Elias Baez : part five

How did you first engage with poetry?

The first time I felt a poem immediately change me was when I finished one called “Fever Dream” in 2016. I’d written poems before then, and they’re real poems, but this one affected my body. It’d been impossible to write for months before a breakup, and then a month of grief thereafter. Finally, this weird thing came out of me – I remember, it ends, ‘crystalline and pillowy, / quiet as a coral reef, / Thinking of your eyes / I ate it all’ – and suddenly I was able to get out of bed. Like I’d soft reset my imagination and so could see again. Then I knew that poetry could change things in reality, like magic, and I liked that. 

Elias Baez : part four

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

I made a Patreon in October (www.patreon.com/baezus) that I’ve since sent over sixty pages of new poetry. At a minimum of five poems a week, the volume is really high, but that keeps me productive and focused no matter how the daily variables of a week might interrupt my writing. At this point, I guess it’s like how people who work out go to the gym every week? Accountability forces me to make it happen, and Patreon is great for that. I don’t submit to publications as much of late. I like sending poems to my friends, for now.

Elias Baez : part three

Why is poetry important? 

Because it can be written on a sheet of toilet paper.

Elias Baez : part two

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

Part II of the poem “Altitudes” by Richard Wilbur has Emily Dickinson resolve the tensions laid in Part I. I usually only read Part I, cause I think it’s truer. It goes:

Look up into the dome:
It is a great salon, a brilliant place,
Yet not too splendid for the race
Whom we imagine there, wholly at home

With the gold-rosetted white
Wainscot, the oval windows, and the fault-
Less figures of the painted vault.
Strolling, conversing in that precious light,

They chat no doubt of love,
The pleasant burden of their courtesy
Borne down at times to you and me
Where, in this dark, we stand and gaze above.

For all they cannot share,
All that the world cannot in fact afford,
Their lofty premises are floored
With the massed voices of continual prayer.

He went to Amherst College, like I did, and I think he was as alienated by its extravagant sacralized wealth as I was. The same is true of Johns Hopkins, where I earned my MFA last year. I hear a lot of scathing sarcasm in these peaceful sounding lines, and that brings me actual peace.

 

Elias Baez : part one

Elias Baez is a poet, programmer, and pop journalist living in Baltimore with his husband Alex. His website’s baez.us, and so is his Instagram handle. Twitter’s baez_us. All he wants is a friend.

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

My first poetry workshop, when I was nineteen, was taught by Richard Wilbur and David Sofield, when both were soon to retire. Sofield insisted that poems should have wit, and snap in places like a rolled-up towel. He also used the phrase “by my lights” a lot, which I stole remorselessly. Wilbur showed me that accomplishment and humility are not mutually exclusive. He also liked a funny line. Most of all, I learned from him that language is all hyperlink, and anything can be sampled or referenced if you place it rightly. Later, James Arthur taught me how to make my references actually make sense. And how not to hide, or strip the humanity from my writing. Of poets I never had as a teacher, Djuna Barnes taught me a poem could build my own personal God. Amanda Berenguer performed immaculate geometry on fruit. Hilda Mundy split the atom of metaphor, and proved that it is the strongest bond. Jericho Brown taught me I’m not excluded from the traditions I was raised to know and love and work and carry.