Billy Pedlow, INTERR-COM No. 1
"In both my paintings and poems you have characters trapped in performances of cruelty, debasement, and yearning. That’s what I am interested in."
Billy Pedlow is co-director of the award-winning film Me and My Victim (2024; with Montreal-based video artist, Maurane), and in August of 2024 he published a book of poetry, Terrorizing the Virgin (NDA Books). He also paints. Pedlow is based in New York, operating between Brooklyn and Dimes Square.
I first became aware of Terrorizing the Virgin via The Last Male Poet, and my first impression was one of wonder: not at the book itself—I hadn’t read a line of it—but at the rare aura by which any book must carry itself along if it is ever going to be read at all.
There is design, there is marketing, there is criticism—there are interviews—all of which can be of fine quality and yet by their combined effort produce no effect. How many books pass by every day without my caring to read even the first few lines? Especially very new books, which, maybe irrationally, I am often less forgiving toward.
For all of the above criteria to mean anything once they have been met, the book—the writing in the book—actually has to be good(!), and sometimes, I almost believe that it is possible to vaguely sense the quality of a text in the way an epileptic senses the glow of an aura before having a seizure. Or maybe its more like being able to tell that a joke will go over with someone you’ve only just met.
If the spirit is absent, the flesh will fail. Design, marketing, the buoying forces of criticism: these are like the limbs of a grotesque, badly made Golem if they are not enlivened by the animating word, a shem, put into its clay mouth.
But Terrorizing the Virgin is no lumbering Golem. I read it (a few times now), and it’s very good—even surpassing my vague forebodings of quality. If we could sneak into the alchemical laboratory (like Wagner and Mephistopheles while Faust sleeps) and grind up Virgin for the purpose of conjuring a little homunculus in a bottle, I think it might look something like the Pierrot Lunaire of Albert Giraud and Arnold Schoenberg: the melancholy and mischievous clown, atonal and charged not with “symbolism” but with the imagistic viscera and the running humours of the Symbolists.
I don’t mean to suggest that there is anything dead or anachronistic about Pedlow’s poetry. It walks the tightrope (because clowns have jobs too) above pseudo-anachronism and cloying contemporaneity with ease.
This viscera is living, crawling up and out of the open neck of our Pierrot Lunaire–homunculus, the lunatic clown decapitated by the moon on his frighteningly sober adventures.
A few days ago, I was reading Henry Miller’s essay on the movie Ecstasy (1933), by Czech director Gustav Machatý. Miller, in his usual way, goes into a vitalistic fugue on D.H. Lawrence, the power of his language, and so on, from which I take the following:
Always in Lawrence's work there is this reducing down to some primitive, mystic, obscene creature, half goat, half man, in whom there exists the feeling of unity—the preconscious individual who obeys the voice of the blood.
I see no reason to be precious about reserving this description solely for Lawrence. Terrorizing the Virgin is written very much in this spirit.
Like the very best poetry, it makes you feel as if an opening-up is near—something like springtime: innocent, violent, bacchanalian—right there in your solar plexus, where the laughter and guts are.
There’s a little triad from Footnotes to an Unfinished Poem, by Stephen Berg, which succinctly characterizes the “zzzzzzzz of most contemporary poetry. Dull ideas, bourgeoise manners, corny metaphysics.” Berg is right. Sometimes, it seems as if poets believe that these three things are the baseline criteria for poetry itself. You won’t get any of that from Billy Pedlow.
Interview
Zane: I was almost as surprised by the quality of your paintings as I was by your poetry. How does painting hang together with writing for you?
Billy: Thanks, I guess.
I think those two particular art forms are interesting to compare because I hate both of them. I think they’re both kind of out of touch with what people actually want. Given the technology we have available, I think it’s funny that we still haven’t given up on these grand historical projects. Just one more painting… one more poem… we can finally redeem life...
When I feel a lazy amount of effort welling up inside me, writing a poem is really gratifying. When I feel I want to work hard at something, it feels amazing to make a painting and look at the finished product. I don’t really need more than that to be motivated to make them. But obviously, I have my taste.
In both my paintings and poems you have characters trapped in performances of cruelty, debasement, and yearning. That’s what I am interested in.
Z: I can’t help thinking that this must be a good-natured, non-neurotic kind of hatred (as opposed to resentment). This phrase, “trapped in performances”: is there also a directorial aspect to how you write (or paint)? Or are they more or less separate for you?
B: I don’t know, man. I think sometimes I get very legitimately frustrated.
Everything is very separate. It’s directorial in the way it’s like “yes, I like this,” “no, I don’t like that,” in the way that it is all problem-solving, but everything is very different. I’m wondering what you’re getting at.
I mess with a lot of different mediums because I feel antsy when I stick to one. Overall, though, poetry is the one I have taken seriously for the longest.
Z: As someone who writes every day, it’s never crossed my mind to even begin thinking of making a film—so their being separate for you comes as a surprise, maybe naively on my part.
What do you think is the most frustrating thing about writing? Also, when did poetry first “open up” for you? Was there a clear moment when you really began to enjoy it or feel an affinity with it?
B: Every medium comes with its own rules.
That being said, Victim is a very textual movie. I think analyzing it like a novel makes sense, or a Socratic dialogue. My co-director, Maurane, is a much more visual person, I am really not. For me, it’s all about the story. My drawings are similar. I like the tension generated over time that you see in novels and not so much in any other medium.
I think poetry opened up for me very gradually. The first step was a dusty complete works of Percy Bysshe Shelley I had bought at a library book sale. I had bought it because I was into a screamo band called Swing Heil! and all those guys were into poetry, so I thought I’d check it out. But it took a long time to find stuff I liked. Shelley was the first thing that really clicked. Then Yeats, and then I became obsessed with Rimbaud.
Early on, I realized that I was much more into translated poetry than writers themselves. I can’t speak French, so I’ve never really read Rimbaud, or so I’ve heard, but there’s something about another skillful writer stepping back and being able to transfigure the language entirely, losing priceless things and gaining them… it’s much more interesting to me. It’s very fragile, and kind of dirty, actually. By definition, impure and fraudulent. Similarly, Pound’s Chinese translations are much better than his formal works.
When I started working as a doorman, and was mostly surrounded by immigrants from Montenegro, or people who never went to college, I started to find the way I talked to be really ugly and not illuminating. That’s the most frustrating thing about writing.
Academic writing voices. I’m really allergic to that now.
I think that opened up another door and closed many others. This one book, A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry, is my favorite book of all time. I go back to it every couple months and I laugh and cry and cum. To me, that is the peak of what poetry is able to accomplish. The writing I like these days resembles writing you can find here, the language is clear, narratives are simple, relatable, irreverent… I like the idea of a poem about getting drunk, calling a woman a “bitch,” and then falling asleep.
I like to think, in Virgin, that you can see the fusion of these sensibilities, but I think at the time of writing, I had my toes a little more in the Symbolist thing than I do now. I want to get even stupider. I want to be drooling and hitting myself in the head with a hammer as I write, and cuckoo birds are circling my head… and those cuckoo birds are hitting themselves in the head with a hammer, and have their own cuckoo birds circling their heads, who are (get this) hitting themselves in the head with a hammer… and so on…
Z: I couldn’t agree more about translation. There are a lot of books written in English that I wish I could read in their translations: Jean Giono’s Moby-Dick or Baudelaire’s translations of Poe—. I sometimes think of original texts as pieces of unplayed Augenmusik, seen only by the performer/translator.
A great quality of Virgin is that you’re able to go into Symbolist territory while hitting yourself in the head with a hammer, but without ever getting smug about it. Smugness kills a lot of contemporary writing for me. Any thoughts regarding “smugness”?
In “The Best Elevator Driver on the Planet” and “Another Day in Paradise”, two of my favorite back-to-back poems from Virgin, the cuckoo bird thing comes out in force. I really laugh reading them, even now when I know what’s coming. Part of what makes them so good seems to be that they still have a melancholy current running through them. There’s kind of a sad but mischievous clown thing going on that I really like.
B: Well, it really depends on the kind of smugness. I think people who write every day and produce great work should be smug, and that ignorance is an important part of the poetic process. But I think what you’re striking on is how you can get away with this if your work is dynamic (not overtly anti- or pseudo-intellectual). This is an essential element of good taste. I say, “you have to have something to bite your teeth into, and something to be hungry for.”
The work I enjoy has at least two functional “faces,” that is, there is a reading that is practical and narrative, and a hermetic, elusive element, existing simultaneously. And so it’s flattering that you suggest that Virgin strikes a balance, thank you. I definitely try to write the kind of stuff that I would enjoy. But I would like to be a little headier maybe, it would be cool to write something like “Kubla Khan.” Further up the branch.
Z: Virgin is obviously a book of poetry—but it also seems somewhat autofictional. What do you think of autofiction?
B: I think autofiction is a somewhat depressing cultural moment. A good contrast is reality TV. I love reality TV, and it’s not exactly honest, yes? They try to have fun. It’s really Reality+. I think the best autofiction pieces are autofiction+. I want to see more of that.
There was only one time I ever K-holed. I don’t do Ketamine much, it’s a horrible drug that makes me want to break up with people. Every time I do that drug, I end a relationship. But the one time I really K-holed, I was in a playground in Ridgewood, and I was surrounded by this steel town, like a tiny child-sized recreation of a suburban village. There was a fire department, a school, a pharmacy, a police department, and a town square. It really freaked me out that in this place where children are supposed to play, that they were just imagining themselves as adults. I guess I think of autofiction as depressing in exactly that way. I am sort of horrified by it. But I really like reality TV.
Z: So listen. You wake up one morning and there’s knocking at your door. You go over, still a little groggy, and open up to see who it could be. Just your luck. It’s the art cops, and they’re here to take you away to artist prison. But before cuffing you and dragging you out of your apartment for what could be a long time, the two officers pause and inform you that you can take a pack of cigarettes and five novels along with you.
What kind of cigs are you going for?
What novels are you taking?
B: Marlboro light shorts. The gold pack.
The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell
The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, by Nancy Farmer
Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen
Man-Eaters of Kumaon, by Jim Corbett
Into Thin Air, by John Krakauer
Yeah, I think I would be happy with those five books for a long time.
Z: Is there a period of history that you read about or look back on that makes you feel extremely creative? I know it seems like a silly question, but there are certain places and periods that completely set my head on fire—16th century Spain and France, for example, or Vienna in the 1890s.
B: Yes, absolutely,
1940’s Germany.1
Z: Yearning and cruelty, as you said. A lot of writers I really love deal almost exclusively with that period: Wilhelm Reich, Agamben, Malaparte. Knausgaard, notably. Painters and poets too.
It seems that overt cruelty in art, when used only to make some explicit moral point, can end up being very boring. The Marquis de Sade, for example. The violence in his books can have a wooden, emotionally dead quality. Cruelty in your own book doesn’t moralize in that way—it remains aesthetic—and because of that, it carries a paradoxical emotional weight. It feels personal and real.
B: Cruelty is bad. Very bad.
People become abused. Their souls become desperate. But it’s unavoidable. If someone is in love with you, the nature of the situation is you can save or condemn their hearts. In general, though, humans aren’t very cruel. We’re an incredibly spoiled species… sensitive and sweet. It’s much easier to imagine a crueler reptilian species than it is to imagine a more peaceful, loving Nordic one. I’m talking about Gaia style alien races, at this point. And when I imagine the peaceful loving race, they’re very flaccid. Not inspiring stuff. The reptilian race is a lot more titillating.
I’m imagining a person being cruel to someone I love, and I feel horrified and angry. I’m imagining myself being cruel to someone I love and it feels fresh and erotically charged. I don’t have that much to say about cruelty, I guess. Except that it’s clearly bad. But also, you gotta be cruel to be kind. Kindness is good. So…
Z: What kind of stuff are you writing these days? Are you working on any prose?
B: I am not writing any prose right now. I am looking forward to seeing what comes from the new regime of The Burning Palace, which now has Jack Ludkey as Chief Editor. I am working on my second movie. Maybe I have some prose-ish stuff floating around. I would love to put two books out this year. Also, I am working on music for a band called The Mutes.
Z: You wrote one of those books of poetry in a single night, right? I’d love to hear about that and what, if anything, precipitated it.
And will Maurane also be involved in this next movie?
B: I didn’t exactly write it. I had an Instagram mutual named Shin Wha Yi, she lived in Halifax and would post pretty frantically. Mostly screenshots of her Facebook posts and comments, and she used a lot of emojis. I followed her for years and always admired the way she wrote, and started to learn more about her. I learned she had survived cancer and lived in her car. She liked to write little fables based on experiences in her life. Anyway, one day, I went through her entire Instagram, it was thousands of posts, and just transcribed all the writing I liked from there. I think I worked on it for like 14 hours. Sometimes I would tilt a phrase here or there, or stitch two disparate posts on the same topic into one. But I ended up with a solid manuscript by the end of the day and I sent it to her, super nervous what she’d respond. But she was like, “Oh this will be my legacy to my son.” The book is called Pom Pom Shin, which refers to her positive attitude.
I haven’t gotten a chance to publish it yet, because I wanted her to make a lot of money off of it, and I haven’t been in that position yet. Maybe now with the movie and everything…
I did also see a real UFO over Brooklyn that morning. It was white and shaped like an egg, and darted around the sky before descending, vertically, behind a building.
I am directing Beautiful Blackmail, aka Movie 2, on my own. Me and Maurane are on great terms and working together all the time, we’re hoping to do a US tour for Victim, this summer, in fact. But she’s got her own movie in the works. I imagine we will both be advising each other heavily in the process of our respective movies. It’s sad, in a way. We were talking just the other day about how weird it is to not be working together. But I think it’s also an exciting opportunity for us both to take our own distinct aesthetic paths to their conclusions. There’s definitely a possibility we will work on another movie together. Still, filming for Blackmail started at the Victim premiere, so she was a part of that whole first weekend, and we filmed a lot. So she’s a part of it.
Z: I greatly look forward to reading that one day—and to seeing the movie and hearing the band. Do you have dates yet for when Victim is showing this Summer? I wouldn’t mind trying to catch a screening myself.
Virgin was easily one of the books I was most fond of last year: I can’t recommend it to people enough.
I understand that Dimitri Karakostas edited the book, something I didn’t know when I read it. Big shout out to him, as well as to NDA Books and The Last Male Poet (on whose page I first saw Virgin).
As of now, which artists, writers, musicians, etc., are you most looking forward to seeing work from?
B: Yeah, shout out Dimitri and NDA. Some cool books on there. God’s Leopard by The Last Male Poet is good and there’s a Dark Margaritaville book on there too.
We want to do the Victim tour in May, I think. It’s starting to look pretty official. This is a developing situation, but it would be a really grassroots campaign. I want to sleep on people’s couches and stuff if we can, and squeeze every cent from this little budget.
In terms of art I am looking forward to, I am looking forward to the art coming out of the corpse of AppleCore (aka the Avant Tarde, aka Cathartic Therapy Group Chat). She H8s Me Because All My Friends are Handsome, by GG Bussy Allin and Jack Ludkey, is gonna be great. It’s finished, just planning out the release. Jack’s got his own book too. Stealthcam0 has some comics for sale that are better than anything else around. And then there is John Padula’s Kubark Manual… which is an illustrated collection of recontextualized declassified CIA interrogation techniques.
I’m also going to be in a play, I think. A Thump A Thud A Roar, by Cassidy Angel Grady.
It’s funny, after the movie came out I’m like, damn 2025 is going to be mad slow and boring. But there’s a lot to do. I have too many things to plug. This is kind of the last hurrah, as I see it, before AI becomes integrated into every facet of our lives. I think people should rush and do everything they wanted to do on their own, this year, before everything changes. But that’s a whole other topic and I feel like we’re supposed to be winding down…
Z: Certainly looking forward to seeing it all come out.
I agree that people should take the current situation with AI as an opportunity (for self examination, creativity, among other things), and I don’t think people should wallow and give in to the use of AI as if it’s somehow inevitable… It seems like an extremely anti-social development, a fine-tuned renovation of the already firmly established Black Iron Prison. Basically, it inspires me with nothing but revulsion—I do wonder whether the way out is through, but what that looks like, who knows…
I always think it’s good to end things when there’s still more to say. But this is a good lead. You should have the last word.
B: Re: AI… I feel like when I talk about these things, I sound like I’m the crazy guy on the corner saying the world’s gonna end. That’s not really how I feel. It’s not like we’re on a good course now, I think our social trajectory is down the drain anyway. It's gonna patch a lot of holes, maybe more than the holes it makes. It’s very mysterious though, but if we’re already in the Black Iron Prison, what do we have to lose? Anyway, in the meantime I’m having a lot of fun doing whatever I want. I always liked leaving things to the last minute.
2016 USA
1870 Paris
14th Century China
0 AD
399 BC Greece
Toba Catastrophe Human Population Bottleneck (60,000-70,000 BC est.)