What other poetry books have you been reading lately?
Lately I have been reading: Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things; Kate Camp’s How to Be Happy Though Human; Ryanne Kap’s Goodbye, Already; and Amanda Merpaw’s Put the Ghosts Down Between Us. Next on my list is Ryan Fitzpatrick’s Coast Mountain Foot.
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
Poetry does not sacrifice form to produce meaning. By which I mean, a poem can be beautiful and nothing else and still be a poem – and it is from that beauty that we then derive meaning. In poetry the meaning can be beauty, without feeling as though something is missing or lacking. I don’t find that to be the case often, if at all, with other forms.
How does a poem begin?
For me, a poem begins with any line that you can’t otherwise extricate from inside yourself unless you write it down. These can also begin as images or experiences or feelings, but I find my mind is very language-driven, and I think in fragments if not complete sentences. The initial lines don’t necessarily remain the first lines of poems – sometimes they migrate down a stanza or two, sometimes they wind up at the very end. An example of this is what became the last line of “a Demy trilogy spinoff,” the first poem in my forthcoming collection (originally published in Harbor Review): “if this were my life i could live like this.” It is a line that continues to echo around inside me. That, to me, is the beginning of a poem.
What are you working on?
I’m putting the finishing touches on my debut chapbook, OTHER MOTHERS’ FUNERALS, forthcoming with Frog Hollow Press in the next couple months. It is terribly exciting to have this collection out in the world – it’s about grief in all these different forms.
I’m also slowly plugging away at a concept for a second chapbook manuscript, which picks up more intentionally on an unconscious theme of the first book: dreams. For the most part, my manuscripts are pieced together from the individual poems that I’ve been writing for the last few years; I take a arrange them to tell the story that I discover threading through them after the fact. I wish I could develop a manuscript concept and then write to it, but that doesn’t seem to be the way my creativity flows. The closest I’ve gotten to that process for this collection is identifying the presence of dreams and dreaming in my regular writing, and making a conscious decision to write down and consider my actual dreams as I, well, dream up new poems.
And, I am in the very, very early stages of a collaborative, cross-medium project with a dear friend and painter, that likely won’t see the light of day until 2023 – but it will be worth waiting for.
How did you first engage with poetry?
My mom bought me Sharon Creech’s Heartbeat when I was about ten. Up until then I was a voracious reader but mostly read fiction novels, and it was then that I discovered you could write stories in verse, that poetry didn’t have to rhyme, that repetition could make for rhythm, and that you could in fact tell a story using a series of poems that interrelate. It paved the way for me to later learn that poetry does not necessarily need to be written in verse – and I did a lot of prose poetry writing for a while, particularly as an undergraduate. That book marked a turning point; from then on, when I said I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, I shifted from picturing a novelist to picturing a poet. Which was really for the best, because my novel drafts from those early days spent four chapters describing characters and scenery and feelings and never did get around to anything resembling a plot.
