What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
I go back and forth between languages quite a bit. My confidence level with French and English fluctuates. For a while I thought I could write poetry in English. It turns out I wasn’t reading nearly enough poetry in English and a lot of my writing didn’t really get anywhere, wasn’t finding a form. It seems undeveloped to me now, awkward. I’m translating a lot of those poems into French now, basically re-writing them, and I’m much happier with the results. I’m someone who can have very rigid ideas, which is antinomical to what poetry can be right now; my first poems were sonnets! And I hadn’t understood all the rules. Styles and movements are so different in French-language and English-language poetry that moving across them is often more muddling than creative for me.
I constantly feel like I’m not inhabiting either language, like I’m just beside syntax. Writing bilingual poetry has been one way to work around that issue. My chapbook, Coup, came out of my first attempt at just doing whatever. I had rules, sure: they had to fit within a tweet, with Twitter’s old character limit; they had to be couplets, one line in French, the other in English; and they had to rhyme. Better if they could be alexandrines. But within that I didn’t worry about perfection, I just sent everything out there. With this form I suppose I’m owning that French will always be my first language, that I might never cease to approach English through it, and that this can be a strength. My speech and writing have been transformed by these hesitations and echoes.
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