Against Singular Shtick

An Interview with Poet Ari Lisner

“If I was on a desert island, I might not be writing poetry.”

We sat down with poet Ari Lisner on the eve of the publication of their first chapbook, One Shtick Pony, available now from Bullshit Lit. Newest York is also pleased to present three new poems from Ari in this issue.

How did the book happen?

These are the first-ever poems I wrote, except for a poem about the four seasons I wrote about my friendship with a girl friend in third grade that I read for the whole school. In March 2020, I took a poetry workshop with Elaine Kahn.

You weren’t writing poetry before the pandemic?

Right before the pandemic, I was trying to pull something out of myself creatively. I gave creative nonfiction a stab a few months before it hit. With poetry, I was able to distill the narrative, cut lines, and make leaps I couldn’t otherwise. I was able to explore some of my experiences and surroundings while exploiting my desires and vulnerabilities as a kind of exaggerated character, a “shtick”.

What was it like, sharing those first poems in workshop? I remember in my case being so mortified and the experience of… people not hating them was this incredible euphoria. 

It is totally validating. I was trying to tell the story of failed engineering, roleplaying, and worldbuilding through this character within me. Trying to be seen at the start of my gender transition. I was not mortified at the thought of people hating the poems, but instead that they might not see me within the shtick. I was reading so much autofiction.

Are all the One Schtick Pony poems relationship poems?

They are poems about what it feels like to enter and exit a relationship. About the way love is experienced against its environment. That time, culturally, was the naughty time where people were creeping outside their apartments. People I knew wanted old New York charm and millennial splendor, a weird combo in retrospect: play-acting with martinis, beef tartare, and designer clothes.

In the Fanelli’s poem, feeling observed by a woman at another table, you say, “God, I should have been writing poetry this whole time.” I always have the feeling when I do finally get down to work after maybe a fallow period, that it wasn’t as hard as I was making it out to be, that I could have been doing more of this. But something about the community element can "jumpstart” the work, in a way.

If I was on a desert island, I might not be writing poetry. I am okay with admitting that. The dedication in the book isn’t to a specific person. It’s “I love everyone I have ever loved”. And I feel that I’m lucky to love everyone I have ever loved. Even love for a relationship that is no longer. Or love for my past self, pre-transition, that is no longer. How else could we have gotten here? Anselm Berrigan gave me the strongest praise I have ever received, for the back cover of the book. He said the One Shtick Pony poems “make for the opposite of regretting life”. To look back on life lived and to feel so glad is a big thing. 

How do you think about recollecting those experiences in your work? Do you edit them, revise them?

It’s hard to fuck with a memory. No offense to the Jewish deli we are sitting at, but at some point, it becomes chopped liver. I fear that garbledness. I try to honor the feeling. I write during weird times when feeling overflows, so I think that keeps it tight, between the original feeling and the moment of committing words. Because they are expressed during a moment of overwhelm, and expressed compulsively.

As I continue on, I find myself writing about the same things and I see the patterns. Somehow, I am always writing about birds. I don't even like birds. But the birds always set the tone, like a plot device. “The birds are chirping” — like, it’s spring. It helps you understand the mood.

Another recurring theme of your poetry is New York.

My dad grew up in Brooklyn, my mom grew up in Queens. They moved us to suburban South Jersey when I was six or seven. They wanted out. My whole childhood was them driving up here, begrudgingly, since the rest of my family lives in New York. I fell in love with it every time, before I even knew what it was, when it was unfathomable to me.

In the Fanelli poem, you say, “Pathologize exiting your apartment,” as though you’ve been prescribed that treatment, or are prescribing it to yourself.

Yes! It’s instantiating your life with purpose. It’s so easy here. There’s always something that will change how you feel. You might get a slice of pizza that ends up being really good. “Pathologize it” is maybe a quippy way to talk to yourself about doing the things that are hard that will make you feel better. Intervening. 

There's a reckoning throughout the book with these ideas of oneself, whether it’s “I'm not going to be Eileen Myles,” or “But baby, it is still me,” or “It all feels very positive, these worlds” — plural — “which I dip my toes in” — these ideas seem to. come together in the last poem, “Things I Tell Myself As I Try To Live Large”: “I do not want to be the mayor / … and while I gave you an award-winning performance / you will never see me on a rooftop again / … You are not between selves / you can reclaim your bender as turbulence / as you jet off / to a more promising reality.”

Even though I claim to be one shtick, these poems came to exist during the most transitory period of my life. That’s the big joke. So in that way, it’s against a singular shtick. I have my shtick down. I get so bored of myself. I want to keep changing. I want to get to the stuff that will have me writing the next. But in my first chapbook, I have to tell you who I am, to some extent.

Anything else for you guys?

Do you have a dessert menu?

Dessert? What would you like? 

Do you have a preference? 

Anything. Let’s see the options.

We’d like to see the options — oh, wow. I’m going to need to do, personally, a German chocolate cake with a scoop of ice cream.

Holy shit.

Are you OK with that? To share?

Yes. To share.

Ari Lisner is a poet, journalist, and researcher whose writing captures queer intimacy against the backdrop of New York City. Find Ari on Instagram at @arisbarmitzvah.