R.J. Lambert : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

There’s both ways to take this question: music as sonics and rhythm, or literal music. I think sonics and rhythm are important to all poetry (even those that are not “musical” are intentionally not so). But I want to answer the literal question. Moviemakers like Cameron Crowe famously create from musical inspiration, and I often do the same thing with poems. I choose some songs to rev me up and I listen to them loudly on repeat, curating an energized writing trance where I can disappear for hours. I wrote several of the final poems for my first collection while listening to Troye Sivan’s In a Dream EP during the pandemic—probably 100+ hours listening to those same six songs. There’s also an entire section in my book dedicated to “streaming” different songs by Frank Ocean, Queen, Whitney Houston, and two teenagers performing Mozart and Chopin on YouTube. A crowning achievement of my book was obtaining permission to use Frank Ocean’s lyrics from “Swim Good” as an epigraph to this “streaming” section.

R.J. Lambert : part four

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 love talking to writers about writing. I love reading writers who talk about writing. This is one of my favorite parts of being on Twitter and getting newsletters like Jami Attenberg’s “Craft Talk.” So, community and talking about writing is a very real and important thing to me. That being said, I’m no longer at a point where I share my work with anyone before submitting it to journals. There is a fragile period when I have to rely on my own intention and self-belief to bring a poem to fruition. I have to trust that I might see value where others might not. I have to know my poem better than any outside reader. So it is not worth risking cold water hitting a poem before it is strong enough to withstand that scrutiny—until its potential has already been realized. Currently, eight poems from my new manuscript are out to several journals and contests, which will be my first gauge. A couple journals have sent positive feedback along with their rejections, which is actually a great sign this early in the process. My hopes are high that some will find a good home soon.

R.J. Lambert : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I think “finished” is maybe not a helpful target. The field of Writing Studies emphasizes writing “process” versus written “product” (after Donald Murray’s foundational work on the topic), and my experience bears that out. My process could go on probably forever—did I mention my first collection took 20 years to write?!—and the product is kind on artificial “end” point at which an editor or publisher sees fit to memorialize a draft by printing it. Maybe my target is more of a threshold than a finish line. If a poem crosses that threshold, if it takes my breath away and forges a curious path, I think it’s ready to start testing the waters with journals. There’s also a lot of value in making final revisions before sending a poem for publication. Sometimes, that last-minute pressure is a source of inspiration and creative spark. I do some of my best editing as I prepare to attach the draft to a journal submission.

R.J. Lambert : part two

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

Maybe what poetry accomplishes is it breaks down (or through) narratives. Narratives are so important for making sense of the world and of ourselves, but narratives are mostly not to be trusted. The stories we attach to are deceptive, and limiting, and they can be kind of a trap. Queer and feminist approaches have shown us this. And anyone who has ever seen a therapist or counselor quickly realizes the limits of their own perspective. What poetry does so well is hit on something visceral and universal, transcending the individual, and shattering the facts and logics that we cling to and hang our narratives on.

R.J. Lambert : part one

R.J. Lambert (he, him, his) is a queer writer and writing teacher in Charleston, SC. He survived the 1999 Columbine High School shootings and has since published and presented on the ways communities and individuals respond to crises through writing. He was chosen by Kaveh Akbar to receive the 2021 Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry from New Letters and is currently nominated for a Pushcart Prize by The Worcester Review. His debut poetry collection, Mind Lit in Neon, is newly available from Finishing Line Press. Tweet him @SoyRJ.

How did you first engage with poetry?

A high school assignment directed me to comb the library for published poems and analyze 20 or so literary techniques like alliteration, metaphor, and simile. I was a TV child of the 80s/90s, and I procrastinated too long. I ended up writing half the poems myself, then “analyzed” my own use of the poetic devices alongside poems by the likes of Richard Wilbur and Elizabeth Bishop. The ego of it! I still keep this project in my box of school files, and while the topics I wrote about were understandably pedestrian, the technique holds up. So, came first out of necessity, and it still does, but it feels even more necessary now, and I am driven internally instead of checking someone else’s boxes.