How did you first come to poetry? What is it about the form that resonates?
I found poetry reading Poe in middle school, and it stuck and has stuck ever since. Now I'm 40 years old, and think about the earliest days writing poems in small pocket notebooks that would fit in my jeans. Any opportunity I could take out the paper and write brought some degree of joy. Poetry as truth through language, poetry as the act of seeking, of discovering, an intentional exploration of what is known and not known. These qualities offer a fluidity that lets poetry buffer the everyday world across any context. Poetry can look and be like anything at all, and yet it is entirely one's own, of them, through them, with them.
How does a poem begin?
Many of the poems written in adulthood have been conceptual, a means to an end. They are written for projects, sometimes performative or presentational, and attempt to reach a certain goal. They begin with questions and visions of possible outcomes, though they are always different, when they begin and when they end. Sometimes poetry is in between concepts: its beginning is serialized, it is born from something else. And then its concept is bigger than itself, it is a cog in a larger machine, a cell in a larger body. This type of poetry might begin on a note app on a phone, or written in a letter to a friend, or it could be born through some small utterance on a hike or in a bed.
How did publishing your first book change your writing? What have the differences been since?
My life toward publishing began with small and indie presses, often in the form of pamphlets and chapbooks. Moving toward a "traditional" publication and a full length manuscript in a perfect binding was slow. Of course there was pressure. Capitalism demands it, tries to drag one in. I felt those forces and that led me to trying and eventually succeeding in having Of Spray and Mist published. But the poetry within the book had, like many poems in many other books by other poets, been in previous places and previous forms, so the book object itself, as a container, did not answer the questions of these poems. If anything, the lines blurred and the waters muddied. Countless things have emerged since that book, including book containers and other containers, and if anything, the book asked the question, what is so important about the concept of the collection? In some cases the collection is a wonderful thing. I am not against collections. But in being defined as such, a collection of poetry also is not necessarily better than any other kind of poetry, be it a fragment of a poem, a single poem, a series of poems, a series of collections, and so on. If anything, we can radically take the book object and say, let this start new questions that need new answers.
Between poetry and sound works, do you see your writing as a single, extended project, or a series of disconnected threads? How do you keep the genres straight?
When I write, I am channeling. When I manipulate sound, I am channeling. These modalities of creativity, these art forms and the practices that lead to them, are coming from the same person, on the same planet, often in many of the same contexts with the same themes. In that sense, it's all connected and extended and overlapping. But also I lean into that sense of fluidity as well: nothing has to be so strictly connected. I am not a persona, but a real person, I have had performance names (like Talus Field), but it is not so strict that every auditory project needs that moniker. In fact, just recently there was a dance poetry collaboration where I brought poetry and soundscape together with Amber Hongsermeier's movement work and it existed in isolation from the previous sound works I've created, the previous poetry, and yet that isolation isn't really isolation. Tools used, techniques practices, they tend to overlap. The romance of this being a "life's work" is fun to think about, probably inspired by too many museum retrospectives, but it's not so easy to keep life from being fragmentation and snapshots of many different moments, each of which can be radically different from one another. As a result, nothing ever feels totally straight, nothing feels conformed and comforting in the ways of organization. All of that ends up being myth. We have so much more going on with ourselves, so many options for existing like small synaptic explosions. And the beauty is that it's still just us, we're living our life, it's our one big thing, as fragmented as it is.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
I write nearly every day and do not feel guilty if I do not write. Poetry can find me wherever I'm at, I'm not afraid of losing it and not afraid of it losing its tracking of me. Often if the piece is a concept, I set time aside to write it and then we're off! And it's done in a single sitting, first though best thought, and maybe there will be a couple smaller rounds of editing. If it's a smaller piece, one that's more spontaneous, it tends to be written wherever I'm at, at my kitchen table or on the peak of a mountain or at the river, and those settings and placements inform the poem. Often life is so busy that it's non poetry that influences how the poetry works itself in, finding each foothold, each crevice, amidst the major activity.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
I'm biased as I've been published in them before, but I love Exacting Clam and Rain Taxi. The interviews, essays, and occasional poetry all meet my needs. I often read individual author collections or engage with poetry live at events, however.
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
The new book Night Owl by Nezhukumatathi is
incredible. I had a chance to read a pre-pub of that and loved the vast
majority of poems in it. Kim Hyseoon's upcoming Lady No looks utterly
incredible. Cara Lorello is local to Spokane and I had a chance to hear her
read from her upcoming But For This Mess was a joy. I don't keep track
of local trends but these poetries, like my own, seem to find me and channel
their truths into me. Ever grateful for the many other poets who are open with
their creations.
Greg Bem is a poet, librarian, publisher, and labor activist in Spokane, Washington, where he co-organizes Foray for The Arts with poet Sarah Rooney, and serves as publisher of Carbonation Press, which is publishing multiple books and anthologies in 2026, including Down River, Deep Root: A Spokane Poetry Anthology, Somos Ajolotes / We are Axolotls: A Collection of Latine and Chicane Poetry, and Winter in America (Still.
Raised in Southern Maine, Greg has also lived in Rhode Island, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Cambodia. Since 2010, Greg has co-designed, co-organized, and co-hosted countless arts and literary events, including The Breadline (Seattle), Five Alarms Lit Crawls (Seattle), Our City (Phnom Penh), Ghost Tokens (Seattle), View.Point (Seattle), and Reflexive Assembly (Seattle). Over the decades, Greg has collaboratively supported work by the New Philadelphia Poets, the Cascadia Poetics Lab (formerly the Seattle Poetics Lab) and Cascadia Poetry Festival, and the Poetic Arts Performance Project (PAPP).
His work concerns ecologies and natural environments, and often bridges literary forms with sound poetry, field recordings, ambient and noise music, and performance art. He is the author of several books, including Of Spray and Mist (Hand to Mouth, 2019), Green Axis (Alien Buddha, 2019), Like salt. Like a spine. (with Maung Day, 2019), Pushing Through Glass (Carbonation Press, 2023), and Emerge: Poems (Bottlecap Press, 2025). He regularly writes book reviews for places like Rain Taxi, International Examiner, North of Oxford, and Exacting Clam. His experimental sound works can be found on Bandcamp under the project name Talus Field. You can learn more at gregbem.com.