Seven years ago, I stumbled upon Mark Leidner’s writing during a studio visit with the abstract painter Alexander Ross. Flipping through Beauty Is the Case That They Gave Me, I stumbled upon this stanza from the poem Gossip:
Talent is to honesty what love
is to gossip, if we are poetry.
Or is it, talent is to honesty in poetry
what gossip in poetry is to love in life?
I don’t even care. Okay, really,
this is going to be over soon. I want a million dollars,
and you, but I would take either.
But I would rather have you,
And gossip moves through love
like money through time,
I basically do.
Reading Leidner’s poems for the first time was like realizing I’ve spent my whole life living in a foreign country where I don’t speak the native tongue, and after years of resigning myself to being the village idiot, I unexpectedly encounter a language that fits snugly into the boot of my thought, which in turn leads to the epiphany that I might belong to this earth after all.
Even though Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me was out of print and I was unsuccessful in manipulating/browbeating Alex Ross into giving me his copy, Leidner’s poems lingered like the imprint of Scooby Doo on my face after being hit really, really hard with a Scooby Doo bouncy ball in a vicious game of dodgeball.
Upon moving to Portland, I met the venerable Jeff Alessandrelli, founder of Fonograf Editions, who published Leidner’s latest book of poems, Returning the Sword to the Stone. My friend Derek Hunter Wilson (whom I met thanks to Jeff– Shoutout to Jeff) and I loved this collection so much that, without consulting the author or publisher, we decided to create a musical adaptation of the poem “Being With You”:
This is the concatenation of events leading to my interview with one of the greatest contemporary poets, Mark Leidner. If you are searching for a reason to be proud to be an American, look no further than Returning the Sword to the Stone, written on American soil.
Yang-Thompson: I’m reading Novelist as a vocation by Haruki Murakami. In the essay, “When I became a novelist,” he tells the story of how, during a baseball game, he had the epiphany that he could write a novel. “I can still recall that exact sensation. It was as if something had come fluttering down from the sky and I had caught it cleanly in my hands.” Prior to this spontaneous insight he had never seriously considered being a writer.
I’m astonished that civilization hasn’t been obliterated by a meteor shower—there’s no reason for meteors to swerve for Planet Earth, after all. How and when did you become a writer? Was it something impersonal and out of your control, like getting struck by a meteor?
Leidner: I was in college and didn’t know what to do with myself after graduation. I didn’t want to be a lawyer, and I was applying to law school anyway. That was how lost I was — when I took a random creative writing class for an easy A. The workshop aspect completely fascinated me. I had always wanted to change everything about myself, but I had no courage to do it in real life. But in writing, I was able to be all kinds of different people. Taking that class was maybe similar to a jock participating in a school play as an obligation only to realize they love acting. Receiving feedback about poems and stories from regular people, as opposed to the kind of feedback you get from a teacher on essays and such, answered some deep-seated need of mine for self-expression. I also was in awe of my teacher, Calaya Reid, not only her skills at inspiring us and dealing with the blistering humanity that resulted, but also her position. It had never occurred to me that you could get a job reading and discussing stories and poems. I didn’t know then that such jobs are hard to get and pay little, and if I would have known, I wouldn’t have cared. It was a revelation that this was a possible form of employment. So I happily abandoned law school and took more writing classes.
Yang-Thompson: Did you have a mentor that challenged you to become the writer that you are?
Leidner: One time my poetry teacher Mark Levine spent half an hour of our workshop detailing why my poem was one-dimensional and uninteresting. He said the poem was a one-trick pony — could only be glibly ironic — and had nothing else to offer, but he showed how this was true one moment at a time, specifically analyzing every word, punctuation mark, line break, sentence, and syntactical element that I had chosen. It was the first “close reading” I’d ever received or witnessed, and it eventually became the way I would read all poems, my own and others’, critically.
Afterward, a few students asked me if I was okay, implying that it had been too confrontational. Although I had been a little uncomfortable, the critique seemed sincere, and afterward I came to respect Mark Levine for the risk he took in being that direct, risking being disliked by me or the other students, perhaps because he perceived that I was the kind of person who would respond positively to that kind of challenge. Throughout the workshop, he argued that poetic images could transcend our conscious intentions for what we wanted our poems to communicate, and so we should embrace them.
After that workshop, I became determined to weave imagery and irony. That led me to Chelsey Minnis and other writers who did this. From them I learned even more, but I’m not sure I’d have been consciously pursuing that with the same level of interest if my teacher hadn’t confronted me with the aesthetic rut I was in, and in a way that motivated me to seek new models. While the same approach might not have worked for someone else, it gave me somewhere new to go that I enjoyed going to. Maybe I would have ignored his advice if he had taken a different approach with me. I’ll never know.
This interview was conducted via email. On February 17th, after not hearing from Mark for weeks, I sent the following email:
“Dear Mark,
On behalf of the beings who will benefit from this interview, I am here to harass you for a response.” (Side note: I am also conducting an interview with Eileen Myles. Three years later, I’m still waiting for a response to the first question.)
Leidner: When I was Dean’s student, I read his books to try to mimic his voice, but I never succeeded. Dean’s imagery, similes, and thought development, for lack of a better term, are more nimble and lyrical than anything I could write. Failing to write a good Dean Young poem, while frustrating for years, eventually led me to something closer to my own voice: less nimble and lyrical, more high-concept and narrative.
As a student in his workshop, one time I turned in a poem that made fun of something that people take seriously. The opening lines were the only funny part, and the middle of the poem was just spinning wheels in the same schtick without any new good lines, and the ending was a callback to the “good” beginning. Dean was sympathetic to the satirical intention of the poem, but he passionately scolded me that circling back at the end to recycle a previously used punchline. He said something like: “Don’t go backward, go forward! And don’t stop! Keep going! Until you find something new! Take us somewhere new! Somewhere sincere! Beyond irony!”
It was something I was probably already doing in my best poems, but I think is outburst made it rise to the surface of conscious awareness and stay there for a long time.
Yang-Thompson: I read an interview in Bookforum this morning where this film critic barfed on substack, saying “social media has no standards.” So if you feel more inspired to talk about your substack and why you publish there, feel free…
Leidner: One time I used to follow this person who really upset me because I hated everything they said. Then I realized that if I never read them, they would never upset me. Then I was happy after that, except for all the other things that made unhappy.
I use social media because it makes me more likely to begin and finish writing. I hate being rejected by magazines, which is what happens 99% of the time I submit, and sometimes it takes months or years for them to get back to you. Even people who solicit writing from me often reject what I send them. It makes me never want to start or finish anything. But on my own blog I only have to satisfy my own internal editor and I don’t have to wait months for publication that may never come.
I may also be drawn to writing things that might not fit anywhere else. A lot of my stories are too long for magazines, and many of my poems benefit from a layer of context that would be lost if they appeared anywhere other than on my blog or in a book of mine.
Yang-Thompson: Do you listen to music while you write?
Leidner: This and this and this.
Yang-Thompson: I was looking through old zines and found several where I referenced your poetry. Your work has really seeped beneath the skin.
In The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover, you wrote, “Early on in his career, the poet sold his soul; he then spent the rest of his life trying to redeem it; as a result, he was highly motivated, and his ambition was sincere.”
I xeroxed this aphorism and typed “True Story” above it. Do I dare say that I am interested in what it means to make universal art? Without ever having met me, your work has expressed feelings that dwell in the core of my being.
Thank you for your contribution to American Arts & Letters,
Ash
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Elegy for Pangaea by Mark Leidner (Fonograf Books, 2026)
Mark chews the fuck out of a premise, and he discovers the sublime in that chewing. In his poem Turning Forty, Mark Leidner pushes Scream masks to their ecstatic, holy extreme. What I love about Mark’s poems is that I don’t have to try to like them, nor do I have to read his poems ten times in order to comprehend them. I laugh and feel things right away, and then end up reading the poems ten times over because I want to make my friends laugh and feel things too.
The opposite of Ekphrasis—
I made this collage in response to a line from Mark’s poem, Turning Forty:
Georgia O’Keefe’s oeuvre if she only painted exclusively Scream masks.
More on the book here: https://fonografeditions.com/catalog/fono-46-elegy-for-pangea-by-mark-leidner/
The product of a Chinese immigrant and a white polygamist from Fort Scott, Kansas, Ashley Yang-Thompson is the author of How to be the Worst Laziest Fattest Most Incontinent Piece-of-Shit in the world EVER and Still Worm (Bateau Press). She is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Equity Fellowship and Mass MoCA’s Assets for Artists grant. She almost won a Pushcart Prize for her poem White Fur Rug. Ash currently lives in Portland, OR.
The product of a Chinese immigrant and a white polygamist from Fort Scott, Kansas, Ashley Yang-Thompson is the author of How to be the Worst Laziest Fattest Most Incontinent Piece-of-Shit in the world EVER and Still Worm (Bateau Press). She almost won a Pushcart Prize for her poem White Fur Rug. Ash currently lives in Portland, OR.