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Hit Me When I’m Pretty

S. Preston Duncan | December 2, 2019

Topics: Hit Me When I'm Pretty, Poems For Dead People, poetry, RVA 38, RVA poets, Ryan Kent, Secretly Y'all

RVA Mag #38 is on the streets now! Here’s the first article, in which Ryan Kent, the author behind Poems for Dead People, talks rock bottom, writing, and redemption with the release of his latest book.

You know the tune: boy grows up on dreams of baseball, falling asleep to bedtime stories of a future riding into battle, saving the princess, starring in his own fairytale. Boy wakes up 30 years later, in an abandoned house full of empty beer cans and cigarette butts, with his baseball bat in a pile of broken glass. With a divorce and a drinking problem, slouched over a space heater, he writes poetry in an old fur coat. It could end there. It probably should have ended there, logically.

This story, felt by those whose childhoods took similarly-unexpected turns, is the story of Ryan Kent: a Richmond artist whose work has become increasingly recognized throughout local poetic and musical communities.

Kent recently released his third collection of poetry, Hit Me When I’m Pretty. His poems are blunt; comical out of necessity, and told with a mortician’s smile alongside vulnerability. The new book, like Kent, is sober and unflinching. It’s the kind of thing that can only be written by someone who hasn’t been seized by morbid fascination, but instead walked the path of death and changed direction. That path began with his first book, Poems for Dead People.

“I got that idea when I wrote a random poem after Norman Mailer died,” Kent said. “I had an autographed copy of Time of Our Time. I wanted to see how many people had put their things up for sale. There was a lot of stuff — it just put it in my head that if you have a name for yourself, you really aren’t anything until someone can exploit you.”

Kent with his latest collection, Hit Me When I’m Pretty, at Plan 9 Music. Photo by Amy Robison

Kent started writing poetry as a teenager, but those early pieces weren’t the angsty ruminations that you might expect from someone who would end up earning cautious comparisons to Bukowski in his later years.

“The shit that I wrote back then was bad, man. It was flowery and whimsical,” Kent said. “You know, dance, dance, dance, tree tops, fly, fly, fly. That kind of shit. I didn’t really know what poetry was, all I knew was what I learned in school. It just didn’t resonate deeply with me. The things that I related to were songs by Nirvana and Soundgarden.”

“Then I read Allen Ginsberg, and it was completely different. It helped show the mechanism. It helped wake that up a little bit. I didn’t really do anything but swim team and baseball. And when I didn’t do that anymore, I had no substance. And I decided I was going to be a writer; I really loved it,” Kent said. “I loved reading books and collecting books, and those became my heroes in the same way as Jose Canseco, Greg Maddux, Jeff Bagwell, Shaquille O’Neal — all those guys were my heroes. These guys didn’t let me down. A lot of ‘em were already dead.”

Richmond abounds with outlets for spoken word artists for whom performance is an integral aspect of their work. But Kent is not a spoken word artist. He’s more of a storyteller with a passion for line breaks.

“I like going up and just telling the story,” Kent said. “Secretly Y’all — I did that once and that was cool. Everything has to be done off the cuff.”

Secretly Y’all is a local organization in Richmond that hosts live storytelling events every other month for the community to participate in and attend. Similar to many spoken word poetry events, listeners gather in a close room and performers are given a theme: but rather than pre-written poems, Secretly Y’all speakers are chosen randomly from names voluntarily thrown into a hat, and share their personal truths from memory in a full story.

“You tell this true story about the topic they decide,” Kent said. “Some people are just great storytellers. Like when you go sit at the bar, and they just rattle off all this stuff that they did 20 years ago. And man, beer is so easy to drink when you’re sitting next to that person.” 

Photo by Jill Hammer

That kind of training doesn’t come with certification, but with an awestruck history of storytelling credibility. There is a belief in the clarity of hindsight among barstool storytellers, like Kent and his heroes: the idea that you have to give yourself over to the absurdity of chaos and despair, so that one day you might dig your way out and make sense of it all.

If there’s an overarching narrative to Kent’s collections, it’s certainly that. 

“The first [book] was cathartic for me. I wrote about people that I actually knew, and people that fascinated me. I could relate it to my own life,” Kent said. “But it was mostly done from a deep ache in my childhood, while the other two focused on my new periods. And those all have a glow of heartbreak, in one way or another.”

Growing up in a small family, Kent’s formative experiences with loss revolved around the deaths of holiday relatives he only saw once a year — and nevertheless, still found himself mourning.

Macabre fixation isn’t exactly a novel concept in the literary world, but Kent’s approach to it offers a life-affirming honesty that doesn’t rely on sugary positivity. The antihero of his own botched American Dream, Kent’s narrative style plucks at the mundane nature of everyday life. It finds tragedy in the miraculous and, more significantly, doesn’t distinguish between the two.

“I think I just look at how profound someone’s story is,” Kent said. “The person sitting next to you at the stoplight, it’s some lady with a purple shirt on, and she’s in some Geo Metro that’s still running. I don’t know how. You just happen to glance over at her. She’s just some person. And she will have an end, and her story will be over. Everybody’s got some story that that would mean something to other people, regardless of whether that story is good or bad.”

Photo by Audrey Shadowwoman

“One of the Poems for Dead People is called ‘You’ll Never Make It as a Singer.’ It was about this rockabilly performer named Eddie Bond. He was in the rockabilly Hall of Fame, he wrote songs for like 40 years. And he is best known for being the man who rejected Elvis Presley.”

“[When] Elvis Presley tried out for his band, he said, ‘You better stick to truck driving, you’ll never make it as a singer.’ So his legacy was being the one who rejected The Man Who Would Be King. He did all that to be remembered for the mistake he made. Maybe he wasn’t right for his band. We’ll never know. That mistake overshadowed everything. Isn’t that the story of every human being?”

Kent became accustomed to being vulnerable as he started posting his poems online, and later joined a band —  a similar outlet for expressing his words. Once his wife left him, he noted that he “kind of flew on.” Without a care, he moved forward, but in a self-destructive manner. It was around this time that his second book, This Is Why I Am Insane, started coming together. And everything else in his life fell apart.

Sleeping on the couch without heat or a bed, Kent resided in an abandoned house. His best work came out of this accumulation of life’s bad decisions, as he almost literally slept in the bed that he made.

“It was a cave,” Kent said. “It was awesome because I could smoke cigarettes inside, I could drink inside, I could play music as loud as I wanted, swing my baseball bat around. I didn’t have any heat, so I had space heaters. I had electricity, no running water. The bathroom and the kitchen were both demolished. And I loved it. I would sit there and smoke cigarettes in a fucking fur coat in the wintertime and just get trashed. It was like camping, camping by myself.”

Image and Photos by R. Anthony Harris

“I was at the bottom, but not that hard. Real bottom is when you have no other choice. I had fuckin’ choices. I could have been somewhere else. I chose that. That was all I knew I wanted to do at the time.”

If This Is Why I Am Insane welled up from a whiskey-colored pit of metal riffs and heartbreak, Hit Me When I’m Pretty is a process of silence and acceptance. There are no Eat, Pray, Love-style motivational morals. No peachy preaching about flowers sprouting from soils, watered with liquid that doesn’t have an alcohol content. Nothing is suddenly and magically great. But it is better.

“I was pushing a lot of people away from me. I was really angry. I was hurt. People always used to tell me, you’re a functioning alcoholic, barely functioning. And I started looking at how there’s always a crisis in my life,” Kent said. “There’s always some fucking problem, and what’s always in my life is alcohol. I remember sitting at the Fasmart across from Millie’s on Main Street. I was going to get a six-pack of Hamm’s for like, $3.99, and there’s this dude outside asking for a dollar. I got a sandwich. I gave the man a dollar, and got back in my car. And then I just didn’t drink. Then I didn’t drink the next day. And it wasn’t really hard, because I was just fucking over it. And then a month went by, and I looked at the track record of the past month, and the month before. And the only thing that had been removed was alcohol.”

“I’m still going through shit. It’s not like a bunch of happy stuff. I’ve read some happy poems by Billy Collins that I really like,” Kent said, “but the ones that always hit me the most were the ones that had a heavy air of poignancy. In that, I saw a type of beauty in something that’s heartbreaking and sad.”

Typed almost entirely on a cell phone notepad app — according to Kent, the only way to accommodate his ADD — Hit Me When I’m Pretty isn’t a story about redemption. But it is itself a kind of triumph; not over mundanity, but through it.

One poem that stands out to readers in Kent’s latest book: two dudes watching a dog eat shit.

“Two dudes watching a dog eat shit. Yeah. It was actually glorious,” Kent said. “Really, it’s taking a picture of how low someone is, that watching this dog eat shit was just unexpected and funny. It’s like a little break in the monotony of darkness. And that’s kind of where I was in my life. So doing it this time, it was some sober thoughts about ‘What the fuck am I doing with my life?’”

The new book may be a sense of relief for Kent, or it may just be step one of everything else coming. Like a CD coming out of a brand-new cover, all scratched up after six months, the latest piece of art can often feels like the artist’s peak… until, down the road, it lays a foundation for their best work. Getting better is the focus, and real writers can put it into words and break your heart with it.

Photo by Audrey Shadowwoman

For Hit Me When I’m Pretty, the spark for the title came from an artistic whim.

“It just popped into my head,” Kent said. “There’s this quote I heard a long time ago, it was Jose Marti — I might be wrong, but it was ‘It’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees.’ It was the same idea, that if you’re gonna knock me down, do it when I’m doing well. Do it when I’m doing good.”

“Or at least let me stand up and fix my fucking hair.”

Interview by R. Anthony Harris, words by S. Preston Duncan. Top Photo by R. Anthony Harris. Other photos via Poems By This Fool/Facebook

RVA Magazine #38 Is On The Streets Today!

RVA Staff | November 21, 2019

Topics: craft beer RVA, Death Club Radio, Enforced, Heaton Johnson, Iron Reagan, Jessi Rosenberg, Matthew E. White, No BS! Brass Band, print magazine, Reggie Pace, RVA 38, rva print mags, Ryan Kent, Spacebomb Records, YOUNG FLEXICO

It’s out! RVA Mag’s 38th edition is a photo-forward issue that focuses on live music, street art, and delicious local food & craft beer — the building blocks on which RVA Mag was built! That’s right, we’re returning to first principles with this issue, just in time to head into our 15th year of operation. Rest assured, you’ll hear more about that once we ring in 2020, but for now, get ready to feast your eyes on the local culture that is our Fall 2019 issue.

This time around, it’s all about the synergy, as we manage to capture two different conversations between leading lights of the Richmond music scene. On the heavier tip, we’ve got Iron Reagan’s Rob Skotis grilling Enforced vocalist Knox Colby on the behind-the-scenes secrets of Richmond’s hottest up-and-coming metallic hardcore band. Then on the smoother end of things, we’ve got a mini-Fight The Big Bull reunion happening right in our pages, as Spacebomb Records head honcho Matthew E. White answers some in-depth questions posed by No BS! Brass Band co-founder and trombone player to the stars Reggie Pace. The former collaborators chop it up about the movement they helped create a decade ago — the one that made Richmond a city to watch where soulful indie music is concerned.

We’ve got a whole lot more awaiting you in this new issue as well, from a photo spread by local photographer Heaton Johnson featuring the lovely and talented Jessi Rosenberg to a glimpse inside the creative mind of local poet and metal vocalist Ryan Kent. Plus, we get the word on WRIR’s long-running Death Club Radio program, catch up with fast-rising hip hop heavyweight Young Flexico, and get all the latest dish from all the fine purveyors of local craft beer your heart could desire. And of course there’s more.

So what are you waiting for? Get out there and grab a copy of RVA Magazine #38. Free copies are available from our many partners around the city — scoop one up before they’re gone!

Check out the digital version on Issu here.

The Sunday Reader: The Most Beautiful Girl In The World & Other Poems

Ryan Kent | November 5, 2017

Topics: poetry, Ryan Kent, Sunday Stroll, This Is Why I Am Insane

Today’s Sunday Reader comes from writer and musician Ryan Kent and is one of the many poems found in his most recent anthology titled This is Why I am Insane.

 

98. THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN THE WORLD

she told people she was           v e n u s

collected rocks and other silly shit

said this one was good fortune

this one was for testicular fortitude

gave them and a few more to me

i threw them in her front yard

as i walked back to the car

she called me drunk at 3 am

about making dandelion tea

said the stars were aligned

and the moon and the gods

and the seasons wanted

us to dance naked in her

front yard where she saw

me toss the handful of rocks

told her i’d be over in a few

n o w         she may have not been       v e n u s

but it’s not like i’m royalty

                                            e i t h e r

 

24. THERE WON’T BE ANY STATUES

her married name was a city in italy

she had yellow purple green bruises

on her legs and arms

track marks

encore

 

thinking of that girl and another one

as i sit next to strangers in brooklyn

drinking corona alone      l o s t      c on  f  u se d

 

no intention of going back

or being asked to turn around for that matter

                 that’s ok

 

one of these days things will be different

 

until then i’ll slink by

breathing at one bar

and breathing at another

holding my breath

in between

 

119. A HORRIBLE DISGUSTING HABIT

the last girl wasn’t around anymore

i spent three days drunk with

some redheaded b i r d

up in her bed       her little    d o g    too

            then it began to wear off

and wore off quickly      f a s t

    like cheap varnish flaking from

            cheaper wood

    then i dropped a house on her

little vintage shoes

                                pointing up

      then there was this town

      then another one      &       g i r l s

girlsgirlsgirlsgirlsgirlsgirls                           g i r l s

now i’m walking up these new stairs

a place where i creak

but the floors

do not

 

141. THIS IS WHY I AM INSANE

she has that curly hair you

can only get if you were to scalp

some unlucky son of a bitch

wore dresses      like carmen m i r a n d a

smoked cigarettes          drank bourbon

could fit on the back of a     sport bike

she collected knick knacks

and cats and skulls and dead bugs

had some knives and custom guitars

the hairs in my five o’clock shadow

have started turning gray now and

everything is too damn loouuudddd

i lie in my bed      on my    b a c k

ask my feet if i was right

was i right to leave her

wait for them to give an answer

but just like me

they got      n o t h i n g

 

26. THE FOX

must have given her number

to forty men that night

she was new to this stretch of road

from somewhere out west

everyone wanted to know her

even me

eventually she made it my way

blinking her eyes

stirring at some drink

wearing some strappy dress

talking all kinds of shit

while i filled an ashtray

on that wooden patio

clever women

cover all their bases

no one wants to be caught

looking over the fence

when standing

ten feet from

the bag

 

82. RED FLAGS IN A PRETTY DRESS

she turned over that time in her bed

back and mermaid hair to me

didn’t like what i’d said about love

i counted her boxes of shoes

her scarves and ties and necklaces

and dresses and hats and purses

from my exiled side of the mattress

her cat hopped up       purred on my chest

made little kiss faces at me

that’s when i knew i was finished

and that’s when i knew i was glad

    oh       we muscled on for a while

but we were already a dead m o u s e

that was no longer fun to toss

             cats sure got a hold on

this reality thing

most of us play dress up

 

112. SPIRIT THAT BEAT THE JAPANESE

he said we had wooden dreams

that we were foolish stubborn boys

real men get out of bed before 7 am

they don’t wear seatbelts   e i t h e r

said christian academy would fix us

knock us down a few pegs

spent years proving them wrong

sleeping through the afternoon

flying under the radar

ignoring all of the gods

our own private suicide missions

now we’re poor drunks

and at night we remember

that we love our fathers

no matter how much

we hate them

 

 

Find more of Ryan Kent’s work HERE.
If you would like to submit writings for consideration into The Sunday Reader, contact us [email protected].

 

Ryan Kent’s latest poetry collection finds truth in loneliness

Marilyn Drew Necci | August 25, 2017

Topics: chop suey books, poetry, Ryan Kent, This Is Why I Am Insane

If you know who Ryan Kent is, it’s probably from his role as a vocalist in several bands around town, most notably southern-fried metallers Gritter and brutal thrashers Murdersome. As a rather talented lyricist, though, it wasn’t much of a stretch to move into the poetry game, as he did with his first book, Poems For Dead People, back in 2014. Since then, he’s continued writing at a furious pace–he even mothballed an entire book’s worth of poems that he decided weren’t the right thing for him to release at that time. However, he has finally given the world another volume, in the form of This Is Why I Am Insane.

This collection, admittedly rather thin at only 64 pages, is nonetheless jam-packed with poems, which often appear two to a page. Each poem is numbered, then placed into the collection out of order, in a sequence only clear to the author. The numbers are as low as 04 and as high as 151, and while not all the numbers inbetween appear here, enough appear to make clear that this project is the result of a sustained burst of creativity in which Kent cranked out a great deal of high quality material.

He didn’t lack for inspiration, either, and the crucial inspirational factor is made clear by the opening lines of the first poem in the collection, “Flicking Her Heel.” “Well/I signed them/like the attorney asked/and like everything/else that fades away/like the hairline/and pride/and teen angst/so does love.” If it isn’t already clear, this is Kent’s divorce book. The subject of a failed marriage comes up multiple times, but the stronger focus of this book is the life that remains once the marriage is over–tales of a loner lifestyle involving too much time at bars, or sitting home alone.

A lot of This Is Why I Am Insane‘s best moments aren’t even drawn from first-person observations, but instead from those little snapshots of someone else’s life a person catches by sitting in one place for a long time, paying attention to everything at once and nothing in particular. Poem 129, “Fwends,” tells the story of a car accident in which the drivers recognize their acquaintance only after they’ve collided. As the two women in the poem sit on a sidewalk crying together over their destroyed cars, Kent, watching out his window, thinks, “The ones you know/are sometimes the/ones who wreck/your shit.”

Image may contain: 1 person

This is, for my money, the most striking moment in the whole collection, but there are plenty more to be found here. Kent has definitely developed a love for odd typography, placing large spaces between words, throwing down lines irregularly across the page, even sometimes s t r e t c hing out a word, or drrrrrrrraawwwwwwing it out across the page. At times, this works quite well; at the best moments it reminds me of Emily Dickinson’s many dashes of irregular length. However, at other times it almost feels like an obscuring device, like it’s being done to divorce the writer from the immediacy and impact of what he’s writing. The problem is, this protective device can also shield the reader from the full impact of the words. And they do hit hard.

Really, a great deal of this collection’s poems would work best read out loud. This makes a ton of sense in light of Kent’s day job as a vocalist–he’s used to converting his notebook scribbles to spoken, sung, or screamed language. Fortunately, he realizes that this talent still has value where his poetry is concerned, and will be harnessing that gift by doing a reading at Chop Suey Books in Carytown on Monday, August 28 at 6 PM (click here for more info). Whether you’re a fan of his previous poetry, someone who’s rocked out to his bands, or a total newcomer, this reading is worth catching. Ryan Kent may or may not be insane (personally, I found him eminently relatable–if anything, I’m a little worried about the guy), but he’s definitely talented. Go see him at Chop Suey on Monday night, and pick up a book while you’re at it. It’s worth the trip.

Follow Ryan Kent’s poetry at facebook.com/Poemsbythisfool.

RVA Shows You Must See This Week: 10/1-10/7

Marilyn Drew Necci | October 1, 2014

Topics: Andrew Blossom, Angie, Angie Huckstep, Anousheh, black liquid, Christi, Citizen, Coby Batty, David Marie-Garland, Derek Evry & His Band Of Misanthropes, Eliot Lipp, en su boca, gallery 5, Gymshorts, Heavy Midgets, Herschel Stratego, Hostage Calm, Inspectah Deck, Iron Reagan, Melanie Rasnic, Michael Menert, Nathan Roche, Noah O, Paul Basic, Pretty Lights Music, Prisoner, Ryan Kent, shannon cleary, shows you must see, strange matter, SuperVision, The Broadberry, The Cales, The Cowards Choir, The Foam, True Love, War On Women, You Blew It!

FEATURE SHOW
Friday, October 3, 10 PM
A Benefit For Freeman Martin, feat. Iron Reagan, War On Women, Prisoner @ En Su Boca – $6 suggested donation

Freeman Martin’s been a fixture on the Richmond punk scene for a long time.
[Read more…] about RVA Shows You Must See This Week: 10/1-10/7

Ryan Kent’s Poems For Dead People Is Full Of Haunting Insight

Marilyn Drew Necci | August 22, 2014

Topics: book reviews, Gritter, Poems For Dead People, poetry, Ryan Kent

Ryan Kent is a poet, which makes sense because he’s probably better known around this town as a singer. The lyrics he writes for his band, Gritter, are probably similar to a lot of lyrics, in that if you separated them from the music and wrote them down on a piece of paper, they’d look just like poetry. But Kent has more to say than what can easily be set to a metal riff and a pounding backbeat.
[Read more…] about Ryan Kent’s Poems For Dead People Is Full Of Haunting Insight

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