The Amsterdammer

“I have written for as long as I can remember, wherever I have been” he affirms, peering at me from the edge of his white bed, with his legs crossed and the palm of his hand steadily placed on his knee. He describes his poetry as “lyric and non-confessional” and his music as “sleepy-time, ambient soundscape music” in which he conceives of sound “as a unit.” “I usually listen to other people’s music but, if I’ve just finished three or four songs, I’ll add [them] to the playlist [which functions] like a working album. Sometimes I’ll listen to my own music before bed, to see how [and] if it works.” When it comes to the writing process, he admits that it’s a tiring one. “Usually, I write my poetry in a workflow and I go, and go, and go until it’s gone. Weeks will go by until something happens again. So everything from the rhythm to the images will be a result of that flow. Because of that, I don’t revise often. I’m wary of how [that] could break the workflow of the original poem. It’s a wonderful and beautiful exhaustion.” We talk about this exhaustion and other feelings or states of being that can be linked to creative output. Most present in my mind are the concepts of happiness and unhappiness. He inhales quietly and leans towards me. “Incredibly arbitrary” is how Darrin describes terms such as ‘happiness’ and ‘unhappiness’. “I have had periods of unhappiness and happiness. I am fairly happy, but I am also being productive, and what I produce is good. What I produce when I’m unhappy is also good. It doesn’t depend on a necessary state of unhappiness – that is something we inherit from romanticism,” he chuckles. “I can’t speak for every artist, but someone who’s had a happy life will probably just produce art that is very different. One thing I can say though is that art always seems to come from struggle. I prefer the terms stability and instability, rather than happy and unhappy. Artists live very unstable lives.” He mentions the personal and artistic instability that has constantly enveloped his own life, though he points out that just about everything has been tumultuous for him in some shape or form. “My present has never really satisfied me fully and that’s what got me into the process of creating, to make the present more bearable. It’s the most typical narrative that probably exists for a lot of queer men who come from the rural Midwest, like Nebraska. I’ve experienced a lot of bad things from people across the spectrum and that’s really important to mention. It is not just straight people who bully – some people within the community do it to protect themselves. Intra-community violence is not something that’s looked at as much as it should be. Art offers a way for all of that to be more bearable.”

So if Darrin doesn’t get his inspiration from the tear-stained poems of romantic lyricists, then where’s it all coming from? I’m surprised to find that most of his gratitude is directed towards mentor and poet Robert Fernandez, who has published three books and has held the Reynolds Chair of Poetry in the English department at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. “[He’s] the reason I even write poetry. Robert really helped me break through, and [he] is why I write the way that I write now. The way I actually developed [my style] and the things I do with imagery – none of that happened until I read one of his earliest published books, Pink Reef.” Darrin also owes some of his creativity to Federico García Lorca, Jack Spicer, Frank O’Hara, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Celane, though he discloses that had he been able to, he probably would not have struck up a conversation with any of them in real life – barring Lorca.

Darrin conceives of his poetry as a place in which he can be “wildly throwing together images,” something he trusts that all of the aforementioned poets also do in their writing. “The primary feature of my poetry is the imagery, it’s like I’m in five fever dreams at once. All of those [poets] also have this aphoristic style and there are moments in my work where I state something like it’s a matter of fact, but it’s only to increase the imagery. There’s also something about tone that I learned from them, definitely.” My speaker claps his hands together enthusiastically because he has remembered something. “I just thought of another one who belongs in that list: Arthur Rimbaud. Now I would’ve loved to have spent time with him, because that’s someone I would have publicly dated,” he confesses unapologetically, creasing up in laughter. But what about Paul Verlaine, with whom Rimbaud had a short-lived but sizzling affair? Darrin is quick to point out that “Verlaine wasn’t even that cute.” After googling him to refresh my memory, I had to concede: he wasn’t. “And not as good of a poet [as Rimbaud],” adds the Nebraskan.