Life as an Art Object

In Alex Dimitrov’s poem “Sleeping with Everyone,” the speaker considers moonlighting in porn: “I wonder if I could role-play / as a plumber or a psychotic / youngish writer who wears leather / and takes it real hard in a walk-up on Allen St. / But wait, that’s me!” With this single deft turn, the “youngish writer” sends up the literary practice of resisting biographical readings of poems while simultaneously reinforcing that everything we do—even in our “real” lives—is role-play.

Dimitrov’s first book, Begging for It, which has just been published by Four Way Books, darts and flirts across the gap between reality and fantasy, suggesting again and again that performance can be truer to feeling than fact. In just three words, even the book’s title contains the winking multiplicity Dimitrov is so interested in: at once a sexual pun, a declaration of longing and an artist’s statement of sorts, acknowledging his role as a provocateur.

“I think I make a lot of people uncomfortable because I want to do more than write poems on a page,” he tells me over cocktails at Elsa, his favorite East Village haunt. “The art for me doesn’t begin or end with the poem. I’m interested in living my life as an art object, in embodying the ‘60s spirit of Andy Warhol. I don’t understand why I have to be accountable for how all these parts of who I am intersect, or don’t—what I post online, who I am in interviews, who I am when I read the poems, who I am in the poems, if I’m in the poems…”

The poet maintains a forceful presence on both Facebook and Twitter, alternatingly fierce and frivolous, as likely to quote Whitman or Ginsberg as he is to post a clip of Madonna or Lana Del Rey, all of whom he considers inspirations. “I want to embody many personas, to have no fidelity to authenticity,” he says. “I’m different every day. I’m different all the time. If I say something today I probably don’t mean it tomorrow. And why should I have to?”

Dimitrov makes an important distinction, however, between authenticity and sincerity; while he might be disinterested in any objective truth, he is a man who, at least in each moment, means what he says and says what he means. In his poems, as in his life, he says he strives “to be both heartfelt and playful.” In Begging for It, the intimate “This Is a Personal Poem” is immediately followed by the evasive, conceptual “This Is Not a Personal Poem,” in which Dimitrov insists “I don’t write about my life. / I don’t have a life.”

Across the table from me, he speaks with enthusiasm and a hint of frustration when I press him further—he won’t be complicit in his being pinned down. “Sometimes a photograph, like a poem, is more true than anything that actually happens to us. And what actually happens to us? Even memory changes with time. I’m not interested in being real but I am interested in the nature of reality.”

Alex Dimitrov recommends: Our Andromeda by Brenda Shaughnessy, A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon by CA Conrad and The Last Usable Hour by Deborah Landau