How did you first come to poetry? What is it about the form that resonates?
I had a really great high school English teacher. I was a tiny little emo and I already was thinking “wow the Cure is poooooetry” so it’s a pretty smooth ride from that to Leonard Cohen, the Canadian emo teen’s gateway poet. Cohen first, then a long little love affair with Anne Carson in my youth, and here we are.
How does a poem begin?
I always have the ideas for my poems when I am not working, and I leave notes to myself on sticky notes. I do not recommend this practice. It means that sometimes you sit down to write and you have no idea what you meant when you wrote down your chicken scratch notes. It also means sometimes you’re working on a big serious work project—like I am right now—and there is no time for writing poems, and so you just have piles of sticky notes and no poems.
Between your text and visual work, do you see your writing as a single, extended project, or a series of threads that occasionally weave together to form something else?
This is a really interesting question, and I had to sit with it for a while. I’m not totally convinced, but I would have to say it’s much closer to the latter. I think about my work more like a grab bag. I think less and less these days about some larger project I am working on and much more about how there are things (methods, forms, media, references, tones) and I like them and so I keep using them. Some of it is political. Some of it is whim. I just like poems and when I get to make them it is nice. I spent so long theorizing poetry and poetics that there is something really quite freeing about just kind of playing. The connective tissue holding it all together is the feminine, in its many winding and wild forms. There’s always that. But everything else is just kind of the usual jumble of my life. Programming, karaoke, chicken wings, horror films, and Greek myths before bed.
How did publishing your first book change your writing? What have the differences been since?
I am not sure that it did. I’ve always just been … kinda messing around, seeing what stuck. I guess maybe publishing a book made me feel like I was allowed to muck about. Like, if I was officially a poet, I could give myself license to do the really silly stuff I always wanted to do. In some ways, OO is a quite serious and scholarly book (in other ways it’s not, like how the afterword is just a recorded conversation between me and my bestie when we were stoned, and also how one of the poems was written by my cat). But, as a whole, it’s a pretty serious and poetry-y collection. So, after that I was just kinda like “everything else now is just valley girl sounds and boobies.”
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
AHAHAHAHHIJSHSHUHSDlolfsj. Sorry I just died.
I am at the tail end of a very intense computer programming bootcamp that takes up almost all of my time. When I am not doing that, I am doing stuff with Gap Riot. And that takes up the rest of my time. When I’m not doing either of those, I try to watch as much of the eight million Drag Race series that just keep appearing out of nowhere. And sometimes I video chat with my nephew and my niece. Very rarely, I fit a poem in.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
I love Canthius. I think they are just completely excellent. I live for The New River, which is pretty much the best place to look for new and hip and cool digital poetries and poetics. And then the best literary journal is Twitter, but it’s also the worst, so you have to be careful. Small doses, rarely, and that’s perfect.
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
It’s a bit unfair of an answer because we published
her work over at Gap Riot, but I think what Sophie Anne Edwards is doing is
just the most beautiful stuff. I am really excited by the way she’s exploding
the possibilities of visual poetics. Also I can’t get enough of Gary Barwin
(who can?). I think Gary’s work is just truly delightful. I often recall little
bits of Gary’s work—equally poignant and absurd—and chuckle to myself. I think
he’s brilliant.
Photo credit: Jesse Pajuäär.
A selection of her work appeared in the seventh issue.