Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
Yes, my consideration of poetry is ALWAYS changing. Since I like experimental writing – there’s always new forms and styles to discover. This is what I love about it. Of course, I read more traditional poetry when I was younger and I still read it sometimes – I think poetry is one of the best things and even though we may like different brands of it, we can still have love for all different types.
How did you first engage with poetry?
My mother was a professional storyteller in libraries and schools, so I grew up within earshot of a fairly ageless poetry. There were lots of other familial inputs as well, from my aunt in particular, but my first personal engagement was with a little anthology of William Blake. The Songs were familiar but the heretical, metaphysical stuff appealed to my sense of religious seriousness and perversity at once. I remember carrying that book around as if I could grasp it by gradual absorption—so my first self-directed engagement with poetry was more or less talismanic. I eventually learned how to read poetry by staring at it for many years without a clue. Probably the lyric sheets of favourite records were another point of entry—there seemed to be such a wide gulf between the weight of the words transcribed and their life in song, sometimes I would just stare at the lyrics and try to guess the delivery.
Why is poetry important?
You know, I think it’s healthy to seriously adjust your expectations for the perceived importance of poetry, and I definitely balanced that with this first book, Dream of No One but Myself. Then suddenly people are calling you up crying about it, and people you haven’t much spoken to in a decade are dropping deep confessionals in your DM’s, and your communities and your people within those communities are reaching out, reaching you anew, are telling you this put words to something they wanted words for in a big way.
It’s a touchy-feely thing but this is all touchy-feely stuff: if it’s important enough to you and you get deep enough with it, it’s going to be important to someone else. A lot about being alive isn’t easily legible, even when the details are as sharply organized as they can be, and poetry can be a tiny, deliberate enactment of that—the intense drama in making sense of things, in making sense in and out here, in making sense at all. Poetry is the drama of still getting after IT, whatever IT is, and getting that “still getting” to someone else that really wants it.
How important is music to your poetry?
There is a strong relationship between music and poetry because they possess many of the same traits. They both have rhythm underlying the piece. They can stick to it for the most part, but escape it by speeding up or slowing down, or by changing the number of beats or syllables for a bit before returning to the starting rhythm. They stress specific beats and specific words. There is the element of crescendo, getting louder, and decrescendo, getting softer. Some poems, when read out loud, have words that sound so musical that it is hard to focus on the meaning; it is as if the words are adding to the music at music’s level. Some songs, when sung out loud, have lyrics so powerful they drown out the melody; they melody is there, but it is merely supporting the words.
I listen to a lot of music. Some of it is purely instrumental. Some of it has lyrics. I have come across many songs with lyrics that I felt close to; I only understood why after I read the lyrics. When that happens, I end up reading the words over and over, and listening to the song on repeat. Over the years, I have admired many musicians for their ability to write meaningful poetry. I have found several songs where the music is overtly happy while the words evoke a lot of pain, but the words are hard to make out. The juxtaposition of opposites is a perfect reflection of someone who is experiencing depression, but who can mask it to the rest of the world. I love artistry like that.
Sometimes I listen to music to help me write. I often I listen to calming, instrumental music. It helps me to relax, to drift off. It gives me the clarity I need to be able to put the words together.
Occasionally, when I listen to music, I play a piece on repeat and focus on how the music is affecting me, what it reminds me of, what emotions it is stirring inside of me. The poem, or poems, that come from listening to the one song are the reactions I have to the melody or the reactions I have to the words. It is funny, though; it is never a reaction of both the music and the lyrics.
Although I don’t think of any kind of melody when I write poetry, I often do pay attention to elements of music with my ordering and choosing of the words. The placement of the words on the paper, the line breaks, the spaces between stanzas, are the musical rests that give the ear a break and the breath to catch up.
How did you first engage with poetry?
I wish I had a clear memory of this. I’ve always loved rhyme and would write short, pithy poems for family members’ birthdays on brightly coloured pieces of paper or in handmade cards. I’m noticing as I answer this that from a young age, I saw poetry as something to share. I frequently gave poems to others, whether they wanted them or not! I even asked for a rhyming dictionary for one of my birthdays in grade school (not the last dictionary I would ask for as a birthday gift). What is a child’s first engagement with poetry? Again I go back to music and song, of my mom and dad singing lullabies to me in the crib and then tucking me into bed as I grew older, welcoming the night with song and prayer. Surely these rituals—this early encounter with imaginative language—left their mark on me.
How important is music to your poetry?
Super important. I’m guilty of hearing a word or line sung in a certain way and jotting it down for further study down the road, the intonation or the sonics serving as inspiration. Hip hop, of course, is a big part of what I listen to: BROCKHAMPTON, Lauryn Hill, Noname, Tierra Whack, Baby Keem are a few on rotation. I put on lo fi or jazz to write to music, though, to get more flow-y with the whole thing. It’s heavenly to be in that space.
How does a poem begin?
For me a poem begins as an enduring image or idea. These are more often than not very mundane. To anyone but me they would be hardly worth noting. They stay with me for one reason or another and so I must write about them. Simple as that.
