Subhaga Crystal Bacon : coda

I’ve been writing poetry since I was an undergraduate in the seventies, then did an MFA in my late thirties. So poetry has been a nearly lifelong pursuit for me. I’ve taken breaks from submitting work for publication a few times in my life but never from poetry itself. I think of Rilke’s question to his young poet: could you live if you didn’t write? For me the answer is probably! But not nearly as fully. 

Subhaga Crystal Bacon : part five

How does a poem begin?

Poems begin in my body. I’ve often compared it to the sensation just before a sneeze. Sometimes, a feeling comes over me and it’s luckily often combined with an opening or triggering phrase. I spend a lot of time hiking in the hills behind my house with my dogs, and I will often find that a phrase comes to me that leads me into a new poem. I find that if I pay attention to this confluence of feeling and sound, if I stop what I’m doing and write it down, a poem will flow fairly easily onto the page. 

Subhaga Crystal Bacon : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s Water I Won’t Touch, Jennifer Martelli’s Queen of Queens, Dana Levin’s Now Do You Know Where You Are, Jill McDonough’s Where You Live, Dustin Pearson’s Millennial Roost, Derrick Austin’s Tenderness. I’m anxiously awaiting Suzanne Frishkorn’s Fixed Star and Luther Hughes’ A Shiver in the Leaves. 

Subhaga Crystal Bacon : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Diane Seuss is the contemporary poet who has had the biggest, most recent impact on my understanding of and thinking about poetry. She combines contemplation of quotidian realities of being alive with what I might call big ideas in a way that is alchemical. We are the same age, so I find in her work familiar references to people, places, and particularities of being an American woman that I’ve found liberating and inspirational. Others are Erika Meitner and Kendra Decolo, both BOA poets, whose catalogues of female experience have also loosened up some of my self-imposed restrictions in style and content. This is also true of Levin’s Now Do You Know Where You Are.

Subhaga Crystal Bacon : part two

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 belong to two workshop groups. One is a group of local poets and the other is a small group of friends from my days in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. The first group is a place where I can get a sense of a poem’s nearness to completion. The second group is the place where my most challenging poems get read and responded to with laser precision. These friends have often helped me to find the best logical ordering of my somewhat wabi sabi lyric narratives. Both groups are indispensable. Of course, I don’t have every poem critiqued before I submit it for publication, but I typically feel more confident submitting work that’s been vetted this way.

Subhaga Crystal Bacon : part one

Subhaga Crystal Bacon is a Queer poet living in rural northcentral Washington on unceded Methow land. She is the author of four collections of poetry including Transitory, recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award for Poetry, forthcoming in the fall of 2023 from BOA Editions, and Surrender of Water in Hidden Places, winner of the Red Flag Poetry Chapbook Prize forthcoming in the spring of 2023. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming in 45th Parallel, Rogue Agent, The Indianapolis Review, and Rise Up Review. She is a lover of nature who spends most days contemplating what's moving, growing, or arriving around her.

What are you working on?

I’m working on a new manuscript that follows up on and develops themes of Queer identity begun in my forthcoming BOA Editions collection, Transitory. It’s a chronicling of and reckoning with murders of transgender and gender nonconforming people in 2020 that’s interspersed with personal poems about gender and sexual orientation. The new manuscript is (so far) a strictly personal exploration of the forces and projections of family and culture on my identity as a Queer person throughout my life.