D.T. Robbins: On the Chaos of Twitter, Self-publishing, Writing for Yourself, Family, and His Debut Collection of Poetry “This is What Happens When You Leave Me Alone”
In the blurbs section of D.T. Robbin’s debut collection of poetry This is What Happens When You Leave Me Alone (Rejection Letters), reviewers write:
“This book is like a near death experience except instead of having a new lease on life I want to kill myself even harder.”
“D.T. Robbins is living in a dream world if he thinks people wanna read this. I want whatever the hell he’s smoking. Actually, maybe not. I like having all my brain cells.”
On D.T. Robbin’s own twitter, he promoted it as “named ‘most toxic book of 2021’ by everyone”. His twitter also includes reposting videos of people receiving the collection in the mail and then proceeding to throw it in the street, kick it in the dirt, punch it, and so on.
I have personally read the collection five times now. It, and its documented life in the wild, has been a source of laughter, entertainment, and confusion for me over the past few weeks. It reads like a twitter feed you can’t look away from. At times it feels aggressive and arrogant. At other times it feels self-deprecating and vulnerable. It is a book that has stayed in my mind most of the summer and I regularly find myself asking, is this all a joke? And if so, who is it on?
Whoever the joke is on, D.T. Robbins has crafted a collection of poetry that truly embodies what it is like to straddle that precarious place of existing in public and both wanting and not wanting to be acknowledged. Behind its irreverent humor is a very human desire for connection.
I spoke with D.T. via zoom about poetry, his new collection, writing for yourself, and self-publishing.
Shelby Hinte: Congratulations on the publication of This is What Happens When You Leave Me Alone. I think it looks so great. The cover reminds me of the 90s art you could make on the paint app of old desktops.
D.T. Robbins: Yeah, definitely. That was something I talked to Mark [Wilson] about. It's a very minimalistic approach to the art, but he did such a good job. I think maybe the cover might be the best part about the whole book. The cover is fantastic and Mark’s a genius.
SH: The book had sort of an addictive quality to it. It reminded me of scrolling on social media or going down an internet rabbit hole, and actually, after I finished reading it the first time I started it over again right after. I think I've read it maybe three or four times altogether. Reading it really creates that scrolling sensation of being online. So I was curious, how has the internet influenced your style and writing process?
DTR: First off, thanks. I'm really glad that you liked the book. I'm one of those, what is the new term? geriatric millennials? I remember growing up without the internet and then the internet just took off and we were automatically addicted to it. But I didn't really join Twitter until mid-2019. To me, Twitter is complete and utter chaos at all times. Just because you have so many thoughts in one place and they're never cohesive, ever, in my opinion. So you know, maybe that influenced the book. That kind of jumping from one strange thought to the next.
Maybe [the internet] inadvertently influenced it. As far as [the book] feeling like scrolling into a rabbit hole and just kind of going and going and going — I didn't feel like I needed to thread anything together. There didn't have to be any overarching themes or anything like that. Like with Twitter, I can have 15 different thoughts. I'll tweet it out there, and it doesn't matter. No one really gives a shit. That's the point of it. Some people will gravitate towards some tweets and some people will gravitate towards the others. And some people may hate all of them. But that's just sort of the nature of social media and of people in general.
SH: It feels sort of vulnerable though – putting yourself out there, which is strange because, like you said, half the time people don't even give a shit, right? You just put these thoughts into the ether and wait to see what sticks.
DTR: Totally, and I think that's sort of my approach with social media and the book. When I set out to write the book I didn't set out to write it with any expectations. My wife and I were in San Diego and I was a little drunk and I just kind of turned to her and was like I'm going to fucking write a book of poems. I don't write poetry. It's never been my thing and I was like I'm just gonna fucking go for it and see what happens. I literally just started on my notes app in my phone. Within 5 minutes I think I wrote the first three or four poems of the book and then it just kind of spiraled from there.
I did it all for myself. That's sort of my approach to social media too. I just post what I think is funny, what I think is tragic, whatever it is in the moment — like we all do. Sometimes we do it for attention. Sometimes we do it just to get it out because bottling that shit up is not healthy.
SH: I am going to move away from Twitter in just a second, but I just got a Twitter account for the second time in my life. I had one when I first started my MFA for like a month and then I was so miserable being online that I deleted it. Now I've had this new account for like two weeks. It's really overwhelming to me because I'm the kind of person that has an app on my phone where I can turn the internet off on my devices for half the day or whatever because without it I just don't have any self-control.
Your poem, “these tweets should have gotten way more likes than they did so now I'm putting them in this book – that'll teach you not to give me the attention I desperately crave” really captures the way the internet caters to, and sort of perpetuates this desire for instant gratification, whether it's “likes” or, like you said, so you don’t have to bottle it up, but I sort of think of writing as this solitary, non-public act. A lot of it is done and not acknowledged for a really long time. How do you balance the relationship between process and product?
DTR: Other than me, just being drunk and getting the hair up my ass and deciding to write a book of poems, one of the reasons I set out to write the book was writing had just become boring for me. I hadn’t had fun with it for like six months. It just felt like a chore. And I mean, yeah, sometimes it feels like a chore and that's part of it and you just kind of have to soldier on and all that stuff, but I wanted to have fun with it. For whatever reason this was just fun, and I think having fun in the process or finding some sort of catharsis – which I did find in writing a lot of these poems because I did talk about some of my childhood trauma and shit — was important.
I wrote it just for me, so the process was just keeping it in mind that this is literally just for me and if it never sees the light of day that's cool. I have no problem with that. And then after it was over I had the feeling of well now I do kind of want to share it. So, I started sharing it with some of my friends. I shared it with Tex Gresham and Kkuurrtt. They really helped me out with a lot of it. One of the poems is about Kkuurrtt actually. After that I was kind of like you know I'll submit it to one chapbook thing just to see what happens. I submitted it and a day later they were like thanks, but no thanks. After I [wrote] fifty poems I thought I'm just going to go ahead and put it out myself. A lot of people that I've been super influenced by like Cavin Gonzalez and Brian Ellis put out their own shit. I don’t have as much of a negative connotation with self-publishing that [I] used to back when I first started my MFA in 2017. And if people buy it, great. I think I told my wife I didn’t expect more than 20 people at most to ever buy this book and it's already surpassed that. If people want to read it, great. I expect nothing from it, and I'm certainly not trying to make money off of it or get rich or famous or whatever the fuck that means. I'm going to die one day. I've got a wife. I've got two kids. That’s my priority, not what everybody thinks about me.
SH: Yeah, I think about MFAs and the whole high-brow literature and vetting by the so-called proper publishing channels thing a lot, but I often find that the books I think are the most fun and the books that stick with me for the longest are books that are “self-published” but by people who are also publishing other people’s really cool work. You run and founded Rejection Letters and then now you’ve self-published your book through your press. Do you have any dreams or visions of publishing future books with Rejection Letters?
DTR: I'm actually talking to a couple other people right now about publishing some of their [work] and they're excited about it. I think when it comes to publishing other people’s stuff, I want to give people the opportunity to do what I feel like I did with my own book, which is to let them share work they are proud of. I think ultimately, I just want people to have as much fun as I've had writing and getting their shit out there.
SH: I like the emphasis on fun. If there was something you wanted [readers] to walk away with after reading your book, what would it be?
DTR: None of this shit matters — in my opinion. My perception of all art is that you're going to have people gravitate towards your art and there's going to be people who loathe your art and that's just life. People are either going to like you or they aren’t. Within the book there is some sense of seriousness, but I try not to take myself too seriously. That’s coming from the place of having spent a lifetime taking myself really, really, seriously. Because of my upbringing, because of the shit I went through, I always took myself seriously. And now as I'm getting older, I'm more comfortable with who I am. I'm more comfortable with the fact that maybe this is it. Maybe this is where I peak, and I'm OK with that. I'm not trying to be a pessimist or anything. I think hopefully with the book people who read it can find deeper meaning in it — if they want to — they don't have to. I've lived a life where I felt like I was beating my head against the wall, and was so frustrated with myself so many times because I felt like I didn't measure up to whatever I was supposed to be measuring myself up to. At the end of the day though, when it’s done, I just walk away from it and if it lives on past my time here, great, if not, whatever. I’m not going to know about it. I guess that’s my philosophy on this. Just write what you want to write.
SH: There is something refreshing about not trying to measure yourself up to anything or take yourself too seriously. I think that comes across in the book. I wanted to point out a couple moments where your book doesn’t take itself too seriously, and there are a lot, but some specific ones for instance are the copyright page. The book is listed as “printed in your dad's butt” and many of the blurbs feel antithetical to what a typical blurb would be intended to do, which is sell copy, right? One in particular that I really liked was,
“Yeah, I read [BOOK TITLE] — well I told D.T. I did, but really I skimmed the first three poems and then said ‘Okay, I get it.’ and then read something else. You'll probably do the same thing because these poems are just that forgettable. If you like them, please feel free to unfollow me. We have nothing in common”
In some ways, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, the book feels kind of like a joke. Since I’ve read the book 3 or 4 times now, I found myself asking is this a joke on the author? Is he making a joke about himself? Is he the butt of this joke? Or am I, the reader, taking time to read this book three times, the joke?
DTR: I didn't think about that [laughs]. I guess maybe I think both are true. You know, I'm absolutely one to make fun of myself. I do it quite often. I think it's therapeutic in a lot of ways. I think that's one of those things where maybe it's better left to interpretation. I think of Andy Kaufman the comedian. You didn't know whether or not to take him seriously because of his comedic style. You could never tell if his schtick was real or not. Like he got into a fight with Jerry the King Lawler, who was a professional wrestler on Letterman one night and it seemed like a real fight and people didn't know if it was a bit or if it was serious.
If you really do find these poems deep and if you read this shit and you get the same feeling that you would out of like Elizabeth Ellen or Elle Nash’s stuff, then I don't know what to tell you. Because I can tell you that they certainly aren’t that deep. I love them both. I think they're both fantastic writers. I'm actually reading Nudes right now, which is so good. I think there will be people who read [my] book and say why the fuck did I buy this? This was a waste of $10. or they're going to sit back and think it’s funny. As far as who the joke is on — I think maybe the joke is on all of us.
SH: You mentioned that your background isn't necessarily in poetry, and that it started from this place of opening your notes app. The third poem in the collection is titled “You Can Write Anything and Call it a Poem”, and the poem itself is large, and my husband corrected me on this, is it a “Stussy S” Is that what it's called?
DTR: I had a conversation with Bud Smith about this recently. It's actually called the Super S.
SH: Oh my gosh, that’s what I thought. I said it was a Super S and my husband corrected me.
DTR: Yeah, I always thought it was the Stussy S and Bud was like no,no,no it’s the Super S. He wasn't all condescending – he was super cool about it. So I googled it and it is the Super S and that’s the poem.
SH: Well, this is great because not only did I learn something here, but I also get to be right in an argument with my husband, which is always a huge win. So thank you.
So the poem itself is just the Super S followed by ‘see.’ Then in the table of contents, and even on your Twitter, you label the collection “poetry” or “poems” – Obviously you chose to categorize these as poems. And I get that all of the genre talk is in part a marketing thing? But I kind of wondered if there was a bigger question that you're trying to ask about what poetry is with your collection.
DTR: Yes, actually. I mean it sort of started as I was writing the book up. I had just finished reading A Completely Nonexistent Carnival and that felt more like a narrative to me than it did poetry, but it's labeled as poetry. And then through running Rejection Letters I’m reading all this poetry and there's so many different styles – again, I don't have a background in it, but there are some identifiers I can see and know it’s a poem. I think with “poems” I wrote that and in the back of my head was like I know if I submitted individual poems to lit journals I would question myself as to whether I would label it as ‘micro fiction’ or as ‘poem’ or would it be like a genre bending thing, so I just put the quotations around it because I don't know if they're actually poems and in the back of my head, some asshole is going hey, these aren’t poems.
SH: I guess that this is maybe an unanswerable question, right? I think it comes down to it's intuitive and then also it's subjective, right? Like who gets to decide these types of things?
You've mentioned a little bit about your work with Rejection Letters which is a journal I read pretty regularly and love. I've also read about how you got the idea to start it as a sort of joke from being rejected, and I'm curious about your relationship to rejection. While the collection is really funny, there’s an element to it [about] wanting acceptance, which feels pretty human and vulnerable. So, as a writer, what’s your relationship with rejection like?
DTR: I've been off and on writing since 2012. I didn't really find my schtick, my voice, my whatever you want to call it and I just kept getting rejection after rejection after rejection. I mean I had a few things that came out that were cool, but it just never felt like I was getting anywhere with it. I think when it comes to rejection, what is hard is we measure our worth and our success by those acceptances. Be them acceptances to a lit mag or when somebody reads it and says this is good. Acceptance in general is what we typically get our sense of worth from. So having dealt with that most of my life I'm at a point now where, of course, when something I send out is rejected or somebody says they don't like I'm a human so I'm not going to be like it doesn't affect me. Of course, it affects me. What I've learned, and thank God for therapy, is that rejection is not a signifier of my worth as a person or my worth as a writer or my worth in general, so it allows me to be a little bit freer with what I want to write and what I want to say. That's done really well for me. Last year, I had a really good and published a lot of my short stories, which I was super stoked on and had a lot of really good help from a few different editors.
With rejection you have to let it sing for a moment and I think that's one of the big things too. I should clarify. You have to let it hurt. You know what I mean? You can't just shrug it off and say this doesn't matter. Like at the end of the day, if you're not letting that pain sink in and you're not letting yourself recognize how you feel and you're not letting yourself have that moment of just feeling like you're melting into the earth because everything fucking sucks, you're never going to be able to actually get through it. But I also recognize it's not the weight of the world the way I used to think it was. It's just human emotion and it's OK to feel it and it's OK to let myself feel it for as long as I need to, but then there's a point where I have to look around and see other things that are actually really good, and the good does outweigh the bad for myself. I've got two wonderful kids. I've got a beautiful wife who loves me.
SH: Totally, I definitely have to check myself after rejection sometimes and ask myself do I really need everyone in the entire world to like me? Shouldn’t I just be grateful that I have a husband who loves me and an awesome kid and I am pretty lucky to have my life? I think for the most part, for me, it's pretty easy to just move forward with rejection, but sometimes I can dissociate and be a little bit of a robot about it, so lately I’ve been trying to let myself be ok with being sad if that is the way I feel over a rejection instead of just trudging on to the next thing. So yeah, I can totally relate, and I guess on that note, do you have any writing advice for people wanting to write stories or poetry or start a small press? What are your words of wisdom?
DTR: If you want to start a small press ask people questions. Don't be afraid to ask people in the writing community. I've talked to Cavin Gonzalez who runs Back Patio Press. I've talked to Brian Ellis from House of Vlad. I've talked to Mallory Smart from Maudlin House. Barracuda from Really Serious Literature. He's helped me out a lot as well. So don't be afraid to ask questions if you want to start a small press. If you want to start a lit mag, just fucking do it. There’s really not a whole lot to it. Anybody can do it. Just do it. Don't worry about finding your voice yet. You don't have to have a thing. Just start it and figure it out as you go along. And if your thing changes, cool. Do what you want.
With writing, I go back to having fun. I don't ever want to tell anybody what writing is supposed to be. I hate it when I see that. Even if I were to say, ‘writing is supposed to be fun.’ Fuck that. There's nowhere that says writing is supposed to be anything. I think what I would say is, write what you want to read. Also, if you’re able to talk to people who write in the same vein as you, reach out. There are a lot of people in the literary community who are very willing to share their thoughts.
bio
About the Interviewer
Shelby Hinte is a writer and educator living in the Bay Area. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart, Maudlin House, Entropy, Witness Magazine, and elsewhere. You can read more of her work at www.shelbyhinte.com or follow her @shelbyhinte
