EIGHT QUESTIONS FOR MIKE TOPP by Sabrina Small
A memory of my interview with Mike Topp, which I forgot to record, and then turned into a pseudo-transcript, at which point I solicited interjections from the artist.The first thing I tell Mike Topp is that I didn’t realize who he was. That I hadn’t done any homework beyond reading his tweets and a few poems on Hobart. I tell him his name is so gay it approaches drag, so I was picturing a young gay dude who had watched a lot of Warhol films and revered Peter Sellers in Being There, a practicing naif, a retro naif even. It was the poet Tyler Burn from the Lo-fi Lit podcast that alerted me to Topp’s legendary status. In the few hours leading up to the interview, I learned about his age (late 60s), his status as a poet, and his wife. I read about his stint managing Artforum and the numerous books that he created with William Wegman and Tao Lin. His interviews are full of a steady drop of luminary art names that sounded famous and important and filled me with a shocking amount of adrenaline, which I wasn’t planning to feel before our interview. I told myself, Maybe this is cool? Maybe it’s cool to be so purely attracted to someone’s writing on Twitter that you seek them out for an interview? This is how the interview begins. I tell Mike Topp that I think it’s a good thing I believed he was young, fresh, and gay. It means your voice is young and fresh and gay.Mike Topp Interjects: I think so too.I tell Mike Topp that I can’t believe he agreed to this interview. I think specifically about a DM I wrote asking if he wanted to discuss The Curse and my budding concept of “Punishment TV” which he responded to briskly and positively, though it must have looked like a fool’s scribblings to him. Winging it now, faced with our reality, I try to approach the interview as hasty performance art. I bring him my list of questions, prepared over the last hour, scribbled on torn journal paper in silver marker.Question 1: Who is the most beautiful person you’ve ever been around?I ask this question because I have conflated Mike Topp with Warhol and I want Warhol’s answer to this question. But I learn very quickly that Mike Topp is not Warhol because he can’t answer. No one comes to mind. And when he finally succumbs to the interview rules I’ve imposed, he totally subverts my expectations and tells me sweetly, my wife.Question 2: Have you ever met Warhol?I was sure there would be at least a brief meeting between Mike Topp and Andy Warhol but I was wrong. The artists that hung around Warhol in the 80s were in his orbit, but Mike Topp is careful not to make too much of their associations. He says he saw Keith Haring working or ran into Basquiat during that time. It’s a common trap to fall into, this idea that if people existed in the same city at the same time in a similar milieu, they must have met.Mike Topp interjects: When I moved to New York City in the 1980s, Andy Warhol’s studio was on Union Square–just a few blocks from where I live now-–but I never saw him. But the beauty of New York City is you can so easily meet people in such a random manner. I’d work as a messenger and meet the producer David Merrick, or I’d go to pick up a book from someone and the person who comes out and hands it to me is the literary critic Harold Bloom. Or I’m at a party and I’m like, is that Matt Dillon? Hey, there’s David Berman from the Silver Jews. Or look, there’s David Byrne browsing in Tower Records. (I am a little star-struck–my wife always makes fun of me for this.) I remember when I started working at Artforum, they sent me to interview Sonic Youth. I was not listening to music at the time and I had no idea who Thurston Moore or Kim Gordon were–I just thought to myself, “Wow, they sure have a big apartment.”Question 2: Would you prefer a sudden death or do you want some warning?At this point, maybe 5 minutes in, I’m nervous and flooding with a sensation that it’s over, I’ve failed. It’s gonna be a bad interview and it will prove something about both of us. That Mike Topp was out of my interviewee league and that I am a joke that no one laughs at. Sudden...that’s his first answer. I start explaining that I would choose the opposite. My mouth is just moving and keeping the conversation going, mostly out of polite duty. I have asked him to talk and so I must do some of the talking. But a different interview could have emerged here, one where I say very little and it becomes a slightly Dada-esque audio poem that lasts 2 minutes and Mike Topp lays down tight staccato answers that have a sharp or mystical edge to them and we set it to music and release it as such. And it’s a perfect little diamond that gets tossed around the indie-lit world and someone DMs me and says, That was cool. If I have some awareness that my death is imminent, I will write a will and make sure my kids are covered and then I will move all of us somewhere with natural hot springs.Mike Topp Interjects: Sproing.Question 3: You’re a writer that comes from the art world. Your art world includes writing but now we have such distinct categories. Are you annoyed by this? This segmenting?Poets are either artists or they’re the most unpopular writers. When I think about Mike Topp’s place in the world of literature and art, I’m envious. He is old and his life has been defined by artistic impulse. He creates books with his art friends. He gets turned on by new writers and new artists and creates projects with them. He is guided by this pursuit. It’s how he spends his days. I’m envious of what I perceive to be his lack of introspection on this question and when he answers, it is as if he hasn’t understood the question at all. He talks about his early days in the city, where he hung around galleries and was invited to quietly look at drawings in a back room.Mike Topp interjects: When I first started writing poetry, I aspired to be someone like Dylan Thomas, or Georg Trakl or Federico Garcia Lorca. Unfortunately, I had no talent in that arena. I wrote really terrible poetry. I remember one line I wrote: “Banana rites on metal beds.” And I thought that was good! I was so blind.I had no money at all in my twenties and so I’d see a lot of art, and meet a lot of artists. During the 1980s and 1990s I published many people and everyone was very friendly and super encouraging. I loved guest-editing art and literary magazines because that gave me an excuse to write to some of my favorite writers and artists. I published, among others, John Cage, Ida Applebroog, John Baldessari, Eileen Myles, William Wegman, Joe Brainard, Sue Williams, Jean Michel Basquiat, Ron Padgett, James Schuyler, Paul Violi, Jessica Diamond, Raymond Pettibon, Gregory Crewdson, Hal Siorwitz, Dominique Dibbell, David Lynch, Richard Prince, Amy Yamada, and Sherrie Levine (Oh no! name dropping!).The inspiration behind all this publishing activity was the poet Ted Berrigan, who said if you lived in New York City, you should grab a phone book and write to people you admire and want to publish. Incidentally, using this same strategy, Berrigan did publish Andy Warhol in the 1960s in Berrigan’s C Magazine.Question 4: Tell me about William Wegman?When I was 14 and growing up in Los Angeles, I learned who William Wegman was. I saw that art could be something funny and easy to digest. It seemed so easy to me at that moment, so easy to be an artist. You find a muse and you create. But William Wegman’s fame also made me the most nervous about talking to Mike Topp. The two of them make books together. Mike Topp’s words and William Wegman’s drawings. I expected to uncover the story of a long robust friendship but after decades they are still two shy artists who discovered they enjoy working together and building little monuments out of their collaboration.Mike Topp interjects: I’ve never met Bill Wegman, although he has written me, called me, texted me, and emailed me (and vice-versa). The poet Sparrow and I have known each other for thirty years, but we didn’t meet in person for the first five years we knew each other–we just sent each other postcards, even though we lived five blocks apart. Raymond Pettibon and I have collaborated practically every day for the last two or three years, but we collaborate online. I might occasionally visit Ray if we work on some art together. I think in the last ten years Ray and I have written about 300-400 pages and collaborated on about 70 pieces of art.Question 5: When you’re in your house upstate, do you feel like landed gentry?Mike Topp likes to talk about his life outside the city. He lives in a town where an annual Scrabble tournament takes place. It is the town where Albert Butts, the inventor of Scrabble, was born. Mike Topp was the 2023 Scrabble tournament champion. He told me that he gives himself little challenges. He’s not a numerologist but he selects a number and tries to create within the constraints of that number when he is writing. He looks for the perfect amount of letters to satisfy both the expression and the exercise of staying under a word or character limit. Someone who writes like this is certainly building Scrabble muscles. I love this recognition. It’s perfect for an eccentric poet and I hope he wins again in 2024.Mike Topp Interjects: I came in fifth place this year, but I beat this year’s champion in a pickup game after the tournament. I am unhealthily competitive. I’d like to remind everyone that I used to play pool every week with Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset (that name-dropping again!), and my nickname was “Money.”Question 6: Are you comfortable being vulnerable with people? Have you ever tried to quit your persona? Have you ever been in therapy?This collection of questions was my attempt to investigate Mike Topp’s awareness of himself. Was it a shtick? He is a poet when he writes anything. His words are hard to categorize but they are not confessional. Sometimes they have an ascetic naivete to them. Sometimes they are acerbic and witty and playful. Sometimes they’re almost purely cynical, though not often. But it’s hard to know where Mike Topp the writer ends and Mike Topp the person begins. Steve Martin came up, organically, while we were talking. One of his poet friends was compared to Steve Martin and didn’t like it. Earlier–on the day we spoke–I had tweeted that I found Mike Topp fascinating and unknowable in a Steve Martin sort of way. In the interview, I mention this comparison to Steve Martin and he is not insulted. He sees it as a compliment.Mike Topp interjects: Sure, I’ve been in therapy. I don’t think of myself having a persona, except when I read. I never get nervous reading. I’m not really “me” when I’m reading. Some might say it’s a pose.Question 7: Do you like the vulnerable position open swimming puts you in?Open swimming is a big part of the life Mike Topp and his wife lead. They are swimmers. It’s an identity. They swim long and cold and it requires stamina. I find that people who are in their heads a lot like swimming. I think it has something to do with a disconnection between mind and body. Swimming is an instantaneous submersion into the body and it’s another plane. Neither earth nor air but water. Humans are among the select few who can swim. What a wondrous place to exist. I think everyone, even the swimmers, will lie on their deathbed and wish they’d done more swimming.Mike Topp interjects: Swimming is terrific because it teaches you not to panic.Question 8: What did you like about writing while high?In a couple of the interviews I read, Mike Topp refers to his “junkie friends” and mentions that he used to get high before writing. The word junkie is inextricably linked to heroin, so I assume that’s the drug he’s talking about but it seems too rough for Topp. Maybe it was heroin at one point and it’s something else now. I don’t gravitate to this question with everyone but certain writers include it in their own writing, and when they do I feel a member-of-the-tribe duty to investigate. It’s also an attempt, only lightly veiled from myself, to figure out if I’m allowed to see myself as above board. I get high to write. It usually starts that way. I smoke a little pot and read with the intent to get inspired and then once it hits and my brain starts doing that beautiful manic thought dance, I leave the book and write my own shit.Mike Topp interjects: I’ve never tried heroin–I have too addictive a personality.The final thing I wrote in silver marker is not a question but I say it anyway because I want him to know what I think:Your boxing title would be Featherweight Champion. You’re the Featherweight champion of the writing world.