Andrew Paul Nelson’s poetry isn’t like anything else in America. His poems are all recited by memory, like songs, but they’re longer and more layered than songs. He’s learned from studying some of the best: Amiri Baraka, Baudelaire, Thelonius Monk.    

Full of motion and tension, Nelson’s subversion seems overt and then cuts deeper.  He talks like a philosopher and writes and performs in San Francisco, the American city most rife with outlaw literary history.  The new blossomed scene in the Bay Area was written up in The New York Times in December.  

Writer/editor/activist/everything Alan Kaufman called Nelson and a group of other exciting young SF poets the future of American outlaw poetry.  Kaufman introduced Nelson as part of this New San Francisco Poetry Underground in the pages of the legendary Evergreen Review’s first installment of a three-issue series.

Nelson has read regularly at the weekly street corner open mic (without a mic), at the 16th and Mission BART train stop, started seven years ago or so by San Francisco poetry figurehead Charlie Getter. 

Chronicled by a flip cam-wielding young man named Evan Karp, the countless readings and spoken word events are uploaded in droves to YouTube and personal websites/blogs.  Almost every night there seems to be something happening in San Francisco.      

 

 

How old are you?

25

Where are you from? What brought you to San Francisco, and when did you arrive?

Fallon, Nevada. 

There was no other place I ever imagined moving to. Even when I was little it was always SF. I moved here when I was 18.

Take me through your first times sharing your poetry with other people, both with friends and on stage. When did you start writing? What was your first night at the corner of 16th & Mission like?

I started sending dirty cocktail napkin scribblings to a friend in Harlem. I don't think they were poems. I am not sure what they were. But I think my poetry originated in wanting to do more with these scribblings. I saw Amiri Baraka read at City Lights maybe five years ago. It was the first time I was really exposed to something profound in poetry. I started reading everything he wrote. Since then I have seen him read maybe five or six times. 

I lived in Harlem one summer and tried to share my poetry with friends. It never went well. Folks would either remain silent afterwards and/or become inexplicably angry with me. When I moved back to SF I started frequenting the Street Corner. I used to think Charlie Getter was just another babbling lunatic on 16th street. When I realized that his babbling was actually beautifully crafted hyper naturalistic poetry from the future, I immediately wanted to be part of it. I think that was three years ago.

Do you work in addition to being a poet? Does the literary community band together to help people from starving or is that a romantic fallacy?

I am a Spanish wine buyer. I don't know too much about "the literary community" banding together. If they are close to one another I imagine it has something to do with either being cold or lonely.

Do you find solace in changing your physical appearance every once in awhile? Does the body have some sort of connection to your image as artist?

I need to cut my hair. I think everything will be a lot easier then. Body and art are different. Body is human. Art is inhuman.

What is the kind of integrity you think a poet should have? Are there artists whose work you've admired whose integrity or personal lives have disappointed you?

If you have integrity you probably are not a poet. Every poet I know disappoints me.

Are there celebrities you like? If someone offered you that much money and fame for writing would you take it?

I like Qaddafi. The most idiotic absurd shit comes out of his brain. I keep checking wikipedia to see if he's dead yet. I just did. He's still alive. That's crazy. Money ruins art. Maybe writers get money from writing but not poets.

Do you think that anyone inclined toward excess has certain emotional/psychological voids or confusions?

Sure. To be is to have. 

What are you angry and excited about?

I am both angry and excited that the moon is shrinking! 

You talk a lot about art as a means of sublimation, and that "he who sublimates is a masochist." Can you explain your view of the latter, and how you feel writing/creating eases your karma?

The whole is not a tangible entity, but, like gravity, exists as a force of consequence in the world. In the same way that the telos of gravity is to hold sovereignty over place and motion, the telos of the whole is to maintain control over the individual's instincts. However, unlike gravity, the whole is not ubiquitous. Instincts are the primary drives of the individual. They are subject to historical modification and are expressed in both psyche and soma. Because the individual is a being in the world, his once free private endeavors become public and political functions of the whole. Thus, the private neuroses of the individual is only a particular blemish of the more totally neurotic whole. 

Through the instinctual domination of mankind by civilized processes, the will of the individual exists under the jurisdiction of the intangible. The chain of events which contrive the individual's instinctual domination exist beneath the veil of consciousness, in the phylogenetic history of repression, and it is within this dichotomy between the conscious reality and latent instinctual quality of man where the struggle towards gratification and liberation occurs. 

The phylogenetic history of the animal becoming a human being is made possible "only through a fundamental transformation of his nature." Because the whole is maintained through the subjugation of the individual's instincts, it is not interested in individual gratification. The whole strives towards progress which necessitates the "renunciation and delay" of the individual's instincts. Thus, he who strives for progress does not strive for freedom. 

A being-towards-freedom is a being-against-progress. Were individuals encouraged to pursue their own gratification without reservation, the whole would become obsolete. In order to maintain its intangible power, the whole does not value happiness only complacent obedience. 

What is most needed in the individual process towards liberation is the active acceptance of the motive of the whole as it is exists against the will towards gratification. According to Freud, "happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been damned up to a high degree, and it is from its nature only possible as an episodic phenomenon. We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from the state of things." It is within the complacent reality of the 'state of things' that the whole exercises its will over the individual. Thus, reality is a tool against individual gratification and is not to be trusted. 

Though culture was created as the cathartic abreaction of the individual against the whole, it does not grant the individual gratification. For the most part, culture is swallowed up by the whole and used to maintain the obedience of the individual. For Marcuse, culture is "the methodical sacrifice of libido, its rigidly enforced deflection to socially useful activities and expressions." This process is best understood as sublimation, that is, the diversion of an instinctual impulse into a culturally higher of socially acceptable activity. 

Though the creation of culture (sublimation) eases the burden placed upon the instincts by the whole, it in turn enforces the whole's relationship of domination over the instincts of the individual. Thus, at least in this sense, he who sublimates is a masochist. 

If someone were to move to San Francisco to be a poet, what things would he or she need to be prepared for?

To be ignored. Also, folks don't choose to be poets like people choose to be plumbers. Poetry is a terrible thing that happens to folks.

Why Poetry?

We suffer from an inherited narrative sickness best referred to as language.  More importantly, the individual human-once-was-animal is imprisoned within a language he did not create but rather inherited; a language that seems to be creating him. This language fails to achieve reference; its pre-eminent goal.  

The classic post-modern assertion is that words only refer to other words.  Unfortunately for the poet, throughout the vast majority of human experience this assertion is not taken seriously.  In using language one is presupposing that it is capable of something which it is not.  That is, the unquestioned pre-supposition that individual meaning can be conveyed from one to another through language.  This pre-supposition must be attacked and re-valuated.  

Words lack inherent meaning.  Rather, their meaning is inherited.  It is passed down through socio-cultural experience.  The public meaning of words is constantly evolving yet most practitioners of language are most often the effect of language rather than its cause.  This phenomena exists backwards.  Being comes before language and not the other way around.  

This imprisonment seems impossible to escape until one considers the realm of aesthetics.  When the poet refers to the moon in the poem he does not reference what is colloquially considered to be the referent of the word 'moon' but rather,  uses moon as an aesthetic tool.  They are using the word much as a painter uses paint.  The color red is only self-referential; i.e. red is red, just like 'moon' refers not to the moon but to the word.  Only for the poet is everything possible.  

While language fails to achieve its functional goal it does possess the ability to go beyond socio-cultural reality.  For example, even if an entity do not possess an existential quality it can, nevertheless, be relevant in language.  You can say unicorn and imagine for yourself what that is, or rather, what that would be.  Language is the most perfect tool for making what could be relevant.  However, at least in the banal process of language as a linear entity for advancing one's own socio-cultural existence, it is, outside of aesthetics, not used for the possibility of what 'will', but rather, what 'is'.  

The surplus suffering manifest in the individual human-once-was-animal's unawareness of his seemingly ubiquitous misuse of language is something that can only be transcended through active aesthetics.  The poet is disinterested in reference.  In fact, through poetry, he frees himself from the repression generated within this catastrophic fallacy of language.

 

 

 

 

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