"You might as well call yourself a warlock"
A Q&A with Daniel Poppick
“I could go on,” Daniel Poppick writes in his poem “Nothing Like the Sun,” published in The Drift in 2022 (and read by Poppick at our first-ever issue release party). True to his word, Poppick has returned this month with his first novel, The Copywriter, a gently absurdist tale of a poet working as a copywriter at a retail startup in the late 2010s. To celebrate the book’s publication, Poppick spoke with Essays Editor Lyra Walsh Fuchs about poetry, prose, and literary cats.
With this novel, you join the ranks of poets who also write fiction. The book contains a few meditations on the difference between the forms, including that “a novel is unpaid labor, while poetry is labor’s ash.” How do you think about the two practices? What’s different and what’s similar, for you?
Poetry means listening to language, and fiction means observing situations? Or poets are more annoying than novelists, and novelists are more boring than poets. I’m joking. The difference between poetry and fiction has always felt like a gradient to me rather than a bright line. Plot, character, narrative conflict — it’s cliche to say it, but all of these elements that we think of as being central to the novel emerged from poetry. With poetry, you’re always creating a vessel and filling it at the same time. It primes you to think about form. With The Copywriter, I realized that I could treat the novel as a form, like any poem, that I didn’t have to accept it as a fixed shape. I figured if I could capture the passage of time and make it funny, novel-heads would forgive the book for occasionally behaving like a poem.
The protagonist of your novel also writes poetry. What’s it like to write a poem “in character,” so to speak?
I think almost all poems are written in character. I mean, the LARPing required to call yourself a poet in the first place... you might as well call yourself a warlock. In almost every social context it’s right up against the edge of absurdity, but then lots of professional life involves being in character too. We’re always performing different versions of ourselves, particularly at work, and particularly in our writing.
Your protagonist has two cats who stay with his girlfriend after they break up, and a secondary character adopts a cat with her boyfriend soon before they have a child. What role do cats play in the book? Do you have other favorite cats in literature?
Cats are basically a form of surveillance technology, but with a soul, and only sometimes cute. They know us and judge us, or they don’t care. At the end of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques he says that humanity is an essence that is bestowed upon us “in the wink of an eye, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that sometimes, through an involuntary understanding, one can exchange with a cat.” That’s my favorite cat in literature.
What do you make of the “autofiction” label? The fact that your protagonist is a poet, and is only ever referred to as “D_” seems to invite certain comparisons.
It’s fine, and I get why someone might make that comparison, but I don’t quite think of it that way. There are writers pinned with that label whose work I find inspiring — Elif Batuman, Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk in the Outline trilogy — but they don’t sound much like one another. I think at this point the term mostly refers to the confluence of a particular historical period and vibes. That’s not nothing, but I try to just think of it as fiction.
The book contains some ludicrous (and hilarious) product descriptions. What’s the most poetic product description you’ve ever encountered in real life? How would you pitch the book?
It’s a product, a description, and a line of poetry all wrapped up in one: NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC 2. And it’s also my pitch for the book.
Coincidental convergence being what it is, I've been having fun combing thru Stephen King's backlist, and his novel Tommyknockers has an antihero in the form of an alcoholic poet who is the only thing standing between the world and some very toxic alien visitors. King's description of the quasi-subterranian world of the poetry reading circuit is enough to keep any sane person from trying it for a living, and that's before the creepy aliens make an appearance....