There are numerous subjects you wouldn’t expect to see pop up in poetry. Yet arbitrary topics — seemingly impossible to be imagined interacting among the precious line-breaks of contemporary poetics — find their way; topics such as pro wrestling (Parts Unknown by Michael Holmes), Andy Warhol (No Work Is Finished by Liz Worth), or stuttering (Blert by Jordan Scott) are but three examples of recent poetry that has taken unique subject matters and made an entire book from the findings.

In late 2015, a small, independent publisher (Talonbooks) in Western Canada continued this trend by delivering Rom Com, a double-authored poetic holiday book hit, which has been deemed “extremely fun to read” by The Globe and Mail. Vancouver-based poets Daniel Zomparelli and Dina Del Buccia answered several questions about their debut collaboration.

Your promotional campaign thus far has been a type of romantic comedy of its own. It’s as if, in my opinion, your media coverage has been akin to that movie with Cusack and Zeta-Jones, America’s Sweethearts, you know, but with less hostility and conflict. What was the creative process like in terms of collaborating and figuring out what aspects of this cinematic genre you wanted to cover?

Dina: It was exactly like America’s Sweethearts, but more Canadian. Lots of us saying sorry for something small and insignificant. And I did so many shots of maple syrup.

Daniel: We tried to come at the poetry through as many angles as possible and with as many conventions of romantic comedies as we could. We even attempted to structure the book in the same narrative arc as a rom-com. It was a fun and weird project to pick apart a cinematic genre that isn’t really created to be picked apart. Also I don’t even want to talk about Cusack unless it’s Joan.

Dina: Joan forever! We really tried to cover so much ground, but there are still things I think of now that aren’t in the book because it can’t be everything. But collaborating gave the book two perspectives and two lifetimes (up to now) worth of rom-com thoughts and feelings.

How does gender and stereotype inform your collection?

Daniel: For me, it was about not having any real way to place myself in a romantic comedy, which is a genre I’m obsessed with. So usually I would be approaching the poem thinking of the lack of queers (and lack of POC, trans, or genderqueers) that gave me ways to snake into the poem. I think of gender as this frustrating thing that as a gay man I was never a part of. You’re not allowed into the gender club as a queer when you’re a kid. Or, if you are, it’s because you overly play into the gender roles. It’s interesting to see gender played out in rom-coms because they have to reinforce stereotypes to make that work. Even when they try to flip them (ie, Trainwreck), the concept fails because they are still gendering stereotypes. I’m keeping myself from going on a rant. What I’m trying to say is that we’re all flesh sacks and we’re all just looking for another flesh sack (or more) to be warm against.

Dina: I second everything Daniel said, but also I think he should have ranted more. When writing I would think about my reactions to gender stereotypes and the representation of female characters in rom-coms, which of course have changed as I’ve aged. I have more complicated feelings about movies I watched as a younger person because I wasn’t aware of the sexism present in those films. As well, as a younger person, I was drawn to male characters in a lot of rom-coms because they were usually the ones who got to be the funniest most often. Or at least they were funny in a more obvious way. Women were there to be pretty, or to have a lot of feelings, or to change the man into a better man. Which is all so gross and limiting.

Boobs and Assholes is sort of an A and B side if you will. Will you? There is a bit of anxiety and frustration, even rage in these pieces. Morrissey once answered, when asked why The Smiths latest (and last as it turned out) album was titled Strangeways, Here We Come. He said something like he felt like throwing his arms up in the air and saying I wouldn’t be surprised if we (The Smiths) ended up in jail by year’s end. “Twisting dicks into pretzels” and “sphincters holding back so much shit” seems to throw human body parts in front of a hail of emotional bullets. Are you at all angry? Did some of these poems need to be angry and confrontational to subvert the pared down and at times trite tropes of the rom-com genre?

Daniel: Rage is Dina’s game. I’m learning from her. I’m interested in dicks and assholes for different reason.
Dina: Yeah. I think anger was a good tool for making a point about some of the saccharine or unrealistic elements of romantic comedies. Why shouldn’t we feel angry? I also think anger can be very funny. Which I hope it is in the context of these two poems. Dick pretzels are funny to me, and I hope to a few other sophisticated individuals,  I also think our bodies can be very funny. We make weird noises and secrete fluids. These descriptions show our bodies in a nonsexual way. Bodies are not merely these flesh sacks (to quote Daniel) of skin that romp around in matching bra and panty sets, or fancy boxer briefs so they can have fake sex on screen. We are made up of blood and guts and we poop! The fetishization of the same orifices that perform both sexual and these other gross functions is also funny to me. The same orifices. It’s funny. And maybe a bit rage-inducing, in relation to the way bodies are represented in romantic comedies.

Could you describe what informed the sex scene pieces written in script format in the collection? I felt it was a real red herring in the collection but that it worked in terms of dealing with the machinery of Hollywood and the restrictive, dare I say, policing of the female and male bodies as it relates to depictions of intimacy.

Daniel: Dina came up with that and I responded it to. My response was obviously that queers rarely get sex scenes unless it’s an “indie” or “edgy” film. Poetry is great because it always was up for queer sex. It’s interesting to see the two genres put together in one form and see how they clash and fail and succeed.

Dina: I like the idea of thinking about sex scenes as red herrings. Because sometimes they are leading us in the wrong direction. We’re both always interested in experimenting in our poetry and I thought, why not adapt screenplay format and see what happens. And what happened was that we each used it to pick apart one of the most clichéd parts of every rom-com. Sex scenes are formulaic. Screenplay format is highly structured so we adapted and worked within it to make some creepy hybrid that was part commentary, part poem, part actual sex scene. And it seemed like a fun idea at the time.