At Salon Joshua Clover Reminisces on the Beginning of the End of Spin

Poet, rebel, and pop culture enthusiast—Joshua Clover—is back in the news, this time for his new Twitter tale called "How I Quit Spin." Prompted by Sasha Frere-Jones and a bad U2 concert, Clover's tale, which has exploded since it began as a series of tweets, details his exit from the music magazine around the time of the Sept. 11 attacks. More:

Joshua Clover has become the first poet in years to get widespread media attention for something besides passing away. His Twitter tale, “How I Quit Spin,” has exploded on social media: The story, if that’s what it is, chronicles his departure from the music magazine around the time of the Sept. 11 attacks in more than 200 tweets. It’s rueful, bitterly funny, introspective and all told in bites of 140 characters or less. Slate has called it “A Piece of Pop Culture Art.”

Most of the time, Clover writes on poetry and teaches at the University of California at Davis. We spoke to him from his home in the Bay Area; the interview has been slightly edited and condensed.

When you wrote his, did you have any idea it would take off the way it did?

Not in the slightest.

How did it come about — what happened?

Well, so I’m writing a book about riots, and I was sitting at my desk doing some editing work… I saw that a Twitter acquaintance of mine was at a U2 concert in New York, and he was bored and regretted it. I tweeted back saying I’d like to say I’d never had the same experience, but I had… I said it was a very complicated story, but one of the better stories of my life. He encouraged me to tell it. I explained that it would take too long.

At that point, an old friend of ours, Sasha Frere-Jones, was online and said, “It’s a good story — tell it! Tell it!” So, I decided I would, with no sense of how it would work, or direction, or anything…. I literally believed it would be the two of them reading it, and that would be it.

There are all kinds of ways of telling a story — if we look at the history of literature, we see lots of forms over the centuries. Why did Twitter seem like the right way to tell this one?

To be honest, it didn’t. There was never a moment where I thought: this would be a good story for Twitter. It was the way I had to communicate with someone trapped at a concert. That’s the magic of the medium, isn’t it — that someone can be trapped, but amused or diverted by someone narrating a series of events from 3,000 miles away.

But once I started writing — and I’m not a narrative writer at all, I write about poetry so I have no experience of making narrative — I got a sense of it as I went along. It was a bit improvised and a bit intuitive.

Maybe you’re as confused as the rest of us. But this has exploded online — any idea why so many people are interested? What stirred people up?

I can make some guesses. People like memoir… And there are still a few rock-crit people floating around. And some people who like narrative and like Twitter — suddenly here are two things they like, together. These are all guesses, I have very little idea. [...]

Continue at Salon.