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We’re more than halfway to our fundraising goal! Only 12 days left– pre-order our new titles and help us to publish five new tomes in 2016 by Myriam Gurba, Lily Hoang, Jacqueline Kari, Meghan Lamb, and Sade Murphy!
Kenji Liu
Describe yourself as a poet in three words: Anise, cartographer, salt
What is your chief misery as a poet: At the moment, having to write mostly in English.
What you appreciate the most in a poem: The will, capacity, and skill to address social justice issues in some way while avoiding cliche.
If not a poet, what would you be? A sweet red bean coffee mochi pan with a tall peach green tea.
Who is your poetry hero and why? I don't really subscribe to heroes, but I greatly admire the work of Don Mee Choi and Bhanu Kapil, among others.
What is your idea of happiness? To be able to discover joy in almost any situation.
What is your present state of mind? Contemplative.
Your favorite poem, ever: Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, the whole book.
Read Kenji’s “Deconstruction: Citizenship” at The Rumpus
Nikki Darling
Describe yourself as a poet in three words: image hungry, soul rippy, wet
What is your chief misery as a poet: Nothing. Poetry is one of my misery free activities. I write poetry to avoid misery, to makes sense of it. Essay's and criticism bring me misery.
What you appreciate the most in a poem: Does it gut punch me. Does it take my socks off and fuck me.
If not a poet, what would you be? I became all the things I wanted to be performance artist, feminist, essayist, poet, stripper, novelist, dancer, actor, lover.
Who is your poetry hero and why? Nikki Giovanni. She packs that Gemini power wisdom realness magic solution based word beauty. Truth. She is her own everything.
What is your idea of happiness? Spending the day with friends or lovers engaged in activities that bring joy. Aka, Disneyland high on an overcast day with the person I love.
What is your present state of mind? It's rainy in LA, I'm high and listening to Barracuda by heart. I feel gravy.
Your favorite poem, ever: Couldn't choose, but my favorite books of poetry are, The Awful Rowing Toward God, by Anne Sexton and Those Who Ride The Night Winds, by Nikki Giovanni. If I could make a cradle between them, I'd live there. Oh, and Adrienne Rich, Diving Into the Wreck. Each is necessary for my philosophical life and sanity, but there are so many!
Read Nikki’s digital collage/poetry chap Ascension at Light and Wire Gallery
Nina Puro
Describe yourself as a poet in three words: Rupture, then suture.
What is your chief misery as a poet? White supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy + the fact that poets have to eat, interact, and monetize their poeming within it.
What you appreciate the most in a poem: In reading: involuntary indrawn breath, e.g. Dickinson's top-of-head thing. In writing: those rare, frabjous occasions I am a conduit and the poem springs out fully-formed (as opposed to a torturous process of trying to make murky nebulous dreck hold itself together, e.g. what it is 98% of the time).
If not a poet, what would you be? Part of me wants to say-- in all seriousness-- that I would be a) dead, b) crawling there much faster, or c) dead inside. Another niggling part wants to say that perhaps I'm just a poet because all it requires is a pen and paper, not expensive classes. As a person who intrinsically requires a creative outlet to survive, I might've found another art form. Who can say? I'm stuck here now.
Who is your poetry hero and why? I have several and meet a discover one every week. But in the last year, Krystal Languell, because she is a badass feminist, a workhorse, a tenderheart, and a role model in what it is to kick ass and take names equitably. Besides all the good she does as a poet and for the Belladonna* collaborative, her generosity has been instrumental to me personally on both social and intellectual levels. She has made me feel like I am a valued part of a community of poets, and she has validated my perceptions and intuition to the extent that the framework by which I view the world has shifted.
What is your idea of happiness? I had the hardest time with this question, which is odd because I am happy many, many times a day. I've answered and deleted a lot. I don't think it is something that can be properly described with language. It’s sometimes about understanding or seeing or being present for another person (or oneself or the world); sometimes a random lovely alignment of Maslow’s heirarchy of needs glowing like a beacon within oneself; sometimes how strange and wonderful and ephemeral being alive is.
What is your present state of mind? Slouching toward happy hour.
Your favorite poem, ever: There is no way I can answer this question. I couldn't even rank my top 50. But Lynda Hull's Adagio in a course-pack in undergrad made me start writing again, switch my major, get an MFA, etc. It's therefore probably the most influential poem to my formative baby-poet self.
Read Nina’s work at Sporklet
Adam Atkinson
Describe yourself as a poet in three words: Painstakingly imprecise!
What is your chief misery as a poet? There's that famous Oscar Wilde quote: "When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss money." Perhaps only in this one respect does my life feel like one long dinner. Even as I type this, I suspect another ancient Mary Poppins banker has died, mid-sentence, discussing art, with no young banker stepping in to steward that crucial first half of the quote. Meanwhile I am quite the dutiful steward of my half. I was born there.
What you appreciate the most in a poem: Poets often describe poetry as a distillation of language, and I can hear that case--but it's too easy when I can trace a poem's methods in the moment, as I'm encountering it. No thank you to a language distillery tour with free samples of wisdom at the end. Instead: language that seems like an uncanny double of the language I know and use every day, an uncanny double of the language I suspect others might know and use every day, an uncanny double of the language of colonization, an uncanny double of feelings or thoughts I can identify as human. I speak, read, and write in English, and I don't have time for the ethical/historical implications to be glossed over by familiarity. Sylvia Plath's "The Applicant" comes to mind. So do poems by Douglas Kearney that are just this absolute war zone of language that (in Sarah Smith's words [http://gulfcoastmag.org/journal/25.1/no-explode/]) seems to be throwing its voices from afar. Or no, maybe I mean from deep within? Once I am trying to locate that, I am forced to try and locate myself too.
If not a poet, what would you be? In all seriousness, dead maybe? Dead maybe. I remember being 18, closeted, discussing Rilke in Yona Harvey's intro class and quaking with anxiety about whether I would ever sufficiently need poetry. I didn't have to wait long.
Who is your poetry hero and why? Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Zachary Harris, Ben Pelhan, Anne Marie Rooney, and Sarah Smith. Also known as Line Assembly [www.lineassembly.org]. Naming one of my own poetry crews might be self-promotional, but after my last answer I feel momentarily liberated from caring. We toured the midwest and northeast in 2013, but well before that we were sustaining each other in clusters of hope and hustle. Which is really the 'why': Very slowly, starting in 2001 for me, we coalesced into a micro-community in Pittsburgh, and these people taught me what literary community is all about, what labor goes into that, and why I need it in my poetry life.
What is your idea of happiness? The end of institutionalized state violence. Touring with Line Assembly and meeting more of the millions of extra-academic poets in this country. Kissing boys between readings and workshops. Fashion without capitalism. (For now, such happiness is not present. But José, I will keep feeling for the warmth of a radiant horizon line!)
What is your present state of mind? Coffee.
Your favorite poem, ever: Right now I'm hot on Marion Mackles and Emilia Scifo from Kenneth Koch's Wishes, Lies, and Dreams. It's a photo finish, and my heart is a lens cap.
I Wish
I wish I was a beautiful chick who could be in any period of life
In the future in the past would be nice
Being Cleopatra in Egypt with handsome men at my feet
How about Annie Oakley putting on a show
Or being a pirate enjoying the gold
Even the first woman president in 3002
Also a bloodthirsty vampire scaring the men
Or Einstein inventing a potion for invisible guys
Maybe the first to live in an alligator plane in 2026
- Emilia Scifo, sixth grade
[untitled poem with the prompt "Lies"]
I am in New York in a cow's head.
I am still in New York in a cow's head.
I am still in New York in a cow's head.
Now I'm in New York in a flower.
I'm now in New York in a cow's head.
Now I'm in Spain taking a bath.
Now I'm in Spain taking a bath tub.
Now I'm in New England eating my friend in the bathroom.
Now I'm still in the bathroom eating my friend but I'm on a cow.
Now I'm in New York in a cow's head.
- Marion Mackles, fourth grade
Read Adam’s work at The Volta.
Mary-Kim Arnold
Describe yourself as a poet in three words: undone by longing What is your chief misery as a poet: all the poems that have moved me, but that I've now forgotten; all the people and things I have loved and now forgotten; forgetting. What you appreciate the most in a poem: long, slow burn. accumulation. sonic texture. music. If not a poet, what would you be? for a time, I thought I might be a dancer. Who is your poetry hero and why? I think often of Carole Maso, and a little slip of paper taped to her office door that read "no heroes." I didn't understand what she could have meant at the time, but I think it is about trying to see people that we admire as whole, flawed, complicated; that to see them as heroes perhaps diminishes some of their humanness, their complexities. All that having been said, having had the chance to see Marie Howe, Anne Carson, and Claudia Rankine on the same stage at AWP was pretty great. Marie Howe read from her series of poems in the voice of Mary Magdalene. Anne Carson read the The Albertine Workout, and Claudia Rankine read from Citizen. To see these women radiate their power; it elevated us all, I believe. What is your idea of happiness? sharing a lovingly-prepared meal with people I love; talking about art; reading, talking about books. knowing love. What is your present state of mind? well, the winter has finally released us, and I was surprised by daffodils in my front yard yesterday, so I am feeling rather fine; hopeful, like the future is rich with possibilities. Your favorite poem, ever: oh, well if one way to think about "favorite" is "familiar" or "deeply-felt," I will say "First Fig," by Edna St. Vincent Millay:http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/3298 My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
Read Mary-Kim’s “The Vanishing” at So and So Mag
Mike Young
Describe yourself as a poet in three words: Orange bus socks What is your chief misery as a poet: The way every poem you feel good about is itself so desperately gulping that it believes it's the last poem you'll ever feel good about, and you always kind of think it's right. What you appreciate the most in a poem: There's a particular highway you can drive down in Northern California where you exit the redwoods and you're suddenly on these cliffs above the Pacific. Some poems also do that, and that's what I appreciate. If not a poet, what would you be? If I were to swap tuned language for something else, it would probably be for a tuned body, which means I would play tennis.
Who is your poetry hero and why? Hard to pick one! I'm inclined to think of people alive, for one, who have sweated and spread poetry in the most graceful and inclusive ways, so I'm inclined to think of somebody like Dara Wier, for instance. What is your idea of happiness? Even harder than heroics. I'm on a train right now through a rain soaked Washington, where all the early blossoms are taking their oops-one-more-round-of-Winter bath. I'm happy toward some visions and less happy toward others. When the sky gets busier, people get shyer. One meditation technique is you check in with your body, starting with your feet and moving up, but I would hate to be the muscle I forget about. Luke is on the phone with Philly, but it's a person named Philly. It might be Filly. Last night, I said "Oh I don't think I'll ever have that 'high school friend who ends up later in your world in an interesting way' feeling." And Leena said something like "Yeah, it's like, you look at your feelings and you're all, oh darn, all I got was 'I'm in love,' was really hoping for that 'high school friend reunion' one, oh well."
What is your present state of mind?
Your favorite poem, ever: Haha, impossible! But here's a classic:
A Woman Driving A Stake Into The Ground At Midnight-Frank Stanford God, I have not forgotten you For sending all my children into your old ice boxes. I remember that goat You let them follow with a compass, Those wooden wheels you let them roll And break their first silence on. I watched those beautiful kites you let them glide, Their hearts all balls of string. When they were young and unfucked And old friends with the moon Spreading its cream over their lips As they slept, you came in The window with the light Like a cat on their necks. You leave When you want, the dark honey Of their breath you store In the catacombs of your lungs. Alone and licked, their dreams All rat-bitten and full of fever, They remember your words, Droppings on the white sheets. Where are the dead? In my arms, their panties pulled high, Their eyes and teeth all small and even. I remember your sadness, too. A pan of wash water. I threw it out in the chicken yard each evening. I wanted my love to be an orchard, Rows of thornless berries. I wanted my love To be death for the suffering. Like you, I knew a woman once. She was carrying a child. One night she cut it Out like a vine With her husband’s razor. I didn’t want you To forget my love Is a dark and rotten fruit on the ground, A deathbed for your dreams, And I don’t know you, now, Your sadness or your mark On everything we bury.
Check out Mike’s book Sprezzatura from Publishing Genius.
Ginger Ko
Describe yourself as a poet in three words: I testify against
What is your chief misery as a poet: Unkindness, cruelty--whether active, or in the form of apathy or myopia
What you appreciate the most in a poem: When a poem is built with the personal as politicalIf not a poet, what would you be? A baker, or a dog trainer, or owner of a therapeutic cat cafe with sliding-scale services (this might still happen one day, Bastet willing)
Who is your poetry hero and why? Oh, this may be my favorite question, and I will unfortunately give a cop-out answer. I'm at a time in my life where I feel myself still on the brink of many things: I'm about to get married, about to start grad school, and still working towards what I'd like to do with my poetry. So when I meet women poets, and read their books, take their classes, meet their beautiful partners and children, and watch them persist against the capitalist racist patriarchy with a really good sense of humor, it is the most soul-bolstering, heart-feeding thing. They are all my heroes.
What is your idea of happiness? family, community
What is your present state of mind? restlessness
Your favorite poem, ever: Audre Lorde's "A Woman Speaks"
Read Ginger’s poetry at Twelfth House
Brooke Ellsworth
Describe yourself as a poet in three words: A total bitch.
What is your chief misery as a poet? Profile pictures.
What you appreciate the most in a poem: Endlessness also single-line stanzas.
If not a poet, what would you be? A satellite probably.
Who is your poetry hero and why? Answering this by quoting David Bowie’s response to the question, who are your heroes in real life: The consumer.
What is your idea of happiness?
What is your present state of mind? Misquoting Pessoa: “I wallow like a pig in my destiny.”
Your favorite poem, ever: Sylvia Plath’s “Mirror” has been important this year. So have Harryette Mullen’s Urban Tumbleweed and CA Conrad’s Ecodeviance in their entirety. E.E. Cummings’ “The Great Advantage of Being Alive” was important when I was young. Hearing Caroline Bergvall read and speak has had a sustaining influence. I also had a really critical moment rereading Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet on a boat last fall.
Read Brooke’s poems at Coconut.
Oki Sogumi
Describe yourself as a poet in three words:
Sloppy, in conflict
What is your chief misery as a poet:
CAPITALISM KILLS MY FRIENDS
What you appreciate the most in a poem:
Interest in sabotage. Time-theft & understanding urgency. The ability to extract and then smear shit onto a page. Maps that don’t make sense to surveillance, but send all their triggers off with warning bells.
If not a poet, what would you be? Living in a warmer place.
Who is your poetry hero and why?
Not one person, but everyone I want to have a feminist sleepover with, all in one place and time. The feminist sleepover is the protagonist, holding that time and space, without dissolving contradictions. We’d live there a lot. Poetry would be more possible.
What is your idea of happiness?
The Paris Commune, but not in Paris and not over, etc.
What is your present state of mind? Like I want to wrap my body in a pink fringe and pretend that is clothes. A few nights ago I had a dream that still seems to be in the air--
A dream where you make out with so many friends. And you hold their hands. And make them cancel their other plans. And you make ravioli, watch them go from translucent to golden, and eat them for breakfast and eat it while touching their face. Just walking around the cities from friend to friend to friend. Everyone else who’s an asshole just might as well not exist. You politely shrug and the friends all know about waiting for them to leave, and then if they don’t, gently pushing them out the door. You forget to do basic things because of just being in love. You ride the bus and keep sliding the card but it's always the wrong way oops. And again and again but it doesn't matter. When you haven't seen someone in forever, there is a kind of mutual pouncing, in the grass full of clovers and daisies, but the pounces are slightly off time so as to recognize the hesitation and then the affirmation in the other person. Like everything had to be a little off balance to be just right.
Waking up it feels like a nice transmission of affection, from everywhere I guess. It's sunny outside finally.
Your favorite poem, ever:
A tie between--
Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
&
People gathered around a riot video, gleaning and whooping.
Read Oki’s “Notes on Glazy Places (seeeeeeing like that), Part 3″ at Drunken Boat
Sara Woods
Describe yourself as a poet in three words: milky orange trying
What is your chief misery as a poet? Tiredness
What you appreciate the most in a poem: Thick rubbery qualities
If not a poet, what would you be? More tired than usual
Who is your poetry hero and why? Renee Gladman, because her poems got so long and thick they became a series of novels that lived in themselves
What is your idea of happiness? A world without fences, without people on top controlling others below.
What is your present state of mind? I just left a beach.
Your favorite poem, ever:
Short Talk on the Truth to Be Had From Dreams by Anne Carson
Seized by a sudden truth I started up at 4 a.m. The word grip pronounced 'gripe' is applied only to towns, cities and inhabitations; the word gripe pronounced ‘grip’ can be used of human beings. In my dream I saw the two parts of this truth connected by a three-mile long rope of women’s hair. And just at the moment all the questions of male and female soul murder, which were to be answered as soon as I pulled on the rope, broke away and fell in a chunk back down the rocky chasm where I had been asleep. We are the half and half again, we are the language stump.
Read Sara’s work at Be About It
Shamala Gallagher
Describe yourself as a poet in three words: doubt-wild, desirous, ecstatic
What is your chief misery as a poet: That race and class exist, that social inequality exists, that some people live constantly between jail and homelessness and between violence and temporary respite. That I am not one of these people and that I don't know yet how to write for them or on their behalf. Another, much smaller misery: that I identify as "of color" but am taken for "white," and that I identify as "queer" but am taken for "straight."To try to work out these troubles, right now I'm not writing poems but instead a book of weird essays called Mooncalf.
What you appreciate the most in a poem: A sudden burn like a shot of whiskey and an ensuing awakeness and clarity that would not follow from any earthly whiskey.
If not a poet, what would you be? A public defender or nonprofit immigration lawyer who works long hours, has perfect fluency in Spanish and three other languages, lives alone but is rarely lonely because she sometimes invites her clients over for tea in the evenings to speak to them in their languages, who drinks lots of coffee and no alcohol and speaks to her (my) mother in Hindi and who is stunningly fashionable (though, like me, she shops mostly at thrift stores and is messy and tattooed--but unlike me is VERY, VERY BRILLIANT AT DRESSING)--her brilliance at dress is a repository for the rest of the poetic imagination that is not swept up into her ethical and political work, and it is largely unrelated to and dismissive of conventional categories of beauty.
Who is your poetry hero and why? Any poet who writes when no one likes her work yet. Any unpublished poet who really believes Rilke in his first letter to the young poet: "Go into yourself. Finds out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple 'I must,' then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse."
What is your idea of happiness? Late spring or long summer. Waking early to write, going for a run in the evening, knowing I am working on writing something and have enough money to live and that Adam is happy or at least all right and hopeful and that I have many friends with whom I can talk about ideas and I have the most beautiful cat in the world and a tiny and soulful dog and I have not closed my eyes to poverty and oppression.I have another idea of happiness that occurs in absence of the preconditions for happiness and is senseless and desperate and wills itself into being.
What is your present state of mind? Nervous and happy.
Your favorite poem, ever: Right now it's Inger Christensen's alphabet. Everyone told me to read it and I don't understand why I didn't read it immediately.
Read poems by Shamala at Timber
Sandra Simonds
Describe yourself as a poet in three words:
What is your chief misery as a poet? My death drive which is almost always in overdrive.
What you appreciate the most in a poem: I like a poem that is able to produce a complex feeling of desire, lust, thought, hope, despair--fuck it, I want everything. If the poem doesn't give me the world, it is wasting my time.
If not a poet, what would you be? A doctor, specifically a pediatrician or an OBGYN
Who is your poetry hero and why? So many. Paul Celan was very important to me because of his ability to unlock senses of despair. Ditto Plath. I have a tendency to relate to poetry suicides. It's a thing.
What is your idea of happiness? Happiness is basically irrelevant to my life. I am not even convinced happiness is ethical.
What is your present state of mind? I'm feeling like someone who has been recently separated from a partner of over 10 years. Grieving.
Your favorite poem, ever: I'm trying to think of the poem I go back to most often. I think Shakespeare's sonnet that starts "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes"---I think that this poem is unexpectedly revolutionary in its politics because he's talking about how one must endure, go on, despite being in a state which one cannot endure. So, it's in a sense saying what Beckett said, probably even more famously (for writers), I can't go on, I'll go on. But mad props to the poet cause he uses a fucking lark to show that.
Read Sandra’s poem “Poetry is Stupid and I Want to Die” at The American Poetry Review
Monica McClure
Describe yourself as a poet in three words: cagey, disputatious, flirty
What is your chief misery as a poet: feeling special
What you appreciate the most in a poem: Slippery logic and the distinction of a particular mind at work.
If not a poet, what would you be? A journalist
Who is your poetry hero and why? Mina Loy because she wrote a feminist manifesto that blew away centuries of mystification. She also had amazing style. She was famous in America for her fashion sense before she even got here.
What is your idea of happiness? The negation of drudgery? It changes. I'm addicted to change, quitting, temporality and adrenaline.
What is your present state of mind? Pleasantly panicked/motivated. Is hungover and over-caffeinated a state of mind?
Your favorite poem, ever: I don't know why, but it's "Rain" by Frederick Seidel.
Read Monica’s “Tender Data” at Cosmonaut Ave.
Roberto Montes
Describe yourself as a poet in three words: And but then
What is your chief misery as a poet? Lacking the second stomach capable of digesting pobiz roughage
What you appreciate the most in a poem: A willingness to be undone that doesn’t attempt to obfuscate the fear of the undoing
If not a poet, what would you be? Interesting at parties.
Who is your poetry hero and why? Bill Knott is a hero of mine because he lived in a way that challenged the institutions of poetry even as he stood to gain from it. He would often redirect the opportunities he received because of his prestige and cultural status to his students. There are many stories of Bill Knott being solicited from Big Time magazines only to politely decline and instead suggest one of his students’ poems for consideration.
What is your idea of happiness? Being able to write when I need to write and, when I don’t, being able to stop.
What is your present state of mind? Unreasonably sure
Your favorite poem, ever: Favorite is difficult but here is a poem by Bill Knott that stays with me
At the Crossroads
The wind blows a sheet of paper to my feet.
I pick it up.
It is not a petition for my death.
Read Roberto’s poem “By A Passive Arrangement” in 12th House
Natalie Eilbert
Describe yourself as a poet in three words: I resist this
What is your chief misery as a poet: I feel I have locked myself into writing about the same subject matter—trauma—for years. I thought that perhaps I only recently started writing about this, but then yesterday I had to put my Google Docs in alphabetical order to find something I was working on and, to my chagrin, discovered somehow all these (bad) poems from 2008 and 2009 were there; I was talking about it then, in florid empty words yes, in awkward raiments, in all this failed wizardry. But I could say “dragged into a room” amidst that blasted diction. I was thinking about it then but I didn’t have a clear enough language yet. There is this fear that if suddenly the curse of trauma left my head, so too would the spell of my work. The irony that the central ballast for my work is actually the terrible actions irrevocably done to me without control or thinking is certainly chief in my mind, and the paradox trembles under my vertebrae. This shitty semaphore of mind/body interruption. I think about this about 700 times a day, and still I write the matter. I trap it under the same shitty bowl. I twirl the pest around in my hands and decide this will be the pest to undo all my neurological tangles, if only I look at it from a different angle, if I only this time I notice its eyes. I capture it in a different form, with a different understanding, this time underscoring forgiveness, and I let the damn thing go. Other times I burn it in a pot to soot. I wake up with a different feeling, and I think this feeling will bring me succor until I touch my body and remember again that the curse isn’t memory anymore—it’s iterated itself into the skin, and the days are just a seam I have to push myself against to endure the same thinking differently. How I fixate on the past as I attempt to wriggle myself into everyday tedium, when identity becomes remainder in this pendulous sucking, all this plops down into the rendered fat I call my process. I’m sick of it; I keep going with the sick of it.
What do you appreciate the most in a poem: The inarticulate scream of my limbs when I read something outrageous. Everything is body-central. Let me read you this line from a book I’ve just started by Gale Marie Thompson called Soldier On, because it is the first book next to me as I type to you and I like proxy referencing: “It’s easy to understand this quest for new pasture. / A long migration through ceramic French doors.” I’m still a sucker for prosody, I can’t help but love the chains of structure. But when the music syncs with a centralizing logic, it breaks my heart. I love how, in a poem, the precision of structure is sometimes the kill-switch needed for a systemic meltdown. I love dual machinations. I love how we can spell ruin and pain and joy by moving words around on a page an exact or inexact way. Emily Dickinson says there’s a certain slant of light that oppresses, and of course duh that is the impact of a line (but and also always death too).
At the same time, I love when a poem declines discipline in favor of conceptual dismantling. Not capital ‘c’ conceptualism—we are learning quickly that capital ‘c’ conceptualism has a built-in white supremacy. I am not speaking of that, but of how concept assumes a failure over the poem, and presides over that failure. A wobbly failing, an anguished (mis)guidance. Think Dodie Bellamy or Alice Notley or Bhanu Kapil. Language is the salvo necessary to commit to a failure landscape of their choosing. These are the best poems in my mind, poems that invigor a new form of worshipping over place, over present. One archaic usage of “weird,” in fact, is worship, and so there lies innovation. This is a writing somatic and bright and unbuckling. I look up from their books and see a world of devastated materials. It’s the closest I get to the sublime.
If not a poet, what would you be?: I used to dance and loved it for a moment until my body became the tool and spectacle simultaneously. Isn’t that always a woman’s dance?, so I left. I used to play guitar and loved it until I found I could understand myself better in written form. My first love was painting and I painted and painted and painted, but I painted metaphors and I found that in order to explain my paintings, I had to write explanations and demand that my visuals be read. I started school as a journalism major. I didn’t really want any part of journalism but the pastiche of journalism: a notepad, glasses, herringbone jacket, an inexhaustible appetite for new information. I dreamed of being a math genius. I come from a family of physicists, and I wanted to impart formulas over these everyday miracles to explain to the world that when a pen drops, we’re witness to a miracle. It is a miracle that a pen and a car can be dropped from the same height and land at the same time on the same surface; that gravity is not dependent on weight, only resistance. I spent a lot of time dreaming about the things I would do that aren’t poetry, but when I think of these things I would do that aren’t poetry, they sublimate eventually into poetry from their thingyness.
In terms of what I’ve actually amounted to that is not poetry, I write essays now, so I suppose I am also an essayist, which means I am always in the throes of attempt. In my poems I interact with trauma in such a way as to welcome others to think about their traumas, and in certain ways, this makes me feel like a counselor. I would welcome that at any point, and I don’t know if that is outside poetry, but I would like to build a safehouse for anyone who has ever been ripped open. I’m an editor of a literary magazine, so that is not poetry but it means I am always chewing on poetry. I handle ebooks all day at my dayjob and that is also not poetry. But HTML coding is a means of translating intention into a blank space to form text, and it is code that asks that blank space for certain order. I don’t think that’s outside poetry either. I think HTML coding is closer to poetry than painting or short stories get. <span> </span>
Who is your poetry hero and why?: I only get one? Fine. Claudia Rankine was the first poet who blew the gasket out of what a poetry collection could do. We call poetry a collection of poems because we seem to assume that the collection is just that—an aggregate of disparate poems that form a singular intelligence when placed back to back. Publishers don’t like poetry collections because they are not marketable, because they resist paraphrase when the rest of the civilization of literature enlists paraphrase. I don’t call Rankine’s books collections—they are not collections. They are methods and arguments that demand refutation on system, place, and people. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely unshackled me from this sense that a poem is up to delicate mischief. Fuck that. It isn’t delicate mischief what she’s doing, it’s a pummeling of compassion and spit and blame and relinquishing. The poem is up to rupture, exploding the surface, decentralizing all the worst parts of governance, systems, institutions. I have been thinking about the phrase “momentary lapse of happily” from her first book for what feels like a century. When Citizen came out, I cried before I even received it, so badly did this country need repair when it could do nothing but fuck itself over like nobody could see them there doing the horrible fucking. This country needs to be sutured shut. We’ve all been walking sore, with a limp, as we glimpse the decades before this moment, and the mightful decades after. Regardless, she has always been a poet of existence for me. The necessary madness in being alive. If I have language for what that means, it’s solely due to her.
What is your idea of happiness?: lol
What is your present state of mind?: Whenever I write about myself in any capacity, I get the nagging sense that I am in fact completely moronic. In the play, The Aliens, by Annie Baker, there’s this moment where the punk-bereft teen denizen goes into hysterics over someone’s death and wants to erase the meaning of that death by means of repeating a word until all context of everything whited out. He chose the word, “ladder.” Ladder ladder ladder ladder ladder ladder ladder ladder ladder ladder ladder. It goes on that way for about five minutes, his throat drying and stumbling and tripping over the forced exhaustive progression of the word on the page in the script. I guess what I mean is that I feel like I have just said ladder ladder ladder ladder ladder ladder a thousand times to fill in space. I suppose I am worried about the very idea of substance, and if ever I can dig into my own brain-gravy for that substance. And I suppose worry is always how I feel.
I think about death as much as I think about trauma. The other day I watched an animated movie by Don Hertzfeldt called It’s Such a Beautiful Day and the narrator, in all his Herzogian doom-talk, breaks down the terror of life in the face of death. I had to pause the movie and cry loudly and violently for ten minutes. Big shaking tears. I still am crying to recall it. Later I would joke with friends at a bar that I cried over a cartoon about death and my friends would laugh and say “aw you’re such a poet.” I wonder how ridiculous it is to cry over something so maddeningly unknown and inevitable. There is nothing in this world like death, nowhere the mind can go to make complete sense of that ongoing erasure. I think I would like to laugh too about this, because it is hysterical. It’s as hysterical as shredding your throat to say ladder until the proscenium shutters and the viewers want to do anything but call what they’re witnessing a spectacle.
I think, too, this is an interesting question to ask because I tend to effusively embed my present mind into every bit of written language. We all do this, and it’s important. So this question serves to dip into that thick greasepit of despair and pull out the exact language. Today: I have sat on a green pilates ball which serves as my work ball at my 9-5 all day. I left once to get a kale salad. I regret all my dietary choices, and reget again how my work asks that I stay stationary. I was accepted into a prestigious residency this morning and I don’t know if I’ll be able to go because my work asks that I stay stationary. Due to this conflict I feel I have betrayed a role, and this sense of betrayal has curtailed what joy I might have felt about this acceptance. I am thinking about what it means to live between these roles, the mask I put on to be a corporate employee and the mask I put on to hustle my poetry life. Is either more earnest? I moonlight as a poet and editor, but all I want to do is say fuck the moon fuck the day and its wages, I want to live on this planet and make my art until my body gives out beneath me. I was so moved to read and write a response to a poem by Carrie Lorig in which she declares that she would die for poetry. Me too. I’m going to die for poetry no matter what. I want to write during the day for once. I want to walk into a cafe on a Tuesday and say I’m working on my art I’ll take that to stay and absorb all the day’s caffeine there. I have done ten reports over the course of this interview and proofread five ebooks. I get outraged so often about time, its uses and my material insistence over those uses. I’m about to leave work so I can stretch my body out on a yoga mat and then I’m going to have the rest of the night to work on a review that is due in two days. Shit is fraught but I’m a hustler. Still die, says Anne Carson.
Your favorite poem, ever: Tied: “I Cannot Live With You…” by Emily Dickinson and “Carrion Comforts” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Also, that’s a mean question.
Read Natalie’s poetry at Jellyfish
Andrea Beltran
Describe yourself as a poet in three words: in no particular order: listen, ask, attend
What is your chief misery as a poet? I want to read too many books—and all at the same time. in sum: my impatience.
What you appreciate the most in a poem: two things, and not necessarily in the same poem: a poem that’s honestly seeking (and sends me seeking), and humor
If not a poet, what would you be? a baker
Who is your poetry hero and why? Cecilia Vicuña: for her questions, for her orality, and for showing me that awareness is a responsibility
What is your idea of happiness? in a day: sleeping in, eggs for breakfast, reading, coffee and a slice of apricot pie with my grandmother, writing a letter or two, whatever else may come, not feeling rushed to do anything, pizza for dinner OR quitting my job, moving to Puerto Rico, and figuring it out from there (this could happen in a day, too)
What is your present state of mind? a makeshift kite ready for takeoff
Your favorite poem, ever: "Making a Fist" by Naomi Shihab Nye OR “This" by Ralph Angel OR...well, I have too many favorites
Read Andrea’s poem “Sex Ed: On Sex and Babies” at Word Riot