Losing Money and Making Friends: A Poetry Tour with Daryl Gussin and James Norman

By Andrew Romanelli | Photos & Captions by James Norman

Author's Note: This piece is a detour from what we do here at Devoid, in that we avoid Q&A-style pieces. Admittedly, I have an extensive track record of rule breaking but I’m not much a fan of Q&A pieces myself either. That said, this poetry tour and the poets themselves are unconventional, and I believe their words, brought to you directly, embody their ethos. Just know, dear reader, that when I step outside the lines, it is only to bring you something that I believe you will enjoy.

I first met Daryl Gussin last March on his solo tour, reading from his new poetry collection at the time. Myself, James Norman (who I have known, worked and read poetry with for years) and a few others, were invited to read as openers for Daryl, a tall unknown (to us) from Los Angeles with zine cred and punk roots. It took place at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Las Vegas. “Not a church,” a fellow poet reminded me. I had been there before for community organizing, and I hadn’t pictured a poetry reading happening there. You can get accustomed to assuming literary events only happen at libraries, college campuses, and bookstores — when you do poetry readings for long enough, you find yourself reading poems in places you’d never expect — or at least you should hope to.

The reading turned out to be impressive — from the talent performing down to the wonderful writers in the audience, it gave it a wonderful feel to such a degree that after the reading everyone got busy connecting, trading contact info, books, zines and future ideas. Experiences like these are what poetry is about on a good day, where everyone leaves feeling fulfilled. Of course, this isn’t often the case with poetry readings. If you’ve been to one, you’ve probably been disappointed more often than impressed. Just bringing poetry up in conversation can turn people off. As a poet, I don’t blame them. Poetry has moved so far away from the people that it can be seen as a novelty, a juvenile expression of emotions, a theatrical performance. To compare the responses I initially receive when talking poetry is like talking about love to someone who tried it and never picked up all the pieces of their broken heart from the floor. “Poetry? Fool me once…”

Going on tour to read poetry might seem downright crazy, but perhaps poets who put it on the line are also suckers for punishment (especially if it makes for great writing). Daryl tells me, "Some people might take out an expensive ad in American Poetry Review, some people might pay someone to optimize their SEO, for us it just makes sense to rent a car, tell our jobs we're not coming in for two weeks, and hit the road." Poetry tours fell out of prominence a couple of generations ago, yet this opens up an advantage for our poets: their audience won’t expect to be entertained let alone inspired and enthralled.

At the announcement of their first tour, few people took them seriously. Best of all, neither did they, in the sense that their expectations were tempered. Attendance? Book sales? Survival? Maybe. In a time where all the facets of our life seem to be bombarded by influence, we are being told what to feel and how to react, poetry readings have not been immune. Readings can be highly orchestrated, with silence and polite hand-clapping as the rule. Or they veer toward the unnatural, pressuring those in the audience to applaud and react in a specific way. Daryl and James, instead, decided to relinquish control in favor of connection. In William S. Burroughs’ Ah Pook The Destroyer (ask James to show you his Ah Pook tattoo), a question arises: “Is Control controlled by its need to control? Answer: yes.” This can be echoed by the teachings of J. Krishnamurti: “The controller is the controlled.” Daryl and James practice the art of embracing moments as they unfold along the way, in addition to all the vulnerability that comes with that. “I like doing stuff that scares me,” Daryl says. It’s refreshing when poets decide to be present, and these two are. That is, until a sleeve of 99-brand liqueur takes hold.

Early into the first tour together, James started keeping a blog on his website that is largely a tour diary. There are beautiful pictures and words from the road, full of fascination, humor, and pithy musings for the invested, culturally aware, internal thinker. “It's funny to see how people are just as unsure what to make of our little experimental, poetry-carnival road-show, as we are,” (vagabondpoetry.com). I posed some questions to Daryl and James (who is often known simply as “Norm”) about their third upcoming tour, where these two scrappy writers will be venturing the show into the upper midwest for the first time, as well as other areas of the country.

Coming from a background of touring as a musician, how do the experiences differ from touring as a poet?

Daryl Gussin: “Well, I was always a big lyrics person, I loved writing the lyrics and telling my life's story in these two minute intervals, but it's fairly rare that people give a shit about the lyrics, and most times in a live punk show setting, absolutely no one can hear what you're saying. So I really enjoy the fact that people can understand what I'm saying and understand the effort I put into crafting the words, and I really enjoy the conversations that happen afterwards rather than a compliment like, ‘Dude, that was a sick riff!’ Which I also like! But it's different.”
James Norman: “Primarily, people seem more confused by the concept of a touring poet. If you meet someone and tell them, yeah, I’m on tour with my band, they probably have a few preconceived notions that reflect these kinds of archetypical myths we have about rolling stones, highwaymen and various other enfant terribles. But in a post-Beat world, poetry has become patently uncool. And equally unpopular amongst the civilian population (read as those not pot-committed to a useless and expensive MFA degree). Poetry has become extremely academic and partitioned off from the rest of culture. But the idea of touring still has a whiff of danger to it. So, people’s response is different, a hedge on expectations. There is plenty of potential in meeting people where they have yet to make their mind up. Other than that, the mechanics of touring remain the same: long drives, unhealthy food, strange encounters and roadside oddities, it just takes less attendance to make an event feel successful. Then again, like most parts of art, I’m probably doing it wrong.”

*Trading war stories with old friends [Undisclosed Location, CA]*

Poets often get in a bubble performing to the same people, at the same places. What's it like reading to an audience outside your comfort zone?

DG: “It's everything! It's so important. Safety and predictability lead to complacency. I can definitely fall into a pretty standard routine if I don't shake myself out of it. So I shake myself out of it.”
JN: “For the record, all the decisions I make in art are always in the service of creating that phenomenon. There is nothing like winning over an indifferent crowd, in that it brings you face to face with the real meaning of what you do. People are more open-minded than we give them credit for (in this artificially divided world of market shares and personal brands). If I can get the old drunks playing cards at the Karaoke bar we just took over to look up and laugh, or engage in any way, that is more profound than any other form of positive feedback. Zeitgeist Press used to describe their home reading as “gladiator school for poets,” and that is an aesthetic I continue to try to live up to. Real art can get through to real people. And if it can’t, it probably needs to spend a few hard minutes in front of the mirror, or else a few hard weeks on the road.”

*Life goes on after the fire [Mono Lake, CA]*

How has your writing and the way you read changed from these tours?

DG: “The way I read has massively changed. Which is probably from watching Norm read every night and talking to him about it. It's all about eye contact! And if you're too uncomfortable to make eye contact, just look above their heads.”
JN: “I have learned, through experience, that certain poems work better and worse than I had believed, before being forced to engage with them repeatedly in front of strangers with unfamiliar customs (ever heard of Florida Man!). Practice is a term that, through a long-term fling with Buddhism, I have grown to see expanded to an entirely new dimension. Sometimes, practice is not just about some kind of measured progress but is the experience itself, as a method of separating ourselves from previous attachments. A performance on a tour has all the intensity of a one-night stand—though maybe that changes if people get famous, I don’t know and have no desire to know.
Point being, every piece of art is only half-complete through the efforts of its author. The audience does just as much of the heavy lifting, in whatever spiritual sense, and to create a truly transcendent moment takes a level of vulnerability on their part, as well. I think the soft chewy center of all these hard truths is rooted in that vulnerability, in the vast possibilities that it opens up in every one of us, individually, and in our collective constructions—nations, cultures, countercultures, bowling leagues, street gangs, etc. To be able to experience that, viscerally—as a practice—exercises those creative muscles in a way that nothing else quite does.
Also, a minor trade secret for other performers—when done right, getting suddenly quieter is way more impactful than getting progressively louder. Dynamics, not volume, baby.”

How have you felt influenced by the other artistically?

DG: “I am absolutely influenced by Norm's ability to drag you down to the gritty depths of the human condition as he regales the listener in sordid tales of criminality and dysfunction only to tie the set up in this wondrous breach of light and life, that for a brief second might even make a heathen like me believe in some kind of omnipresent cosmic force and everything might just be alright!”
JN: “Daryl is a stud. His writing engages you without lecturing you, if that makes sense. As a person and an artist, he is both incredibly sincere and also capable of laughing at himself, individually, or as a nonessential element of the present mise-en-scene. He humbles me the way talent, especially quiet talent, should humble anybody. And what I mean by quiet talent is that it’s enough for him to get up and do his thing. He doesn’t need to lecture you on the self-importance of it all. All artists are self-conscious at the very least (and buffoonishly transparent egomaniacs at their worst). Daryl is particularly grounded (and helps keep me grounded). He leads with what matters to him and holds himself accountable to his own word. And all that is part of the writing. Sincerity is the one thing they haven’t figured out how to teach in schools. They call it “authenticity” and try to turn it into a persona, not understanding how that is just an oxymoron. Daryl doesn’t really suffer morons at all. Not even fancy ones like that.”

*David is a fellow traveler [Bishop, CA]*

Your first tour together, you didn’t really know each other aside from a poetry reading where you met. What have you learned from the other since?

DG: “I can't even begin to quantify this. We were strangers who got in a rented sedan and spent 4 weeks together every single second of the day. It's a lot.”
JN: “If I had to be trapped on a desert island with someone, I’d trust Daryl not to bop me over the head with a coconut and eat me to save himself. I mean, there are very few people I could spend two weeks of long drives with—sans the radio, mind you—and not have planned at least twelve different ways to murder, let alone still enjoy talking to. I also learned he is a sociopath who hates listening to the radio. It’s actually crazy that he runs a MUSIC zine…. Naw, I’m joking. I mean, we actually don’t play the radio…. but sometimes it’s a good experiment to drop out and tune in. We get plenty of stimulation at home. Silence is also profound. And eventually (with enough of that) someone might actually come up with something worth saying.”

Poetry tours most often face monetary challenges and are without financial success, yet you're both focused on connection and community. What can you say about your experience and perspective, bringing your poetry around the country?

DG: “I'm looking for love. Not romantic relationship type stuff. But a mysterious love that might not even exist, but I have to try and find it. The poetry is the closest thing I can imagine that can summon it. Money comes and money goes. But right now I have my life, and my health, and the ability to be gone for two weeks at a time, I have to see if what I believe is out there is really there.”
JN: “I like chaos. More than I should be comfortable admitting. I saw a therapist for a little while and they tried to convince me that had something to do with childhood trauma, and they are probably right, but I have another theory that doesn’t require I continue to pay large sums of money I can’t afford into a broken health care system…
Chaos is the churn out of which all novelty arises. As in, those who believe in some kind of intelligent creator might see the world as part of a plan. But as a dirty “creative evolutionist” (read your Bergson!), I understand every improvement upon life through the entire history of this planet has begun with a mutation. That—along with a deluge of variable experimental material—i.e. US—the sentient things riding around on this blue rocket we call earth. I love being at the liminal edges of what already was—all that backroad, forgotten, discarded fuel of previous progress—because it brings me closer to what might be next. Art is part of that practice for me. So is travel. So is building community. The most fertile ground for change exists in smaller, bespoke communities. They are nimble, L-E-A-N (as these dumbshit new techno-priests love to rave about). They have not finished coalescing into all their potential, let along begun the entropy death-march towards becoming the establishment.
In that spirit, love itself is chaos. And hate is a straight line towards drawing the same outdated conclusions. Hate builds empires, sure, but I’m a poet. All I gotta do is make rent, keep gas in my van, feed my dog. I choose love, for all its wonderful and terrifying consequences. I wish more people would take that leap… Tour will show you all of that, and a lot of other irrelevant stuff as well. But it’s a hell of a ride. And the destination is, eventually, death—for all of us—so maybe slow down a bit and enjoy the scenery. And while you are waiting, patiently, for your turn at the abattoir. In fact, wash it all down with 99-brand, rotgut sugar-fire!!! [They should definitely be sponsoring us.]”

The tour — the poetry itself, larger than the words that ink the page — the venues at which it is read, more than the audience as a number merely gauged to measure success. It’s not awards and publications in journals that are “read by 3 people/argued over by 8” (David Lerner Why Rimbaud Went to Africa). It is the bringing together (not necessarily in agreement) a vehicle (within a literal vehicle) on a journey of developing the self in tandem with the community. It gets messy, the poetry that can get self-deprecating, the poetry that dares to engage in a meaningful conversation about our world. Daryl says, “Oversharing is a political act.” I think of them both out there traveling as revolutionary characters inside the world of “The Lottery in Babylon,” a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, where eventually every citizen is entered into the lottery which has prizes and punishments that can range from ascension to the highest positions of society to death. I think of them operating in that world (which has startling parallels to ours) as paradoxes, not opting out of the game, but also not accepting success or death, instead opting to live life. Can you imagine?

Catch up with Daryl and James this summer on their tour. If you’re out of town escaping the heat, maybe they’ll be in a city near there — or come out to the end of the tour where they will be here in Las Vegas, closing it out at Grouchy John’s Coffee, located at 8520 South Maryland Parkway. I’ll be there reading with them, as I did at the end of the last tour.

In the meantime check out:

The Corn Belt, Rust Belt, Serpentine Belt Tour

Losing Money and Making Friends: A Poetry Tour with Daryl Gussin and James Norman

Speed Dating? No, Speed Activism