To Meet People and Create Some Shit: Barrelhousing with Michael Tager

Michael Tager's Pop Culture Poetry: The Definitive Collection, out now from akinoga press, is a wonderful collection of contradictions: fun, accessible, smart poems that examine our cultural and personal connection with celebrity. Funny and sad, jokey but not a joke, these poems take subject matter like Justin Bieber, Patrick Swayze, and the Golden Girls just seriously enough. We sat down to talk with Michael about the book and making real art out of, as the Barrelhouse tagline goes, pop flotsam and cultural jetsam, his work with Mason Jar Press, and his own editing and publicist work. 

Not really on purpose, and mostly because Dave Housley is the world’s slowest interviewer, we wound up catching our friend and fellow writer/editor at an interesting time, as some significant parts of his literary life are winding down for various reasons. He has some interesting things to say here about managing the kinds of independent literary projects that we’re managing at Barrelhouse, and also trying to maintain a writing and family and person-in-the-world life as well. We’re here for the Year of No and whatever might be next for Michael, and look forward to whatever he puts out into the world next. He also has one of the best answers to The Swayze Question, and we’re glad that after letting him stew for twenty years, we finally had a chance to ask it.

BH: Okay I always start these out the same way: since a lot of our readers are writers themselves, can you tell us a little about this book’s path to publication? 

A few of these poems were published in other venues first. Hobart (now HAD) & Longleaf Review share the Attenborough poems, Rejection Lit put out the Golden Girls poems and Genre 2 owns the Marilyn Monroe poems. I’m looking at the copyright page and just realized that I left out print editions where some of the poems were published and I feel like a real cad. UGH! Sorry Welter, Skelter and Babe Press. 

However, there’s another couple steps. As I was graduating from my MFA program at University of Baltimore,  I had some readings scheduled. I wanted something to sell, so I approached my friend, who was a year ahead of me and had published a beautiful thesis, and asked him to help me put out some chapbooks. He said sure, but asked if he could put them out on his own press, which he was thinking of turning into a real thing. I was cool with that, so we put out three super cute chapbooks on Mason Jar Press…which turned into a thing of its own.

Not long after, I wrote Whoopi Goldberg poems. We’d run out of the individual chapbooks, so we decided to do another small print run, but this time as one book, and with the addition of Whoopi. So there’s two different versions of Pop Culture Poetry but they’re much smaller, and very different, as I edited all of them in between each version. There’s a reason this collection has the subtitle: the Definitive Collection. 

Mychael, my publisher, asked if I had enough other poems for a book back in ‘16 or ‘17. At the time, I didn’t, but I kept on writing poems until, well, I did. When I had what I felt was a complete collection, I gsent him an email and was like, “yo. You still interested?” He was. I had maybe 100 poems at the time, which was more than enough, and I wrote some new poems, which turned out to be Bieber and KPop. I think I wrote the Jan Brady intro a couple days before print. Fucking poets. 

BH: I’m realizing that I don’t really know your history with Mason Jar Press. How did you go from those cute chapbooks to where you are now, the Managing Editor and a real do-stuff make-things-happen person at Mason Jar? 

God, those chapbooks really were cute. Adorable, pocket-sized little monsters. I love them. 

I’m glad that we’ve known each other for 10 years now and there’s still huge gaps in our knowledge. For example, I was talking to my buddy about how I don’t know exactly how Barrelhouse got started other than y’all were in an MFA program in the…90s? Early aughts? It’s unclear. I just know I heard of y’all when I read Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs and Klosterman shouted you out in his Swayze essay (more on that later).

Anyway, back to me. Mason Jar was one of those joyous accidents where one thing led to another which led to another. Since Ian was noodling with the idea of doing an actual press, and we learned all these publishing and design skills in the MFA program, plus our collaboration on the chapbooks was a lot of fun and super smooth, he asked if I wanted to team up with him to publish a friend of ours, Matt Falk. We were very open with one another and with Matt that it was an experiment to see if our partnership would be good and if we were actually able to put out a good product. Matt is a chill dude, so he let us publish Nihilist Kitsch which is what we consider our real first book. It was a handmade chapbook, but real-book sized.

Nihilist Kitsch was a success, so we had another hand-made chapbook experiment with Stephen Zerance and that was cool, so we decided to do two books the following year, this time perfect bound with ISBNs and everything. Those were Not Without Our Laughter by the Black Ladies Brunch Collective (edited by our mutual homie, celeste doaks) and Notes from My Phone by Michelle Junot. And then we brought people on board, and did open submission calls and it’s suddenly 10 years later, you know? 

Tl;dr: one thing led to another. And now we’re in the late stages of MJP, because, as you know, we’re transitioning out with the old and in with the new. We have 4 people who are sticking around and a bunch of people who we’re recruiting for the next iteration. I’m going to be a part of it for another year or so, but purely in a passing-along-institutional-knowledge way. I have a lot in my head and I need to get it out so that they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. 

It’s a little sad, but overall I’m quite happy. I didn’t realize how ready I was for MJP to be someone else’s thing. It had become really tied up in my identity and that’s actually a bad reason to continue something. Instead of holding on tightly, I realized that maybe I should broaden my identity! 

BH: How did you start writing these pop culture poems? Do you remember which one(s) were the first? 

The David Hasselhoff poems were first. I’d read Stephanie Barber’s Night Moves, which is a nicely experimental book of Youtube comments on Bob Seger’s song. I quite enjoyed it, but what I didn’t personally like about it was Barber’s perfectly reasonable decision to leave the youtube comments unedited. I thought that editing the comments to make them more lyrical or narrative would have made the reading experience more fun. I totally dig why she didn’t do it, but it got me on the “how would i have done this differently.” 

Shortly thereafter I discovered the Amazon comments for Hasselhoff’s seminal cd Looking for… the Best. It’s a beautiful wonderland of people waxing philosophic and heaping inordinate praise on the cd. People just having fun. Yeah, they’re mocking the Hoff, but I think there’s a real undercurrent of respect throughout. They’re taking the piss, but not just for the sake of taking the piss. Everyone loves Night Rider, you know? And honestly, Hot Shot City is pretty good. 

After losing myself down the rabbit hole of that page, I decided to do Night Moves, but how I wanted it to be done. Initially I had like 50 poems that I edited and edited and truncated and edited. While none of the words are mine, they’re pretty transformed. Some of the reviews were hundreds of words and I got them down to like 20. (Also, I’ve always made sure to give credit. All the reviews were credited to pseudonyms or anonymous–plus they’re lost in the internet now–so I don’t know exactly who wrote them, so they’re credited to Amazon reviewers).

That opened the floodgates, even if the floodgates was more like a trickle at first. Swayze and Taye Diggs came next, then Whoopi. Bjork was written at the inaugural Writer Camp in ‘15, and 8 years later I wrote the KPop and Jan Brady poems. Fun journey!

BH: That is so much fun. I love that you’re taking this stuff that’s pretty silly to begin with and making something new with it. I have what may be a strange question. This feels like something where once you get your head in that space, it might be hard to stop. Are you still writing pop culture poems? Do you find them creeping into your head while you’re watching Bluey or the new Road House movie, for instance? 

God I love Bluey. I think Bluey is the best show on television. Not the best kids show, not the best animated show, but the best Show, capital s, full stop, send tweet. It’s beautiful and perfect and the writing is absolutely pure fire. Can this just become a Bluey interview now? Can Barrelhouse and Mason Jar collaborate on a Bluey fanfiction issue? 

To your actual question…believe it or not, I have fully stopped. I think I’ve said what I had to say in the way I had to say it. There’s a book now and it’s very good, and I take a lot of pride in the poems I’ve written. I don’t feel a burning urge to continue writing these. I’m sure I will at some point, but it’s not even a glimmer in the back of my throat. 

What I have been doing is taking stock of where I am in the world as a writer and editor and publisher and publicist, particularly where it’s intersecting with my personal life and work and family. Not in a bad way or a good way, but more that I realized I’m at an inflection point. 

I honestly had one goal when I decided to start writing again (back in ‘11), which was to get one book published. At the time I thought it was a novel, but regardless, I felt I had enough within me to fill a single book and after that I wasn’t sure. Technically I have 4 manuscripts lying around–2 short story collections, an essay collection, and a terrible novel that will never come out of the drawer, but the point is still valid. I have a book and it says a lot of what I wanted to say and the bucket list item is checked, the itch is scratched and I’m not sure what’s next.

So, yeah. I don’t have any particular intentions of continuing down this path. I might, but it’ll be incidental to whatever comes next. Or I’m wrong and I’ll do nothing but write pop culture poems. Ask me tomorrow.

I actually admire that! You accomplished that goal and now you can kind of assess what you want to do next. I’m still kind of grinding every now and then on the occasional commercial, thinking goddamit if I was still writing short stories based on commercials…But anyway, back to you. You’re doing a bit of everything in publishing right now and we’ve talked about editing and writing, so tell us a little about the publicist aspect of what you’re doing. I know you’ve mentioned this in passing a few times when we’ve talked, but I’m terrible at asking questions and never followed up. What’s going on with that? 

Well, I had a 2nd kid last February and was like, “you know what I need? Another job that requires a lot of time and effort and is also inconsistent when it comes to time of day and needs so that I can never quite rest.” Makes sense, right?

I used to pretend to be people’s publicist when they needed something set up but felt weird about doing it. So I’d email or call agents/venues/whatnot and say “I’m so-and-so’s publicist and I’d like to pitch them for ____.” It worked every time and so I figured I’d give it a try. Naturally I now have 7 or 8 clients and I had to recruit a partner to handle the work.

Primarily I work with poets and help them with whatever they need. Some of them want help doing tours, some obtaining reviews, some don’t have it in them to send mass emails, or do social media, or what have you. It’s very individualized and actually a lot of fun because by and large I’ve been successful. In a lot of ways I consider the job almost like a life coach for writers, because they really just need encouragement to allow themselves permission to ask people for things, and to admit they want to move up a rung, or have people read their work. 

We all kind of need that.

I also want to follow up on something you mentioned above about all the different things you’re doing, in addition to having a family and a regular nine-to-five kind of job. How do you balance all of those different things? Is there a part of you that wishes you were able to just focus on some or one of the aspects of publishing/writing/editing? This is a selfish question because I’m pretty much in the same situation and have thought about this a bit, personally. 

Well, Mason Jar is now mostly gone from my life in a lot of ways, as you know, and that’s going to free up a lot of time. It’s well past time for me to move on and while I’m sad it’s gone, I’m also happy. I’m ready for what’s next, whatever that is.

I’m thinking about writing again, fiction specifically, but there aren’t any particular plans. That’s the key part: I’m not making plans other than “hiatus.” I’m thinking a year or so of just saying no to everything and letting my brain rest. If I have a good idea or good opportunity, I’ll just stick it in a binder or spreadsheet or something and then come back to it later and see if it still makes sense. 

I’ve just been going at full sprint for the past several years and I realized how bone-tired I am and how much I’ve been neglecting myself. I’m going to see what it feels like to just have a couple things and nothing else and let all my creativity hang out in fallow fields. Maybe then I’ll bust out. Or maybe I’ll move on to something else, or maybe I’ll need more time. I dunno! I also don’t care. I’m just stoked for the break. 

This is kind of a weird question after you just talked about needing and taking a break but…I think you’re planning a writer’s conference in California next year? Do you want to talk about that a bit? 

We can, but also I don’t know if there’s anything to talk about anymore. We had everything lined up: funders, famous featured readers, a famous keynote, and like 30 different organizations from across the country, and then a bad faith actor in a position of authority pulled some shenanigans in the contract that would have taken IP from me and my crew. It was especially egregious because we were in the 11th hour and had everyone on board, just twiddling their thumbs, waiting to make a move. It was a bummer. 

At the same time, it’s also…ok? Like, I’m tired, man. I’ve been going at breakneck speed for a few years now and I think I hit my limit. The event would have been awesome, but there will be more events and honestly, I’ve made a bunch of friends and working partners in the last year and a half that I never would have made otherwise. Isn’t that sort of the point of living and doing things in the world? To meet people and create? Turns out this creation was a failure, but hey, we learn more from failure than success right? 

Once the conference got pulled, that was when I made a decision that the next year is going to be the Mike Tager Year of No. I’m going to say No to everything that isn’t such a slam dunk that I’d be a silly billy. And even some of them I’m going to say no. I’ve already said no to a couple things and it was really gratifying! Leaning into it. 

Okay this is our standard wrap-up question and it’s very perfect for this interview: what’s your favorite Patrick Swayze movie? 

You know, I’ve told you before, but I knew about Barrelhouse before I ever started writing. As I mentioned above, I read Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs in ‘04 while traveling from Denver to Baltimore and one of his essays is called “The Swayze Question” and he says something like “The good people at Barrelhouse asked me about Patrick Swayze…” and then talks about Road House. Which is a long winded way of saying that I’ve been thinking about this question for 20 years, my dude. 

There’s a lot of Swayze movies and they’re all amazing in their own special way. My first thought was Dirty Dancing because I watched that on network tv when I was 10 and not only was it my first introduction to abortion, but I distinctly remember yelling “Pick her up Johnny! Do it Baby, do it!” in the climactic dance scene. It made an impression. But it isn’t Dirty Dancing. 

I also kind of want to say Ghost because it was my introduction to Swayze and there’s that incredibly loaded kiss between Demi and Whoopi-as-Patrick which was quite a thing to dissect. Plus it’s weirdly scary with the dude in the subway. But no, it’s not Ghost.

Obviously it’s not Red Dawn because that movie just isn’t amazing enough to rewatch over and over. And Donnie Darko isn’t really a Swayze movie; he’s just in it. And while I like To Wong Foo…fine, I don’t love it. Road trip movies really aren’t my thing, even if it’s great. Besides, Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo upstage the Swayze left and right. He’s too generous!

While I love Road House–and I had a bit of a sexual awakening with Sam Elliott pulling his hair back–it’s too 80s for me to truly love. So that leaves Point Break and once I say it out loud, it’s obvious and not even a real fight. 

Point Break has everything. Keanu’s name is Johnny Utah and HE IS AN FBI AGENT! It has Anthony Kiedis and Gary Busey and Lori Petty and all of them are amazing. It’s sad and it’s funny and it’s beautiful and it’s weird and it’s got such good action. Kathryn Bigelow is the best. But Swayze is what holds it together. He’s playing against type, but also kind of not? Bodhi is just the dark side of Dalton and it’s a perfect role. Without Swayze, that movie doesn’t hold at all. It would just be Keanu flailing at the ocean, and without his brand of serious-but-sensitive Bro, a movie about surfer crooks is just silly instead of silly-with-a-point. Which, now that I think about it, is my brand. 
I watch Point Break every year or two and I’m never bored. Shit, I should watch it now. Thanks for this. Thanks for everything.