Perry Gasteiger : coda

Poetry is personal.

When you create, you are exploring your self and your world and it will open up universes of opportunity for you to expand yourself if you let it. If you let your mind slip through the cracks of social rhetoric you can see the veritable infinity of truths and unifying factors that are vibrating just beyond what we’re told to look at. Find something for yourself when you write. Write to learn, to answer your own questions through the process of writing. Your poetry is for you.

And it is not yours.

It never was, and it never will be. What you create becomes a personal experience for everyone who comes across it. It takes on its own life in the hundreds of individual realities it happens to fall into. We must all cut the cord eventually, let our work grow into its place in the world. Give your words and your art the space they need to expand and outstrip themselves, to become more than you made, to affect the world the way only ideas can. If you hold too tightly, you’ll find yourself with a pile of broken sentences and misused words. Just let it go.

Perry Gasteiger : part five

Why is poetry important?

To me, poetry is important because it is a questioning, a wondering, a searching. The poem is a site of discovery -- of oneself, of one’s understandings of life, the universe, and everything… Poetry is important because not only does it first engage the writer in authentic questioning, asking them to gently dismantle their view of the world and reconstruct it in a beautiful way, but it also engages the reader. When poetry is successful, it makes you feel something in your bones, behind your eyes, wherever your truth hides… Poetry finds your truth, yanks it up by its hair, and screams at you to see it. Whether or not we’re ready for that truth, we know it’s there, inside of us somewhere, and somewhere else somebody else figured it out, and maybe we can too. And I think feeling that connection to something big is important, to remind people they’re not alone.

Perry Gasteiger : part four

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

I have 4 poems that are very important to me:

#53 “May my heart always be open to little birds” - e.e cummings

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - T.S Eliot

The Goblin Market - Emily Brontë

Nuns Fret Not - William Wordsworth

These poems always remind me of why I write, why I create -- not the content of them so much as how they make me feel. Every one of them punches me in the gut, brings tears to my eyes, and that kind of asynchronous connection across (excuse the cliché) space and time really is what gets me hooked on writing and art.

Perry Gasteiger : 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?

Usually my work first comes into the world as an overly excited message to my sister or my partner saying, “YOU WANNA READ WHAT I JUST WROTE???” haha… But yes, I believe that having a solid group of people that you can go to for soundboarding, editing help, idea generation & development, and just a fresh pair (or two, or three!) of eyes is extremely important. Having a community helps build everyone’s skills and work.

Perry Gasteiger : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

My mom used to read me poetry when I was a baby! She “gave” my sister and I each our own e.e cummings poem to “describe” us. Mine was “May my heart always be open to little birds”, #53 from his 100 collected poems -- I remember memorizing it by fourth grade. My mom would keep us home from school to study Brontë, Wordsworth, Eliot, and others. Poetry was always in my life, I’ve never known a time without poetry in my life.

Perry Gasteiger : part one

Perry Gasteiger (they/them) is a queer, non-binary poet and writer from Waterloo, Ontario. Their work shows an interest in the mundane darkness of our everyday world using juxtaposition between the real and the abstract, the beautiful and the deformed, the congruent and the disordered. Perry’s work explores issues surrounding pain, trauma, mental illness, and how these twist perceptions of the human condition. Their work aims to see the easily unnoticeable in an evocative and empathetic way. You can find their words in or coming to Anti-Heroin Chic, Fevers of the Mind, Not Deer Magazine, Warning Lines Magazine, Outcast Press, and others. You can find them on Twitter @sunshineloft

What are you working on?

I just recently queried a chapbook, “Meditations for the Dead and Dying” to a few presses. I am also working on another chapbook I’m hoping to query in November! “Meditations for the Dead and Dying” explores the brutality of existence, looking at themes of birth, death, and the violence found in life. The other chapbook (as yet unnamed) follows the speaker through different hurts we experience in the world, focusing on trauma, isolation, and mental illness. Other than that, we’re dipping our toes into novel writing, so we’ll see how that plays out!