The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Jeff Tweedy
“The fact is we’re all living part of one long song.”
...more“The fact is we’re all living part of one long song.”
...more“And as those masks fall away, we get down to the shame and envy underneath.”
...more“A poem is like a vision test—its vision is either clear or it’s not.”
...more“Any good poem has form and acts out its meanings in form.”
...more“All evolution—in every sense—entails loss, the need to let things go.”
...more“I really believe that if it matters to the writer, it can find space in the poem.”
...more“To really write, I need to hold a pen.”
...more“While the past remains always present, old women exist in the present.”
...more“I like to tell my secrets.”
...more“Technology is our most common landscape, no?”
...more“You can make any topic enough in the telling.”
...more“You’re solving this mystery, you’re taking this journey, but that’s only an opening to another journey.”
...more“I’m interested in beautiful events that are wrong.”
...more“I found that the tap seemed to open when I accessed deep emotion and memory.”
...more“Memoir is about recreating the complexities of a life.”
...more“I work slowly, from sentence to sentence, and attempt to stay attuned to opportunity.”
...more“Hopefully, the takeaway is the journey.”
...more“Ultimately art is about making sense of our brief lives on earth.”
...more“[I]t is an itch that needs to be scratched. To test. To push. To prove to myself.”
...more“It doesn’t matter your gender or your sexual orientation; you can disorder your eating.”
...more“Our memories are always in flux.”
...more“I’ve never had a book happen to me the way WE HAD NO RULES did.”
...more“Everything in my life is basically a scribble.”
...more“A poem cannot exist without form or structure, just like the human body can’t operate without a skeleton.”
...more“I like to engage with and argue with the research; this makes the work dynamic.”
...more“I had thought of the title as a placeholder, but it ended up hanging around.”
...more“Ultimately, this is who I am. I can only write honestly, and from where I live.”
...more“I am the salt; the stories are the food.”
...more“I don’t think I know how to write if I’m not guided by sound—that’s when it feels like I’m flailing or straining.”
...more“This reality is so much dustier, smellier, and bitterer than it seems through a screen.”
...more