An Interview with Brian S. Ellis

An Interview With Brian S. Ellis

by Kimberly Sheridan

October 19, 2022

The poetry of Brian S. Ellis unravels, inverts, investigates, and complicates. His poems are radical koans and invitations to forego common narratives. In a review of Yesterday Won’t Goodbye, Jeanann Verlee writes, “His poems speak with an unbridled urgency yet come to you patient, coy, brimming with wisdom—and acutely aware of their own necessity.”

Ellis’s new poetry collection Against Common Sense will be published in 2023 by Limit Zero Publications. He is the author of the chapbook Pharmakos (2006) from Destructible Heart Press and the poetry collections: Uncontrolled Experiments in Freedom (2008) and Yesterday Won’t Goodbye (2011) from Write Bloody Books, and American Dust Revisited (2013) and Often Go Awry (2015) from University of Hell.

Ellis first began performing his poems at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and now lives in Portland, Oregon. He is a member of the arts collective the Whitehaus Family Record. Ellis has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times and, in 2013, he was the recipient of the William Stafford “War No More” Award from Portland Community College.

It was a delight to meet with Brian virtually where we discussed the value of complexity, humor and absurdity, artificial intelligence, and what snacks pair best with his new book.

Read a poem from his new book HERE.

SHERIDAN

The back cover of your new collection states, “The poems in Against Common Sense do not think there’s a type of knowledge that a person can obtain that detracts from said person’s overall ability to think: this is the theory that is invoked when common sense is employed; that it is possible somehow that learning can separate us from ourselves; that learning is a dangerous activity that will leave us with less information than we began with.” Did you know early on there was this theme, or did it start to emerge in the process, or after writing all the poems?

ELLIS

It happened halfway through. I think I already had a snowball. Have you ever played the video game, Katamari Damacy? It’s this PlayStation video game from the early 2000s where you’re a tiny magical creature that’s in this big house. You’re mouse-sized and you push things around and anything that you touch can be absorbed into your ball. And the ball just gets bigger and bigger and bigger…anyway. I think that idea emerged partway through; I already had all this inertia. I wrote the poem “Against Common Sense” and I had intended to write this poem that was anti-Thomas Paine. I was taking some classes and I had just actually read Common Sense, the pamphlet that Thomas Paine wrote around the founding of the United States, and I thought about this thread of anti-intellectualism that runs through the United States, just this pride in lack of learning that’s very popular now. I feel like even before Donald Trump started running for president, this was a trend. And I remember reading Thomas Paine and being like, Oh, when someone evokes common sense, what are they really saying? That this is so obvious, that I don’t need to learn things. I want to reject expertise. This is just common sense. And also, somehow learning will make you stupider.

The poem actually ended up being not as much about Thomas Paine and ended up being about Occam’s razor. But, I was thinking a lot about that—I was thinking about poems that allow for complexity, poems that don’t try to make things simple. You know, what if simplicity on its own maybe isn’t a virtue?

SHERIDAN

I love the rethinking of a cliche or something that you almost take for granted—like common sense is good and simplicity is a virtue. You don’t deconstruct it and think, Why do we value it? What does it mean?

ELLIS

Yeah, and I think of the United States as just a powerfully conservative country. At the time, I was just so angry about everything and I was trying to think of new perspectives that hadn’t been covered before. So I was reading a lot of Enlightenment writers. And, at the time, the argument Thomas Paine makes in Common Sense is so weird and complicated, because he’s like: Kings don’t make sense; monarchy doesn’t make sense; monarchy is unnatural…but also white-men merchants should be in charge of the world and that’s also just common sense. And what’s amazing about common sense is that it stops explanation. It’s a dead end, you don’t go any further with it. So, over the last ten years, I’ve just gotten slowly more and more radical. I mean, I was a pretty punk kid and I’m even more radical than I used to be. And the logic behind the founding of the United States does not make sense. It’s a country that shouldn’t exist. It’s not logical and common sense was invented to just stop the conversation. It’s a conversation-ender.

SHERIDAN

It’s making me think of your last collection from 2015, Often Go Awry. Unfortunately, I haven’t read this collection yet but it contains poems “attacking determinism in one form or another.” It’s interesting to think of everything that’s happened since 2015. What was the progression from unraveling determinism to battling common sense? What were you thinking about then?

ELLIS

The old Scottish poet Robert Burns is part of that whole book and “often go awry” is from his poem “To a Mouse.” It’s an old-fashioned pastoral poem. He’s plowing in the field. He accidentally flips over a mouse’s nest. There’s the line, “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” I had heard that phrase forever, right? I had most often heard people say, The best-laid plans of mice and men, dot dot dot…and people don’t finish it because it’s just assumed or known. I was like, what is the actual end of that cliche? What’s the end of that phrase? But this poem was actually pretty complicated, and I was thinking about the method of inversion. What if we take this thing that we take for granted and flip it upside down, what happens then? So that’s what all those poems are about— flipping things on their head and looking at them from the opposite way. And yes, I guess it’s a really clear progression to Against Common Sense. That’s because I’m basically continuing that thing; I never even thought of that.

SHERIDAN

Many of your poems are funny! I’m thinking of the “Internet of Objects” series and “Hello? Hello? I Have Returned From The Future to Tell You That Time Travel Is Pretty Boring.” What role do humor and absurdity play in your creating a collection that embraces complexity, honesty, and thinks about thinking?

ELLIS

What’s funny is I’m not a big “humor person.” I don’t like stand-up comedy. People will see me read poetry or they know that I like performance and they’ll recommend a stand-up comic to me and I’ll be like ugh…I don’t know, there’s something about people who try to be funny on purpose that turns me off. I mean, I love laughing, I’m not a total psycho. I love laughter like anybody else. I think humor is a thing that for the most part I try to avoid, but I think absurdity is a great way to put it. I do like absurdity. I do like the absurd. I think there’s a grand tradition in writing and surrealism and the Italian surrealists from the mid-20th century emerged out of totalitarian Italy. They were so shocked, right to their core, that they felt like absurdity was the only reasonable response to the horrors that they lived through. So I feel like surrealism is anti-fascist, right? Because you’re disrupting the system. Like, let’s not make things too cohesive.
And I guess this goes back to Often Go Awry—any system that’s too complete is a type of fascism. You need holes. You need mistakes. You need silliness.

Also, I have a complicated relationship with technology. I wrote the “Internet of Objects” poems and I really love them. They’re close to me. I feel like there are a lot of ideas I have about them that are not explained anywhere in the poem—which are just general feelings about AI. Artificial intelligence. You get to a certain point where you’re just reinventing people. That’s sort of what all those poems are about. Here are a bunch of sentient objects who are just people and they have regular problems, they’re boring.

SHERIDAN

“I’ve earned a season of maggots.” [Line from “The Internet of Objects, Part 2: Refrigerator Fires Its Therapist”]

ELLIS

Yes, you can make your refrigerator alive. But it’s not going to want to take over the world. It’s going to want to do drugs and get massages. Sure, you can make conscious robots but what makes you think they’re gonna turn into the Terminator? Why wouldn’t they just have sex?

SHERIDAN

That’s what I loved about “Hello? Hello? I Have Returned From The Future to Tell You That Time Travel Is Pretty Boring” too. You’re like, meh, we’ve already done this…

ELLIS

Also, if time travel ever gets invented in the future…At the moment time travel gets invented at one point in time, it gets invented for all of time, right?

SHERIDAN

[Laughs] Yes. So you have a background in competing in poetry slams. Do you still compete? Was there a transition from performance to the page? Do you approach your work differently?

ELLIS

I’ve never approached my poetry any differently. I have stopped competing. Competition is hard and it can be devastating. It’s really emotional. I mean, I love attention. I still like being on stage. I have stopped doing poetry slam competitions. I did it for ten years or something and I toured for a while around the country. And then, when I moved to Portland, I had just come off a couple of years of feeling pretty ungrounded and a little lost. So I was like, I’ve got to stop doing this. I’ll stay in one place and just be in Portland—and it was good.

But I always considered books the places where my poems lived. To me, that’s their primary place. Even though there was often, in the years that I was performing, this divide of page versus stage. People would sometimes come up to me and offer me a compliment, and they’d say, Oh, Brian, I had read your poetry before but seeing you perform it live is so much better, you’re so good. And my heart would break a little bit. You know, I love performing. I love being on stage. I get a lot of pleasure out of it. But making books has always been my goal. I just love books.

SHERIDAN

I understand that. I think maybe a false divide has been created between page and stage or sometimes it’s a hierarchy thing—a book is better than a performance or vice versa.

ELLIS

There are those people who read their poetry and get on stage and they hold their book out, and they just look down at their book (mumble), and someone in the back is like, Talk louder! And the poet is like, No. And that gets to me. Then on the other end of the spectrum, there are people who just scream as loud as possible. I mean, listen, there’s plenty to scream about; I’m all for screaming sometimes. I just like a little variation, right? There should be peaks and valleys. I don’t think it’s any big mystery, finding a middle ground. Some poems are intimate and should be read intimately. I think the poems are already sort of telling you how to do it, and you can just listen to the poems.

SHERIDAN

This interview is for the wonderful Abandon Journal. What role does abandon play in your writing? Do you write hot, edit cold? Do you do a million drafts to achieve elements of abandon?

ELLIS

I do write hot. I feel like I do. I try to get the draft out as quickly as possible without trying to think too much. I try to turn my brain off as much as possible and write with my body. And I try not to care about the results. When you’re starting a poem, you can’t care. There has to be a certain amount of recklessness in there or it won’t get written. I write the same poem over and over again by hand. A lot of my editing process is just to copy poems over and over again, start to finish, and see how I feel about them.

I hadn’t quite thought about the journal’s name; it’s such a cool name. There’s writing with abandon and there’s writing out abandon. You can abandon things, you can leave things behind. And there’s also letting go without hesitation—and I think letting go without hesitation is so important.

SHERIDAN

What snack pairs best with your new collection? And drink?

ELLIS

I was gonna answer before you even said drink. I was gonna say coffee. Against Common Sense…coffee and almonds.

SHERIDAN

A little protein, a little caffeine.

ELLIS

Yeah, it’s really utilitarian. Trail mix is something that you would eat with this book. It’s not a luxurious book. It’s not like cake and wine, although I should write that book of poetry.

SHERIDAN

That might be the next one. You can use that as your jumping-off point: what collection would I write for cake and wine?

ELLIS

I guess they’d kind of have to be sex poems, basically. When I write my poems, I’m always like: What am I upset about? What are my fears? And, man, what about those people who just write for pleasure? Like, what is Danielle Steel doing? That’s who I need to start emulating. Maybe we should be just writing for pleasure. Having a good time. Stop puking our guts out, writing poems about the worst mistakes we’ve ever made or our most embarrassing moments, you know?