Interview: KAi Warmoth

We’re back- and we never officially had a conversation outside of the podcast about this collection of work. We released it, sold out of the first copies, and just let it live in the paper. Can you tell us a little bit about the title of the book, and how it ties in thematically to the collection?

It’s from a Manic Street Preachers’ song and I think it’s really the only song by them that I love. I’ve always had an affinity for long titles, a lasting remnant from the early 00’s white belt corner of metalcore. I still have a soft spot for bands like The Chariot, Fear Before and The Blood Brothers. As for the meaning, the ominous nature of the title lets anyone form their own specific guess and some are more charitable to me than others. I think I’ll leave it at that.

The second pressing is here. It’s limited. The difference is largely in the cover. Obviously, we have a sketch of Ezra Pound and he’s almost whispering the torch to you (who is also on the cover). Can you explain your connection to Pound (perhaps other Modernists too, such as TS Eliot) and why he makes sense as a critical piece of the cover art? 

I’ve had an interest in writing and authorship since I can recall but it wasn’t until a poetry unit in probably fourth or fifth grade English that I really latched onto poetry specifically. We were taught about haikus and something just clicked in my brain and I found myself having fun writing them, something that was unheard of for me in school. But the haikus were something I enjoyed writing and I had little interest in reading others’. It wasn’t until I found Eliot in probably 6th or 7th grade that I remember being truly moved by other people’s poetry. And of course it was “Prufrock” that hooked me. I remember knowing exactly what it meant but not being able to describe it in normal, common language. It didn’t need to be explained, as far as I was concerned; it was all there on the page plain as day. 

So naturally once one starts reading Eliot, they end up stumbling upon not just Pound but Lewis, Lawrence, and Yeats. Lawrence’s novels were an obsession for a period of my early 20’s, specifically “The Plumed Serpent” and “Kangaroo,” but Pound always just orbited right outside of my grasp until the last 6-7 years of my life. I think I read “Guide to Kulchur” first and that blew the door off of the hinges for me. Already having an interest in the effects of usury on the greater culture, my entry into Pound’s work didn’t start in the poetic. It moved that way eventually, of course, but the initial interest came from his political and social theory. This being the one part of Pound’s writing you’re supposed to ridicule or feign embarrassment about in polite conversation only made it more appealing to the natural contrarian in me (I had a dear friend tell me “You can’t wash away punk” the other day and few phrases have ever applied to my life so well). Without Pound’s socio-political essays, I doubt I’d ever have ended up reading Michael Hudson or Michael Hoffman or developing such a keen fascination with the Abrahamic principle of the Jubilee. 

At 32 years old, I’ve read a majority of his work. I still haven’t finished “The Cantos” in its entirety but I keep it on the same shelf as my Bibles, Qurans, Gitas, etc. because there is a part of me that feels something divinely inspired about it. “The Cantos” are a truly American piece of art and I don’t think they will ever get the full appreciation and attention they truly deserve, at least not outside of dissident circles or the few corners of academia that haven’t been hijacked by neurotic losers.

I was drawn to publish your work primarily because of the Proto-Trinitas poem in seven parts. I love conceptual work, and the Christian-laced themes of redemption or the idealization of nearing it. What prompted you to dig into the ideas of the penitent and impenitent on the crosses shouldered to Christ?

For reasons I don’t fully understand, I’ve long had an interest in “side characters” within literature, especially the ones that appear elsewhere or seemingly have lives of their own outside of the work. The Bible has a ton of these individuals that pop up here and there subtly and that subtle introduction springboards them into history, not just within the church martyrology but art in general. Dismas and Gestas drew my attention for a variety of reasons, not least of all because they seem to be the origin of the “devil on one shoulder, angel on the other” bit that’s become a cliche. I believe it’s mentioned in the footnotes but Nikos Kazantzakis’ “The Last Temptation of Christ” was hugely influential and I started to ponder about other Gospel characters being offered a final glimpse of what their lives could be if they turned against the Truth. Dismas suffering exile and squalor as a punishment for guerrilla activities against the Roman state while Gestas finds the fulfillment of his lust for earthly pleasures, to me, played very well off of the biographical sketch we have for them. And these are rather massive sketches, mind you, as most Abrahamic traditions seem to have some sort of unique take on the duo. So I asked myself what exactly these two would witness in their mind’s eye as they died and I thought that Gestas, the impenitent thief, would see the realization of his profane goals while Dismas would likely see an extension of his sufferings. Dismas strikes me as the “natural Christian” and his particular mentioning by Jesus leads me to assume his heart remained pure, so much so that even his final “temptation” was overshadowed by grace.

It’s by far my favorite thing that I’ve ever composed. I’ve given quite a bit of thought into translating it into some performance piece either through film, music or theater but I’m not exactly sure how to go about it. Maybe someday.

Does Christianity inform your work? Is the influence cultural, spiritual, or is it merely a nod to aesthetics?

Absolutely. Part of it is unintentional. If you’re an english-speaking writer, the Gospel is going to be near the root-level of influence, along with Shakespeare, Dante and others, whether you want to admit it or not. I think maybe we delved into this a bit on the American Sublime podcast but I’ve always conceived of religious systems as a language with which we use to speak about that which is beyond language, namely the Ineffable. You can surely identify as whatever branch of faith you like but at the end of the day, if you were born an Arabic speaking person in Jordan then the metaphorical language in your head will be based upon the Quran. The same applies to English speakers in the West with the Gospels. One can claim to be an atheist (a label and identity that quickly vanishes when the shit hits the fan) but I don’t necessarily believe a person can remove the tendency towards the Divine from within. I’m pretty aligned with Mircea Eliade on the innate religious nature of humanity. There’s definitely a concerted effort on the part of the Cult of Expertise and other profane/secular groups to try and sever that tie between us and our God(s), in the same way that there is an effort to destroy the ties of family, tribe and nation. It’s an atomization meant to create a more pliable and submissive human being. The gauche and uncouth term for it is “Satanic” which naturally brings about the mockery and derision of Love is Love yard sign crowd. Some people enjoy LARPing as soulless bugs for the sense of superiority it brings them. I don’t think I’ll ever understand it.

But to return to the meat of your question: I call myself a Christian because I speak English and was born in the West. Jesus of Nazareth is my “totem,” for lack of a better word. The household I grew up in was unofficially Perennialist. Neither of my parents were reading Guenon or Burkhardt yet I was always taught that, while we may be Christians and attend a Christian church and pray to our Christian God, that wasn’t the case for everyone. If a good Muslim woman dies and a good Sikh man dies, they are moving on to the same place, it just might look different through their unique, cultural perspectives. We all pray in our own languages. I usually have to put a little asterisk next to my identity as a Christian because of this belief of mine. And I’ve had plenty of people tell me that it is disqualifying, which is fine. Given the state of things, I’ll stand side by side with anyone who can recognize the Imago Dei, even if they call it by a different name or recognize a different totem than I do.

So much of Indiana is in this work. It is clear the importance of the home territory. What’s going on in Indiana? It always struck me as the place where people could still be countercultural, but in that genuinely American, low-down sense.

I don’t know if I’m plugged in enough anymore to even properly answer this. After my last band split up and Antigone was born, I sort of removed myself from the art world or, at the very least, took a backseat for the time being. So much of what drew me towards punk and the counterculture had been lost in the quagmire that was 2016 and I increasingly found that “agreeing with the regime” and loudly shouting empty platitudes at normal, working people was the new way of business. I don’t know, maybe it’s some implicit bias on my part or I’m just getting old and crotchety but being the free labor foot soldier for pharmaceutical companies that killed my friends and politicians that sent my classmates to die in the Middle East didn’t seem very “punk” to me, no matter how much it was colored by vapid calls for “liberation” of capital-constructed identity groups that often enjoy greater patronage than the ones to which I belong. It didn’t feel countercultural to rehash racial issues so Nike could move more stock. I didn’t imagine the “revolution” would consist of erasing the existence of women for the benefit of porn-addicted men. 

I’ve mentioned it before but I remember waking up one morning in 2016 and finding that everything that had made me a staunch, if not old school, Leftist the night before now made me a raging fascist who stood in the way of progress. I think a lot of people experienced that same thing. Many of them put their heads down in shame and adjusted their long-held principles to better fit in with the new mold that the mob created but I couldn’t bring myself to suddenly think censorship and imperialist wars were fine and dandy, no matter how many times I got called a racist or a sexist or whatever boogeyman term was en vogue that week. No amount of social pressure has managed to force me to say that femininity and masculinity are just ghosts in one’s brain or that the Ukrainian border is a sacred line that requires daily sacrifices to the gods of Democracy. 

I’ve gotten off subject a bit but my point is that my diversity of thought was never tolerated by the preachers of Tolerance and Diversity who had usurped the once-potent energies of the art scene and I fear this is the case for any city, not just Indianapolis. Now I live outside of the city in a more rural area. I work at a blue collar dive bar and I have conversations with customers that would make an enlightened cosmopolitan shrink back in horror, aghast that the proletarians aren’t praying to the right idols. And while that freedom of discourse is certainly nice, the stranglehold that neoliberalism has on art has become much more stark in my view. Hoosiers, at least where I am, certainly retain some of that midwestern fighting spirit that causes the elite classes to disdain us but there’s a depressing lack of artistic and aesthetic impulse. I imagine this is because artists have long been coded as “progressive” which is ironic because the majority of the “greats” have been far from progressive. Nobody could say that Pound, Yeats, Mishima, Dostoevsky, or others were liberals. Even dos Passos’ “U.S.A.” trilogy, something I would normally categorize as brilliant leftist literature, would be called reactionary today, if only because it views the White dude fixing toilets as being as worthy of dignity as any other citizen.

If a new dissident movement is to really take shape and get its legs then it has to have an aesthetic sense independent of regime organs in the entertainment industry. Yeah, it is cool and funny that a Jason Aldean song about how you shouldn’t rob people can cause meltdowns amongst the Ivory Tower class and their peons but it's a flash in the pan and nothing more. We need something new and dangerous. That’s what I’m hoping to help accomplish. Running off to NYC or LA to be around the publishing hubs is hostile to that goal so I stay right where I am because this is where America is.

To pick up off of that last question- there’s all these distinct entities in your poems that embody the Indiana working class. Lovers, interstates, lonesome rooms, addicted friends, recklessness, alcohol consumption- what is To Be Tolerated in all this?

They say you should “write what you know” so that’s what I did. I spent my early 20’s being drunk and playing punk shows, sleeping around, barely working, etc. I fully dove into Dionysian pleasures and I’m glad I had those experiences but I also saw the fallout from it and lost friends along the way. There’s a hopelessness that is endemic to the Midwest partially because we are surrounded by screens telling us that life is elsewhere and that we must escape if we want to be a Real Person. The idea that to be genuine, one must cut themselves off from their land and their tribe is an evil one but it makes sense from the perspective of those trying to run a crumbling empire without getting shot at or overthrown. If you barely speak to the people that live in the house next door, you’ll have fewer qualms about seeing them get carted away. If you’re always being told to hyperfocus on your assorted traumas, you’ll become the perfect narcissist, untethered by the very things that have allowed human life to flourish for centuries. 

The motifs you mentioned are the metaphorical structures that have taken root in my psyche and filter whatever I take in. I can’t remove them because they are me. But I can learn from them and see what works and what doesn’t. Being impoverished, being low, being addicted; all of these things remind me to love those who still find themselves in that mire (as in, I love them and want better for them, not “love” in the contemporary sense where one just blindly supports self-destruction for the sake of “empowerment” or whatever horseshit buzz word is the current favorite). On the other side of that coin, that poverty, that addiction and that atomization reminds me where to direct my hatred and scorn. Flooding my hometown with opiates and SSRIs doesn’t suddenly become forgivable because the same people made a vaccine for a manufactured virus that wasn’t going to kill me in the first place. Of course, it’s impolite to have a memory of longer than three months these days.

You just had a reading in Indianapolis that was almost canceled. How’d that turn out? Have your politics and social views gotten in the way of opportunity? Or is it merely a chance at artistic liberation?

The reading was great. Caleb Caudell put it together and did a fantastic job, all things considered. He’s an incredible novelist and a friend and I can’t thank him enough for the opportunity. Naturally, there were hiccups. The presence of myself and a few other readers was too much for the Tolerance and Diversity crowd but their efforts at cancelation were appreciated because I think it doubled the number of attendees. My wife was worried I’d get smashed in the head with a padlock or jumped by a gang of the ugliest people alive because even she, a mostly apolitical individual, recognizes these people lack the spines, chests or integrity for actual, even-keeled confrontation. But nothing came of it and things went well. I had a great time.

I absolutely think my social views have limited my success. How could I not? When I was still regularly submitting work to zines and blogs, not a week went by that I didn’t receive some reply about how my work was good and right in line with what they usually published HOWEVER the zine was only seeking to publish marginalized and underrepresented voices at that time. Setting aside how amazing it was that they felt they could determine my representation or marginalization status based off of a small author’s photo alone, I began to wonder whether or not I had long been misunderstanding the meanings of words like “underrepresentation” or “marginalization.” Being locked out of publishing because of my immutable characteristics certainly felt like marginalization but what did I know? I never went to a fancy college and both of my parents had to work to get by so maybe I should just shut up and get a factory job and leave art to the true intellectuals of the landed classes. 

Eventually I was fortunate enough to find spaces and publications that were willing to publish the untouchables like myself. ExPat, Apocalypse Confidential, Sentimental, etc. etc. It was a huge relief to find out there are still individuals out there who don’t allow their interactions with art to be mediated by vulgar bullshit like politics. 

Is literature dead? Dying? It seems like the arts are the most conquered elements of dull politics. The mad ones have grown docile and blind. 

I think a lot of us feared that poetry in particular was dead or dying when a hack like Amanda Gorman was named “poet laureate” as a reward for her support of the regime. I certainly had that thought for a desperate moment or two. But then one has to remember two things. Number one is that great artists, or at least those approaching some form of true Beauty, are always relegated to the sidelines. The masses have low taste and prefer pulp. This is all fine and well (I have my own guilty pleasures) but we’re at a point where the “democratization of everything” is in full swing. Naturally that’s going to result in the arts becoming dumber and profit-obsessed. Great poetry that is in touch with the Divine is never going to do well on the free market because God and the free market are naturally opposed. We are chattel to an usurious economic system and we act surprised when Art doesn’t flourish. 

The second thing to remember circles back to the Christianity talk above. All of the prophets throughout world religions were reviled and hated by the centers of power. I have to think that if your art is being canceled and attacked by Capital and the willing dupes who hold it up then you’re probably doing something right.

Are you getting married soon? Are you back in college? Is the little one growing up fast? Where’s life going?

Getting married in September, yeah. It’s funny because my fiancee and I have known each other since our teenage years but never actually seriously dated until our late 20’s. We commiserated with each other over our individual relationships and break-ups a lot back in the day, so to find ourselves now together and starting a family might seem strange to some but, to me, always just made sense. Our daughter, Antigone, is growing like a weed. She has her mother’s emotional range and beauty and my intelligence so I’m absolutely screwed when she becomes a teenager but I’m excited anyway. We live extremely close to my large family and it’s a joy I can’t begin to put into words, knowing my daughter can run across the yard to her grandfather’s house for candy, the same way I did as a child. I will never understand why people separate themselves from their extended families like they do, especially when children are involved but I have to remind myself that I have a unique situation and not everyone is so blessed.

As for college, yes, I’m taking the community college route for now, if only out of boredom. I have no idea what I’m going to do or major in once the prerequisites are finished but likely something horrifically unmarketable like religion or history. I have a great talent for making myself anathema to lucrative careers. I know it’s quite frustrating to those around me, my complete lack of money-focused motivation, but it is what it is. I’m rendering unto Caesar and giving the rest to God.