit. Look at his ability for ingenious punctuation that stochastically creates meaning instead of sound. I’m nowhere near that smart. I pollute my work with random tinker.

OCULUS: What mindset were you in when you wrote the series fuckscapes?

Revenge instead of publication, genocide instead of writing, a little holocaust in every line, ugly and wrong and no making goddamn sense, the poetry of hate, a looney tunes hysterectomy, nothing resembling stand up comedy with wise pointers to be giggled through. Just loud.

I think one of the great forefronts of literature is Action Books and the writers associated with it. If I can approach, even in a small way, what they’ve already achieved, I will rejoice.

OCULUS: Do you perform your poetry often? What are your thoughts on performing at, and attending, readings?

SK: In an extreme exercise of masochism, I hosted an open mic, years ago. I geared it toward avant garde literature and, of course, no one showed because I wasn’t rapping or playing guitar. If you want to see retard day care for the pseudo-hip, subject yourself to an open mic. I highly recommend the terminal pain it causes. Do not do it sober or without threatening your audience every ten seconds. The worst ratfink human cunt congeal imaginable swarm there. It’s a visit to the wrong end of an abortion vacuum.

I’ve never done a real reading because no one with academic backing will ever care about my work. Passing through that open mic, as fellow hosts, and equally disgusted with it, I was lucky to meet only two great writers, who I’m close friends with today.

I’ve attended great readings by great authors. I become very nervous around great authors. I go to see them with the proper fear.

OCULUS: Why did you decide to start the interview blog The Anorexic Chlorine Sex Toy Museum? What are your plans/hopes for it?

SK: The idea is I have a lot to learn and, while I know it’s impossible for an artist to impart their trade, talking about it in general helps me get excited, not give up, though I should, and may possibly help any beginning writers happening onto the blog. Help is a suspicious word. I just talk lit continuously, because I’ve grossly stuck my life into it.

The writers I interview have different styles and methods. Their similarities are that I love the work they make. When I love someone’s work, I want to talk to them and touch them and fear them.

OCULUS: Your debut book is forthcoming from Six Gallery Press in 2008. What can we expect from it? Will it be all new work, a collection, both?

SK: New work, still in progress, a Sade, Apollinaire, Aragon, Bataille, Mirbeau, atavistic, grotesque, comical pornographic novella. The aforementioned Sade list will be in it.

It was originally a collection of poems and stories that I kept polishing. Six Gallery Press is very patient with me.

OCULUS: What’s next for Sean Kilpatrick?

SK: Hard work, finishing and submitting manuscripts, a continuing lack of interest from a majority of publishers, women, and keep an eye out for more awesome suicide attempts as a symptom of joy, not despair, void in Tennessee.

I’m trying to write a play. It’s almost impossible, though I went to an Edward Albee reading, so I feel better.