Marcus Clayton makes his debut with ¡PÓNK!, out now from Nightboat, a genre-defiant testimony of Afrolatino professor and guitarist Moose. He emerges from a South Gate stage surrounded by the two thrashing mosh pits of academia and punk, navigating the push and pull of contradiction, performance, and language that could turn catastrophic with a shove. ¡PÓNK! fills the page with screaming lyrics, unfolds in acts, and writes in overtures to insist and criticize: “Punk can be a teacher.”
—Daye Jung
Daye Jung: ¡PÓNK! moves in and around (and outside of) genre; or maybe it shatters genre, to glimpse meaning in the brief alignment of falling shards. To me, the euphoria of protagonist Moose’s closing Pipebomb! yard show comes from some collective understanding, a shared vision, the moment when the fragments perfectly align and “we witness everyone become a witness.” Can you speak to the process of working through genres, and how that relates to the text’s understanding of performance, collectivity, and language?
Marcus Clayton: That is the most beautifully put version of genre-bending I’ve heard probably ever lol. Generally speaking, I am someone who is largely dissatisfied with the confines of genre in any medium—literature, visual arts, music—because it often dictates a normalcy that errs toward capitalism and heteronormativity. By adhering to such constraints in art, everything becomes so formulaic and boring and at the beck and call of literary agents (no offense to literary agents). That said, I think it’s very important to learn these constraints, to ingest as much art as possible without fearing tastes or popularity, so that one can see intersections and commonalities among disparate mediums. Putting this book together, it was very important for me to tell a narrative around an ethos, not necessarily characters, and the best approach was to combine modes of fiction with nonfiction, to weld literary poetry and song lyrics, and to try and dismantle the normalcy of prose on a page by incorporating white space to—ironically—tell the whole of a given narrative. There are so many interesting moves among very different genres that can work so well together that it felt necessary to blend them all together to get the full scope of (my view of) punk rock. Punk is supposed to be chaos while also a place for a community of othered individuals, and the best way to reconcile those seemingly distant ideas was to not think about genre at all, just tell the damn story. Especially considering there are people we see within the text who don’t dress “punk,” don’t like the music, but can still communicate the same language of the “appropriate” punks through ideas of burden and joy because there is a commonality when we let go of the status quo. So, in the same way genre boundaries bore me, I look toward artforms of all kinds to learn them then enact the best ways to break away from convention—as you mentioned, when those broken shards align, it is so goddamn beautiful.
Daye Jung: The book is sonic as well as textual, referential at many turns. How has the writing process been informed by your relationship to performing and composing music; the collaborative jam session, the unpredictability of performing, the adrenaline, the audience? How has it all informed (or made difficult) the making of ¡PÓNK!?
Marcus Clayton: Writing is in itself a performance, right? It’s an act best practiced in collaboration and with the intent to share with a wide spectrum of people. So, when constructing this book, I kept in mind that it is a document that is ever-evolving and contours toward the moment it is being presented. That’s how I’ve always thought about playing (and listening) to music—the way a song plays in a writer’s head is extremely different than what the final recorded version sounds like once other musicians have helped mold the notes, which will inevitably sound different when played live from venue to venue. As someone who loves doing live readings as much as live musical performances, I think often—while I write—about how to execute reading certain passages to an audience without the text in front of them. What will excite them while staying true to the text, what will translate despite contexts being absent. In this vein, two influences of mine stay with me regardless of project: Douglas Kearney and Gabrielle Civil. Two writers who genre-bend in their own work, and translate the texts into memorable performances when they have readings, with the idea that the text itself and its recitation are as important as one another, require an equal and visceral amount of attention from both writer and reader. Now, those two incorporate levels of performance into their text that are otherworldly dynamic—standards I can only dream of reaching—so I’m not saying I wrote the book with the intention of doing full on interpretive performances at readings, but the way I wrote the book called on me to not just think about “how to read this at a bookstore/for grad students,” but think about “what should the text do to match the energy of sweating profusely over a guitar?” From there, the energy became inherent.
Daye Jung: The text is rife with contradictions, both within and between the worlds of academia and punk. Moose turns to his relationships and encounters in an attempt to understand his alienated position, and some characters offer differing models of coping. How does the book relate the idea of community to the space between academia and punk, and the unrealized promises within both? How does community work as an intervening force?
Marcus Clayton: To be honest, a lot of the book was an exercise in venting my frustrations about living between the academic world and a punk world. They don’t work together, but they absolutely do? The histories of punk rock are rich with black history, queer history, and immigrant history, but that’s somehow only documented via research inside Universities or Big 5 publishing houses where white dudes have final say over what gets printed? I have a lot to say about that but that’ll be for another time lol. What I will say, despite being largely auto-fiction, I wanted the book to translate those very real hypocrisies—counterculture within the status quo—by having these punk-ademics interacting with the communities they come from in discomforting ways that forces them to relearn and better allocate their academic privilege for their communities. Not trying to say “boo! Fuck college!” but I’ve seen too many cases where someone enters the system to change the system only to be changed by the system. And I think fishing these characters out of the academic pool just long enough to see who is still above the water is very important so they know why they shouldn’t let themselves drown.
Daye Jung: ¡PÓNK! redacts, crosses out, leaves blank, and alludes to [NAMES REDACTED, ETHNICITY WITHHELD]. What is expressed in your text with each of these choices, a text that confesses and also bears witness?
Marcus Clayton: The format speaks a lot to what the previous question asked—living between worlds inevitably creates contradictions about ourselves that we try to hide in a world that favors blacks and whites over grays. All the strikethroughs are purposeful, with the idea that the reader can be privy to the speaker’s soon-to-be self-censored thoughts, while the blanks and redactions create a hole in the narrative that leaves the addressed both forgotten and transformed into “everyone.” It was very important for me to disrupt normalized conventions of prose in these ways for a couple reasons: 1) it’s fun, and 2) it inevitably forces the reader to contend with not only the storytelling in this book, but storytelling generally, stopping to interact with the sudden brackets or blackouts to ruminate on why these moves are happening when they were expecting something more natural; easier, if you will. Has that been hell on my editors, sure! (My bad, y’all!!!) But I needed those disruptions to make sure this book that deals with multiplicity, polyvocal narration, and willful contradiction, gets folk to slow down as they take in the text, experience the same discomforts that come with balancing all the ways one can experience life. Conversely, it could piss a lot of people off and they put down the book because the format gets too weird—that’s pretty punk rock, too.
Daye Jung: One of the main themes running through the book is the scripts of allyship, and how those scripts are wielded to discourage action, or to stifle one’s ability to speak up for themselves. Can you describe this tension in the book?
Marcus Clayton: Much like how the book contends with academia and punk rock, allyship fascinates me because it is a test of how one wields privilege—can they change the system from the inside when they are not legally obligated? I tend to be very arm’s length with all white people (even the ones I love) because I am scarred by how swiftly an ally will drop their responsibilities when the going gets too tough. That being said, everyone has a certain level of privilege to them that can be used for good, that they too would drop if it proved to be more convenient. Male privilege, straight privilege, academic privilege, all of which Moose has in this book despite the damning racism he experiences. The tension in this book looks at how allyship works verbally and physically, what promises are made to protect one another and if those promises hold nearly as much weight as the actions manifested from those promises. In a lot of ways, the book plays out my deepest fears about allies—if they speak for us, does that not still keep us silent? Do we police our language to help others or save ourselves? What good are land acknowledgments if you’re still giving white men medals on top of stolen land? Admittedly, these ideas get pretty cynical, leaving much of the prose more of a “what not to do when trying to protect our communities,” but that’s how my brain works, I guess. Better than nothing!