How does a poem begin?
My poems begin with obsessions, unanswerable questions, and phrases that I can’t get out of my head. For my last book, Entering Sappho, I began with the title of the collection, which is a phrase I saw on a road sign in rural Washington. I couldn’t get it out of my head, and over the course of six years, the whole collection grew out of those two words.
What other poetry books have you been reading lately?
I think that the last four books of poetry I’ve read were Molly Cross-Blanchard’ new collection Exhibitionist, Kama La Mackerel’s Zom Fam, Tanya Lukin Linklater’s Slow Scrape, and Maxe Crandall’s The Nancy Regan Collection. All of these books were published during or just before the pandemic hit, so I’ve been trying to sing their praises whenever and wherever I can! Everyone reading this should buy at least one of them!!
What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
The poet who has most changed the way I’ve thought about writing is Divya Victor, who has just published a new book, CURB, with Nightboat Books. Divya has shown me so much about embracing the density of language—it’s amazing how many meanings every word condenses, and Divya’s capacity to draw these histories to the surface is really unparalleled.
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
One important difference between poetry and other forms is that poetry doesn’t require that we follow the rules of grammar. It doesn’t require that we adhere to sequential logics, and it doesn’t even have to “make sense.” What I think is important about poetry is that it asks us to think about the process of making sense—how does it happen? Who decides what is sensible? Sometimes other genres ask these questions too, but they are raised especially often in poetry.
Photo credit: Paul Terefenko
What are you working on?
Unfortunately, I’m not working on any poetry right now! I just published my book Entering Sappho last fall, and any time I finish a big poetry project it always takes me a long time to figure out a new one. I am working on a book of literary criticism, though, which is about lying down—I am interested in all the different novels, poems, plays, and so on where there is a person lying on the ground at an important moment. I tend to tack back and forth between poetry and literary criticism.
