On a particularly hot day this August, Tommy Pico explained his approach to the work of poetry. A book-length poem he wrote, “IRL,” will come out in September, and he had been giving readings and planning events. Pico grew up on the Viejas Reservation, near San Diego. His dad was a chairman of the reservation and often told his son that he was good at his job because he didn’t like it. This is how Pico now feels about being a poet. “That’s why I’m good at reading,” Pico told me, as we rode the train from a hair appointment to his apartment, in Bushwick. “I don’t want to be the one onstage, but that’s part of the job.”
“IRL” will be published by the independent press Birds, LLC. Pico’s next book, “Nature Poem,” is scheduled for release in May, 2017, from Tin House. Pico, thirty-two, is part of the Kumeyaay nation; he has lived in New York for the past thirteen years. He told me that he uses poetry to square two identities that don’t fit together well: being a poor, queer kid from the rez, and being a pleasure-seeking, technology-addicted New Yorker who would rather chase the boys he meets on apps than think about centuries of pain passed from one generation to another. Poetry is also, he said, a way to make people understand just how hard that squaring is. He wants his readers to feel the disjointedness of his life.
With that goal in mind, Pico, in his poetry, creates unsettling juxtapositions, which can have a comic or a dramatic effect—or, most often, some combination of the two. At one point in “IRL,” he writes, “Some things can go on / forever, like looping ‘You da One’ / by Rihanna or the colonial legacy / called ‘constant Debbie Downer.’” A more solemn example comes earlier in the poem, which centers on a character called Teebs. Teebs is an exaggerated version of the author, in the tradition of Fernando Pessoa’s Álvaro de Campos or Nicki Minaj’s Roman Zolanski. When the poem begins, Teebs is texting with a few different boys, and their banter is light and funny. “If he / said ‘I’ll fuck you / Tuesday’ I would / have :-) :-) :-) If / Muse texted ‘I / want to be with you’ / I would have a / minor coronary incident, / would have to dic- / tate this from Woodhull / Medical Center.” Then Teebs is distracted from his texts, by Facebook, where people he knows have written posts about wanting to commit suicide. Teebs details some of the suicides he has known and reflects on the idea that “cultural inheritance / is generational trauma.” He decides that the people posting online don’t deserve their hurt. “Stop / fucking posting about / Klonopin, or cutting yourself / or throwing up—Save it / for a shitty poem like a normal / wretch,” Pico writes.
Like Teebs, Pico struggles with what it means to be a Native American so far from the reservation. He told me that he rarely goes back home, because he feels so much guilt for leaving in the first place. He attended Sarah Lawrence College, and for most of his time there he was convinced that he would ultimately return to the Viejas Reservation. He studied in the college’s pre-med program and wrote a senior thesis on diabetes and obesity. He wanted to go back to the reservation with a cure, or at least with new information that could help the kids he saw growing up sick. By his senior year, however, he realized that there was little that an individual doctor could do to solve the array of health problems faced by Native Americans. He began to think about just how deep the troubles on the reservation were, how rooted they were in hundreds of years of colonialism. He felt helpless, so, like many people who don’t know what to do with their lives, he moved to New York.
He got a job at a coffee shop in Williamsburg. His days became so routine, he told me, that he felt like he was floating above his own body. Mostly, he partied and pursued men that he met online. He had stopped writing poetry when he got to college and didn’t start again until a year after he moved to the city. Then, one night in the middle of the summer, he got high and wrote a four-page poem about being attracted to someone he saw on the subway. It felt good to write, Pico said. But it took him another couple of years before he felt like he could write in the way he wanted to, not just about crushes but about history and trauma.
Eventually, Pico learned how to get all the balls in the air, as he put it, and to juggle “the fucking or texting somebody” and the “three hundred years of colonial practices,” his love for the English language and the pleasures of pop culture. He began crafting poems with an eye toward destabilizing his readers and listeners, lulling them into a false sense of security with jokey lines about Grindr and take-out food, getting them to laugh in recognition until suddenly he’s talking about diabetes or the killing of Native Americans and his audience is finding out who can stop laughing the fastest. “I call it Trojan horsing,” Pico explained. “I gotta be, like, ‘This is a gift of a beautiful horse I gave you,’ and then put the drawbridge up, and it’s chaos.”
There’s an aggressiveness in this approach to writing and performing, of which Pico is perfectly aware. “I don’t have a really good relationship with my anger, because I feel like it’s unending,” he told me, sitting in his apartment. Readings provide an opportunity to express some of that anger. “I’m fucking pissed off at everyone sitting in those seats, for the most part, because none of them are Indian people.” Once the reading is over, he said, he can “put the lid back on” that anger.
On a recent Friday, he held a book-release party for “IRL” at a crowded bar near McCarren Park, in Brooklyn. There was karaoke; some of Pico’s friends read. The air conditioning was broken and the stage was lit in a deep green. Pico read from the last part of his book, in which Teebs is onstage with his friend Maud during another karaoke party. Teebs becomes overwhelmed by the thought that his singing voice is being controlled by his Native ancestors:
A moment later, the boy that Teebs has been following throughout “IRL” texts back, and Teebs asks if he has an air conditioner: “he says / Yes n I just straight up / drop the mic / n Leave.” It feels like a happy ending. But after hearing Pico talk about his two lives—about the pain of not being able to fully inhabit either, reconciling the two only in his poetry—it becomes clear that the last section is less about love than it is about the past and the recognition that it will never leave him.
