5 poems Lillian Currens saw
Feat. ferrymen and small sandwiches
Welcome to 5 Poems I Saw, a monthly series where I share five poems I found out in the world. These aren’t your standard poems—they might not even have words. Instead, they’re moments, gestures, vignettes, asides, and anything that resonates emotionally.
Today is an exciting day because it’s the first-ever guest 5 Poems edition! Woohoo! Our inaugural guest poem collector is Lillian Currens, a poet, musician, and film curator based out of Cincinnati. Lillian is a fitting first guest, because she’s essentially the muse behind this series. Our friendship is partially rooted in an appreciation for tiny, significant moments from the past and the present. Once we realized we both saw these moments in the same earnest light, we couldn’t stop gushing over all the poems that surround us.
I’ve been looking forward to this edition of 5 Poems for months, and I think you’re going to love our conversation almost as much as the poems Lillian foraged for you. <3
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Katrina: What’s a poem to you?
Lillian: Before we were friends I would just see something and I’d go, “Oh my goodness,” and feel very pleasantly inspired and just tickled by it. But I was never like, “Oh that’s a poem.” Like we’ve been out and I’ve been like, “Oh, look at that little sparkling water on the side of the road, look at that little puddle shining in the sun.” And now we’re always like, “Oh that’s a poem.”
I think it’s just things that make me have a little moment of delight.
*Car starts and is extremely loud.* This is not a poem. Well… sometimes something upsetting is a poem.
Later. When you’ve had some time to stop being upset by it.
If you write a poem, does it happen faster if it’s delightful rather than upsetting?
Well… It doesn’t always have to delight me. But it does have to give me a sense that there’s something going on around me. Like God has kissed me or slapped me.
So a poem is either God slapping you or kissing you?
Yes.
There was this one time when I worked at [redacted] and I was so fucking miserable. But every day, around this time of very deep winter depression, I would get in my car, which always faced this worksite where nobody ever was—there were dogs back there, barbed wire. Everything was just so winter and grey. And I kept thinking of this line that I made up: When the world’s gone blue with AM radio and the sounds dogs make behind worksite fences. And I kept thinking about that and that’s when God slaps you. When you’re like, this is the line and the moment that summarizes my whole life right now. But I think that kind of thing just summed up how miserable I was and how trapped I was.
And I think when I see something delightful, like when we’re out and I see some sunshine on a puddle, I’m just like “Oh I’m so happy right now, and we also saw some sunshine on a puddle.”
Like it’s an image that holds so much more than the image itself.
Yeah, like something that’s weighty and significant.
Based on this definition of a poem, what’s your earliest memory of seeing a poem?
This is probably not the right answer, but I can think of the first poem I wrote.
Ok I want that too.
When I was little, obviously I read a lot of Dr. Seuss, so I thought that a poem had to be something that interacted with like a creature or an animal, like every single poem had to be your action upon something. So my first poem—I was like 5—and I wrote on a piece of paper
Tap a rat with a stick
And I gave it to my mom, and they thought it was so funny. But I think just little things like that. And maybe a better answer is kind of the unreality of childhood. Things feel so big and warped when you’re a little kid. You see something and it’s just looming over you, and I don’t know if you realize that’s a poem at the time but kind of just the dizzying unreality of being a little kid.
Did I tell you about crying at the giant table1 in L.A.?
Yes!
I feel like that’s kind of what you’re talking about. I never thought of that as being a significant experience until I remembered looking at the bottom of a table.
Being under a table is really poetic. I have so many stories of being under a table. Like I used to have this recurring dream that my cats were being really mean under the table.
I also have this memory of my little sister in a really bad mood at Thanksgiving, and climbing under the table when everyone was eating and going up to where my mom was sitting and raising the table cloth and whispering “I! Hate! You!”
Having something that’s not big to everybody else but is big to you… it’s just so overwhelming when you’re little.
Yeah, you still have emotions when you’re little that are as real as the emotions that we have now, but you don’t have all of this language to rationalize them so you’re only able to feel them. There’s maybe like an abstract depth to feeling emotions that you can’t name.
Did you feel like you were, like, under water?
I don’t know…
Part of me feels like I wish that I would have been a little less under water as a kid, but also I really miss being so dreamy and weird, and the things that I thought about reality.
I feel like you are still dreamy and weird and think really weird things about reality.
Yeah, I think I’m hard on myself about being an adult.
Not to be dramatic, but I feel like the way you talk is like art. I think you and I both value people that have really odd and unique perspectives on things.
Yes! It’s something that I love. We’ve kind of gassed each other up in this way where it feels so natural to just tell you my observations about shit that means nothing to anybody else.
We really have gassed each other up. It’s our opposite charts, maybe.2
How do you think of yourself as an artist?
I feel like I’ve hopped around a lot. I’ve always been a writer—ever since Tap a rat with a stick. (lol) I’ve always loved words and a sentence has always been able to make me cry. I’ve always like to sing, even when I was really little, and I’ve always liked playing music. I just don’t like all of the affectations around music and I don’t like all the gear. When I was younger I was really into art and drawing and I don’t do that any more. But now I feel like I’m more of an arts organizer than an actual artist. I want to get back into being an artists but I’m so busy promoting other people’s art. It’s hard.
Why do you think you’ve shifted to prioritizing promoting other stuff more than doing your own stuff?
I think it’s just a muscle that I’ve been working out for a longer time at this point. One of the reasons I don’t feel like the same kind of artists that I was when I was younger is because I was doing it all the time, so I had those muscles that I was flexing all the time. I was in a poetry collective so I was doing readings here and all over the place. I was in a band and we were practicing all the time. I studied creative writing fiction in college. So I was constantly flexing those muscles.
Then I sort of switched into film and doing a lot of community organizing. And it’s so hard to do those things at the same time. When I started I was like “Oh, I’m just going to show some movies.” But now I’m in too deep, and that’s the muscle that I flex over and over again so I just know how to do it. And it’s really hard to pick back up my pen and write a poem. Because I don’t do it so much, I’m not working that muscle out.
Ok, but thinking back on what you said—not that what I’m saying is art, but I do feel like when I’m communicating with people I’m either like, what is the most outlandish thing I can say, how can I make people laugh, how can I inject a deep-seated memory into what I’m saying…
Do you actively try to do that or do you think it’s just there on the surface all the time?
Well I have terrible ADHD so I think something and then I just say it.
I do think that listening to you talk and observing you be, it’s very clear you’re a very creative person. I don’t think you have to be actively maintaining a practice to be an artist.
Yeah, and even if I’m not producing anything right now… I mean, for my job I am unfortunately in the creative industry. And I think that’s part of it too, is just like I spend all day thinking up ideas for people and then I get home and I’m like, I don’t have a single other idea in my goddamn head. But I also love having conversations with you where we’re just riffing. I think talking about your childhood memories, talking about your past with people—like, that’s a poem, too.
Yes. We’re always collecting little tidbits to mention later.
What advice do you give to someone who’s trying to see the poetry in life more?
Ooooo! Well I think one thing is just reading more. Watching really good films. I watch so many movies there’s just like teeny parts in movies where I’m like “Oh my Goooddd!” And it’s obviously so intentional. Like there’s this great scene transition in this Douglas Sirk movie where she’s sleeping, so she’s laying down, and the scene does a slow fade to this man just sitting on a couch in a suit.3 And it’s in her face, and it’s like two seconds but everyone knows it’s one of the greatest transitions of all time. And there’s stuff like that where it’s so small but it’s so intentional.
I think reading and watching really good movies helps you see what could be a movie in your real life. And also just getting off your fucking phone. Which I’m not good at. Like I rarely see a poem on my phone. It’s best to just have open eyes and ears in your everyday life.
Stunning.
Wait—I take it back. The internet has poems. Social media rarely does.
Where do you find poems on the internet.
Craigslist! Craigslist has amazing poems.
Yeah, you taught me about Craigslist poems.
Yes. I have read some incredible poems on Craigslist. One of my favorite kind of poems on Craigslist is the penis innuendo poem. Like when somebody’s like “I’ve got a lot of wood that needs picking up.”
Ew.
Those are my favorite, I always screen shot those and send those to my partner because we love to laugh about the snake charmer and wood chopping poems.
Also, YouTube comment sections. Full of poetry. Because people are commenting on YouTube so earnestly. Everybody who uses the internet earnestly for better or for worse—aka older people—that’s where they go.
There and, like, Google reviews.
They’re in Google reviews, they’re in YouTube comments. The people that use the internet as a horrible forum are like my favorite people. Maybe the poem is using the internet earnestly.
I now present to you five poems collected by Lillian Currens!
1. The unreadble ferryman
Going around collecting money in an old NASCAR shirt, not sure what to make of two girls singing Joni Mitchell in a CRV. “Sittin’ in a park in Paris, France” a noisy mantra for a silly spring day spent with a friend bookended by a short and balmy ferry ride between states. His expression sits somewhere between annoyed, amused, and entirely unreadable as he takes our $7 to cross. “What do you think he thought of us?” I ask later. We really don’t know. The ferryman does not know the world of women. He does not care to. He is not required to. So I think he never will.
2. This American Girl book
Rediscovering my favorite FAVORITE American Girl book on Internet Archive about sleepovers and still feeling as excited about it now as I was then. Knowing in my heart of hearts that a pillow pile and a doodle sheet would work on me like medicine.
3. A modest sandwich
These pickles and tiny sandwich from late March, because there’s this kind of squishy, low-budget earnestness that’s not very pretty but always charms me and makes me weep that I am trying to capture and show to people but just can’t find the words. I think the food sculptures of Claes Oldenburg do it well.4 Sometimes I see it in a bowl of cereal and bananas. This sandwich—slightly pathetic, sort of funny, extremely earnest, very charming—also sums it up.
4. Mom’s mints
My mom (Bonnie) supporting me in a big horrifying but maybe good adult decision and then pulling out these mints when we pulled back up to my house and just laughing and laughing.
5. Expectant chairs
These chairs, waiting for me to unstack them at Open Source Cinema.5 Angelic, simple, quietly ready for someone to sit in and enjoy a film with community members and friends.
Bonus poem #1: This YouTube comment
Bonus poem #2: This missed connection
This is in reference to Under the Table by Robert Therrien, which I saw at The Broad museum.
Lil is an Aries, I’m a Libra. AMA.
The movie in question is Written on the Wind (1956). I tried really hard to find this particular scene transition, but no luck. You’ll just have to go watch it yourself.
Lillian is the co-director of Open Source Cinema, a free community film series held at PAR-Projects in Cincinnati every Tuesday night.