How does a poem begin?
Sometimes with a title, although those tend to take years to complete. Still trying to find poems for some really fun titles, years later, yet I won’t give up on them.
Some are stitched together from errant lines in a dozen crummy freewrites.
Some – these are the rarest, one in every three hundred times, and almost never when I’m at my desk – some come out fully formed and ready to go. Those are the ones I send to contests.
What other poetry books have you been reading lately?
Junebat by John Stintzi, Pluviophile by Yusuf Saadi, Kyla Jamieson’s Body Count, Curtis LeBlanc’s Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation, The Dyzgraphxst by Canisia Lubrin, A Sand Book by Ariana Reines, The Suitcase Tree by Filip Marinovich, Mythical Man by David Ly, Cloud Game with Plums by Rose Maloukis.
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
Poetry accomplishes absolutely nothing in the material world—and yet, poetry is also capable of radical transfiguration of the human soul. Go figure.
Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
Haaaaa. I didn’t know when I signed up for this “job” it was going to radically alter my entire conception of the universe. But it did.
I used to think poetry was just words on a page. It’s not that at all. It’s about listening and speaking to the pain and beauty around and inside you.
What are you working on?
I’m shopping around my first manuscript, wrapping up my second + dismantling it into a couple chapbooks, and the forever-work of trying to maintain a happy balance of life + work.
