RM Haines reflects on the background of his new chapbook, Poem At the Going Rate

It’s tricky to write a book that pays homage to another artist, because people who don’t know or like that artist might ignore it. That’s a risk I’ve taken here in writing an homage to the Minutemen. And while there are allusions to lore and quotes from lyrics, much of the influence is more about ambience, and the poems are very much doing their own thing. It began out of a surplus of energy, and that is the main thing about it: it is driving, a book of propulsion, and you can find something in it whether you know or care about early punk and post-punk music. Below, however, I do want to trace some of my specific points of orientation in writing it.

The project began in the summer of 2023, and several early drafts of the poems ended up on my blog. At the time, I’d been reading a lot about early 80’s underground music in the US, the rise and fall of SST records, and the nature of DIY culture. The Minutemen, whom I’ve long loved, stood out to me as one of the small handful of bands that really knew what they were about on a material level and had a coherent vision and set of principles (which I’ve written about in some detail here). Sadly, as many know, they were cut short by the lethal car accident of D. Boon, guitarist, vocalist, and co-founder of the band.

While the energy of that music (not just the Minutemen, but punk music more broadly) had been a part of my life since my teenage years, it never really entered into my poetry. I wasn’t sure how to make that happen. But without trying to or planning it, that’s what started to happen last summer as I sketched new drafts. I found myself writing about making things & circulating them on the cheap; about staying focused and inspired even when it feels dead all around us; about capitalism and fascists; and also, for some reason, about eternity as something tangible and here, even though it couldn’t be held onto. Eventually, I realized that the music’s energy was only accessible to me through writing in an affirming and almost ecstatic voice, something I basically never do (much of my work is doom-laden and frequently impersonal). So that was the real spark: to follow the music, the energy, and the voice as they stumbled into an affirmation of striving, creating, and living.

Amplifying this further was an unlikely connection. Unknown to me, Mike Watt (the band’s co-founder, bassist, and frequent vocalist) had been deeply inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses—maybe the most important book in my life—around the time of the band’s classic double album, Double Nickels on the Dime. Apparently, Raymond Pettibon (artist and one-time illustrator for SST records) had introduced him to it, and it changed him. The band even named a song “June 16th” after Bloomsday. As Watt stated, “Just finishing [reading Ulysses] at that time and getting ready to record [Double Nickels on the Dime] . . . I was inspired. With songwriting, you could talk about anything!” (qtd. in Rutland, Corporate Rock Sucks, Hachette, 2022). This feeling of being freed to say and discuss “anything” is connected to a sense of totality:

It seemed to me then, and still does now . . . that [Joyce] was trying to write about everything. And in a way the Minutemen were trying to do the same. Never sat down and agreed to do this or anything, but it seems like we’re trying to write about everything. The whole world, the history, the future, what can be, could be, would be, what might have been.” (qtd. in Fournier, The Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime (33 1/3), Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2007)

Ultimately, it was this convergence of the band with Joyce that truly unlocked the poem for me. This freed perspective in which anything reveals everything is crucial to how I went about writing it. The words “all,” “anything,” and “whole” echo alongside a radical assemblage of concrete particulars and metaphorical imagery, and there is a reiterated feeling that any given day (be it Bloomsday or not) contains everything. And alongside a Minutemen lyric, the book takes as epigraph [Note: This epigraph was later changed before publication.] a passage from Ulysses’ “Ithaca” chapter (one of Watt’s favorites): “[H]e was with any as any with any.” The individual, the particular (“any”), is a free radical, entering into endless combinations, and circulating through the rivers of the world.

Just as crucial, for my purposes, is that Ulysses is a book that moves toward affirmation, famously ending on the word Yes. Of course, the road to that Yes is extremely fucked up, and the Minutemen also confront fucked up negativity without end. In a sense, what I take from this conflation of Ulysses and Minutemen is an affirmation in negation: a propulsive, erratic embrace of energy that repeatedly collides with the world, arrests itself, and starts again; it morphs and changes voices, faces, moods, breaking out of itself and tearing forward before cutting itself down again. It’s protean and infinite, yet clipped and knotty, and no matter how cosmic it gets it never forgets the crumbs, the shoelace, the dirt.

Whether or not anyone else recognizes the Minutemen or Joyce in this—and whether or not it’s a mistake for me to insist on their influence— it’s a mode I could have only arrived at through blending them in this ambient way. The whole project exists in a kind of triangulation. The poems’ “I” both is and is not mine. What seems at times like an off the cuff, first-person rant is actually mediated through these other voices and texts. (Can one rant inside a collage?) Again, as with the poem as homage, there is a risk that this paradoxical urgency-in-mediation could throw people out of the poem. Who knows? But without that layer of complication, I don’t think the poem would have happened.

Ultimately, I wrote this booklet as medicine, as a drug or supplement to enhance my imagination and give me life. Because I desperately need to feel this energy sometimes, and I think poems can do that work of medicating us—not as therapy or “care,” but as lighting a fire, setting off an explosion in the nervous system that breaks through blockages. Plugging in, flipping the switch.

But enough of my reflections. Here are a few samples. I hope you’ll check it out.