PAUL CUNNINGHAM: Whether it’s George Orwell’s 1984 or Roberto Bolaño's 2666 or Blake Butler’s 300,000,000, I think there’s something immediately conspicuous about a book with a number for a title. How a person might immediately want to link the number to a particular value (i.e. 1984 = date). In Deluge No. 8, I published some poem excerpts from a collection you called "1000 Words". What was the impetus behind $50,000? How long did it take you to complete?
ANDREW WEATHERHEAD: Right! “1000 Words” was sort of a test case for $50,000. I had originally wanted “1000 Words” to take the form of $50,000 (single, unbroken lines with lots of white space around them), but the language kinda got away from me and “1000 Words” ended up featuring more varied use of the page.
I arrived at the numbered titles separately though. For “1000 Words,” I was inspired by Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and the way the title defines the piece in almost scientific terms. (“1000 Words” is exactly 1000 words long.) For $50,000, I was thinking about value and currency, and I wanted to highlight an amount of money that could be seen as value ambiguous. Depending on circumstances and timeframe, $50,000 can either be a whole lot of money or woefully inadequate.
The first draft of material that became this book I have dated as July 2, 2015 and I approved the final proof mid-December, 2019.
PC: Like a world that invades or a world that arises, this book-length poem functions in similar ways. $50,000 sometimes invades, sometimes creeps up on you and there isn’t a line in the book that doesn’t invite curiosity. Take the second line for example: “The sun rising on W. 27th street, the sodium lights hum on 10th Avenue.” You could have written “streetlamps” or “street lights,” but you wrote “sodium lights.” The specificity made me pause and after some Googling I learned that the setting was most likely New York City and that sodium lights actually use pressurized sodium in “an excited state” and next thing you know I’m reading about particles and something called atomic sodium and different color spectrums and it all comes back full circle on page 85: “Quarks, lepton, bosons.” Did you write this poem hoping to slow readers down at all? To get them to ask: what’s missing from my life? What have I overlooked? Or, what has life (or our world) been reduced to?
AW: I did not write this hoping to slow readers down. I think the experience you’ve described is fairly characteristic of how many people interact and engage with the world in 2020. We have so much information and content at our fingertips that these myriad applications and algorithms are constantly slowing us down and spinning us off in different cognitive directions.
As a result, I often feel like something’s missing from my life – because I’m constantly reminded of how much is out there. It feels crazy not to think about what life could be like. I’m just grateful I have poetry to channel all of this disparate shit into. As an art form it seems to uniquely encourage mental wandering and curiosity/dissatisfaction with reality.
PC: “Unsure what anyone looks like.” Moving from line to line, there were times when I felt like I was probably making associations that you had intended, but then there were other times (specifically the sequences of names) where it felt like I was left to my own devices. Namely Google. I Googled every single name in this book. I believe I first started Googling the names after I came across “Otis Overcash.” I really loved that name and eventually listened to some songs by J.E. Mainer’s Mountaineers.
AW: I struggled with how to convey to readers that all those names are real names. They came from a website called nameoftheyear.com, which holds an annual March Madness-style tournament to come up with the best name each year. I mention it in the acknowledgements page of the book, but I still don’t think that captures how much I love that website. I find so much poetry in some of those names. Otis Overcash is a great one. Tokyo Sexwale, Charles Fugger, Ned Spaghetti, Tumpsey Speeks – they float in and out of my consciousness all day every day, like little mantras.
PC: “I played basketball every day for years and years until one day I just stopped.” Basketball players—their names and bodies pass by throughout the poem—feel like constellations in this poem. Additionally, given the massive scope of this poem, it feels like being lost at sea at times, like we're drifting. Familiar stars that they are, I was comforted anytime I saw their names. More so than the thought of discovering water on Mars. Should we think of basketball as a guiding light?
AW: Yeah, possibly. The personalities are so huge and the drama is so straightforward that the triumphs and tribulations really do function like modern day mythology, in terms of being instructive and aspirational. I know I’ve certainly looked to Michael Jordan’s insane work ethic or Russell Westbrook’s abandon as inspiration and guide during different times in my life.
I sometimes worry that this kind of emotional investment in basketball is infantilizing, that I’m stuck in some endless childhood following a sport played by people a decade my junior, but I can’t help but think the alternative – turning away from a game I’ve cared about my whole life and has helped me forge lasting connections with others – seems worse. It’s a narrative to invest in, just like any other, accumulating weight with time and the bonds built in and around it.
PC: I was thinking about Georges Bataille’s notion of poetic expenditure after reading the line about Andy Warhol on page 39 (“Maybe Andy Warhol was right, making money is art”). Bataille has said poetry could be considered synonymous with expenditure. Would you agree?
AW: I wasn’t aware Bataille had written about economics until reading this question, so I don’t think I can agree or disagree without knowing more about what he means by “expenditure.” Doing some googling now… his ideas look interesting. Looking forward to reading more.
PC: “The trees were blue and brown, purple and black.” I thought about the Baldwin quotes you included for days after finishing $50,000. How Baldwin uses anything but the color “green” to describe the trees in that quoted passage. Trees also sometimes tend to appear in close proximity to violence or loss in your poem: “World War I ends / Trees rustle overhead / Haven’t experienced much tragedy lately”. I wondered if you could say something about how you see Baldwin’s words functioning in terms of the book. What has his writing meant to you?
AW: I love that line. I think about it a lot, even though it’s just a kind of a throwaway line in Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. The way it makes mysterious something so common, as you note, is just magical to me. That’s the highest achievement of art and literature, in my eyes – to remind us of the mystery of living and the world around us.
I’ve had profound experiences reading Baldwin – those experiences where it seems like he’s writing only for me, describing very specific thoughts and feelings I thought were uniquely mine, explaining me to myself, somehow. I’m sure others have had this experience with Baldwin, which is what makes him so amazing – the ability to connect broadly while touching each reader individually and privately.
Andrew Weatherhead's $50,000 is now available from Publishing Genius Press. He is the author of the poetry collections Cats and Dogs (Scrambler Books, 2014) and Todd (Monster House Press, 2018). He lives in New York City and used to work in health insurance.
ANDREW WEATHERHEAD: Right! “1000 Words” was sort of a test case for $50,000. I had originally wanted “1000 Words” to take the form of $50,000 (single, unbroken lines with lots of white space around them), but the language kinda got away from me and “1000 Words” ended up featuring more varied use of the page.
I arrived at the numbered titles separately though. For “1000 Words,” I was inspired by Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and the way the title defines the piece in almost scientific terms. (“1000 Words” is exactly 1000 words long.) For $50,000, I was thinking about value and currency, and I wanted to highlight an amount of money that could be seen as value ambiguous. Depending on circumstances and timeframe, $50,000 can either be a whole lot of money or woefully inadequate.
The first draft of material that became this book I have dated as July 2, 2015 and I approved the final proof mid-December, 2019.
PC: Like a world that invades or a world that arises, this book-length poem functions in similar ways. $50,000 sometimes invades, sometimes creeps up on you and there isn’t a line in the book that doesn’t invite curiosity. Take the second line for example: “The sun rising on W. 27th street, the sodium lights hum on 10th Avenue.” You could have written “streetlamps” or “street lights,” but you wrote “sodium lights.” The specificity made me pause and after some Googling I learned that the setting was most likely New York City and that sodium lights actually use pressurized sodium in “an excited state” and next thing you know I’m reading about particles and something called atomic sodium and different color spectrums and it all comes back full circle on page 85: “Quarks, lepton, bosons.” Did you write this poem hoping to slow readers down at all? To get them to ask: what’s missing from my life? What have I overlooked? Or, what has life (or our world) been reduced to?
AW: I did not write this hoping to slow readers down. I think the experience you’ve described is fairly characteristic of how many people interact and engage with the world in 2020. We have so much information and content at our fingertips that these myriad applications and algorithms are constantly slowing us down and spinning us off in different cognitive directions.
As a result, I often feel like something’s missing from my life – because I’m constantly reminded of how much is out there. It feels crazy not to think about what life could be like. I’m just grateful I have poetry to channel all of this disparate shit into. As an art form it seems to uniquely encourage mental wandering and curiosity/dissatisfaction with reality.
PC: “Unsure what anyone looks like.” Moving from line to line, there were times when I felt like I was probably making associations that you had intended, but then there were other times (specifically the sequences of names) where it felt like I was left to my own devices. Namely Google. I Googled every single name in this book. I believe I first started Googling the names after I came across “Otis Overcash.” I really loved that name and eventually listened to some songs by J.E. Mainer’s Mountaineers.
AW: I struggled with how to convey to readers that all those names are real names. They came from a website called nameoftheyear.com, which holds an annual March Madness-style tournament to come up with the best name each year. I mention it in the acknowledgements page of the book, but I still don’t think that captures how much I love that website. I find so much poetry in some of those names. Otis Overcash is a great one. Tokyo Sexwale, Charles Fugger, Ned Spaghetti, Tumpsey Speeks – they float in and out of my consciousness all day every day, like little mantras.
PC: “I played basketball every day for years and years until one day I just stopped.” Basketball players—their names and bodies pass by throughout the poem—feel like constellations in this poem. Additionally, given the massive scope of this poem, it feels like being lost at sea at times, like we're drifting. Familiar stars that they are, I was comforted anytime I saw their names. More so than the thought of discovering water on Mars. Should we think of basketball as a guiding light?
AW: Yeah, possibly. The personalities are so huge and the drama is so straightforward that the triumphs and tribulations really do function like modern day mythology, in terms of being instructive and aspirational. I know I’ve certainly looked to Michael Jordan’s insane work ethic or Russell Westbrook’s abandon as inspiration and guide during different times in my life.
I sometimes worry that this kind of emotional investment in basketball is infantilizing, that I’m stuck in some endless childhood following a sport played by people a decade my junior, but I can’t help but think the alternative – turning away from a game I’ve cared about my whole life and has helped me forge lasting connections with others – seems worse. It’s a narrative to invest in, just like any other, accumulating weight with time and the bonds built in and around it.
PC: I was thinking about Georges Bataille’s notion of poetic expenditure after reading the line about Andy Warhol on page 39 (“Maybe Andy Warhol was right, making money is art”). Bataille has said poetry could be considered synonymous with expenditure. Would you agree?
AW: I wasn’t aware Bataille had written about economics until reading this question, so I don’t think I can agree or disagree without knowing more about what he means by “expenditure.” Doing some googling now… his ideas look interesting. Looking forward to reading more.
PC: “The trees were blue and brown, purple and black.” I thought about the Baldwin quotes you included for days after finishing $50,000. How Baldwin uses anything but the color “green” to describe the trees in that quoted passage. Trees also sometimes tend to appear in close proximity to violence or loss in your poem: “World War I ends / Trees rustle overhead / Haven’t experienced much tragedy lately”. I wondered if you could say something about how you see Baldwin’s words functioning in terms of the book. What has his writing meant to you?
AW: I love that line. I think about it a lot, even though it’s just a kind of a throwaway line in Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. The way it makes mysterious something so common, as you note, is just magical to me. That’s the highest achievement of art and literature, in my eyes – to remind us of the mystery of living and the world around us.
I’ve had profound experiences reading Baldwin – those experiences where it seems like he’s writing only for me, describing very specific thoughts and feelings I thought were uniquely mine, explaining me to myself, somehow. I’m sure others have had this experience with Baldwin, which is what makes him so amazing – the ability to connect broadly while touching each reader individually and privately.
Andrew Weatherhead's $50,000 is now available from Publishing Genius Press. He is the author of the poetry collections Cats and Dogs (Scrambler Books, 2014) and Todd (Monster House Press, 2018). He lives in New York City and used to work in health insurance.
