by Carolyn Mimran and Chris McMorrow

Travis Jeppesen’s debut collection Poems I Wrote While Watching TV is a ruthlessly implosive meditation on the death of language in a media-saturated world. Perfectly complimented by painter Jeremiah Palecek’s sardonic illustrations, Poems I Wrote While Watching TV ponders the mundane and the un-nameable with a highly personal mixture of devastation and humor. Provokator recently met up with Jeppesen and Palecek to discuss their work and methods to their madness.  

Chris McMorrow: What exactly are these poems about?

Travis Jeppesen: This concept or idea of mass mediation and its effects on transforming language which we rely on and how it transforms the core of how we communicate our ideas and how we think. So I guess to a certain extent that's a lot of what's going on in a lot of these poems and what's going on in this book as a conceptual unit. It's basically a meditation on that death of language and how the media has portrayed it – language and our thought as a result of that.

 New words are now commonplace, more the same…for instance I'm writing advertising copy right now and there is a limited vocabulary I'm allowed to employ in this job – in order to communicate ideas clearly and effectively. And this is the same language that we hear every day on TV – this is the same language that we read when we open up most magazines produced for mass consumption. I'm talking about buzzwords - certain key phrases that are supposed to signify a certain communal human experience that weren't in circulation before. For example, 911 or 'war on terror.'

Provokator: Do you feel like poetry is dying a slow death in today's society?

Travis Jeppesen: Poetry has become obsolete because the way most people view language is that it's just there as a tool, to convey information exclusively. When people want to explore or express themselves or whatnot – they don't turn to language, they turn to things like painting and visual media or music when they want to express some sort of inner chaos. I guess in some ways I'm a failed visual artist...I can't paint but I love art. I have no knack for it, no talent whatsoever. My interest has always been in words and language.

P: How did this particular book come about?

TJ: I wrote this book while I was watching Czech TV. It's the first book I wrote in the Czech Republic. I already had some Czech but I thought it would improve it if I watched TV all the time. It's a really tortuous experience if you see TV here – I was trying to be disciplined, to force myself to do this but I needed something to do with my hands so I just played around in my notebook, putting stuff together. It was my first year here so the book is about the death of language but at the same time there's also some isolation in that because it wasn’t my language. There's a certain amount of displacement there.

P: What programs were you watching?

TJ: Everything from Spanish serials dubbed in Czech, I just had the four channels that are dubbed in Czech but during the day they play a lot of soap operas. I really like that tele-shopping stuff. One of the poems is actually entitled 'Velky Cesky Country Svetny' and that's the name of a Czech country music CD for sale.
 
P: What's the significance of 'Nebulous Spectre' – the featured on Jeremiah's painting blog ?

TJ: I guess a lot of it is about TV being this artificial field. There is a line in one of the poems about reaching out and touching the screen and it's flat staticy. Because I think a lot of the poems are flat and staticy. Right, Jeremiah?

Jeremiah Palecek: Right.

P: Could you describe your basic approach to painting?

JP: I start with a basic idea – I have a dream or something.  The other day I got an image of Michael Jordan holding a bird's nest. There is one from my 'one painting a day' dream blog (www.jeremiahpaleck.blogspot.com) with the balsam airplane and my dad. On the latest one I have this painting where I'm driving down the Vltava in a car. So basically I'll get this image in my head, then I'll just start googling images. It takes a long time and can be really frustrating to find what you see in your head – I don’t feel like I'm a good draftsman. I would have it in my head at first then start searching the images to match it closely so it gets annoying. I use PhotoShop to make the initial collage and I don't worry about the edges of the images I cut out at first. Then clean them up as I start to repaint everything in oil. I only use red, yellow and blue when I paint. I keep my laptop to the left of the canvas so I can use the zoom features and I also have a printed image I hold in my hand to save the time it takes to look from the canvas to the computer.

P: When did you originally start painting from television?

JP: I started because my first private teacher was this guy John Twinley and he told me that I should do some drawings from TV because people are constantly moving and that would be a way to draw people quickly. And it would be a good way to draw things naturally, instead of drawing things when they're still. I was interested then in painting like Rembrandt and I wanted to become a better artist. Then I started studying really classical painting, then I started painting video games. It was a kind of natural shift.

P: That was a natural shift for you? From Rembrandt to Zelda?

JP: Well, yeah. I think my paintings are pretty classical. People always paint their experiences I think. Since I started painting my dreams it's been getting weird. I've started to see finished paintings in my dreams. I basically use images from my experiences, my dreams, movies and TV shows I'm watching.

P: When did you and Travis realize you were both using TV as inspiration?

JP: It was almost a year before we realized it…which is really strange because we've been friends for almost three years. He doesn’t talk about his poetry much; he's so humble but also so irreverent – especially about his writing.

P: Did you immediately show each other your work at that point?

JP: Well he's redone a lot of it since then but he initially brought over about 150 pages of poems. At first we thought about putting it on a web site. Then we said screw that, let's just make a book.
 
Poems I Wrote While Watching TV can be ordered through www.books.blatt.cz, by sending $15 via Paypal to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or at Anagram Bookshops .

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