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Interview with Eric Sanders on SUCCUMB
SUCCUMB is a book of poetry that loops, questions, and resists—an interrogation of humanity, technology, mythology, and the war between surrender and survival. In this interview, Eric Sanders discusses the fractured consciousness that shaped the collection, the influence of Westworld and Julian Jaynes, and the fine line between repetition and recursion.
What follows is a conversation about the book, the mind, and what it means to be (or not be) a machine.
Eric: I don't usually repeat myself, but I was in a weird turgid space when I was writing these poems—I collected them in one place because they felt 'of a piece,' not because they were written intending to appear next to each other—half in heaven, half in hell, half in purgatory, and so this monotonous, robotic, repetitive quality intuitively felt like it was communicating something of what it felt like to be in this loop.
Interviewer: That makes sense—there’s a kind of oppressive, recursive energy in the repetition, like a mind stuck in a feedback loop.
Your poems grapple with existential weight—war, time, life, death—but they also have these moments of dark humor, like "A lawn care routine" following "Our swan song." How do you see humor functioning in this collection?
Eric: It's not funny, but I always think real comedy isn't funny. If anything, it's relief—and real comedy doesn't even give relief. Well, it does, but only at the existential level, not in the immediate moment-to-moment level. Maybe they're the same thing.
Interviewer: That makes sense—comedy as a kind of release valve, but not necessarily in a way that makes anything feel better. More like acknowledging the absurdity without offering comfort.
There’s a recurring tension between technology and humanity in these poems—writing on screens instead of paper, being a "flesh and blood machine," even referencing robots and programming. Do you see this as a major theme, or is it more of a background hum in your work?
Eric: Yes, this is the major theme of this collection—humans vs. machines, are we machines, were we always machines, are we becoming machines, where is God in all of this, where was God before, was there God, will there be (a new) God(s), etc.
Interviewer: That tension really runs through the whole collection—whether humanity is merging with machines, always was mechanical, or if there's something divine (or the absence of the divine) in that transformation.
You reference mythology and religion throughout—Horus, God, Heaven, Hell—sometimes reverently, sometimes irreverently. Do you see mythology as a framework for understanding these questions, or are you deconstructing it, stripping it for parts?
Eric: Absolutely, both. I'm looking back to Greece and Rome (and Egypt), mostly, the most 'advanced' societies that informed ours, and seeing what types of myths will/may undergird our new mythologies...
Interviewer: That makes sense—examining the myths that shaped the so-called height of civilization to see what might shape whatever comes next.
There’s a sense of dislocation in these poems—not just between past and future, but even in the present. Lines like "I won’t remember / Yesterday, let alone / Past lives" suggest a kind of fractured consciousness. Do you think this is a product of modernity, or is this dislocation something deeper, something intrinsic to being human?
Eric: I think it's a product of me, for sure—my life is quite fractured, my mind is quite fractured. I'm talking to you from a coffee shop, surrounded by people—I'm going to do my 'remote work' day job in like thirty minutes. So it's all very arbitrary-feeling, and I often feel like I'm some sort of malfunctioning or only pseudo-functional robot, either a very old model or a too-new beta version that doesn't quite work yet, a harbinger of things to come, at best.
Interviewer: That fractured, beta-version-of-a-human feeling really comes through in SUCCUMB—like being out of sync with both the past and the future, malfunctioning in the present.
There’s also a recurring struggle with control in these poems—programming yourself "not to listen to yourself," the idea of life making deals, but on its own terms. Do you see this as a central tension—agency vs. inevitability?
Eric: Absolutely! Westworld (the TV show—I never saw the movie or read the book) was a huge influence on me when it came out (2016, season one). I read Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind right after seeing the show—it was a major influence on Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, the creators—and it blew my mind. And since then—even before, but the show and the book just solidified by search—I've been obsessed with the roots of sentience, reading things like Douglas Hofstadter's work on 'strange loops', etc.
Interviewer: That totally tracks—there’s a real Westworld energy in SUCCUMB, especially in the way you play with self-awareness, recursion, and the tension between free will and programming. Jaynes’ Bicameral Mind theory is such a wild, compelling lens for thinking about consciousness—especially in a world where AI and machine intelligence keep advancing.
Your poem "I am not a bot / But a flesh and blood machine" really hits at this question—do you think there’s a fundamental distinction between human consciousness and artificial intelligence, or is it just a matter of complexity?
Eric: Yes, of course they're fundamentally different, but we are too stupid to understand how. Ironically, probably only AI will be able to truly understand how we're different, and will probably be unable to explain it to us. We're like kindergarteners who are about to be taught by Albert Einstein.
Interviewer: That’s a chilling but fascinating thought—AI might figure out what makes us unique before we do, but we’d be too limited to grasp its explanation. There’s something deeply bicameral about that, too—like we’re waiting for the metaphorical ‘gods’ to speak and explain our own consciousness to us.
Throughout SUCCUMB, there’s a push and pull between surrender and resistance—between ‘succumbing’ and fighting, between inevitability and defiance. Do you see surrender as defeat, or is it sometimes a kind of liberation?
Eric: It's definitely not liberation in the original sense of the idea, the kind you dream about as a child and teenager—there's no Nietzschean 'power' in it, and yet it's something. It's not nothing, to succumb.
Interviewer: That makes sense—succumbing isn’t empowerment, but it’s not pure annihilation either. It’s an act, even if it’s not the one you imagined wanting to take.
The last poem ends with "All fours"—which almost feels like an evolutionary reversal, like returning to something primal. Does that final image suggest a kind of rebirth, or is it more of a collapse?
Eric: Exactly! I wrote that line before I heard about the (now-famous) Miranda July book, which looks awesome, and feels like it might be playing with a similar (head)space.
Interviewer: That’s a great connection—July’s All Fours plays with regression, animality, and transformation in ways that feel like they’d resonate with SUCCUMB. Your ending really carries that eerie ambiguity—whether it’s de-evolution, surrender, or something more elemental, beyond human categorization.
If SUCCUMB had a soundtrack—whether a specific album, artist, or just a general sonic atmosphere—what would it sound like?
Eric: Haha—I started listening to Poppy's amazing album Negative Spaces on a loop right after writing these poems, I think, so probably/definitely her, even if these poems presage that.
Interviewer: That’s perfect—Poppy’s Zig and Negative Spaces both have that synthetic-organic tension, like a human becoming machine (or vice versa). The way she blends mechanical coldness with raw emotion feels very SUCCUMB—that uncanny space between surrender and defiance.
If someone reads SUCCUMB and comes away with just one feeling or realization, what would you want it to be?
Eric: Don't succumb.
Interviewer: That hits hard—like the book itself is the warning, the loop playing out so the reader doesn’t have to live it.
Final question: Do you think you’ve personally escaped the loop, or is writing SUCCUMB just another iteration of it?
Eric: It's a partial escape—I can write new things now. So it worked.
Interviewer: That feels like the best possible outcome—like SUCCUMB was both the loop and the key out of it. A necessary exorcism.
This was a great conversation. Thanks for letting me dig into it with you.
Eric: Thank you so much! That was fun!