Kendra Grant Malone & Matthew Savoca Talk MOROCCO

Morocco is the latest title in the Dark Sky Books catalog. Below, poets Kendra Grant Malone and Matthew Savoca answer some questions about the book, exhibitionism, and bladder-pushing.

Seth Amos: Why did you decide to co-write the book?

Matthew Savoca: We never really decided to. We just started writing poems and sending them to each other and eventually, at some point, realized that we had a lot of them and that they kind of told a story and that it might be good.

Kendra Malone: There was never a conscious decision made like “say, lets write a fucked up book about difficult things and try to publish it — are you in?” What happened was that Matthew and I have been friends and writing partners for years and when Morocco started to take form our friendship was changing and we didn’t know how to navigate it. So, like one might expect we just started sending each other these poems to express things instead of messing it all up like people usually do in conversation. The poems added up quickly and suddenly we realized that voyeuristic people might enjoy them. It surprised us, really. We wrote them expressly for each other, but being exhibitionists, and with the quantity we wrote, we took a leap of faith and formed a collection.

Was there any collaboration in the writing?

MS: Um, no. There was collaboration in the creation and organization of the book, but not the writing. At least not directly.

KM: Nope. I think we maybe even were very careful not to edit each other too much. We wanted each of us to feel like we still controlled what we were saying to each other, even if we were about to send those private messages into a public space.

What was the writing process like for these poems?

MS: Well, we almost never wrote any of the poems in the presence of the other. Maybe one or two, directly after something particular happened. I wrote a lot of the poems at night on my roof. And some on the train. It feels hard to describe this. I wish I could answer this question out loud to ears instead of writing it for eyes.

But, um, ok, so the book was written in like three months and, for me, I was pretty much just writing about whatever had been happening recently or how I felt about what had happened or what might happen. That probably sounds confusing.

I think, thinking about it now, that I really just wanted to write down a lot of things that were happening because I didn’t want there to be an end to them, or to experiencing them, and somehow writing it down and sending it to Kendra made whatever had just happened not be totally done happening.

KM: I couldn’t really say it better than Matthew here. For me, it was compulsive. I felt I had to write these poems to preserve something that I just didn’t yet have the vernacular for and with his responses we slowly created a little vernacular for ourselves to describe something that was happening.

The poems act like the transcription of the separate interior monologues between the two perspectives. At times they even hint at a sort of call-and-response. Do you see the poems as such?

MS: I think that’s pretty accurate. It took me a minute of reading that first sentence to understand what you meant, but yes.

We have described the book many times, mostly for ease and speed of explanation, as call-and-response poems. I think saying that might not be the best way to explain it, but it is definitely a quick and easy way. I don’t think we ever really meant to sort of call out to one another in search of a response, at least not in the beginning, but as it went along I think responses were something we started to expect and maybe even rely on to keep it going.

KM: As far as separate interior monologues go, that is absolutely true. If our personal perspectives of our situation had been perfectly aligned then I’m sure the book would never have been written and we would probably just email each other occasionally like we used to. What makes life exciting for me personally, is when things are not working and I get a chance to see if I can understand why. If things are easy, I am not interested. A lot of people feel this way. And how I navigate that emotional space is to antagonize people to tears and then soothe them — just kidding. What I mean to say, is I feel conflicts can’t be solved until they have been deconstructed by both people and rebuilt through communication. We were just in a situation where we are poets so we did it the best way we knew how. And that’s where the call and response came into play.

The book touches on a number of themes: self-destruction, boundary pushing, fetishism, and escape, to name a few. What kind of relationship do you think the book describes?

MS: They are only themes in hindsight, I think. None of it was intentional. Most of the time I didn’t even know what was happening until all of a sudden I was writing a poem and finding some things out. Almost nothing I do is very calculated, and I think that might be a pretty good definition of what kind of relationship Morocco describes.

KM: Yeah, we never had any purposeful conversations about what kind of themes or topics would be discussed in Morocco. I think the ones you listed here came to be themes because of our fascination with them. Maybe that is an over simplistic way to view it. But fetishism, for instance held a certain significance to us because we were discovering that we are both people with fetishistic desires that were at the same time compatible and impossible to placate, so the fascination became obsessive. Most of the themes in the book came about naturally in a way similar to that.

As far as what kind of relationship Morocco describes, I mean, if I knew I suppose we wouldn’t have felt a need to write it.

In “morocco III,” Kendra, you give some insight into the significance of Morocco and how it became such a main theme for the book. Could you expound upon that theme?

KM: Morocco as a theme that guided the book was really a very simple thing. Morocco became a representation of escape. And though the poems at times, especially mine, can be very cruel, what always was the most important thing was that if we could escape the lives we had constructed for ourselves, then we could still be soothed. Choosing Morocco as the place happened because we have both traveled quiet a bit and Morocco was a place neither of us had been, to start. We still haven’t gone. At this point I don’t think we ever should. For me, Morocco was tied to someone I loved. The political environment in Morocco is incredibly unique, and that was what brought that person there. It’s something I don’t entirely understand and like I said earlier, I am attracted to things I don’t understand, because I love difficult things. I love to struggle, and for me, Morocco is tied to struggle.

Matthew, in two separate poems (“i don’t want us to care about anything” and “humming bird time”) you describe the act of “sharing headphones and cigarettes.” Tell me what this activity means to you and why it resonates so loudly in your memory.

MS: I think… I don’t know. Romance or whatever. It probably comes from movies. I remember watching Mystery Train by Jim Jarmusch like maybe ten years ago and just really liking the scenes where the two main characters share headphones listening to a cassette player on the train and when they smoke out of each other’s mouths and stuff. I like nice, calm, almost sad ways of sort of backing off from the world with someone else.

Kendra, in “can i be king?” you write, “you will call me king,/ king kendra/and the guilt will/be thorough/because that is really/the only good/measure/of a very good/time.” Can you discuss the poem as a whole and then these lines on their own?

KM: This is my favorite poem of mine in the book. I feel that it is the closest to accurate of a description of myself as I can create. I suppose its no secret if you read the book that I am a bit of a controlling person. But also, I am riddled with guilt. It’s kind of simple stuff. I also love being a woman though being a queen seems limiting as far as royal metaphors go. I like to be alpha to a fault, and from day to day, when I feel good, the word king sounds better in my mind. I’m not a fan of gender markers in language. I find it really easy to communicate without them — without much thought at all. So in a way, its fun to use that construction backwards to say “hey I’m the boss, I’m a tyrant, this is how I like it and if you want to be around me, then you will not even bother calling me a queen.”

The last lines that you have quoted in the question also serve a simple purpose. It’s a way to admit that my image of myself is full of delusion, and I am aware, but I will not discard it because it makes me feel good. Guilt is a lovely little thing that lets us enjoy our fantasies and also helps us retain that we are good people “deep down,” because look, after all, I feel very bad about something I cannot or refuse to help feeling.

There’s both a lot and a little mystery in these poems. The reader realizes that he or she has a window into the mystery between the two perspectives and their ongoing conflict, but the writing is straightforward and unfiltered. How do you feel about being so honest and open in these poems?

MS: For some reason, I just keep thinking about something Frank O’Hara said: “You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, ‘Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.’”

Frank O’Hara said his movement Personism was founded one day after lunch when he was writing a poem for someone and realized that he could have been using the telephone instead if he wanted to.

How do I feel about being so honest and open in these poems? I feel embarrassed, but after the fact. There’s no other way it could have gone down. And anyway it’s good to embarrass yourself.

KM: God, it is good to embarrass yourself. It’s really terrifying in a way that we are publishing this book. All the time I think “What the fuck have we done?” But we keep doing it and so far, so good.

In a similar vein, what about the waning mystery between the two perspectives? It seems they feel comfortable enough to see each other at a base human level, and once they expose themselves entirely, where does mystery lie?

MS: Maybe the mystery ends up lying in “What else?” or “What now?”?

KM: “What now?” was the first thing that popped in my mind reading this question. That’s where the mystery will always be. As far as base human levels go, let me just say this. We are the kind of people who pee with the door open, no matter who is home.

“Pushing on my bladder” is mentioned in two poems (“not being your wife (and some useless assertations)” and “i don’t want to think about ducks dying”). One of these poems was written by each of you. Is it an inside joke?

MS: Yeah it’s more or less an inside joke, but the kind you can be let in on. It’s just something that happened early on and kind of ending up being an important moment. I was in line for the bathroom at a bar and Kendra walked past and saw me and just all of a sudden lunged for my bladder and I did fall down and we both laughed a lot and then I peed and went and found her out on the back patio. Something about that event just clicked things over.

KM: Yep. I’m a jerk when I’m drunk and Matthew likes it.

Is something beautiful damaged? Is something damaged beautiful?

MS: Um, no? I don’t know. I think Freud said something like, “As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.” I don’t know why this makes me think of that. I’m not really into Freud. Maybe beauty and damage are just easy things to be interested in. Doing damage is beautiful in a lot of ways. But I mostly like to protect pretty things.

KM: I don’t think there can be a blanket statement about it so much. Only because damage and beauty are both so perspective based. It can shift a lot from situation to situation.

Sex seems to be both the root and cure for the two perspective’s conflict. Do you think this is the major cause of their struggle?

MS: I don’t know. People tend to make sex an ultimate measure of things. Me too. So it becomes an easy target. The fact that we wanted to spend just so much of our time together is probably what’s actually backing the conflict. The struggle has a lot to do with being genuinely upset by that.

KM: I wouldn’t say it was a major cause, but it definitely became a fixation. For me, the major cause was that Matthew existed at all.

The last poem in the book, “ruined,” seems appropriately placed at the end as a summary of all the books themes. Is its placement intentional?

MS: Yeah. For the most part, the poems are ordered in the way that they were written, chronologically. When we realized that this thing was going to be a manuscript, and started putting it together, we talked a bit about how we should end it. “ruined” was written last or close to last and once we had it, we knew it was the end of the book.

KM: When I first read “ruined” I knew I could stop writing Morocco. It was a little relief.

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Kendra Grant Malone lives with her cat Delores Grant Malone. Her first collection of poetry, EVERYTHING IS QUIET, is now available from Scrambler Books. Matthew Savoca was born in 1982 in Pennsylvania. He is the author of the poetry books LONG LOVE POEM WITH DESCRIPTIVE TITLE (published 2010 by Scrambler Books) and OH WELL, which is forthcoming from Ravenna Press in 2011. Morocco releases 11/11/11 from Dark Sky Books.