Graham Irvin is a Philadelphia-based writer whose recent publication, I Have a Gun, blends poetry and prose to target the topic of gun ownership in a tone that is at times satirical, and at other times deeply earnest. I sat down with him to discuss contemporary poetics, adolescent rebellion, the expectations and demands we place on our ever-changing notions of masculinity, and what it means to have a gun.

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How would you classify I Have a Gun in terms of genre? Is it poetry, prose poetry, or some third thing?

I think of it as a book-length poem, although I’m not sure if what I write, just because it has line breaks, would necessarily be considered poetry. I don’t know if it’s doing exactly what poetry does. Sometimes I’m just writing with shorter lines so it’s faster. If it weren’t broken up into lines, would it really change the effect that much?

What informed your decision to move between poetry and prose?

I was reading a lot while writing I Have a Gun, and I noticed that typically over the course of the last fifty or sixty years, book-length poems tend to change form. That’s the way they proceed rather than having a muse or a specific point of return, like in The Odyssey. A lot of book-length poetry is about changing up the form, moment-to-moment, and experimenting with that. Poetry itself is the muse. Specifically, the American poet Charles Olson, or Paterson by William Carlos Williams. They switch back and forth between forms.

Are those your main references here?

Shape-wise, Paterson was a big influence. As far as other influences though, I think poem-by-poem, a big influence is a writer like Mike Andrelczyk. He’s a great writer and he’ll have poems that catch you by surprise within the text. Some element will suddenly change halfway through. He writes in a straightforward voice, and because you’re focusing on this voice, the poem has the ability to become something new, immediately, without warning. Like you’re talking to someone and they switch subjects mid-conversation. I wanted to do something like that, but with the sections of the book-length poem. Two other references that come to mind are Phillip Levine and Frank O’Hara. They both have the tendency to begin a poem, branch out into different directions, and then come back to that one central starting point. I’m thinking specifically of “Having A Coke with You” or “What Work Is.” Each of those poems is about everything else, until it’s about the one thing. I think that’s a very cool, admirable, exciting thing to do in writing, and I wanted to do that in individual sections of I Have a Gun.

You name Infinite Jest, Lolita, and Blood Meridian as books that some people avoid discussing because,“They’re afraid they might look like that guy.” Can you unpack some of the stigma around those titles?

Listen, I liked Infinite Jest. It’s not 2012 anymore, I think it’s okay to like Infinite Jest. I’ve only read it one time, but I have friends who’ve read it a bunch. I think it’s annoying to say you can’t like a thing because it has too much negative context to it. They’re not my favorite books but I like them, and if anything, I want to reread them knowing the stigma around them. Blood Meridian, I just read that recently, while writing this book. The thing that stands out about Blood Meridian to me is not the violence. I mean it is a violent book, but it’s a beautiful book. It has all these descriptions of the landscape that are very image-based and poetic. Infinite Jest is good because it’s about not wanting the reader to feel like they’re reading a thousand-page book. I think that’s what a writer should be thinking about, how somebody is reading. I don’t think it makes sense to think in the vein of, “Only writers read.” That’s a big refrain in the poetry world. “Only poets read poetry.” I think that the result is bad poetry when you start from that premise. I also want to reread Lolita. I like the idea of the deceptive narrator. I’d like to focus more on that because when I first read it I didn’t consider myself a writer. Now, the mechanics of that trick excite me.

It’s interesting that you should bring up the question of deceptive narration. I took for granted that Graham Irvin was the narrator of I Have a Gun. Are you the narrator?

A version of me is. I’m not a reliable narrator. I admit as much a number of times throughout the text. I made up the part about Robert Jan Verbelen’s headstone and the story about his kids. But parts of it are true. It is true that Alexandre Galopin, the CEO of the Herstal weapons manufacturer, was assassinated. And it is true that Jan Verbelen escaped prosecution his entire life. That was also just a big part of post-war Nazi history, that nothing happened to the perpetrators. But I did invent the story about the headstone. Some elements were fictionalized.

I do think you are a reliable narrator in the sense that you would tell your reader when and if you were lying. Your story adheres to a consistent version of reality. Whether or not it’s the version of reality that we’re living in, it is coherent within itself.

I guess when I think about writing, I think in terms of rhetoric a lot. I really like voice. When I think about writing, I think about speaking. And when I think about speaking, I think about how your rhetorical flourishes might influence the people you’re speaking to. Telling people you just lied, even if it’s true, is still a mechanism for building trust. And for making whatever you say next feel more believable. Even if it is true, I feel that there is a little bit of unreliability to that.

The epigraph to I Have a Gun is a short quote by Louis “Jolly” West: “Adolescent rebellion is man’s eternal struggle for freedom.” Can you discuss your coming of age and adolescence, and how your particular case of adolescent rebellion manifested?

I’m from North Carolina and I was raised by a single mom for a good portion of my childhood. My dad died when I was young. I didn’t have a father figure for a while and then my mother re-married—a great guy, but there was always a feeling inside of myself of being unable to relate to him. In my mind, a lot of those feelings of adolescent rebellion stem from there: this feeling that I never had a father figure teach me how to be a man. I didn’t have an individual person who was close to me growing up, who mentored me on manhood. And I’m embarrassed about that. It’s a major hang up for me. To tie it into I Have a Gun, certain elements of the book are satirizing the idea of masculinity as a thing to reckon with, but other elements acknowledge it as real thing, that I do reckon with.

When you were growing up, did you have toy guns? Did you play the first-person shooter games?

I had paintball guns, and also those plastic BB airsoft guns. I wasn’t a huge video game guy, but I definitely played Grand Theft Auto. Also Turok and Golden Eye. Those were mid or late-90s games full of gun violence.

Did you ever shoot a real gun?

I’ve shot rifles, .22s. Not much bigger than that. Shotguns. I’ve done skeet shooting before. I have shot animals, not quite hunting but in a less structured way. A squirrel or a robin. You don’t really do anything with them after. After doing that I decided, I don’t really like hunting.

Did you ever shoot a handgun or an automatic weapon?

No, those two specifically feel very different and kind of what the book is about rather than my lived experience with guns.

Did you ever think about going into the military?

Briefly when I was 21-22. There was a time period I didn’t know where I was going to live or move. I was in a relationship and I thought, “If this doesn’t work out, that’s how I’ll start over. I’ll join the military.” But I didn’t do it. I don’t know what the plan was. I think that the violent aspect of it was what appealed to me at the time.

Did you ever considering owning a weapon?

I’ve always been afraid of myself vis-à-vis owning a weapon. I don’t want to be perceived as someone who would own a gun, because it’s scary and because it immediately puts you in a category where you have to explain what you are or what you aren’t. But I think mainly the reason I don’t own a weapon is because of my fear of my own self. When you own a gun, firing it becomes an ever-present option. For example, if you bought a box of cookies you could eat at any time, you’re more likely to eat the cookies. You’re thinking about the cookies. That’s how I would feel about the gun. I wouldn’t go into gun ownership thinking, “I’m going to use this to protect myself.” I would go into it thinking, “When am I going to get to eat those cookies?”

It’s almost like you wouldn’t trust your own impulse control.

For real. And in the same way, it would change the way I thought about my home and my space to know there was a gun there. If I spend a lot of money on a nice liquor and say I’m only going to use it sparingly, I realize that I’m probably not going to use it sparingly. I’m going to make a drink with it pretty soon. I’m going to think about the kitchen differently because the liquor is in there. I think that’s how it would be. The gun is an extension of that idea.

Is the gun a metaphor for something, or does it resist straightforward allegorizing? You’re very careful to stipulate that it’s a not a penis, it’s not a phallus. But can we approach it as a symbol for something beyond a gun?

To me, the gun is an extension of myself. What is the worst part about myself, and how can I express it and still be accepted? Can I put this part of myself forward and still be widely received in terms of love and acceptance between friends? So, the gun allows me to ask these questions about the worst parts of myself. Can I tell you I have the gun? Is that enough? Can I show the gun to you? Can I use the gun? At what point does it cross this line? The gun is both a real example of how you could approach those parts of yourself that are at the fringes of social acceptability. And I think maybe I am indulging this specific male urge to want to be provocative. Not necessarily in my writing, but also in the way that I interact with people. I want people to laugh with me at something that’s fucked up. I want people to follow me along on this thought project. So, I Have a Gun traces the process of that particular kind of thought project, specifically as it relates to masculinity. I still want to be a good guy, and I think that that is of the argument. What does being a good guy look like in terms of masculinity?

Can you answer that question, or is it strictly rhetorical?

To me, being a good guy feels like being caring and non-threatening in a real way. To me, what I hope it is, is exposing some parts of myself that would make me seem more trustworthy. But maybe it is strictly rhetorical.

Can you unpack the way that gun ties into masculinity, in terms of the way that it is both pathologized and the object of all these expectations that we have placed on?

It’s still confusing to me, but I think that the idea of the gun does tie into contemporary notions of masculinity in a big way. I don’t want to speak for anyone else, and it might be more universal experience and not just something that I experience in my position as a man, but there is this feeling in a lot of situations that I have to be the locus of protection. I am the thing that would be the protector. There is often the feeling—if I’m in a relationship, among friends, or at a party where something goes wrong—that this is the time to step up, to be a man. I think the idea of the gun is a reflection of the thin, precarious line that masculinity has to walk in order to protect without frightening. At what point does it remain a tool to neutralize outside threats and at what point does it become a threat itself?

How do you create as a man in a way that transcends the idea that all masculinity is inherently toxic?

The gun as a representation of that toxicity is compelling to me. It’s out there, we know that it harms people. But at the same time, it’s something very dear to you and part of you that you need people to see and understand. I think that is huge. Even while writing the book, the argument that kept me going was that these ideas are less present in poetry. But, I think that’s wrong. Of course, there is a long lineage of men writing violent poems, even more recently. Sam Pink comes to mind. He has a book called I am Going to Clone Myself Then Kill the Clone and Eat It. One poem is called, “I am Going to Jump Kick your Face and then Kiss It.” It’s commenting on the inability of the speaker to say exactly how they feel about the beloved, so they use this other imagery that they have, in the language that’s available to them. That book is from 2009, so it’s not a new thing. All that to say, it feels boring to me to wring my hands and ask for forgiveness for being a man through writing. A lot of what I aspire to do in my writing is to put my cards on the table, not asking forgiveness, where I’m just making something new.

You were a precocious young artist who abandoned your art career because of your ethically compromising commission from your grandfather (a confederate flag). Did you ever go back to visual art?

I painted for a little bit. I’ve done stick and poke tattoos, things like that. I like visual art. But it always felt like less palpable of an art form than writing poetry. It wasn’t because I had an ethical conflict with my first commission, sadly. That would be a better story. I like the way visual art is absorbed—it’s much more passive and it is something that is also an object that can be displayed, so it’s limited. That kind of creation makes me very anxious whereas the creation of an experience feels more comfortable to me.

Do you think of this book as an experience?

I think of writing in general as an experience. When I think of writing, I think of moving through a concept and guiding the reader. I would say reading a book is more of an experience than viewing an object, just because of the way the narrative unfolds over time. When you’re looking at a painting or an art object you’re just taking it all in at once. That is also an experience, sure. But the experience of reading is absorbing something and moving through time with it. It means something different to say, “I’m reading something,” or “I read part of that,” or “I read that.”

Have you ever been in an active shooter situation?

No, I have never been in an active shooter situation.

What informed your decision to dedicate a portion of block text to listing statistics related to mass shootings in the United States?

We all agree that mass shootings are bad but then there’s also the feeling that in the absence of doing anything to stop them, we are willing to tolerate them. We do just tolerate them because they don’t harm a large enough population. If anything, these situations seem to further the argument that we need more guns, because we need more protection. Maybe the thought-process is, we need access to guns in order to prevent a war from happening on American soil. The situation with mass shootings is not war even though you could argue that if it were happening anywhere else, the U.S. military would find reason to invade that place. But to us, it’s not war. It’s individuals going crazy. We point the finger at Incels, White Supremacy, and Toxic Masculinity. But we can tolerate that. We have to tolerate that. This is the price we pay for the kind of civilization that we insist on having, and it takes its toll in blood. It’s not through a foreign war, but through a different kind of war, one on the home front. In that sense, you could think of I Have a Gun in the tradition of a lot of war poetry. War poetry grapples with themes of masculinity and violence, maybe less ironically though. Less apologetically about the masculinity, probably.

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I Have a Gun is available from Rejection Letters.

Graham Irvin is from North Carolina. He lives in Philadelphia. He is the author of Liver Mush (Back Patio Press) and I Have a Gun (Rejection Letters). Twitter: @grahamjirvin, Instagram: @_gram_irvin.

Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Return.Life, La Piccioletta Barca, and on her Substack. Instagram/Twitter: @monalisavitti.