High Above Grand (Writer and Poet Denmark Laine)

Brett Underwood, a poet and writer, interviews St. Louis writer Denmark Lane. They discuss Lane's background and journey into writing. Lane talks about his early days of writing and his transition from acting to writing. He also mentions his move to California and the challenges he faced there. Lane discusses his experience with writing chapbooks and his published books, including "Immaculate Jones and the Love Pirates." Hello there, this is High Above Grand, my name is Brett Underwood, I'm the host, I'm a poet and a writer and I know a lot of people, so we're going to talk to some people here in the Killswitch Studios with producer R. W. Smith, listening to some past Ajak assassins from their album Motherboard, and we're here in studio with St. Louis writer Denmark Lane, how you doing? Hey. Welcome, welcome, welcome. How'd you know? I don't know, I looked down and there I was. Sometimes that works. Sometimes. Unless you have a mirror. Yeah, when you're not there. Are you from St. Louis? Are you just a St. Louis writer? That is a spontaneous question, I'm glad you asked. No, I was born on Arsenal. Oh wow, you're more local, you're local. I'm just right over there, and yeah, my folks lived there for a while until my sister was born, and then they got scared and moved to Maplewood. You can't have young girl babies in the city. You can't, but me, that's fine, that's fine. Just let the kid run loose. Dribble him out to the truck and, where's the girl? Wow, that is so dark right off the top. Like, I knew we would get to that level of dark, but I didn't think we'd start at that level of dark. He's wearing all black. Anyway. What happened? Where did your parents decide to move you to? Maplewood-y. Oh, Maplewood-y. When was that? And it was still weird. I want to know, because I remember the old days. God, I want to say late 80s. It was the late 80s. Yeah, it was still pretty weird out there. I think they still have the shop and say where the bottle works is now. Yes, and I distinctly remember everybody seemed a little bit drunk at any time of the day. I don't know why. They had a lot of bars and not a lot to do. Yeah, that whole strip down there. Yeah, they weren't yet used to Reaganomics. So, anyway. We're here to talk about writing. Yeah. When did you start writing? How'd you get that fire? You know, ever since I was a little kid, I was kind of writing. I was writing before I really knew how to spell or anything. I initially would do little drawings of stick figures and stuff and do little flip stories. Then I would bother people and narrate. Then this happens, and he goes down the street and da-da-da-da, turn the page. But honestly, I really started with acting. When I was a little kid, I was always in school plays and community theater. My mom got me into some classes at COCA, and that's what I pursued, the acting thing. But the writing was always behind it. Sooner or later, I just got tired of saying words that other people had written for me. I wasn't very good at acting, let's be real. But the writing thing, I would get more compliments for the writing stuff than I would for the acting stuff. So, I just finally made that switch. Right, right. Okay. Yeah. So, when did you start writing things down? You decided you wanted to write your own plays? Well, yeah. God, when I was in college, I wrote a very should-never-see-the-light-of-day type play. It was about this adult twin brother and sister who would go around shooting politicians because he thought there was... I'm laughing. No, but see, that's the thing. At that time, we're talking like the early 2000s, we didn't yet have the real craziness that is. I didn't even think in terms of that. So, you get the QAnon sense, all that bullshit going on. Yeah, nobody needs that. Nobody needs to think about that. At the time, I didn't know what I was doing. I knew that I was looking back at the 1960s and trying to borrow from that and saying, well, what would happen if you took the peace and the love out of it? You just have people acting nuts. I guess I was right. Well, there you go. Yeah. How did that progress then from like, I don't know, where did you go from there? Around 2012, I remember because everybody was talking about the end of the world. Around 2012, I moved out to California as kind of a last ditch to pursue the writing or the acting thing. I didn't understand at that time being a Midwesterner, there's a big difference between Northern California and Southern California. So, I wound up in the Bay Area and I was like, the weather is just like St. Louis. What the fuck? What the fuck? The rent is higher. So, it was a total crash and burn moment. But I was writing like my very first book the whole time I was out there. That was the only good thing that came out of that whole thing. And then I ran out of money and came back. How did you end up back on South Grand? Well, I wound up back here and one of the first people that I met who was a writer in town was our friend Dan Wright. And I remember at a show, he loves this story, he could tell this better than I can. At some concert or other, I remember this being at Off-Broadway, I might be wrong. Ali Vogler grabbed him and dragged him over to me and said, you two should meet. We were like the only two writers that were known at the time. And at the time, I was super salty about it because I genuinely thought I was the only writer in St. Louis. And she and other people were like, hey, you should meet this guy. He's another writer in town. I was like, oh, well, we're all writers, aren't we? We've all written messages, emails. I was super like, but I just didn't believe it. But no, we hit it off. We talked about the Velvet Underground or some shit, and we really hit it off. And we slowly started meeting other cool people. And off it went. Did you do a lot of like, when did you maybe do the first reading with him or something? Or when did you start doing readings with or without him? Yeah, I remember. He's gone now. He's not in the studio. He's not in the room. No, but he's waiting outside with the detailed notes. He's got to open the door. But no, one of the first things Dan scheduled for me, and actually, I think this was like a Facebook memory, you know, those that he sent me quite recently. Yeah, it's like your parents slides. I don't remember that. But I remember the picture. Mommy, why does that bull have five legs? Here's Yellowstone Park. But anyway, one of the first things Dan started a tradition, which continues to this day, which he started these reading series at Dunaway Books. And I think the first one was him, me and Grace McGinnis. And, and that sort of started and I, I met RC Patterson. Right around that same time. We met Sierra Lowe. She's another fantastic writer. Yeah. And we just started to, you know, those six degrees of separation. Yeah, started to snowball out of there. And when did you come out? Like, did you start doing chapbooks back then? Or did you have a I did like, I would do. I did like some really, really crappy books from the start. And when I first started out, I was doing like, it was it was just like word salad. It was just like every word that I knew at the time, and I was putting them next to each other. Like, that must be what poetry is. I still do that. Because I was looking at like the all this really old stuff. Yeah, like the angel hair anthology, stuff like that from the 1960s. So we're talking Jonathan Cotts. We're talking like Ann Waldman. We're talking like Robert Creeley. I was I had a job selling calendars and Walden books in a mall. And so I found which one I worked at St. Louis Center. I'm way older than you. The Galleria. Okay, I was at the Galleria and I was selling like catitude. It's like, here's a bunch of cats with scarves. But I started reading them too, didn't you? Oh, yeah. You know, that's, that's my dirty little secret. But I started to read all this old stuff, all this avant garde stuff from the 1960s. And I didn't really know what the hell I was doing. Yeah, at the start. But you know, you pick up and you go with it. And you learn, you learn by failing. Sure. Yeah. Right. You have published books out? Yes. Yes, I do. That's the ISBN numbers and stuff. That's a great question. I know getting that past you. I think yeah, we got well most recently, let's talk about what what we have in the room here. Let's do it. Look at this. I've got I'll have you read some stuff. Yeah, I've got Immaculate Jones and the Love Pirates. That's published by back of the class press. We know them. I've heard of those guys. They're pretty good. I'm the art director full disclosure. I'm okay. I'm in no way associated with old crow. Contrary. But old crows associated with you. Yeah. More so now. I'm also I have the American Paranoid Society, which is a last book poetry that I put out. It's by well, I guess technically liquid lunch press, which is an imprint of back of the class. Okay, there's a name that I came up with. And people liked it. But yeah, and those are the two things that I have for you today. So I'm gonna stick with that. Yeah, that's great. We're gonna focus on that. Yeah, the Immaculate Jones and the Love Pirates. It's, it's prose. It's a collection of letters, mostly a buddy of mine, Alex Aiken, who I've known for years. Eventually, he came to me and he said, Hey, man, you got like all these crazy letters that you would write to people. And that's very true. Like I had a, I had a buddy in prison, I was like traveling across the country, I was like sending people crazy stuff, just going like going, it's like drunk dialing people, but with paper. Yeah, and that's what I was doing. And he said, Hey, wouldn't it be weird if like, we collected all this stuff and put it into one thing for people to see? I was like, I don't know, man. And one of the main things that was like this conspiracy theory that I thought was going on at the time, I was much more into that sort of shit when I was younger. Like, the joke, it was like a joke that took on a life of its own. And I and the joke was like, there was some sort of like, hippie dippy arts commune thing on the loose in St. Louis, and other places, headed by this, this weird guy called Immaculate Jones. And the more that I would write to friends about this, the more that they would write back, as though it was real. And it just got out of control. Point where I was like, did I make this up? Why are you? Anyway, so that's what that book is about. It's about it's it's it's the wonderful merge of fact and fiction. And when did it come out? It just came out. When did it come out? Last year? I remember here. Well, yeah, happened pretty much. 2023 this year. I don't know. It was right. No, it had to be sometime in the last six months. Maybe it was it was real. It was real close. That's a good gestation period. And then boom, it's in the world. Yeah. What do you want to read? Oh, do you want to talk about the poetry book first? And then let's well, let's do the poetry book because I think yeah, you're going to read a chapter or something. Yeah, the scene like the St. Louis poetry scene is getting to be sort of sort of like a I think like there's a lot of there's a lot of like folks who just I think and I think I think there's a level of like therapeutic, cathartic good. So thank you. Get a refill. More funny. I think this is where your whip comes from. You know, I think I think a lot of a lot of the open mic stuff is now really like pivoting towards this this area of people who are hurt and fucked up and freaked out. And no, it's always been that way. I've been going to open mic since the early 90s or maybe late 80s. Yeah. But there's not a lot of spin on the ball. There's not there's not like a lot of imagination. There's not a lot of imagery. There's not a lot of it's just a lot of I feel bad because Oh, I know you did this to me. I'm like, I read another journal. Yeah, that's that bugs me. Like people do that. You know, I mean, that's what open mics are for. I mean, I figured this is how I think of it. It's like it's conversational. If you say, I feel depressed. But it's poetic. If you say I am filled with blackbirds. You gotta do something with it. You can still be getting it out. Yeah. But like, unless you're doing something with it. If you were just making narrative statements. Yeah, I don't know. Well, you got to learn the words first and all that good stuff. You know, but but what the fuck do I know? Because you can open mics are open mics. So you know, yeah, they are they are a pogo stick. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. People playing handicrafts. Anyway, this is what I got here. This is from the American Paranoid Society. It's basically one long thing. I wrote this during like 2020 when I was just stuck in my apartment and thought I was never going to see my friends again. Right. And just went a little nuts. Did a book then too. That's a good time to do it. Musharrona. So she whispers, even the words you write on the bathroom stall will be the Rosetta Stone for the next civilization. Consider your words well. America, her imperious mane of vagabond hair swaying to and fro down her bush belly and matted dreads, loping across the sepia flats, crazy bones stomping the alkali waters carefree as a tumbleweed barefoot along the interstate. Tequila blooded wanderer marking her trail on the asphalt tide, rough tongue panting at the burnt pepper Arizona wind, tracking red clay into all night gas marts, sleeping under Joshua Tree stars burning like Sterno, lapping up black coffee at Oklahoma Pancake House, winking her mismatched eyes, one turquoise, the other yellow as a Spanish doubloon at every raven haired Catholic school boy of Mojave. Wasn't she last seen scaring chickens in Abilene, frozen blue atop the Rockies, sunk like an anvil to the bottom of Lake Tahoe, sun stroked and giggling around Death Valley, plummeted to certain doom off the Grand Canyon, trampled by burros, bound and gagged in the back of a shot up minivan headed for the Rio Grande. Yet here she is, home from her odyssey, thirsty and smelling of venison, and no one can account for the sight, always one step ahead of the June gloom, chasing chemtrails by day and industrial glow by night, smoked enough nature until her head tilts at the equator like a sunflower. Didn't she squash the still beating heart of Cortez under one flip-flop, arrested for selling oranges on the freeway on-ramp, Our Lady of Guadalupe candles from a dirty sidewalk towel. Is this the one we thought? That's awesome, is that really outside or that happening? Right, who the fuck did that have? That's great, that's some good, that's some good ambiance. How long do we got? How much money have we raised? Here you go. The first troublemaker, a pile of rocks for Vatican, coyote and heat luring watchdogs away from town, shapeshifter cackling in the wind at hunters who try to claim her trickster sexuality. Addicted to mystery, fed by drought, alcoholism, rabies, she collects bones from a dry riverbed fitted together, life in tanagrams, skulls of revolution waiting to shout again as she fans the hickory smoke into labor pangs, coughed up blood and sang in the firelight to the broken heart of the earth. She lay back and thought her legs were a golden door, but only darkness emerged when she called out Lazarus, some new colossus risen from the sea to devour the end of history, as she herself was nursed on alabaster by a seven-headed beast speaking Latin, lips red with grapes and martyrs sniffing around its iron ankles, empty cities, rotting flesh, breast milk turned to gall. Yet quick-eyed, slew-footed, she sets out alone, swaddled in the used clothes of a fallen empire, listening with her ears pricked for the ancient storytellers, other playful spirits of deception with their humanity slung over one arm like a cloak, myth-makers who live among us, twins of her urge, another runaway from the 20th century, ronin of peyote and tall grass imbued with recklessness, given to blissful abandon. She built herself cages, Manhattan a game of solitaire, the house of yes that is Brooklyn, too old in Williamsburg, too young anywhere else. She's counted the missing teeth of the domestic and escaped, wandering without a compass from alias to alias, glaring at the road her teacher, her murderer, collapsed after the last exit only to find no voice of absolution, no independence gained even this far from home, only black-winged oracles on the blood-spangled horizon warning, faster friend, the old world is behind you. No, you are. I am. All right. All right. Do you want to read some more? Sure. What do you want to, uh, we want to do, uh, let's go to the other book. Let's, okay, let's, let's switch to track two here. Uh, um, Denmark lane reading from the Immaculate Jones and the what, what, and the love pirates, which are, are not real. Well, they might be real. Do I want to, I don't think I want to squash that right now. Yeah, they might be real. Sure. Go ahead. There were these kids that like, uh, community college who would like sit under a tree. You know what I mean? We went up to the Denny's on big bend. That might've been those same guys. I think I knew some of them probably before them though. Who knows, man. I feel like it's all part of the same continuum. You're stuck in St. Louis. You're all part of the same. Do I, you know, I didn't, uh, did I not prepare for a second sort of thing? I didn't have a contingency plan. Well, that's all right. That's not good. I mean, you can read another poem if you want. We'll just do, here you go. So this is, uh, this is, uh, where I was, I was stuck on a bus, uh, uh, traveling to a concert. Well, you'll see. Yeah. Here it is. This is a Immaculate Jones and love pirates. It's letters. Now it's letters. It's not poetry. So it's different. Uh, take my word for it. My dear doctor, what can I say about this foul year of our Lord 2011 AD? The woman I love is in the arms of another man. You, last of my college chums, awaits his sentence, detained at the state of Illinois' pleasure, and our beloved Amy Winehouse is dead. I suspect sometime very soon, whatever bad karma has been hovering over my wretched little ungrateful plight will finally come down like a hammer and knock me stupid. There's no excuse for my not having written you in over a month's time, and I realize that. I'll probably have to shave my skull in recompense. As we speak, I'm cramped in the back of a little bus, a pretty big little bus, painted purple like a fluorescent eggplant, racing at top speed through torrents of rain, legs propped against a cooler of warm beer. I sit trapped between stoned love pirates and an uncertain future. My forced captivity gives me ample time to scowl out the window at the Nevada highway and rue whatever comedy of manners or tragedy of bad choices led to this moment. The air is thick with the smell of gasoline and cheap whiskey, and a certain strain of cannabis I can only imagine is called dead skunk farts. As the bus rambles through the desert, my eyes blurry, my mind racing with the line, I'm a blunt getting smoked and I can't wake up. We've been on the road for days, chasing down a story that seems to slip further and further away with each passing mile. The sun beats down mercilessly. No AC in this rust bucket. I can feel sweat pouring down my face. We must be close, but I'm so addled from lack of sleep and too many stimulants, I can't be sure. After a long day of driving, the music, and I use the term loosely, bumping from the speakers, has left my tethered nerves deep fried in hemp oil. The one genre on this relentless playlist is something the kids call glitch hop, which to me sounds like a dial-up modem banging my old Nintendo. Perhaps I'm showing my age, but I consider repetition a sign of illness, Emerson's hobgoblin of small minds. I hate these under 30 glowstick-wielding douchlings who gyrate on strobe-washed dance floors, high on Axe body spray and children's chewable narcotics as some muppet-headed DJ clobbers them senseless with the same bass riff for three hours straight. Trap, dubstep, techno, the death knell of music by any other name. EDM was really just disco's final solution, wasn't it? Skip the foreplay, all throbbing lights and narcoleptic beat that pounds your ribcage into quivering jello. Thank you, no. I'm a writer, after all. I only feel alone when I'm around other people. The last thing I need is some sweaty communal grope through this kumbaya wankfest, but boy howdy, am I sitting in a puddle of it now. I absently pick at the nicoderm patch on my arm, wishing more than ever I had a cigarette. The wad of chewing gum lodged against my back molar lost its flavor a few states ago. Now a bitter reminder of how briefly the taste of success lasts. I replay Ezra Pound's Hymn to the Dope in my head, a goddess of the murmuring courts, nicotine, my nicotine, ori of the mystic sports, trailing robed in garbadine, gliding where the breath hath glided. It goes on. It does? Yeah. I like it. There's more stuff there. That sounds real good. Yeah, there's real good stuff in there, you know? Everybody should have it. Do you read that at readings often or sometimes? I don't know if I've read that one out loud outside of my bathroom. No, you haven't. Speaking of readings, what's coming up? Speaking of, yeah, you know, on May 18th, myself, Dan Wright, R.C. Patterson, if I can strong arm him into it. Real content. Some people, that's right. That's what they say the R.C. is for. That's good shit. We started that. Anyway, we're going to, no, we're not supposed to, we are going to be at the Smalter Art Gallery, Kansas City, May 18th. Oh, that's a Kansas, something about that. Yeah, I've never been to Kansas City. From what I'm told, it's the St. Louis Expansion Pack. That's what I've been told. It's got some similarities, but not a whole, I mean, yeah, whatever. Is it going to be different? There's a different, I think I've seen three different kinds of Kansas City, so, you know. I'm told there's a real Hooteries kind of bar across the street, so we're going to figure if that's true or not. Well, make it down to 39th Street. You got to see the folks at the bookstore. Oh, Crossboro. Yeah, Crossboro's books, yeah. I've heard of that, and that's supposedly the other camp that I have not visited in this war of nobody gives a fuck. Yeah, Will Lethem runs that store. He's a great guy. He'll tell you some stories, but anyway, yeah, so anyway, yeah, so that means at the Smalter Gallery on May 18th. Yeah, that's what I know about. What did he just text me today? Oh, here at CBGB's, just underneath our feet. Oh, that's right. On June 18th, I think that's right. More times than that. It's Lou Brock's birthday. Yeah, and we're going to be doing some readings there as well. That's right. I think I heard about that one, too. Just sort of bothering people. Bothering you. Bothering me. It's like, shut up, kid. Did you ever want a drink that's just not quiet? But let's be fair. That's most bars, because usually it's or worse. Feelings, you know, some sort of. Nothing more than, oh, man, you were sort of acoustic. I never went to a fern bar, but I heard about them, and I think they played Yacht Rock. We're in a landlocked state. What is going on? Well, you can still play it on the radio. You can, but you shouldn't. There are things to do with Yacht Rock. Frickin' khaki shorts. He had two turntables and one microphone. Balding, get your foot off that boat. What happened? It's Yacht Rock. That's not true. We're in the studio. This is the Kill Switch Studios. This is High Above Grand with St. Louis writer, Denmark Lane. I'm Brett Underwood. I don't know. What else is going on? I'm thinking about the stuff you read. Yeah, you got books out. Oh, let's say Back of the Class Press again. How do they find it again? Let's say it again. Back of the Class Press needs more press. They are us. We are publishing. We are your neighborhood friendly publisher here in St. Louis. We are exactly what we, and by we, I mean Dan, RC, and myself and other friends. We did not have this shit when we were kids just coming up doing local open mics. We were doing open mics at the Venice Cafe. We were doing stuff at the Shameless Grounds. We were just taking our show on the road. We didn't have a place. You know what I'm saying? We didn't have a central location to send our shit. We were operating on nothing but our own encouragement. Now, what do we have? We have something in your encirclement. We're seeing the wrap it up motion over here. He's getting the hook. But no, Back of the Class Press. You should check us out on the media. You can stick around for another second if you like. Oh, you're listening to a high above gram. Oh, you're listening to a high above gram. Oh, you're listening to a high above gram.