Interview with poet Tyler King: “Emerging? We’ve Always Been Here” Writer Series
Tyler King (they/them) is an editor at Flail House Press, an online literary magazine that serves as a “mouthpiece for writers without a voice.” In April 2020, Tyler released Transmission, a chapbook that is accessible online and free to read.
Kasey Renee Shaw spoke with Tyler for a the first installment in littledeathlit’s “Emerging? We’ve Always Been Here” Writer Series, where writers are interviewed on their artistic journey, craft, and personal philosophy.
KS: When did you first realize you were a writer? What did that word mean to you at the time? What does it mean now?
TK: I always thought I would be a writer actually. I used to write all kinds of short stories and shit starting when I was about 7 or 8. I never really expected to do poetry, though. I never took it especially seriously until I saw Hanif Abdurraqib perform in Dayton in maybe 2015 and I thought oh, yes, this is it. As a kid I suppose I started writing because I was full of ideas and needed to get them out of my head and into the world and it’s more or less the same now, it’s just the ideas that are different.
KS: It’s interesting that you didn’t start out as a poet. I’m much of the same: I primarily wrote fiction all my life until twenty-two, when I began to focus on nonfiction. I had to learn new concepts in craft, style, things like that. I’m wondering, then: what is your writing process? How do you construct (and, perhaps, deconstruct) a poem?
TK: I guess I don’t have what you’d call a solid writing process. I write all my poems late at night, or very early in the morning if you want to be technical. As far as the actual approach to constructing poems, it’s kind of a maddening process. The idea is to layer these tangentially related abstract images on top of each other, seemingly at random and occasionally at a blistering pace. The effect is disorienting, and it creates a hyper specific mood. I think of it like selecting colors for a painting. It’s a way to sort of transmit an unspeakable feeling to the reader. I’m not worried about the poems making logical sense, as long as they make instinctual, emotional sense.
KS: If you had to describe your “brand” of poetry, how would you describe it? What do you want your poetry to say to people? When writing a poem, do you have an audience in mind, or are you writing more for yourself?
TK: I have to say I’m not very good at writing for an audience, it’s why I never do very well in poetry slams. If I had to pick an audience for my poems it would be an audience of ghosts. A lot of what I do is simply trying to write the dead back to life. There’s certainly a religious undercurrent running through it, but grief and longing for miracles are kind of a universal experience as far as I can tell. If I had some kind of a brand I’m almost certainly the least qualified of all people to speak on what it is. It’s more than a little bit spooky though, I can say that fairly confidently.
KS: It seems to me that the “universal experience” is the undercurrent of all writing. It reminds me of that phrase: “the personal is political.” Do you agree or disagree with that? Does the personal and the political play a role in your poetry?
TK: I’m of essentially two minds about this. Yes, I think the personal is political but I’m not sure if that means exactly what you’d think it means. The political is internalized into the self and the self is externalized into the realm of the political, sure, obviously. The parameters of what you’re capable of thinking, the actions you’re capable of taking, the freedom you’re capable of exercising, these are all influenced by political forces even if you can’t see what these are. That’s what institutional power looks like. It doesn’t mean that, you know, not cutting your hair or practicing self care or writing poems about how you feel is an inherently political act. It’s about intent, you know? It’s about having material political goals and pushing for them. Anything beyond that is just survival, which of course is by no means a bad thing.
To return to the point, of course these forces play a role in the poems. If I write some shit like “my landlord is going to kill me” or whatever, that’s a personal reflection of an extant political reality that I would like to see done away with, and if somebody reads that and empathizes with it, that’s how solidarity happens.
KS: Flail House Press is your literary magazine. Can you talk a little bit about how the mag can to be, and why? And what kind of writers and readers did you want to reach?
TK: I have to correct you on this, I absolutely wouldn’t call Flail House “my” magazine. The original idea came from my dear friend Richie Vincent, and he put in an incredible amount of work on the thing. He did basically all the branding, built the website, did all the promotion and stuff like that. As you might’ve guessed, I’d make a terrible face for a brand. The concept he approached me with was a very simple one, so simple in fact you’d think it was made to be a tag line: a mouthpiece for writers without a voice. That’s the whole deal.
I, as I’m sure you and every person who reads this can relate to, am just a bit strung out on the publishing industrial complex. The prestige and elitism of the whole thing has never sat well with me. We both know so many unbelievably talented people who have never been published, and who never really thought they could be published. I’m very much into the idea of just, giving people a chance who might never otherwise get one because they’re not in the right MFA program or whatever.
That’s what we tried to do here, a very proletarian approximation of what a lit mag could be. Whether we succeeded in this or not, let me know, the magazine is free online.
KS: Thanks for the correction. I’m excited to see where Flail House goes, because, wow, what an impressive mission statement. I want to wrap this up by talking about you, as a person, since so much of your poetry deals with identity. What should people know about you? Both as a person and as a writer.
TK: Oh man, I feel simultaneously compelled to overshare massively and to close up entirely here it is bizarre. There’s so much about me that helps to give context to the poems I think, such as the fact that I’m a socialist, I’m bisexual, I’m non-binary, and so on. All my poems are true, even when they aren’t exactly. It’s always born of something real and specific, and I’m always happy to tell anybody who asks the story behind any of them. My favorite thing in the entire world is sharing work with other poets. I’m absolutely ravenous about reading other people’s poems, I can’t get enough of it. There’s more poets I owe a debt to than I could possibly list here, but two I would like to shout out are Brendan Joyce and Chris Costello, who have inspired me not only to rethink the way I approach writing poems, but also the way I think about poetry and its purpose in the first place. Their work is phenomenal and I would very strongly urge anyone to go seek it out.
I would also very much like to let your audience know that I have a new tiny kitten, a boy named Dolly Parton, and that you should follow me on Twitter if you would like to see pictures of him constantly, and I promise you you do. This is, of course, a bribe.
Want more from Tyler (and of course you do because cat pics, duh)? Follow them on Twitter.