What other poetry books have you been reading lately?
Since Christmas: The Combustion Cycle by Will Alexander; Concrete Poetry: A 21st Century Anthology ed. Marjory Perloff; I’d Better Let You Go by Nikki Dudley; and Dreamland Trash by Dylan Krieger. A couple of non-fiction/poetry-related works by poets too: The Unreality of Memory by Elisa Gabbert; From Fibs to Fractals – Exploring Mathematical Forms in Poetry by Marian Christie.
How do you know when a poem is finished?
I’m not sure you ever do, but the more you engage with poetry as a reader and writer and – if you’re fortunate – as an author, the more you get a feel for when a poem might be finished. A combination of instinct and experience, I suppose. But it’s not an exact science, and I’ll often find myself wanting to ignore what my gut is telling me just to be done with a particular poem. If I decide a poem’s finished, but the piece itself has other ideas, it’ll quietly nag at me until I work out what it wants. Once I’ve figured that out, the poem goes into a drawer for a while I write others and/or make collages. This gives me a chance to look at each poem with a fresh eye later on and make any eleventh-hour adjustments.
How important is music to your poetry?
Very. I love music and listen to all sorts of stuff. It inspires a lot of ideas and language for my writing. As for my work specifically, I think it’s musical in a different way to a lot of poetry. Just as most songs have two elements, music and lyrics, my work also has two elements, collage and text. I try to play around with the dynamic between these elements the way a songwriter might. Sometimes the collages and texts complement each other; sometimes there’s a tension or dissonance between them, just like in a lot of songs, where maybe the music is upbeat, but the lyrics contradict or complicate that mood. Also, as my collages are built up from layers of visual samples with words over the top of them, I see an oblique hip-hop influence in it too.
How does a poem begin?
They come about in all kinds of ways, but I’ll often set a timer and freewrite by hand for 10-15 minutes and see what emerges. From that, I’ll maybe get a couple of lines and develop those, or see if they spark anything with the unused or abandoned work in my notebooks.
What are you working on?
I have a new chapbook of poems and collages coming out in March through Steel Incisors called Greater Vegas Bleeds into the Dreams of My Cryogenic Slumber, so I’ve been getting that ready to go. I’m about 70% done with the follow up to Vegas, and I’m writing a few more pieces to pull that one together. I have another project too, but that’s at an early stage, and I can’t say too much about it.
