I'm going to talk about food for a minute. There's this place down in Olympia, Washington, called Firenze. It's down by the water next door to the the Fish Tail Brewery on Legion just between a couple of Presidents (Adams and Jefferson in this case). If you happen to be in Olympia--which, since it has been proclaimed the "Hippest" city in the United States now, is the destination of all our errant wanderings these days--you have got to stop in and try the food. The chef--Art--makes a fine plate of asparagus (among other fabulous dishes) and they had a Beaujolais on hand that even a ceramic mug couldn't taint the smooth joy of the grape. It's a beautiful August evening, the night graced with the lambent cry of gulls and there is just a breath of wind off the water.

We went there to talk about poetry. "We" being poet Nicole Blackman and I. For those unfamiliar with the incendiary burn of her words, you have been missing out. Her performances are vibrant, living windows into the souls of troubled and ecstatic girls and women. They can sometimes begin with laughter and cries of "Go girl!" from the audience, but most of them end in total silence and darkness, Nicole's blood-covered body still fresh in your vision (it's not hers, really!) and her words still paining your ears and heart. These words of hers cry out for music and these cries have been heard. The results so far are two spectacular albums: Anton Fier's Golden Palominos album, Dead Inside, and Alan Wilder's new Recoil album, Liquid. Her work on these albums was recently put together with a number of her other poems in the book, Blood Sugar (now out on Incommunicado Books).

We played a wee game. I brought along an envelope of quotes: some from her poems, some from her songs, some from other places. We did a little Rorschach experiment. She pulled a quote and gave me what thoughts filled her head.

"But isn't creation a shearing off of a sliver of your soul and grinding it into a fine point to fill the microdots on the page? And, as each act pares away part of you, that piece is replaced by the expanding fire of your sustained passion. Until your body of work is simply your body and all that is left is a vessel of fire. It cools, it hardens, and you begin anew."

Nicole Blackman: I don't really understand the process of what happens when I finish something because it is a piece that I'm writing on a subway or in a hotel room when all my friends have stood me up and it is written really just for me. I don't think that someone is going to hear it or read it. Honestly. I never ever thought anyone was going to hear Dead Inside. It never occurred to me that it was ever going to be released. It was just something that Anton [Fier] and I were doing to satisfy ourselves. So when it came time for us to do a photo shoot and a press release and actually release the album, I was really shocked. Anton didn't understand this. But I never thought of my work ever being made public.

When I get an email or a postcard or a fan letter or just a response from somebody that says, "Wow, I really love your work. I quoted it in my high school yearbook," it really stuns me. Maybe I'm just beginning to come to grips with the fact that whatever I write is like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean and you never know where it is going to go. And sometimes I get messages back that say: "We got it, it's okay, thank you."

I guess it is kind of like raising a kid. At some point you have to simply push them out of the nest. You don't know where they're going to go. You don't know what kind of adventures they're going to have. Occasionally they get in touch with you and say, "We're here. We're fine. We're having these adventures. This is what is going on. I still love you." They're from you, but they're not yours anymore. And it is hard to understand how people take ownership of work that I have done--personal ownership--because I never thought anyone was going to give a shit. As I'm coming to terms with that, I'm also coming to terms with the fact that I can't let that intrude on the creation process--corrupt it--and that is getting harder the more work I do.

Throwing out the bottle is starting to become part of the act of creation.

Nicole: I try not to let it. I only concentrate on what is between me and the page or me and the microphone. Whatever is beyond that I can't control and I have to recognize that I don't have any control over that. I just try to do the best job I can and hope that it lands in the right hands.

The nicest comment that anyone can ever give me is to say that something I wrote changes the way they look at something. There are a number of poets who have done that for me--Gwendolyn Brooks being the first. Her poem, The Mother, has this line where she's talking about the smell of onions wafting down a hallway. She compares it to an aria and it is such a concrete image that whenever I smell onions, I think of her. And I adore the fact that she now owns a part of my brain space and always will because of that one line.

It's actually part of the impetus for this grab bag because there were so many parts of Dead Inside that have that arresting effect. I'll be in a conversation when the phrase "tastes like hot candy" will pop out. The other person will be like, "What?" And I have say, "Nothing. Just my own little moment." Because they don't have the same reference to the album that I do.

Nicole: The craziest thing about the record is that Marilyn Manson used it for opening music on his Antichrist Superstar tour. And I met him through a friend--he had invited me back to his hotel room after some show in Los Angeles--and he was shaking my hand and saying, "Yeah, yeah, I love that record of yours. That line you wrote. That line that really fucked me up. What was that line?" And I was like, "Um, I can't help you here. Give me a clue?" And he said, "That candy line." And I said, "'You kiss her and she tastes like hot candy.'" [drops her voice to a whisper] "That's it. That's the one."

He tells me that he used to fuck groupies to Dead Inside after the shows. And this one girl was introduced to him and was dating him for a short period of time; she was back in his hotel room, giving him a blow job, and he's got Dead Inside playing. And they're in the middle of "Victim" when she stops and asks him, "What is this?" And he says, "It's the Golden Palominos. It's called Dead Inside." And she goes, "Wow. This is a really great record." And she stops blowing him and sits next to him on the bed and listens to the rest of the record. I wanted to meet this girl. And she's, like, one of my best friends now. And Manson's like: "If I hadn't been playing the record, she'd still be blowing me." [laughs]

"I want to know how it will end.
I want to be sure of what it will cost."  ("Want," Liquid)

Nicole: Zero Hour, this indie label, was doing a Christmas compilation and wanted me to do a track on it. The only time they had for me was on this Thursday night between 10pm and midnight. I was at Brownie's--this club in New York--that night, working with a band that I was doing PR for. I told them I couldn't leave; the band was going on later and I needed to be there to do the press. What was I going to do? I still didn't have anything written. Which was terrible. "Ah, how about I phone it in? It'll sound really cool. I'll phone it in from a pay phone. We'll just put a mike or something up to the phone."

I noticed that "All I Want for Christmas" is different than "Want" on the Liquid album.

Nicole: That's because there are two different "Want" pieces. I had written "Want" as its own piece--which was pretty dark--and Ray over at Zero Hour had heard that one. I decided to do sort of a funny version of that [for his record]. Originally there was "Want"--"All I Want for Christmas (And Other Holidays Where We Speak of Dead Men)"--and the Christmas piece, which didn't end up in the book because we had to cut some things out. It works better live than it does on the page so I didn't mind losing that one. The track on the Recoil record was the only one that was adapted from existing text. It was sort of rolling around in my head when Alan [Wilder] gave me the track. It had never been recorded before so I didn't mind using it. It became a very different piece.

That's one of the things I like about collaborations. I like working with people with very different abilities than mine but that overlap in a kind of sensibility--even if it just in a small area. Kind of like a color variation. His bit of red and my bit of blue make a little violet in between. There is something that we can give and learn from each other. I think that Alan worked a little differently on the tracks with me--at least he told me that I worked very differently from Diamanda [Galas] and the others. He certainly changed the way I worked. It was the most relaxed atmosphere I had ever worked in and, at that point, I felt able to give suggestions and ideas about what we were doing. I wasn't just a hired hand--even though I was just a hired hand--he really incorporated me into the creative aspect of it.

"I think I have a way with pain. When I come to that kind of sequence, I have a certain confidence that I can make it play...I wonder if there is a connection between why you write and what you write well."  (William Goldman, Which Lie Did I Tell: More Adventures in the Screen Trade)

Nicole: I don't think I necessarily choose what I write. I think it is chosen for me. Someone once asked me why I chose the subject matter that I have and I said that the only thing that I can come to terms with is that I can't write about something that someone has written better than me. I cannot write about nature, romantic love, history, God--because those are such classic themes and have been covered so much better than I ever could. There is an image I have had of people whose husbands or wives or companions or best friends had left a message on their answering machine and then been killed in a car accident. You come home from having identified the body at the hospital and there is a message from them. "Hey! I'll meet you at the party." What do you with that tape? Would you erase it? No, you'd save it forever. And I thought what happens if you're a pilot's wife, what happens if the last recording of your husband's voice is on a black box, what would you do to have that recording? That led to the writing of "Black Box."

"...I sleep with lead." Yeah.

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