DH: I don’t know Hazlitt but I remember reading Bataille talking about the practice of potlatch among Native American tribes, where the objective is to humiliate and defy rivals through the spectacular destruction of your own wealth. Sometimes this entails slaughtering your own slaves. This seems apropos of waste as a condition of success. He uses the term “expenditure” for what he calls unproductive forms, or activities with no end beyond themselves. Things like luxury and war, mourning, art, etc. These are all characterized by a loss that must be as great as possible for the activity to take on its true meaning. So it’s about maximizing the opposite of return, attaining the most negative ROI possible. What’s interesting is he singles out poetry as being synonymous with expenditure. I’d say this explicit equating of expenditure and poetry is, if not the heart of your poetics, something at the heart of it. In Kasmir especially expenditure creates a field in order to perforate itself, so there are these moments of ecstatic infinity bursting through. But Bataille I think takes it in a different direction. For him poetry is a symbolic expenditure that does real damage to the poet. You end up becoming a reprobate or you renounce it and do something mediocre instead. Rimbaud kind of does both at once. A Season in Hell is basically its own announcement and renunciation. Blanchot’s take is that Rimbaud murdered poetry so it could survive, and Mallarmé says something similar: “He operated on himself alive for poetry.” It’s a strategic decision, and a poetic expenditure to the nth degree in that it expends itself to the last drop. There is nothing more to be lost. This idea of Rimbaud is like the first step. What Glory Hole tries to do is push the limit of negative return, or expand the opportunity beyond what can be lost, by taking this gesture of defiance and multiplying it against itself. In other words, what if Rimbaud felt the way he did, with a force strong enough to abandon poetry forever, and then kept writing anyway? But you could say this is exactly what Baudelaire is doing. It’s like the act of poetry as expenditure is a closed loop between the two: The next step after Baudelaire is Rimbaud, and the next step after Rimbaud is Baudelaire. But at the same time I view the excess of your work, especially Hit Wave, as very Whitmanian, like a French Whitman, rooted in a kind of cosmic exuberance and autoeroticism and fuck it nonchalance. I wanted to ask you about the prologue poem in The Hot Tub, how it relates to the rest of the book. Is it the same speaker? It reads kind of like a dedication to the reader, since it’s untitled and the only piece to use the 2nd person address, unlike Glory Hole, which is punctured throughout with “you”.

JL: I understood intuitively Rimbaud's refutation of poetry and subsequent activities almost before I began to write poetry. So from the beginning of my practice I've courted the idea that poetry is something to be left behind, abandoned. With each successive book I've produced I'm getting further from poetry. My practice is a deliberate expenditure, or waste, of talent, in an effort to absolve myself of what I consider a pathogen. I want everyone to stop writing poetry. My prologue to The Hot Tub is indeed an attempt to speak directly to the reader. It's the only way I know how to relate to the reader that poetry is not it. Poetry is not why you come to poetry. That prologue isn't a creative work. It's meant to say exactly what it says: love, music, being "on booze together," quite simply, life, is more important than this. Mediated by art and other forms of sublimation life is reduced to our perception of life. As far as my previous books are concerned I only know that there is a character named Brian Paul, the same throughout, who's only aim is a draining away of excess energy by any means possible until the energy is finally dissipated and involuntary death occurs. If the things he does or builds or destroys are increasingly excessive it is because it requires more energy to do these things and hence brings him closer to a total liquidation of energy. He achieves this in Kasmir.

If you can talk about why "Everyday is Forever," I might feel like talking about sunlight and sand.

DH: Because it’s always today. Whatever day it is it’s today when you die. This is an instantaneous continuity that’s difficult to experience as fact. Agamben calls our consciousness of our experience of time “operational time”, or “messianic time.” This is the time it takes time to end, or the time between the announcement of the apocalypse and the apocalypse. To me this is really just the circumference of the moment: Right now is happening right now. “The kingdom of God is at hand” is just another way of saying “It is today today.” Paul in Hit Wave captures this experience perfectly when he says “My God I’m really here I say to myself.” The comprehension that life is the impossibility of life. This is what forever is. When I talk about the Now Wave this is really what I’m getting at. There are two nightclubs in Hit Wave: Kasmir and The Embassy. You wrote a novella called Kasmir. Are you going to write anything called The Embassy?