Anti-Heroin Chic ~ The Interview

Selections from an interview with James Diaz, publisher of Anti-Heroin Chic; published on 9/28/2017

(Link: http://heroinchic.weebly.com/blog/a-noir-life-an-interview-with-author-poet-peter-marra)

 

 

1: Fill us in a bit on your artist trajectory. When did you first start writing, how long before you first saw publication, what and who have been your influences throughout the years, have they changed at all since you began writing and where do you see or situate yourself and your work now?

 

I wrote my first book, an illustrated children’s book at the tender age of 6. It was composed of about a dozen drawings, one per page. Under each drawing was a descriptive sentence. I don’t remember much of the project but I do recall one page that had a drawing of an airplane on fire. The caption read: “The people are on a plane. It is going to crash. They are very afraid.” I was inspired to create this book because for years my parents had been reading “Where the Wild things are” and Dr. Seuss to me. I was impressed by the general weirdness of these books and wanted to create my own. My mother had always encouraged me to read and I read all the classics, my reading was never censored. My family lived in an Italian Catholic neighborhood and I attended parochial grade school and high school, so I had religion shoved down my throat. This was Gravesend Brooklyn, but it might have as well have been Small-town, USA. The people were very provincial and I never fit in, so I retreated into fantasy.

 

I would have to say the once I got to Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry and fiction, my path started to form. I wanted to be a horror writer, gradually moving on to Lovecraft by the time I was in early adolescence. I wanted to read every fictional piece in the library, and eagerly awaited the time I could get an adult library card which would gain me admittance to the pleasures of the grownups. There I discovered Henry Miller, the Beats Kerouac, Corso, Ginsberg, Burroughs, cutting edge poetry, the Dadaists and the surrealists. I took a fancy to Joyce Mansour, Tristan Tzara and Andre Breton. Artaud was a major influence with his Theater of Cruelty. Through Bob Dylan’s music I became acquainted with Rimbaud. It was about this time I started gravitating towards poetry – I liked the immediacy and fluidity of the poetic form. I was also exploring the associated fine artists of these movements such as Duchamp and Man Ray. If I didn’t leave Brooklyn soon I felt I would cut my throat.

 

In 1973 I started going to the Saint Marks Church for poetry readings to hear Ginsberg, Corso and Burroughs. Burroughs had a big influence on me, his melding of science fiction, politics and sex made my brain melt. “Naked Lunch,” and the works of Hubert Selby taught me that narrative could be molded and experimented with. I realized I could deviate from the standard. Selby’s work like “Like Last Exit to Brooklyn” and especially “The Room” got me started thinking about the implications of sex and violence and vengeance in everyday life. They also introduced me to an underworld of society that I didn’t know existed and that it was ok to be fascinated by it and write about it.

 

I attended one of Patti Smith’s early readings in ’72 an d ’73. Punk was not even in existence formally at this time although there were rumblings that things were about to change. As I mentioned, I was already interested in writing and had made some attempts at poetry in imitation of my heroes but it seemed unattainable to me. Patti made it seem like it was possible. I think it was her rawness and conviction and foul-mouthed gutsiness that drove the nails of inspiration home. I began hanging out in the East Village bookshops: Eastside Books and the 8th Street Bookshop. I also ventured uptown to the Gotham Bookmart.

 

Later on in my junior and senior years of high school I started to hang around in CBGB’s, heard and met many who would become the downtown luminaries of the punk scene: Tom Verlaine, Patti, Deborah Harry, Joey Ramone. This was a time of Sturm und Drang for me. I wanted to create pain and pleasure through art, especially the written word, but I was also interested in painting and film. Drugs and alcohol were beginning to come into my life (and would almost take me out permanently). I went to Bard College for 2 years and dropped out, ended up in the East Village making attempts at writing, music and art. I was all over the place, didn’t know what to do or why I was doing it. I had some poetry pieces published, but the work and I were very unfocused. I loved the punk writers such as Patti, Kathy Acker, Richard Hell and especially Lydia Lunch. Lydia’ drug-fueled nihilism and the way she dissected our present lives impressed me. The whole No Wave scene was made for me: total annihilation in a city that was rotten to its very core. I lived a Noir life and I vacillated between contentment and despair.

 

Starting in high school I began hanging out in times square in the 70’s and into the 80’s. I made the acquaintance of many of the sex workers from that era that populated the area as well as some of the famous performers from the golden age of porn: Annie Sprinkle, Vanessa del Rio, Marlene Willoughby, Velvet Summers as well as many who were never famous, those who became the detritus of the area. They were interesting, weird, wonderful characters: they pushed the envelope or died trying. I frequented the peepshows, strip joints and grindhouse theaters. I ran around with addicts and sex workers. I also consider this attempt to engulf everything and maybe annihilate myself to be part of my artistic training. I would frequently spend the afternoon at museums and fueled on one drug or another end up in Times Square roaming around. I was a lost angel in the sex-ozone. One place that I frequented was the Avon 7 which was situated on Seventh Avenue over the very center of Hell. I immortalized one night there in the piece, “Amorphous Hustlers of the Avon 7 Cinema,” published in DM du Jour.

 

I get very emotional when I see art and artists that I have idolized in person. The First time I saw a Francis Bacon painting in the flesh, I wept. The same happened when I saw Duchamp’s “The Bride stripped Bare” and Modigliani’s portrait of Jeanne Heubertene.

 

At this point in my life I would say my writing exists to explore the dark undercurrent of life, whether it’s sex, drugs or the depravity of our political system. The people in my pieces are victims constantly trying to find some sort of redemption and frequently failing. I write through the lenses of punk and the grindhouse, two genres that create reality through a hyper-sensitized reaction to pain and pleasure with black humor thrown in occasionally. It comes close to exploitation sometimes but there is a deeper goal present: to survive, to destroy the status quo. Some people have accused me of being misogynistic. (so far only male critics have made this accusation). If they’re saying that, then I know they haven’t scratched the surface of my writing. I could maybe comprehend if they thought my work was misanthropic because my work might be interpreted as hating all mankind (it’s not), but misogynistic it isn’t.

 

 

2: You have said that films play a huge role as far as influences go, and much of your work is very cinematic, what is the relationship for you between these two forms and how have they blended together in your poetry Who are some of the filmmakers and films that have made the biggest impact on you?

 

Film has influenced me greatly. When I was a child I was really interested in the horror film genre. I idolized Roger Corman, F.W. Murnau, the works of the Hammer Studio Directors and the great horror actors. I adored the trip into the unknow, the “dark side,” they provided, the realm where sex and fear are indiscernible.  

 

When I was a kid, my parents would often take me to Coney Island, the sleaze was fascinating to me. I was probably only about 7 or 8 but I remember a specific incident where my father and I were waiting to ride the famous Coney Island carousel. The carny running the ride was a biker. He had relatively long greasy hair, filthy jeans and a knife dangling off his belt. He also possessed many tattoos and his arms were riddled with holes.

 

“Daddy what’s those things on that man’s arms?” I asked. “Tattoos.” “No, the other things, the holes.” My father squirmed. He whispered to me, “track marks.” He said he’d explain when we got home. This must have been about 1965 or so. Years later I discovered Kenneth Anger’s “Scorpio Rising” – his film about the Coney Island biker gangs in the 60’s. I like to think that Anger was shooting his landmark film at the same time I was hanging out in Coney Island with my dad.

 

I discovered the French new wave and the Italian neo-realists and Ingmar Bergman in my freshman year of high school. “Through a Glass Darkly,” was on television late one night. This film floored me: a fractured heroine, hallucinations, the statement that God is a spider: this caused my Catholic Education to go haywire. I was in adolescence so sex was becoming very important to me. I viewed the sexual act as a mystical trip. Women were something to be explored and cherished, they contained mysteries to be unearthed. Godard’s muse Anna Karina was also my muse.

 

At one point in the late 70’s I came across Amos Vogel’s “Film as a Subversive Art.” What a treasure trove of images and theories of underground film! It opened up a whole new world of film that I was only vaguely aware of: Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Warhol. The images alone fueled my creative mind. I love Warhol’s art and film, the way he explores the freak world and the mundane. The way he makes us look at ourselves.

 

When I write I usually envision the work as a screenplay or film. In fact I think that many of my poems would make great experimental and experiential short films. Film possesses immediacy and I want the poem to have the same effect.

 

Bergman’s “Persona” and “Hour of the Wolf,” should be required viewing for all artists especially writers. The manipulation and fluidity of the images, the wrenching emotion forces oneself to explore. I’ve seen both many times in many stages of life: adolescence, youth and middle age. They generate new found fears and discoveries when viewed at every stage of life.

 

Speaking of which, I recently saw Jean Eustace’s “Mother and the Whore.” I first saw it at the NY Film Festival in the 70’s and loved it. It’s the 3 and ½ hour chronicle of a man’s relationship with two women and their decay and attempts at salvation. Each character assumes the personality of the title in different sections of the film. Seeing it at 57 after being married twice, getting sober and having a child, the film struck right to my core. I identified with each character and at the film’s end I was crying. These emotions are what I want to rip from the readers. My writing is confrontational. I want the reader to think and dream and search.

 

I strongly identify with Pasolini. He was a contradiction. He was a Marxist Scholar ostracized by the Communist Party, an atheist who made the greatest film about Jesus ever filmed, but he was a poet first and he remained one to the end. His masterpiece “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” is a brutal study of power and commodity fetishism. As he said, “power commercializes the body, it transforms the body into goods.”

 

Through my exploration of the exploitation genre, I was influenced by Russ Meyer – I enjoyed his concept of the Super Vixen, the violent woman who takes advantage of the dumb male. In all his films the female is the strong protagonist and the male is something to be manipulated or destroyed. The stylized violence of Dario Argento and the other Giallo directors has great appeal for me, especially “Suspiria.” I like Argento because he sometimes incudes a murder scene that doesn’t really make sense, but he includes it because the color and rhythm and style of the murder is appealing and gets under your skin. Sometimes through reading or viewing a violent action we can achieve an epiphany or catharsis.

 

When I write I see a visual narrative of some kind (usually disjointed time) that goes forward then winds back upon itself transposing film, a visual medium into poetry, a subjective medium

 

 

3: People who are familiar with your work know that you broach very difficult, controversial and possibly triggering material and topics. Personally I find that you have struck an incredible balance that is hard for most writers to maintain, where the poems could but don't veer into exploitation or mere shock value, but actually try to say some very important things albeit through a very harsh, unforgiving landscape. What do you think the biggest misconception about your work is? What are the common reproaches that you receive and if you were to clarify and make a stand on your work what would it be?

 

First, I have to say I despise “PC” people, self-righteous motherfuckers. I must confess that I get a big thrill hearing that my work is a “trigger.” It’s my childhood wanting to be noticed! I love to push buttons and envelopes, rip envelopes apart. People have been lulled into a false sense of security by our current media state. They would rather watch Reality Television and elect a reality TV star as the President, than try and confront their inner addictions, loved-loss, pain and suffering inherent in everyday life. As a child, I found the mundane terrifying. I felt trapped. I had to destroy the boundaries. I think I maintain the balance because I lived through a lot of the incidents I describe graphically. I usually use dialogue as I remember it and many of my characters are people I knew in real life.

 

I remember one guest editor from “Sein und Werden” sent me the following gem:

 

“I felt uncomfortable at several stages whilst reading these poems, which may well have been your intention. You seem to be making and reinforcing a link between consumerism and the Heisenberg principle, with the female protagonist who populates all three of these pieces being at times manipulated by her own desires and the need to consume, conform, perform and be part of the TV generation… As a diatribe against the way the media controls our actions, you make some valid points. However, at times I felt that the writing veered towards torture porn. I am not in any way saying that this was your intention and it may well be that I should have a stronger tolerance and let the writer make his points as harshly as is necessary…”

 

That was my intention, to make the reader uncomfortable (not sure where he was going with the Heisenberg principle –measuring uncertainty)? I guess he wanted me to be wittier. The poems he was referring to described a long -ago self-destructive relationship. It was painful for me to write about it and it hurt that he couldn’t see beyond the implied and sometimes real violence. Torture porn was not on my radar. Other editors have said I ignore the beauty in the world, but I do not. There is a type of beauty in all my work. I know my poetry isn’t easy to take. The veneer must be stripped, as we all have personas that we present to the masses, we should look under the mask. It hurts, that’s why I include some black humor that borders on exploitation. It gets to be grand guignol sometimes. Like you said, my poetry doesn’t forgive. Since I kicked a substance abuse problem, I feel that writing is now my addiction. I must write every day. My writing explores addiction, loss, betrayal, secretes and the pain that they cause.

 

By the way, the poems mentioned in the above rejection were quickly accepted by another journal and received a few compliments. The biggest misconception about my work is that I write about sex and violence for their own sake. I write about sex and violence in an attempt to find salvation.

 

 

4: Does music figure into some of your influences, if so how and who are some of those influences? Many writers right in a silent pristine environment. I don’t. I write with music blasting, movies playing, on the subway. I grab dialogue and impressions from all around. One usually inspires the other. I think in this way I’m recreating the environment in which I experienced a lot of my life that I am extracting for the written page.

 

As far as influences I’ve always liked the British Invasion, 60’s garage punk (13th Floor Elevators), NY Punk, NY No-Wave (Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Contortions, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, DNA, Mars), The Velvet Underground, Lou Reed. For the past few years I’ve really enjoyed listening to the soundtracks of Ennio Morricone, Goblin and any music from Italian and French Horror and the Nouvelle Vague. The soundtrack to “Suspiria” is a big favorite. I try to give a rhythm to my writing through the music.

 

 

5: Tell us a bit about your two most recent books, what are the themes at work for you in them and how do they differ or complement each other?

 

I have two poetry collections out now, “Peep-O-Rama,” published by Hammer & Anvil Books and “Vanished Faces,” published by Writing Knights Press. They complement each other since both are based on my experiences in NY’s East Village and Times Square in the 70’s to 80’s. “Peep-O-Rama” was originally published as a Kindle book. This new edition is a hardcopy book and it also incorporates another e-book of mine called “Sins of the Go-Go Girls,” published by Why Vandalism? Press a long time ago. In 2002 I read that the last peepshow in Times Square was closing, the final coffin nails had been driven into Sleazy Times Square’s coffin, a product of the Giuliani administration’s rape of the area to make it a wholesome environment for Disney and tourists, so “Peep-O-Rama” was born. It is my experiences in that neighborhood before the cleansing and before the gentrification. It contains portraits and describes playtime among the hookers, pimps, sex-workers, sex-show performers, drug addicts and flotsam seen through the eyes of Giallo, erotica and general murder and mayhem. The experiences are all real.

 

“Vanished Faces,” has many of the same themes but there are some undercurrents in place. The title comes from a quote by Thomas de Quincey in his “Suspiria de Profundis,” a sequel to his “Confessions of an English Opium Eater.” In it he describes the Three Mothers who rule the earth: Mater Lachrymarum – Our Lady of Tears, Mater Suspiriorum—Our Lady of Sighs and Mater Tenebrarum—Our Lady of Darkness. The book is composed of poems, each of which describes the rooms of a hotel. In each of these rooms something unsavory has occurred. It’s a reflection of the SRO’s I used to stay in when on my binges. I can still hear the moans and screams that came through the paper-thin walls of neighboring rooms. These SRO’s have all been gentrified and re-done – mostly by Best Western, I believe.

 

 

6: Do you have any words of advice for writers struggling with the creative process and who have perhaps yet to see publication and are experiencing huge doubts about what they do? What kinds of things have helped you in times of self-doubt/artistic-desperation? 

 

First of all, writers should just trust their instincts, get rid of doubt (easier said than done). Read as much as possible, listen to your inner thoughts and hallucinations. Take a chance in your writing and art. Watch as many films as humanly possible, the more non-mainstream, the better. Too bad there are no new music movements like punk around anymore. Listen to the punk rockers of the 70’s and 80’s. Listen to No Wave until your ears bleed. Derange your senses like Rimbaud (you don’t need drugs to do it). Explore the unusual, explore museums. Hang out with other writers and artists wherever you live, we’re out there. Go to open mic’s. Go underground. Most importantly, write and re-write. If you don’t feel inspiration, write anyway. Don’t listen to people who say your work doesn’t have it. They’re full of shit. I think one must develop a confidence in the path that one has chosen. I have never read a writing text book or an “Artist’s Way,” type of book, maybe they help but I’m suspicious.

 

A lot of times not being published is a result of not submitting to the right publications. Sign up for Duotrope and find the journal that’s the good fit for your work. I’m a poetry editor for Literary Orphans, they are very open minded as is “Danse Macabre” edited by Adam Henry Carriere and “Unlikely Stories” edited by Jonathan Penton. I like Anti-Heroin Chic because you’re flexible and willing to take a chance. Also, you give exposure to writers, artists and musicians.

 

When I was starting to write as a child, I was told that it was a waste of time by my parents. I kept my writing activities secret for many years which partly led to substance abuse problems. Eventually I kicked the stuff and realized I had to take a stand. Don’t hurt yourself, the people next door will do enough of that to you.

 

 

7: Any new projects or upcoming events/readings you'd like to tell people about?

 

We just returned from a trip to Italy to visit Rome and Florence. I’m Italian and this was the first time I have ever been to the land of my ancestors. Both cities were amazing in their stature and artwork. I slightly preferred Rome since its origins go back 2500 years, I could sense the phantoms and the auras and the silhouettes.  Its gorgeousness carries a sinister underbelly to it which thrills me and arouses me. Anyway, while browsing the many small shops of the local artisans in Rome I came upon a window which is providing the inspiration for my next book. Not sure what I will call it but the phrase “broken dolls” will be incorporated in the title. I started writing it in Rome and Florence, similar to “Vanished Faces,” which I started in Paris.

 

I have a featured reading on 10/25/2017 in NYC at Phillip Giambri’s “Rimes of the Ancient Mariner Poetry Series” at the 3 of Cups on 1st Avenue in the East Village, NYC.

 

I am also featuring at the Risk of Discovery Reading in November 2017 and at Richard Jefferey Newman’s 1st Tuesday reading in Jackson Heights, Queens sometime in 2018.