At the heart of Anders Carlson-Wee’s Disease of Kings (Norton, 2023) is a touching friendship between two young men alike in means yet contrary in outlook, an odd couple living large on the treasures they resurrect from dumpsters. As in Carlson-Wee’s prior outings, The Low Passions and Dynamite, life on society’s margins gets extensive coverage, and again we’re treated to a cast of captivating voices in dramatic monologue, this poet’s specialty. But here the poems’ speaker is much more at center stage, sharpening, deepening. As his every emotion—low and high—burns, Disease of Kings paints an intimate, tenebristic portrait of the artist as a young man who chooses material poverty only to unearth, finally, spiritual wealth.
The interview which follows was conducted by email in October 2023.
Joshua Lavender: In your recent interview with Tyler Robert Sheldon published in Ninth Letter, where you mention the “imposed limitations” of the dramatic monologue, you say, “The larger the limitation, the more generative I become.” This recalls a maxim I read long ago: “Form is the limit that forces a writer to invent.” Which other formal limitations have forced you the most to invent? Which have you liked best?
Anders Carlson-Wee: For several years I had this idea that I wanted to write a poem comprised entirely of dialogue, like the call-and-response form of prayer, with no tags or other information. I made numerous attempts at this, all failures. Finally I gave up and moved on. Then one day, a year later, I was writing in a café and an idea for a poem struck me—the opening lines came into my ear, intact, and the lines were a call and response. Immediately I began drafting, and by the end of the day I had a rough draft. That draft would eventually become the poem “Primer,” which is in my first book, The Low Passions. For me, that limitation—of pure dialogue—was all but too much, too limiting, and for years my conscious attempts fell short. However, all those attempts seemed to have primed my mind for that one moment in that one café, when the right material arrived in my head to be paired with that call-and-response form. From beginning to end, that idea took over five years to come to fruition.
I’ve used many other formal limitations, usually to do with voice or meter. With meter, it’s always best to be a bad friend to it and manipulate it as you see fit. Sometimes I’ve given myself the goal of building around a single image or of using no imagery or concrete language at all. Other times, I’ve tried introducing a quarrel between two characters and then finding the fastest route to a resolution or finishing point. Sometimes the limitations play to my strengths; other times, they intentionally knock my feet out from under me. All limitations can be fruitful.
JL: It makes a lot of sense that you bring up call-and-response and the pure-dialogue poem. My favorite poem in Disease of Kings is “Where I’m At.” Earlier in the book, a poem with which it is clearly in dialogue, “Where I’m From,” casts a skeptical light on how people in a small town respond to tragedy. At the end of that poem, the speaker witnesses his father, a pastor, saying “what no one could believe.” Conversely, at the end of “Where I’m At,” receiving an unexpected gift from a sympathetic stranger who can perhaps ill afford it, the speaker says “the only thing there is to say.” In both cases, what’s “said” goes unsaid in the poem, but we can guess what it is. Yet I can’t imagine a starker difference in tone, implication, situations in which people in these poems are left. “Where I’m From” questions one sort of faith, “Where I’m At” affirms another—at least, that’s my take. Given the titles, did you see these poems as being in dialogue with each other from the start, well into writing them, or only after? And how do you see their dialogue?
ACW: The link between those two poems came late, and actually it came after I’d established a relationship between the poems “Where I’m At” and “Good Money,” which includes the line “Where I’m going.” That line is spoken not by the book’s central speaker but by North, who has been the speaker’s only friend and co-conspirator throughout the collection but ultimately leaves for a job fishing in Alaska. For me, the link between those two poems was crucial, because those two sentiments (“where I’m at” and “where I’m going”) spoke to the heart of the two characters’ divergent personalities. The speaker is here, where he’s at, and doesn’t intend to go anywhere; in stark contrast, North is wildly alive and perfectly able to embrace change and newness. The third poem in this trinity, “Where I’m From” (which comes first of the three, in Section I), originally had a different title. Several titles, actually: I couldn’t decide what to call it and agonized over the title for quite some time. Finally, I realized that the speaker has not always been where he’s at—he has a distinct origin worth highlighting —and the title sort of arrived (thanks to help from some friends). Once I had the title “Where I’m From,” it felt inevitable. Taken together, I hope the trinity offers a certain effect: where I’m from to where I’m at to where I’m going—but in the case of the third, the baton is passed to North, who is going somewhere, while the speaker remains yet is changed against his will by North’s change.
JL: I gather the central speaker in Disease of Kings is a younger you, an aspiring writer living on the cheap to free up time for pursuing his art, and though you know more than anyone about that young man, I’m not sure I agree he doesn’t intend to go anywhere. Different from North as he is, he appears to be living on novel terms, considering his family background. That seems brave. Also, while North sometimes exasperates him—I’m thinking of their foray to steal abandoned bikes on a college campus in “End of Term”—he clearly admires North, not least for his devil-may-care ways. Early in the book, hearing North cracking eggs in the kitchen, the speaker reflects on their differences:
I like listening to him get reckless,
even though half of everything is mine
and I’d never waste so much on one
meal. Isn’t that the secret indulgence
of friendship: being near what you
can never be?
(“Listening to North in the Morning”)
It seems, over the course of the book, this speaker is learning to live with difference, ambiguity, limbo. In the first poem, “Hired,” an unseen stranger hires him for the odd job of just existing—with an indefinite termination date he comes to understand as the real work. As he and North live off the fat of suburbia by dumpster diving, it seems the speaker is learning not to be torn by finding so much abundance and so much waste in the same place. After North leaves for Alaska, as the speaker dumpster-dives at a grocery store in “Contact,” the last poem, he finds himself again in cahoots with a shadowy accomplice, an employee whose missives on cardboard boxes point him to “the good stuff.” He tries to discover who’s helping him, but his suspense finally yields to an immense gratitude:
What else could I do? Thank you,
I wrote in the branches above
the monkeys. Thank you, I wrote
in the ocean below the fins.
While his resourcefulness harkens back to the speaker of “Living”—who says, “I get everything I need for free”—in your wonderful chapbook Dynamite, the speaker in Disease of Kings seems more aware of other people, more spiritually indebted to them. If my guesses about his evolution are correct, would you agree it’s analogous to becoming a poet? What are your thoughts on that?
ACW: Yes, the speaker in Disease of Kings ultimately yields to gratitude, but not without a lot of self-doubt, self-obsession, insecurity, and greed along the way. And yes, I could see relating his character arc to the experience of becoming a writer. At first it’s about self-expression and self-seeking, and the language seems to originate within you. But the more you write, the more you experience a kind of trance—you, the writer, fade into the background and finally all but disappear. And what replaces the ego is a kind of expansive consciousness, an alertness to the possibilities of the moment, the possibilities of language. In those moments of deep immersion in the work of writing, the “you” of normal life, normal consciousness, acts as a conduit for something much larger. That’s when your writing can really surprise you. And in that ecstasy of tapping into something greater than yourself, of having that chance to commune with the universe, the emotion that seems to rise above all others is not pride or self-satisfaction or even happiness, but gratitude.
JL: That’s well said. For me, ego and self-satisfaction have been real stumbling blocks when writing poems. When I studied at the University of Maryland, my teacher Stanley Plumly would sometimes pencil a line across a draft, often just above my favorite part of what I’d written, and he’d say, “The poem ends there, kiddo. You’ve got to learn how to get out of it.” That burned me up. But the more Stan gave my writing that treatment, the more I saw how I was mistaken in some of my motivations for writing what I had. It was humbling, at once a lesson in psychology and poetic craft. It’s strange how the two can overlap. What do you think has been the hardest craft lesson for you to learn? Why was it so hard?
ACW: It’s tricky, because elements of craft are so hard to isolate. Image, rhythm, voice, narrative, rhetorical devices, argumentation, and so on are all happening at once, each part playing off and augmenting the others. Early on, it was hard to resist showing off—pumping up the music, slamming down the expensive verb. But soon I came to see the value and infinity held in the humblest words. Another long and ongoing craft journey for me has been interiority—how best to use it, and when, and how much, and also just finding the right language to express inner thoughts, deep secrets, private shame. That’s a vital part of writing I struggled to access in my youth, and I’ve had to dig deep to develop it.
JL: In another interview, with Joy Baglio in The Common, you say that the speaker in Disease of Kings “isolates himself to a tragic degree,” but also develops “a sense of spiritual hope.” If we see his hope emerge in a poem like “Contact,” we see his loneliness overtake him in the book’s fourth section, particularly in poems like “Living Alone” and “Dimple,” which begins:
Sadder than believing you’re alone
in this world is believing
you’re alone while others exist.
Have I let it come to this?
Later in your talk with Baglio, recounting how you lived in your twenties—no expenses, getting everything by dumpster diving, paying only rent—to make time for creating art, you say, “The culture doesn’t want me to do that; it wants me convinced that I need things, and in order to have these things I need to trade away my time. A long time ago I said no to all that. . . .If this was radical, it was radical because our culture is insane. For me, the idea of conforming to our culture is profoundly inhuman.” This observation seems to underscore the speaker’s yearning at the end of the fourth section’s final poem, “Lay It Bare”:
. . . Slow, that’s what
I have. I’m not happy either.
I walk past bars where flush people
drink. Markets where I dumpster
what I eat. Down streets quiet enough
to hush the last ten years. Parks
dark enough to find Gemini, Lyra.
I don’t wish you were poor.
I wish you were here.
Loneliness may be self-imposed for him, but loneliness also appears to be a fact of life in our culture, obsessed as we commonly are with materialism, status, and—as “slow” implies—speed, getting what we want now. You’ve traveled a lot. How have you seen loneliness play out in other people’s lives? What do you think it means for us? Can we escape it? How?
ACW: Loneliness is one of the only things that is not self-imposed by the speaker in Disease of Kings. He’s ruthlessly committed to his bizarre lifestyle, and he sees himself as a greedy, selfish person with the near-total privilege to choose exactly how he spends his time, but when it comes to loneliness, he finds himself unable to maintain control. North, his only friend, abandons their shared life, leaving him groping in the dark for even the smallest forms of connection.
I’ve traveled the United States extensively and have found my country to be utterly plagued by loneliness. It leaves you wondering if it’s the natural, inescapable human condition, and I don’t have a good answer to that question. I can only speak to my own experience. Some eras of my life have been notably more social than others, and I can say that I do feel profoundly soothed by strong and consistent human connection. But I can also say that there is some part of me, deep inside, that is always and forever alone. That part of me can’t be accessed, can’t be witnessed, can’t be understood. So what to do? The author Marilynne Robinson has offered vital insights on this topic, and one thing she’s written about is the notion of becoming good company for yourself. Of actually working at it. Putting in real effort. Like how you put in effort to develop any healthy relationship. This idea is easier said than done, but the impact on your life cannot be underscored sharply enough.
JL: I went out on the road in 2022, camping out of my car for a few months, and now I better appreciate the value in what you’re saying about becoming good company for yourself. I also learned to be more grateful. I can’t say just who I’m most grateful to, so I won’t put that question to you. But what in your life or your travels are you most grateful for?
ACW: I am most grateful for companionship. For friends and family to face the days with, and talk with, and quarrel with, and imagine the future with. I’m also profoundly grateful for my body, which allows me to experience anything at all.
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Joshua Lavender earned an M.F.A. from the University of Maryland. His poems and songs most recently appeared in Salvation South and The Museum of Americana. His novel Quibble, which explores transhumanist disembodiment, is published at singulardream.substack.com.
Anders Carlson-Wee is the author of Disease of Kings (Norton, 2023), The Low Passions (Norton, 2019), a New York Public Library Book Group Selection, and Dynamite (Bull City Press, 2015), winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Prize. He is the editor of Best New Poets 2024. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, Harvard Review, BuzzFeed, American Poetry Review,and many other publications. The recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, he is the winner of the Poetry International Prize. Anders is represented by Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents and lives in Los Angeles.
