R.J. Lambert : part one

R.J. Lambert (he, him, his) is a queer writer and writing teacher in Charleston, SC. He survived the 1999 Columbine High School shootings and has since published and presented on the ways communities and individuals respond to crises through writing. He was chosen by Kaveh Akbar to receive the 2021 Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry from New Letters and is currently nominated for a Pushcart Prize by The Worcester Review. His debut poetry collection, Mind Lit in Neon, is newly available from Finishing Line Press. Tweet him @SoyRJ.

How did you first engage with poetry?

A high school assignment directed me to comb the library for published poems and analyze 20 or so literary techniques like alliteration, metaphor, and simile. I was a TV child of the 80s/90s, and I procrastinated too long. I ended up writing half the poems myself, then “analyzed” my own use of the poetic devices alongside poems by the likes of Richard Wilbur and Elizabeth Bishop. The ego of it! I still keep this project in my box of school files, and while the topics I wrote about were understandably pedestrian, the technique holds up. So, came first out of necessity, and it still does, but it feels even more necessary now, and I am driven internally instead of checking someone else’s boxes.