Theo Thimo has “poet” tattooed on his knuckles. They showed up for an interview at Vineapple Cafe with a backpack full of books — Oscar D’Artois, Lily Lady, Kristen Felicetti — and a generally gleeful disillusionment with society. (They say “no thank you” to gender.)
Thimo considers the traditional publishing of poetry to be contrary to contemporary experience, where “you’re constantly reading stuff, maybe not anything in a sitting-down-with-a-book way, but like as stuff is ticking across the screen.” In their view, a book of poems, like an art gallery, raises the reader’s expectations — “if you go inside a room with white walls you’re gonna be like, well this art better be very artful” — giving the viewer or reader an inauthentic experience. This is opposed to, as Thimo expresses it, “If someone sees art somewhere on the street or they see art when they’re not expecting it. … People see so many more images than they used to 100 years ago. It’s the same with words.”
One of Thimo’s favorite poems is “The Tiger,” widely shared online in late 2016 and eventually attributed to a child named Nael, written when he was 6 years old: “The tiger / He destroyed his cage / Yes / YES / The tiger is out.” Rejecting contemporary literary stereotypes, Thimo tests the limits of the subculture of alt-lit (or at least, what’s left of it). They tell me, “The alt-lit community can suck my d. The alt 2.0, the ‘Dimes Square’ scene [originally, a neighborhood located loosely between Chinatown and the Lower East Side], those people are losers. Dimes Square is like if all the nerds in high school received some conservative think-tank money to make their own cool clique and nobody in real life actually cared.” Thimo prefers to categorize their work in the same vein as memes from Reddit’s r/copypasta and r/nosleep, adding, “I actually had a story that went pretty viral on r/nosleep.”
“The government traumatizes its citizens, and that is used to measure the progress of time.”
Thimo’s day job is in early childhood development. They’ve had poems published by Peach Mag and Tao Lin’s MuuMuu House, and although they’ve previously self-published, the new book was put out this year by Amygdala Press. Trauma in Metro tells a story about the state of America, in a blend of poetry and prose, through a protagonist’s mind-altering experiences. Thimo describes it as the opposite of stream of consciousness — instead, making a lot of stuff short and combining it — with lines such as “materialized from the quickest sperm, now some sixteen years after the attacks on 9/11” and “walking around like some dude w nothing to do, unaware of the current inner workings of my own mind.”
Thimo aspired to work at Vice when they wrote Trauma, in 2014, but they have since lost faith in mainstream media and developed a penchant for researching conspiracy theories. “I would maybe be a journalist if it was, like, the Gateway Pundit. It’s like the conservative fake news place, but they had White House press credentials during the Trump administration,” they joke. (Which is probably a good place to point out that this interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Andrew Scott: Why were you arrested for selling poetry?
Theo Thimo: I was arrested for spray-painting the title of my poetry book on a wall in the summer of 2022.
That’s kind of like selling poetry.
Let’s not focus too much on the arrest part.
Well, it is kind of interesting.
But it was for graffiti. It was for my previous poetry book. And the police didn’t like the title. They arrested me and dropped the charges. They found narcotics on me as well. I was a little worried; I called a lawyer.
Wow, sounds like you got lucky.
Yeah, I can only thank the district attorney. I wrote him a thank you letter. I never sent it, but I did write one.
So, you moved here from Albania?
My parents say I was born in Kastoria, Greece, and then we got deported back to Albania after I was born. I was in Albania for two years. There was, like, a Ponzi scheme at the time that was taking over the government. There was some Bosnian stuff [war]. But we got out of there — got me to America. I was around 2 or 3 and never looked back since, you know? [Laughs]
We moved to Boston. We stayed on some people’s couches, then got an apartment next to my cousin’s place. My dad bought and rented out one floor of it. Then, my dad did carpentry shit.
How did you end up in New York?
I dropped out of college and got into alt-lit and was hanging out with people on the internet, and they’re all like, let’s move to New York. I was around 18, so that was like maybe 2012, early 2013, I would say. I was in L.A. for like half a year.
Who are your favorite poets, living and dead?
I love YouTube comments. I love reading Catullus. He had like only 100 poems that survived in this book, and it begins with him being like, I hope this book of poems survives, which is crazy because it’s his only book of poems that survives. He has other poems where he’s like, I don’t want to get to know you, Caesar. I also like spam and Flarf poetry. I could name-drop some friends: Chariot [Wish], msw [Marcus Scott Williams]. I’ve truly just been reading the Quran, mostly.
So, how much of Trauma is based in fact?
I would say every detail is totally accurate to reality, but everything else is not. The context of everything has been changed. I think every interaction is real, but I think what it meant I would change. I would call it more creative nonfiction over autofiction because autofiction is more stream-of-consciousness, and this was a very heavily edited work.
Chelsea Hodson has this chapbook called Pity the Animal. I wanted to release something of that size or length, and it be a big deal. I don’t think it ever came to fruition, sadly.
In your book, you say, “masturbating sans sexual connotation through the day.” What exactly did you mean by that?
I thought of masturbation as sort of transhumanist. I thought it made you a more powerful person basically, at the time, because you were controlling your own hormones instead of being left to the hormones. I dissociated from the sexual aspect and it became about the dopamine aspect, so it’s like a drug user’s idea of how it works. It’s like pleasuring yourself has nothing to do with the actual human part of wanting to procreate, thinking of someone sexually. In that way, that person is becoming less human.
It was like pressing a button.
This is a very ace-coded book. I wanted to try to redefine what masturbation was with the book to some extent. Now it’s hard for me to think it’s not just addiction to masturbation, and the book is really about addiction. I don’t know that I would write so openly about my drug use. It’s a lot less than back then, currently. It was supposed to be published with New York Tyrant, but the founder died. Rest in peace, Gian. I was trying to make it longer for him, but I couldn’t do it. I just started printing it out by itself because I needed money. I would give them out at parties, and one person was like, my publishing house wants to put this out.
The book is mostly in lowercase. Why make “FOUR KIDS PLAYING SOCCER IN GAZA” all caps?
Everything capitalized is news headlines. The title itself is a news headline from a Russian subway bombing. I remember the headline said “Trauma in metro.” There are a couple of meanings for “metro,” so I thought it was cool.
I just felt like every big — well, I call them psyops. The government traumatizes its citizens, and that is used to measure the progress of time. In a way, it was sort of like bringing people together but in a trauma-bonding-type manner for America. It was just like a person that was masturbating too much, and doing drugs too much, and failing at relationships placed in a political context.
Are you working on anything right now?
Simp. It’s a novella. I’m trying to structure the story so the first half is being a simp, and the second half is finding out how not to be a simp. It’s a culmination of not being in a relationship. Writing the book, I actually got pretty locked into the zone of being a simp; I need to finish it as soon as possible. I have a friend teaching me about topology. It made me love math in a way I didn’t before, which is helping. Hopefully, that will make sense by the end of the book. ❖
Andrew Scott is a Brooklyn-based writer and is an editor at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
