Do you want to tell us about the dogs, where do they enter the picture?
I’m fascinated by dogs and the relationship between dogs and humans. I find the relationship kind of disturbing and hilarious at the same time. It’s really weird, both sick and sweet. For example, if you take the smartest rocket scientist on earth, they still sound dumb when they are talking to their pets and, on top of that, in the same gesture, it makes them sound stupid. We’re earnesty and unconsciously performing a very real power dynamic with this living thing that we are more powerful than, and have ownership over.
It’s just a lot of fear and love and ridiculousness and earnestness all wrapped into these relationships, and I will eternally be fascinated with that.
It’s so performative. That’s the word. I adore watching people on the street whose dogs look like a copy-and-paste collage of themself.
Definitely. I’m not particularly a pet person, but watching people with their pets it’s an obsession of mine. My friends all have dogs so I can choose when I want to be around them, but I can’t have them all the time. I’m too close to a past life in which I was a dog to own a dog.
I’ll quote that. Why Pomeranians though? What’s significant about them? I know nothing about the different breeds.
Well, I don’t really know that much either, about anything really. But what strikes me about Pomeranians is how stunning they are. They look like a luxury. And they look like something man-made. On top of that Pomeranian is a beautiful word which also refers to the historical region of Pomerania, which for an American sensibility conjures almost mythological feelings. One might even think about Pompeii. The clash of a historical region and a man-made living creature.
When I think of Pomeranians walking I think of them strutting down the sidewalk.
Absolutely, they’re fabulous.
In what ways are poets similar to pomeranians?
They might have small brains.
Small brains, big ideas.
Small brains, big hearts.
Big heart, just as the man in my favorite poem out of the ones you performed to us. Is it called Tuesday Lunch? The one where the woman ends up dead.
It’s called a Seikilos Epitaph.
Do you feel like life is as absurd as Seikilos Epitaph? The picture you’re painting is so bizarre, yet then again it feels like a normal wine lunch in West Village.
That piece actually started while I was out walking in the West Village. I noticed two couples having lunch and I started observing them, placing myself outside the scenario. One woman was coughing and her husband was pounding her back–really dramatically — to help her. I found that immediately hilarious because it’s so violent yet it’s an act of love and care. It’s got all the right opposing elements.
It ends up with her dying covered in low-fat whipped cream.
