Portland, OR: Tin House Books, 2019. 78 pages. $15.95.
For someone who spends less and less time on Twitter, I think about Twitter a lot. Part of which is Trump’s fault—one cannot write and live in the age of Trump without considering the reach and absurdity of his favorite communication platform. But Twitter is interesting for much more than Trump: Twitter is, for good and for ill, a megaphone that amplifies voices. Granted, it can do this until it seems certain voices are the only ones present—per a recent Pew study, only 22 percent of American adults tweet, and of those a mere ten percent of users are responsible for 80 percent of the content on the site.
Regardless, what a megaphone Twitter is, when on its face it’s a straightforward text-posting platform; in an interview with Rolling Stone, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey compared it to a public square. It has been used to break news (fake and otherwise), tell weird jokes, bring dictators down, sell stuff, boost and reduce profiles, and of course foment division. Indeed, Twitter’s versatility and the written word’s versatility are nearly one in the same, with the difference being that Twitter is public. And its content is brought to us by a company whose business model is based on monetizing its users’ activity.
Which makes the occasional use of Twitter as a sort of diary—specifically, a public, searchable, archivable-by-others diary—doubly compelling and weird. The urge to keep diaries is hardly new, nor is the tendency in the internet age to overlook (or become comfortable with) the public nature of online diaries. But Twitter’s more than 300 million monthly users, and the many ways those users use the site, make it a curious platform for airing one’s thoughts.
Obviously people of all stripes use Twitter in this way, but it’s particularly interesting when writers do so; their keeping a public diary blurs the line between their published selves and their private selves. Of the writers I follow on Twitter, the most active use it to promote their work, sound off on all sorts of topics, and dish about their lives. Examples of what let’s call “the extremely online literary community” include Morgan Parker, Sandra Simonds, Joyce Carol Oates, and of course the subject of this essay, Tommy Pico. In each case, Twitter acts as a view into the writer’s room, so to speak; the language of the writers’ posts, at times, mirrors language found in their published work.
Pico frequently uses the phrase/joke “I mean” in his Twitter feed, such as on March 17th, when he Tweeted: “every day truly is a winding toad I mean road.” There are many instances of “I mean” that recur throughout Pico’s new collection Feed, published by Tin House in November 2019; the phrase is used both to tell jokes and as a device to redirect lines. In all, “I mean” appears thirty-five times in Feed (such are the conveniences of PDF review copies). Here are a few examples, the first of which appears in the poem’s first stanza (separation asterisks mine):
and he didn’t know I was fully head over banana peels I mean in Kiehls
I mean in straight up crappy love*
There’s a kind of stability
being so thoroughly Teebs I mean seen*
Dear Leo,
I mean Reader,
I will always remember You
I mean Leo
Because I’ve been reading Pico for years, and because I follow him on Twitter, when I first began reading Feed I was struck by how similar its language was to Pico’s Twitter feed. I experienced a distinct moment of recognition. And I wasn’t sure what to make of this recognition; it felt akin to being able to watch Donald Hall putter around Eagle Pond, tending to the dying Jane Kenyon while thinking of the next line in “Her Long Illness.” Or being able to see, as if in double vision, both the finished version of Francis Bacon’s 1944 painting Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion and Bacon working on the painting in his studio.
But of course we can see Bacon’s studio, because following his death it was acquired and moved from London to Dublin. Bacon’s studio was famously disgusting: he mixed his paints on its walls, and in the preserved studio lay piles of empty oil tubes, books, papers, jars with solvent and brushes, and an empty Vat 69 carton that was used as a mixing surface when its days transporting scotch were through. Sometimes it’s best not to see behind the artist’s curtain.
Yet allowing his readers to do so, by erasing the distinction between public and private, is one of the points of Pico’s poetry. At its best, Pico’s work is both art and not: his 2016 book IRL opens with a flirtatious text message exchange. One of Pico’s greatest strengths is co-opting non-artistic—what once might have been called “low”—language and sentiment and making them do truly artistic things. In Pico’s best work, there is no clear divide between poetic and non-poetic language. That is also true of Feed, the fourth book Pico published between 2016–9. But it is less true than the book’s predecessors; Feed may be the weakest entry in what his publisher calls the “Teebs tetralogy.” Though it’s flawed, and somewhat overly stuffed with motifs, Feed also signals an intriguing shift in Pico’s work. Specifically, to story, scenes, and explicit, intentional structure.
As noted, Feed is Pico’s fourth book since 2016. To be clear, it’s not the fourth book he’s written, but the fourth book he’s published. This is an amazing and, to my mind, unsustainable pace, and it shows. The book feels more rushed than his previous collections, both in terms of its writing and themes. Feed includes both the by-now signature Pico verse—unexpected line breaks; cornily amusing humor (“the edible is hitting like a gif of Daffy Duck in pjs pounding his butt / against a wall”); and a casual, slightly flip, conversational tone—as well as recreated conversations between the speaker and friends in a sort of loose prose. Here’s a sample of the latter:
Me: Everyone is talking about the Fermi Paradox right now, you know
what that is?
She hands me the spliff. I hold it eye level, staring at the ember
raveling the white paper black and grey before crumbling away
Wilkes: Of course! I wrote the book on Farm Socks!
She rolls her eyes and lifts her palms up.
Me: It’s like, against the infinity of space and all those stars and all
those worlds out there, the probability of extraterrestrial civilizations
other than us is extremely high. But where are they? Even if
interstellar travel is really slow, our sun is relatively young compared to
the age of the universe as a whole. They’d have had millions of years
to get here.
Wilkes: I think it’s paternalistic to assume we’d be demonstrably visited
in our lifetimes. History basically just started recording itself. They
could have come a million years ago and been like, this rock is trash!
If . . . you’re not gonna smoke that? Pass, plz.
Feed’s main theme is unrequited love and being alone; it is a book about loneliness. In addition to exploring the loss of a relationship, and Pico’s/the speaker’s attempt to fill the romantic hole in his life via a series of unsuccessful dates with a series of men (some of whom are given planetary nicknames, re: the celestial discussion above), Feed also addresses the loneliness that can come with success, specifically the success that comes with publishing a series of well-received collections in a remarkably short span:
When yr jib job is to zig zag about the glib globe
it’s impossible
to build a temple
with anyone. All you get
are the brief blips in Texas
I mean taxes
I mean texts, bending
like plants to the neon bar Starlight
(There goes “I mean” again.)
Where the speaker addresses his loneliness/aloneness in verse works well, when he does so in stylized prose, as seen in the above conversation, specifically via weed-fueled, dorm-esque philosophical prose that tends to overstay its welcome. The thing is, Pico’s books—book-length, meandering poems all—tend to work because they’re eminently readable and difficult to put down. The prosey, stoney, spacey sections of Feed—those were easier to put down.
Being alone is hardly Feed’s only topic. It’s stuffed with themes: it addresses the history of New York’s High Line; cooking and ingredients as metaphors for togetherness and culture; plants; it uses song lyrics as rough section breaks; Pico’s upbringing and Native heritage; and his own drive to make a mark on the world. Indeed, this last point—and Pico’s rapid pace of publication—is directly addressed:
& someone tells me “You shd wait
five yrs btwn publishing
books like what’s
the
rush?”
and I’m like did u not just read? My cousin died today
and he was only two years older
than me and it’s been this way my whole
life like biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinch
In addition to anticipating a criticism of his work, with sections like the above Pico fully casts aside the mask of the speaker. Across his books, Pico’s speakers have always felt like loose guises adopted for the sake of his art, but in Feed the ruse is largely dropped altogether. (And lest it go unmentioned, “binch” is also a favorite Twitter word of Pico’s)
It’s because of developments like this, and the overall excellence of Pico’s work to date, that I’m curious to see where his work goes next. Pico himself has given hints: in May 2019, he told The Creative Independent—in an interview titled “On not wasting any time”—that he’s “kind of making the transition from literary writing to screenwriting” and that he’s “really, really excited” about “writing more with an eye towards plot, dialogue, character, and narrative.” Reading Feed was therefore akin to watching an artist experiment with new ways of working in real time; I thought of Miles Davis in the late 1960s, as he transitioned from traditional jazz to fusion. Is Feed Pico’s own In A Silent Way, leading up to whatever his version of Bitches Brew will be? Only time will tell.
And as much as one likes seeing new work from artists one admires, constant new work doesn’t, invariably, make for constantly good new work. Likewise, as a painting professor of mine pointed out once, artistic success can lead to a sort of stasis: success at one kind of thing can incite artists to continue producing that same sort of thing, in search of the same sort of success. It will be nice to see Pico finish his screenplay—which will certainly be interesting in its own way—take some time off, and then return to poetry with, say, a collection of villanelles.