Travis Jeppesen is an American writer, artist, poet, novelist, and art critic whose work crosses poetry, fiction, criticism, visual art, performance, and object-oriented writing. His books include the novels Victims, Wolf at the Door, The Suiciders, and Settlers Landing; the poetry collections Poems I Wrote While Watching TV and Dicklung & Others; the nonfiction book See You Again in Pyongyang; and the essay collection Bad Writing.
Jeppesen developed object-oriented writing as a hybrid creative-critical practice that attempts to encounter works of art through language. His project 16 Sculptures was presented in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and extends writing toward installation, sound, and visual art.
“Us Anyway”
“Us Anyway” moves through mutated bodies, Prague, Armageddon, factories, angels, pornography, politics, music, jokes, bodily fluids, and declarations about poetry. The poem’s language keeps generating strange compounds and tonal collisions, making verbal instability part of its method.
The poem is crowded with cultural material, yet its speed prevents any one register from controlling the whole. High and low references, bodily imagery, apocalyptic language, humor, and literary self-consciousness meet in quick succession. The reader experiences excess as structure.
That excess gives the poem a deliberately unstable surface. Words seem to mutate under pressure, and grotesque compounds create a vocabulary suited to a world where identities, genres, and social categories keep shifting.
Grotesque combination
Jeppesen often builds intensity by combining elements whose usual contexts clash. A sacred image can appear beside pornography, a political phrase beside bodily fluid, or an art-world reference beside crude comedy. The effect produces friction inside the sentence.
This combinatory method enlarges the poem’s emotional range. Disgust, fascination, laughter, anxiety, and aesthetic pleasure can arrive together. The poem uses those mixed reactions as evidence of a culture saturated with images and languages that rarely stay in separate compartments.
Bad Writing and literary experiment
Jeppesen has repeatedly explored writing that embraces excess, failure, awkwardness, embodiment, and disruptive form. The title Bad Writing names a long-running interest in literary practices willing to absorb disruption into their structure.
Within that framework, “badness” can function as a productive category. Awkwardness may expose conventions that normally remain invisible. Excess may carry experiences that elegant compression would flatten. An unstable voice may register a fractured social environment more accurately than a smooth one.
This concern gives “Us Anyway” a useful later context: the poem’s volatile diction and grotesque comic pressure belong to a broader commitment to writing that tests what literary form can accommodate.
Object-oriented writing
Jeppesen’s object-oriented writing turns criticism into a more immersive encounter with artworks. The method seeks a language for approaching an object from within the pressure of attention, allowing description, projection, speculation, and response to intermingle.
This practice bridges art criticism and creative writing. Rob Stanton’s ekphrastic work offers a related way of seeing how visual art can alter the structure and pressure of literary response. The object remains the focus, while the prose records the encounter as an event.
16 Sculptures extends the method across sound and installation. Writing becomes one component of a larger artistic arrangement, and criticism enters the space of exhibition.
Fiction and genre instability
Jeppesen’s novels also reflect his interest in extreme states, social dislocation, and unstable identity. Victims, Wolf at the Door, The Suiciders, and Settlers Landing move through very different narrative worlds while preserving a taste for psychic intensity and formal risk.
The movement between poetry and fiction matters because each genre changes the scale of his experiment. Christian Peet’s hybrid writing provides another example of literary practice moving across poetry, prose, documentary impulse, and experimental narrative.
Criticism and art worlds
As an art critic, Jeppesen writes from sustained engagement with visual culture. That experience gives his literary work a strong sensitivity to objects, surfaces, bodies, performance, and the institutional settings in which art appears.
Criticism also introduces another mode of address. A critic has to describe, interpret, judge, contextualize, and communicate an encounter. Jeppesen’s hybrid practice repeatedly lets those tasks bleed into creative writing.
A cross-genre practice
Across poetry, fiction, essays, criticism, visual art, performance, and object-oriented writing, Jeppesen treats genre as a changing set of possibilities. Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé’s interdisciplinary practice offers another contemporary model in which poetry, visual art, publishing, philosophy, and hybrid form interact.
That range places Jeppesen within contemporary American poetry and a broader international tradition of writers who move freely among literary and artistic forms. “Us Anyway” condenses many of these tendencies into one volatile field of language.