Has your consideration of poetry changed
since you began?
As a younger
student of literature, I wrongly invested in what others told me was hip or
important, deeply afraid that I’d make some grave error from which I would
never recover. That included being afraid to confess anything, to put myself
and my heartbreaks and my failure and my EXPERIENCE into my writing. It was received
avant “knowledge” (read: currency) at the time that nobody wanted to hear about
any of that. That inherently racist, classist, ableist, sexist thinking, and
the entire sway of certain insidious strains of academic poetry, took a long
time to unlearn. I’m still trying to rinse that shit off.
Further, I’m
less invested in “poet” as an identity—or any particular writerly identity. I’m
more interested in writing as a community practice, a way to reach out and
participate, and at the same time, a way to listen, to show up for others, and
to learn.
I once thought
I loved poetry above other genres, but I think that too was a wrong-headed fad
I fell for. I study and I write because I am a searching person. I’m hungry and
hard to satisfy, so something called “poetry” doesn’t house everything I need. Necessarily,
I go to podcasts and visual art; I go to 18th century women’s
fiction and the history of transportation. These days, poetry is just one name
for an urge I follow or a set of associations I try on or take off.
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