“Dudes of a certain age,” Michael B. Tager says, “weren’t necessarily taught how to socialize in real and meaningful ways.” Instead, such dudes bonded over pop culture: bands and sports and movies and TV and video games. And by pop culture, Tager means everything from The Fast and the Furious to David Attenborough nature shows. “Everything that is culture,” he says, “is pop culture.”
In his new book, Pop Culture Poetry: The Definitive Collection (Akinoga Press), most of the pop culture figures are the ones who shaped Tager, himself a Dude of a Certain Age (43; Gen X). Herein are poems featuring actor and singer David Hasselhoff, the Golden Girls (all four), hip-hop luminaries Tupac and DMX, and Whoopie Goldberg, among the brightest stars in Tager’s celebrity empyrean.
In these playful poems, Tager explores figures who he allowed to shape him but whom he never knew, whose lives and performances gave him a contemporary mythology to use in the formation of himself. As he writes in a poem featuring Icelandic performer Björk, “I believe nothing / if idols don’t tell me.”
It’s been two years since a Q&A with Tager appeared in this publication. Then, he answered questions as managing editor of Mason Jar Press and editor of its literary journal. Our conversation, excerpted below and edited for brevity, covers other things, like Justin Bieber and unlearning bad writing habits and jury duty.
BFB: How did you come to write this book?
Tager: I feel like it came about really organically and by accident, which I feel like is how a lot of cool art happens.
I wrote a poem, and it was fun, and it got good reception, and I was trying to write more weird shit to kind of undo the MFA voice after graduating. Trying to get back to the more raw quality of my earlier writing. To unlearn all that, I had to play a lot. And I played with poetry. I never really wrote poetry. I never took a poetry class, anything like that. It was fun. It got good receptions, so I just kept on writing it and kept on writing it, and I had more inspiration than I thought. And then one thing led to another, and then someone asked if they could publish the book. And I was like, oh, that sounds exciting. I’m into it!
I was never intentionally writing for a book–except for the Justin Bieber poems, because there are a lot of Justin Bieber poems, and I envisioned them as a chapbook. There’s actually like twenty Justin Bieber poems. Maybe I’ll take the ones that are not published in this book and try to make them a chapbook at some point. That was just a really boring day on a jury trial. I wrote a lot of Bieber poems.
BFB: Did you get called?
Tager: I was on a jury. Yeah. The last song I heard was a Justin Bieber song. I don’t actually remember which one it was. But he was in my head. And lawyers really drone on. They really, really, really drone on. And there are so many breaks when the judge is like, can I speak to you lawyers now? I just got bored. I was thinking, man, I wonder if Justin Bieber would ever be a good lawyer? And then wrote a poem about that. Because inspiration strikes in weird places, and you’ve just gotta write.
BFB: Did the jury convict?
Tager: It was a medical malpractice. And it was so ridiculously cut and dried. We gave the guy three million dollars.
BFB: Celebrities–many of the ones you write about–create personas. What persona did you inhabit as the poet who writes about people who inhabit personas?
Tager: I was talking about this with a friend. I’m actually attracted to celebrities where they’re either really, really good at putting on the persona or they give the appearance that their celebrity persona is them. They seem like authentic humans.
Justin Bieber always seemed pretty authentically him. He was an excited kid who got famous. Then he was a deeply fucked-up teenager. Now he seems to be just who he is.
So, I was trying to be my most authentic self when doing this. Trying to really be the me writing these poems. The authentic me persona–trying to tap into that. Because sometimes that can be hard.
BFB: In the opening poem, “Requiem for the Only Idol I’ve Ever Truly, Deeply Loved,” featuring Jan Brady, the middle daughter from The Brady Bunch, you write
but I’m never joking
“I say I’m always being funny
It’s how I disguise the truth”
That’s a good definition of irony. Why disguise that authenticity with irony?
Tager: I’m sure there’s places where there’s irony. I don’t view (the book) as ironic. I’m being pretty truthful about how much I adore these things. I was more trying to say, “Don’t read too much irony into this.” I’m trying to make you laugh–or trying to make myself laugh. But I’m being pretty serious throughout. I don’t think there’s that much irony.
BFB: Jan is an awfully sincere figure.
Tager: And I am being sincere most of the time. I might just be saying it with a smile.
BFB: For those without your pop culture knowledge, a quick Google search can reveal the significance of almost everyone you write about. But not Mandy May. What can you tell us about Mandy May?
Tager: Oh. She was a friend of mine, a really wonderful poet. She was a year behind me in MFA. She died recently. Thanksgiving of ’22. … I was having a conversation with my publisher about writing more poems, and it was right around when she died, so she was very much right in the forefront of my head. And one of the poems anyway, even before that–“Can’t Talk. On Drugs,” one of the Lucy Liu poems–she was a part of that. Not that she was on drugs with me. But. It’s more of a complicated anecdote than is necessary for this. She was just a really good friend of mine who passed. Then I decided to write those poems, it was right around then, and they wound up being about the moon. And she was about the moon. Yeah.
BFB: The bulk of your creative literary output has been in prose. How are you different as a poet?
Tager: I don’t think I had any bad habits to unlearn. And it works for my short attention span. I’ve decided I’m not going to–I have no interest in writing a novel. I just don’t have an interest. I can’t fathom sticking with an 80,000-word book. It’s not in my wheelhouse.
Anyway. Part of it is the attention span. Part of it is I didn’t have the bad habits to unlearn. I came to poetry late. And I didn’t even consider myself a poet for a long time. But I had read a whole lot. And I had gone through the MFA program and had been writing for a while, so I have the good habits of just being a good, experienced writer. But not the bad habits that you can pick up in workshop or class when you’re trying to please everyone. So I feel like with poems I can get into the rawness a little bit easier and get into the play that makes art so much fun. They were and are by and large written for me. And when I’m writing prose I think about my audience–maybe too much? I’m not discounting the audience with poetry by any stretch of the imagination. But, like I said earlier with humor, I’m trying to make myself laugh, and I’m trying to make poetry that I want to see. Then hopefully the audience will come along.
Launch Event
Friday, April 5, 6:30 pm at Ottobar
Free
Celebrating Tager’s book and featuring more than a dozen poets and writers
