Adam Ai : part five

How does a poem begin?

I don’t know anymore. With hope, I think. Writing a poem is a life-affirming act. I am here, and I care, it matters to me even if nobody else does – even if it’s not a very good poem or has dark intentions or is misguided in some way. If I write something I must think it’s something worth writing. So something in this world is worth writing about and maybe I can survive the day because I found something worth keeping, worth redeeming. If I share it with someone I must think there’s something of value to others in there, too. But I never know. 

Everyone wants to be seen somewhere. Yet devotion to poems have helped me to see myself. The reward for being the writer who stays in the chair seems to be the poems come looking for you. There are so many I want to write now I struggle through anxiety – there’s never enough time. And there isn’t, of course. And it goes fast. 

If you have something to say, now’s the time. Now is always the time – tomorrow never comes. It will not be perfect. There will always be more to learn and challenge yourself with, right – but you still have to dive in and swim because you may not get another chance. The feeling you have today may be gone tomorrow. Someone you love, someone you might have shared yourself with may be gone tomorrow. You’re here now and real and you, and no matter how bad you think you are your voice is worth being heard. So don’t self-reject. Time is the monster. There is no cure for this. Staying solitary can be a curse but you can break through. Never stop working, first.

Home is where you stand with love, and maybe a poem is where you stand most bravely. Poets don’t get backing vocals and a rhythm section. So for me a poem begins with love, I think. The best kind. Radical self-love in the face of devastation – and the monster comes for us all sooner or later – is among the finest impulses of the human spirit. In the past I was overrun by the intensity. I don’t fight it now and it goes easier. I fight no more but to surrender. 

In defense of love, you poets out there – you honor us with your bravery. This is important work and I think probably the most important. You’re actually saving lives in the places no-one else can go. 

You’re saving mine, every day.

So back to work!

Adam Ai : part four

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

My own poems, usually. Although this year I discovered Jericho Brown’s poem Duplex after I heard on Twitter about his Pulitzer prize win, along with a handful of other modern poets and that’s been big for me. A real education. So much is possible. Even coming from dark places it’s possible to carry light and shed it into the world, maybe even in places it’s needed.

When I need to get away from poems I get far away as I can and don’t read anything at all. When I write I write hard and overwrite and I’m long-winded anyway so I exhaust myself with it – I’ll do something else then that I enjoy and can focus on when I need a breather – painting usually. It’s the only other pursuit I can happily lose hours doing. I also find it centering, in a way that comforts me. I would recommend it to anyone writing poems. I’m learning conscientiousness, patience, and attention to detail in a way I never had, not to mention the joy of color and of just getting paint all over your hands like a kid. It’s really lovely. I tend to extremes and have always had trouble handling emotion. I’m moody and mercurial. Anti-social and sensitive. But I’m starting to find that I’m okay despite all that. Another blessing of finally taking a chance on publishing. If there’s anyone out there hesitating – stop it. Rejections don’t hurt as bad as you think. After losing mom I don’t feel much about them anyway. When they say no but ask to see more during the next reading period I give them a mental hug and put them on a list. I hope I can get submissions to that list some day! Time is such a factor. There are many more literary magazines than I ever imagined and submitting a poem to every one of them is taking some time. I don’t even know why that’s the goal. The amount I don’t know about poems is more evident daily. I love it – I’ve learned more this year than any other in my life.

The only other thing that snaps my head into place seems to be getting my ass kicked but one way or the other I’ll take it. I’d prefer to avoid taking the hits I do but that’s just how it is for me. Sometimes it’s all that works. Hard-headed, you know.

When I was younger I would have rattled off a list of poets, back when I thought I had a lot to say (but nobody was asking me for interviews, then. I had a lot to say – but maybe it wasn’t anything anyone needed to hear.) I try to keep young Adam’s voice in check around here these days. Still you’ll note this answer just got long too. They get away quick.

Because it’s the poems that save me. What they’re giving me now, I don’t even feel I deserve. It’s so much. The growth I’ve had just this year is astonishing and I’m losing touch with old poems daily because of it but happily. It’s making me better. It quiets the ghosts. I’ve been haunted so long the ghosts and I are more long-time associates, rather than having your usual haunter-hauntee relationship. I think the dead are learning too.

Or so I pray.

Adam Ai : part three

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

Poems seem enter from somewhere else and leave in print so they are only mine for a little while and I’m part of a larger process. I appreciate the time I have with them more. There’s so much about the process you aren’t aware of until it hits you. I used to say nobody cared what I have to say so why bother and I guess I don’t have that excuse anymore. I lost a lot of years thinking that way. But it takes what it takes and you can only start from where you are. I realized this too late for my mom to see any of these successes. She knew me as she knew me, and we had little to be proud of. If I had stopped running earlier I might have been able to help us both. Given both of us reasons. Healing. Forgiveness. So the cost of that kind of thinking is high.

I heard a poem isn’t finished until somebody reads it and I’m finding that’s true. Poems I thought I’d probably keep on editing into different forms privately and just not show anyone have become something outside me and really do seem “done” – warts and all. So I’m learning something about letting go in that sense, and it’s a blessing of the process I didn’t see coming and a balm in a year of crisis. My poems were each a moment for me – but a moment I couldn’t let go of – and now they’re a sort of benchmark for how much I’m learning and how far I’ve come.

I really didn’t know the first letter of each line in a poem doesn’t have to be capitalized, for instance. I’m serious. There’s a word for that, but I can’t quite come up with this moment. Naïve will have to do. But that’s what happens when you spend all your time reading Emily Dickinson and other old-schoolers but have no exposure to modern poetry, or know any poets or anyone really interested in poetry. It’s just not my background. I learned what ekphrastic means the other day – I’ve been writing poems about pieces of art in other disciplines for a long time, dudes. A long time to not know that. But again, we all have to start somewhere. 

Nobody sees a poem of mine until I submit it, and since I never simultaneously submit or show the same version of a poem to successive editors it’s always a shot in the dark. I have to trust my instincts and that’s a useful, if rigorous process for a poet I think. I see now that many poets have a circle of people they trust and show their poems so they can get feedback and a sense of how it’ll hit people once it gets into the world. It sounds lovely but it’s not my story. If I leave the house with broccoli in my teeth I have to live with that. The lesson? Poems are never perfect. And they aren’t supposed to be. That’s not the point. Perfect isn’t a reasonable goal. So, I’ll live even if I’m embarrassed and hey, makes me push for the next poem to be even better. 

Anyway I figure the more varied and diverse voices we have in the poetry world the more potential there is we get a shot at saving someone. So I’m okay with being weird. I’m relieved I’m not the only one.

Adam Ai : part two

What are you working on?

I bought a copy of Writer’s Market from Barnes & Noble January 1st, 2020 and began submitting poems for the first time. I submitted for about six months, netting 31 acceptances. My mom’s passing has a lot to do with the sudden rush to publish. I figure there’s nothing left to lose – nothing to gain either, but I’m seeing I might be wrong about that. Been carrying them around long enough. After six months I stopped – to catch my breath I think. I never imagined I’d have so many that editors would like what I’m up to. I was just sending everything I had to any magazine I could find with no real idea what I was doing. I figured it out on the fly. My acceptance rate rose as I learned how to be more professional. 

I’ll begin submitting again in the coming weeks. I write every day and I’m reworking older ones, too. I just set up a website – adamaipoems.com – and intend to collect poems I’ve published there. I’m taking my time to put my best work out now that I realize someone might actually publish them! I’m learning so much it’s changed the way I see my poems and I’m growing so much through the process I’m regretful I waited. Now I’m being interviewed about my poems, and how cool is that? I don’t know how it keeps getting better with the poems but it does. I’m humbled with so much to be grateful for and look forward to, when it still feels so often like nothing will ever matter again with mom gone. Not to mention Coronavirus, the riots, and all the other things making this the hardest year. But I’m starting to wonder where poems might take me next – a powerful tonic on days and nights when hope is hard to find. 

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.