Aesthetics Over Everything: Alex Dimitrov & Robert Wood Lynn

I became friends with Robert Wood Lynn in the summer of 2018. He wasn’t a poet. He was a lawyer. Except he was a poet and no one seemed to be telling him that. So I did one night. I basically said, change your entire life.

The people around you. Your job. Your relationship. Your routines. Change everything. What are you so afraid of? And I don’t think anyone had ever spoken to him that way because he actually made eye contact with me once, and if you know Robert, he has a hard time making eye contact.

Now, I’ve said this type of thing to other people, too. People who needed to hear it. But little did I know that Robert would actually do it. He’s an extremely self-actualizing person, which is what I most admire about him, and what really interested me in being friends with him at a time when, I wasn’t really looking for friends.

I was very much sick of the literary world, the online literary world, the online world—and I can just keep going but, the point is—I was very sick of reading tweets about myself, being at readings and hearing people talk shit about me, seeing passive aggressive bullshit online around my poems or what I said or wore or whatever.

I was definitely in my fuck you era when Robert came along. And he actually saw me, without all the noise, and took me entirely at face value. Soul value, to be frank.

I think my friendship with him has been the most complicated friendship I’ve ever had with a human being. And it’s also been the most interesting. If someone asked me if I’d rather have a happy life or an interesting one, I think we all know what I’d say.

So it’s April (and then May). The year is 2024. We’re in New York City. And we had this exchange right around the time he was helping me move from the Upper East to the Upper West. Kind of an emotional move for me because I’d lived in my old place for a decade. And written 2.5 books there. And had so much awkward, hot, weird, and dumb sex…it’s just kind of. Oh you know. The past.

And Robert is a good person to sort out the past with. So he was helping me move and we were having dinner at Casino and then I dragged him to Le Dive where he had like, a Diet Coke lol. And I had like, five hundred very dirty martinis, three olives (vodka obviously).

This is a long and weird interview. But I don’t care. Because this is my stack and I can do what I want. To reference Miley Cyrus (a Sagittarius).

Will I ever shut the fuck up? Definitely not. Here we are. Forever New York baby.

Alex Dimitrov: Robert, what do you remember about the first time we had a drink? I think it was at this wine bar across from my apartment and I was so offended because you were like, you never leave your apartment. Only to go to this wine bar. And I remember being in hermit mode because I was writing Love and the Astro book simultaneously and you were...working as a lawyer and writing poetry, which really confused me. I was just like, quit your day job and write poems! 

Robert Wood Lynn: That was the third time we got a drink. By then I had gathered enough intel to make an insane pronouncement like that. The first time was at that strange coffee shop bar on 91st that doesn’t exist anymore. There should be more bars like that, someplace it’s normal to order a tea at 11pm.

I’d been writing poems for a decade by then, mostly alone in some office building and showing them to almost no one, occasionally to poets I respected. I’d made you read a bunch, of course hoping you’d be like “You’re brilliant, you have to devote your life to this.” It seemed like you clocked that and entirely skipped the praise part. You asked me why I hadn’t quit my job yet and then repeated “What are you afraid of?” until it became something of a mantra for me. Also I remember you wore all white which felt like daring New York to do something.

AD: Oh god, yeah. I did wear all white. But only for that summer. I was going through a crisis but I can't remember why. Certainly not over dating a compulsive liar which my last crisis was about.

Anyway, I'm not in a crisis now. But Robert, there are so many places you can order tea at 11pm. You could also just come over. Although, I can't cook.

I just remember looking at you and thinking, this guy is way too weird to be a lawyer. And I liked your poems, I did, but I don't really praise anybody. I mean, I would praise Walt Whitman or Ginsberg. Or Dickinson. But anyway.

I definitely thought you should dedicate your life to poetry which was interesting because at the time I was wondering if I had made the right choice doing so myself. Because I was teaching like 5 classes, and I had just quit my editorial job at the Academy of American Poets which was basically run like a fascist, communist country, it was so anti poets that place. At least in the Jen Benka days. Not in the Tree Swenson days.

And I was a bit lost, I guess. But then I loved when we would get drunk which would be me having seven glasses of wine and you having one. I remember we went to Auction House on the Upper East, even though it sucked, but they had that great big American flag. What else do you remember? I feel like we never talk about our friendship but it's been so long and so strange and kind of iconic, honestly. 

Robert reads his favorite poem of mine, “People”:

RWL: I don't think Auction House sucked! I loved it, the lighting and the grand bad paintings and the not-quite couples making out at the bar. It's the place in the city people go if they want to make out but haven't seen the inside of each other's apartments yet.

What you didn't know then was that was the year I was so sick I could only get out of bed for like 4 hours a day and I'd spend those 4 hours closing down a bar with you uptown. Everyone else in my life was upset with me for that, it was so impractical. But it was just obvious to me. I had almost no waking time and everyone else wanted to talk about podcasts, Netflix and real estate, three things we've never discussed even now. And you wanted to talk about, like, Rilke and being in love with your lesbian best friend. Drive a car on the sidewalk-level love. Obsessions. Which I loved because I don't have any part of my personality beyond obsessions.

AD: I don't think it's worth it to be friends with people who have a personality beyond their obsessions. But also, they have to actually pursue and do something about their obsessions.

Auction House did suck. We only went there cause it was on 89th so I could walk to it. Typically I remember us at Primo’s, when it was at its height, which was like 2018-2019. That was the best bathroom in New York to do cocaine in. I remember I have a selfie just fucking sitting on the ground. It was that clean and just like—I wish I sucked dick in that bathroom at least once. But I was very well-behaved there. I mean it was my favorite bar. This is before my Bacaro era, obviously. But actually me and you would go on like these dates at Bacaro, before I even made it a part of my lifestyle and poems (Bacaro, I mean). How would you say a poem starts for you, by the way? For me it starts with irritation, discomfort, and unease. Like Frost says, it’s almost like a homesickness. But let's not even get into what the idea of home is. 

The bathrooms at Primo’s, November 2019

RWL: Primo’s! I miss it, we took so many selfies in those bathrooms. I think I know what you mean with the discomfort. For me a poem starts with an interesting line or image, something that sticks out strangely. I’m always looking for those. Like a bowerbird, anything from life I can steal and assemble a weird little nest out of.

But there are plenty of interesting images or lines in the world that don’t make poems. For me it becomes a poem if I find an unease in the gap between the starting image and the next one. A problem to solve with voice or syntax. Once I have that I’m off to the races, seeing how far it will go.

The poem riding on its own melting, if we’re gonna quote Frost. I don’t worry about direction because I will impose one, ouija style, without intention. My obsessions will do that whether I want them to or not. Your poems have so many interesting turns. How much of that is intuition vs intention? I'm thinking about the late-breaking you in “Out of Some Other Paradise.”

How right as it ends, both the I of the speaker and the you of the beloved come out of nowhere in a list poem. Everything is observant and detached, people do this, people do that. And then “I saw you, as if in the middle of a sentence.” Almost a Marie Howe gesture. “Snow: your new evening clothes." Was that planned or did it break through from below? I know you're going to hate this question because it cuts against mystery, but I’m going to ask it just so you get a little mad.

I read my favorite poem of Robert’s, “An Apology”:

AD: I love how your brain works. It's one of the reasons I’m friends with you. And I think one can feel your brain working in your poems. While, exactly the opposite, I don’t think one can see or feel my brain working in mine. And if they can, I’m not interested in talking about it. I absolutely don't care how poems happen. I just care that they do.

And I don’t spend much time thinking about it, to be honest. What I will say is that everything for me has been intuition. I knew I had to get to New York when I was six years old. I knew I had to be an artist. I knew I liked dick. I've always known the important stuff in terms of myself.

I just haven't really had the easiest path there, despite the fact that some people in poetry still think I have because I actually don’t reveal much about myself or my story. And I won't. Because that's my business. The most important thing is what you invent out of your life. Aesthetics are more important than the truth because they are the real truth.

As Keats said, truth is beauty, beauty is truth. We live in a truly impoverished time, in terms of even artists themselves putting aesthetics first before any kind of...I don't know. Posturing. Virtue signaling. Whatever people are tweeting about today.

I'm just not interested. But what I am interested in is the bars we've been to. We have to stop bringing up Primo’s but I will say, you are the only person to ever see me cry in a bathroom for, what you claim was over two hours. I really have no recollection. I am trying to think of the others bars I’ve cried in, in front of you. You're actually a really easy person to cry in front of and I think that says something. I’m not sure what. I have definitely cried in Clandestino. Or at least thrown a fit. I’ve cried at The Penrose. I’ve cried at The Odeon. Obviously. If you could live in any neighborhood in Manhattan, which would it be? 

Robert and I are reading together in Brooklyn this Sunday, May 5. Come!

RWL: It was definitely two hours. Perfect bathroom to cry in because Primo’s has those like 4 or maybe 6 individual, genderless bathrooms. Not stalls but actual bathrooms. No one so much as knocked the entire time we were in there. I’m sure they thought we were having sex or doing drugs but it was just you crying and me telling you it was okay. Men crying is more interesting than sex and drugs anyway. What a time. Have we even been back there since the pandemic? For some reason I thought it closed.

I like to think of poems as maps of brains, as thoughts taking their little walk. What people get wrong is it’s not the poet's brain. It’s the speaker’s, which is more fun because you get to create a whole new process each poem. I’ll never really understand why poets want to write as 100% themselves. The space between yourself and a persona is where all the interesting stuff happens.

Like those kids who show up to the first day of high school with a new name and wardrobe and pretend not to know anybody they went to middle school with. Those kids, they knew something I didn’t. The Daniels who became Rustys or whatever. I never saw it work, they always regressed to some half-Daniel/half-Rusty hybrid. It was uncomfortable, but that discomfort was so charged. That’s what I want a poem to do.

And Manhattan? I don’t fantasize about moving. I fantasize about never moving. I already live in the apartment they’ll have to carry my body out of one day. Between that and Virginia, hard to see myself in Manhattan. I’d have to make a Manhattan friend besides you. I'd have to dress a lot nicer. Maybe the Village. But not the East Village, because I have such fond memories of waking up on couches there in my twenties fresh after taking the Chinatown bus from Virginia.

One particular couch on 12th and 2nd. An apartment so narrow I could spread my arms and touch both walls. Don't want to overwrite any of those moments. But generally I love that about New York, that everything folds in on itself. Someone invites you home with them and their place is on the same block you had a breakup a decade ago in front of a mural of a duck. Memory and place are so linked, do you like mixing them up?

AD: You're just saying men crying is more interesting than sex or drugs because you don't do drugs and our sex lives are different. But yeah, I mean, this sudden push (or maybe it was always here) for poets to write as 100% themselves...it’s boring.

First of all, art is about making an aesthetic object. The poem is an aesthetic object that must be beautiful. It doesn't really carry your DNA or where you were born or how hard you struggled or blah blah. It is a separate made thing from you and therefore of course an expression of you. But it isn’t you.

Also to me, there is no distinction from being yourself and persona. All my personas are me. I am all my personas. I’m the person throwing a tantrum at my boyfriend on East 77th. I’m the person feeding this one cat who lives around the construction that's been across from my building for 3 fucking years now. God, I’m so glad I’m moving to the Upper West.

And I’m the person who loves to suck dick then gets bored halfway through. Like. Do I contradict myself? Do I have to bring Whitman in here. “Song of Myself” is about the multiplicity of selfhood. Because many people writing today don’t have a personality and think they need to stick to their bio, handed to them at birth. That’s not me.

But we also don’t have to keep defending or explaining ourselves, those of us who are writing differently. I think that's why “Notes For My Funeral” is my favorite poem I've written. I really sort of say it all there. 

I do know what you mean about certain memories and New York. Like, I will never forget my first ever anything in New York, my internship at Interview magazine, which I worshipped as a child (and still do) because not only did Warhol start it (and a Warhol is on the cover of my next book by the way) but for me, Interview was my first glimpse into what New York was.

The first one after like, Madonna. But Madonna was one lens. Interview just opened me up to so much. I saw how people dressed, how people talked, what people ate and didn’t eat. And it basically taught me to jerk off, at least to the right things because no one can style a man like Interview can. They are back in their iconic era. Mel Ottenberg is a genius. I would die to meet him.

RWL: I was just teaching persona poems to my intro to poetry students at Juilliard yesterday. We read Larry Levis’s “Whitman,” where he updates the good gray poet's multiplicity of identities, even casting one of them as Charlie Parker. It’s an incredible poem—the humor, the empathy, that surprising bitter ache. And they’re Juilliard students, so a couple of them knew of Whitman, maybe none knew of Levis, but they all knew Charlie Parker.

His whole backstory, addiction, struggle, impossible brilliance, early death. We talked Whitman’s ragamuffin qualities and Levis’s too, the affairs, the drinking, the meth. And before I could even lead them there, they were leaping to spot all the places they felt Levis talking about himself as he donned the masks of Whitman and Parker. The layered selves, they immediately clocked that. Lineage as artists, the past speaking through you, using the past to speak. For them it seemed instinctual. If they don't know poetry yet, they know artmaking. They don’t have to be convinced of it. I love teaching there so much.

AD: Yeah, I absolutely loved visiting your class. They were brilliant. I have never taught actors and singers and musicians. They are so special. I was on a total high after speaking with those kids.

RWL: You say our sex lives are different and I don't really believe you until you say you get bored in the middle of it. We are opposites. For me sex is the most boring thing until it’s actually happening—or better yet, about to happen—and then it’s the most interesting thing in the world. Totally locked in. You have another person's whole attention! Nothing else matters. Not the phone. Not your appointments, not the days of the week. Maybe sex for me is that intensity of attention. And I think maybe sex for you is intensity of aesthetics. Which would be very Warhol.

AD: I mean, you're an Aries. All I see is: “you have another person’s whole attention!” That's what you want as an Aries. And I get it. And I am unfortunately attracted to so much of Aries energy.

But I do find sex very boring around 1/3 in. Like the first third is just exciting. But then a dick just becomes like that last piece of the steak, you know. Do I have to finish it? Suddenly I want like, a cigarette. So essentially, something else in my mouth.

I really can't believe you don’t smoke or drink or do any drugs, like, we are honestly so different in how we live. You bike. You see people between the hours of 3 and 7 pm. You like activities. It drove me nuts about you, when we were becoming friends how you just wanted to do an “activity” in the middle of the day. I was like no, shut the fuck up I am not going to a museum or going on a bike ride or some shit like that when what I should be doing is chain smoking and writing and not eating and then be rewarded for that with dinner, which is when I would see you, with like a ton of wine. And a big piece of meat. 

RWL: Have we ever done an activity together? I don’t think so. Besides walking, talking, and closing down bars. I guess we’ve been to the gym together a couple of times. I’ve watched you shop for clothes in so many cities. We played pool that one time on your pub day with Will Chancellor.

We sat by the pool in Miami but that’s more in the walking/talking/bars camp. We’ve been to bookstores together but only for parties in them. I never get bored of unstructured time. And I’ve never gotten bored of talking to you. I wonder what our longest phone call has been? I’ve seen the time counter hit 5 hours before when I’m in Virginia or you’re in Miami. And definitely longer if you count the breaks where we call each other back.

No wait we watched tennis! The US Open at Arthur Ashe. But that’s holy to you. Church doesn’t really count as an activity.

AD: Yeah I'm against activities. Activities are for people who are boring. My mind is active enough! But yeah, our night at the Open was so sweet. The Open to me, like, what would New York be without it? Oh my god. What would life be without it! 

I remember one night after a run, I was feeling so depressed about my life and writing and hating everything, and I just looked to see who was playing and it was Serena. And she was playing Sharapova in the first fucking round at the Open. I was like, oh I have to see this thrashing.

So I just got a night session ticket and literally took the cab from Central Park in my running gear still. And I’ll just never forget that night and how everything in New York can turn around. Instantly. For better and worse!

And I just love the Open at night. I went only once during the day in the last decade to see Denis Shapovalov play Rublev. And that was amazing because it was on the Grandstand and you feel literally so close to the players. And Denis is so beautiful. His game is beautiful, too. It’s so nice when like, your talent is as beautiful as your face.

But at night, the Open just does something to me. I will forever miss being in a cab on the way to a Serena Williams night session. The way she embodied the electricity of New York night tennis...no one will do it better. The year she came out in literal leather high top boots to play. Or the denim mini skirt. Now this is turning into a tennis interview. I could go on forever.

I think our longest phone call was 7 hours and I was on adderall. I also didn't sit down the entire time and I remember also texting you for 3 hours after we hung up. Like 3 hours straight but you were asleep lol. That was also my last relationship...texting into the void with a man who was never around but maybe in Switzerland or maybe in Egypt or maybe in New York! Who knew! Lol. Isn’t it nice how we never have to relive the past? I love that about life. No matter what, the past is not coming back.

RWL: Tennis is a perfect thing to be obsessed over. It’s so intimate, primal. Like boxing without the boring violence. My grandfather was absolutely hooked on it, no surprise I come from a long line of obsessives.

I grew up watching the Open on TV at his house in a Charleston West Virginia which was something of a tennis town back then. Not really enough flat land for baseball, at least that’s how it was explained to me. He would make us hit twice a day no matter how hot it was.

I’d never been to New York and the Open might as well have been on the moon but he had such pride in it. Those were the Agassi and Sampras years and then the early Federer and Williams years. He rooted for anybody Swiss or American, so he had a good run. Anyway that was a long time ago. Now I can see the glow of Arthur Ashe from my roof in Brooklyn. Say what you want about life but clearly I am condemned to the past.

AD: You're so dramatic. You are not condemned to the past. No one is! I love how in the weeks we’ve been doing this interview I literally got over my pathological liar ex, started seeing a boring Brit (but boring and Virgo do go together at times), then let that go just as fast as...well, this interview is coming to a close. Haha.

See that’s the thing about life, it keeps moving! Also, I think boxing is primal and amazing. And violence is a lot of things but it’s not boring. It’s terrifying. But not boring.

What are you doing today? I’m going to John Elliott to pick up a black button up then I’m going to run in the park and then go to the Epoxy show. I haven't been to a punk show in so long. Or is it not punk? Is it screamo or something? I love that the Bacaro boys are in a band. Those boys have saved my life so many nights just by being at Bacaro. They are my friends. I don’t see them as anything else. I mean, they are in a band! That’s so cool.

All that said, I'm also so looking forward to spending more time alone. It's really weird. I always want to see people more in the autumn and winter, and less in the spring and summer. I say weird because others are usually the opposite. But I really feel like I’m entering my zen era and it’s going to be a lot less people. I think Alex Dimitrov needs to be around Alex Dimitrov. And go to The Well like every other day.

RWL: I’m in Kansas on my brother’s farm teaching my nephew how to fish. It’s 80 degrees here because I didn’t check the weather when I left New York and I’m stuck in a sweater.

Got whacked already by a couple stray fishhooks before it occurred to us to teach my nephew on an unbaited line. More evidence I should not be in charge of anything. He’s pretty good at casting for a three and a half year old.

O’Hara would be freaking out because there are no subways, record stores or other evidence here that people do not totally regret life. But I’m feeling pretty good, showed my nephew a killdeer and he even said the word out loud. I showed him a mourning dove sitting on her eggs and he whispered tweet tweet at her and said they had a conversation. This rocks man. Anyway. 

Violence is definitely boring, or maybe that means I just grew up in the video game and 24 hour news era and it’s just worn off. Give me complication! Give me tenderness. One thing I like about tennis is that it’s a one-on-one sport that’s as complicated as team sports. Not arm wrestling, sprinting. Those are just “Are you stronger or faster in one particular way?” You know that feeling in tennis when you’re playing someone better than you and the only way to win is just concentrate harder?

And even most of the time that isn’t enough. The abject desperation of it. The fact that it’s always possible to come back. That’s what a real sport is. Art always feels like that to me. Failure is likely. Anything continues to be possible.

Heading to the airport now. Literally not in Kansas anymore (hi Missouri). After all that, will be sleeping tonight with the Statue of Liberty out my window. Enjoy the punk show. I’ll call when I get home.

AD: I'm gonna show you that tenderness and violence are both not boring, Robert. But we may have to watch some shit and I know you're kinda jittery with cinema (which by the way, film was what I majored in in college). Also text me. I'll prob be high. I mean, I’m going to a punk show lol.