Nicky Beer : part five

How does a poem begin?

As a tumbleweed stuck between gravestones. As a confession written in the margin of a library book. As the stifled belch of a polite ghost. As a duck-shaped rock in the middle of a pond. As a serendipitous typo. As the faint smell of jasmine inside an old boot. As a beer can flattered to the shape of a heart.

Nicky Beer : part four

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

I never plan on this, but I seem to pick up Charles Simic’s Dismantling the Silence every few years, and I always feel like I’m reading it for the first time. I think it’s a quintessential representation of the tension in his work: the push and pull between the beautiful and the grotesque, idealism and cynicism. It always does an excellent job of clearing the bullshit from my brain.

Nicky Beer : part three

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Right now, I’m making my leisurely way through Gerald Stern’s This Time: New and Selected Poems—it’s very bolstering stuff to read first thing in the morning. And I taught a queer lit class last semester, which gave me the opportunity to read and reread books by some wonderful contemporary poets: Donika Kelly’s Bestiary, Alicia Mountain’s High Ground Coward, Stephanie Burt’s Advice from the Lights, Stacey Waite’s Butch Geography, Aaron Smith’s Primer, Sam Sax’s Madness, Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Not Here, and Cameron Awkward-Rich’s Sympathetic Little Monster.

Nicky Beer : part two

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Keeping the faith when I’m not writing—or rather, muting that booming, repetitive dance track “You’re Never Gonna Write a Poem Again (Club Remix)” when I’m in a fallow period.

Nicky Beer : part one

Nicky Beer is a bi/queer writer, and the author of The Octopus Game (2015) and The Diminishing House (2010), both winners of the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. Her honors include an NEA, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a scholarship and fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is a poetry editor for Copper Nickel.

Photo credit: Brian Barker

What are you working on?

I’m finishing up my third book of poems, called Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, in which I explore benign forms of “fakery,” such as duplicitous taxidermy, stage magic and optical illusions, as well as more malicious frauds such as plagiarism and forgery.