Kate Durbin: On Examining the American Relationship to Consumer Objects, Writing about Television, and Her Poetry Collection ‘Hoarders’
I began following Kate's work nearly 15 years ago, when her book The Ravenous Audience had just come out. I followed her Los Angeles-based performance art projects as well as her numerous online presences, all of which were essential to understanding her art practices. It was an exciting time when the internet was a much different thing. Kate's engagement with semiotic systems of Tumblr, Disney, Sanrio, and the early work of Lady Gaga fascinated me. In 2014, I worked with her to publish her book E! Entertainment, on Wonder Press, which I had co-founded with Andrew Durbin (no relation to Kate). Kate has a gift of prophecy—she sees things happening before other people do, and uses this extreme present as material for her work. Hoarders is a logical advancement in all of this, and I was eager to talk to her about it.
In this interview, we discuss the characters on the show that appear in the book, having compassion towards objects, and the artists to which she feels kinship.
Ben Fama: First of all I wanted to say congrats on Hoarders. It’s exciting to read something that seems so fresh and conceptually realized. I’ve been following your work for a long time. Can you talk about how you see Hoarders fitting into the trajectory of your writing and performance art work?
Kate Durbin: Thank you, Ben! Hoarders probably has the strongest relationship to my last book, E! Entertainment. Both were written in response to reality TV shows, and both attempt an immersion inside the TV screen, an uncanny space.
BF: I love E! as you know, and Hoarders is so fun to read. It has such a complicated emotional palette because the subjects are disclosing so much personal information, and the index of items is so abject. Can you talk a little about your process? I feel like I would have to take a lot of showers if I was transcribing those shows.
KD: I’m glad you enjoyed the humor in the book, which I feel comes through the objects. Part of that is maybe how I process objects generally — like I get a lot of pleasure going into Bed Bath and Beyond and looking at the Yankee Candle names, or browsing the bath mats with phrases on them, like “Life is Better at the Beach” or “Live Laugh Love.” I feel like so many consumer products are inherently absurdist and kind of cheeky. In a way you could say Hoarders is my attempt to go into the beyond of Bed Bath and Beyond. To the place where these symbols break down.
As for my writing process, it was definitely emotionally difficult to watch this show. It brought up a lot for me regarding my family and our struggles with mental illness, hoarding, and substance use. But at the same time, I think I would have had a hard time watching it even if I didn’t have a personal connection to it. I took a lot of breaks when watching. Later, writing the poems, I was able to move into a different space, enjoying the beauty and strangeness of these objects, and the pleasure of making poems.
BF: I noticed most of the characters have difficulty in relationships with spouses and family, they can’t seem to manage them, actually it seems like that is a main focus of their stories. Is that something you focused on, or is that a focus on the shows themselves?
KD: I was most interested in how they feel a friendship and compassion for objects, even if they can’t find this with people.
BF: Yeah the stuff they are hoarding seems to carry some alchemical lifeforce, though maybe it is symbiotic. A lot of the people admit they can barely stay alive in their situation.
KD: At the heart of the book is what I keep calling an impossibility. That impossibility felt like it is connected in some way to trying to live in the United States. Which is a hard place, but filled with these grand consumerist dreams and promises. There was something about these characters taking care - or trying to take care of and failing - their objects that felt like trying to care for this broken thing we call the USA.
BF: The consumer fantasy is a true trick of the devil, because you can’t opt out, and even if you know there is no ethical consumption, what then do you do? Sometimes when I buy something I think “I’m filling the God-sized hole in my life with this scone.” I don’t know. What are you gonna do? I really like the “Cathy” section opening. “I’m Cathy, I’m a medical lab technician.” That seems … pretty functional? Maybe that’s related to the flat promise of the consumer fantasy, being able to state your job title.
KD: I like the job titles too. Cathy is a “medical lab technician rhinestone tiara” which speaks to her job identity and her fantasy identity.
BF: Someone once told me that if you have a job and a place to live you are 90% doing really good. I still think about that.
KD: I have heard something like that too. But of course there are so many bad jobs. Cathy hates her job, her husband, and her kids — there is a real refusal of the domestic in her story, which is understandable. Her house is exploding with Thomas Kinkaide painting reproductions of idealized wood cottages filled with glowing light, LulaRoe leggings from the LuLaRoe multi-level marketing scam, and gowns from Windsor, the prom dress store in the mall. They are a way of creating a world she wants to live in. Or maybe they are a way of trying to come to terms with a certain stereotypical idea of the home, of motherhood and wifehood, which deep down her heart rejects.
BF: Seems like they dwell in the metaphysical world that the items signify; I think everyone does this but just not surrounded by the same types of things. Maybe that is specific to Cathy.
KD: Yes, I think so too, and I don’t think it’s just specific to Cathy. I think consumer products in general are like little dreams that invite the consumer to dream along with them. Consider the Twinkie flavored Keurig coffee pod. It allows the drinker to experience this iconic American dessert of a Twinkie while also having their morning cup of coffee. It shouldn’t technically be possible to drink a Twinkie, but the dream of the Twinkie Keurig coffee pod makes it so.
BF: I wanted to talk a bit about the “poetry” of the book. How did you decide on the form that each of the sections takes?
KD: The form came in a flash and then it was pretty set. That doesn’t usually happen for me but it did with this book. Still, there were a lot of discoveries in the writing. At a certain point I realized the poems wanted to focus on a specific category of object, and the associations that category might evoke. Such as plants, or Barbies, or vintage Vegas casino items. Each category of objects not only told a story about that type of object, and the person who hoarded them, but also about some different aspect of life in the USA. And then there was the white space on the page, which is important because it allows each line to be like an individual still life. For each object to matter instead of getting swallowed up into a giant mush mountain.
BF: And then in the editing stage, did you receive outside suggestions? I’m a reader of Joshua Beckman’s work, and always curious about how he is as an editor. I noticed he was mentioned. Could you talk about how working with Wave shaped the project?
KD: The editor I worked with closely was Heidi Broadhead. Joshua was great too. Heidi is a remarkable editor — both in terms of conceptualizing a larger project but also with line edits. By the time she and I were working together, I had mostly finalized the poems, but she helped with ordering the manuscript, which moves from consumer objects into more earthy materials, like bones, feces, and dirt. I feel this movement gave the book a more metaphysical quest.
BF: Yeah that makes intuitive sense to me. I like when animals appear in the poems. It’s gross, and it gives a disorienting sense of inside/outside. Early in the book one of the hoarders says “nature abhors a vacuum.” I love that in this context.
KD: One of the last poems in the book is about Gary, who collects plants. He has a tree growing through the middle of his house up to a collapsed roof, and buckets of rainwater at the foot of his stairs. His poem gives a feeling of the outside coming in, of earth taking the house back, re-absorbing everything.
BF: I love how powerful Gary feels, looking at his plants.
KD: He says he feels like God. Maybe it’s about having control over something, when he has had such a lack of control in his life, particularly as an EMT, watching strangers die in his ambulance. With his plants, he can help something grow instead of die. But of course, the plants are taking over. You can’t stop change, death, or time.
BF: What artists or writers you felt kinship with, or what type of things happening right now were inspiring you?
KD: These days, I love Monica de la Torre’s writing, particularly her book The Happy End / All Welcome, which includes charming and smart poems about corporate office chairs. I also love Joseph Mosconi’s new chapbook, Occupational Elegies, with its funny phrases like “one Day’s Inn busted commendably.” When I was writing Hoarders I was inspired by Tender Buttons, which is one of my all time favorite poems. Obviously Stein’s project and mine are different since she uses the language of objects as a kind of material, but from Tender Buttons I got the idea that you could have many objects in a poem—that objects could be a poem.
BF: That’s really interesting about Tender Buttons. I really like the grammar of Hoarders, the quotes blending into the objects. And how it’s sometimes literal, sometimes dissimilar, in the way simile brings unlike things together.
KD: I like that you see them as a simile. The connection between the person and their things is slippery. Sometimes it feels like a three-legged race, where the two are uncomfortably tied together, and there’s friction between them. Other times the object becomes something like a metaphor for the person’s words. Still other times, it feels like the objects are taking over the poem and the person, a kind of avalanche. But ultimately, I wanted the feeling of the person and the objects in a sticky relationship to one another.
BF: I don’t want to ask you anything too personal about yourself, but when we were planning, I suggested we include some images, and you sent me one of a k-cup. Can you share that here?
KD: Yes of course! And I’d like to include a few other images if that’s okay because I can’t stop myself. I’ll try not to go overboard.
BF: Damn, I love this diabolical moodboard. I can actually imagine you owning all of these except the Keurig cups. I guess I imagined you don’t drink coffee?
KD: I drink one cup per day, albeit with some consequences, like anxiety. However, I don’t own a Keurig though I find them… compelling. Especially their idealistic flavor variety, some which are mentioned in Cathy’s poem: Cinnamon Roll, Death by Coffee, Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich. Keurigs are of course bad for the environment because of the individual pod packaging. And even though they are convenient in that you don’t have to grind or scoop your coffee grounds, they are also inconvenient in that you need a whole bunch of accoutrements to use one, such as a carousel to put your pods on. There’s something so American in that: an inconvenient convenience.
BF: Yeah they are so novel. I always thought Donut House tasted like donuts, even when I was drinking it, which is patently not true. That candle looks kind of freaky to me. I learned recently you could design your own Yankee Candle, did you know that? What picture would you put on there?
KD: Amazing! I didn’t know. So that is where we are at in late-stage capitalism — designing your own Yankee Candle? For my candle I would go with “A Calm and Quiet Place” for the scent, because I want a scent inspired by an abstraction. For the picture, I would put a picture of … a blank not-yet personalized Yankee Candle? Make it meta. Although now this candle is getting kind of pretentious.
BF: I just looked over my questions and there is one I missed: did anything surprising happen with this book as you were writing it, as in, it turned out to be about something other than you thought, etc?
KD: I knew that the consumer items would be delightful to write, but the book ultimately went to a more tender place, toward this idea of objects as companions for the lonely journey that is life. I also didn’t expect the objects in the book to reveal a kind of vitality or life force to me. The more I wrote through them, they became more mysterious and unknowable. It was kind of trippy. Now, when I buy things, I’m like...do I really want to take on this new thing?
Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based writer and artist. Her books of poetry include Hoarders (Wave Books, 2021), which was an NPR “Best Book of the Year,” E! Entertainment, The Ravenous Audience, and ABRA, which won the 2017 international Turn On Literature Prize. Durbin was the Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence in Brisbane, Australia in 2015. Her art and writing have been featured in The New York Times, Art in America, Art Forum, The Believer, BOMB, poets.org, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She has shown her artwork nationally and internationally at The Frye Museum in Seattle, The Pulse Art Fair in Miami, MOCA Los Angeles, The Spring Break Art Fair in Los Angeles, Peer to Space in Berlin, and more.
About the Interviewer
Ben Fama is a writer based in New York City. He is the author of Deathwish (Newest York, 2019) and Fantasy (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015). He is the editor-in-chief of Wonder Press and runs a monthly writing workshop for poets called Cool Memories.
