Alina Pleskova : coda

How does a poem begin?

With the light just-so, a change in external or internal weather, or feelings getting fucked with by the state or the state of things. With something a brilliant friend says offhandedly while fiddling with their jacket cuff on the porch. With looking at the moon. I mean, look at her.

Alina Pleskova : part five

Why is poetry important?

To mark where we are, each of us, even if we aren't sure how we got there.

Alina Pleskova : part four

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

Sometimes I do a sort of brain-jogging bibliomancy with Frank O'Hara or June Jordan or Jack Spicer's collected works. They're pretty hefty volumes, & because none of them were capable of writing a single bad line, let alone a bad poem, they’re revivifying. I also return to Anne Boyer, for proof of how the personal & the political are inextricably linked & how it's okay to write about crushes, too. Kathy Acker for fucking—not sex— in all its viscerality & corporeality. Hanif Abdurraqib for how to notice everything— like, everything, & turn it into a song that no one can forget. Roberto Bolaño, for reminders of how to be both playful & deadly serious. CAConrad for how to write poetry with my entire body. Tommy Pico for a reminder of how internet slang & unadorned, everyday vernacular, when wielded just-so, can be incredibly powerful. Jenny Zhang for messy & precise immigrant feelings. Larissa Pham for gorgeous lyricism that cuts. Mary Ruefle for quite literally anything else. Okay, also, I've given away & replaced my copy of Anne Carson's Short Talks so often, it's comical. That'll do it.

Alina Pleskova : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry? 

Because my poems are entirely written w/ a first-person speaker, & very feelings-driven, it's difficult convincing myself that anyone else might care, or be interested. It's difficult to forget the word 'myopic'. Workshop experiences with [stodgy older white male] professors did a number on me, & the effects still linger.

When I see other poems that seem comfortable in/with their interiority, I relax, too. I think, "Hello, I'm waving to you from inside this poem."

Alina Pleskova : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

When it's time to do something else. Jack Spicer: "Poetry ends like a rope."

Alina Pleskova : part one

Alina Pleskova is a poet who lives in Philly by way of Moscow. Her first chapbook, What Urge Will Save Us, was published by Spooky Girlfriend Press in 2017. Poems have appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, American Poetry Review, Peach Mag, Queen Mob's Teahouse, & more. She's on twitter at @nahhhlina.

What are you working on?

I was working on a sort of ethnography of desire. I sent a short survey to a couple dozen people-- internet strangers, friends, former lovers, current lovers, etc.-- & asked them (among other things) what they desired, how & when & if desire ends. I've been thinking about desire's mutability, duality, voraciousness, what it looks like in the current cultural climate & in late capitalism & in a body/mind in the aftermath of traumas, how it fractures, how it can become hierarchical, etc. I wanted to write into that & include many other voices, a sort of riff on A Lover's Discourse, as part of a suite of poems I've been working on about fraught intimacies. But it's sort of on hold while I get my bearings. Desire in any form, even a messy one, is a difficult head space to access in light of the news recently. One thing I noticed, in the survey results I've gotten so far, is how often people want to leave their bodies entirely.