by Tiffany Troy
In their debut chapbook Freak of Nature (Choo Choo Press, $15), Ry Cook demands: “Look me in the eyes when / I’m talking to you.” The chapbook’s opening poem, “Burn Book,” introduces readers to many of its concerns, not least of which is its preoccupation with the aesthetics of cringe. Hewing to a form—single-stanza syllabic poems with alternating indented lines—Cook’s poems vacillate between self-deprecating humor (“On Monday a Dogecoin / tells me to kill myself / and I think about it”) and an almost-classical bravado (“I’m just waiting / here listening taking / everything in before / going downstairs knowing / exactly what to sing”).
Dwelling in and beyond cringe, Cook asks what it means to cope with pain and shame through humor. These questions swerve like the back-and-forth “spine” of Cook’s poems and land them in a sense of absolution as they “wolf and howl / at Cher’s tomato moon.”
Recently awarded the Belladonna* Residency in Nonbinary Poetics, Cook received an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and has published poems in The Baffler, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, and other magazines. A resident of Brooklyn, New York, they have taught at Pratt Institute and currently work as a program manager at the Academy of American Poets.
Tiffany Troy: How did Freak of Nature come about?
Ryan Cook: It started because at a certain point during my MFA, everything I wrote felt too cringey to edit, and Timothy Donnelly told me to write about that feeling—the sense of shame that comes with looking at a past piece of work. As I did, I became interested in the idea that these kinds of feelings could literally be deleted in the past—it was possible to erase words from existence permanently. And there’s a luxury to that. People now pay services to scrub their digital footprint clean, even though theoretically the cloud keeps texts and images forever.
When I started writing and exploring my gender, I found that I was making myself smaller so that fewer people could interpret my mess. By writing Freak of Nature, I forced myself to take up as much space as I could and to claim as many things as I wanted, and every time I tried to edit something out, I would see if I could instead lean into the bit, so to speak. Everyone in the MFA sphere loves to quote that Emily Dickinson line, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant”—but no one talks about how deep the slant can go.
TT: Let’s talk about cringe as an aesthetic. In “Rimbaud of Shit” the speaker introduces themself:
Me the Rimbaud of shit
O my good! O my boo-
tyful collection of
cringe. My potions my po-
ems.
As the poem goes on, figures like Rimbaud, Verlaine, and the “perfect genderqueer i- / con” seem to serve as foils to the speaker. The lyric magnifies some dark experiences—ranging from a car crash to suicidal ideation—into something beyond embarrassment.
RC: I’m glad you brought up “Rimbaud of Shit,” because writing it was probably the start of this project. I was thinking about how clowns find humor by being absolutely true to themselves when practicing their art—it creates a childlike sense of play—and I realized I hadn’t been allowing myself to play on the page because I was worried about the first thing I got published being the smartest, most groundbreaking work out there. To me, however, the self-awareness of a lot of contemporary writing feels like a way to avoid looking dumb, so I wanted this collection to be a lyric manifestation of, say, dancing to a goofy song to make someone you think is hot laugh.
The lyric itself is cringe; it requires us to look back on a moment or a feeling and conjure up an echo of it, or justify it, or try to understand it . . . while in reality, so much of what we experience is more complicated than understanding will admit.
During graduate school, a professor told me that you write a poem to try to figure out a question you have, even though most of the time you end up with more questions. To me, that’s like trying to get a fishhook out with more fishhooks—yet there’s something beautifully pitiful about that in terms of the contemporary lyric. I want to write about things that I’m feeling, or that matter to me, but I worry about how others will see them, or if they feel the same.
I also tend to over-intellectualize—as I think a lot of younger writers do—mostly because it feels safer to back something up with theory. This book actually started as a failed piece of theory exploring the aesthetic of cringe and how it has changed.
I think cringe started off as a physical reaction—at least this is how boomers tend to refer to cringe—you cringe at a rat in the street, for example. Cringe then turned into a weapon in the early 2000s through clips of people making fools of themselves online— early iterations of this became “lolcows,” or people who were made fun of on the internet—yet I found that a lot of the people who were being labeled as cringe were queer or neurodivergent.
When someone bullies another person in person, they typically only use the information they have available to them at the time, but that information is exponentially larger online—the digital footprint provides endless kindling for this type of behavior. I used to watch YouTube compilations of cringe moments, clips of people having meltdowns, singing poorly, claiming greatness, or whatever, that viewers found hilarious because they perceived these people as weak. So much of cringe compilation culture was a space for people to find community through making fun of the same targets—cringe as weapon. Yet I was also struck by the confidence of some of the people who were being deemed cringe.
The current phase of cringe is self-policing. I’ve had students tell me they won’t try something new because they don’t want to be seen as cringe. I’ve also seen people scrub their digital footprints in hopes that they won’t be seen as cringe later on. This fascinates me, because it feels so antithetical to the lyric.
Anyway, the more I tried to write about this theory of cringe, the less excited I became. I kept hitting blocks because I didn’t think I was smart enough. That’s when my amazing editor, Taylor Zhang, asked me to approach this idea in a different, more personal way—she suggested making it feel like a diary, a receptacle for all the self-aggrandizing and contradictory feelings. It was while working with her that I realized I didn’t have to write the perfect treatise on cringe right away; instead, I could explore the questions I had about how people feel about how much of their past is online, and how much of it ends up in their poetry.
TT: Your idea that the reactionary impulse to scrub the parts of the self that one considers cringe is anti-lyrical is fascinating. How are the aesthetics of cringe connected to the body? And does this connection reveal something about the speaker’s alter ego in Freak of Nature?
RC: I don’t know if there is an alter ego; I think we are all constantly testing out new alter egos online. I’ve seen people display themselves completely differently online than how they are in person. I often wonder how much the digital persona reflects the true nature of the person, or if it constructs something to the left of their personality.
At any rate, the speaker in these poems is certainly more outspoken than me, but they have the same amount of shame—of their body, their past, their work. I only recently noticed a lot of these poems feature bosses, which, while not intentional, shows where my head was at: I was working between three and four part-time or freelance jobs while writing this chapbook, and had a lot of different thoughts about the relationship between work and art.
Our bodies decay, bloat, and overflow. I was actually one of the clinical trial patients to try the fecal matter transplant pill (marketed as VOWST by Nestlé) because I had so many recurrences of C. diff—it worked, and I’ve never had a recurrence since, but this experience made me think a lot about the chronic health conditions myself and my loved ones have. Writing about the body is a cliche with the lyric, so “Rimbaud of Shit” gets in your face about that, while “Three Voices” discusses the speaker’s stepdad withering away and how quickly even that can be commodified:
I know
he’ll probably pass in
the next 10 years. I don’t
know what to do with that
information. Proba-
bly write a book. Sell it.
Have people pity me
with capital. Boo hoo
boo hoo boo hoo boo hoo
goes the lament of the
loudest possible flow-
er.
I wrote this poem from a place of disgust as I was trying to sort through my feelings about my stepdad’s health conditions. I don’t want to use his pain as a prop in my art, but at the same time I need to write about this stuff, or it stays burning away in my stomach. I love my stepdad dearly, but I found that in writing about him I was commodifying him.
TT: How is the aesthetic of cringe captured and heightened by the visual form of the poems in the chapbook?
RC: In regard to the visual form—the “spine poems,” as I like to call them—the main form consists of five-syllable lines indenting back and forth. The lines give an echo of iambic pentameter—the forward pulse. Working on the level of the syllable really helped me—it made the editing and writing feel like a puzzle, allowing me to play more within the guts of these words. I had to adjust what was there if I wanted to add more text. It felt important to me to explore the insides of these words and find moments where the sentence ruptures when fitting inside the verse. I wanted the clothes of the poem to feel too small. The feelings felt too big to write about, and the structure felt freeing.
I’ll probably look back on this interview and cringe, and I love that.
TT: What are you working on now?
RC: I’m finishing a new chapbook, called ASUSHUNAMIR. This one feels different from Freak of Nature. It works with a mistranslation of the Descent of Isthar myth, which features one of the first instances of a nonbinary/genderqueer character in poetry: Asushunamir was created by the god of wisdom to save Ishtar, who was stuck in the underworld; when they do rescue Ishtar, they and everyone like them get cursed by the goddess of the underworld. Here’s a portion of the classic translation by Pirjo Lapinkivi (edited slightly by me):
I wanted to explore the implications of each curse in relation to nonbinary bodies today. It’s a big myth and it will probably take me many years to write about fully, but I’m grateful to Thom at Blue Bag Press for believing in the curse section of this much larger undertaking.
TT: Do you have any closing thoughts for readers?
RC: Thanks for letting me be messy.