What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
I would describe my writing style as tending to fall more on the conversational side. Finding a balance between making sure that particular lines work sonically, have a proper internal rhythm, and serve to carry the momentum of the piece can sometimes be a challenge.
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
Poetry can punch you in the gut faster than any other genre. It can bring tears of laughter (or sadness) in a few short lines. A picture of life can be painted with words in a stanza. There is a rhythm and economy to poetry that I love, no padding with wasted words. Everything in the poem is of importance, especially the white space.
What poets changed the way you thought about writing?
There are so many… For starters, I’d say Anne Carson for experimentation, Terrance Hayes for his American sonnets (and more) and Gertrude Stein for how she plays with language and repetition. But every poet I read offers a different way to think about writing.
When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
I always find myself returning to the first poet I ever got into, Stevie Smith. I’ve always loved how her free verse poetry is quirky and light in tone but, at the same time, very profound and moving.
In terms of a particular poem, my favourite of Smith’s is I Remember, where the narrator is an old man, during the Second World War, on his bridal night, in bed with his young bride (‘a girl with t.b.’), listening to German bombers flying overhead when, just at that moment, British bombers have chosen to set out for Germany. The young bride asks him, ‘Harry, do they ever collide?’, to which he answers, ‘I do not think it has ever happened / oh my bride, my bride.’ The two sets of bombers never colliding appear to be a metaphor for this couple’s relationship and generational difference, and it’s an 11-line poem that says so much, and made a lasting impression on me in showing what could be achieved in just a few lines.
Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
Until college I did not have any formal training or instruction in reading and writing poetry besides what was needed to be successful on an exam or standardized test (and a few informal writing groups). When I began to write poems in earnest in college, I carried a lot of fears about what I could and could not write about. My professors would point out how I tended to write around a subject or concern rather than directly at it. Their encouragement, and reading poetry widely and often, unlocked different ways I could consider and write a poem. I once thought of poems as static, concrete things. Now I find a poem slippery, amorphous, shifting in its power and influence within time and context.
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
I feel that, somehow, poetry manages to be emotive, compact and layered without taking up much space – both literally and figuratively. Yes, there are long poems (looking at you T.S. Eliot), but I feel that even when reading those poems, there are usually just a few lines that really stay with the reader (and continue looping in their minds). I feel that only poetry can do that, without the foundation of any character background/development (as compared to fiction, for example).
How does a poem begin?
I fall hardest for poems that have an intriguing first line, then I’m compelled to follow wherever it leads me. I was reading José Olivarez’s “Mexican American Disambugation,” where he’s describing his parents, who are “Mexican who are not to be confused with Mexican Americans/ or Chicanos,” and I’m like, “Yeaaahh.” The narrative of cataloguing diasporic people changes depending on if you’re in-in or in-out or just plain outside. Sometimes it’s the title that gets me as well. Jill Osier’s poem “September” unfolds a tragic farm scene which becomes a temporal marker in the speaker’s memory or landscape of the year. Sometimes when I write, there’s an image I can’t get out of my head, and I don’t want to turn it into a metaphor. I try to translate the moment into a compelling wondering—maybe relatable, maybe epiphanic. Oh, and I learned from William Nuʻutupu Giles, an afakasi Samoan writer, that sometimes people don’t remember titles, but they remember the subject, like his “Deodorant” poem or Gabriella Bates’s “The Dog” poem. Unforgettable poems. So, I try to begin a poem with that idea in the corner of my mind.
