Poetry is Not the Final Girl: Ed Steck

All hail Ed Steck, truest geek fan of all time. And I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I raised myself in fandom too, so I know that loving something outside of your world rabidly, be it film, poetry, TV, whatever, also means that you no longer give a fuck if it's fictional—it twines itself so closely to your everyday reality that it becomes a pleasurably eternal chokehold. Creepily, without you even noticing, the object you love begins to fictionalize you rather than vice versa. It's like superpower. You begin to develop the ability to take pleasure in multiple registers of fiction vs. the traditional binary of being able to distinguish fiction from reality.

No one knows this better than Ed Steck, whose work continually provides us with infinite streams of information that are bruised and torqued by the way human nature inevitably ends up manipulating universal systems to suit its opportunistic need—it forces a reversal wherein we become permanently damaged by how we have been trained to need to process information. Similarly, being a fan is a mode of such total information overload at all times, of total immersion in every fact and figure pertaining to your beloved object that it is humanly possible for you to lay your hands on, that it will make you literally insane. Being a fan forces you to "conceptualize desire in reflexive and performative terms" (Saito Tamaki), meaning that there no longer remains any existence apart from the information you can't stop feeding into your plugged-in, networked being; and no information left but the essential perversity of desire.

I mean, just check out his VHS horrorshow collection and you'll know what I mean:

Ed Steck is the author of The Garden: Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulation (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), sleep as information/the fountain is a water feature (Center for Ongoing Research and Projects, 2014), The Rose (with Adam Marnie, Hassla Books, 2014), Door Graphic Data Recovery (orworse, Summer 2015), and Far Rainbow / Against Time (Make Now, Fall 2015). He is currently working on a piece titled An Interface for a Fractal Landscape, and a project on low-budget horror movies consisting of essays and a long poem.

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TL: Let’s start with the most obvious, but also most telling question in honor of my favorite horror franchise, SCREAM: What’s your favourite scary movie? But also, why? Do you think this has any bearing on your aesthetic practice? And I do mean that in the most general of terms, since no one in this series identifies purely as a poet. I understand that as a fellow horror expert this will be extremely hard for you but you do have to pick at the very least a sub-genre.

ES: This is an incredibly difficult question to answer. Answering this question is dependent on when it is being asked, but I think an accumulative chronology of my horror preferences is important in configuring what exactly is my favorite scary movie. As a child, I would obsessively dub horror movies off TV and keep all of the VHS tapes in a cabinet: here I became infatuated with the Universal Studios monster flicks and the Hammer Horror movies, as well as Japanese kaiju movies (specifically Toho Studios). Around this time (I was probably about 8 or 9), my grandfather took me to a Woolworth’s where he bought me George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead on VHS. This movie blew my young mind, and remains one of my favorite horror flicks of all time. I learned that the film was shot near where I lived (around the Western Pennsylvania area), and then I saw Romero’s Dawn of the Dead when I was visiting my aunt and uncle in Chicago a couple years later. Then, I learned that the mall that I had been going to as a kid my entire life was the filming location of the zombie flick—and my world was blown apart instantly, and I became absolutely obsessed with finding more horror movies. I was completely enthralled that these other worlds could exist so close to mine, but be absolutely built on the so-called normal aspects of society by confounding these conventions. Maybe I didn’t realize it then, but it was encouraging to know that something I considered so grandiose and spectacular was happening at the boring-ass mall right off Route 30 and past my great-grandparent’s house in Wilmerding. Horror collapsed artificial things for me as a child. And, I think that is what is the most important “why” of why I like horror movies, and why these are my favorite horror movies, because horror shows that security is false, and that engaging and enacting the fiction of horror is a departure from false security. It empowers the viewer in a sense that the walls are so easy to push over and to see how everything works underneath the scaffolding—and its often ultra-violent, unsafe, bloody and disgusting. It’s also really fun to get drunk and yell at a movie theater screen or TV screen as some degenerating styrofoam model of a head shoots a blast of grotesquely bright red corn syrup after a plastic axe slams into it. Anyways, after Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, I worked my way through the formative slasher flicks as a teenager and then into the more gory horror flicks of the 70s/80s, like Return of the Living Dead, the Guinea Pig series, Re-animator, From Beyond, and Cannibal Holocaust. I discovered John Carpenter’s Halloween and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at this point, and both of these flicks scared the hell out of me (and still do). I think at this point (even though I was unaware), I started to associate these movies as some kind of healing practice to trauma—almost therapeutic, which is also what ultimately brought me to writing poetry. After this, I sought out the cheapest low-budget shot-on-video gorefests and regional slashers (Wally Koz’ 555, Gary Cohen’s Video Violence, the insane films of Carl J. Sukenick, the films of Chester N. Turner, Tim Ritter’s The Day of the Reaper and Killing Spree), logic-depraved Italian blood-splattered madness (Joe D’Amato’s Anthropophagus, Andrea Bianchi’s Burial Ground, Lucio Fulci’s Zombie), and then the just absolutely beautiful experiments on the genre that still relish horror (Jeff Lieberman’s Blue Sunshine, Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case, all of the Argento flicks, Larry Cohen’s The Stuff, Roger Watkins’ Last House on Dead End Street).

So, too-long-didn’t-read: my favorite horror flicks are Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Basket Case, Zombie, Last House on Dead End Street, and Anthropophagus.

TL: God bless you Ed Steck, I would not have expected any less than such terrifying and total taxonomy.  I’m interested in what you say here: specifically that horror kind of exaggerates certain kinds of banalities and social conventions and then basically paints them as a giant inflatable toy that is 100% not immune; in fact becomes extra susceptible to some kind of ridiculously gory but also gloriously artificial fate. The convention is blown apart, at the same time as the horror of its real-world implementation is felt at a very visceral level. But as your response basically exemplifies, horror isn’t just about total destruction. It also gives itself to every possible iteration in this sort of replicative, tessellating way, it keeps making the same movie in a slightly different fashion to make it more ridiculous, funnier, scarier, sillier. I’m wondering if this has anything to do with the kind of reiterative structure of trauma right, the fact that you keep re-living the same thing until your object of fear disappears, and really what is left is just this arbitrary loop of fright. Do you think this relates to your thinking about horror as healing or therapeutic in some way? Personally, I don’t think it can be—but I do like the way it reifies cultural wounds.

ES: One thing about horror movies that particularly interests me is that it renders death as a constructed, calculated, tested, and performed event—into something crafted by human hands, often turning the moment of death into an object able to be performed on or with, manipulated or edited (I really admire Tom Savini’s special effects work in this case—I lived on the same street as him for awhile in Pittsburgh). I was watching a gory genie movie titled The Lamp (the cut version titled The Outing is more well-known) the other night, and I was kind of amazed by the slow-cooked character development. I mean, horror films are known for cookie-cutter formulas for characters. But, there was something so bizarrely empty about how characters were portrayed in this flick: the roving archetypal teen assemblage bent on sex and beer, the fumbling adult authority figures, and the massive, fog-consumed curiously immobile djinn sculpture. The characters seemed like templates for stage direction that was never completed, but their deaths were elaborate and partially unseen: ravaged by once inanimate cobras, ripped-in-half offscreen, and death-revealed after djinn identity replication. I’m sure this is primarily due to ineptitude. Death scenes are almost always the pinnacle and most-celebrated moments of horror films, because it allows the viewer to continuously enter the distortion of a tenuous moment usually only reserved for finality. But, in The Lamp, the death scenes kind of cemented the artificiality of these characters—there wasn’t anything there except their death to begin with, and their deaths occur in rapid, ultra-violent bursts often committed by no one in particular (just the body, or vessel, inhabited by the djinn’s green spirit). Yesterday, after watching Intruder, Maniac Cop 2, Satan Place, and Psycho Pike, I came to the conclusion that characters in horror movies can be a kind of substance template, often filtering social or cultural concerns (yesterday’s viewing: the sanctity of small business, the failure of the justice system, domestic roles and relationships, and the industrial effects on the environment) rather rapidly through the course of the film—then leaving that vague space open for the viewer to enter, but this space has to hold a very specific positioning for it to be effective. I think this is why Carpenter’s Halloween is so successful, and, especially, as you say, tessellating: Michael Myers is nothing in this movie (later he becomes something but should have remained nothing), he is The Shape—an embodiment of all the potential layerings and scaffolded consequences brought on from external horror, impenetrable anxiety, lingering trauma, crushed humanities, and other terrors that is able to seep into the domestic experience. “The night HE came home!” was on the OG Halloween poster—this faceless and endless terror is coming to your home in your neighborhood to embody your innermost fear. Horror is an entrance. At one time, I would re-watch Halloween night-after-night, trying to make sense out of my associations connected to this harbinger of unrepentant violence and continuous disappearance. It became almost therapeutic to re-evaluate these associations over-and-over again—to define my trauma through a medium and a genre projected through fictional characters. And, I’m in agreement with you, horror isn’t healing or therapeutic, but it almost is—for me, in these terms, horror is like a hybrid of a file management service and a sinkhole: it tidily puts all of my troubles away into the empty compartments or file folders while simultaneously sinking and consuming everything entered into oblivion. But, that isn’t healing or therapy—it is just kind of a system for displacement, further walling things inside, or burying it. That’s not therapy. Horror is a disappearing act. It’s a burial ground. I feel that way about poetry too. I’ve been trying to work on a project about this for awhile now, and it’s incredibly difficult to write about self-perception, healing, and personal trauma through an individual chronology of film, especially when that chronology is defined by machetes lodged in a zombie’s head, or, like, Pinhead. But, anyways, it’s not always like that: sometimes I’m just having a ball eating potato chips and watching Things, Curtains, The House of Whipcord, Monster Dog, or The Nostril Picker.

TL: I’m so glad you say that you feel the same way about poetry. Because I kind of do too. I really just don’t understand people who seem to see poetry as a morally superior or ethically rigorous space. It’s a trap in the same way horror is, every door or window that seems like it might be a way out is really only a way to enfold us deeper in the bosom of having to know the impossibility of redemption or the reality of the inarticulable. Poetry can do nothing apart reflect specific cultural or societal concerns, create for us an elaborate fantasy of what or how we might fix things and in that process lead us further and further towards a death we can’t escape. Everything is already a failure that’s predetermined.

I love how many gory deaths there can be in poetry! I like that you think about it as an endless filing cabinet or a sinkhole because at the end of the day, what is more horrific, as my friend Aaron says in his interview, than the continuing banality of daily life we can’t escape. Poetry, our daily bread. What’s interesting about what you say though, is that you can get lost in the sinkhole, and that accumulation is somehow therapeutic. I like getting lost in the sinkhole so very much, and feel like poetry has so much to learn from horror in that way, in that eternal enfolding/unfolding of fantasy. Would you agree that poetry can learn from horror in that way?

ES: You know, let me think. I don’t know. Poetry, for the longest time, was just a thing for me to do in my spare time, to help me kind of coalesce back into whatever condition I needed to be in. I sat down on a bench, ate a bag of food, and wrote a poem. But, many years after meddling around on paper, I realized, as you say, that “poetry can do nothing apart reflect” and “create for us an elaborate fantasy” and, at that moment, I fell completely into poetry’s sinkhole—to create fantasies that can do nothing but reflect, and to ultimately explore the particularities of these simulations. This was incredibly exciting to me, because it allowed for the entrance into world-building, and observing how objects functioned within these constructed worlds. Aaron (a great writer) is correct that there is nothing more horrific than the continuing banality of inescapable daily life—but, banality can be overpowered and controlled, manipulated, turned into something more succulent and rewarding. Inserting the elaborate fantasies that horror provides—often the deepest-unknown-sexually-empowered, grotesque-body-defying-transformations, erotic-tinged-autodissections—that’s power: using fantasy against the banal. Sure, the argument can be made that fantasy can be broken down and reduced to its foundation, which, at its core, is simply the everyday—but, why not just continuously build atop other built moments until that banality is transformed? Really start ripping it up. Enjoy the bloodbath. Subvert banality. Subvert your trauma. Subvert what bores you. Subvert power over you. Subversion is therapy. I think of flicks like Nekromantik (I think Nekromantik is one of the most harrowing, desperate, and perfect pieces of art on the human condition—it deserves a Criterion release), the Guinea Pig series, From Beyond, Carpenter’s The Thing, Last House on Dead End Street, Burial Ground, Society, Death Dream, the films of Jess Franco, Sleepaway Camp, and even Terror Train and Re-Animator at times. Hell, even The Blob. The Nostril Picker, too. Horror is about transformation—the active transformation of the body, the active transformation of the self in space, the active transformation of bodies-into-bodies. You know, activating the grotesque. Horror is about subverting violence, transforming it—not implementing it into the body of the work just as reflection. If poetry is just reflective then it should learn from horror’s transformative elements, it should learn how to manipulate and subvert its own forms and the material or experiences that informs the work—but, ultimately, that lends itself to how the poet approaches their writing, I guess. I think for this to happen: poetry needs to become something else—it needs to transform, it needs to becomes a monster, or a grotesque transformation of whatever literary tradition it was vomited out of. This reminds me of certain scenes from the quintessential body melt flick, Street Trash. There is a famous scene where a character drinks the tainted Viper drink and melts into a toilet, then continues to writhe around, morph and stretch out of the confines of the human body. Maybe that is what poetry needs to be. Melting. Anyways. I’m part of horror contingents in some ways, as I am part of poetry contingents in differing ways. Horror, to me, at the core of it all, is about getting together with some friends, a loved one, your cat, or by yourself, and having a hell of a time screaming in absolute glee at some goofy looking Bigfoot busting down a cabin door, or a bunch of naked people obsessed by an ill-willed genie, or an entire town taken over by crazed worms, or a lumberjack mall Santa Claus taking on Nazi-constructed Elf-like creatures hellbent on elven master race global domination. Odd that something focused on glorifying decapitations and gory eruptions, monstrous abominations wreaking uncontrollable havoc, and unhinged maniacal male violence can be less judgmental than poetry at times. I’ve never been punched in the face, ridiculed for not dressing appropriately, or called a phony and told to go back home at a horror convention. But, I did almost rip off Hershel Gordon Lewis, and I couldn’t imagine the curse that I would have been burdened with if I forgot to pay the grandfather of gore for his signed glossy photo.