How do you know when a poem is finished?
Usually I hit a point that feels final, like the idea has travelled full-circle or I’ve expressed all I had to say on something. People do debate whether poems are ever really finished, though. I have old pieces I read now and would still edit, but at the time I set them down they felt complete. I suppose it’s more true that it’s us who might not be finished with the poems, rather than the other way around.
Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
Definitely. At the start, at school, I thought every poem had to be making some hugely groundbreaking argument. Then when I started to write I inserted myself into every poem until they were basically just diary entries with line breaks. Now I only include either of the above if they work for it in the poem. I enjoy experimenting with different voices and using those voices to say different things, and I especially enjoy the revelation that the little things sometimes are the hugely groundbreaking ones.
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
Clarity and freedom of image. There’s also something to be said for that specific feeling you get after reading some poems that doesn’t really have a name - it’s a mix between comfort, recognition, and the sensation of being punched in the gut. Poetry doesn’t need you to pull your punches in the same way other forms do. A novel-length work that did to its readers on every page what Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things does, for example, would probably have to come with a health warning.
How does a poem begin?
For me it usually starts with a conflict of some kind. If I ever lose sight of a poem as I’m working through it I ask myself, ‘where is the friction here?’ That’s how I get back to the meat of it; the disparate parts that bump together and make me want to write the poem to tease them out in the first place.
What are you working on?
Think Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, but written from a voice beyond the climate crisis point of no return. I’ve been wanting to explore this future we’re barrelling towards - we already know so much about what it’s going to look like, operate like, require of us, just not what it’ll feel like. So in the same way O’Hara walks us around his city, frozen in time, and lets us experience those moments with him - that’s what I’m trying to do. It’ll just feel worse, probably.
