Dear Readers1,
The response to my forthcoming debut of poetry American Sex Tape™ has been incredibly positive. Thank you all so much for the pre-orders. The experience of having loved ones, my peers, THE Pulitzer-prize winning poet Dianne Seuss, and fans of poetry (and/or Kim Kardashian) sharing their excitement for my book is alien to me (in the best way). I’m realizing this book, which was all mine, my baby, for five or six years, is no longer my secret to hold. It is now an art object that will live and breathe in the world through its audience, its readers. My god! The feeling is a mix of absolute horror (oh god people will judge me) with a mixture of wells of giddiness (hell yeah! people will get to interact with my art).
I’m reading for you today one of the oldest poems in American Sex Tape™. “This world is not good,” written in 2015, was the first fully formed stroke I made towards shaping cultural criticism around a free verse poetic form. At the time I was moved to start this project mostly by my consumption of TMZ on weekday afternoons with my mom. Watching so much celebrity TV made me want to write about Kim Kardashian and the socioeconomic condition that is celebrity, like an autopsy, which is to say pathologically.
Kim Kardashian doesn’t fascinate me. I think that’s the first myth I want to dispel. I’m not obsessed with her. And I’ve watched less than two hours combined of her reality TV show and her sex tape. This is a myth I created out of a self-conscious need to defend the fact that I got into a prestigious MFA program on the strength of poems written about fucking Kim Kardashian. Don’t ask me to explain the logic. It’s just what I would say at the time. Why are you writing about Kim Kardashian, professors and classmates and coworkers would ask out of judgmental curiosity. And because the directness of the question caught me off, I just blurted out that I’m obsessed with her when I barely understood anything about her at the time.
Kim can be interesting sometimes in my opinion. Sometimes, she says or does fascinating things. Fascinating because often she is classist, sexist, out-of-touch, or surprisingly (and this is the thing I really was inspired by) — self aware in a self deprecating way that makes her accidentally funny.
All in all, at the time of writing “This World is Not Good,” I found Kim Kardashian so boring as to wonder why anyone gives a shit about her anyway. That’s the true impetus for the series of poems inspired by her in this book: I wrote poems to imagine conditions in which the superficial, the obsessively designed facade of celebrity was actually concealing someone quite deranged or excited by the idea of losing everything – her wealth, her influence, her mind. “This World is Not Good” imagines the day Kim Kardashian wakes up and deliberately starts to poke holes through her own secured, manicured shields. Poking holes by rhetorically shaping questions around the issues that she has been fortunate enough to hide from herself: questions about lack and precarity, man-made conditions of inequality, natural disasters. This poem conceptualizes what it means for someone who is full to butt up against the threat of being emptied. The Kim Kardsahian of this poem goes mad as she comes into class consciousness.
This World Is Not Good
Especially to Kim Kardashian tender
as an egg, crying, her mouth a busted yolk
would eat her roasted placenta three meals a day
to heal the heart-shaped ache in her belly
she asks if there’s too much beauty in her diet
imagines her kidneys growing eyelashes, polished fingernails
why are the appetizers the shape of bullets
her meals fluttered or moaned once, having known fear.
She sees the seabass wink before her chef lops him in two
she wonders aloud should Apocalypse come will we try to eat her
what color does starvation come in anyhow
how many loaves of bread can we break from her body
will famine reduce men to their essentials: salt & semen
what makes some women all steeled bone or chagrin
won’t she become gossamer, our last mother to suckle & teethe
how many licks does it take to get to the center of her soul.
This world, regrettably, is poor with explanations.
If the End should come tomorrow, Kim concludes,
I will give them just a little taste of my pain
served only on Hermès dinner plates.
Apologies to my Listeners! I hope to incorporate more audio and voice into my posts, but I risk some “poor” audio quality. I don’t have a podcast-style set-up and so I sincerely hope my voice recording has come through clearly with little background noise.
A heart-shaped ache