Mikko Harvey is the author of Let the World Have You (House of Anansi, 2022) and Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit (House of Anansi, 2018). He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Dirty Poem
When I take Adderall I feel connected to my dad, who takes it too, although I haven’t told him we have this in common because I’m scared he will judge me or feel sorry that I’m like him. When you orgasm around my hand I feel connected to you. Yesterday, you said Sometimes I get so excited it feels a little bit like panic and I nodded and wanted to say something but didn’t. I don’t know, I just feel like there’s soft dirt at the bottom of this river and I love stepping into it together— or even not quite together, like the way I felt connected to Henri Cole when I first read his poem “Beach Walk” (we fall, we fell, we are falling) on the computer in my cubicle at my internship in college, and I thought I don’t want to spend my days in an office. Anyway, I do spend my days in an office now and I read Henri Cole at night sometimes and I love making you cum more than almost anything and I’m talking to my dad on Zoom later— he’s getting surgery, I’m scared, and there’s a lot we haven’t said.
“I think poetry and humor are siblings. They are both ways of saying: hey, here is a new and possibly strange way of looking at things. They are both about surprise…
“They succeed by cutting against the grain of expectation, and part of their art is getting the audience to take that journey with you. For me, the closest art form to poetry is probably stand-up comedy — even in my poems that aren’t funny at all — because the tools feel similar.
Of course, there are other poets who view poetry as more similar to music, memoir, painting, philosophy, etc., and I love that the house of poetry is big enough to accommodate all these different rooms — it might be my favorite thing about poetry.”