Evan Williams : part five

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

I should say first that I appreciate the use of the term form over the term genre. I find genre largely pointless—recently a brilliant friend of mine told me, If you want to write poems, write poems. If you want to sell poems, call them stories. I’m getting away from form.

Poetry as a form is fundamentally limber. It is a form that attempts to undermine categories of form. Poetry collects, but it does not horde. It is a form of accumulation which constantly is compelled to let go of itself. 

I have a deep respect for other forms, other disciplines—they are hard. I don’t wish to say that there is anything that they cannot do. Questions of formal capacity do not seem to me like questions related to Can it? but rather questions related to Is it willing? Poetry is willing. Poetry is always willing. 

Evan Williams : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Mostly contemporary writers. The state of poetry in the last couple of decades is an innovative explosion. I’ve learned so much from poets like M. NourbeSe Philip, Sabrina Orah Mark, Zachary Schomburg, Ben Lerner, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Suzanne Buffam, Nathan Hoks, Srikanth Reddy, Carsten René Nielsen, Mark Leidner, Kirsten Ihns, and so, so many more. 

When I made a turn toward prose poetry, I looked to a lot of writers who blew up the idea of genre for me in so many ways, like Joanna Ruocco, Lydia Davis, Mary Ruefle, Anne Carson, and Mark Baumer. 

I hold all of the above work very close to my heart. In fact, I have these authors’ books arranged in my apartment such that, if there were a fire, I would be able to grab them in one hand on the way out the door with my cat. 

Evan Williams : 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?

I usually draft my poems by doing fifteen to thirty minutes of timed, nonstop writing. Then I pare them back until I think to myself, Oh, there’s the thing that’s cool. Then I take a screenshot and send four separate messages to a total of five people: My mom (who usually says something like, Oh wow, I love it), my dad (who recently told me that, You have to be able to think like a child in order to understand your poetry), my partner Ruby (who is herself a skilled poet and whose thoughts constantly expand the world(s) of my work and the world in which I live), and finally a groupchat with my dear friends and sometimes-collaborators, Ben Niespodziany and Evan Nicholls (who hype me up with expertly chosen gifs and fire emojis (and precise feedback, usually on pacing)). I’ll often exchange large chunks of poems with Reuben Gelley Newman, who has an ear for music and the musicality of language unlike any I’ve known. These folks see the entirety of my projects well before I send them anywhere, and are integral to my writing and personal lives alike. I feel quite lucky. 

Evan Williams : part two

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

If it had not, I would still be taking myself seriously. 

Evan Williams : part one

Evan Williams is a Chicago-based writer thinking about surrealism, masculinity, and the anthropocene. His work has been published in DIAGRAM, Pleiades, Joyland, X-R-A-Y Lit, and The Cleveland Review of Books, among others. He wrote the chapbook Claustrophobia, Surprise! (HAD Chaps, 2022). Along with Ben Nespodziany and Evan Nicholls, he is one-third of the temporary prose poetry braintrust known as Obliterat. He can be found on Twitter.

What are you working on?

I wrote a novella in 49 days loosely about the idea of motion as a form of love, and love as a kind of motion. It has a rattlesnake that opens itself up into a river of blood, a narrator in conversation with his maximally sad sadness (which takes physical form), and a baby made by two people the narrator once loved. I’m turning it into verse right now, just in case it’s better that way. It’s my favorite project right now.

I’m also drafting another long fiction project tentatively called Nuns Out, Guns Out about a band of bodybuilding nuns who want to stage a coup at the Vatican. I was Catholic growing up, then left the Church and did bodybuilding for a bit (the two aren’t correlated, though wouldn’t it be fun if they were?), so this is an act of superimposing one thing that caused me a lot of pain over another thing that caused me a lot of pain in an effort to create something heartwarmingly absurd that upends the negativity in both.

I often find myself writing what are basically cento poems, but using my own body of work as a source text. I want to publish a book of them one day—I think that as a concept it would be really fun to read, just an author riffing on and reinventing their own work. The poems all have, by nature, a similar tone and rhythm to their original versions, but offer a never ending series of small (and large) surprises. It’s like seeing my body of work in an alternate universe that’s marginally distinct from my own. 

In my spare time I write book reviews. I’m increasingly interested in what I think of as processual reviews, and have written one about Nicholson Baker’s book U and I (coming soon in Hobart). The idea is to read a book in a given number of days, and to each day write something brief about the experience of the particular chunk of reading. It’s been a way for me to legitimize expectations, misinterpretations, and the personal context(s) of reading as forms of criticism. The best part of it is that it often lets me (and leads me to) be wrong, which undercuts in a satisfying way the pretense of the book reviewer’s position of authority.