Alicia Wright : part five

What are you working on?

Namely, the work now is my dissertation. For that I’m working on resuscitating my writing spirit, which means attending to feeling-projects connected to writing, such as letting a manuscript go, finding my footing for new poems, and reviving my love for poetry that might not show me something new, but remind me of things that are important. Adjacent to all that, I’m reviewing several recent poetry collections, editing Denver Quarterly, F I V E S: A Companion to Denver Quarterly, and assembling pieces for my own online journal, Annulet: A Journal of Poetics, coming to the world this spring. In many ways, I think, I’m working on waking up.

Alicia Wright : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

One night when I lived in Brooklyn I drew a hot bath and read C.D. Wright’s Steal Away from cover to cover, and I’m pretty sure I emerged a different person and poet. Natasha Trethewey showed me that the lyric present could also be in the historical past. Later, Ellen Bryant Voigt’s perhaps now legendary shift from form into wilder lines and rhythms also broadened my brain. Poets like M. NourbeSe Philip, Susan Howe, and Myung Mi Kim drew me closer to fragment’s power. The poets who are also your teachers change your thinking about writing, even if it’s just for a phase or course’s length: there’s that handful who never leave your inner dialogue. And my poet friends from my MFA changed everything about how I thought about writing, as they each think differently about it. To be in a writing program with others is to study, and if you’re lucky, love almost everything about each other, as your thinking and writing merge into living simultaneously. Some readings I’ve heard at Naropa have also deeply affected my thought. If you study anyone’s work enough, it changes you.

Alicia Wright : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

It takes me a long while to identify the subject of a poem. I’m not exploratory; I’m specific. And then comes consideration and internalization of the subject’s conditions, implications, and connections, which takes place on a preverbal level, close to language’s moods but not yet in any of them—I have to wait and make sure I’ve paired the correct feeling and language with kind of vision. Then I form the poem through the appending of language to meaning in a moment, so I have to also be able to focus my physical body on its production, which is a whole other nested process that usually involves sleep deprivation, caffeine, and an immense bout of anxiety. Basically my answer is: writing a poem.

Alicia Wright : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

The poem’s resonance touches the end of my feeling. Then the momentum in my brain shifts, and I fall forward, back into present consciousness. 

Alicia Wright : part one

Alicia Wright is from Rome, Georgia, and her poetry appears or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, Ecotone, and jubilat, among others. She is a PhD candidate in English & Literary Arts at the University of Denver, where she serves as the Denver Quarterly Editorial Fellow (Associate Editor).

How did you first engage with poetry?

In the most beautiful and obvious childhood, then teenage way: I had many, many feelings and no form for them. So entered Emily Dickinson’s meter into my heart, which picks you up like an ocean wave and shapes your inner thought for you. It was a way of being held. I wanted so much to see myself in others’ lines and images—I’d found Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore—which I did fleetingly, but nothing compared to Dickinson’s drum and soaring scope, her singular voice. I wrote her lines as graffiti in my closet, on the planks of upper bunkbeds, over Phish lyrics and lewd verses scrawled in the back of a densely graffiti’d school bus. The more I loved her poems, the more I realized the experience I could use for my own poems was limited—so I decided to go out and get some.