Q&A with Steve Roggenbuck

 

BH: What does alt lit mean to you?

SR: It’s just a word people started using to describe the communities that are emerging around certain presses and writers. The main shared characteristics I see in the work are an embrace of the internet and maybe a vague interest in Buddhism. There is no alt lit manifesto, and I don’t think there could be one. It’s too broad to have a single clear focus. And it’s somewhat arbitrary in that it’s just been built around a certain community or set of communities. That’s why the longer version “Alternative Literature” feels so goofy.

It’s not like this is the only alternative form of literature. It’s just that there is an increasingly large and prolific community forming here, and having a name makes it easy for people to refer to it. “Alt lit” is the name that has stuck. There is a lot of diversity in style and worldview within “alt lit,” though; having one name gives it a false sense of unity I think.

BH: How did you react when the New York Times had described you as ‘what may be the first 21st century poet’? Do you feel like this is an apt description, and if not, what would you rather they would have said?

SR: I wouldn’t say that, because it maybe discounts the efforts of many other poets who have already experimented with new media forms. What I hope to be is a figure parallel to ee cummings in a certain way. ee cummings wasn’t the first poet to experiment with spacing and punctuation, and yet he’s the main one that a common person knows about. Cummings went and made the experimentation exciting and playful and accessible. He connected the formal experimentation to his feelings and his personal style. For cummings, the formatting was part of a complete package, it was a dramatization of his message of playfulness and aliveness, which is a message people connected with.

BH: In that same article, they quoted you as saying that these days we may be entering the “golden age of poetry.” Why is that?

SR: There are no longer gatekeepers who can keep us from our potential readers. You can go on the internet and connect with people directly. “Poetry” will no longer be ignored by a rule because it doesn’t even need to be labeled as “poetry” and filed in a “poetry” section of a store or library. Writers can post directly to people on Facebook, Twitter, etc, and if it affects those people, it will get reblogged and shared and reposted to more people. And besides the distribution — the internet has introduced so many new formats for sharing language: images, videos, tweets, comment threads. It’s so fun to have all these new possibilities of how to present our language.

BH: It seems as though you’re almost trying to redefine the paradigm of what a writer is in this new century of infinite ways of connecting to people, as well as connecting people. In the populist view writing is seen as an isolationist activity, but you speak of the community and its ability to bring like-minded people together as though it is of an almost equal importance to the poetry itself. How would you describe the relationship in-between the community-building and the work you produce and share?

SR: I’d even say the community is more important to me than the poetry, in that people are more important to me than art. Wow, haha, this is an interesting train of thought, though; I just thought, “people are more beautiful than art.” But art is just an extension of people. Art is people in a concentrated form… I don’t know. I want to boost people. For the past few years I’ve considered art-making as one of the best ways I could boost people, by writing funny or beautiful poems. Just this year I’ve realized that connecting people and actively building community is an equally if not more valuable way I can boost people.

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