Isabel Sobral Campos : part one

Isabel Sobral Campos’s most recent book is How to Make Words of Rubble (Blue Figure Press, 2020). Other works include Your Person Doesn’t Belong to You, Material, and Autobiographical Ecology. Her poetry has appeared in the Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, in the anthologies BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World, and elsewhere. A translation of Salette Tavares’s LEX ICON is forthcoming with UDP in 2022. She is the co-founder of the Sputnik & Fizzle publishing series. 

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

I find myself often waiting for a mental place, which resembles the feeling of being carried by water. It’s a state where self-consciousness recedes in the mind, allowing for other mental processes to come forth. My best writing occurs when I inhabit this half-meditative space and stay there without realizing it. Our minds are made of this water from which poems emerge. It takes effort getting there, even though being there is an effortless experience, and you only realize it retroactively.