Nü-Metal Poetics: A Conversation with Zach Peckham

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To celebrate the publication of his debut collection of poetry As If And, Zach Peckham and I sat down to talk about the relationship between poetry and various kinds of sound: rhetorical babble, idiomatic slang, the bands with whom one changes, and of course, the staged performance of a poem. Playful in a way that does not subvert its sense of panic, As If And begets a sonic pleasure unmitigated by the desire for communication. With nods to poets such as Lorine Niedecker and George Oppen, Peckham’s poetry advocates for an ulterior knowledge, language begetting language as melody. Appropriately, too, we discussed Zach’s devoted work as an editor and teacher of literature. Zach, the former Editor-in-Chief of Cleveland Review of Books, first hired me as a Contributing Writer in 2021 (this is an in-house celebration! as much in praise of his poems as his catholic editorial tastes), a position that has influenced my critical interests for half a decade. Lucky for me, Zach is and has always been a generous (and funny) interlocutor. Held over Zoom in April 2026, this conversation has been edited for clarity. 

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Christian Wessels: First question I want to ask you: What did you have for breakfast this morning?

Zach Peckham: I had a banana and a piece of toast with butter and nutritional yeast on it, and a vitamin and this new thing for me, which is a psyllium husk capsule.

CW: What is that?

ZP: Psyllium husk, so it’s the same active ingredient in Metamucil and similar fiber supplements. Okay. Taking care—

CW: —of your gut?

ZP: Yeah. Trying. You know, the psyllium husk, it’s literally just like hard plant matter. It’s just indigestible fiber that is theoretically good for you.

CW: So let’s talk about your debut collection of poems, As If And. Is it useful to speak about your writing process, how long it took to compose this volume? And maybe at the same time, you could answer how the poems changed in the process of drafting and revising. This book formally reads like a single sequence, to the point where I can distinguish the poems individually, but at the same time they’re almost unified by a single formal method. 

ZP: That’s cool. They originate from a similar place and were written in a pretty condensed period. I hoped it would all be somehow cohesive, if not coherent. Thanks. I trust you. But yeah, I wrote the book during my MFA—it was my MFA thesis—although the version now is pretty different from what the “thesis” was. 

CW: How long ago was that?

ZP: I finished writing all these poems in 2020, 2021. So that’s one of the weird things: I finished all this stuff like six years ago, and now it’s all “new” again.

CW: You didn’t touch the poems in the meantime? You were working on other stuff?

ZP: I did, but not substantially. I had little obsessive detail granular things. Kind of like just thinking about a word here or there for a year while I submitted it around and got it rejected over and over. Some things shook out like that, which is funny, to have an epiphany about tweaking a line break or fragment three years after you first write it and it’s so clear. I worked on other stuff in the meantime for sure, but it was very hard to write poetry at all, partly because I felt stuck or maybe just too comfortable in the mode of the book, which was done.

CW: When you say they feel new to you, do the poems still feel like your own?

ZP: Definitely. I guess they don’t feel new to me, but now they are new to the rest of the world. Do you know what I mean? To me, these have been done for years, so it’s been a funny process to get reacquainted with them. I was really scared of that experience but then learned from doing readings from the book over the last couple of months, discussing it in various ways, that, actually, I still totally agree with all of this. I’m still interested in the same things even if I’ve cooled off on some of the specific stylistic concerns and formal techniques that I was really fired up about and working through at the time. 

CW: Maybe it’s useful now for our conversation: I can just describe how I see the book operating formally, because we’re sort of talking around it, and please say if this seems right to you, clarify anything. To my mind, all poems are led by sound to varying degrees, but your book is so explicitly led by microscopic inversions of a sonic template, which also seems to be how each poem finds its next word. Each poem starts with a sort of initial sonic conceit, and then the poems are thinking, okay, what would this word sound like if these two letters were swapped around, something like that? Then that word has to go next. Like here, in “Post-World”: 

cinchy winch
a narrow clinch

snorting chorus
in a pinch

you are only
just an inch

away from saying
what you mean

Of course, this is a general impression, and there’s variation across the book. But where that leads me next is pacing: So many words are split across lines, and much of the book is composed in very short lines. Counteracting that, these poems often have lists that really slow us down with articles, as in “Forced Perpetuity”:

the lens
the lift
the lend
the sift

Does all of this seem right to you?

ZP: You’re right on the money. I feel like I composed the majority of the book with my ear, thinking about not just my own listening as a generative or compositional tool, but then wanting to share an experience of sound. I am often trying or hoping for poetry that feels like music, not just in that it is “musical” in an aesthetic or sonorous way but that it can create an effect or experience that feels akin to how listening to music feels, regardless of how it sounds. That’s a very physical concern to me, because playing and listening to music are physical in ways that literature is not. To be honest I kind of feel like music is actually my main creative medium, because it’s what I default to when I have true free time, even though writing is what I spend most of my waking hours and professional life on. Playing and listening to music is so important to me, it’s hard to describe. Which is probably appropriate.

Listening drew me to certain choices on the page, like those breaks, those lists. I think pretty often about how the poem on the page is or isn’t like a score. I am trying to treat the poem as a transcript of a sonic object, but that can also be digested visually and create an experience in the inner, mental ear. 

This can all be true while also recognizing that it can fail. I have zero control. You know? And people are going to read it how they’re going to read it. But I felt these concerns were useful to me during the process of writing the book. It was my MFA thesis, but it all came at the very end of my time in the program, three years in which I completely changed as a writer, like, very profoundly.

CW: What happened?

ZP: I had gone in with some learned and preconceived notions of what I thought made a poem “good” or “serious.” Much of that had to do with poetry not rhyming, not being goofy in an unserious or potentially facile or cheap way. I was obsessed with the idea of sounding like a certain kind of Dean Young, David Berman off-kilter wisdom-doling fucking cool guy indie rock shit. I do love that stuff, actually, to be clear. I wrote a lot of that stuff that’s never going to see the light of day. But what I realized during this period of intense, pressurized reading and writing in grad school is that what is actually true to me is sound. I’m not a cool, chill, insightful, collected, organized, insightful person. I’m a fucking spaz. I’m really anxious. I’m scared. I am not comfortable. And one of the ways I cope with just moving through reality is making up these dumb songs in my head all the time. 

So, the first step was just embracing that and leaning into it. I also encountered certain work that provided examples or felt like permission for me. A big one I talk about all the time is Joyelle McSweeney and Toxicon and Arachne, which is just maximal. It is decadent in image, in sound. It does a lot, and it does some things that seem a little unsure of its moment, but the work fully commits. Regardless of whether it’s quote-unquote successful, that becomes a poetics. Ronald Johnson is another important one for me. For the sonics and play but also I feel like his work is so often right on the line between so cool and so fucking cornball. This Doctor Seuss-y type shit is risky.

But I got really interested in a natural inclination to play with sound in ways that are not just hyper musical, but also maybe extend something that I saw in a lot of the Objectivists, in cool, controlled ways, a kind of listening intelligence or sonic sensing. At one point during that process I wondered: Why do all my favorite books have Oppen as an epigraph? Then I went and read all of Oppen. I was like, oh, that’s why. That’s why. 

CW: I remember hearing you read some poems aloud, and where the line speeds me up, you were so slow, so methodical about eliding the sounds across lines. We’ll go back to influence and the Objectivists, but first I want to ask how you hear the poems, their pace, because it feels counterintuitive for me to hear the poems this way. But also, what you’re doing is really dramatizing the sonic focal points.

ZP: Just to contextualize it: The thing you heard me read last spring was cycle hum, a chapbook that came out from Sistrum Books, which is an imprint run by Ed Steck and Hayley Mulhern of Fungus Books & Records in Pittsburgh, with Ben Pease from the Ruth Stone House in Vermont, who does the printing. That chap became the occasion for a series of sound and text performances with Ceremonial Abyss, where I’d read the book every night with their drones and textures, alongside other poets and performers we liked and wanted to work with. C. had the idea for “the cycle hum tour” and it really pushed the whole thing into a conceptual and collaborative territory I never would have thought of, which was sick. And a rad, challenging, ultimately insanely fun two weeks riding buses and trains together (Abyss tours without a car, which is pretty fucking rock and roll but also very practical, as long as you can plan ahead and revise the plan every time an Amtrak or Greyhound connection gets cancelled), wondering if I could still hack not knowing where I was gonna sleep every night, unsure if I was just out there rehashing some lost punk dreams or having a midlife crisis.

It’s interesting, though, that book, I think of it very much as a little release valve from my time working on As If And. I felt like there was a still more hyper-granular sonic strategy that I didn’t get to do as much as I wanted to in the longer collection. So there were some things I did reading that work that were informed by and evolved from the performance and collaboration, which I won’t do with As If And. But you’re right, I do read aloud deliberately, slowly, because I want to try to project, as much as possible, what’s on the page into space. There’s a longer poem in As If And called “Lightroom” that is not really granular at all. 

CW: “Lightroom” is its own section in the book.

ZP: Yeah, it’s a whole section, and I will read that in more of a cascading and propulsive way. I do try to read everything as it appears on the page to emphasize the sonic qualities, the little parts. I got really into thinking about the material poetics that were possible, and material not from an analytical mode necessarily—you know, material history or social materialism or something. But I feel like in sort of an Objectivist spirit, I am interested in fragmentation and sound and listening, and how these qualities and ideas might map onto questions of political aesthetics. So it became really useful to think of language as material that contains potential meaning and meanings, that changes perception, that can be used for good or ill or whatever. And it felt like sound was the nexus for all of this stuff.

I hate utility when we’re talking about poetry, though, because the function of a poem is to be a poem. Like, fucking shut up. That’s it. 

CW: Can I include that in the interview? “Fucking shut up.”

ZP: That’s fine. Totally. Absolutely. I get so sick of it.

But also, that is what’s important. Right? Something is still possible there, and I’m interested in being in that kind of impossibility, where we don’t know how to function in the world. Poetry is useless, but it’s also all we have. We can’t understand anything, but thought is all we can bring to anything.

CW: And form is a way of thinking?

ZP: Totally, 100%. I’m not a very hopeful person at all, but I get very hopeful when I consider ideas like that.

CW: Well, listening to you now, I also noted so much of tone in the book is—I wrote the phrase “punk-ish disagreement” next to these lines from “Banned Width”: 

hey you
yeah you

get dusted
you nut
you flustered appliance
left out

the sidewalk
so hot
you wreck
you slot

There are so many moments like this, of contrarian address. We’re talking about sound and method, though there are recurring thematic elements. Structures of knowledge. Screens. Technology more broadly as reinforcing those structures of knowledge. Death is the big one. Pathways to death. When you’re composing—and maybe there’s not a way to generalize about this part of your process—what information is prioritized for you when you’re writing? Or is information even the right word?

ZP: Good question. I’m often thinking a lot about what I am trying to say, what I can’t say, and what feels totally insufficient to say.

CW: For you personally or broadly speaking?

ZP: I mean, both. When we’re talking about poems, we use these words like “confession” or “witness.” I like a lot of stuff that is actively working in those modes or traditions, to an extent, but at the same time, that shit feels totally fucking useless to me. In all honesty, it actually feels caustic at a certain point or dishonest because we’re witnessing fucking genocide in real time. Our witnessing is really a big part of the problem. And I’m not saying that people should not document all the ways that are possible, anything that is happening that feels important…

CW: But there’s a contrived idiom for response that fails?

ZP: Yeah. That’s often what we are given: This is poetry. “This is what poetry can do.” And I’m just sort of like, man, fuck off. Miss me with that fucking shit. You know? To me, that mode so often doesn’t fit, I guess—not even the actual experience, but just the actuality of noise and disjunction that one feels every day, the reality of struggling to mean something in language as a thinking expressive medium and always failing, which I am completely obsessed with and excited and disheartened by and terrified of.

CW: Listening to you explain witness and confession, I mean, these categories are useful to study poetry, they’re useful for categorizing aesthetic and historical trends, understanding formal diversity and how various kinds of poems can operate, though perhaps using them in our contemporary moment tends to feel reductive, at least when poets embrace those labels themselves of the work they’re currently making. In these cases, perhaps the poems become rhetorically motivated and can feel as if they have an articulable design upon their readers, which becomes a sort of intellectual project and not the embodied visceral experience—which, you know, is what I love about poetry too, that physical sensation of sound and discovery. So there is a way to do it. The question is when a poem is led by the act of convincing someone.

ZP: I think the work risks being reductive, serving too much of its own productive function, you know, becoming an apparatus in a way. I think what is useful about poetry is that it rejects that functionality.

CW: Apparatus to what?

ZP: Message. Communication. Surety. Rhetoric. You know? I loathe debates. I despise argument.

CW: Well, if I can tie all of this to your book, the title As If And suggests to me how much of this language happens in the middle, so to speak, that we’re not beginning with a conceit. There’s no argument to hold because there’s no idea with which we begin or end. 

ZP: Absolutely. That’s definitely a bit of my love for the Objectivists coming across there, Oppen, Niedecker. Love for the connective little words and compact clusters, how a line might be crafted against the logic of a sentence, against the logic of a thought to a new thought. “If” or “of” can take on so much particularity and charge and variance. I’m fascinated by how those sort of utilitarian words and phrases can be made to carry these levels and valences. Sound is a way of pulling some new attention to that.

CW: I think we see that today too, obviously in a different way, with poets like Carl Phillips. I read him with admiration, and I think the second most important word in his poetry is “horse,” but the first is “or.” Because his poems are enacting a sense of thought and feeling by way of syntax, and a line inflects that thought happening in real time, a visceral experience, “or” dramatizing those leaps. Anyways, how far back does this influence go for you, Oppen and his generation? Did you study Williams? Do you find him useful for thinking about your own work? 

ZP: Williams was a lily pad for me, but not because I read him, haha. The first “serious” historically important poet that I really got into when I was coming up was Roethke. I have a little glitch in my poetry brain because I left my college after the first year—Mass College of Liberal Arts—and I was supposed to take this class when I went back called “Whitman, Williams, and Roethke.” I ended up changing course last minute and just working at a bakery, going to community college for a little bit. But I think of those three together in this way that I never actually learned. So then Williams was one that I encountered later but bounced off on my way to finding and probably being—like a lot of boys—utterly corrupted by John Berryman and the Dream Songs. He was an early model for me, poetics-wise, corrupted is a good way to describe it. 

So, if we’re thinking about influences, Berryman had this kind of pessimism mixed with silliness. I think this is a sensibility that doesn’t always comport with cool collected thoughts. Although, that is one of the things that I love about David Berman, too. I am a sad millennial man so I obviously love The Silver Jews? But I guess we’re returning to that breakthrough I had in my own development: Poems don’t have to be cerebral or recognizably smart. They can be seemingly or secretly stupid. I’m really interested in that line between decadent and goofy as fuck.

But then Inger Christensen’s Alphabet is such a formative text for me, and is definitely not funny, haha. I count Gustaf Sobin as a primary influence as well. Both are models for sound-as-thinking, leading to political consciousness, political aesthetics. Sobin’s commitment as a life-long amateur is so inspiring, too. I feel similarly about Cid Corman, not only as a model for sonic aesthetics but for living a life of and in poetry (not to ape Muriel Rukeyser’s phrasing too much, but also not-not), where one is not some solitary artist or genius but in fact at their core a dedicated amateur, a listener, facilitator, corresponder, collaborator and conspirator who is always in it with others. I often think of myself as more of an editor than a writer anyway, and that life-craft mess is a nice way to think about editing that is not artificially siloed in professional ideas. Sometimes editing is writing a stupid email. Sometimes it’s making coffee or getting someone a snack. Corman famously ran an ice cream café in Japan for a while. Ronald Johnson was a well-regarded caterer. Obviously I am a slob and I love to eat and drink. But ultimately I think I am interested in poets who are models for aesthetics as well as approaches to living.

CW: This is music that you grew up with, Berman and The Silver Jews?

ZP: I didn’t, but I grew up listening to a lot of music that definitely was in his orbit, and then I sort of found him later on. Maybe one simply has to reach twenty-seven to fully appreciate “In 27 years I’ve drunk 50,000 beers” or twenty-eight to connect with “Self-Portrait at 28.” Growing up I listened to a lot of punk and hardcore, which ran the gamut, but I especially loved the DC scene and Dischord Records stuff. Later on I got into noise and more experimental stuff the bands I was in in high school and my twenties were trying to emulate.

CW: Microphones? Mount Eerie?

ZP: Absolutely. All of that lo-fi sad white boy shit too. Elliott Smith obviously. Jason Molina. I love the Elephant 6 bands of the nineties a lot, Elf Parlor, Olivia Tremor Control, The Glands. Instrumental bands like Lightning Bolt, Hella, Mogwai, Don Caballero, Giraffes? Giraffes!, Earth, Boris, Sunn O))), Godspeed, just to name a few, were and are really important to me. ZZ Top was my first favorite band when I was a little kid. My dad had Afterburner and this Joe Satriani tape I was obsessed with in his truck. I have always liked guitars.

CW: Well, you’re not mentioning a group that is quoted in the book, which is the Insane Clown Posse. How important is ICP to you? 

ZP: I would say extremely. One thing that I definitely was thinking about with some of the goofiness of the book was my relationship to nu-metal, and kind of what that signifies. There was the rock station in Central Mass, where I grew up, WAAF, “107.3—the only station that REALLY rocks,” and it was just my whole worldview at an early point. Metallica, Slayer, Nirvana and Soundgarden and all the post-grunge butt rock stuff. Creed. Classic nu-metal like Korn and Slipknot and Static X, then the rap-rock moment of ICP and Kid Rock…

CW: Rough.

ZP: …and Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park, which, like, this is not music I listen to actively anymore. But I’m very interested in embracing these bands or certain things about them as an influence just as I embrace George Oppen and Joyelle McSweeney, if I’m going to lean into a sort of instinctual tendency when it comes to listening and writing.

CW: Everything should be there.

ZP: Everything should be there, yeah. I really do think beyond the nostalgia there is actual authentic art happening in some of that music, even if parts of it are silly or even kind of toxic. I think the “real” and “silly” in equal measure or tension are kind of crucially what I’m interested in, especially amid toxin and pollution.

CW: Regarding other aspects of your professional life: I think of you as a devoted editor and a devoted teacher. It’s worth noting that you were Editor-in-Chief of Cleveland Review of Books for several years and first hired me as a Contributing Writer, so before becoming friends, we knew each other in that capacity. And now you’re teaching at Colby College. So I’m just curious if or how these aspects of your life influence your writing, if at all.

ZP: That’s a really good question. When I wrote the poems in As If And, I was not teaching, I was in school. But since I finished the book, I have spent the last six years teaching as much and as frequently as possible. That was the main reason I did an MFA, apart from wanting to learn and have time to write poetry. Teaching is my main job.

CW: Because you were an adjunct.

ZP: I adjuncted at Cleveland State and at Cleveland Institute of Art. I just said yes to every single class I could get. I needed to learn.

CW: What was your teaching load like?

ZP: I would teach two classes at each school each semester, usually.

CW: A four-four load?

ZP: Yeah, between two schools, which is not the most insane thing. I’ve heard of people doing way crazier things, like six comp classes or whatever. But sometimes I had four completely different classes, four different preps. And at some point, usually the middle of the day, I’d have to take the bus from downtown Cleveland out to University Circle to teach at the art school, which isn’t a way of claiming cred so much as just thinking about how I learned to teach. 

I think it’s sort of difficult for me to say how much those specific practices have really impacted my own creative “work.” Lately I haven’t spent nearly as much time writing as I have reading and editing.

CW: Do you learn from teaching and editing, though?

ZP: So that’s the next thing I was going to say. I was just reading an essay that one of my teachers, Hilary Plum, who I worked with at the CSU Poetry Center, wrote for a recent series at CRB about Toni Morrison and her editing work. There’s a Morrison quote in that essay that’s like “editing, teaching, and writing is all one job.” Yeah, hard agree.

But it’s all the same process. I learn as much about editing from reading as I do from teaching. Though I do think that writing steals away in its own particular manner. I mean, this is such a cliché, but I really feel like I only ever get anything written when I’m avoiding doing something else. Maybe having a lot to do increases the chances I’ll actually write something at some point.

CW: And now that you have health insurance, you don’t need to put nutritional yeast on your toast every morning.