Nicole Raziya Fong : part five

How does a poem begin?

With living.

Nicole Raziya Fong : part four

How important is music to your poetry?

Music is pretty important to my poetry, but not as a source of inspiration. I use music as a screen to close me off from the outside, allowing me to turn my attention fully inwards. The physical world vanishes, and the music that I use for this purpose never really informs the work and is usually quite banal or what might be considered “bad” by a judgmental auteur. I usually attach to one song and play it on repeat for the entire time I’m working on a certain piece. It never really imprints upon the work, but provides an energy I use to propel me further and deeper into the work.

Nicole Raziya Fong : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

George Oppen’s work—reading him felt like an outstretched hand. His presence & very humanistic perceiving has really informed how I cast my own experiencing into the act of writing.

Aimé Césaire absolutely shattered all tentative obligations I might have felt to keep believing / caring about the people who had told me for so long what the function and tradition of poetry might be. It was hugely important to be able to read him, and important to still be reading him.

Lisa Robertson, as a different way to approach and grapple with the lyric in poetry. The same with Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, the early work of Joseph Ceravolo.

Dictée by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, essential. Paul Celan (of course).

Really, a great majority of the writers who have vitally affected my relationship to writing haven’t been poets.

Nicole Raziya Fong : part two

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

The most difficult part about writing poetry, for me, is the physical and mental cost of the sustained effort of writing. Most of the writing I do occurs in a short period of time, in between long pauses where I might be able to make a few quality edits (at best), or essentially undo all the work I’d done previously. So, when I’m writing, everything I do channels into the work. I write until I’m exhausted, always pushing myself to do more as I can never predict when the work will end and I’ll enter that state of being unable to write. It is a place of excitement and happiness, but it’s always followed by a pretty severe collapse.

Nicole Raziya Fong : part one

Nicole Raziya Fong is a writer living in Montréal. Her work seeks to delimit and re-construct immaterial ampules of psychic experience, coaxing the incorporeal into inhabiting a more muscular physique. Her chapbook, Fargone (2014), was published as part of the Poetry Will Be Made By All project. Past work has appeared in publications including Cordite, Poetry is Dead, and The Volta. PEЯFACT (Talonbooks, 2019) is her first book.

What are you working on?

I’m currently grappling with a long, onerous project titled OЯACULE. It’s an imperfectly theatrical channelling of psychic mutability, suffering and feminine resistance. It’s onerous in the sense that it’s being written alongside a process of uncovering traumatic memory, difficult in that I’m trying to maintain an equivalent level of hiddenness while implementing a legibility of my own making. I’ve always had more of an interest in the workings of language and how certain convergences might reveal or conceal something ordinarily untouchable; it’s something I’m trying to access in this work.