Always has been

Daisy Alioto and Brendan Joyce discuss his new poetry collection, Personal Problem.

Brendan Joyce is a poet, teacher and essayist from Cleveland, Ohio. Reviewing his 2020 collection Love & Solidarity for Cleveland Review of Books, Alex Skopic says: “working-class poetry is precisely what Brendan Joyce writes, from his workplace to mine—and if that makes him an outlier in today’s literary world, it’s also part of what makes him so damn good.”

Last week, Joyce’s latest collection Personal Problem was released by Grieveland. You can read excerpts in Prolit and Literary Hub and Cleveland Review of Books. Joyce’s previous collection dealt with his experience as a restaurant worker during the height of Covid. Some of that experience echoes through Personal Problem with dark humor: “Only the rich get all four seasons / the unemployed get Spring 2020.”

However, Personal Problem represents a grim return to business as usual. The ordinary, not extraordinary, problems of wage work. The precedented times. And with it, a working class manifesto, tucked into the last lines of Joyce’s poem Necromance: “When I am dead / do not name me in relation to capital I will/ be wageless & worthless & perfect.”

I corresponded with him to discuss the new collection.

Daisy Alioto: In the collection you have a lot of lines about value exchange and debt both on a practical and theoretical level. When I read, “Like god, debt predates money & will survive it” I was thinking about David Graeber. The things being exchanged are not commodities for money or money for commodities, they are subverted exchanges like the sky becoming a gun or poems becoming chicken, cigarettes becoming rent.

These images recur throughout the book. The final effect is the book itself being traded for the attention of the reader. I couldn’t help but think about when poems actually could be traded for patronage or food. How did you choose these images? Were they supposed to be talismanic?

Brendan Joyce: You're right about the David Graeber rip! I think MCM (money-commodity-money) and the wage really broke me as a child, mentally. Money just never made any logical sense to me. As I grew up and worked countless jobs it still stuck with me, that bafflement at its incoherence.

My first poem in my first book has the same theme as Value Form, though less dramatic or inventive. I think capitalism plays this trick on everyone, which you could call an aspect of Capitalist Realism, that on a deep level we are constantly in an exchange with our things, and that that exchange makes us on a deep ontological level equivalents or parts of things. Graeber writes extensively about how arbitrary and ahistorical that is, and I guess I wanted to gesture towards that in Emergency Fund Request.

Most images I choose are those objects that I'm interacting with day to day. But also in Value Form I'm using the objects that I have to have every day as an addict; nicotine and a ride to work. You don't need gas, you want gas kind of intervenes in that thinking. The series of images in Autobiography is a little different, because it started with how I felt the poem Value Form was working so similarly to the astronaut meme and I thought that was interesting so I just teased that out. Gesturing towards your next question, I also thought the Mao flip was funny. (You hold up half my gun)

DA: My two favorite references in the collection are Dril (“I faced god and walked backwards into the commodity”) and T.S. Eliot (“I can measure my lives in fire sales”) when you find a good line that inspires you, do you write it down or do they just rattle around in your brain? What’s your philosophy on borrowing and collaging?

BJ: Unfortunately they stick around in my head and emerge on the page sometimes faster than I can cite their origin. I think this is a Twitter problem, as in switching out inputs in a viral text format, like fucking the text man for texts etc. A story related to this is I asked Joshua Clover permission to structure Dishes around his quote "The wage is the price paid to relinquish claims on fairness" and he said "Sure, but I don't think I ever said that" So I sent him a screenshot of him saying it on Twitter six years ago.

I guess I've tried to get more aggressive about conferring with people before they show up in my work, which I definitely had to learn the hard way. I think in a poetics like mine that is structured around dealing with these big ideas the poetry of these ideas exists primarily in the phrases I received them. So when I say "poetry is the imaginary resolution of contradictions" I'm both playing with Jameson and trying to make sense of him. The final point about this (sorry if this is too long an answer) is nobody reads this shit anyways, and I'm never going to make enough to sue me for it. So I guess that's my ultimate philosophy.

DA: Together, the poems tell the story of most jobs as conscripted self-harm. They seem to say that what we should inflict on capitalism, we inflict on ourselves. What we should buy for ourselves, our labor buys for others.

But the narrator obviously has an eye for beauty as well and focuses less on another world being possible and more on the cracks in this world that defy transaction. They buy lobster tails with food stamps, they max their card out on ricotta. How would you describe your relationship to beauty and pleasure as a human right and political necessity?

BJ: In terms of the other world, I think when I've written about it in the past it's been some of my most treacly and preachy work, primarily because I feel so far away from another world or liberatory futures. I think others are better suited for this work, so I leave it to them.

I thought about that question a lot throughout writing this though, why am I ignoring the other world so much? I think that's where the title comes in. The limitation of my perspective, the contradiction of the individual. But also, I'm as skeptical of pleasure and desire and beauty as I am infatuated with it. I think everyone should have it, but I think as a consumer I'm also alienated from it. Part of the theme of video games in the book is referring to that, I found myself throughout the pandemic playing these games for twelve hours at a time, with no idea whether I was enjoying myself.

DA: I liked the relatively late reveal of being an Ohio poet that tried to do the New York thing. And saying that in this supposed city of poets it was lonely and unproductive. The narrator would rather create value out of a smaller number of interactions and images in Ohio. You have these great lines:

All of that envy pretending to be an aesthetic; / Its apoplectic commutes, its tiny distances made / Impossible large by the heave of bodies, wanting / For so much to burn that they burned themselves.

It reminded me of Camus calling the city a “prison by day and funeral pyre by night.” The reader gets the distinct feeling these poems couldn’t be written anywhere but Ohio.

BJ: Thanks! I struggled a lot over the years with this poem. I don't want to be the person who lived there and leaves and shits on it. But I also had a pretty terrible experience, which was probably mostly about myself.

The envy pretending to be an aesthetic was mine. When I cared most about fashion and felt the least fashionable I lived there. Those lines are about me. I think as an adult with no children, not of a real ethnic group (white) and not moving there for school, there was no community there for me to inhabit. The supposed community I was supposed to inhabit was that of gentrifiers, and I did not easily congeal to any of that. It was lonely and I moved back.

I'm trying to write more about the odd circularness of that experience, growing up in a gentrifying neighborhood and then moving to New York and just repeating it, but it's deeply difficult to sort out.

DA: I wanted to talk about the false dichotomy between political poems and domestic poems. These are political poems about the working class. They also include a lot of domesticity, lifestyle imagery, charcuterie, DVDs, the stuff we surround ourselves with.

I read Maggie Millner’s Couplets earlier this year but I also agreed with Jamie Hood’s review that, “Couplets’ inclination toward gestural political and intellectual moves is divested from rigorous engagement.” It’s really hard to strike a balance between the personal and political in poetry, but I think you do it well. Was that challenging?

BJ: It's unimaginable to me to write about my life and not write about money. I haven't read Couplets, but (unsurprisingly) I read Jamie's review and as always was astonished by her capacities as a reader. One of the few people I'd ever want a review from and simultaneously be terrified of a review from!

I've been overwhelmed for the last few years with the incongruity of the phrase "political poetry" and the over-broad implications of the word politics itself. I guess the challenge for me is whether it works to do it all the time. But the basic premise of the book is these very personal things I'm going through aren't really personal, and that kind of bridges the two.

DA: Late in the book you have a poem that asks: Is it possible to undo your desire / for money without undoing your desire / to live?

This is a question that runs through your other work, but this collection is the first to explore it so explicitly. Do you plan to keep pushing it forward?

BJ: God I hope not. But probably.