Interviewed by Co-editor of Line Rider Press, Joshua McDermott
Ryan Thoresen Carson is a community organizer and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. His featured poems come from his manuscript titled An Admittedly Sinking Yacht, which he sees as a meditation on loss and creation in the age of climate change.
IG and Twitter: @ryantcarson
Joshua: First, introduce our readers to yourself by telling us a little bit about your background, including how you became interested in poetry and any other kind of work/interests you have.
Ryan: My name is Ryan Thoresen Carson, and I am a poet living in Brooklyn, New York. I make my living as a community organizer, working particularly on issues relating to environmentalism and higher education. On the side, I also do some tenant organizing.
When I started college, I was exposed to my first real activist struggle through the Occupy Wall St. movement. The two new passions informed each other and most of my art since has been focused on locating the individual in collective struggle. My own writing is a means of decompressing. Most of the writers I admire are also actively taking part in social struggle. I like to hope that my work can be in dialogue with those people that aren’t just writing about an issue, but actively struggling with their community.
Aside from that, I’m really into basketball?
Joshua: Your two featured poems are selections from a larger manuscript. Can you share more details about the forthcoming book with readers and for those interested in potentially getting a copy?
Ryan: The manuscript is called An Admittedly Sinking Yacht. It’s a collaboration between myself and the visual artist Alexander Harristhal, who also happens to be my best friend. Alex is a metal fabricator. We both work exhausting jobs, so we often meet after work to destress and have a beer. We started responding to each other’s work about a year and a half ago. This book is a product of that conversation, which was mostly focused on the changing landscape of New York City, both environmentally and culturally. Particularly, the book focuses on the experience of organizing for change and the diseases of despair that claim the people you struggle with.
Hopefully a press will pick the book up. It’s in competition at several small presses. If anyone is interested in reading it though, I would be happy to send it to them. My email is ryancarsont@gmail.com.
Joshua: Who are some of your biggest influences in terms of working-class/leftist poetry?
Ryan: For this project, my biggest influences were Sean Bonney, Wendy Trevino, Juliana Spahr, and Mario Santiago Papasquairo.
More recently, I’ve been really bowled over by the work of Mark Nowak on using the poetry workshop as a means of building solidarity among working people. It’s something I would like to use as a tool in my own organizing work. His recent book Social Poetics was a revelation to read. I also just finished Socialist Realism by Trisha Low, which was one of the most moving books I’ve read in quite a while regarding what it means to organize within an artistic community.
Joshua: Your work is notable for blending the deeply personal/intimate with the systemic and profound, and for exploring the political without coming across as hollow or sloganeering. That’s not the easiest thing to do well. What are some of the main challenges, from a technical viewpoint, of writing good political poetry?
Ryan: I spent years of my life in the punk scene and organizing rallies and demos, so it’s really easy for me to fall into sloganeering. I think in organizing, you have to come across as so confident, so sure. But the fact of the matter is I’m fucking scared. I spent this summer, like many of the past years of my life, watching people I care about get attacked by the police in the streets. Organizing is often failing with the hopes of winning another day. Frankly, it sucks. My poetry is often my own rectifying with that fact, to build a space where I can reflect and begin again.
I used to write poems where I was really up my own ass, either trying to do cheap sloganeering dressed up in academic language, or worse being really accusatory. These days, I think of my work in dialogue with several of my closest friends. People often talk about writing as building a space of one’s own to reflect, but for me, it’s much more of the commons, a place anyone can engage in. I think that to be a poet right now is to be radically vulnerable with the world, particularly those who are engaged in action, and use language to open up a space of dialogue. Folks like the poets Jessica Rizkallah, Hannah Rego, and Jack Nachmanovich are people I speak with regularly about what it means to even write poetry during a moment where so many people are suffering. I think a good poet can express the rage of having some of, but not all, of the answers. Through dialogue with each other we can get more answers. Mostly, my poetry is a means of finding community.
Joshua: What do you think is the importance of fostering a poetic voice among working-class people/socialists?
Ryan: I think that it is essential that working class people write poetry as both a means of personal expression and self-care, as well as a means of writing a “history from below.”
My work is often written in or about spaces where I organize or build community. Babel On, to me, is an homage to both my good friend Mark Fletcher and the space where we met, Shea Stadium, a DIY venue in Brooklyn. It’s dedicated to my friend Alex Levine, who is an incredible songwriter and activist who fronts New York’s political punk institution The So So Glos, who were founders of that space and really made me feel at home, like we were working on something together. I first went to Shea Stadium to go to a bail fundraiser for comrades at Occupy.
History’s Actors was written at my fellow organizer and close friend Tousif Ahsan’s home on Super Tuesday, while we watched a crushing defeat of a campaign we canvassed for. I wrote it following a conversation of hope with my close friend, the painter Tom Krantz.
For me, poetry is a moment of reflection before going back to work. My poetic voice is often a cacophony of the voices I struggle with. Alex, Mark, Tousif, and Tommy are all people with so much love and empathy for their communities, I aspire to be like them and their words often make up a part of my work and in that way they make up my self. These poems are deeply personal, but hopefully speak to a universal idea of solidarity.
Joshua: Why do you think class-conscious and explicitly socialist poetry is so rarely seen within the dominant poetry milieus of America today, especially in academia and what one might call mainstream poetry?
Ryan: This one is tough. First, working class people often don’t have access to those spaces. Poetry is mostly an academic exercise at this point. While I can enjoy a lot of academic poetry, I feel it is walled off, much like the ivory tower it’s conceived in. It presents language with very little stakes, that doesn’t suggest the power of language outside of language for its own sake. The poetry I respect most is moving on a fundamental level that really invites the reader into a collaboration through language, one of the few things we all share. However, that language carries such minutiae as to make it tease out grander truths.
To borrow the old cliche, people write what they know. A lot of colleges lack cultural diversity and therefore lack a diversity of thought. In my organizing life, I work training young organizers who often attend CUNY. CUNY is a flawed institution that has been decimated by the austerity politics of the democratic party’s project in New York state. However, it is one of the few working class institutions that we have. Many of the professors that I organize with, and the majority of the students, are working class. To me, institutions like CUNY offer a way forward for an art that speaks to the lived experience of working people, and just as importantly uses the language of working class people. As capital destroys more and more of our institutions, like CUNY, the one thing that they can’t grab from working people is language and the way it mutates to fit the needs of the people. While I’m scared shitless, anxious, and ultimately often feeling defeated, I do have hope for freeing the university here. If we want poetry by working people, for working people, freeing our institutions of higher learning will be essential.