Disease of Kings
An Interview with Anders Carlson-Wee
When my mother was diagnosed with cancer in 2019, my family and I experienced a whirlwind of emotions, unsure what the best approach for caring for her would look like. My sister, stepfather, and I did everything possible to ensure that she made her appointments, received her prescriptions on time, and provided encouragement for her new reality. My mother, thankfully, was able to beat cancer the first time around, but in that process, her body endured daily battles she wasn’t always prepared for. She lost weight, lost her hair, lost the full use of her kidneys, and, in conjunction with her ongoing diabetes and a constant ulcer, she had to have the pinky toe on her left foot amputated. Her body had changed, and while reading Anders Carlson-Wee’s newest collection, Disease of Kings, I found myself in Carlson-Wee’s speaker’s shoes when he tried to intervene in his friend’s North cravings for less-than-healthy food, cravings that resulted in constant attacks of gout. The intervention that I had with my mother versus what Carlon-Wee’s speaker had with North were no doubt different, but having to care for someone because of health reasons, regardless of how severe their condition is, is a universal feeling that prompts greater empathy and love for those in need. This understanding is ripe throughout Carlson-Wee’s sophomore collection, and it is one that pulls at the reader’s heartstrings as much as it does on their instinctual emphasis for a common humanity. I was fortunate enough to sit down with Anders to discuss Disease of Kings, the writing process, and the considerations that go into depicting everyday life into poetry.
Esteban Rodriguez: Disease of Kings is a remarkable collection that traverses a myriad of locations, situations, triumphs, tragedies, and uncertainties. There is constant movement, and the speaker along with a diverse cast of characters seeks not only a simple means of survival, but a pathway toward lasting happiness. Where did this book find its genesis? What real-life scenarios led to such vivid and memorable poems?
Anders Carlson-Wee: For five years, I stopped buying food altogether. I found my nutrition in dumpsters behind supermarkets, and trash provided everything else I needed, too: shoes, clothing, headlamps, camping gear, board games, hangers, stepping stools, candles, rope, and raw materials for making whatever I failed to find. These years of living off trash provided half the inspiration for writing Disease of Kings. The other half came from my emotional life–specifically, my experiences of friendship, the loss of friendship, and an abiding loneliness that seems to haunt me regardless of where I go or what I do. The speaker in Kings–who is based on me–yearns to escape all societal norms and responsibilities. He wants to never work, never pay, never give away even a shred of his precious time. He sees this untethering from society as total freedom, and he believes attaining total freedom will equal happiness, but as the collection proceeds, he faces the great cost of his supposed freedom.
ER: I appreciate you sharing that with our readers, Anders. In addition to this personal insight, what I greatly admired about this collection was the realness (and oftentimes grittiness) of the characters populated throughout. We have a curious woman at a moving sale, a compassionate barista at a café, a juggler, Lou, Barb, Oscar (who each appear in a persona poem with the same title), and the always present North. Poetry can be quite intimate, and I think sometimes readers don’t see the fictive veil of rendering situations/people within a piece. How did you go about navigating the characters on the page versus the people from which they were inspired? Was there any hesitation about depicting someone you know or knew who would read these words?
ACW: Yes, major hesitation. Particularly with the character of North, who is based on my real friend North. Many years ago, after I’d drafted some poems that included the North character, I sat down with my actual friend North and asked him how he felt about the possibility of my writing about him–and fictionalizing him. Luckily, North is an artist himself (we even had early writing courses together) and understood the complexity of such a request; he was also extremely generous toward me and granted me total freedom to fictionalize the character of North as needed for the project. I will be forever grateful to him for his generosity, understanding, and encouragement. As for the character in Disease of Kings who is named North: it is true that he possesses many of the qualities of my actual friend–who I find infinitely compelling, infinitely complex, and infinitely lovely–but it is even more true that he is a make-believe character. He is an amalgamation, cobbled together in my mind from various sources. Some of the sources are consciously known to me, others are not. And it is even more true that the character North is comprised of symbols on pieces of paper, alchemized in the reader’s mind into a person, who (hopefully) becomes real. To speak more generally about inventing characters, I often combine the qualities from multiple sources: the speech tics of one person mixed with the worldview of another, topped with a sprinkle of contradictory behaviors from a third. And so on. But this process is not planned. My characters pop into my head almost full-grown. It usually begins with their voice–I hear a voice in my head talking to me, and what they say contains everything: speech tics, strange opinions, personal problems, paradoxes. It’s all in the voice. I write down what they say, and from there, I reverse-engineer them into life: If this person says these particular things in this particular way, who are they? That’s how I create characters: all intuition, no plans.
ER: To return to your response to the first question for a bit, you speak about the resourcefulness of living off what you could find, and that shows quite prominently in a poem like “Footprint”:
Throw away eggs and I make
breakfast, plastic and I weave
rugs, duct tape and I reinforce
a chair leg, milk cartons
and I plant seeds, start
a nursery. Your torn jacket
gets hemmed. Busted shades
get jimmy-rigged. Throw away
Tidy Cat buckets and I add
hardware, convert them to rain-
proof panniers.
The speaker in your poems never leaves anything to waste, and as the saying goes, “what is one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” But I started wondering about the ways in which poets and writers reuse/recycle/reinvent their past material, particularly subjects, themes, and techniques. Similarities between a poet’s sophomore collection and their first book can appear in more ways than one. What poetic footprints can readers find in Disease of Kings that were prevalent in The Low Passions, your debut collection?
ACW: Disease of Kings is the mirror image of The Low Passions. Where the speaker in Passions is adventurous, confident, reckless, socially fluent, and befriends strangers everywhere he travels, the speaker in Kings is domestic, insecure, calculating, profoundly isolated, and only has one friend. As contradictory as it might sound, each of these characters embodies a set of traits that are at the heart of who I am. If Passions is about movement and flux, Kings is about conservation and becoming devastatingly stuck. The two collections are also in conversation on a craft level. For example, Passions has a sequence of dramatic monologues from the perspectives of various homeowners who host the speaker during his transient journeys, while Kings has a sequence of dramatic monologues from the perspectives of various guests who stay at the speaker’s seedy bed & breakfast (where all the food secretly comes from dumpsters). So the roles reverse: the speaker in Kings is the host to strange guests, where the speaker in Passions is himself the strange guest. But I didn’t set out to create this conversation between the two books–it emerged over years as I drafted poems for Disease of Kings. In the later stages, I recognized the relationship between the two books and made certain choices to enhance it, but the process was very organic and intuitive.
ER: As I was reading Disease of Kings, I was on the lookout for how the title manifested in the themes present throughout, and the poem “Gout” not only provided the clarification, but summed up the essential issue at the heart of this book: the desire for something versus the reality of having nothing. In the poem, the speaker must keep North from eating too much meat because of his flare ups of gout on his foot while also trying to ensure that he is eating, given their circumstances:
The problem was how easy it was
to find rich foods. And not just some.
Ungodly amounts. We ate a diet
we never could have enjoyed
if we’d been paying for it.
To further the irony, the speaker tries to negotiate with North by telling him that he will give him back his Oxy when he begins to eat better. Can you speak a bit about this poem, and how you’re able to make a situation that is so specific so understandable to readers entering these scenes with little to no knowledge of this level of living/survival?
ACW: Over the years I’ve told stories of my dumpster-diving life to new friends who knew nothing about who I was back then or what my lifestyle actually looked like. Explaining myself has proven to be a challenge. But trying to do so has given me the chance to get clear on what people need to know, what’s engaging, etc. By the time I sat down to begin drafting “Gout,” I’d developed a sense of how to talk about that life and make it accessible.
In “Gout,” the speaker wonders what to get North for his birthday, and one of the questions I asked myself as I drafted the poem was, “What do you get someone who has everything?” In the context of their lifestyle, the question is partly ironic (since they live on trash), but it’s also not: these two friends have figured out how to get every conceivable material item for free. Food, clothing, bicycles, fishing poles, headlamps, hand lotion––you name it: if it’s an item available for sale, they know how to get it without paying. So they live in a kind of bizarre luxury. In the end, the speaker doesn’t get North a birthday present, but instead offers him an experience. I won’t give away the ending of the poem, but it’s grappling with big questions in life: How should we live. What matters most. What is of value. What will it cost us. Who am I. What is friendship.
ER: I love that you ponder these questions of friendship and that they are evident throughout your collection. You spoke a bit about revealing to North that you were writing about him, but I wanted to dig a bit deeper and ask how important your friendships have been to your writing? What writing (or non-writing) guidance have they given you that led to this collection? That leads toward a more fulfilling career/life?
ACW: My close friendship with the poet Edgar Kunz is at the heart of all my writing. I met Edgar when I visited Vanderbilt’s MFA program in 2013, and the creative spark between us was so sharp and immediate that I chose to go to Vanderbilt based solely on my hopes for our friendship. It was a reckless choice, based on a 48-hour visit, yet it proved to be one of the best choices of my life. During those Nashville years, Edgar and I pushed each other to write more, to write better, to experiment and stretch the limits of our personal visions. Soon we could hand each other lines, titles, concepts for poems; we basically co-wrote much of our work and it was a great joy. Thanks to our friendship, our writing thrived. In 2019 we published our debut collections –– TAP OUT and THE LOW PASSIONS –– simultaneously. We toured together and shared the story of our creative collaboration. In sharing it publicly, I became aware of how incredibly rare it was. I treasure our friendship. It has made the lonely aspects of the writing life tolerable, and has fueled my creativity more than perhaps anything else. Now, in a beautiful twist of fate, Edgar and I are publishing our second collections –– FIXER and DISEASE OF KINGS –– simultaneously.
ER: That’s amazing. I had a small group of writer friends that I would spend time with every Friday evening during grad school. We always pushed each other, and even now, a decade later, I carry their voices with me when I begin a poem, or when I’m revising one. But some of the voices I carry with me the most are those of readers who have said they have enjoyed my work, that a certain poem has impacted them. How do you hope your words impact others? What do you hope Disease of Kings offers them?
ACW: Disease of Kings is a narrative project, but told glancingly and piecemeal through standalone poems. By design, much of the story is “missing.” I hope readers enjoy cobbling together the various threads inside their own minds––an act of imagination that will create something larger than the poems themselves. No two readers will construct the exact same version of the story, and no two readers will assign to it the exact same meaning. So I guess I’m hoping to offer each reader a collaboration: something to build upon inside yourself, which will deliver a vision that is wholly unique to you.
