On masculinity, making art in late-stage capitalism, gatekeepers & how to find readers

in conversation with Joshua Turek, Poet & Comedian

Artwork by Mariam Chagelishvili

I can’t remember when I first came across Joshua’s existence over on Instagram, but whatever that day was, it was blessed by his disarmingly charming blend of poetry, every-day absurdism, & somehow…amidst that…serious engagement with culture, art, politics, people, life.

Also, with all of these “big” things, it’s just so rare to come across something excavated anew on social media, so much so that it makes you feel like a baby duckling swimming in sparkling wine, drunk on the pleasant weirdness you’re surrounded by.

I mean…just take a look:

See what I mean? So it was inevitable that I wanted to engage in SERIOUS CONVERSATION with such an awesome human. & usually when I want stuff, I make it happen (I have fairy godparents obv).

Oh & Joshua’s new book of poems Of Dumb Importance is out now & y’all should get it yesterday. 💙✨

SHANNAN

“I haven’t learned to let creativity die.” This line from your birthday essay feels like a thesis for your entire body of work. Can you talk about what keeps you committed to making things, even when the world feels like it’s unmaking itself?

JOSHUA

Yes! Creation and destruction are our two options and I’m grateful most of my attempts are toward the former. None of it is perfect, we aren’t achieving any sort of purity in our attempts to create and often in the Western world the impulse is allowed atop mounds of destruction but we all recognize the intention of the energy when we feel it. It’s a great curiosity toward having kids is how that is the ultimate human act of creation and its what allows for all these other forms of it.

Creativity is inherent in us. That Picasso line about how every child is an artist the challenge is to remain one as we get older. By design we have the creativity stripped from ourselves through so many mechanisms and then we are fed it in commodities of the acts.

Somehow what we are doing at the pottery studio, in a painting class, by ourselves in our journals are messaged as inferior compared to the scale of Avengers movies but that is not the case. And so yes, I’ve been gripping tightly to creativity despite the marketplace discouragement.

My wife says I hate when people talk about giving up on their creative pursuits and I hadn’t noticed it but I attempt to talk them out of it on an almost compulsory level.

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KARAN

Hah, I love your commitment to the spirit of creativity, Joshua — it really is of utmost importance in our age we refer to as “late stage capitalism” without truly grasping all its horrible complexities.

Would you like to speak about how corporations benefit from us moving away from our inner selves? Also, the acts of creation you mentioned — pottery, painting — are physical and embodied.

What are your thoughts on creativity that is digital — I’m especially thinking of the way social media has allowed people to explore their inner selves the way they never could before, but also how it has separated all of us further from each other and our own selves.

JOSHUA

Thanks Karan for such a thoughtful response. I believe the evidence makes clear that it benefits corporations to isolate us from communal experiences. They’ve commodified behaviors that were never products, they were behaviors. That in and of itself is so damning.

I think of expression in the digital realm as a means for amplifying what should be a physical experience. It’s been the most gratifying part of releasing two poetry books.

Sending out a physical being to other physical beings and engaging on a material level. Same with comedy and putting on shows. Still products but to infiltrate the market and social media with humane messages are our acts of creative resistance and they are up against a lot so it’s ok if we are only moving the needle bits at a time and not with purity.

Nudging ourselves back toward communal creative experiences and explanations of our existence together. I’ve been thinking how in a communal society stand up comedy would be totally different and possibly unnecessary. How it’s really a release valve for the neuroses of behaving according to the totalitarian world of our work lives and the social lives colored by this work under late stage capitalism.

And how our own self-interrogation and deconstructing of our discomforts in this market based society is really an exercise in just feeling ok for a second about it but it’s still so far from our orientation with being a human on animal levels of experience often shrouded from us.

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SHANNAN

I’m fascinated by the title for your upcoming book. Of Dumb Importance feels jarring and yet humble, a beckoning…a reckoning? I’m not sure whether to smile or furtively lean in, and perhaps that’s the point.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you landed on this title, on titles or naming things/feelings/failures in general, and of course about the book itself.

JOSHUA

Thank you for noticing and even validating what I was hoping came through. I’ve questioned whether that title is off-putting. I was struggling through a lot of life uncertainty and even with a shot nervous system was trying to get to that playful element of being creative and so I sort of aimed at what my mission statement toward my work was and it was to try to say the things I felt were important in the dumbest way possible.

And as a comedian and poet that piece of clarity helped me. Then I thought oh that’s a good title for the book. I feel like “Of Some Importance” is a mini phrase we implant in our sentences and so playing on that felt a little musically in line with the rhythms of our common language use.

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SHANNAN

Your work often returns to the ordinary details of living—walking a dog, riding the bus, making someone laugh—as if they’re sacred and also totally absurd.

What draws you to the dailiness of things, and what do you think lives there that we’re not paying enough attention to?

JOSHUA

It’s a pretty bourgeois sensibility that’s overtaken the arts. Cost of living is so difficult these days that often it's the progeny of the rich who are able to explore their creativity and we get works reflective of that and then the rest of us are tempted to aim for that. But life is what’s happening between the transactions and without ease, it’s supposed to be in conflict with itself.

And I find these details to be the actual texture of living. It took me a while to get to them though. It’s like how I’d been working in restaurants off and on for fifteen years when I finally read Anthony Bourdain and was like “oh some people find this shit romantic?” Oh yeah I guess it is, whoops. Life is still happening even when it’s not the things we want served to us on a platter.

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KARAN

I’m very interested in this division between the working class aesthetic and the bourgeois — because there is a very clear distinction — and though most people know that this division exists, nobody seems to acknowledge it.

I was speaking about this to a poet the other day and she was telling me how in her MFA workshop, folks write about stuff like getting nails done and relating it to be a huge part of their identity (the whole mythos of self-care BS, etc) but if she were to bring in a poem about person who works at the nail-salon as her mother once did, they wouldn’t know how to speak about it.

I also find poetry that has anything to do with money severely absent from the scene, and I suspect it’s because most of these people have never had to worry about money. Some of us have managed to move outside of that life by way of making a life of letters, but what about those that haven’t had that privilege?

Do you see a world where more working-class people are able to explore their creativity and use expression despite the capitalist hell breathing on their necks?

JOSHUA

Currently the economic hardships in the United States for the working class are only growing due to the upward vacuum of our resources to the 1%. Something like 10% of Americans own 89% of the stock market.

The rest of us are being picked down to our bones as we labor and/or are told our labor can be done by machines with no financial recourse. Our tax money is funneled to the worst people who care the least about humanity. Most writers I admire still have day jobs.

You read John Fante books about being a struggling writer in the 1920’s and how he’d get paid a few hundred bucks for a short story and that is more than most today. The written word was more popular back then but also the value of creatives was rewarded. I always have a part time or full time day job and don’t foresee a scenario by which I won’t.

My retirement plan is to eat the best foods I can (closest to their natural state), rest when I can, enjoy what’s left of the natural world, and work a job until my last days. I believe this strain is terrible for us as poets but it is a conflict that allows us to communicate more urgently.

I believe being at street level is the most important thing for a creative. Pain is the fertile soil for creativity but the bourgeois sensibility corrals it into colorful little pastures that can deceive us with their playfulness and that’s fine. I love Curb Your Enthusiasm, its a rich guy with nothing left to do but argue about petty things with no consequences.

We’ve been trained to lesser trash too. I noticed when reading a book I will start calculating the main character’s finances with the information given and always want them to be ok financially, why?

Why am I reflexively worrying about a fictional character’s finances? Why must they be ok? Is that the sole requirement of being able to tolerate the trials and tribulations of life and wellbeing for a character? Knowing they can at least pay their rent I can handle anything else that comes to them? It’s twisted.

Not sure if that makes sense but we’ve been infected by the bourgeois sensibility in the art world because they’ve controlled the gears and levers of what gets seen and read to reflect their bourgeois worldview. Our job as the working class is to tell the truth to each other and demonstrate the beauty in our station of society and how it’s not a mark against us but rather a collective experience most of us are suffering through unnecessarily.

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SHANNAN

What does the word “masculinity” mean to you right now, and what role—if any—does poetry play in reshaping it?

JOSHUA

First off, these questions are personal and amazing. Thank you for them. I made a video about the bell hooks book “The Will to Change” which was a book my friend and manager Drew recommended to me when we first met riding bicycles together on the beach. I feel like hooks articulated masculinity so well. So piercingly empathetic and accurate.

To me masculinity is the embodiment of characteristics historically associated with men through their interactivity with the environment and which roles they performed in human survival according to their bodies. Masculinity has since been hijacked by popular media often shaped patriarchally into a market sense of the word to sell us behavior modifications and products to align with consumerism and the division it encourages.

I don’t believe masculinity has a gender. I also don’t believe it is something to be performed as an outline of manhood. bell hooks says within the word masculinity is the word “mask”. And in the video I made a joke about how the spellings are different but I get what she’s saying. And it’s so accurate. Masculinity associated with domination rather than a greater strength to care for people is a source of current crises.

We no longer interact with the natural world for our collective identity and so a real confusion is reigning and a lot of young men are moving toward these digital mentors providing easy and lazy answers that ultimately will be at war with their soul.

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KARAN

That’s beautifully articulated, Joshua, and I agree with your estimation of the situation. I’m sorry and even afraid that this is happening at such a large scale. Is the future feminine, then? Because the strength to care for people, nurture, tenderness, beauty, kindness, building communities are generally thought of as feminine traits.

I also see masculinity and femininity beyond gender, so I’m coming at this from the same angle as you. And how do we correct our relationship with nature, if that’s at all possible at this stage? I’d like to think it is.

JOSHUA

I think the future needs to correct the scales that have tipped too far into this demented controlling dominator model and however that happens is good.

Yeah, if those traits are associated with the feminine bring it on. It’s also only because the masculine has been so misconstrued and distorted like we were talking about. I see my friends, dads, raising their kids in such gentle and loving ways and I know it’s in us despite the pressures of our work lives to break us down so that our home life becomes mirrored with dominion.

The union of masculine and feminine is beautiful and full of the right blend but I don’t know. I get pessimistic. People don’t read enough. They don’t challenge their assumptions, the propaganda. The violence celebrated by soldiers bombing children and blue smoke gender reveal mockery rising up from the wreckage putting it on the internet. It’s like what is happening?

I live so often in ideals but the evidence is damning. I’m trying to confront the material reality of things and it’s bleak and trending in wrong directions. And yet things can change. Change is inevitable. Goodness is frequent. Yes, bring on the feminine and whichever version of masculine helps strengthen, not exploit it.

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SHANNAN

I am really struck by your reading of masculinity as something not inherently gendered, and how you trace its shift from a kind of environmental, survival-based identity into a marketable product—something sold back to us as performance. That line you quoted from bell hooks, about the mask inside masculinity, feels devastatingly true.

I keep thinking about the moment we’re in, where so many young men seem lost, clinging to digital “mentors” offering easy scripts for power and meaning. Do you think there’s still something of value in the word masculinity itself – something that can be reclaimed or reimagined – or does the word carry too much damage now? What might it look like to rebuild that term with care, with curiosity, with real connection at the center?

And connected to this and our literary sphere, I’m thinking of that viral article that was published in the NyTimes towards the end of last year: In it, David J. Morris talks about how young men have retreated from fiction, and how that retreat feels less like a cultural shift and more like a kind of starvation. He’s not nostalgic for male dominance in literature—he’s grieving the loss of stories that gave men space to wrestle with themselves, to be morally torn, emotionally awake, imaginatively alive.

Do you think literature – poetry, the novel, the essay (maybe less so?) – still has the power to call men back toward themselves? To offer something slower, more honest, more redemptive? Or are we too far gone from that possibility…for now, at least?

JOSHUA

Damn yeah when I made that video about bell hooks. I said something like “I want to use my strength to enjoy my life and survive. I don’t need to conquer anyone.” And I think speaking to male physical strength is something that can be really beautiful and helpful and that’s the simplistic idea I have of masculinity that then is genderless but aligned with that original source.

But if we have to let it go and come up with new words and ideas to get there without all the toxic baggage I’m fine with that too. I was hanging out with my awesome 26 year old Gen Z friend today who was telling me how his generation had the worst movies to grow up on and I thought damn, that’s such a symbol of the moment young men came into, even in the contrived sense of what the media delivered to them. I feel sympathetic that they are turning to these idiot influencers because it’s nice having easy solutions to chaotic problems.

The sense of meaning has been stripped from society in the United States. It’s a deluge of media and inequality and ecological degradation. Between the institutions and the devastation wreaked, the lines to our natural usefulness have been severed. This is life in late stage capitalism. I can sound like a granola broken record but it’s true.

The market is eating itself and there are new victims enraged that their privileges won’t save them, that their disenfranchisement seems to be deepening. Fast food employees don’t smile at you anymore because there is no hope for a future of material stability, the possibility of working hard and owning a humble home.

They never should have been smiling with how exploited their labor is, but now without even the hope of the false dream sold to us, that unvarnished veneer is a source of despair and sometimes the easiest answers can placate that despair. Poetry, books, music, they are creative entryways into alternative thought. None are pure but some bring empathy better than others. Information is the world's greatest currency and right now the destructive forms of it are winning.

We must still provide alternatives and sometimes an easy answer can be one aligned with love and care if it sparks an impulse toward beauty. I will always believe in the benefits of creative expressions even if they might lose plenty of battles. I often think of the much maligned movie “Cloud Atlas” which is full of camp but which I profoundly loved the one time my brother and I saw it in the theaters years ago.

There is a rebel in a future dystopia being interviewed by a detective who caught her and after sharing her story to the detective who interrogated her he asks how she can feel all right knowing her story will never be told and she tells him it already has been told. He had listened to her and was changed and she recognized it. Change is inevitable and we can nudge it along and seduce it with our words.

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SHANNAN

Much of your writing carries this quiet rage at systems—capitalism, empire, ego, algorithms—while still believing in people. How do you hold that contradiction? Or do you think contradiction is the only honest form left?

JOSHUA

This reminds me of how I once heard the “true measure of enlightenment is how comfortable we are embracing our own contradictions.” And let me tell you I am not comfortable at all.

Yeah, being a member of the working class as long as I have, it’s been a lot of slow dawning realizations through experience and reading and listening that I have seen through the inhumanities of the systems in place and also how unnecessary they are for humans to flourish.

It’s wild how any time someone reminds me that my self worth shouldn’t be tied to my productivity, I’m relieved hearing that as if for the first time. These concepts of selfhood and measurement are baked into us so early and constantly through the language and reward systems in place that it’s a constant battle to reclaim what we believe this human experience to mean to us.

And how I wonder who we’d actually be without the overbearing systems whose sole purposes are to control and extract. Yeah I have rage and communicating it creatively feels slightly better than the impotence of stifling it in the general sense of trying to feed myself given the rules laid out.

It’s also just sort of fascinating unraveling all that we’ve been told to accept without question. It is a bit of a puzzle and puzzles are fun, even if this puzzle is sort of a bunch of life or death questions.

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SHANNAN

Do you think rage becomes more legible when softened through humor or art? Or does softening it risk diluting its power?

JOSHUA

I think it’s more palatable. It becomes smaller bites you can handle with a measure of necessary sanity to find solution or grace or respite from the agony. Yes, more legible, better to throw that spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down in the form of humor or art.

Share with others in that way even to those who understand your cause because even allies don’t like anger for too long, it’s activating and only the shortest term solution best kept on a low simmer to tenderize hearts. In my opinion.

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SHANNAN

You’ve written across forms—poems, essays, stand-up, storytelling. How do you decide what kind of vessel a thought or feeling needs?

JOSHUA

It’s usually what the mood calls for, often evident but sometimes what starts as comedy looks more like a poem by the time I’m done writing it. I’ve been able to sort of cross wires and bring poems into comedy videos and even on stage as bits and then re-engineer them back into writing in my books and they feel good there too.

One thing I’ve been thinking is how comedy should be sad and poetry should be funny. Sort of simplistic and not totally accurate but I think it helps take pressure off the approach.

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SHANNAN

That is a really wonderful way of looking at it. You’ve built your own way through the literary world—self-publishing, touring, building an audience without gatekeeping. What do you want poetry to feel like for readers who find it through you? And also, what advice do you have for poets entering the world of publishing?

JOSHUA

I’ve been thinking about this because I don’t think I write poetry that serious, studied, poets might be drawn to. I think my poetry is a creative conversation I want to have with regular people where I get a little more license than one would in everyday conversations.

We live in a day and age where everyone is talking at us so it’s nice to find ways to soften or awaken those exchanges through poetry. My advice is to continue expressing and explaining your experience to yourself and others. Then in the age of social media just post it or don’t.

There are all kinds of moral reasons why social media is bad but this is the way we are finding each other at a larger scale but that doesn’t mean it’s any more significant than at a personal confidential scale, a love letter you never send or do. Put together a reading, an open mic, hang some flyers up at the coffee shop and do it the real way. But think about other people you want to show something to.

I think we were misled into thinking all art has to be incredibly personal but what was left out of that message is how only if the personal is done to reveal something closer to universal. And per any sort of commerce around your art, the gatekeepers are either pretentious people often born of privilege and/or computer algorithms, I’ve had better luck with the computers, better personalities in my opinion.

But yeah you gotta learn the language of the marketplace if you are trying to make a little pocket change from it. So many traditional forms of it are in shambles anyway which honestly feels liberating as someone with a lot less involvement in it to lose. I hope you feel excited by the fissures too.

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SHANNAN

Haha, that is funny and deeply inspiring! Interviews are often spaces to discuss our best work, but I’m weird and curious so – tell me about something you’ve written that you’ve hated and how or if you entered into it further, changed it, pieced it together (or maybe ripped it apart). I’d also love to know about your relationship with revision.

JOSHUA

Haha. I’m too thankful for writing to hate writing because I’m just grateful for the outlet. I hate not writing at times, that’s for sure. My dad used to say “hate is a strong word” but I use it casually all the time.

There are times when a piece feels a little like I’m pandering and I can feel a little self hate bubble up there. I just deleted a couple poems last minute from my new poetry book because I was like “who is this for?” “are you trying to impress people with how clever you think you are for no good reason?” yeah catching myself cheating the meaning for a conceit is a reckoning at times.

Or even when it’s deep but smells of self aggrandizement I try to nip it. I have become a lot better at revisions over the years but it took work because in my early 20s I thought the brimming energy of the impulse was enough and then the world told me it wasn’t so many times I had to believe the world (even if I don’t totally).

Social media posting has been interesting because sometimes your impulses really do have something captivating that people respond to which an editor might’ve beaten out of it. The best is when you write something down first in a journal and then find it later so that is already one layer of revision right there.

But yeah, how to keep the initial potent energy of the piece is most important to me. If it doesn’t have that potency then I’m just circling the drain and usually realize it. Then clearing the weeds around the potency so it can grow is a lot of fun. I love these questions thank you.

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SHANNAN

You say: “I have seen through the inhumanities of the systems in place and also how unnecessary they are for humans to flourish.” That word—inhumanities—won’t leave me. It makes me think of the Humanities—what was once seen as essential not just for artists but for anyone trying to be human in the world. Art, literature, history, philosophy. The whole point was to confront beauty and brutality at once, to be humbled, to hold contradiction, to find language for the unspeakable.

I can’t help feeling like something has come undone. Between what’s happened to education, to the Humanities, to how we talk about meaning now—with AI, with market language, even with some kinds of progressive institutional speech—it can all feel hollow. Like we’re wearing the Halloween costume of the Humanities personified, as they were.

But then again, maybe something better is forming in the cracks. Maybe we’re slowly breaking free from Eurocentric gatekeeping, from the myth that brilliance has to speak a certain way. Maybe the future of the Humanities doesn’t look like what we knew, maybe it’s more diverse, more collective, more transdisciplinary, more embodied. Less obsessed with mastery, more attuned to care.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: I feel torn. There’s sweetness in what’s been lost, yes—but also deep possibility in what’s emerging. A future that might be less extractive, more honest. One that’s still being written.

Do you feel any of that? What’s your sense of where we’re heading?

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JOSHUA

I feel that. Nature breaks down and rebuilds, why shouldn’t we as components of it ourselves? And yeah, so much of what I was trained to find human was geared toward a Eurocentric fill in the blank power hungry institutional detachment from nature, collectivism, matriarchal, equitable, caring ways I believe are inherent in us prior to the propaganda.

You speaking to what the future could hold I believe is already here in the present day, “diverse, collective, more transdisciplinary, more embodied. Less obsessed with mastery, more attuned to care.” That is absolutely already here, it’s just not the mainstream marketed ideals of the creative industries product catalogue.

Our value system has been wrenched toward thinking the scale of artistic merit is based on how high up the ladder of market it climbs, how many books sold, poems published, comic book movies made, but drum circles on the beach, dance gatherings, poetry open mics, camping trips, community organized care all exist powerfully in the present.

How that becomes the dominant narrative without dominating is the huge question we find ourselves stumped by but yes imagining our ways and living, moving toward. There’s a big groundswell of anti-celebrity sentiment on the internet I find interesting, the cracks in idolatry.

Losing hierarchies and building collective conversations and tapping into the ongoing communication everything is already having with itself below the noise of human machines is where my mind goes in hope. Moving in steps toward the world of care and creativity I believe you’re talking about, it’s possible, there’s evidence everywhere, it just needs to reach around and through the barriers to conjoin.

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SHANNAN

You give me hope, Joshua! Sometimes I think of what my daughter might ask me when she’s older, like hey, mom, what do you do? Well, she’s already asking that, but it might get more pronounced, more seriously inquisitive about the nitty-gritty. I feel like the first thing I say might have to do with literally anything other than the thing I feel myself to be at heart. Like, I can’t just answer without a blink: “I’m a poet, Ana.” It’d feel funny, a farce, even facetious (god so many f’s).

And I wonder why that is. Maybe you don’t feel this—I’d love to hear if you don’t. But I know a lot of writers, poets, artists who carry this gap. Like, I’m not a poet in that sense. I don’t do poetry. I do… [insert job here].

But if the world were ending—and I don’t mean existentially, I mean the whole capitalist scaffolding just vanished—then yeah. I’d scream it from the rooftops: MOM’S A FUCKING POET.

Or you know, some variation. How do we reach this point, though, right now? How do we, in a way, die before dying, as poets, as people…is that even needed, for true creative liberation…which in some way is a bit of a paradox.

JOSHUA

I’m on the side of “MOM”S A FUCKING POET”. There are so many more intentionally destructive things to identify with. Lie to your kid if you work for a weapons manufacturer or are an executive at an oil company. The worst thing about a poet is they might risk being a bad one. Whatever bad means.

Not too many poets are out there intentionally inflicting evil with their poems and if so, they are not who you think about when thinking of poets. If you’ve written a poem and align your movements, observations, closer toward poetry than the language written on billboards and pointing you toward gas stations on the freeway than you’re a poet. I remembered putting comedian and poet in my instagram bio almost as a joke because I liked seeing them next to one another but then it was like “no that is true.” It’ll defrost if you say it enough.

In the general context of equating income with self worth and societal worth there is a self consciousness, but how beautifully defiant: telling someone you are a poet. I know what you mean maybe, poet can risk being like a sour coffee shop personality, oppositional never do well, an over indulgent ego tripper, one who tries roping you too far into themselves with the very I’m a poet answer to the question, I don’t always love that energy sure.

What about “I write poetry and find ways to survive with it and through whatever else I have to do to stay alive to write more poems.”?