Erik Fuhrer : part five

How does a poem begin?

As a phrase or an image—something that gets stuck in my head and forces me to go to the page or the computer. It usually blooms in the midst of things and gets caught, making me repeat it over and over until I can jot it down— this repetition helps me further visualize the image or form the sonics of the phrase in my mouth, so that consistently becomes more vivid. That’s not to say that the poems themselves always occur spontaneously, though they sometimes do, as I often engage in a version of automatic writing, with the initial phrase or image as a conduit to the rest of the poem. Sometimes, however, the poems come painfully slow, with each line of the poem following the process of the first line—caught, repeated, written down, rinse and repeat, until the next phrase or image that murmurs feels like it is starting a new poem. I usually trust the sound of the poem to guide me as to whether a line is the start of a new poem or the continuation of one that is already building. 

Erik Fuhrer : part four

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

Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler. Over and over again. This painful multi-vocal symphony of a book, which explores the unspoken, as well as gives voice to those who have not always been afforded one, has stuck with me since I first heard Smith read from it at The Dodge Poetry Festival in 2010. As someone who is often thinking through the relationship between the nonhuman and the human, I am particularly fascinated by Smith’s personification of Hurricane Katrina and other hurricanes. I think what makes the book a powerful renewal for me is that it comes at topics that are important to me (climate change, the representation of the nonhuman, the way individual and collective bodies and personal narratives are elided by official narratives) from different angles than I normally do, which helps me think more expansively about content, representation and style. 

Erik Fuhrer : part three

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

I think it depends on the book. For the Buffy poems, I have been sharing them with some people who I trust, and who know the show well, because I am interested in seeing how well the source material is working in the poem. Since I am also working in a more narrative mode than I am normally comfortable with, having other people’s opinions on clarity and structure is helpful. At the moment, it feels safer to be able to choose the people who read these poems, rather than being in a workshop environment, since they do feel a little bit raw right now. 

My book not human enough for the census was born in my MFA workshops and I owe a lot to the feedback I receive there. Workshops really help me find new ways of thinking through what my work is capable of. I don’t think not human enough would have looked quite the same if it wasn’t developed alongside a group of people who helped push me toward the strange, which is what the book was always kind of gravitating toward naturally but didn’t completely have the language for yet.

Alongside the above communities, my partner, Kim, is always my beta and final reader. She has helped shape, organize, and finalize nearly all of my poems. It is because of her close proximity to my work that her and I were able to develop collaborations with one another. Both not human enough and in which I take myself hostage feature full-color paintings by Kim that engage in visual dialogue with my work.  

Erik Fuhrer : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

My partner is a painter, and her methodology is to continuously overpaint a piece that she does not feel is working. I am always astonished at her boldness, since I can get so precious about what I write, and have the luxury of being able to paste words that are “not working” into another document for quick recovery later if necessary. Due to the nature of her medium, her revisions literally efface the original attempt, and sometimes she decides the finished piece was the one she has already replaced with new strokes of paint. It makes me feel grateful that my art form is more malleable, because I often go back and forth, swapping and cutting, but this also means I lack the resolution she has to stop messing around with something. She stops because there are no refunds in her practice, and she likes it enough to live with it, for now. Since I can always go back, I sometimes continue to do so, in a loop. That said, there is always a point where the sound of the poem, the spacing of the poem, the way it feels on the tongue, just clicks. I’m not sure I can quite describe it, but it is a bit like the poem itself is an active object asserting its own finality. I used to be skeptical of writers that described their work as speaking to them, as if the work was a separate entity, but now that I have been writing for a while, I realize it kind of is like that—writing is kind of witchy in that way, as I’m sure much art is. 

Erik Fuhrer : part one

Erik Fuhrer (he/they) is the author of in which I take myself hostage (Spuyten Duyvil, 2021), At Root (Alien Buddha Press, 2020), not human enough for the census (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2019), every time you die (Alien Buddha Press, 2019), and VOS (Yavanika Press, 2019). He holds an MFA in poetry from The University of Notre Dame and will be completing his Ph.D. in creative writing this year from the University of Glasgow. He is from Long Island, New York, and currently resides in South Bend, IN where he teaches writing and gender studies courses.

What are you working on?

I am hesitant to call anything I have written “quarantine poems” but the collection I am just now finishing was born in March, when quarantine had compounded the depression that had landed me in the hospital in February. These poems were a way to grapple with the world I was, as many of us were, feeling estranged from. They are often bizarre, surrealist inspired poems that sometimes evoke an apocalypse that is both otherworldly and of earthly. They shift between short and squat and long and slender—though are never more than a page each. I’m currently playing around with the spacing and order of the poems, but feel like this one is soon to enter other orbits.

A book of poems exploring personal trauma that includes Buffy the Vampire slayer as both character and metaphor is currently taking up the majority of my writing time. The desire to write about personal trauma, to lift it from my body and onto the page in some way, just felt necessary for these poems, and Buffy felt like a natural companion, as that show, and the fact that her character was consistently forced to carry and process trauma, helped me, often subconsciously, process my own trauma. I started writing these poems in quarantine as well, and I have probably just under the length of a chapbook right now. This is the first time I have written poems that I find to be narrative, and part of the slow progression my poems have taken from being more abstract to more personal. 

I am also continuing to write a long poem in the skin of a play, because it feels like multiple voices need to speak it, but that these voices need to remain voices—to give them shape I think would rely too much on articulate bodies, despite the fact that this particular poem is drenched in questions of embodiment, but also disembodiment: what does it mean for a body to stop being a body, what about the transmissions in between flesh and ether? I think this project might stay in my pocket for a while, gestating.