In tandem with the release of the collection Clinical, Brutal... An Anthology of Writing with Guts Christopher Nosnibor will be interviewing some of the contributors to the book about their contributions, their writing methods and their outlooks more broadly.

Karl van Cleave is something of a mystery to me. I didn’t find him: he found me. nevertheless, the small quantity of his poetry that I have seen is, without doubt, both clinical and brutal, and for this reason I was more than happy to accept the pieces he offered for inclusion in the anthology. On the back of this, I decided to interrogate him in order to learn more about the man behind the words.

CN: For many, the pieces in the Clinical, Brutal anthology will be their first encounter with your writing. For the uninitiated, how would you describe your writing, and would you say that the poems in the book – ‘SPAMONYE’ and ‘Room’ are representative of your work more broadly?

KVC: I would describe my writing as brutal, and, to a lesser degree, clinical. The writing process, which is primarily derived from the cut-up technique, is in itself quite clinical also, while committing acts of brutality upon the works of others. I would say that these two pieces are entirely representative.

CN: What inspires your writing?

KVC: I suppose to an extent my experiences, although those experiences tend to be more internal or psychological than actual or physical these days. I tend not to get out much. But I read a lot, I spend a lot of time on-line and have a fairly vivid imagination and memory. I have almost perfect replay.

In terms of literary sources, Sade is perhaps the most obvious but also greatest influence on my work. The man was a genius, on so many levels, and produced some writing which remains unsurpassed in terms of its imagination, flair and force. I also admire Peter Sotos, for his extremity and his fearless prosody. Some horror, although most bores me. the same is true of much so-called pornographic writing, which influences me in the sense that I strive to write something of a higher standard. I aim to cater for more refined tastes. Lautréamont. Burroughs. Not only did he give us the cut-up, but also some magnificent work that crosses so many boundaries and combines multitudinous areas. The way he drew on medical journals and other such non-literary sources in his fiction writing is very much something that informs my own work.

CN: There’s a strange sense of detachment in your writing – the human element seems somehow diminished, even in the passages where senses and sensations are the subject. Your work is also, overall, particularly dark it its nature. Where does that come from? Is it representative of your world-view?

KVC: I take a pretty dim view of humanity, in the main. I'm not into all this elevated self-aware bullshit about life being sacred. It's complete hypocrisy. We'll eat the flesh of most animals that dwell on the planet. We're permanently at war with ourselves as a species and are happy to kill and maim in that context, and yet in the same breath bleat on about life being sacred and how important and superior we are. It's a delusion. We're all expendable.

Furthermore, these are dark times. While emerging technologies fascinate me greatly, and the rate and direction of the development of the Internet in the last five to ten years has been truly remarkable, and has done more than simply change almost beyond all recognition the way we communicate on a daily basis and the way that information is transmitted and received, the fact it has also changed the way we think, our perception of the world and one another appears to have gone almost unnoticed. We perceive individuals as avatars, emoticons, somehow disembodied. Simultaneously, objectification is more than simply rife, it’s become our culture. The medium of the pop video and the wall-to-wall pornography that accounts for a remarkable and disproportionate percentage of Internet content substantiate this claim and are evidence in themselves.

I embrace all of this within my work. I do not claim to have anything specific to say by way of a commentary on these maters, they simply are.

Life is pain, interaction torture, an exchange that occurs within a complex nexus of power relations. This is what my work represents.

CN: Some of the images in your work are rather shocking. Is this the intention?

KVC: I suppose it is, yes. Obviously, what one individual finds shocking, another may find entirely mundane. However, there is a certain consensus regarding acceptability, and those who transgress the boundaries set by that majority consensus are generally condemned as deviants, dangerous to society. I like to think that my writing somehow challenges those boundaries.

CN: Your persona is rather enigmatic, your biography disturbing, if it’s to be believed. How much of it is true?

KVC: I could not possibly divulge such information. To do so could not only prove incriminating, but detrimental to the mystique.