Adam Ai : part one

Adam Ai is a poet and U.S. Army veteran from Los Angeles. His work is seen in many print and online publications and now at adamaipoems.com. He lives with a Ghost. Hobbies include time travel and teaching robots love. Connect on Twitter and Instagram @AdamAiPoems.

How do you know when a poem is finished?

Writing a poem is being in love. It comes first in feeling. Shots of instinct, like when you meet someone and they feel so good to you and it’s almost like you know them. Like a part of you is in the other and maybe it is. So in that sense you belong to each other a little bit. If a relationship develops – maybe a lot. And you can’t get enough of them and then at times you can’t stand them. It’s just so much. And you can’t get away from it.

I know a poem is mine when I have that feeling. Endorphins, adrenaline. It’s a rush. And I don’t think we choose love but are chosen by love – through instinct, DNA, fate… I don’t know but I guess it doesn’t make much difference – the things that strike us are who we are. Whatever you find in a poem that works for you and unlocks something, that’s all yours. We each take from the world according to our own. Everyone gets something different. A poem is everything and nothing.

I’ve never sent two editors the same poem or done a simultaneous submission. Rejections are my workshop. If a poem is rejected it goes back in the stacks till I’m ready to re-inhabit the headspace with fresh energy and reimagine the poem - from the ground-up, always with a sense of maintaining the central motivation I had to write it in the first place. Usually a specific person. I tend to write poems about specific people, even if it may not seem apparent. All poems have secrets. I think you have to protect them.

Once the feeling flies a poem is finished. I can only hope I’ve been able to fashion enough from the concept to achieve an effect worth sharing. Sometimes the feelings around a poem go for years, like any relationship, even if you’re no longer in that relationship. There are some poems I’ve been working on twenty years that are still alive for me so I revisit them. There are some I look at and can’t see a way into anymore. The Vanishing Poem. Smaller and smaller. Like falling out of love and you see that person again after some time has passed and think, what on Earth was I thinking? I must have been out of my mind. And you were. I’m nuts all the time. But that’s what love is for me. Losing your mind and finding your heart. Because sometimes even madness can save you.